This is the first of a series of short articles which are really part of a thinking process towards a conclusion not yet reached. (Rather than starting with a conclusion and then trying to force the facts to fit it.)
Ever since Steve Wright was convicted of the five Ipswich Prostitute murders in 2006, people have wondered aloud if he might also have killed Victoria Hall (who lived in the same village as Wright) in 1999. But this theory has only been entertained by the police from 2019, when they received more information, after releasing covert CCTV footage from the precise site where Victoria's body was found. The police had (for those twenty years) never released the exact location, because it was some distance from the road and therefore not something that a person suffering from idle curiosity was likely to locate without a lot of random wandering. What they wanted to see, was who went straight there. There were people who knew exactly where to go, and in the month following the discovery of Victoria's body, they did. "People" is a plural and that's the first part of the anomaly. If the location was known only to the killer and that was someone who worked alone, how come there was more than one visitor (in more than one vehicle) to the location?
Another part of the anomaly was that Victoria was apparently tracked all the way from the nightclub in Felixstowe, which she left at 1AM on the 19th of September with her friend, Gemma, to a point in Trimley St Mary within yards of Victoria's home, where they finally parted at 2:20AM after walking all the way.
There's a workload issue for one man doing that tracking, just as there is with one man carrying Victoria's body and arranging it, as it was found, in a running stream channelled through a ditch. (It's not just a field drain.) And, as suggested above, more than one man seemed to know the exact spot.
Steve Wright has also been nominated as a suspect in the murder of Jeanette Kempton, who disappeared in South London in January 1989 and was found near Wangford in Suffolk about two weeks later. Given that this involves a journey straight up the A12 from South London, where Steve Wright was living and working up to 1988, to Suffolk where moved back to when he got into trouble and lost his job, he's not an unreasonable suspect at all. Except that workers on the country estate where her body was found, associated two different suspicious vehicles (a hire van with tinted rear windows and a somewhat ropey white car) with the case and the police didn't conclusively trace either one. (An untraceable hire van must take some doing!) Again, multiple vehicles suggest multiple perpetrators.
Jeanette's body was too decomposed to establish her exact time of death, but the pathologist was able to say that she'd suffered a head injury about forty-eight hours prior to death. That suggests a two-day period of captivity and, again, there's a workload issue with that for one man acting alone. And how does anyone hope to establish an alibi if they are absent from their normal setting for two days? You'd need a large-enough group for everyone to turn up where they were expected to turn up, whilst keeping the victim under control. It's a bit hard to calculate the number needed, but it's obviously more than two.
At no point up to and after the moment Steve Wright was charged with the Ipswich Prostitute Murders did the police, or prosecution counsel, suggest or say anything which could be taken to imply that he acted alone and to this day they still haven't! Indeed, at the moment that Steve Wright was so charged, another unnamed suspect was in custody, where he remained, the author believes, until the following afternoon.
And at least three of the Ipswich Prostitute Murders present similar workload issues as Victoria's murder, in that the body was artistically arranged in a problematic location with flowing water. (That is almost certainly why the police have resisted any suggestion that Steve Wright acted alone, even though accepting that premise would spare them an awful lot of work and resources.)
Again, whilst a forensic psychologist who'd worked on the Ipswich Prostitute Murders was convinced that Steve Wright might well have had something to do with a similar cluster of prostitute murders in Norwich, Norfolk police say that not only do they have a DNA profile that is not his, but they have more than one DNA profile that's not his. This has been used to "prove" the psychologist wrong, but all it really proves is that there was more than one man involved in killing prostitutes in Norwich, a possibility that Suffolk Police continue to hold open for ALL the murders that Steve Wright has been convicted of so far.
{One last thought, which takes us a long way from Suffolk. One of the detectives who investigated the disappearance and probable murder of Claudia Lawrence in York, ended up wanting to charge pretty well ALL the customers from her local pub who'd been interviewed by the police, with withholding information or making false statements. He wasn't allowed to, but the fact that he wanted to is telling.}
Anyone who has read this far will now understand why the author isn't yet ready to come to any conclusions, other than the obvious one: there's something here that defies understanding with the currently-known facts. Steve Wright is absolutely not innocent; the issue is more one of how many others might be involved and why on Earth would several people (one assumes all males, but that really is an assumption) cooperate to do something so vile?
