Departures of note

Stanley Ellis was the first person to give expert evidence for speaker identification in an English court, and in June 1979 he correctly identified that a tape released by police as being from the Yorkshire Ripper was actually a hoax, because the accent was from a region far from the crime scene.

The police disregarded his warning; the hoaxer was finally identified in 2006 and was shown to have lived in the region Ellis had identified. His colleague Jack Windsor Lewis said in November 2012 that Ellis located the speaker to the Wearside area by comparing his speech with a recording made while studying the Washington dialect, and dismissed reports that Ellis located him as precisely as Castletown.