“The Ripper” Review: A documentary about a man that took the lives of 13 women

As a true crime enthusiast and criminology researcher, I was counting down the days on my snowman-themed advent calendar till Dec. 17 — the release of the Netflix Original Documentary “The Ripper.” Since I’ve always been someone who enjoys studying up on on notorious killers, this documentary was right up my alley.

The documentary follows now-famous era of Peter William Sutcliffe — the “Yorkshire Ripper” — a span of five years in which a confirmed 13 girls and women were killed and seven attacked. 

The first of the four total documentary episodes highlighted the Ripper’s motive: to rid prostitutes from the streets of West Yorkshire, a county in the England. Through interviews and clips from the time of the murders, my understanding of the situation changed drastically due to the captivating storytelling in a four-part series. I couldn’t look away as new people were introduced and evidence was stacked into the ever-growing pile.

Starting the first episode with the death of Wilma Mccann, you get a first look at the modus operandi — the mode of operation — of the killer. Taking you through the next three murders, the idea of a prostitute killer was engrained into the case files of The Ripper.

The introduction of the documentary captured my attention. Mccann’s son Richard recalled the morning he found his mom’s body. Only five at the time, the officers told him and his three siblings that his mom “had been taken to heaven, and [they] won’t ever see her again.”

For the entirety of the first episode, I whole-heartedly believed that the police in Leeds, where Wilma lived, were going to handle these murders with utmost respect and responsibility. But as the story progressed to the fifth murder, I started to suspect what they were leading up to in the latter end of the documentary — a huge shift of the police work in the eyes of the public.

The first episode ended on a perfect note of suspense and intrigue.  

Episode two rapidly presents the next few murders, as new evidence is discovered just prior to the seventh death. They hurried along the train of death, almost skipping over details of some of them to continue to more important developments.

The final two episodes discussed the murders from the female perspective because almost everyone involved in investigating the case was male. I think that it was placed into the story perfectly, lining up not only with the timeline of events, but flowing perfectly with the storytelling.

The majority of the third episode involved the evidence the police had on The Ripper and how they tried to use that information to investigate and question potential witnesses and suspects. While the progression of the story was ideal, this section was completely contradicted in the fourth episode after a meer glance at the evidence — then viewed as groundbreaking — by a detective. 

The profile the police had built of this man was wrong in many basic aspects, such as what city he lived in and why he was murdering women. This is likely what they were going for — but making it seem so important for so much of the episode made it seem a little pointless in the end.

The fourth episode mainly acted as the conclusion of the documentary series, talking about the trial and the aftermath of Sutcliffe’s actions. This was one of the better-executed episodes, concluding the series in a satisfying way.

Overall, this documentary series was a riveting retelling of events — from the interviews to the storytelling abilities of the writers and producers. I do believe they could have gotten more input from the families of the victims just to cover more angles of the story, as it could’ve added a lot of detail to the final episode to interview parents or siblings for their opinions of the trial’s outcome.

I was also impressed by the amount of footage they were able to put in the documentary, almost all of it being news footage from the 70s and 80s.

As someone who thoroughly enjoys true crime and frequently studies notorious killers, this documentary was extremely entertaining and educational. I love the way they presented the pieces of this terrible time in history. It was done in a way that enhanced the suspense and the opinions of the people interviewed.

After four hours of tucking myself away in my room and binging, I came our better educated on the sinister events that occurred and their effects on West Yorkshire.