The few people who regarded Steve Wright as a friend thought of him as quiet,
a little awkward in company – taciturn, except when the conversation turned
to golf, about which he was almost obsessive.
He seemed devoted to Pamela Goodman, his latest partner, and was a bit
unlucky when it came to finding and holding down a decent job.
Only after he was arrested did they start to find other words and unearth
memories of incidents that didn’t seem quite right. The social awkwardness
became standoffishness, the quiet demeanour seemed secretive, and the
devotion to Ms Goodman now appeared domineering. They started to remember
occasions when he had been suddenly rude or inexplicably aggressive.
But no one had him marked down as the serial killer who murdered five
prostitutes over six weeks and dumped their bodies in streams and on
wasteland around the outskirts of Ipswich. All were found in the first ten
days of December 2006, a frightening period when long, dark nights
heightened the sense of insecurity in the town.
For the psychiatrists who will assess him in prison, Wright will prove a
fascinating subject. In his early months in jail it will be their job to
prepare a detailed assessment of his mental condition, literacy and family
background before planning how and where he will spend his sentence. But it
will be left to him to decide when he wants to “engage” with the
psychiatrists.
To date there has been little to suggest that Wright is prepared to reveal
his motives. At trial he mounted a stubborn defence, despite evidence
linking him directly to all five murders.
Letters from prison to Ms Goodman revealed his state of denial. “Please
believe me when I say I’m not capable of those crimes,” he wrote in January
last year.
He professed his dedication to Ms Goodman, yet he betrayed her repeatedly –
dropping her off at the call centre where she worked before cruising the
red-light area of Ipswich for sex and victims.
An examination of Wright’s life reveals a contempt for women that may stem
from a lengthy separation from his mother, a dislike of his stepmother, two
brief marriages and years of paying strangers for sex.
Wright was born on April 24, 1958, in Erpingham, Norfolk. His mother,
Patricia, married his father, Conrad, when she was 16 and pregnant.
She lived in the shadow of a husband who worked as a police officer in the
RAF, then at Felixstowe docks, and who showed a ruthless disciplinarian
streak in his professional and family lives. She walked out on the marriage
and her children when Wright was 8. His father remarried a short time later
but Wright never warmed to his stepmother, Valerie.
In interviews since his arrest, Patricia has claimed that the son she left
was the “apple of her eye” and never showed any inclination towards violence
when she was around.
“Steve was shy, especially in a crowd, but he was such a love when he was a
kid,” she said. “I never saw any violence there. He definitely didn’t have
it in him when he was a little boy.
“Steve was withdrawn. He was afraid of his dad if I wasn’t there. He would
actually hold his breath and pass out if he thought his dad was going to
smack him.”
Patricia says that she was prevented legally from taking her four children
with her and they grew up subject to their father’s strict rules.
She was fleetingly reunited with Wright when she visited Britain from her
home in the US over Christmas 1992. But as she left to fly home he made it
clear in a foul-mouthed tirade that he did not want to see her again.
Wright left school at 16 with no qualifications and took a job at a hotel in
Aldeburgh, Suffolk, where he received silver-service training.
A friend suggested that they join the Merchant Navy together and the pair
went to Sea School in Gravesend with a view to joining at 17. His first job
was as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a ferry operating out of Felixstowe.
In 1978 he married Angela O’Donovan in Milford Haven, West Wales, and had a
son. The couple divorced and his former wife has since remarried. Shortly
after his arrest she said that the news of his crimes had “come as a
complete bolt out of the blue”.
Wright also has a daughter who was born in 1992 after he had a relationship
with a woman he met while working in a pub in Chislehurst.
In 1987 Wright married Diane Cassell in a ceremony in Braintree, Essex. He
met her while working on the QE2 where one of his fellow crew members
was Suzy Lamplugh, who was murdered while working as an estate agent in
1986. Police are understood to have reviewed the Lamplugh case but ruled out
Wright as a suspect.
Steve Adler, a former steward on the QE2, said: “Steve wasn’t really
one of the lads and was on the periphery – but he liked the girls. He would
sniff around all the girls and particularly the beauticians.”
Mr Adler said that Wright visited prostitutes when they landed at Pattaya in
Thailand.
Ms Cassell said that they married only because the brewery they wanted to
work for had it as a requirement for couples taking on the tenancy of a pub.
They took over the Ferry Boat Inn in Norwich, but separated after less than
a year of running it when he left her for another woman.
The pub was in the centre of the Norwich red-light district and a regular
haunt of prostitutes. Natalie Pearman, 16, a prostitute who used the pub,
was murdered in 1992 and her body was found dumped in woodland. The murders
of Ms Pearman and of Kellie Pratt and Michelle Bettles, who also worked the
streets of Norwich, remain unsolved.
The second Mrs Wright now lives in Hartlepool and is known as Diane Cole. She
said: “I couldn’t believe it when I first saw his name on the telly. Our
marriage wasn’t good and I was glad when it ended.”
A former neighbour and friend of Wright’s second wife said he was prone to
violent rages after which he would seem perfectly calm. The woman said: “He
would pin [Diane] up against the wall and put both hands around her throat.
There were at least three times when he did it in front of witnesses. It
would end when either my exhusband or I would pull him off or he would come
to his senses.
“He had an ability to have a violent row one minute and then have a calm
conversation with you straight afterwards, as if nothing had happened.”
In 1999, beset with money problems, Wright went to live in Thailand. He is
said to have married there but returned apparently in worse financial
straits. His experiences overseas made paying for sex a habit that probably
contributed to his financial problems and two attempted suicides.
His half-brother, Keith, said: “He tried to do himself in a couple of times.
In about 1995 or 1996 they found him in a car down some alleyway. He’d
attached a hose to his exhaust. In about 2000, after coming back from
Thailand, he took an overdose of pills. . . he went to Thailand and got with
some girl who ended up scamming him for everything he had. He got himself
into a lot of debt.”
Wright declared himself bankrupt with debts of £30,000, on his father’s
advice, and tried to set his life right. He found work in a variety of
short-lived jobs as a labourer, fork-lift truck driver and barman. Money
problems persisted: he was sacked for stealing from a bar where he worked
and he continued to pay prostitutes.
The street girls in Ipswich said that Wright was a regular punter, cruising
the streets in his Ford Mondeo while his partner worked at a call centre.
They knew him as Mondeo Man.
One prostitute, who gave her name as Lou, regarded Wright as “an average,
normal punter” with whom she had sex two or three times a month.
“He didn’t strike me as weird,” she said. “I can usually tell if someone
is trustworthy and he always seemed all right with me and never gave me any
reason to believe I was in danger.”
Wright was a member of Seckford Golf Club, Woodbridge, for five years, played
off a handicap of 19 and would happily fill his day playing 36 holes. He
joined the Brigands (the Brook Regulars Golf and Notable Delinquents
Society) set up by customers at the bar where he worked.
The Seckford club’s professional, Simon Jay, 30, said: “We always knew Steve
Wright as a quiet chap who was very unassuming.”
The other regular fixture in his life was enjoying a few pints at Uncle Tom’s
Cabin. Sheila Davis, the pub’s landlady, and her partner, Eddie Roberts,
befriended Wright and Ms Goodman about four years ago.
Ms Davis said: “Once he just shoved me out of the way when I was sitting on a
chair. It surprised me. I was talking to Pam and I had annoyed him but I
didn’t know why. I couldn’t believe he would do a thing like that. It was a
silly thing but it stuck in my head.”
She added: “Pam and I would talk a lot, and according to her he would say how
he hated tarty women.”
Ms Davis said that she had received a letter from Wright. “It said, ‘You must
know in your heart I am not capable of doing this’ . . . but I don’t know.
He is nice-looking, not slimy, nothing like that. But, as a personality -
there is none. He had no personality.”
Extracts from a letter that Steve Wright wrote to his father while he was
in jail
Dear Dad This is a reply to your letter you are right you have never
seen me angry before because I am a quite (sic) and placid person whenever I
get upset I tend to bury it deep inside which I suppose is not a healthy
thing to do because the more I do that the more withdrawn I become because I
have seen to (sic) much anger and violence in my childhood to last anyone a
lifetime . . . You said in the paper that when you looked in my eyes you
would know whether I was guilty or not that really hurt me it was like a
knife in the heart for you to even contemplate that I could even be capable
of such a terrible crime . . . My head seems to be all over the place at the
moment so please try and sort this out . . . Love Steve
Full
text of letter
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