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  • Peter Sutcliffe arrested (2-1-1981)

    From Ross Clark@21:1/5 to All on Tue Jan 2 08:58:27 2024
    Early appearance of "forensic phonetics". Not much more than a footnote
    to the "Yorkshire Ripper" case, but --
    In 1979 the police received a voice tape from someone purporting to be
    the serial murderer they were looking for in Yorkshire.
    Two dialectologists from the University of Leeds pinpointed the
    speaker's accent to an area in Sunderland, maybe 100km to the north.
    They considered the tape a hoax, though the police took it seriously. Sutcliffe, the actual killer, turned out to be from Bradford, very near
    Leeds. The hoaxer was not identified and prosecuted until 2005.

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  • From Antonio Marques@21:1/5 to Ross Clark on Tue Jan 2 00:32:35 2024
    Ross Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
    Early appearance of "forensic phonetics". Not much more than a footnote
    to the "Yorkshire Ripper" case, but --
    In 1979 the police received a voice tape from someone purporting to be
    the serial murderer they were looking for in Yorkshire.
    Two dialectologists from the University of Leeds pinpointed the
    speaker's accent to an area in Sunderland, maybe 100km to the north.
    They considered the tape a hoax, though the police took it seriously. Sutcliffe, the actual killer, turned out to be from Bradford, very near Leeds. The hoaxer was not identified and prosecuted until 2005.

    Does the UK not have a statute of limitations, that a mere hoaxer could be prosecuted 26 years after?

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  • From Athel Cornish-Bowden@21:1/5 to Antonio Marques on Tue Jan 2 08:13:30 2024
    On 2024-01-02 00:32:35 +0000, Antonio Marques said:

    Ross Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
    Early appearance of "forensic phonetics". Not much more than a footnote
    to the "Yorkshire Ripper" case, but --
    In 1979 the police received a voice tape from someone purporting to be
    the serial murderer they were looking for in Yorkshire.
    Two dialectologists from the University of Leeds pinpointed the
    speaker's accent to an area in Sunderland, maybe 100km to the north.
    They considered the tape a hoax, though the police took it seriously.
    Sutcliffe, the actual killer, turned out to be from Bradford, very near
    Leeds. The hoaxer was not identified and prosecuted until 2005.

    Does the UK not have a statute of limitations, that a mere hoaxer could be prosecuted 26 years after?

    It does, and one might think it would apply in this instance.
    Presumably they found more recent activities for which he could be
    charged.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearside_Jack


    --
    Athel cb

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  • From Ross Clark@21:1/5 to Antonio Marques on Tue Jan 2 21:22:16 2024
    On 2/01/2024 1:32 p.m., Antonio Marques wrote:
    Ross Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
    Early appearance of "forensic phonetics". Not much more than a footnote
    to the "Yorkshire Ripper" case, but --
    In 1979 the police received a voice tape from someone purporting to be
    the serial murderer they were looking for in Yorkshire.
    Two dialectologists from the University of Leeds pinpointed the
    speaker's accent to an area in Sunderland, maybe 100km to the north.
    They considered the tape a hoax, though the police took it seriously.
    Sutcliffe, the actual killer, turned out to be from Bradford, very near
    Leeds. The hoaxer was not identified and prosecuted until 2005.

    Does the UK not have a statute of limitations, that a mere hoaxer could be prosecuted 26 years after?


    I wondered about that too. My brief investigation suggests that there is
    no single statute of limitations, and the various rules that do exist
    are applied somewhat flexibly.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_periods_in_the_United_Kingdom

    The hoaxer who eventually confessed sounds like a rather pathetic
    figure. He was charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice
    (in what was, after all, a rather important criminal case). He had given
    a DNA sample in 2001 in connection with an unrelated minor offence; this
    was matched with DNA from the envelopes he sent to police in 1979.
    Perhaps the fact that this was "new evidence" might have been adduced to support prosecuting him after such a long delay.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sutcliffe#cite_ref-WearsideJackIDeserve_55-0

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