When we encounter murderous healers, as we have in the cases of the British GP-turned-serial killer Harold Shipman, the homicidal American nurse Charles Cullen, and now Lucy Letby, the instinct is to cry “monster!” and make every effort to distance ourselves from such horrific behaviour. Surely these people are mentally ill? Psychopaths, deviants: people totally unrooted in basic human compassion.

In reality, this doesn’t stack up. Shipman and especially Letby seemed to be confusingly normal people living mundane lives. They were well thought of — if that is, they were thought of much at all. Shipman was a former rugby player who expressed remarkably compassionate and forward-thinking ideas, very much current today, about care for people with mental disorders. Meanwhile, Letby has been characterised as “beige” — not a word that springs to mind for many serial killers. She was a fan of salsa dancing, adopting cats, and taking holidays with her parents while in her mid-twenties — and was so “nice” that doctors initially discounted her as a possible cause of the deaths. The explanations of her motives: that she had a crush on one of the consultants; that she feared never having children of her own; that she suffered from Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy or psychopathic tendencies, seem contradictory.

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In my many years of working with murderers, serial killers, and criminals with a range of complex mental troubles, I have learned that when things seem most confusing, the answer often lies in a person’s life experience, and especially in the “obstacles” they have tackled in their personal relationships. As psychoanalytic theory shows us, people are often poor narrators of their own reasons for doing things: instead, their actions tend to powerfully echo their life experiences. Harold Shipman, for example, at the age of 17 watched his mother die a slow and horrible death of lung cancer, eased only by the use of large amounts of morphine. This was exactly the method he later used to kill his own victims as they struggled (on the whole) with illnesses that they would have recovered from, something that as a GP he would have known.

When it comes to understanding this drive towards death, we must naturally start with Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that there were two “drives” in everyone’s unconscious: an Erotic drive towards pleasure, procreation and life; and a Thanatotic drive towards destruction, pain and death. Each is important because we all eventually have to face up to the temporality of sexual relationships and the inevitability of death. But unfortunately for those of us working in forensic psychiatry or psychotherapy, Freud wrote a great deal more about the Erotic than he did about death. This means that a lot of thinking about perversion — the turning away from life and towards death — has been filled in by other writers and psychotherapists since.

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Estela Welldon, a forensic psychotherapist, writes particularly powerfully about “dancing with death”; the idea that for some people a closeness to death provides a kind of life-affirming excitement, a reminder that they are still alive. It doesn’t matter whether this is their own death, as is the case for people who self-harm or consider suicide, or the death of others who choose to express this outwardly (and certainly not always fatally if we think of extreme S&M sex play). Very often, this takes the form of what Freud called a “repetition compulsion”: a compulsive desire to recreate important circumstances from one’s past in a way that induces the excitement of the “death dance”, but provides a sense of control over it. Shipman is an obvious example, but I have worked with many male offenders who cannot seem to help but repeat upon their loved ones the violence they saw inflicted on family members by fathers they swore they despised.

For Letby, her own birth was a “near-death” experience; she was told that her life had been “saved” by the nurses who helped her mother through a difficult childbirth. This has been cited as the main reason Letby went into nursing herself. But what was it that appealed to her so much? A sense of debt to the profession, possibly, although it must have seemed awesome to her that another individual had such power over life, and that she herself could take on this power.

As someone who trains aspiring psychologists and psychotherapists, I meet a lot of “wounded healers”: those who chose to follow such a profession because of their own life experiences. There is nothing wrong with this, in itself, and of course talking therapies equip people with considerably blunter tools for helping and harming than those wielded by doctors and nurses. Yet several ambitious people I have trained have subsequently left the caring professions because the realities of working every day with suffering people can often be more oppressive and harrowing than it can be life-affirming. Young women who seem hell-bent on deliberately harming themselves; middle-aged men with depression so crippling they can barely mumble a sentence in their clinic session; people from migrant backgrounds who can barely speak English, but their distress and trauma seem to seep from their very pores and cause your voice to choke in your throat. All of these cases, day after day, and some of it reminding you of — even triggering — your own past traumas and obstacles. We politely call this experience “compassion fatigue”.

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It shows great maturity to abandon your dream when you realise that your fatigue is so strong that you cannot continue. But I imagine that this must be even harder to do if you genuinely believe your life has been saved by the profession you have spent countless hours training in. In that case, where does this fatigue from a constant experience of death and near-death go? The natural, unspeakable response would be to try to exert some kind of control over it; to show that the life-affirming experience of her birth could be repeated through an equally potent act. But, lacking the skill to save truly sick babies, her only way to exert this power, to show that she still lived and her life was worth living, was to take the lives of others in her care. Quietly, and with minimal suffering, perhaps, but was this a choice of convenience rather than compassion?

As the respected forensic psychologist Naomi Murphy has said, to take life in this way is a callous, almost psychopathic response — but the uncomfortable truth is that it is also oddly human. Letby is not anything so straightforward as a monster or a psychopath. Confronted repeatedly with suffering and loss in a world she so fervently believed she belonged, her drive to sustain life became perverted into a drive to inflict death. Only in this way could she feel that her identity, her power — that instinct to care which, in others, kept her alive and then gave her a reason to exist — could be sustained.

It always astonishes me that while those of us working in mental healthcare are expected to receive regular, even daily, supervision and therapy to “detoxify” us from the psychic pain, those in physical healthcare — who, frankly, see far more death and trauma — receive no such consideration. In the face of suffering and death, which was already worryingly common at Countess of Chester Hospital long before Letby worked there, NHS workers are expected to simply get the job done. It feels unreasonable to suggest that, amid a staffing and funding crisis in the NHS, regular psychological support should be offered to those who regularly work with death. Yet at the same time, this would be one way to spot those for whom compassion fatigue had started to eat away at their empathy — and paralyse their drive to life.

It wasn’t long after that the disappearance of 25-year-old Alabaman Carlee Russell became an internet sensation. Russell had called 911 to report that she was helping a toddler she had found wandering along the side of a highway. But when officers arrived at the scene, Russell and the child were nowhere to be found. Instead, they found her wig, phone and car. Sparking a 49-hour police search, Russell then turned up at her parents’ home saying she had been blindfolded, kidnapped and forced into a vehicle, where she could hear a baby crying. She claimed she had been held in a home where a woman fed her cheese and crackers, but that she had managed to escape.

In a statement from her lawyer nine days later, Russell admitted that the entire story had been fabricated. Police reported that they had found some “very strange” searches on her phone, including “how to take money from a register without being caught” and “the movie Taken” — in which Liam Neeson tracks down a gang that has kidnapped his daughter in order to sell her into sexual servitude.

Days after Russell’s deceit was revealed, Californian “momfluencer” Katie Sorensen was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Her crime had been to falsely report, in social media videos that had gone viral two years earlier, that a Hispanic couple who “weren’t clean-cut individuals” had attempted to kidnap her two children in a suburban parking lot.

This collection of bizarre and sad stories point to a strange phenomenon. Awareness of human trafficking has curdled to such an extent that an increasing number of women think it feasible that they or their children could be snatched off the streets. Exacerbating their fears, Sound of Freedom was released in cinemas at around the same time Russell came clean. It tells the story of Tim Ballard and his foundation, Operation Underground Railroad, which purports to have rescued around 4,000 children from traffickers and has found a receptive audience.

Earlier this year, a Pew survey on American parenting found that 28% of parents of children under 18 — that figure rising to 35% of mothers — were extremely or very worried about their kids being kidnapped or abducted. The fear ranked third on the list of concerns, behind mental health issues and bullying, and above getting shot, pregnant or addicted to drugs. It appears that America’s long history of stranger danger has been supercharged by very modern forces.

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The period between 1970 and 2000 is known as the “golden age of serial murder”, as the birth of the interstate highway system meant unprecedented numbers of people moved to urban and suburban centres. The resulting loss of community and greater anonymity is thought to be behind the dramatic increase in murders and abductions, with children and young women overwhelmingly the victims.

In the same era, a newly empowered generation of women entered the workforce en masse — which required them to outsource the care of their children to strangers. This contributed to the “daycare panic” of the Eighties — more commonly known as the “satanic panic” — in which thousands of unsubstantiated cases of “ritual satanic abuse” of children were reported around the country. Most of the alleged perpetrators were childcare workers, despite the fact that fewer than 1% of abuses have been found to take place in those settings. This anxiety suggests that America wasn’t ready to accept women leaving their children in the care of others.

While the number of serial killers in the US has decreased decade by decade, the fear remains stubborn. Urban legends about abductions have been around forever, but the internet has made them more widespread. Hoaxes about kidnappings are now clickbait staples on social media, and often find their way into local media. The online fact-checking website Snopes has a database of kidnapping hoaxes dating back to the Nineties, featuring reports of everything from a hook-handed psycho targeting teens making out in parked cars, to attempted abductions of kids from amusement parks being thwarted because the kidnappers forgot to change the child’s shoes.

This is not to say that horrific events don’t happen. When they do, they legitimise the fears behind some of the wilder notions. In 2002, for instance, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint from her home by an itinerant preacher and held captive for nine months before being rescued. Smart has since become an activist who has testified in Congress, addressed conferences and become a film producer turning the stories of famous abductees into daytime television staples. In other words, tragic as it is, her story has had an outsize impact on America’s cultural consciousness.

And where there is fear, there are those waiting to exploit it. The anti-human trafficking cause, while virtuous on its surface, has become a lucrative business, both for groups who exist to raise awareness for it, and for influencer-entrepreneurs.”There is a willingness for a lot of nonprofits to say whatever they need to say to get donations,” says law professor Bridget Carr at the University of Michigan’s Human Trafficking Clinic. More often than not, these organisations are geared towards awareness and training, and not working in the actual field with genuine victims. As Carr notes, “many in the anti-trafficking movement are always willing to use sex trafficking as a synonym for human trafficking”.

Anti-trafficking organisations played a large part in promoting the myth that, each year, the Super Bowl is the largest human trafficking event in the world. As hundreds of thousands of people descend on the host city, the story goes, so too do pimps, prostitutes and unwitting victims. Researchers found that, between 2010 and 2016, 76% of US print media reported a link between the Super Bowl and trafficking for sexual exploitation; the story had also been picked up by outlets such as CNN and Reuters — even though there is no definitive data behind it, and it has been repeatedly debunked.

While media and societal shifts laid the foundations for the abduction panic, the advent of the pandemic brought such issues into the mainstream. Conspiracy was in the air, and lockdowns meant that many turned to online communities for company. In real life, people masking on the streets were suddenly viewed as unrecognisable, suspicious and potentially dangerous.

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It was in this atmosphere that a wannabe rapper, model and cryptocurrency enthusiast Scotty Rojas, aka Scotty the Kid, became radicalised by QAnon. On Instagram, Rojas developed the social media movement #SaveOurChildren, which promised to tackle “the real pandemic”, citing the false statistic that 800,000 children go missing in the United States each year — the equivalent of around 2,000 a day.

Taken up by a broad coalition of people — from wellness influencers to a former high-flying PR executive who went viral for destroying a display of face masks to raise the alarm about elite paedophile rings — the #SaveOurChildren movement began holding mass rallies around the nation. Though they existed in the name of child protection, they quickly became a way to protest against lockdowns and looming vaccine mandates, as well as progressive values in general, safetyism in particular and, on top of everything else, the validity of sex work. This “conspirituality” coalition had been building for some time. But as #SaveOurChildren grew in popularity, many who jumped on board were simply concerned parents who were absorbing disinformation via social media.

And yet, no matter how well-intentioned, online scare campaigns certainly weren’t addressing the real issues behind child sex trafficking, which ultimately require more robust welfare and state intervention. Overwhelmingly, trafficking victims, particularly children, are preyed upon by a close family member, or someone they know and trust. As Bridget Carr told me, during her many years working to advocate for children, she’s “represented hundreds and hundreds of victims and consulted on many more cases, and never, not one time in my case work has a child been snatched by a stranger. Not one time.”

Sensational tales do well on social media, with facts trailing far behind. Katie Sorensen was a failing influencer until her video went viral. As police investigated her claims, she appeared in news bulletins, repeating her story. On TikTok alone, videos tagged “abduction warnings signs” have 245.7 million views.

As with most social media ephemera, the energy behind the #SaveOurChildren movement has since shifted. Hoaxes about women being abducted outside Target stores are currently racking up tens of millions of TikTok views. In a climate where many have terrified themselves into believing that child abductions are happening all around them, it’s not much of a leap to believe women will be snatched too. The #MeToo movement, though it did an enormous amount of good, also led to a heightened sense of vulnerability among women, who were often already fixated on urban legends of abductions.

Behind the abduction panic is an even wider problem, then, than the legitimate crisis of global human trafficking. It is a product of the social isolation of modern America, which was accelerated by the pandemic. As we work from home, have our entertainment beamed to our couches and have food delivered to us, everyday interactions with strangers are becoming rarer and rarer. In turn, we’re becoming increasingly suspicious of everything and everyone. As with many of modern life’s ills, the way out of this new fear may just be spending more time in the real world and less time online.

No longer. When my wife recently accidentally left one of our two new cats outside overnight — she found it mewing pitiably at the kitchen door in the morning — she was racked with guilt. I hunt the house to make sure they are safely indoors before turning in of an evening. My mind roams to images of my cats being torn to bits by the urban foxes that slink along the fence, of their being scragged after accidentally invading the territory of a local tom (that happened to my old cat, and the vet’s bills were horrendous), or… of worse.

Our digital culture is saturated with cat adoration — the small portion of the internet not devoted to pornography or political hate-speech is mostly taken up with pictures of cats. But it’s also blooming, like squid-ink, with a related anxiety — that of cats as the objects of malice and cruelty. Rather than being independent creatures, cats now occupy a peculiar position in our minds: we think of them as (God help us) “floofs” and “fur-babies”, cuddly creatures utterly dependent on us for protection; but also as being hard to protect because, well, they’re cats. Unlike dogs, they go where they like and do what they like. It’s a recipe for paranoia.

And where there’s paranoia, there’s a buck to be made feeding it. ITV’s recent How To Catch A Cat Killer told the story — an easy heartstring-tugger for the likes of me — of a spate of cats being stabbed in a quiet close in Brighton, and of the Facebook group of local cat-lovers which was set up to warn other owners of the danger, and even ended up helping to track down the culprit. Where vigilantes, in the traditional Hollywood account of it, tend to be flint-faced, damaged, solitary men with gravelly voices and an unsmiling sense of purpose (think Charles Bronson, Jack Reacher, Batman, Rorschach or The Punisher), the acceptable real-life face of them is now a mildly out-of-shape middle-aged cat lover in a sensible jumper, specs illuminated by the glow of a last-generation laptop.

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Audiences eat this stuff up. This show was very obviously a low-stakes UK reprise of 2019’s surprise Netflix hit Don’t F*** With Cats, which followed an ad hoc group of Facebook friends tracking down a sicko who posted a video of himself suffocating a pair of kittens to death. Their collective digital sleuthing — every pixel was combed for clues as to the killer’s location, from soft furnishings to plug sockets — closed in on a Walter Mitty character called Luka Magnotta, a Canadian porn actor and wannabe model who had created an online persona for himself as fabulous as it was fictitious. Far from being a harmless weirdo, though, Magnotta showed all the signs of psychopathy — and went on to kill a human being before the police caught up with him.

The villain of ITV’s show had a bit less of Tom Ripley about him. He was a nightclub bouncer known to his colleagues as “Creepy Steve”, and though he stolidly denied the cat-killings in the face of all the evidence, he didn’t show any great flair as a master-criminal. He was clearly caught on CCTV, pretty early on, stabbing a cat. He had a knife in his flat contaminated with cat hair and blood. His mobile phone placed him at the location of 14 of the attacks. And his internet search history was full of things like “Dog killing cat”, which in the context is the sort of thing that tends to raise the long eyebrow of the law. Moriarty, at least, would have known how to use Safesearch Mode while planning his next heist.

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Still, a happy ending in both cases for the cat-loving forces of good. The online vigilantes in both these documentaries showed every sign of being responsible and cautious about what they did: they did everything they could to get the police involved. And their discoveries were in some cases genuinely helpful. It took a Brighton cat-lover to obtain the CCTV footage of Creepy Steve by following a trail of blood back to the scene of the killing; something that hadn’t apparently occurred to the police (busy as they no doubt were solving “proper” crimes). Funny, though, that we’re more inclined to give vigilantes a free pass when it comes to cats. Going after cat-killers online, fine: going after child-molesters, not so much (let’s not forget the innocent paediatrician hounded out of his house by concerned parents a few years back).

Pet cruelty seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s at once deeply emotive and, for the most part, below the level of the sort of thing that the police take an urgent interest in. Cats are low-level crime — in the Brighton case, the cat-killer had to be prosecuted for offences against property rather than cruelty to animals because there’s a far higher possible custodial sentence for the former than the latter. The law, literally, cares more about cats qua property than qua living beings. So why not get citizen detectives involved?

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The grisly history of serial killers might be one reason why not. Many if not most of them start out by torturing animals. Luka Magnotta was a classic example: like Ed Gein, he started on cats and moved on to people. Magnotta identified and threatened one of his principal pursuers, Deanna Thompson: he posted taunting videos of the casino where she worked. That is a bit yikes, as they say online. Creating fresh crimes, and making more work for your overstretched local bobby, by getting yourself killed is not anyone’s vigilante dream.

And there, again, we return to what documentaries like these say about our collective anxiety about cats. The stakes are at once low, and high. We infantilise them, much against their own nature. We pour into them — into their free-roaming nature and their vulnerability — our fears of an outside world that is more dangerous than our keyboard-tethered selves would quite like to look at face-on. And we fantasise, too, about being able to reach out and right wrongs in that outside world from the safety of our laptops. Prevention is better than cure, and documentaries be damned. Let’s lock the doors at night, and make sure the cats are in.

But Harvey is not a woman. He is a male serial killer.

The New York Times, formerly a paper of record, but more recently a censorious mouthpiece, referred to Marcelin its report as, “An 83-year-old Brooklyn woman”. In fact, almost all media reports of his latest crime – murdering and dismembering a woman he met two years ago online – refer to Marcelin as “she” and “her”.

Marcelin already has two convictions for killing women, and has served much of the past five decades in jail. He was released in 2019, but earlier this month, he was taken into custody again, after the severed remains of Susan Leydon were discovered at his home and local area. The “defrauding the government” on the charge sheet referred to his attempts to cover up his crime.

Marcelin began his long career of violence with an assault charge in 1957. In 1963, he was arrested and charged with attempted rape, but the case was dropped when the victim didn’t show up to court. As violent men do, he escalated, and murderered Jaqueline Bonds on 18 April 1963. He shot her in the head in front of witnesses in Harlem. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years to life.

While in prison, Marcelin served repeated stints in solitary confinement, about which he submitted numerous complaints that this amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment”. All were dismissed. Then, in 1984, having served only 13 years of his sentence, he was released on lifetime parole.

The following year, 1985, he fatally stabbed Anna Laura Serrera Miranda and dumped her body in a bag on a roadway near Central Park. Despite this being the second woman he had killed, he plea bargained down from murder to first degree manslaughter and was sentenced to just six to 12 years.

Every two years, Marcelin unsuccessfully applied for parole. At one hearing, he blamed his crimes on “youth and poor judgement and stupidity”, and was rebuked by a parole officer, who told him he was a “grown ass man”. Marcelin complained about this comment, but it went nowhere.

Following his 1997 parole hearing, Marcelin submitted a complaint to the court that he had been denied a fair hearing because all three members of the parole board were women. He felt that the nature of his crimes would lead women to be biased against him, telling the court, “I have problems with women.” But his complaint was rejected by a three-judge panel as speculative and baseless.

In 2001, according to the court filing, a guard “observed the prisoner [Marcelin] engaged in an act of oral intercourse with another inmate”. He had to face a hearing about it, but no penalty was applied. Eventually, in 2019, the parole board made the decision to release him.

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On 27 February this year, Susan Leyden was seen entering Marcelin’s apartment, carrying a multi coloured bag. On 3 March, a woman’s torso was discovered in a garbage bag in a shopping cart on a busy street in East New York, Brooklyn during the early morning hours. Five days later, a leg was discovered in Cypress Hill only blocks away from where the torso was discovered. The next day, detectives questioned Marcelin following reports that he had been seen leaving the apartment with the same bag. A search of Marcelin’s home turned up a human head, and electric saws he had bought from a nearby Home Depot. Then a severed leg was found, four blocks away, poking out of a tire, cut from the knee down and still wearing a sock. Astonishingly, Marcelin was caught on CCTV in a 99-cent store in Brooklyn, in his wheelchair, with Leydon’s severed leg, wrapped in a garbage bag.

Nora[1. Not her real name], an experienced lawyer and feminist campaigner based in Brooklyn, is furious.  “It outrages me that this perpetrator murdered one woman, was released on parole, then brutally murdered a second woman within months and was later paroled again. How would that be possible in a world that valued women’s lives?” She tells me that even with serial murders of women, some victims are seen as expendable.

At the time of his arrest, Marcelin was living at Stonewall House, New York City’s first LGBT-welcoming senior housing. No one seems to know when Marcelin began identifying as a woman, but there is no evidence that he had undergone treatment of any kind, and it would appear that he was presenting as male until very close to the discovery of Leydon’s remains.

“He needs to be incarcerated,” Nora says. “But at the same time, we need to protect incarcerated women. How would I feel if a woman I cared about were put in a cell with this defendant? I’m worried about women being confined with this person. We have to be able to talk about those concerns.”

I also spoke to Oren Yaniv, Director of Communication at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office about Marcelin’s case. At first, Yaniv used male pronouns to refer to Marcelin, then within a couple of minutes he suddenly switched to “she”.

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“I don’t know what her driver’s license says,” he told me, when I asked if Marcelin had legally transitioned. “Usually in the US these days it is based on a person’s preference, so right now she identifies as a woman, and we are respecting that.” So does that mean Marcelin will be held in female correctional facilities? “To the best of my knowledge, yes,” he replied.

But what about the risk he may pose to the women incarcerated with a male serial killer? Wasn’t this of concern to the DA?“I’m sure that they are taking precautions now,” Yaniv said, “this individual has spent… years in prison already, where to my knowledge they did not kill anybody, I don’t think there are too many chainsaws in prison but… she won’t be the only accused murderer that’s being held in Riker and they have policies and precautions to, you know, minimise the violence of it.”

He also confirmed at trial, “we respect the person’s gender identity… She identifies as a woman, and we refer [to] her as a woman.” Marcelin will be referred to in court as she/her. The DA’s office and the correctional facilities will “respect” Marceline’s gender identity, make the bold assumption that his transition is genuine, call him she/her in court, and put him in prison with women.

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Susan Leyden, Marcelin’s latest victim, was a devoted single mother. At her funeral, her daughter Nicole said, “Mom had a heart of gold. She was so much fun to be around. Our relationship was more like sisters at times. Perhaps because it was just the two of us, I never wanted to leave her side.”

I feel for Leyden’s daughter, and her family, and the families of the other victims. They will have to listen to the court referring to a male serial killer as “she” and “her”. They will have to live with the fact that the second and third murders were entirely foreseeable and preventable if the authorities had only acted. And all the women who will be incarcerated with this man, and who are already vulnerable will know that they have been put seriously at risk.

Marcelin epitomises the worst example of unbridled male violence, and to pretend he is the same sex as those whose lives he destroyed is nothing short of an abomination.

It’s hard to deny that the practice of self-identification is increasingly open to abuse — in the UK, as well as in America. Only last week Baroness Nicholson broke the story of the rape of a woman in a female ward by a male-bodied transwoman, who had been allowed in the ward thanks to the acceptance by the NHS of self-identification.

Gender identity ideology often comes packaged in warm and fuzzy clichés. “Trans women are women”; “What impact does it have on your life anyway?”; “Can’t you just be kind?” But for how much longer can we ignore the grave consequences for women when predatory men take advantage of the new rules of this ideology.

It wasn’t that late when Jacqueline got off the bus. At 9.23pm on 17 November, she crossed a busy main road, not realising she had been spotted by Peter Sutcliffe, a 34-year-old lorry driver. Sutcliffe later told the police that he had just finished eating a portion of fried chicken in his Rover when he saw her. “I decided she was a likely victim,” he said.

She was only 100 yards from safety when he drove past, parked his car and hit her on the head with a hammer. He dragged her into a lane that led to some rough ground, struck her again but paused when he heard someone walking past. Then he returned to the attack, using a screwdriver to slash and stab her several times. Jacqueline had just become the final victim of the man known as the Yorkshire Ripper.

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A week ago, a women’s group, Leeds Spinners, placed a plaque close to where Jacqueline died. It bears an inscription that tries to fill in the character of a young woman most of us only know, if at all, as a victim of one of this country’s worst serial killers. The gesture gained extra poignancy when Sutcliffe’s death at the age of 74 was announced on Friday. He outlived his last victim by almost exactly four decades.

Rage at the incompetence of West Yorkshire police lives on, though. Sutcliffe was careless, leaving so much evidence that he was interviewed by detectives on nine occasions — but never once put on an identity parade or arrested in connection with the murders by the Ripper squad.

After Sutcliffe’s death, West Yorkshire’s current Chief Constable, John Robins, made a belated apology for mistakes in the inquiry. But even then he couldn’t resist a whinge. He complained that the hard work of bringing the Ripper to justice had been overshadowed by the language used by the upper ranks, who had described women as pawns and seemed to belittle the death of prostitutes.

Robins’s apology was all very well, but his force didn’t bring Sutcliffe to justice. The arrest was made in Sheffield in January 1981 by a traffic patrol from South Yorkshire, who were suspicious about the stolen number plates crudely taped to his car. And it’s not as though the language used by senior officers in the 1970s was incidental to the conduct of the investigation. On the contrary, it reflected a deep-seated misogyny that led to indefensible judgements about the victims and persuaded senior officers to doubt — and in some instances ignore — crucial evidence. To put it bluntly, some of the early victims, while definitely not involved in prostitution, didn’t meet West Yorkshire police’s exacting standards for female conduct. One woman had a black boyfriend! Another went to the pub without her husband!

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From early on in the case, detectives and the press wrongly assumed that the killer’s motive was a hatred of prostituted women. It didn’t bear a moment’s scrutiny: the first four attacks, all in the second half of 1975, had nothing to do with women who were selling sex. It did, however, appeal to the detective in charge of the inquiry, Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, who was convinced he was hot on the heels of a latter-day Jack the Ripper. He overlooked the fact that Sutcliffe’s first three victims, who all survived, were attacked in quiet residential streets and a country lane nowhere near Leeds’s red light district. One was a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Tracey Browne, who provided a photofit of her attacker that turned out to closely resemble Sutcliffe. But detectives decided she was too young and had been in the wrong place to belong in the series, thus ruling out a vital piece of evidence.

Another early victim, 46-year-old Olive Smelt from Halifax, also offered crucial testimony. She encountered Sutcliffe twice on the night of the assault in August 1975 — first in a pub, where he made an obscene remark, and later when he spotted her on his way home. Sutcliffe stopped his car and spoke to her again before striking her twice on the head with a hammer. He was slashing her buttocks when a passing car scared him off. Mrs Smelt described her attacker as around 30, with dark hair and a beard. She was also certain that he had a local accent. Sutcliffe was 29 at the time and matched her description closely.

Unfortunately, detectives were sceptical about Mrs Smelt’s value as a witness. In a secret report summarising the murders, she was dismissed in astonishingly pejorative language: “She is of loose morals,” the report declared, adding that “it was her usual custom … to visit public houses in Halifax on her own”. What detectives really believed about Mrs Smelt was revealed in a slip by then Chief Constable, Ronald Gregory, who described her in a newspaper article as “a prostitute”. It fitted the “prostitute killer” narrative and damaged Mrs Smelt’s credibility in the eyes of the inquiry, even though it had nothing to do with reality.

Sutcliffe’s fourth victim, and the first to be killed, was 28-year-old Wilma McCann, a mother of four. She was not involved in prostitution either. But Sutcliffe was tired of having his attempts to kill women interrupted and he targeted her in Chapeltown, a red-light area in Leeds where kerb crawlers didn’t attract attention. His fifth victim, 42-year-old Emily Jackson, whom he attacked in January 1976, was selling sex in Chapeltown as a result of a family financial crisis. Sutcliffe had realised prostituted women were easier targets, desperate for money and willing to get into his car. Mrs Jackson was the second woman to die, and her injuries were horrific.

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By the following year, evidence that should have led to Sutcliffe was mounting up. In October 1977 he made his biggest mistake, leaving a brand-new £5 note in the bag of one of his two Manchester victims. In a rare piece of effective detective work, officers traced it to a consignment of notes that had gone to a small number of firms in West Yorkshire, one of which employed Sutcliffe. He was convinced the game was up, but the line of inquiry petered out. Even so, Sutcliffe was a local man with a Yorkshire accent, his appearance matched photofits produced by another surviving victim, Marilyn Moore, and his car had been spotted in red light districts hundreds of times.

Yet when a junior detective, DC Andy Laptew, interviewed him as part of the £5 note inquiry and suggested that Sutcliffe deserved further investigation, Oldfield banged the table with his fist. “Peter Sutcliffe is not the Yorkshire Ripper,” he shouted, threatening anyone who disagreed with a return to traffic duties. There was a reason for Oldfield’s bizarre behaviour, though not a good one. Increasingly desperate about his failure to catch the killer, Oldfield was easy prey for an amateurish hoaxer who sent him anonymous letters and a tape. The man had a distinctive Wearside accent, something none of the survivors had described — but hey, what did they know? I questioned the tape’s authenticity when I first heard it but it flattered Oldfield, addressing him personally and reinforcing his ideas about the killer’s motives.

In the summer of 1979, he decided to ignore the surviving victims, with their regrettable personal habits, and release the tape to the public. West Yorkshire police wasted £1m on a publicity campaign, asking people to look out for a killer with a North-East accent. In Halifax, Olive Smelt was outraged; she told me so when I interviewed her after Jacqueline’s murder in 1980. But a floundering investigation had taken a catastrophic turn and three more women — Jacqueline, Barbara Leach and Marguerite Walls — would die as a result.

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West Yorkshire police’s apology has come too late for Mrs Smelt, who died in 2011. But I’m troubled by Robins’s claims about modern policing, not least the idea that misogynist attitudes have been “consigned to history”. It is true that police forces have better technology than they did in the 1970s, but I see no end to victim-blaming. The “short skirt” defence in rape cases has been replaced by a “digital strip search”, where victims are asked to hand over medical records, school reports and mobile phones, allowing detectives to access intimate photos and messages.

The result is evident in crime statistics: around 55,000 women report a rape to the police in England and Wales each year, but there were only 1,439 convictions in 2019-20. Victims are still being discredited and having their stories disbelieved; it’s more sophisticated than West Yorkshire police’s division of Sutcliffe’s victims into “innocent girls” and the rest, but the underlying impulse is pretty much the same. The situation is so dire that the Victims’ Commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, has argued that rape is being decriminalised.

In Leeds itself, women challenge Robins’s assertion that policing is now “wholly victim-focused”, ensuring that “those harmed by crime are at the heart of what we do”. His force operates the controversial “managed approach” to prostitution, allowing men to kerb crawl in Holbeck, a light industrial area to the south of the city centre, without fear of arrest — as long as they stick to certain hours. It didn’t prevent the murder of a young Polish woman, Daria Pionko, who was kicked to death in Holbeck by a sex buyer in 2015.

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The commercial sex trade always attracts predators, putting women who sell sex at risk, while local women say they are pestered for sex while out shopping or on their way to work. Last week a local headmaster, Ben Mallinson told the BBC he was afraid one of his female pupils would be abducted by men looking for sex, as several had already been propositioned. Holbeck is only four or five miles from Headingley, where Jacqueline Hill was murdered by a man who hated women, yet it now seems to be operating as a “managed misogyny” zone.

It has been painfully clear for a long time that Hill’s death and those of other women could have been avoided if West Yorkshire police had put aside their prejudices and listened to Sutcliffe’s surviving victims. On this tragic anniversary, it is hard not to think of everything Jacqueline might have done in those four lost decades: the friends she would have made, the career she might have have followed, and the children she could have had.

It is also hard to contemplate the fact that women in Leeds and other parts of the country still don’t feel safe from predators, let down by a criminal justice system that seems incapable of locking up violent men. Misogyny is as entrenched as ever — and I’m as angry now as I was when Jacqueline was murdered all those years ago.