Steven Gerald James Wright was born in Erpingham, Norfolk, on April 24, 1958. He served in the merchant navy and the army catering corps, worked as a barman, a steward on the QE2, a lorry driver and a forklift operator, married twice, gambled heavily, and by 2006 was living in London Road, Ipswich, in the middle of the town's small red light district.
Between the end of October and the middle of December 2006 five women disappeared from those streets: Tania Nicol, nineteen; Gemma Adams, twenty-five; Anneli Alderton, twenty-four; Paula Clennell, twenty-four; and Annette Nicholls, twenty-nine. All were working to fund heroin addictions. Their bodies were found naked in rural spots outside Ipswich over ten days in December, two of them arranged with their arms out in a cruciform position. The British press called him the Suffolk Strangler.
The speed of it, five bodies in less than a fortnight, produced a national story and an operation of around six hundred officers. Ipswich effectively shut down at night. The women who remained on the streets went on working, which was widely misread at the time and is simply what addiction does.
Wright was arrested on December 19, 2006. His DNA was found on three of the bodies and fibres from his home, his car and his clothing on all five. He gave no explanation at trial beyond admitting he had paid several of the women for sex. He was convicted at Ipswich Crown Court on February 21, 2008, of all five murders, and the judge imposed a whole-life order.
The case changed the language used about the victims. The early coverage referred to the dead women almost entirely as prostitutes; by the trial, after sustained objection from their families and from women's organisations, most outlets were using their names.