A man accused of killing five women during a spree at a rate unprecedented in Britain, carried out a deliberate campaign to murder prostitutes in the town of Ipswich, prosecutors said today.
Steve Wright (49), denies killing Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholls, whose naked bodies were found dumped at rural locations around the town within the space of just 10 days.
Two of the victims were found with their bodies deliberately posed in a cruciform shape with their arms outstretched, the court heard, and Wright might have had an accomplice.
The prosecution said the evidence indicated all the victims, who had been systematically selected, were asphyxiated while under the influence of hard drugs.
"It is the prosecution case that either alone or in conjunction with another or others these deaths were the handiwork of the defendant," prosecutor Peter Wright said.
"And for a period of six and a half weeks he had preyed upon the women working as prostitutes in and around Ipswich, killing five before his campaign was brought to an end by his arrest."
The nature of the killings and the places where the bodies were dumped, which were isolated but easily accessible, showed that the killer had local knowledge, the prosecutor said.
Wright lived in the red-light district, used prostitutes, which meant they would not suspect him, and had the opportunity and means to commit the murders, Ipswich Crown Court was told.
All the victims were slightly built, slim, aged under 30. They were addicted to hard drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, and were working as prostitutes to fund their habit.
"In each of their cases this decision was ultimately to prove fatal," Peter Wright said.
Post-mortem tests clearly revealed the cause of death of just two of the women: Ms Alderton, who had been asphyxiated, and Ms Clenell, who died from compression of the neck by a forearm or crook of an elbow.
But all had been found with hyper-inflated lungs which "was in keeping with some form of interference with the normal mechanism of breathing".
All were thought to have been killed shortly after they vanished.
People did not die of natural causes or by accident with such frequency only to turn up dumped naked, some of them posed, the jury were told.
"It is the Crown's case that there was a common denominator in each of their untimely deaths and that was the defendant, Steve Gerald James Wright," the prosecutor said.
The first victim was 19-year-old Tania Nicol, the court was told. The last possible sighting of her was a about 11pm on October 30th in the red light district of Ipswich, an area in the southwest of the town near its soccer stadium.
However she was not the first to be found dead. The body of Gemma Adams (25), who vanished late on November 14th, was discovered on December 2nd immersed in a brook near Hintlesham, to the southwest of Ipswich.