Police were last night under pressure to quiz Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright over several unsolved murders after he admitted killing a woman 26 years ago.
Experts said he was likely to have killed others after making the shock confession yesterday to the 1999 murder of 17-year-old Victoria Hall and the attempted abduction of a woman 24 hours earlier.
The serial killer pleaded guilty to the kidnap and murder of Ms Hall on the first day of his Old Bailey trial.
Former forklift driver and QE2 cruise ship waiter Wright, 67, snatched the A-level pupil off the street in Felixstowe as she walked home from a nightclub on September 19, 1999, before dumping her body in a ditch.
He also admitted attempting to kidnap Emily Doherty, 22, from the same area the day before.
Police failed to capture the killer for seven years until Wright went on a rampage in Ipswich’s red-light district, murdering Gemma Adams, 25, Tania Nicol, 19, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24 and Annette Nicholls, 29, over a six-week period in 2006. Last night his ex-wife, Diane Cole, blasted police for failing to stop the ‘monster’ sooner.
She spoke out after it emerged that he should have been at the top of the list of suspects for Ms Hall’s murder after Ms Doherty escaped his clutches and gave police an accurate description of Wright, his car and part of the number plate.
Seven years before he stalked Ipswich’s red-light district murdering five sex workers in 2006, Wright snatched the A-level student off the street in Felixstowe
Anneli Alderton, pictured left, and Tania Nicol, right, were sex workers also killed in the attacks
In a six-week frenzy in 2006, former QE2 steward Wright went on the rampage, also killing Annette Nicholls, pictured left, and Paula Clennell, right
In a hearing ahead of yesterday’s trial, Mr Justice Joel Bennathan revealed the details matched Wright and ‘very few others’. Yet officers were determined to prosecute a local businessman who had nothing to do with the killing.
Adrian Bradshaw had been at the same club as Ms Hall on the night she disappeared but was acquitted of her murder in 2001.
Now Ms Cole is urging police to quiz Wright about other unsolved cases in the area: ‘I think this is just the beginning. I suspect he has killed quite a few other women.
‘If police had investigated the earlier attempted abduction properly it could have saved so many lives. Hindsight is a wonderful thing but it was obvious even to me how alike Victoria’s murder was to the other women he later killed.’
The 71-year-old was regularly beaten by Wright during their four-year relationship and he once attempted to strangle her.
She told the Daily Mail: ‘Police should consider reopening the cases of those unsolved murders. There could be a lot more victims that we do not even know about. He is a monster.’
Wright’s brother Keith, 57, also urged police to act, telling The Sun that the serial killer was an ‘animal’.
He said: ‘It’s time he did the right thing and told the police everything. There’s still so much we don’t know, so many unanswered questions. How many more victims are there?’
Criminologist David Wilson believes there are many similarities between Wright’s six murders and the unsolved killings of Kellie Pratt in Norwich and Mandy Duncan in Ipswich.
Victoria’s body was found five days later 25 miles away
Serial killer Steve Wright has pleaded guilty to murdering 17-year-old Victoria Hall in 1999
Gemma Adams, then 25, pictured, was one of the victims of Wright’s murder spree in Ipswich’s red-light district in 2006
Mr Wilson, a professor of criminology at Birmingham City University, told the Mail’s The Trial podcast: ‘His modus operandi fits with a number of young women who died in the early 1990s.
‘If he had been arrested for what was happening at that time, then clearly we wouldn’t be talking today about what he is.
‘Mandy Duncan, whose body has never been recovered, disappears and is murdered in 1993, then Vicky Hall in 1999 and Kellie Pratt in 2000. They never found the bodies of Kellie Pratt or Mandy Duncan. Both of them, therefore, for me are still likely to have been victims of Steve Wright.
‘Having admitted to the murder of Vicky Hall, I hope this means he might be willing to talk about Kellie Pratt, Mandy Duncan, and about suspicions that exist about other young women that he may have murdered.’
Even after Wright was sentenced to a whole-life tariff for the murders of the five sex workers in 2008, police did not charge him with Ms Hall’s murder until 2024.
Yesterday the father of one of his victims warned that Wright could have killed years before Ms Hall’s death.
Tania Nicol’s father Jim Duell, 68, said: ‘He might have done other stuff that we don’t know about, even before he killed Victoria. We just don’t know.’
