Ripper Territory

I’m thinking of the title of the George Harrison song, Beware of Darkness… I’m currently reading Michael Bilton’s 2003 book Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, and am finding it a harrowing but compelling read. I should add upfront, that this is not a subject I’m entirely comfortable with, I find true crime books too sensationalist, or too disturbing to enjoy, and for the most part I find their attraction as mystifying as say Mondo films. That said, I picked up Bilton’s book on a whim, just to sample the first few pages, but was immediately drawn into a world that I recognized from Sidney Lumet’s film The Offense - gray, damp, depressed, Industrial. Chronologically, I’m 5 murders into Peter Sutcliffe’s reign of terror, and the only thing more excruciating than the missed leads and mishandled information are the murders themselves, and the volcanic rage that fueled the extraordinary violence that was inflicted upon these poor women. So I have much ground yet to cover, but I’m already looking ahead to David Peace’s Red Riding novels and the 2009 C4 series. Incidentally there’s plenty of Industrial Music out there to serve as a musical companion for a book about Peter Sutcliffe, and I must say I did think of Kevin Tomkins’s power electronics outfit Sutcliffe Jugend, and the 10-cassette collection We Spit On Their Graves, from 1982, which takes its inspiration from the Sutcliffe case. I have an mp3 copy of the entire 10-hour run (Christ!) and while I initially thought of sampling a little, a quick visit to the Discogs page reminded me that all 20-sides of the tapes were named after Sutcliffe’s victims, which I find rather distasteful right now. Evidently Cold Spring did as well – their single CD digest edition dispenses with the names altogether on the disc’s artwork...