LONDON  In a grisly case that British newspapers have compared to the Yorkshire Ripper murders of the 1970s, the police on Thursday charged a 40-year-old man pursuing a Ph.D. in 19th-century homicides with the murders of three women identified by the police as prostitutes.

One victim was caught on closed-circuit television last week being killed with a crossbow shot to the head before her dismembered body was dumped in a nearby river.

The man charged with the killings, Stephen Griffiths, is a former van driver with a psychology degree who was enrolled in a postgraduate course in criminology. The Times of London reported that he had told a neighbor in Bradford, the rundown industrial city in West Yorkshire where he lived until his arrest on Monday, that he was studying for “a Ph.D. in murder and Jack the Ripper,” the pseudonym given to the unidentified serial killer of prostitutes in London’s Whitechapel slum district in the 1880s.

Image A police diver searched the River Aire in Shipley, West Yorkshire, after a woman’s remains were found on Tuesday. Credit... Andrew Yates/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But it was the resonance of another serial murder case involving a man from the Bradford area that helped make the latest killings a newspaper sensation. In a case that terrorized much of northern England and led to years of inquiries about police investigative failures, Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, was convicted in 1981 of murdering 13 women, including several prostitutes, and of attempting to murder 7 others.