Even when all of the victims are women, true crime documentaries tend to be told from a male POV – the police, the reporters, and of course, the killers are mostly men. The female victims, dead and/or disregarded, often have no voice.

Released this week, the new Netflix crime documentary The Ripper offers an important and often overlooked perspective – that of the women involved.

This isn’t a story about Jack the Ripper; this is the Yorkshire Ripper, a serial killer who terrorized Yorkshire and surrounding towns in Great Britain starting in the 1970s. All told, he killed 13 women, injured more and terrified the female population of northern England from 1975 to 1980.

The documentary shows how the killer eluded the police for years, killing with impunity without leaving behind much in the way of clues to propel the investigation. The police rely heavily on a taped message and written confession they receive that seems to admit to the murders, but it turns out to be a hoax. Victims who survived his attacks have head injuries and can’t remember their attacker. And crucially, police inadvertently derail the investigation from the beginning by mischaracterizing the victims.

Journalist Joan Smith, newly hired to the London Sunday Times, tells director Ellena Wood that in going over the police files she discovered that the first victim was not a prostitute as she was described, but that the biases of the investigators caused them to label her as such. When the next victim is another woman in less-than-respectable circumstances, the cops decide the Ripper is a prostitute killer. He wasn’t, but for too long the police focus their efforts on warning sex workers of the dangers they faced.

Eventually the killer murders a so-called “respectable” middle-class woman, and finally, the warning against being out at night is extended to all women. The documentary shows, in sickening detail, how differently the police at the time reacted based on the perceived status of the victims, as if they were only half-heartedly investigating at first.

The producers also use contemporary interviews and archived footage with women who lived in the area at the time, and who were angry with the police response that put a curfew in place not for men, one of whom was perpetrating the crimes, but for the potential victims: women. In response, women banded together and held “Reclaim the Night” marches to protest what they felt was victim blaming.

While justly critical of the police response, the documentary does cut the police some slack; 1970s forensic techniques are much less sophisticated than those we have today. There was no DNA analysis available – the best crime science had to offer was blood type matching, which only can narrow the field so far.

In 1980, almost by luck or accident, Peter Sutcliffe was arrested and convicted of the crimes, but that is not the most interesting part of the documentary.

Without the added perspective of the women interviewed – the survivors, potential victims, the reporters and the few female investigators on the case – this documentary might be just another run-of-the-mill true crime story. The Ripper is a story with a unique perspective and distinct voices though.