Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Ripper’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About The Serial Killer That Terrorized England In The 1970s

The Ripper, directed by Jesse Vile and Ellena Wood, is a four-episode docuseries about how a serial killer called The Yorkshire Ripper terrorized the County of York, in northern England, during the latter half of the 1970s. Between 1975 and 1980, Peter Sutcliffe murdered 13 women in and around the city of Leeds, and assaulted scores of others. But it took the police in Yorkshire years to capture him, due to a combination of his elusiveness, sexist assumptions about his victims by law enforcement, and a general feel that the entire department was disorganized.

THE RIPPER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A dark scene outside of low-slung apartment buildings in West Yorkshire, England. A man describes being awakened in the middle of the night by his sister when their mother didn’t come back from going out. He was 5 and she was 6.

The Gist: The first episode talks about the first few murders, which took place either in the city of Leeds or the town of Bradford. The first victim, Wilma McCann, was found not far from her home; she had been bludgeoned with a hammer, then stabbed 15 times. Because she was out for the night, her four kids at home, near the city’s supposed red-light district, it was assumed by both the police and the local press that she was a prostitute. The same went for the next three victims.

Vile and Wood talk to police investigators who were on the case as they pieced together that they had a serial killer on their hands; they came to the conclusion that this killer “hated prostitutes,” because that’s who he had killed to that point, not taking into account why these women were doing sex work to begin with. The fourth victim, Patricia Atkinson, was found in her Bradford flat, breaking the mold that the women would be killed in random spots. Then his fifth victim, a 16-year-old named Jayne MacDonald, was discovered, with all the earmarks of the killer that’s haunted Yorkshire for the prior two years.

Christa Ackroyd, who was a young local reporter at the time, knew that the view of who murdered these women was colored by the idea that he killed random prostitutes, what she felt was a misogynistic view, unnecessarily informing women who “didn’t have many boyfriends that they were fine.” The discovery of MacDonald, who was most definitely not a prostitute, changed that notion, even though the male reporters and cops dismissed the pattern change as mistaken identity, that he thought that the girl was a prostitute.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A whole segment of true-crime docuseries that tried to figure out the motivations of serial killers that attacked only women. It’s sort of like the killer-focused parts of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark.

Our Take: What The Ripper strives to do is follow the long and winding path the West Yorkshire police took to find Sutcliffe; it eventually became one of England’s biggest manhunts as he went mostly around Yorkshire killing young and middle-aged women for five years. From the first episode, the filmmakers are setting up a story about how the area’s downturn following the departure of various industrial behemoths led to women needing to perform sex work to make ends meet, putting them in the path of Sutcliffe.

That’s the angle that we find refreshing. As more than one of the male investigators and Christa Ackroyd said, describing these women as merely prostitutes minimized the murders in the public eye and gave the public a false sense of security. It also led the cops down paths that just ended up being dead ends. What we hope to see going forward is how law enforcement’s blinkered view of his victims, along with the constant reorganization among police leadership, led to Sutcliffe getting away with murder for a half-decade.

Yes, we’ll get to see all the beats you usually see in true crime docuseries, including Sutcliffe’s trial. But it’s the issues in the background that allowed Sutcliffe to murder and attack people unchecked for years that will really be the interesting part of this series.

Sex and Skin: Beyond showing archival footage of a topless stripper to talk about a local strip club, there isn’t anything.

Parting Shot: A seeming break in the case — a young woman that survived Sutcliffe’s attack — is found.

Sleeper Star: The archival footage that Vile and Wood were able to dig up — mostly from local news reports — shows how truly poor some of the areas in Yorkshire were in the ’70s, after its major industries left. Some of the footage equals or even surpasses some of the poverty we’ve seen in footage from major U.S. cities during the same time period.

Most Pilot-y Line: It’s just amazing how these old White guy cops haven’t really changed their language about the people in Leeds’ red-light district (mostly Black) or the women that Sutcliffe killed, despite the fact that more than four decades have passed.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Even though the case has been settled for almost 40 years — and Sutcliffe died in November — The Ripper is fascinating to us because it will examine the underlying factors that slowed down the investigation, instead of talking about the killer himself.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Ripper On Netflix