WEARSIDE JACKBOOTS - The Wearside Jack Case

A few years ago in New Labour's Great New Britain, the Yorkshire police ventured north into Sunderland, kidnapped one of its citizens, and without interference from anyone, including even the Sunderland police, removed their hostage back to Yorkshire, and began proceedings to prosecute him for a series of blunders that they had made nearly thirty years before in their handling of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Their victim was detained in custody and refused bail, this being a precautionary measure in cases where a defendant is suspected of being a dangerous criminal, and so he was tried and convicted.

To understand why the Yorkshire police could feel justified in this prosecution, it is necessary to look at the mistakes that they had made thirty years before. The first of these occurred when a member of the public, obviously an amateur Jack the Ripper academic, sent to the police investigating the Yorkshire Ripper case a letter and a cassette tape in which he purported to be the killer they were trying to catch. He famously presented himself in the tape (with a thick Sunderland accent) as “I’m Jack”, and in his letter he used phrases from a famous Jack the Ripper letter which was itself a hoax written by a journalist during the Whitechapel murders investigation of 1888. The Yorkshire Ripper police immediately accepted this new hoax as genuine, thus derailing their investigation into the Yorkshire Ripper series, because instead of hunting the Yorkshire Ripper as before, they now began to hunt the Sunderland Ripper, who didn’t exist. And while they were doing this, the Yorkshire Ripper continued with his own series, and murdered three further women before he was caught red-handed.

The Yorkshire police were determined that their killer was a Sunderland man, and now they are determined that the perpetrator of their errors thirty years ago was a Sunderland man too. Apparently they would prefer history to see Yorkshire men as blunderers and their Wearside rivals as criminals, and surely they must be committing further blunders to justify the blunders of the past.

There are many ethical as well as political and intellectual problems with this enterprise. For instance, the police are forgetting that their hoaxer of thirty years ago had actually telephoned them when they had made their mistake and informed them that it had been a hoax, and that the police recognized his voice immediately (and his sincerity) and passed this information on to the police investigating the Yorkshire Ripper case, who ignored it. An even more serious error occurred when the police also ignored two surviving victims who insisted that the killer had a Yorkshire accent, hence his nickname “The Yorkshire Ripper“.

Some of the mistakes that the Yorkshire Ripper police made can be attributed to a lack of expertise in the matter of serial killers, because this was in the 1970s, in the early days of public knowledge of these matters, when Ted Bundy was still on the rampage. For instance serial killers prefer to have their own identities in relation to their crimes, especially when they are themselves courting publicity, and only a joker would attribute the crimes to Jack the Ripper.

However, the Yorkshire police can’t be excused an error that they must be making today, in their belief that their errors in the Yorkshire Ripper case would have made any difference in the matter of the three subsequent victims. Serial killers are notoriously difficult to identify and catch, and owl-type killers do not hoard evidence for their wives to find, so the only way that the Yorkshire Ripper could have been caught was the way that he was caught – on the job.

The idea that the hoaxer nicknamed “Wearside Jack” could have been responsible for the deaths of these women, and that he was responsible for the errors of the police too, comes from TV people, who see the public as being intellectually null, and who are doing everything they can to degrade public intelligence into a malleable pulp that they can manipulate for their own profit and for their own ideas of personal success. The arrest of Mr John Humble, namely the man known as Wearside Jack, followed soon after a commercial TV programme which announced the absurd idea that if he were ever caught, he would be facing many years in jail. This idea had never occurred to anyone before. But why should he be in jail?

If John Humble was 49 when he was arrested (in 2005), then he would have been 21 when the hoax was committed, and his only experience of the legal implications of such public hoaxes then would have been that they occurred in high profile murder cases, that they were not criminal, and that they did not interfere with police procedures. He was therefore entirely innocent of any crime when he made his hoax.

Furthermore, during the famous Whitechapel murders, the Metropolitan police and press were blitzed by hoax Jack the Ripper letters from members of the public, with many scores of them being written, a veritable flood that was triggered off by the journalist alluded to above. And during the Black Dahlia murder investigation of 1948 in Los Angeles, the police had to deal with twenty-one false confessions, one of which was a false false confession which was actually genuine, and no one has ever been prosecuted for making false confessions.

The fact is that when mass media coverage inundates the public with a sensational murder series or similar event, such a reaction sometimes occurs. It has not been a criminal offence for someone to do it in such circumstances, although it could be professionally embarrassing in some cases, such as for the journalist who started the craze during the Whitechapel murders. This phenomenon can be attributed to the sensational nature of the news perhaps and to the public’s exposure to it, and no doubt arises when it becomes the subject of common gossip. It amounts to nothing more than pranking and trying to get oneself in the news, as Wearside Jack did.

Pranking begins in schools, and it does not in itself indicate a criminal psychology, unless it is malicious or is part of a campaign of intimidation, or if it means to do harm. In Wearside Jack’s case, the consequences of his prank were an accident and an opportunity for the police to improve their procedures and learn by experience..

The Wearside Jack prosecution resembles that of Major Ingram, which also had a customer being prosecuted for the faults or failings of those providing a public service. Not only is the indiscretion for which the citizen was prosecuted not a criminal offence historically or politically, but just as Major Ingram didn’t cheat anyway, neither was Wearside Jack responsible for the police errors that have been attributed to him. And surely it is wrong to assume that these errors actually caused the deaths of the three subsequent victims. In both these cases the prosecutions were impelled by the commercial TV media, and their hapless customers simply swallowed it in the courts. A well-known expression explains this: “It must be true because I saw it on TV.“ No one has thought about the social and political implications of these two cases.

John Humble was given an eight-year jail sentence for his youthful prank, and the severity of the sentence must be to give weight and substance to an absurd conviction. His youthful folly has been countered with a severe judicial one.

For the Algebra of Justice, click here.

blackneck@gawab.com