True crime books have tended to concentrate on the perpetrator of the crimes, usually to try and help the reader understand how someone could have committed these acts. Some of the books also concentrate on the trial and legal proceedings or the mystery surrounding the crime. A book I recently read of this sort was A Different Class of Murder and I found it compelling reading. A good true crime book can illuminate human nature to the reader.
More recently, however, a number of books have been published that concentrate more on the victim and the impact of the crime than on the perpetrator. The best of these that I have read is The Five by Hallie Rubenfeld which talks about the known victims of Jack the Ripper and shows how they were vulnerable and available to the killer and also challenges the common view that the women were sex workers.
Carol Ann Lee’s book Someone’s Mother, Someone’s Daughter does the same thing but with the victims of a more recent serial killer – Peter Sutcliffe, known as the Yorkshire Ripper. She tells the story of his crimes by concentrating on the lives and experiences of the women whom he killed, those who escaped him and those who are thought to be unrecognised victims. The author tells us about their lives, what happened to them and how the police regarded and investigated the events. This author is also intent on humanising the women and rejecting the media/police/public view that they were all sex workers and therefore, somehow, less deserving of sympathy and attention than other women. It’s a pervading view about these murders and I heard a reference to the killings only recently on the radio that described the victims not as people, not as women, but as prostitutes as though that made them some different kind of a being.
This book is well researched and clearly written. The story of the investigations and the now well-known police mishandling of the case comes out by looking at the individual women. The book’s focus is on the women and on their families and little time is given to the motivations or life of Sutcliffe – there are plenty of other books which make him the main character in the story.
This book is not sensationalist although it is grim reading in places. It will make you sad about what happened but also angry about how these women were perceived and the damage done to their reputations. A very interesting book which is written in an accessible way.
Anne Is Reading 