Gory details in Ipswich murder trial
Updated on 16 January 2008
Former pub landlord Steve Wright murdered five women and left two of the bodies in a crucifix pose the jury heard at the start of his trial.
Prosecutors claimed the state of the deceased women's bodies was just one of the 'striking similarities' between their deaths and alleged that Stephen Wright was the common denominator.
Wright, who's 49 and lived in the Ipswich red light district when the women died, has denied five counts of murder.
The victims were five attractive young women, three of them mothers, one still just a teenager, who fatally, the court heard, turned to prostitution to fund their drug addictions.
Upon post mortem, their lungs were found to be hyperventilated said the prosecution, consistent with them fighting for breath in the moments before their death.
And Steve Gerald James Wright, claimed the prosecution, was the man who killed them.
He is a forklift truck driver from Ipswich, a man engaged, said the prosecution, on a quite deliberate campaign of murder directed at the working prostitutes of his home town.
He was brought to the crown court just before nine this morning, where he would soon be led into the dock of court 2.
He wore a black suit and dark striped tie and sat quietly throughout the proceedings leafing occasionally through the court papers in front of him.
His father Conrad, now retired from the RAF, was also in court, along with Wright's half brother Keith and another brother David.
Today the prosecution made the grim claim that two of the bodies, found in and around Ipswich, appeared deliberately to have been left posed in a cruciform shape with arms outstretched.
The prosecution also claimed that the defendant, who visited prostitutes frequently, murdered all five women by asphyxiation or compression to the neck, either alone or, it was said, with the assistance of another.
He targeted them, the court heard, in the red light district of Ipswich, on occasions when his partner Pam was out working night shifts.
Just before Steve Wright was taken from court this evening the prosecution said they had DNA and fibre analysis evidence which linked the defendant directly to some of the missing women.
The prosecution opening continues tomorrow.
Steve Wright denies all of the charges against him.
