Steve Wright, the Ipswich woman-killer, and how he was tracked down

It was a case that taught so much, especially about how the media “uses” serial murder, although what I learned ranged from the very instrumental and practical, to how to deal with the more abstract problem of trying to communicate complex ideas in the middle of an active police investigation.

After signing non-disclosure agreements, I’m usually unable to describe what my role has been in any such case. Ipswich was different, as I’d been engaged by Sky News to work with their broadcast journalist Paul Harrison to explain more generally the phenomenon of serial murder.

Of course, when we started working together – after Tania and Gemma had disappeared, we’d no idea how this story was going to develop but Paul had read some of my academic research about serial murder and the vulnerabilities of sex workers and he sensed that this was the context to explain what had happened.

Even in those early days I stated on camera that no one wakes up one day and decides to become a serial killer. “They’re a long time in the making”, I said and suggested that the disappearances of Tania and Gemma – we were already being briefed that murder was presumed – could be linked to an earlier sequence of disappearances and murders of young women in the area, some of whom worked as sex workers in Norwich, which isn’t so very far from Ipswich.

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I named some of the women from that sequence of disappearances and murders, suggested that Tania and Gemma were likely to have known their killer, that he would live locally and, with a bit of luck, his DNA would already be on the national DNA database.

Gemma’s body was discovered first, although she’d disappeared after Tania. Both of their bodies were found in Belstead Brook, which had burst its banks due to the heavy rain that had fallen in late November 2006. Finding their bodies in water led to a great deal of online speculation and public comment that there was a “religious motive” for their murders. Given what they did to earn money, so this argument went, the killer had been trying to “cleanse them of their sins”.

Obviously, on air, Paul asked for me to comment on this and I explained that it had nothing to do with religion but suggested that the killer was “forensically aware” because putting them in water was a way of destroying evidence. This was something, I suggested, that he’d learned from “earlier experiences.”

It was a mistake, but not because I was wrong in that assumption.

I hadn’t appreciated that the culprit was going to be watching and listening to me and that he might shape his subsequent behaviour accordingly. When the police found Anneli’s body, it had been posed in a cruciform position – not only a classic piece of staging behaviour on the part of her killer but also an attempt by him to give credence to the idea that the killer was some sort of religious maniac. There and then Paul and I decided that we had to be much more careful about what he asked and how I replied, we had to “self-censor” no matter how keen we both were to explain.

Ipswich sex worker killer Steve Wright (Image: free)

By that stage I’d also had a run-in with some members of the Suffolk Constabulary. In the first few days of their investigation the very few press and broadcast journalists – that would be Paul – covering the case were being offered tea and coffee facilities within police headquarters at Martlesham.

We were able to mix with the various police officers working the case and, after one on-screen interview I went to get myself a cup of coffee. The detective had clearly been watching. I was struggling to get the coffee machine to serve me my flat white which provided him with the perfect opportunity. “Oh,” he said, “you can solve murders but the coffee machine is beyond you!” I smiled and suggested that he should “get a life”.

Within a week all the print and broadcast journalists had been made to leave the police HQ and had had to set up refreshment facilities within their grounds. However, it did teach me a lesson and was a small indication of the pressure that the police were under because of the media’s growing interest in the case.

This was a story which quickly moved from being something local, regional and small scale to one that had national and even international journalists covering the case. Managing that interest was never going to be easy and would need a much better police media strategy than criticising me over the coffee machine.

Above all, this case was one where I could truly bring my academic and applied experience about serial murder to a wider and more popular audience and so emphasise that we needed to concentrate on the victims, rather than the motivation of the killer.

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What should interest us was why these young women had become vulnerable to attack, rather than the perverted fantasies of who it was that had killed them. Change those vulnerabilities, I suggested, and we would do much more to reduce the incidence of serial murder than wallowing around “in the mind of a serial killer”.

The following month, on February 21, 2008, Wright was found guilty of murdering all five women. He did indeed know all of the women that he’d murdered in Ipswich, lived within the town’s red light district, had ties to Norwich where he used to work and his DNA was on the national DNA database from an earlier conviction.

And other cases he might have been linked to?

In early December 2023, Suffolk Constabulary issued a press statement indicating that they’d “re-arrested” a man suspected of having murdered Victoria Hall in September 1999, last seen in the High Street of Trimley St Mary.

I suggested on Twitter that this suspect was Steve Wright. Trimley St Mary is 12 miles from Ipswich.