A Bradford linguistic expert who warned that a so-called recording of the Yorkshire Ripper released by police in 1979 was a hoax has died.
Stanley Ellis, formerly of Lidget Green, Bradford, studied the tape and concluded it came from a man from the former pit village of Castletown, near Sunderland. The fake tape taunted the police chief leading the hunt for Bradford serial killer Peter Sutcliffe and may have thrown detectives off the scent for months.
Mr Ellis was a leading authority on dialects and a pioneer of the forensic analysis of recording voices.
The former Grange Grammar School student spent years throughout the 1950s searching for words and phrases as part of a linguistic survey of England while he was a research assistant at Leeds University. Armed with questions, notebooks and tape recording machines, he travelled the country interviewing subjects.
In an interview with the Telegraph & Argus, published on November 25, 1969, while Mr Ellis was a lecturer in English language and medieval English literature at Leeds University, he said he could tell a Thornton resident from a Queensbury resident by their dialects.
He said: “I can demonstrate the very minute differences that occur in some places only a mile or two apart. I have recordings which indicate the difference in dialect of a man from Thornton and a woman from Queensbury, less than two miles away.”
Reports from the 1950s often described Mr Ellis as “a pleasant young man” who got on well with his subjects.
In 2004 Mr Ellis became the first person to be awarded honorary life membership of the International Association for Forensics, Phonetics and Acoustics.
Mr Ellis, who was 83 and lived in Harrogate at the time of his death, leaves his third wife, Margaret.
