Two decades after a Bradford lorry driver held the north of England hostage to his reign of murder and savagery, a TV documentary has pieced together the full, shocking story. The Hunt For The Yorkshire Ripper discloses not only one man's evil but also a catalogue of police incompetence on a scale previously unimagined. David Behrens spoke exclusively to the programme's executive producer and recalls being the first journalist to interview a Ripper attack survivor, Maureen Long, in 1977.

ONE OF THE detectives who bungled the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper breaks a 20-year silence tomorrow.

Today, the TV producer who lured him out of self-imposed exile spoke of his battle with today's police to be allowed to tell the full story.

Ray Fitzwalter, a former editor of World in Action and the man behind ITV's two-part history of the Ripper era, spent months piecing together the background to a case which in the late Seventies and early Eighties convulsed northern England in sheer, palpable terror.

He said: "We have film of two policewomen speculating about whether the Ripper might catch them between leaving the front door of their headquarters and getting to the car park opposite.

"It demonstrates the kind of paralysing fear that had taken hold of people."

Fitzwalter and his team, headed by former Sunday Times and YTV reporter Michael Bilton, persuaded former Det Supt Dick Holland, at one time head of the Ripper Squad, to discuss his part in the inquiry. But he had a tougher job to secure official co-operation from West Yorkshire Police.

"Dick Holland had reached the point where he did want to talk at length about it," said Mr Fitzwalter. "Others were more difficult to persuade - and for those officers who were still serving, it took frankly ages of diplomatic negotiation.

"The police were not very keen for all sorts of reasons, but eventually they did agree to give us access both to serving officers and to their premises."

Mr Holland, he said, appeared worn down by the years of criticism over the case.

Mr Holland, who was also severely criticised for his handling of the Stefan Kiszko murder case, in which an innocent man was sent to prison, says in the programme: "I'll live with that for the rest of my life. I'll live with being party to the wrong decision."

The programme-makers also interviewed Bradford detectives Trevor Lapish and Andrew Laptew - both of whose "concerns" about the conduct of the Ripper inquiry were dismissed by their boss, the late Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield.

"At one point, Mrs Thatcher threatened to come up and take charge of the investigation herself - because her daughter Carol was a student at the time," said Mr Fitzwalter.

The ITV programme reveals that towards the end of the inquiry, a member of the so-called Ripper "Supersquad" plotted all the killer's journeys and deduced that he lived no more than three miles from Bradford - which eventually proved to be the case. But Oldfield again refused to listen, convinced that the killer was the same person whose voice appeared on a notorious hoax tape.

"The police were desperate to learn lessons from this," said Mr Fitzwalter, a former deputy news editor of the Telegraph & Argus.

"But while giving them due credit for that, there is still an edge of caution. A great many police forces bought computer systems that weren't compatible with one another."

The first words from a survivor of the madman

An ill-fitting black wig covered Maureen Long's scars. It sat on her head like a guardsman's helmet, writes David Behrens.

She had been propped up on a stuffed, plastic chair for the occasion. A police officer stood guard at her door.

"She isn't allowed to speak about what happened," the police had said in advance. "But you can ask her how she is."

It was the first time that a victim of the Yorkshire Ripper had lived to tell the tale. Five other women had not. Now, Mrs Long was facing the world for the first time.

It was the lunchtime of July 29, 1977. I knocked and entered the small, private room at Leeds Infirmary that had been her home for the last three weeks. No-one outside her family and the police had been invited there before.

She was frail and frightened. She looked older than her 42 years - hardly surprising given the wig and the depressed skull fracture healing beneath it. She adjusted her quilted housecoat and looked pensive as Paul Bentley took her picture for the T&A. "I want to move well away from Bradford now," she said. "Somewhere

they won't find me." In 1977, the country outside West Yorkshire was not much concerned with the madman who stalked the dark alleys and cobbled streets of Leeds and Bradford.

After all, his early murder victims had been "just" prostitutes (hence the Jack-The-Ripper label the police had given him). All the same, there was a genuine sense that a breakthrough had now been made: here was someone , an ordinary woman with no vice-trade, connections, who might actually have seen the killer's face; maybe even knew his name.

The atmosphere in Mrs Long's room was quiet to the point of reverential. As far as detectives were concerned, here was a seer who had learned the meaning of life. But if she did know anything, she wasn't saying. Maybe it was the medication, more likely the intimidatory presence at the door which stopped her from discussing anything more meaningful than the holiday she was planning in Cornwall.

"She's had enough. You'll have to go now," said the policeman, and he closed the door. A sense of anti-climax hung in the air.

Two years later, I met Mrs Long again. The Ripper was by now a national figure, and the Daily Telegraph had asked me to play her the tape of the Geordie voice we all thought was his. She was, after all, the only person known to have heard it at first hand.

She remained non-committal, as well she might. But I remember her as a warm lady who was trying her best to be helpful. It wasn't her fault that the police didn't know what they were doing.

She never did manage to get out of Bradford. When the makers of tomorrow's documentary caught up with her, she was still here, and as emotional as she was back in that hospital room.

"The doctors and nurses have done their best to cheer me up," she said, that lunchtime in 1977.

They did not seem to have succeeded, though they had at least saved her life.

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