Steven Gerald James Wright (born 24 April 1958)
is an English
serial killer
A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more persons,A
*
*
*
* with the murders taking place over more than a month and including a significant period of time between them. While most authorities set a threshold of three ...
, also known as the Suffolk Strangler and the Ipswich Ripper. He is serving
life imprisonment for the
murder of five women who worked in
Ipswich
Ipswich () is a port town and borough in Suffolk, England, of which it is the county town. The town is located in East Anglia about away from the mouth of the River Orwell and the North Sea. Ipswich is both on the Great Eastern Main Line ...
,
Suffolk. The killings took place during the final months of 2006, and Wright was found guilty in February 2008.
Early life
Steve Wright was born in the
Norfolk
Norfolk () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in East Anglia in England. It borders Lincolnshire to the north-west, Cambridgeshire to the west and south-west, and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the No ...
village of
Erpingham
Erpingham is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. Its area of had a population of 541 in 210 households at the 2001 Census. Including Ingworth it increased to 700 at the 2011 Census.
Governance
For the purposes of loca ...
,
the second of four children of
military police
Military police (MP) are law enforcement agencies connected with, or part of, the military of a state. In wartime operations, the military police may support the main fighting force with force protection, convoy security, screening, rear rec ...
man Conrad and
veterinary nurse Patricia,
on 24 April 1958. He has an older brother and two younger sisters. While Wright's father was on military service, the family had lived in both Malta and Singapore.
Wright's mother left the family in 1964 when he was aged 6;
his father divorced his mother in 1978;
both remarried. Wright and his siblings lived with their father, who fathered a son and a daughter with his second wife, Valerie.
Wright left school at the age of 16 in 1974, and soon afterwards joined the
Merchant Navy, becoming a
chef on ferries sailing from
Felixstowe
Felixstowe ( ) is a port town in Suffolk, England. The estimated population in 2017 was 24,521. The Port of Felixstowe is the largest Containerization, container port in the United Kingdom. Felixstowe is approximately 116km (72 miles) northea ...
,
Suffolk. In 1978, at age 20, he married Angela O'Donovan in
Milford Haven,
Pembrokeshire, Wales. They had a son, Michael. The couple
separated in 1987, and later divorced. Wright became a steward on the ocean liner ''
Queen Elizabeth 2'', a lorry driver, a barman and, just prior to his arrest, a
forklift truck
A forklift (also called lift truck, jitney, hi-lo, fork truck, fork hoist, and forklift truck) is a powered industrial truck used to lift and move materials over short distances. The forklift was developed in the early 20th century by various ...
driver. Former prostitute
Lindi St Clair
Marian June Akin (born 11 August 1952), formerly known professionally as Lindi St Clair or Lindi St Claire, is a British author, leader of the Corrective Party, and campaigner for prostitutes' rights.
Originally a prostitute, but now retired an ...
said that Wright attacked her in the 1980s. His second marriage was to 32 year old Diane Cassell at
Braintree,
Essex
Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Grea ...
, register office in August 1987.
They divorced in July 1988 while he was a pub landlord in
Norwich
Norwich () is a cathedral city and district of Norfolk, England, of which it is the county town. Norwich is by the River Wensum, about north-east of London, north of Ipswich and east of Peterborough. As the seat of the See of Norwich, with ...
.
It was during this time that Wright also managed a pub in
South London.
He lost this post due to his gambling and heavy drinking. Wright was convicted in 2001 of theft, having stolen
£80 to pay off his debts.
This was his only criminal conviction prior to the murders.
Wright accrued large gambling debts,
and was declared bankrupt in the late 1990s.
He had twice tried to commit suicide, first by
carbon monoxide poisoning
Carbon monoxide poisoning typically occurs from breathing in carbon monoxide (CO) at excessive levels. Symptoms are often described as " flu-like" and commonly include headache, dizziness, weakness, vomiting, chest pain, and confusion. Large ...
in his car in 1994; secondly in 2000, by an overdose of pills.
Suffolk murders
Wright met Pamela Wright (no relation) in 2001 in Felixstowe, and they moved to a house in
Ipswich
Ipswich () is a port town and borough in Suffolk, England, of which it is the county town. The town is located in East Anglia about away from the mouth of the River Orwell and the North Sea. Ipswich is both on the Great Eastern Main Line ...
together in 2004.
Wright had always admitted that he patronized prostitutes, and had done so since he was in the Merchant Navy,
and continually throughout his life.
In Ipswich, he admitted he went to certain massage and sauna establishments that were actually
brothels.
During his trial, Wright stated he had patronized professional prostitutes on many occasions, including three of the murder victims. Wright began having sex with
prostitutes again when his partner began working
night shifts
Shift work is an employment practice designed to make use of, or provide service across, all 24 hours of the clock each day of the week (often abbreviated as ''24/7''). The practice typically sees the day divided into shifts, set periods of ...
and their sex life became almost non-existent; he paid at least a dozen women for sex in the final three months of 2006.
Local prostitutes nicknamed him "
Mondeo Man
Essex man and Mondeo man are stereotypical figures which were popularised in 1990s Britain. The "Essex man" as a political figure is an example of a type of median voter and was used to help explain the electoral successes of Conservative Prime ...
" and "Silver-Backed Gorilla".
Between 30 October and 10 December 2006, Wright murdered five prostitutes in Ipswich.
Forensic evidence
Forensic identification is the application of forensic science, or "forensics", and technology to identify specific objects from the trace evidence they leave, often at a crime scene or the scene of an accident. Forensic means "for the courts".
H ...
led to his arrest on 19 December; tiny flecks of blood were found on the back seats of Wright's
Ford Mondeo
The Ford Mondeo is a large family car manufactured by Ford since 1993. The first Ford model declared as a " world car", the Mondeo was intended to consolidate several Ford model lines worldwide (the European Sierra, the Telstar in Asia and Aus ...
, and partially matched the DNA profile of murder victim Paula Clennell.
Wright was found guilty of all five murders on 21 February 2008. At Ipswich Crown Court the following day, Mr Justice Gross sentenced Wright to
life imprisonment with a recommendation that
he should never be released.
On 19 March 2008, Wright appealed his convictions, but on 2 February 2009, it was announced that Wright had decided to drop his appeal.
Possible links to other crimes
Wright is still being investigated in connection with other unsolved murders and disappearances. Experts have highlighted how it is unlikely for any serial killer to start killing at such a late stage (Wright was 48 years old when the 2006 murders were committed), and that serial killers almost always start killing before their mid 30s.
This indicates that Wright likely killed before in his life, and psychologists told police after the murders that it was 'highly likely' that he had done so.
Wright is one of a number of high-profile murderers or
sex offender
A sex offender (sexual offender, sex abuser, or sexual abuser) is a person who has committed a sex crime. What constitutes a sex crime differs by culture and legal jurisdiction. The majority of convicted sex offenders have convictions for crim ...
s to have been identified as possible suspects in the
Suzy Lamplugh murder case; he had worked with Lamplugh on ''Queen Elizabeth 2'' during the early 1980s. Lamplugh went missing in London in July 1986, and was
legally declared dead in 1994, but her body has never been found.
However, the
Metropolitan Police have stated that this is not a strong line of enquiry. In 2002, the police named
John Cannan
John David Guise Cannan (born 20 February 1954) is a British murderer, serial rapist, serial abductor and suspected serial killer. A former car salesman, Cannan was convicted in July 1988 of murder and multiple sexual offences, abductions and ...
as the man they believed killed Lamplugh.
Cleveland Police
Cleveland Police is the territorial police force responsible for the policing area corresponding to the former county of Cleveland in Northern England. As of September 2017, the force had 1,274 police officers, 278 police staff, 124 police com ...
have not ruled out a link between Wright and the murder of Vicky Glass, a heroin
addict who vanished from
Middlesbrough
Middlesbrough ( ) is a town on the southern bank of the River Tees in North Yorkshire, England. It is near the North York Moors national park. It is the namesake and main town of its local borough council area.
Until the early 1800s, the a ...
in September 2000, and whose naked body was later found in a brook on the
North York Moors.
In 2019, Wright was linked by an ex-police officer to the murder of Jeanette Kempton in 1989.
Kempton had vanished from
Brixton, near where Wright lived at the time, and was later found dead many miles away in a rural location in Suffolk.
In July 2021 Wright was arrested, at
HM Prison Long Lartin, on suspicion of murdering Victoria Hall, a 17-year-old who was murdered on her way home from a Suffolk nightclub in 1999. Her body was found in a ditch five days after she was last seen alive in Felixstowe. Suffolk police reopened their investigation in 2019 after receiving fresh witness information. They announced that Wright had been “released under investigation, pending further inquiries”. Only two months after this police announced a re-investigation by a historical crimes unit into Vicky Glass's murder in order to pursue "new lines of enquiry".
Previous East Anglia prostitute murders
Wright has also been linked to the murders of other sex workers in Ipswich and nearby Norwich. When investigating the five murders committed by Wright in Ipswich in late 2006, criminologist
David Wilson, who was personally involved in the case, stated that he felt that the murders were far too practised for someone murdering for the first time.
There was a cluster of sex worker murders in Norwich in the years before the 2006 murders, which have gone unsolved to this day.
Wright used to live and work in the city, and he frequently returned to the city in the years after he left, usually travelling from Ipswich to Norwich once a month.
He ran a pub in the middle of the red light district of Norwich, similar to how he lived in the centre of the red light district of Ipswich at the time of the 2006 murders.
Wright has been linked to the unsolved murders of:
* Natalie Pearman, Norwich, November 1992
(a link was disproven with DNA by 2017)
* Amanda Duncan, Ipswich, July 1993
* Kellie Pratt, Norwich, June 2000
* Michelle Bettles, Norwich, March 2002
(a link was disproven with DNA by 2022)
In June 2012, Wilson said that the killer of Norwich sex worker Michelle Bettles was likely Wright.
The police responded to the suggested links between Bettles's case and Wright by saying that they had found no evidence linking Wright to the crime. It was revealed in 2019 that police had already made an arrest in April 2003 of a man whose DNA matched samples from Bettles' body, and this man admitted having picked her up for sex on 26 March 2002, two days before she was last seen.
The man claimed that he was at home with a migraine on the night she was killed, but phone records show him making a large amounts of calls that evening, although police failed to locate where the calls were made from.
On 28 March 2022, police announced they had recovered further DNA profiles in Bettles' murder case, indicating Wright can be ruled out of the murder with forensic evidence.
Wright had previously also been linked by criminal experts to the unsolved murder of Norwich sex worker Natalie Pearman in November 1992.
Pearman was last seen at night soliciting clients outside the Ferry Boat Inn pub – the pub that was owned and run by Wright and that was located in the heart of the city's red light district.
The police cross-referenced the DNA found on Pearman's body in 1992 to Wright's, but the results were "inconclusive".
However, in 2017, police announced that they had a full DNA profile of the attacker and that solving the case was simply a matter of matching the DNA to an individual, meaning that Steve Wright could be ruled out of the murder.
Ipswich sex worker Amanda Duncan vanished after talking to a man in a car on Portman Road in the town in 1993, a road that Wright was known to acquire his prostitutes from, and from where some of his victims were known to have disappeared from in 2006.
After Wright's murders in 2006, the police re-opened and re-examined these four cold cases to establish whether Wright could be responsible, and questioned Wright about them.
Family members of the victims stated they believed he could be linked and called for the police to investigate this further and charge him for them.
See also
*
List of serial killers by country
This is a list of notable serial killers, by the country where most of the killings occurred.
Convicted serial killers by country Afghanistan
*Abdullah Shah: killed at least 20 travelers on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad while serving under ...
*
List of serial killers by number of victims
A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, in two or more separate events over a period of time, for primarily psychological reasons.A serial killer is most commonly defined as a person who kills three or more peop ...
*
Alun Kyte (Midlands Ripper)
*
David Smith – fellow British prostitute killer
*
Lorraine Thorpe
Lorraine Thorpe (born 1994) is a British woman who is Britain's youngest female double murderer. Over the space of nine days in August 2009, Thorpe tortured and murdered two people in Ipswich, one her own father. She came to national attention u ...
– Britain's youngest female double killer, murdered two people in Ipswich in 2009
*
Simon Hall – murderer who killed in Ipswich in a high-profile case in 2001
References
External links
Ipswich serial killer Steve Wright ITV Local
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wright, Steve
1958 births
21st-century English criminals
British Merchant Navy personnel
British people convicted of theft
Criminals from Norfolk
Criminals from Suffolk
English male criminals
English people convicted of murder
English prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment
English serial killers
Living people
Male serial killers
People convicted of murder by England and Wales
People from Ipswich
People from Erpingham
Prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment by England and Wales