The sex worker and the serial killer

Jade Reynolds used to be a prostitute. Steve Wright was her first client. When he was convicted of killing her best friend and four other women, she realised how narrowly she'd escaped. Here, families and friends of the victims talk to Clare Dwyer Hogg about life after the Ipswich murders
Jade Reynolds Ex-Prostitute
Jade Reynolds, 24, Ex-prostitute and best friend of Annette Nicol , one of the prostitues murdered in Ipswich last year. Photograph: Sonja Horsman

The following apology was printed in the Observer's For the record column, Sunday 1 February 2009

In the article below, we inadvertently reported that the late Anneli Alderton had lived in Cyprus with her father between the ages of nine and 14 and subsequently returned to England to live with her mother. She actually moved to Cyprus with her mother and they both returned to England so that Anneli could be close to her father. We apologise to Ms Alderton's family for this error. This has been changed.

The train's CCTV cameras show Anneli Alderton standing up, waiting for her stop. She's the only person in the carriage, and she is looking at her reflection in the window: she inspects her profile, turning her head from side to side, blonde ponytail swishing. The train stops at Manningtree station, where there will be a connecting train to Ipswich, and Anneli gets out. She walks along the platform, caught on the station's CCTV camera as she hoists her bag on to her shoulder. It is 3 December 2006. These are the last images of 24-year-old Anneli Alderton, because that night she is strangled and her naked body left in woodland at Nacton, near Ipswich. She is laid in the form of a crucifix, her hair pulled back from her head in a conical shape. It is nearly a week before she is found.

Ipswich is a quiet market town, says Suffolk's detective chief superintendent Stewart Gull, in one of the safest counties in the United Kingdom. In Gull's 27 years' service, he's seen nothing like the events of 2006. We meet in the police station, just a few streets away from what was once the red-light district. Gull explains that a month before Anneli was murdered, he already had concerns about the area. At the end of October, a young woman called Tania Nicol had been reported missing.

"Tania was 19. She caught the bus into Ipswich to work as a prostitute and disappeared off the face of the earth." Gull pauses. "These are key milestones that will never leave me," he says. The police quickly identified that she was vulnerable. Another cause for alarm lay in her mobile phone records: there was normal traffic until 30 October - and then a flat line.

On 15 November, another young woman, Gemma Adams, was reported missing.

"Gemma's 25, a street worker, similar profile to Tania," Gull says. "They knew one another - they shared the same clients." Again, Gemma's mobile signal disappeared. "So [there was] real grave cause for concern now." Two weeks after that, on 2 December, his fears were confirmed: Gemma's naked body was found in Belstead Brook, at Thorpe's Hill, Hintlesham, and the missing persons enquiry became a murder investigation. The water made it difficult to establish a cause of death, and Suffolk police employed a wade-and-dive team to search for any of Gemma's property that may have washed downstream. Instead, on Friday 8 December, the team found the body of Tania Nicol further down Belstead Brook, at Copdock Mill near Ipswich. Stewart Gull now had a double murder enquiry on his hands.

Two days later, on Sunday 10 December, Gull received a call at home from his Force Operations Room. A motorist had reported another body of a female. This was Anneli Alderton, who hadn't been reported missing and wasn't on the police radar. Gull describes the way Anneli had been laid out as "pretty chilling", saying it was clear that the offender had spent some time with her. She wasn't in water, so there was some hope that evidence could be recovered. The media descended on Ipswich, and the 300-strong Suffolk force working on the murders was bolstered by another 300 mutual aid police workers.

Then, on Tuesday 12 December, the naked body of another female was found: 24-year-old Paula Clennell had been interviewed by an ITV news crew, back to camera, during the murder investigation. When asked why she was still working on the street, she said: "Because I need the money. I need the money."

As soon as Paula's body had been found, the police mobilised, containing the scene and deploying the force helicopter to take pictures of the body by air. Later that day, the helicopter would reveal another body, 100m away from Paula. It was Annette Nicholls, her naked body also stretched and arranged in the shape of a crucifix. Ten days, five victims.

By the end of December, Gull and his team had charged Steve Wright - a forklift truck driver living on London Road, the heart of Ipswich's red-light district - with all five murders. It later emerged that Wright's employment history involved a stint on the QE2 in the 80s, at the same time as the presumed murdered estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, but Scotland Yard ruled out his involvement. There was, however, a weight of evidence to connect him with the Ipswich killings. Fibres matching the carpet of his Ford Mondeo were found in Tania Nicol's hair, while other fibres from the car matched those found on Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Gemma Adams. Fibres from his clothes linked him to four of the victims and his grey and brown fleece coat had traces of blood that linked him to Paula Clennell.

In December 2006, Wright gave no comment throughout questioning, and pleaded not guilty during the trial in January 2008 - but did not answer in his defence, claiming that everything that linked him with the killings (around 57 separate pieces of evidence, Gull says) were coincidences. Still, the police trawled through 65,000 documents, and presented 14,000 exhibits to the court in order to build up a case against Wright. A major breakthrough for police was that DNA, found on all three of the victims discovered on land, belonged to Steve Wright. After a six-week trial, the jury retired for six hours to give their verdict, and Wright was jailed for life.

"These were young vulnerable women," Gull says. "They were somebody's daughter, they were somebody's mother."

For the families, though, the repercussions are ongoing, especially given that Wright is appealing his sentence - for the second time - in the final week of February. Anneli's brother, Tom, softly spoken, and wary of trawling through the details of his little sister's death, agrees to meet me in Norwich train station. With a face more weary than 30 years should have thrown on him, he says that what is especially devastating is that Anneli (like the other victims, a drug user) had been clean - with only one short relapse - for almost two years.

"It's always an ongoing battle," he says. "She was doing absolutely everything right - and then - that night..." She had been trying, with success, to get her life together so she could have her son again, who had been in her mother's care. So why, in December 2006, did Anneli Alderton leave her flat in Colchester and head for the streets of Ipswich? The fact that she went from brunette to peroxide, especially for that trip, holds resonance for Tom.

"Annie dyed her hair that night which was significant as it was part of a guise she'd assume as a coping mechanism," Tom says. He maintains she had to assume a persona to go out and walk the streets. "It wouldn't be the first time she relapsed and there's no way to judge the magnitude of the relapse," her brother says. The timing of her relapse is, however, unmistakable. "She'd been really good friends with Gemma Adams, so reading about Gemma may not have been good for her mental health either... We know she was very upset about it," Tom says quietly, practised in picking over the fragments of clues his sister left behind.

Anneli, who moved with her mother to live in Cyprus between the ages of nine and 14, spoke fluent Greek. She did her exams in Greek before they came back to England so that Anneli could be close to her father, and showed all the signs of being fiercely intelligent. But when she came back to the UK and started school, things changed. "She spent years trying to deny her intelligence," Tom says. When she was 17, their father died of cancer; unable to handle the grief, Anneli ran away from home on the day of his funeral, and everything deteriorated from there.

"The 'prostitute' label is annoying," Tom says, "because it was a last resort and was on the table as something she'd do if she was desperate, but it was only one thing on a vast resumé, including legal things." Those included factory work and painting and decorating. "[The coverage] mentioned all of them by their worst, most desperate, actions and that's not how they spent 99.9 per cent of their lives."

Tom, a support worker in social housing, was working at the Foyer, a youth project that provided accommodation, while his sister was hanging out with the women who would later become headline news. He knew Paula Clennell, whom he describes as "cosy and innocent" when she was off drugs. He knew Gemma Adams, too - she lived in the Foyer for a while - and says she was not summed up by the life that led to her murder. She came from a comfortable background that involved ponies and good schools, and graduated from recreational drugs to crack under the influence of an early boyfriend. "None of them really fit the stereotype," he says, "but nobody ever does. You can't define a person by the substance; you actually can't unify people by the way they died either." He stops, layers of grief contained within his gentle demeanour. As he walks into the chill of Norwich train station, he is gracious enough to say it was a pleasure.

Annette Nicholls, at 29, was the oldest woman to be murdered. Her closest friend was Jade Reynolds who, at 24, looks older. "Annette was my best friend," says Jade. We're sitting in a room in the Iceni drug centre in Ipswich, and Jade, who knew all the murdered women, has been off crack and heroin for a year. This is one step in a long journey. Jade started smoking cannabis at the age of 11, and was taking heroin before her 15th birthday. Articulate, intelligent and with the emotion she carries betraying itself in an occasional wobble in her voice, Jade is open about her experiences.

"Heroin and crack kind of came together really. You can have one without the other, but they came part and parcel. By the time I was 17 I was on the streets." Jade's very first client was Steve Wright. He was, she says, never nasty, and in fact presented himself to the women outside his front door as someone they could turn to for help. "Sometimes he'd let us use his flat if we were really desperate and had nowhere to go with a client," Jade says. "Only when his wife was at work." Not many women - about three or four, she says - took Wright up on his offer. Jade used Wright's flat once for a client. "I had nowhere to go - I needed this punter." It wasn't, she says, as though they trusted him: he was a last resort.

She did, however, trust Annette. "Annette was amazing - the most gentle, loving, best person I think I've ever met in my life," she says. "It just rips your heart out. Some days you don't cope with it and some days you do, but I keep telling myself I am where I am now because of what happened. They saved my life."

Jade is now five months pregnant, and on track to be off methadone by the time her baby is born - an achievement she is proud of, given that the past two years have been emotionally fraught. Now she goes to the Iceni treatment programme almost every day and has a stable home of her own, which she hasn't had since she was in care - the car she lived in for a year doesn't count.

"I make sure my bills are paid and I've got food. I'd never have done that two years ago."

Two years ago she was on the streets - "£250 a night was the minimum I'd allow myself to go home with. I'd spend that, smoke the drugs, and guaranteed by tea time the next day I was out on those streets again." Now, she's relishing having a TV licence, and has been building up a relationship with her mother, who is seriously ill. "I got the best card off my mum this Christmas," she says, taking it out of her bag. "I've treated my mum really bad, I've done some stuff to my mum. And all she's written is: 'To my lovely daughter Jade, Merry Christmas - hope you have a lovely Christmas. Next year will be your year my darling. Love Mum'. And she's never written stuff like that."

The youngest murder victim was Tania Nicol. At night, she would get into strangers' cars and have sex with them to finance the drug habit she hid from her mother, but during the day she seemed like any other unemployed teenager. She read Harry Potter and Dickens, and liked listening to the Zutons. And every Friday morning she'd meet her friend Jack Wright in the Sunrise Cafe in Ipswich for breakfast. It was strange, on the face of it - Jack is in his 50s and Tanya was 19 - but in the year-and-a-half before Tania was murdered, they'd developed a friendship. She would pull him up on his bad diet, insist he ate organic food, and always denied her drug use to him. Jack speaks with the blessing of Tania's mother, Kerry - they are now friends - and says he finds it hard to comprehend what the truth must have been. "I just worry that perhaps I pitched myself to her as someone who had such a dislike for drugs that I had a dislike of the people who use them," he says.

Kerry has nagging regrets, too: Tania always denied using drugs when her mother confronted her, but Kerry had suspicions. She wonders now if she should have delivered an ultimatum that Tania gave up drugs or left home. Jack can't see how that would have helped. "At least on her last night she slept in a warm bed with a loving family around her," he says. Some of Tania's friends have planted a tree near where she used to live. "It's got a little plaque on it saying 'In memory of Tania - we knew what you were really like.' I don't know who the people are, but there are always bunches and bunches of flowers."

When Steve Wright lived in Ipswich's red-light district, there were more than 100 street workers he could have chosen from. Now, two years later, there are only a handful of women working there, and residents prefer to call the area simply the West End. That they can is mostly thanks to PCs Janet Humphrey and Gemma Bishop, the vice liaison officers who, for the past two years, have been concentrating on eradicating prostitution in the streets that made up the notorious area. Before the murders, the police strategy was enforcement: regularly swoop into the area, arrest street workers, charge them with soliciting, see them through court (where they'd pay a fine of around £50), and then encounter the same women when the next swoop took place.

The cycle was not working as a long-term solution and, when the murders happened, the police were already starting to put together a multi-agency approach that involved the Drug and Alcohol Action Team, Mental Health Partnership Trust and National Probation Service. The murders in December 2006 acted as a catalyst, new strategies were suddenly top of the agenda and, as the funding became available, they began a different approach.

Shortly before Christmas, Janet Humphrey meets me in Ipswich police station. She dealt with most of the murdered women when they were alive, and feels keenly the opportunities that were missed. "Annette Nicholls," she says, by way of example, "was a lovely girl. She was always polite, she was attractive, she could have easily got on in life." Janet is slightly late for our meeting because she and Gemma have been delivering Christmas presents to former street workers. The fact that they have addresses now is a small but significant sign that their new approach is an ongoing success. But it's early days, and the journey to this point has been painstaking. One vital foundation stone in the strategy for change is that the police now have a zero-tolerance approach to kerb crawlers (they've made 139 arrests since March 2007), but the women found soliciting - provided they agree to undergo help for their addiction - are not charged. At the start, Janet and Gemma would don plain clothes and walk the West End every night. The point was to try to build up a relationship of trust - not something traditionally present between street workers and the police.

"We'd go out and stop and talk," Janet says. They'd ask the women what they needed, and start with the small things, like a can of Coke and a Mars Bar. Then, as time went on, they dealt with bigger issues. The drug treatment programme at Iceni would come up in conversation and, if they got a positive response, they'd act fast. "We'd say we'll pick you up tomorrow and take you there," she says. They had business cards made up; rather than police insignia, there was just a flower, three words - 'Make A Change' - and a 24-hour phone number.

Once regular contact was established, the level of help increased. They took the women to the dentist, the doctor, sexual health clinic and - vitally - the housing benefits office.

"A lot of them were either homeless or bed-hopping," Janet explains. "How do you help someone so chaotic? One of the women was six months pregnant and living in a shed."

While relapses are frequent, and expected in Janet's work, the situation has substantially changed. "I got a text from one of the women quite early on which said: 'Thank you - you've saved my life,'" Janet says. "There is a way out for people - it's just getting the right support and giving some self-esteem because their esteem is rock bottom... We say to them, you can get a job, there's a nice life out there for you." She stops. "Unfortunately for the girls who lost their lives, they lost that opportunity."

Cutting Edge: Killer in a Small Town - The Ipswich Murders is on 5 February at 9pm on Channel 4

This article was amended on Wednesday 28 January 2009 to correct an error regarding the time Anneli Alderton spent in Cyprus between the ages of nine and 14.