The Home Office is refusing to release under the Freedom of Information [FOI] Act 2000 the 1982 report by Sir Lawrence Byford into why ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’ Peter Sutcliffe was not caught much earlier.
The refusal on grounds that much of what it contains is already in the public domain, that it contains confidential information and that important lessons have been learnt by the police from it ends up posing more questions than it answers.
Members of the “Super Squad”, an external advisory team of specialist officers, assisted Byford in an inquiry set up by the then Secretary of State William Whitelaw in 1980. Sutcliffe subsequently confessed in January 1981 to murdering 13 women and attempting to murder another 7. It was later revealed that police had interviewed him twelve times before he was caught.
In a statement on the report to the House of Commons on January 19th 1982 Whitelaw admitted, “there were major errors of judgement by the police” such “that there is little doubt that he [Sutcliffe] should have been arrested earlier”. A summary of the main conclusions and recommendations were placed in the Commons Library.
However the information and evidence employed to compile the report has never been made public.
Byford’s report was one of two. Assistant Chief Constable Colin Sampson’s report in October 1981 was not published on the advice of Chief Constable Ronald Gregory due to the fact that several unsolved murders and attacks required ongoing investigation.
However Gregory then left the force and subsequently sold and had his memoirs serialised in the Mail on Sunday, forcing the Home Office to release The Sampson Report on June 30th 1983.
The Byford Report remained, however, under lock and key. The Government’s much-vaunted FOI was supposed to end such secrecy.
In his refusal letter Jon Hill from the Home Office said “I have reached the firm conclusion” that “it is not in the public interest to disclose the [Byford] report” because “the public interest has been amply served by the information which has already been made accessible” from Whitelaw’s statement and the report placed in the Commons Library.
Yet that isn’t really the point, members of the public have a right to know what information was used to draw up the conclusions and recommendations. Not to allow them the opportunity to see it can only lead to speculation that the state and the police are still hiding something about ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’ case that they don’t want making public.
If this is so, then what is it they are hiding? Is the case against Sutcliffe on some of the crimes he has confessed to not that strong? Are there members of the police who feel that one or possibly more of the murders he confessed to were not actually committed by him? What would the Byford Report reveal?
Mr Hill is also skating on thin ice with his refusal to release the report on grounds that “lessons have been learnt from these events, with amongst other things, major incident rooms being standardised and the appointment of one Senior Investigating Officer to oversee major crimes where more than one force is involved.”
Yet as the Bichard Inquiry into the Soham murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells showed “police officers were alarmingly ignorant of how records were created and how the [local intelligence] system worked” as well as the fact that Humberside Police and Cambridgeshire Constabulary appeared not to be speaking to each other.
Other reasons cited for refusing the release are that ‘the review undertaken by Sir Lawrence was conducted as a confidential inquiry.’ Certainly true, but so were other reports at the time and now under FOI Act they are being released; that’s the whole point about the Act or it should be.
Mr Hill also stated in his letter that disclosure was being refused because “The Yorkshire Ripper case remains open” and that “no information should be released that would be likely to prejudice the detection of crimes.”
However a call to Faye Johnson, Mr Hill’s manager at the Home Office, brought a statement that the Yorkshire Ripper “is not a live ongoing enquiry” begging the question then ‘why not release the report’?
And so the release of a major report into why ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’ was not caught earlier, and if he had a number of women would be getting on with their lives, has been suppressed. However not for everyone - the author Michael Bilton was able to use a copy for his book ‘Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper’ published last year and now being profitably sold by Harper Collins.
Bilton does not say where he obtained a copy of the Byford report putting it down to ‘a piece of good fortune’ which he admits has been denied to ‘many of Britain’s most senior policemen, charged with responsibility for investigating of homicides, [who] have still not been allowed to read and learn the truth about the Ripper case, particularly what went wrong and more importantly the rational behind the very valuable lessons that need to be learned.’ So a journalist has an opportunity to see the Byford Report and senior policemen charged with protecting the public don’t – both amazing and some would say disgusting.
Michael Bilton admits that his book is ‘really Dick Holland’s story.’ Detective Chief Superintendent Dick Holland was a senior officer involved in the search for the Yorkshire Ripper including taking overall command in late 1979.
In his book Bilton fails to mention
Holland’s role in setting up Stefan Kiszko for the murder of Lesley Molseed
and Judith Ward for the M62 IRA bombing in 1974. Kiszko served 16 years in prison
before his conviction was overturned; he died within 12 months of being released.
Holland was found to have suppressed vital information that would have revealed
he could not possibly have committed the murder. Judith Ward served 18 years
in prison for a crime she could not possibly have committed.