Jacci Goldsmith has heard a lot from Tom Stephens over the past couple of weeks. He has been calling her often, wanting to talk about Gemma, Annette, Anneli, Paula and especially Tania. Mr Stephens has been increasingly distressed as he talks to Ms Goldsmith, who used to ply her trade on the same Ipswich streets from which the murdered women disappeared.

Then last Friday evening he arrived unannounced on her doorstep and asked if he could come in and talk. “He was just sitting talking — he was upset about what was happening so he came round to talk,” Ms Goldsmith told The Times yesterday, shortly after Mr Stephens was arrested on suspicion of murdering all five women.

“He said that he felt bad because he had not picked up Tania on the night that she disappeared. He was meant to pick her up from her house and take her to work. He said that she was one of the innocent ones, because she was new to it.”

Ms Goldsmith was not the only person that Mr Stephens was talking to about the murders that night. He also spent two hours sitting in the car of a Sunday newspaper reporter, crying, talking and predicting that because he knew the dead women, because they trusted him and because he had no alibi, he was certain to be arrested. “I know I am innocent and I am certain it won’t go as far as me being charged,” Mr Stephens, 37, told Michael Duffy, of the Sunday Mirror.

“I am completely confident of that. It’s not unusual for someone to be arrested, released without charge and then someone else be arrested and charged.” He added: “I don’t have alibis for some of the times — actually I’m not entirely sure I have tight alibis for any of the times. But I’m not worried about being charged, I’m innocent.

“From the police profiling it does look like me — white male between 25 and 40, knows the area, works strange hours. The bodies have got close to my house. If new information, coincidental information, crops up, I could get arrested.”

He is also understood to be the man who left a bunch of flowers at the junction of Handford Road and London Road, the edge of the red-light area. A card attached to the bouquet read: “Tania, Gemma, Netty, Paula, Annie — I knew some of you better than others but I miss you all. Tom x.”

Mr Stephens, who often works nights at a Tesco superstore, said that by the end of last week, police had already spoken to him four times. His purple Renault Clio car and his semi-detached home in Trimley St Martin, near Felixstowe, had been searched in connection with the disappearances of Gemma Adams and Tania Nicol.

At the time of those earlier interviews, Suffolk police were already running a large-scale inquiry. The two women had been classified as “high-risk” missing persons because their work meant that they were likely to get into strangers’ cars and be vulnerable to attack. Criminal profilers had been drafted in to help to paint a picture of the kind of man who might have abducted the women.

Mr Stephens has said that he was spoken to by police within a week of Ms Nicol being reported missing.

He said: “I spoke to a couple of officers in a car for an hour. They asked me and I went voluntarily to the police station. They wanted to put it on tape so that nothing would be lost. No information would be lost. In notes things can be lost.”

Three further conversations followed at police stations, as did a detailed search of Mr Stephens’s home. Geoffey Bond, 53, a neighbour, said: “The forensics guys in white suits spent four or five hours walking backwards and forwards between his home and their vans.

“The police helicopter was also hovering overhead at the time. I didn’t know the guy so I had no idea what it was all about.”

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