Accused admits sex with victims
Forklift truck driver who denies five murders tells jury of his life in town's red light district
The forklift truck driver accused of killing five young women who worked as prostitutes told a jury at Ipswich crown court yesterday how he picked up one of them in his car on the night she disappeared.
In the first account Steve Wright, 49, has given of his relationship with the murdered women, he said that Tania Nicol, 19, got into his car in Ipswich's red light district on October 30 last year after he told her he wanted sex. But he said he changed his mind and dropped her off five minutes later.
Wright told the court he only started picking up street prostitutes in mid-October after he moved into a flat in the area. Two weeks later, Nicol was the first woman to go missing. The bodies of all five were later found naked in remote locations over a 10-day period in December 2006. Two victims were found with their bodies deliberately posed in a cruciform shape with arms outstretched.
Wright was escorted out of the dock yesterday by three prison officers. He looked straight ahead as he stepped into the witness box, watched by relatives of the dead women in the public gallery.
Wright, who rebuffed police interview questions with a repeated "no comment", chose to sit down rather than stand as he gave evidence about his life and movements at the time of the Ipswich murders.
The former merchant seaman, who said he had been paying for sex intermittently for 25 years, was shown CCTV footage of the teenager next to a dark blue car at 11.15pm on October 30, the last night she was seen alive.
He agreed with his defence lawyer, Timothy Langdale QC, that is was "quite possibly" him picking up Nicol but said she had left soon afterwards. He said: "As she got in the car, she had acne on her face and that's what put me off."
After driving off along Hanford Road, Wright said, he told her that he had changed his mind, whereupon she spent "two or three minutes" trying to persuade him to have sex with her.
When asked if it was a hostile exchange, he said that it was not.
He told the court that she was "all right" when she got out of the car and that she walked off back towards Hanford Road, where he had picked her up.
He did not see her again and did not continue his quest for sex because he had "lost interest", he told the court.
Wright denies killing Nicol, 19, Gemma Adams, 25, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24, and Annette Nicholls, 29. He said he picked up all five women, but had sex with only four of them in the three months before his arrest on December 19.
He admitted having sex with Adams in his car around the time she disappeared and said that he later took the others, Alderton, Clennell and Nicholls, back to his home for sex.
But under questioning from Langdale, he denied strangling the women or having "rough sex" with them. Asked by his barrister if he had "ever put pressure on any of the girls' necks," he replied: "Never."
Wright was asked about CCTV footage showing his car heading out of Ipswich at 1.39am the night Nicol went missing and again at 1.41am on December 3, the night Alderton disappeared. Langdale told him: "The suggestion is that there you are taking off the body to get rid of it." Wright replied: "No way." He said he couldn't sleep and was driving around "to relax".
During the first day of his evidence in the witness box, Wright was asked about details of his relationship and his dealings with prostitutes.
He admitted he had been deceiving his partner, Pamela Wright, by using prostitutes and that she would probably have left him if she had known. "I didn't feel good about myself, obviously. It was the situation I found myself in."
Wright gave an account of his progression from paying for sex abroad while on shore leave from the QE2, to frequenting massage parlours in London and Ipswich "every six months", to using street prostitutes.
After a period in London, where he used massage parlours when he worked as a publican, he moved to Felixstowe, Suffolk, and began to use the Oasis, Cleopatra's and a house called the Far East in Ipswich. He said he stopped paying for sex when he met his partner when they both worked at a Felixstowe bingo hall. But he admitted he began to use prostitutes again about six months after they moved into a flat in Ipswich together in 2004. He used to visit them after playing golf at the Seckford club or "whenever I got the urge".
Wright was "very happy" with his partner but told the court their sex life deteriorated over the years, until it became non-existent when she began working nights, eight to nine months before they moved to London Road.
He insisted he did not realise the flat was in the red light district, but said that when he noticed there were working girls around he decided to use them because he thought they would be cheaper. He would then drive around the red light district looking for women and would drive out to secluded locations where he would have sex in his car.
He said he paid between £65 and £80 for sex in massage parlours but only between £20 and £40 for the street prostitutes.
He said he would only go out cruising for women when his partner was working nights at a call centre. Sometimes he would go after dropping her off at work.
He said he used the services of prostitutes only 12 times between October 2006 and his arrest in December that year.
He began taking the women to the home he shared with his partner, he said, because he suffered from cramps which intensified when he had sex in the car.
He would take them to his bedroom, but would not use the bed in case his partner was able to smell the women from the bedclothes. Instead, he had sex with them on top of two jackets on the floor.
The court was earlier told that bloodstains from Clennell and Nicholls had been found on one of the jackets.
Wright told the court he was "very proud" of his Ford Mondeo and would wash it often, sometimes early in the mornings, before playing golf. When asked if he remembered washing it at around 7.30pm, he said he could not remember. The prosecution had suggested that Wright cleaned his car to rid it of any clues.
The court heard Wright had a previous conviction for stealing £80.
His arrest led to police taking his DNA sample, which matched DNA on three of the dead women.
guardian
