As girlfriend worked nights, forklift driver 'hunted women'
· Court told two victims found in cruciform pose
· Wright denies charges
Karen McVeigh and Esther Addley
A forklift truck driver "systematically selected and murdered" five young women before stripping and dumping their bodies in isolated spots, deliberately arranging two of them in a cruciform pose with their arms outstretched, a court heard yesterday.
The jury was told that Steve Wright, 49, may have had an accomplice when he conducted a "deliberate campaign of murder" against women working as prostitutes, for a period of six and a half weeks before it was brought to an end with his arrest.
Wright, a former publican who lived in Ipswich's red light district where they worked, denies killing Gemma Adams, 25, Tania Nicol, 19, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24 and Annette Nicholls, 29, between late October and early December 2006. All five died fighting for breath, asphyxiated, while under the influence of the drugs to which they were addicted.
DNA found on three of the bodies matched Wright's. The court was told that the probability of this coming from someone other than or related to him was one in a billion.
Yesterday, Wright, wearing a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie, listened intently to the evidence through headphones as he sat behind a glass screen in the dock at Ipswich crown court.
Opening the case for the prosecution, Peter Wright QC said: "It is the prosecution's case that either alone or in conjunction with another or others, these deaths were the handiwork of the defendant."
He spoke of the vulnerability of the women to their killer or killers due to their dependence on hard drugs.
"Each of them had resorted to prostitution in order to fund their addiction," Wright said. "In each of their cases this decision was to prove fatal."
There were "striking similarities" in the circumstances of their deaths, he said. All were young, between 19 and 29, slightly-built, and all were found naked and abandoned in semi-rural locations on the outskirts of Ipswich. All had been found with hyper-inflated lungs, consistent with interference with breathing, such as being suffocated or by manual compression of their necks, the court heard.
It was over 10 days in December 2006 that the naked bodies of missing women began to turn up to the south-west and south-east of Ipswich. The speed of the killings was unprecedented and it led to the biggest murder investigation in the history of Suffolk police.
The prosecutor told the jury that the "common denominator" in each of their deaths was the defendant. "Mr Wright was a user of prostitutes; a local resident of Ipswich; a man with transport and also the wherewithal not only to pick up prostitutes in the red light area of Ipswich, but also to transport and dispose of their bodies after killing them. A man who had the opportunity to commit these offences at a time when his partner was at work and accordingly out of the house."
That Wright was no stranger to the prostitutes of Ipswich meant the women were at ease in his company, unsuspecting of his motives in picking them up, "particularly at a time of heightened awareness" as the bodies of missing women began to turn up, the jury was told.
The jury also heard that police stopped and questioned Wright early on December 1 in the red light district. He told them he had been unable to sleep and had gone for a drive.
The prosecutor said there were several links between him and the deaths:
· At the time of the offences, Wright lived with his partner at 79 London Road, in the red light area and a short distance from where the women worked.
· "Significantly, at the time of the first two murders, he was working in Hadleigh", an area close to where the bodies of Adams and Nicol were found.
· He would drive his partner, Pamela Wright, who worked nights, to her job at a call centre on the same side of Ipswich as Nacton and Levington, where the last three bodies were found. Whoever disposed of the bodies, the court was told, had a degree of local knowledge.
"It is the prosecution's case, therefore, that while Miss Wright was at work and engaged on the nightshift, the defendant was engaged on other activities: namely picking up prostitutes and killing them while they were severely affected by opiates."
Swabs taken from the bodies of Alderton, Nicholls and Clennell, the last to be found, revealed DNA matching that of Wright. Fibres from his home, car and clothing were found on the women. The presence of Wright's car, a dark-coloured Mark III Ford Mondeo, at times and locations close to where some of the women went missing also linked him to the crimes, the court heard.
A dark-coloured Ford Mondeo, of the same type as that owned by Wright, was captured by CCTV in the red light district on the evening of October 30 at the time Nicol was believed to have gone missing.
In the early hours of November 15, when Adams went missing, a car which "bore a distinct similarity" to Wright's was again captured by CCTV in the red light district. It is the crown's case that Wright was "again cruising the streets of the red light district in search of a suitable victim".
It was an "interesting coincidence" that during the two weeks between the night Nicol vanished and when Adams went missing, Wright's partner had only worked on one night. Alderton also went missing on a night Miss Wright was working.
"It is the prosecution's case therefore that when she returned to work he had resumed the killings."
The trial continues.
guardian
