Does this CCTV image damn the Suffolk strangler? Detectives probe murderer Steven Wright

Can it be possible that Steve Wright killed another young woman years before his murderous reign as the Suffolk Strangler had begun, that he has even more blood on his hands?

It seems so. Five murders in quick succession have been attributed to him.

They occurred in and around Ipswich in a six-week frenzy in the run-up to Christmas 2006, an unprecedented rate of killing not even matched by Harold Shipman, Fred West or Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.

Six weeks, five victims. It was the speed at which the former QE2 steward struck as much as anything else that made the case so notorious. But could the timeline that unfolded at his trial at Ipswich Crown Court in 2008 have been wrong and his list of crimes incomplete?

There was speculation at the time – there always is – that Wright could have been responsible for other deaths; there was no evidence, however, nothing concrete, just rumours.

Until now. More than a decade after Wright, now 63, was given five life sentences, his face is once again staring out from the news stands.

On Wednesday, he was arrested at Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire, where he is serving a whole life tariff, on suspicion of killing 17-year-old Victoria Hall. She went missing on her way home from a nightclub in Felixstowe in September 1999 – seven years before he stalked the red light district of Ipswich.

Like two of Wright’s known victims, the teenager was found naked in stretches of the same stream in the village of Hintlesham, Suffolk. Similarly, a post-mortem examination revealed that Vicky had been asphyxiated but not sexually assaulted.

The similarities, in other words, were striking.

Unlike Wright’s known victims, however, Victoria was not a prostitute. She was studying for A-levels in English, sociology and business studies and was hoping to go to university. She didn’t even drink or smoke.

Not all of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims were sex workers, either, and history tells us that many serial killers leave a gap, sometimes years, between the first and second murders.

Christopher Halliwell, another Long Lartin lifer, whose capture was turned into the recent ITV drama A Confession, waited nine years to claim his second victim

So there will undoubtedly be questions, in the circumstances, as to why has it taken so long for detectives to formally interview Wright over the death of Victoria Hall.

All Suffolk Police would say on the matter is that her murder is being ‘reinvestigated by a new team of detectives and fresh information has been received that was not previously known’.

In fact, the inquiry was reopened on the 20th anniversary of Victoria’s death in 1999.

A blurred CCTV image of a man standing next to a white van near where her body was found was released by the ‘cold case’ team.

The image was taken by a camera installed by officers from the original murder squad to capture anyone visiting the scene in the belief the killer might return. It showed a grainy figure getting out the vehicle, walking around and then driving off at 12.34 on October 7, 1999 – about three weeks after Vicky’s body was discovered.

At the time, it appears Suffolk Police did not follow up or identify the vehicle or the driver.

What is known is that the information was made public for the first time on BBC Crimewatch in 2019, which staged a reconstruction of Victoria’s abduction. The Mail can reveal that a member of the public with extensive knowledge of the case contacted Crimewatch after seeing the CCTV on the BBC. He said the van was identical to the one owned by Wright back then and the man closely resembled his profile, age and height.

Was the man in the footage Wright revisiting the scene of his crime? The police would not be drawn, but it’s hard to believe that the CCTV did not play a part, in one way or another, in this week’s dramatic development.

The arrest of the Suffolk Strangler in connection with the disappearance of Victoria is an embarrassment for Suffolk Police. Apart from the CCTV, Wright is said to have been one of 1,200 names on a database drawn up by detectives after his car number plate provided a partial match for a vehicle that followed a girl the night before Victoria went missing. He was believed to be staying with his late father in Trimley St Mary where Victoria also lived.

But in 2008 her parents said police had visited them three times since Wright’s arrest and assured them there was no link to their daughter.

‘Although they say there were some very similar aspects they say there is no connection with Victoria’s death,’ her father Graham Hall, who worked as a freelance book agent, said in an interview with the Ipswich Star newspaper.

Businessmen Adrian Bradshaw was later charged with Victoria’s murder but was found not guilty at Norwich Crown Court in 2001.

Mr Bradshaw, now a marketing consultant and publisher who owns 12 monthly magazines as well as the Felixstowe Flyer newspaper, was initially questioned as one of dozens of people at the Bandbox nightclub in Felixstowe where Victoria and a friend had been shortly before she vanished.

At the centre of the prosecution case were ten grains of soil found in his car that were alleged to have come from the spot, near Creeting St Peter, where Victoria’s body was found by a man walking his dog six days after she disappeared.

But a soil expert said they could have come from any number of sites in East Anglia.

The jury took just 90 minutes to acquit him. ‘I am really relieved it’s over,’ said Mr Bradshaw, then aged 27, who spent 11 months on remand waiting to stand trial. ‘I was confident this would be the result. I didn’t commit the crime. I am innocent. The jury did the right thing.’

Mr Bradshaw extended his sympathy to the Hall family, who had attended court throughout the nine-day trial. More than two decades after Victoria was murdered, there is still no closure, if indeed there can ever be closure.

There can be little comfort in knowing your daughter may have fallen victim to a serial killer. Understandably, the family have asked for privacy after news that Wright was now a suspect. It was in the early hours of a Sunday morning in September 1999 that Victoria and her best friend Gemma Algar had walked the two miles from the Bandbox to their homes in Trimley St Mary.

Although their parents had expected the pair to get a taxi home, they did not have enough money so they stopped to buy chips and began to walk. The two split up when they reached the village high road. Victoria was supposed to phone Gemma when the next morning. She never did.

Her parents raised the alarm and called the police when they discovered she was not in her bedroom. How could their reliable, responsible daughter, who did not drink and only began going to nightclubs three months earlier disappear?

For six grim days, her parents clung to the hope she was alive before receiving that terrible knock on the door.

They knew from the look on the policeman’s face that the news could not be worse: a body had been found 20 miles away and it was believed to be Victoria’s.’

Wright had not yet entered the public consciousness. He was just a grainy image captured on CCTV near the scene of the murder, if the suspicions of the source who rang the BBC after seeing Crimewatch were borne out. At the time, Wright, who had gone through two brief marriages, was working as a forklift driver and was living with Pamela Wright in Ipswich. He was a member of a local golf club. No one could have marked him down as a serial killer.

But unbeknown to his girlfriend he had been paying strangers for sex for years – an addiction that turned to something much darker while Pamela was on night shifts.

The remains of the five woman – Gemma Adams, 25, Tania Nicol, 19, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24 and Annette Nicholls, 29 – were discovered in isolated locations near Ipswich between December 2 and December 12, 2006. Wright had systematically selected and murdered them over a six-and-a-half week period starting in late October. Two of his victims were laid out in the shape of a crucifix

The fear that engulfed cities such as Leeds and Bradford at the height of the Yorkshire Ripper murders gripped Ipswich. Women were too scared to go out at night. In the end it was science, not police footwork, that solved the crimes.

At the Forensic Science Service in Birmingham, 250 of the centre’s 275 scientists worked shifts around the clock testing dozens of samples from bodies until there was a match with Wright. His DNA had been put on a national database when convicted of stealing from a bar till five years earlier. Wright protested his innocence. He still does. He is not alone in denial.

In March, a documentary about the Suffolk Strangler, The Murderer and Me, was shown on Sky.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever thought that he was capable of killing someone,’ his former love Pamela, who now lives in Devon, told the programme. ‘When I fall asleep I’m turning things over in my head I wake up in the morning and it’s there again. This my life sentence.’

But the real life sentence is being served by the family of the teenager he is now suspected of killing. Victoria died shortly before her 18th birthday and would have been in her late 30s today.

‘We see her friends who were the same age and you do wonder what Victoria would be doing at this stage of her life and what she would have achieved in the last 20 years,’ her father said in the last interview he gave about the tragedy.

‘The person that evening took all that away from us.’

Additional reporting: Rebecca Camber

EXCLUSIVE: Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright’s ex-wife declares she is glad he has been arrested over the 1999 murder of Victoria Hall and hopes the teenager’s family will finally get truth about her death

By James Fielding for MailOnline 

The ex-wife of Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright says she is glad he has been arrested for Victoria Hall’s murder.  

Miss Hall, 17, was strangled and dumped in a water-filled ditch after disappearing while walking home from a nightclub in Felixstowe on September 18, 1999 – almost a decade before Wright’s reign of fear just 15 miles south in Ipswich.

Wright, 63, given a whole life tariff for the murders of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2008, was dramatically arrested at Long Lartin Prison in Worcestershire on Wednesday this week on suspicion of the murder of Miss Hall.

Suffolk Police had reopened an investigation into her death two years ago after receiving new ‘information from witnesses’ which they described at the time as significant.

Now Diane Cole, who married the serial killer in 1987 but divorced just two-years later has spoken exclusively with MailOnline about the arrest. 

Ms Cole, who now lives in the North East, said: ‘I heard about his arrest yesterday and my initial thoughts were ”so be it”. I hope that Victoria Hall’s family will eventually get some closure. I hope justice is done.

‘I’m glad the job is getting done and being sorted out once and for all because I just want the truth out there.

‘By the time of the murders, Steve wasn’t in my life anymore, he’d gone.’

She added: ‘I’ve spoken before about my life with Steve and I don’t want to be dragged back all through that again. It took over my life and wasn’t very pleasant for me.’

Ms Cole, 65, Wright’s second wife, previously branded him a ‘monster’ and revealed how he would beat her.

Miss Hall had left her home in Faulkeners Way in Trimley St Mary, at 9pm on September 18, 1999, to join friends at the Bandbox nightclub in Felixstowe.

She left the club with her best friend Gemma Algar, 17, at 1am the next morning, stopping to buy chips from the Bodrum Grill takeaway.

The pair walked back along Trimley High Road towards their respective homes while eating chips and singing, before splitting up at the junction of Faulkeners Way at 2.20am.

A short time later Miss Algar heard screams, but assumed it was someone messing around. Other eye-witnesses heard what sounded like a sports car roaring away.

Miss Hall’s parents Graham and Lorinda Hall reported her missing in the morning and a huge hunt for her got underway.

Her naked body was found by a dog walker on September 24 in a water-filled ditch around 20 miles away in Creeting St Peter near Stowmarket, Suffolk.

Tests revealed that Miss Hall who had just started her second year of studying A levels at Orwell High School, Felixstowe, had not been sexually assaulted.

Porsche-driving businessman Adrian Bradshaw, then aged 27, was charged with murder but cleared after a two-week trial at Norwich Crown Court.

In a statement Suffolk Police statement said yesterday: ‘Police investigating the unsolved murder of a teenage girl from Trimley St Mary – which took place over 20 years ago – have made an arrest as part of the inquiry.

‘Victoria Hall, aged 17, was last seen alive in the early hours of Sunday 19 September 1999, in High Road, Trimley St Mary.

‘Victoria left home on the evening of Saturday 18 September 1999 to go for a night out with a friend at the Bandbox nightclub in Bent Hill, Felixstowe, where they remained until around 1am on the morning of Sunday 19 September.

‘They then went to get some food at the Bodrum Grill in Undercliff Road West, before beginning the walk back to Trimley St Mary. They parted at around 2.20am near to the junction of High Road and Faulkeners Way. Victoria was just yards away from her home.

‘When Victoria’s parents woke-up that morning and discovered that she had not returned home, the police were called and a missing person inquiry commenced.

‘Five days later, on Friday 24 September, Victoria’s naked body was found in a ditch beside a field by a dog walker in Creeting Lane, Creeting St Peter, approximately 25 miles away from where she was last seen.

‘In September 2019, Suffolk Police revealed that the case – known as Operation Avon – was now a live inquiry again and being fully reinvestigated by a new team of detectives, after fresh information had been received that was not previously known.

‘As a result of the work that has been ongoing for the past two years, officers have arrested a man on suspicion of murder this morning, Wednesday 28 July.

‘This individual is not someone who has previously been arrested as part of this inquiry’.

The new investigation into Miss Hall’s murder was announced in September 2019 by Detective Chief Inspector Caroline Millar of Suffolk Police, who said at the time that it was ‘quite possible’ that someone was protecting the killer, and appealed for them to come forward.

Mr Hall, 67, said in 2019 that he and his wife were told six months previously about the new police leads.

Describing his daughter, he said: ‘She was a fun loving teenager who liked to go out in the evenings. She was an intelligent girl who was working hard, hopefully to go to university. She was a normal 17-year-old girl.

‘We obviously see her friends who were the same age and you do wonder what Victoria would be doing at this stage and what she would have achieved in the last 20 years, and what she would have done with her life.’