Killer in a Small Town

For years, prostitutes in Ipswich had worked the streets around the football stadium. Many of them were feeding drug habits and their activity was largely ignored.

But all that was to change in the winter of 2006 when, one by one, the working girls of Ipswich began to disappear.

The first to go missing was 19-year-old Tania Nicol. Her mother called the police, but they failed to track her down. Then, two weeks later, 25-year-old Gemma Adams was reported missing by her boyfriend. It was only then that her parents realised she was working the streets.

With two women missing from the same red light district, the police investigation began to escalate. When the bodies were found, both washed clean of DNA evidence but bearing signs of strangulation, it became clear that a serial killer was at work. It would take three more deaths before he was stopped.

When Steve Wright was arrested for the crimes and subsequently found guilty it caused shockwaves, not least among the group of working girls who knew him as a former punter.

'I wouldn't have suspected him for a minute,' says Tracey Russell. 'At the time, he was seeing other girls like me and he was just a regular punter. He wasn't violent, he wasn't nasty. He was just normal.'