Deliver Us from Evil

by David A. Yallop

Tells the story of the Yorkshire Ripper who murdered at least thirteen British women and eluded an intense manhunt for more than five years

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, Crime

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

David Anthony Yallop was an agnostic British author who writes chiefly about unsolved crimes.

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[De Wet]

DNF. I hate non-fiction that invents thoughts, conversations and dramatizes events. There are some good photos in here, and it did get me interested in the Yorkshire Ripper. Ended up putting this one down and getting Yorkshire Ripper - The Secret Murders: The True Story of How Peter Sutcliffe's Terrible Reign of Terror Claimed at Least Twenty-Two More Lives instead, which was very good.

[Lord Bathcanoe of Snark · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't really take this seriously as a true crime book. Invented situations, invented dialogue. At times it reads more like a novel based on real events. At times it seems as if the author is actually side by side with Sutcliffe during his roaming around the pubs and red light districts of Yorkshire. He invents conversations and scenes that he could not possibly know really took place.
There are much better books about this case available.
Incidentally, the authors theory that the killer of Joan Harrison was the same person who sent the I'm Jack tape turned out to be completely wrong.

[Paul Goff-Deakins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book heartbreaking and shout-out-loud frustrating at the same time.

The very real back-stories given to these innocent women mixed with mind-boggling incompetence shown by the police all played out against the backdrop of a society who thought that because the Ripper was "only killing prostitutes" it didn't really matter...

The police investigating these horrific crimes get off far too lightly in this book, in my opinion.