The Yorkshire Ripper: A True Story about a Copycat Killer (The Stacks Reader Series)

By Guy Martin

Somewhere in the north of England, a man who has murdered thirteen women is hiding. Police have been searching for him for five years. Even the villains have a price on his head. But he’s too smart—or too familiar.

Including an introduction by imprint editor Alex Belth.

About The Stacks Reader Series
The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Brought to you by The Sager Group with support from NeoText (NeoTextCorp.com).

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Oct 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958861301

Guy Martin

Richard Guy Martin was born in Alabama and educated in the U.S. and in Europe. He lives in Alabama and in Berlin. Fluent in German, Martin has written for The New Yorker, The (London) Observer, Paris Match, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Esquire, and the (London) Sunday Telegraph magazine. He is a John J. McCloy Journalism Fellow of the American Council on Germany and in 2013 received the Best Foreign Travel Story award from the Society of American Travel Writers.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION GUY MARTIN: OUR MAN IN THE FIELD

I was always amazed by how Guy could insinuate himself into the shadowy worlds of the KKK, neo-Nazis, and the East German secret police, says Martin’s longtime editor at Esquire, David Hirshey. But he carried himself with the rakish charm of a Southern gentleman and the sartorial savoir faire of a John Le Carré character—and that has served him well. Of course, it also occurred to me more than once that he might have been working for the CIA.

Richard Guy Martin knows what it’s like to be watched. The child of strict Methodists in Athens, Alabama, Martin grew up in a house designed by celebrated modern architect Paul Rudolph, who also happened to be from Athens. Built in the mid-’50s when Martin was a child, the house came together, Martin remembered, with staggering incongruity in Athens, AL, a cotton town not known for its embrace of cutting-edge modernism. The building of the house, spare, modern, and dominated by windows, became an attraction and not just for townspeople. For years, Martin recalls, tourists grazed through the property like cattle. For us, it was like being the cheetah family in the zoo.

But if Martin understood what it was to be different, to be looked at and scrutinized, he developed a gift for blending in and looking back. His first major piece for Esquire came in March 1980, when as a twenty-seven-year-old, he embedded himself in the Ku Klux Klan scene in Athens. The resulting story earned much praise and garnered the magazine’s first National Magazine Award nomination. It was clear from the start that Martin’s grace on the page and his reportorial chops put him in the first rank of nonfiction writers. His next piece took him to England for seven weeks, to northern industrial towns, chiefly Yorkshire, where he reported about a modern-day Jack the Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. The Ripper appeared in the January 1981 issue. As Esquire editor Phillip Moffitt aptly put it: The rhythms, language, and attitudes of Yorkshire permeate Martin’s story and make it one of those special pieces in which the feel of an entire world is captured.

By a quirk of fortuitous timing, Sutcliffe was apprehended within weeks of Martin’s piece appearing on the newsstand. He was sentenced to thirty years before he would be considered for parole; in 2010, it was decided that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

Martin’s story has the unsettling tension of a killer still at large—certainly, you’ll not ever listen to Thank You for Being a Friend, Andy Gold’s catchy 1978 pop song later used as the theme for the sitcom The Golden Girls, the same way again. Not after Sutcliffe included the song at the end of a cassette recording he mailed to the police. Martin evokes the landscape of northern England, its people, and their sensibilities with cinematic detail.

His knowledge of Europe, fluency in German, and natural ability to find the story in the most opaque foreign environments allowed Esquire to fulfill the capacity for which Martin seemed born, that of correspondent-at-large. For two decades, Martin reported for Esquire from Russia (a devastating feature on the AK-47), Africa, South America, the Czech Republic, and, of course, Berlin.

I was always amazed by how Guy could insinuate himself into the shadowy worlds of the KKK, neo-Nazis, and the East German secret police, says Martin’s longtime editor at Esquire, David Hirshey. But he carried himself with the rakish charm of a Southern gentleman and the sartorial savoir faire of a John Le Carré character—and that has served him well. Of course, it also occurred to me more than once that he might have been working for the CIA.

Martin first