The vital genetic clue

Published on Saturday 23 February 2008 18:47

Steve Wright's conviction for a minor theft seven years ago led police straight to his door

THE INVESTIGATION

THE conviction of Steve Wright for the theft of 80 in 2001 from the Brook Hotel in Felixstowe did not even merit a mention in the local weekly paper. Yet seven years later it was this crime that led directly to him being jailed for the rest of his life for the brutal killing of five young women. The two crimes, as far apart as can be in the criminal spectrum, were linked in one crucial way – DNA.

Forensic experts examining evidence taken from the corpse of one of the victims were able to extract a genetic profile of the suspected killer. By comparing this to the national database of DNA samples, murder squad officers were almost immediately provided with the name, age and address of their prime suspect.

It meant that Wright's killing spree in Ipswich lasted just 50 days, in stark contrast to the six years it took to catch Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. That investigation stretched from 1976 to 1981 and was beset by police incompetence, a cripplingly-slow and laborious manual filing system and fierce inter-force rivalries.

Following Sutcliffe's conviction, the Government vowed the mistakes that allowed him to kill at will for six years would never be allowed to happen again. Changes in technology helped. The Home Office Large Major Inquiries Computer was established to help co-ordinate and modernise major inquiries. But poor communications between police forces continued to plague investigations, as was illustrated as late as 2004.

The murders of Jessica Wells and Holly Chapman in Soham eventually led to the conviction of Ian Huntley but the public was aghast to subsequently discover how the killer's criminal past had manage to pass unnoticed by the local authorities. This time there was an official inquiry – the Bichard Report – and a promise of a new-found co-operation among law enforcement organisations across Britain.

But these improvements paled in comparison with the introduction of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tracing, which, given the right scientific conditions, can identify an individual more accurately than a fingerprint, using a person's unique genetic code. In 1988 Colin Pitchfork became the first person in the world to be convicted of murder thanks to DNA evidence.

He killed Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth three years apart but was traced after Leicestershire Constabulary contacted a scientist called Sir Alec Jeffreys at Leicester University.

His analysis proved the girls, both aged 15, had been killed by the same person and eventually Pitchfork, a local baker, was found guilty and jailed for life.

Just a day after Wright's conviction last week, the science's usefulness was again underlined when another murderer began a life term.

Mark Dixie raped and murdered Sally Anne Bowman in south London in September 2005. Like Wright, his DNA had been taken following a minor incident – a scuffle during a World Cup match at the pub where he worked as a chef.

Within six hours of police receiving the results of Dixie's test, they had him in custody for Bowman's murder.

After he was found guilty at the Old Bailey, it was revealed Dixie also had 18 previous convictions – but they had each occurred before the law was changed in 2005 to allow police to take DNA swabs for even the most routine inquiry.

Police are adamant that if Dixie's crimes had occurred after this watershed that they would have identified him months earlier.

Detective Superintendent Stuart Cundy, the man who headed the Bowman murder inquiry last week suggested that if everyone's DNA was on file it would speed up arrests and cut down on further offending.

To some campaigners for civil liberties this kind of comment arouses suspicion and anger. For them a DNA database would be even more unwelcome than the introduction of identity cards.

At present, information on 5.2% of the British population is on the national DNA database – the largest of its kind in the world. But moves to expand it to include everyone have been met by fierce opposition. David Davis, the shadow home secretary, recently labelled the idea "arbitrary and erratic", while Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights organisation Liberty, said a database for every man, woman and child in the country was "a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse".

Unlike England and Wales, in Scotland samples of DNA can only be taken when people are arrested and must be destroyed if the individual is not charged or convicted.

Now the Association of Chief Police Officers Scotland wants the same system as south of the border. It also believes all registered and non-registered sex offenders should have their details held for use in possible future inquiries. This weekend, however, it looks like ministers in Edinburgh and London are reluctant to make the necessary changes in the law.

Banning the sale of sex will not protect prostitutes on the streets

MARGO MacDONALD

WE HAVE to look at the phenomenon of prostitution from the position of the women involved. No one prostitute is the same as another. There is no template for a prostitute, as a look at the five girls in Ipswich will show. They were not all the same.

Most of the women involved in street prostitution are there because they have to get money for drugs or alcohol, or both, and they have to feed their own habit as well as, quite often, the habit of their partner. In their mothers' generation, the women on the streets would have been there to try to feed and clothe their children.

I don't think the public believes that prostitution can be eradicated, but they do not want the nuisances that it can create in their own neighbourhood – and that, obviously, is quite understandable.

What I am convinced about is that the banning of sex for sale is simply unworkable. If you do that, what is there to prevent someone bartering for sex? Do you ban that too?

In Sweden, the buying of sex was made illegal about three years ago. In the first year, there were no girls working on the streets, but this just meant support workers did not know where they were.

Do not forget that support workers not only help the girls who work as prostitutes, they also try to help them get out of prostitution. But because they were off the streets, they did not know where the girls where, or who they were with, or what they were doing.

And did assaults on the girls increase during this time? Yes. Just as happened in Edinburgh when they were moved away from the recognised red light district, attacks soared and so now you have a situation in Sweden where there are girls back working on the streets.

I am sure that the police's policy of dealing with prostitutes in Ipswich has changed since the death of the five girls, but prostitution differs from town to town, and no doubt the approach is as different in Norwich as it is in Liverpool, Leeds or Newcastle.

By trying to ban the sale of sex, you do not get rid of it, you just make it more difficult for the prostitutes and for the community as a whole.

• Margo MacDonald is Independent MSP for Lothian

Lives cut short: the Ipswich victims

TANIA NICOL

Last seen on the night of Monday, October 30, 2006, Tania was leaving the home she shared in Ipswich with her mother and younger brother. It was three days before a public appeal was made to highlight the 19-year-old's disappearance but by that time she was already dead.

CCTV cameras picked up images of her talking to a man in a car around 11pm that evening in the town's red light district. The vehicle was identical to Steve Wright's.

One of the prosecution's main pieces of evidence was the fact a nylon fibre from the black carpet of the Ford Mondeo was later found entangled in her hair. The court was told Tania's head had come into "forceful or sustained contact" with the floor of the car.

Her body was found at Copdock Mill on the outskirts of Ipswich on Friday, December 8.

Family and friends later talked of a "placid and quiet girl" whose life was devastated by heroin, forcing her into the sex industry.

Her mother, Kerry Nicol, said her daughter never told her that she was a prostitute. She had left home at the age of 16.

She told the court: "Tania said she had a job and was managing all right. She told me a few different things. She was a hairdresser at one point. Another time behind a bar in a pub."

GEMMA ADAMS

It was Wednesday, November 15, when Gemma was reported missing by her partner, Jon Simpson. She had last been seen standing outside a BMW car dealership in Ipswich's red-light district.

The 25-year-old's life was blighted by drugs, in particular, heroin. However, unlike some of the other girls she worked alongside, Gemma's childhood and early adolescence was spent in a comfortable middle-class environment in Kesgrave, a village on the outskirts of Ipswich, where she lived with her parents, Brian and Gail and her brother, Jack and sister, Carly.

Gemma's life began to spin out of control when she moved out of the family home and began experimenting with drugs – initially cannabis.

Brian Adams has spoken repeatedly of the family's "complete heartache" at her killing. He said: "Gemma was a normal, happy girl until we lost her to drugs when she was about 17 years old."

Seventeen days after she disappeared, Gemma's naked body was discovered in a brook at Hintlesham, Suffolk, on Saturday, December 2. Although she was the second victim to vanish, Gemma was the first body to be recovered. Like Tania Nicol, her parents did not have a clue about their daughter's lifestyle until the police knocked at their door to inform them of their loss.

ANNELI ALDERTON

Her body was found by police on Monday, December 11, and she became Wright's third victim. A passing motorist spotted Anneli's corpse, initially mistaking it for a mannequin as he drove past the site at Nacton, outside Ipswich.

She had last been seen shortly before 6pm on Sunday, December 3, on the Harwich to Colchester train.

Anneli's body had been laid out in a "cruciform pose" by Wright in an apparent attempt to shock whoever would eventually discover the body.

The cause of death had been strangulation. Four days later, Suffolk Constabulary issued CCTV pictures of Anneli at Harwich railway station in an attempt to jog people's memories.

The 24-year-old had been working as a prostitute in Ipswich for some time and was well-known to both the working girls there and the police.

At the time of her murder, she had been three months' pregnant.

Anneli had dreamed of becoming a model but after her father Roy died, friends recalled how she began to lose confidence and become more and more withdrawn.

She began to experiment with drugs and initially started smoking cannabis before moving on to heroin and crack cocaine. Alderton had a three-year-old son and spoke fluent in Greek after spending several years in Cyprus.

PAULA CLENNELL

Police believe Wright was disturbed whilst trying to dispose of her body, because, unlike Anneli Alderton's corpse, which had been deliberately and provocatively posed, the 24-year-old had been "hurriedly dumped".

She vanished early on the morning of Sunday, December 10, five days after giving an interview to an ITN news crew in which she talked about going back on the streets despite knowing a serial killer was operating in the area.

Friends believe it was the split of her parents when Paula was 14 that proved to be the catalyst for her spiral into drugs and prostitution. Within months of this occurring, the previously well-behaved and quiet schoolgirl had been sent to a referral unit.

Paula's father, Brian Clennell, who lives in Berwick-upon-Tweed, was unaware of his daughter's involvement in the sex trade, as was the case for many of the other parents of Wright's victims.

It was December 12 when police discovered two bodies, those of Paula and Annette Nicholls, close by each other near the village of Levington, just five miles south of Ipswich.

Two days later, she was formally identified, and at a post-mortem examination it was revealed she had died as a result of "compression to the neck".

ANNETTE NICHOLLS

It was the night of Friday, December 8, when Annette was last seen, standing alone in Ipswich town centre. Four days later her body was spotted by a police helicopter on wasteland around the village of Levington. Just yards away lay Paula Clennell's corpse.

Her body, like that of Anneli, had been laid out in the shape of a crucifix, indicating to detectives that Wright had spent some time at the scene.

Because of the state of decomposition of the body, a pathologist was unable to say conclusively how the 29-year-old, mother-of-one, had died but he was able to say that her breathing had been "interfered" with.

Years beforehand, Annette's life had seemed mapped out. A successful and talented beautician, she had passed a four-year training course at Suffolk College in Ipswich.

However, she began to experiment with drugs and eventually became addicted to heroin, forcing her to sell herself for sex in the town's red light district.

She begged anyone who knew her and who saw her on the streets not to tell her family.

In the last weeks of her life, "Netty" had been living in different places, leaving the upbringing of her son, Farron, to her mother, Rosemary. She was reported missing by family members who had become concerned after hearing of the disappearances of Tania and Gemma.