If you are looking for one of the best true crime documentaries of recent times, Netflix’s The Ripper is definitely worth taking a look at. This four part documentaries well crafted and put together, taking the view from the murdered women, the horrible misogyny of the media and police at the time. The incredible errors that the police made from the fake ripper ‘Wearside Jack’, to labelling all these women for the most part as prostitutes, to wasted resources, ignored lines of inquiries and ignored victims/witnesses, and how that nearly half of the victims could have been avoided if the police and media had framed it properly and stuck to the facts rather than their preferred narrative. This is very powerful stuff.
For five years, between 1975 to 1980, the Yorkshire Ripper murders cast a dark shadow over the lives of women in the North of England. It was a time of national hysteria. 13 women were dead and the police seemed incapable of catching the killer. No one felt safe – and every man was a suspect.
Chronicling the twists and turns of the largest police manhunt in British police history, this evocative four part series re-examines the crimes within the context of England in the late 1970s: a time of radical change, de-industrialisation, poverty, masculinity and misogyny, all of which contributed to the Ripper evading capture for so long.
Apart from the families (Who are involved in the doc) wishes being ignored in the titling of the doc. This is essential viewing. You realise what a different time it was, but still some of these stigmas remain today.
The Ripper is thought provoking throughout, in a era that despite living through, having very vague recollection of events due to being young at the time and not having the instant supply of news that we now have.
Netflix in The Ripper, have put together yet another brilliant documentary on an awful human being, but yet manage to take the spotlight off him until the section where he is eventually caught (By sheer luck rather than good policing), which he is only then mentioned by his name and even then he’s the afterthought other than to really push home what a truly hideous excuse for a human being he was. The final frame of all the victims names in black and white on the screen, gives them the power back in some small form and we pray that this will never, ever happen again.
