Review: Yallop, Deliver Us from Evil

[truepenny]

Deliver Us From Evil by David A. Yallop

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book about the Yorkshire Ripper is at its best at the end, where Yallop actually talks about his own research experiences and opinions and theories. Yallop went on to write a number of conspiracy theory books about the Vatican, so I'm a little leery of some of his claims, but comparison with the Wikipedia article says that he's as accurate as he can be in 1982 (the identity of "Wearside Jack," the hoaxer who sent a tape recording to the police claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper and caused the wildest and most costly of wild goose chases, wasn't discovered (via DNA) until 2006), and certainly he lays out the logical steps by which he arrived at, not the identity of Peter Sutcliffe, but a pretty narrow range of men to consider. And I appreciate the anger with which he asks why the police couldn't do the same. I also appreciate his understanding (a) that Sutcliffe's motivation was hatred of women, not a moral crusade against prostitution (that being the red herring Sutcliffe laid across his tracks at trial) and (b) how Sutcliffe was a product of systemic misogyny, that he was a symptom of a much bigger problem. Yallop can see the connections between how women were (and still are) being treated globally and how one man could decide that he had a perfect right to kill as many of us as he could. It's a remarkably feminist perspective to find from a male writer in 1982, and it made me like Yallop in a way that the body of the book did not.

Most of this book is the chintzy kind of true crime that is written alternating between the POV of the murderer and the POV of his victims (including a slow build to the murder of Barbara Leach, the 11th of 13 murdered women, with extracts from her letters--I recognize that he's trying to do a ring composition, tracing both Leach and Sutcliffe from the beginning of Sutcliffe's murderous career, but clearly he got permission to use the letters of the 11th victim rather than the 13th, so his ring composition is broken before he even starts to make it; I feel callous for pointing this out, but it bothered me, and I can't help feeling that Yallop should have known better), with occasional excursions into the POV of the police. It's not badly done, as these things go, although Yallop can be confusing. He never names the murderer, and he describes at least one murder that Peter Sutcliffe didn't commit but that was attributed to him. (This is on purpose because Yallop thinks the man who murdered Joan Harrison was Wearside Jack, a theory disproved by DNA in 2011.) So it got kind of hard to keep track of who was doing what. And in any event, I can never get away from the feeling that writing from the POV of the victims is cheating, and none of the body of the book gave me the intellectual thrill of Yallop's description of his own research.

Four stars on the basis of the last 50 or so pages. Otherwise three.



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