Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  Maxine Carr added her confession a few days later. She had lied about being with Huntley that day to protect him, not believing that he had carried out the murders. She knew that Huntley had a rape allegation against him from 1998, which had been dropped when police established that he was not with the young woman concerned at the time of the assault.

  Huntley persisted in his claims that the girls’ deaths were accidental and establishing this fact became the basis of the defence case for the remainder of the trial. It was a tall order.

  Their first witness was Ian Huntley himself and the prosecution tore into him, accusing him of being a liar and suggesting that rather than trying to help with a nosebleed, it had been his intention to kill the two little girls from the moment he opened the door to them. When asked why he made no effort to resuscitate them or call for help, he told the court that he panicked. It was suggested that Huntley’s motivation for killing the girls was sexual, although no evidence of sexual molestation could be proved due to the advanced state of decomposition of the girls’ bodies when found.

  The judge sent the jury out on 12 December, advising them to consider their verdict very carefully. Five days later they returned a verdict of guilty against Maxine Carr for conspiring to pervert the course of justice. She was sentenced to three years and six months in prison.

  Ian Huntley was found guilty of murdering Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman and was given a life sentence for each murder.

  It emerged afterwards that Ian Huntley had previously been in trouble for sexual offences. Between 1995 and 1999 he was accused four times of having sex with girls who were aged between thirteen and fifteen. There had also been three allegations of rape and one of indecent assault against a victim of eleven. He had never been convicted, however, because either the police failed to find sufficient evidence of his guilt or the victims refused to press charges.

  Astonishingly, in spite of these incidents, he had still managed to get a job as a school caretaker. There was horror and anger at the way the system had failed. It also became clear that communication between the various offices handling the case was poor and some of the evidence regarding Huntley’s previous sex accusations had been deleted during a process to clean out archives. Had everything been brought together, an escalation in Huntley’s offending would have been noticed and he might have been stopped. It was discovered also that his name and date of birth had been entered incorrectly into the national crime database when he was being checked for his job at Soham. Thus, his record did not appear. If it had been done correctly, he would not have obtained the job at Soham and Holly and Jessica would not have died that day.

  Maxine Carr was released from prison after serving twenty-one months. She was provided with a secret new identity in order to protect her from attacks by the public.

  In September 2005, Huntley was scalded by boiling water thrown at him by another inmate, quadruple murderer, Mark Hobson. Then on 5 September 2006, he was found unconscious in his cell at Wakefield Prison, having taken an overdose. He had previously overdosed at Woodhill Prison in 2003 before his trial. He survived but as his cell was searched afterwards, a tape was found on which it is believed he had made a full confession. He had made the tape in exchange for the drugs with which he tried to kill himself and the prisoner who provided the drugs was planning to sell the tape to the media on his release. On 28 January 2008, Huntley was moved to Frankland Prison in County Durham, where in March 2010, he was attacked again by a fellow inmate, and although reports stated that his throat had been slashed, he was back in prison the next day.

  Steve Wright

  They called him the Suffolk Strangler or the Ipswich Ripper and for six terrifying weeks in late 2006, he went on a murderous rampage in the quiet East Anglian town of Ipswich, killing five prostitutes.

  Wright’s childhood had been fairly exotic. Born in 1958, he lived as a child in both Malta and Singapore where his father, a military policeman, was posted. However, while he was still young, his parents divorced and each remarried. Wright moved in with his father and his new wife. After he left school in 1974, aged sixteen, he became a chef on ferries sailing out of Felixstowe in Suffolk. Five years later he married and in 1983, his son Michael was born. However, he and his wife divorced in 1987 after which he worked in a succession of jobs including as a steward on the cruise-liner, the QE2, a lorry driver and a barman. At the time of the murders, he was working as a forklift truck driver.

  He married again in 1992, a marriage that lasted less than a year and then had a child with a different woman later that year, while he was running a pub in south London. He was sacked from this job because of his gambling and excessive drinking. He also stole £80 from the till and it is known that he had such substantial debts around this time that he was declared bankrupt.

  He twice tried to commit suicide, firstly by carbon monoxide poisoning and in 2002 he survived a deliberate overdose of pills.

  In 2001, Wright started a relationship with Pamela Wright in Felixstowe and the couple moved to Ipswich in 2004. When Pamela started working nights, Wright became frustrated by their lack of sex. He had used the services of prostitutes since his days at sea, and as he became increasingly frustrated, he began to frequent the prostitutes of Ipswich’s red-light district, in the middle of which he and Pamela conveniently rented a flat.

  The first girl to be reported missing was nineteen- year-old Tania Nichol, an Ipswich girl who had disappeared on 30 October 2006. Forty-eight hours after she had last been seen, her mother called the police. On 8 December, her body was found by police frogmen in a river near Copdock Mill. She had not been sexually assaulted, but because of her lengthy submersion in the river it was difficult to establish the cause of death. Nichol had been using heroin since the age of sixteen when she left home to live in a hostel and like many of the ‘working girls’ in the area, she worked as a prostitute to fund her drug habit. When her habit had led to her being thrown out of her job in one of the town’s massage parlours, she had been forced to take to the streets. Her mother had no idea she was a prostitute, believing her to be working as a barmaid or in a hairdressers.

  Twenty-five-year-old Gemma Adams disappeared in West End Road in Ipswich just after midnight on 15 November, after last being seen outside a BMW dealership. Her partner reported her missing later that day. Gemma, a heroin addict since her teenage years, was found on 2 December in a river at Hintlesham, naked, but not sexually assaulted. She had once worked at an insurance company but had lost the job because of her drug habit.

  Twenty-nine-year-old mother of one, Annette Nicholls was last seen in Ipswich on 8 December. Anyone connected with the world of prostitution was beginning to become edgy and her family, concerned at her absence, called in the police. She was found on 12 December, near the village of Levington. She was naked, like the others but also like them had not been sexually assaulted. There was one important difference, however, in that her body was laid out in the shape of a cross. Police were unsure how she died but believed that her breathing had somehow been hampered. An addict since about 2000, her son, Farron, was looked after by her mother.

  Anneli Alderton was a twenty-four-year-old drug addict from Colchester in Essex, who was in the early stages of pregnancy. She was last seen on 3 December on the 5.53 p.m. train from Harwich to Manningtree, where she got off the train at 6.15 p.m. that evening to catch another train for Ipswich. Seven days later her asphyxiated naked body was found in woodland in front of Amberfield School near the village of Nacton, just outside Ipswich. She was laid out, like Annette Nicholls in a cruciform position.

  The stories of the Suffolk prostitute murders were now headline news in the media. A local Ipswich business offered a reward of £25,000 for information leading to the arrest of the killer, a sum it later increased to £50,000. The Sunday newspaper, the News of the World offered £250,000 for information.

  The strangler’s fifth and last victim was a twenty-four-year-old mother of three, Paula Clennell, who dis
appeared on 10 December and was found on the same day as Annette Nicolls, also close to the village of Levington, southeast of Ipswich. Again naked but not sexually assaulted, she had been strangled. Also a drug addict, Clennell had moved to Ipswich from Northumberland ten years previously following the break-up of her parents’ marriage. Ironically, she gave an interview about the disappearances and murders to Anglia Television News just days prior to her own death. She confirmed that like all the girls she was wary of climbing into strange cars, but she did it simply because she needed the money.

  The police enquiry made little headway even though a huge task force, called Operation Sumac, had been assembled to investigate. Officers from neighbouring constabularies were drafted in and two hundred and fifty of the two hundred and seventy scientists employed at the Forensic Science Service in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire worked full-time on the case, undertaking painstaking analysis of fibres, clothing and anything else that was found at the scenes of the murders. It was soon clear that the women had been killed elsewhere before being dumped in the locations where their bodies were found.

  The DNA analyses provided rich rewards. By 17 December, the scientists had constructed a good DNA profile of the person they believed could be the murderer. Just before 8 p.m., it was sent to the national DNA database in the Midlands and thirty minutes later, a police officer waiting by a computer at Suffolk police headquarters received the information they had been waiting for. The DNA had matched a name on the database – Steven Gerald James Wright. The DNA obtained on his conviction five years earlier for stealing £80 from the pub in which he worked at the time would send him to jail for the rest of his life.

  A surveillance operation was set up and Wright, already questioned twice during door-to-door enquiries, was questioned for a third time.

  Nonetheless, three men were arrested in connection with the murders. The first, released without charge, was arrested in Felixstowe at 7.20 a.m. in the morning of 18 December. A day later, however, a supermarket worker, Thomas Stephens, was questioned, but again was released without charge. Finally, on 19 December, Steve Wright was arrested. His car and his clothes provided a substantial amount of incriminating material, including small amounts of his victims’ blood. Two days later, he was charged with all five murders, appearing before magistrates in Ipswich on 22 December and being remanded in custody. On 1 May, he formally entered a plea of not-guilty and a trial date was set for 14 January 2008.

  It was an unusual media frenzy for a British court. A special ‘media pen’ was created at the court while Sky News went one better by erecting a shelter on the roof of a nearby building.

  The prosecution case opened with pictures of two of the victims that had been deliberately posed and information that DNA linked Steve Wright to three of the victims – two had been washed clear of DNA evidence as they had been immersed in water. There was also fibre evidence that connected him to them. The defence, however, argued that as a frequenter of prostitutes, there was every likelihood that there would be links between him and some of the women. They claimed he had had sex with all of the victims, apart from Tania Nicholls whom he had picked up in his car with the intention of having sex with her but had changed his mind and deposited her back in the red-light area. But, police had him on record as having been stopped one night driving in the red-light district. He had claimed to have been unaware that he was in the red-light district – even though he lived in the middle of it. He claimed he had been unable to sleep and was just driving around.

  It took the jury eight hours to find Wright guilty on all five charges of murder on 21 February 2008. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with the trial judge, Justice Gross, saying that because of the element of premeditation and planning, in his case life should mean life.

  Josef Fritzl

  His lawyer tried to blame it all on the effects of a brutal childhood, and there is no doubt that the kind of upbringing endured by Josef Fritzl would have taken its toll on anyone, but would probably not have turned everyone into a criminal responsible for murder, incest, enslavement, rape and the depriva-tion of his daughter’s liberty for twenty-four years, not to mention the incarceration of the seven children she gave birth to during those years of rape and astonishing brutality.

  Fritzl was born in the Austrian town of Amstetten in 1935, three years before the Anschluss, the absorption of Austria into the Third Reich. After his father abandoned the family, his mother brought her son up alone. She was a strict disciplinarian, however, and the young Josef Fritzl often bore the bruises he received in vicious beatings by her. Of course, this brutality was inflicted against the even greater social brutality of the totalitarian and aggressively militaristic Nazi regime which had supplanted the authoritarianism of the previous Austro-Hungarian empire.

  After the war, Josef Fritzl was an ordinary man. In fact, he was always an ordinary man – well turned out and the driver of a well-maintained Mercedes. His finances were always well organised and his home and other properties he owned were always in good order.

  No one knew very much about him, however, not even the people with whom he worked. If only they had known what was really going on behind that veneer of ordinariness.

  The gloss of respectability was smashed wide open in 1967 when, aged thirty-two, he was convicted of rape in Linz and sentenced to a year and a half in prison. He was also suspected of assault in two other cases in the area at that time. It has been reported that he also liked to indecently expose himself. Another rumour has it that he raped his wife’s sister. These crimes and rumours would shamefully be ignored by the authorities later, allowing Fritzl to continue with his monstrous life of deceit and horror.

  None of his various criminal acts seem to have concerned his wife, Rosemarie whom he married when he was twenty-one and she was just seventeen. She was a kitchen helper and during their marriage he would dominate her as he would his daughter and grandchildren later. She deferred to her husband, submissive to a fault, and does not seem to have been bothered when he went to prison in 1967 or when he would go on sex tourism holidays in Thailand. She asked no questions, especially when he began to spend a considerable amount of time in their basement, working, as he told her, on mechanical drawings.

  He had been making his perverted plans for some time. His daughter Elizabeth was born in 1966 and he began sexually abusing her in 1977, when she was eleven years old. A year later, he began building a subterranean extension to the modest Fritzl house in Amstatten. The cellar he was building, however, far exceeded the size for which he had obtained planning permission. He cleverly added walls that would conceal a part of the structure. That part – fifteen-feet square, but only five-and-a-half-feet high – was reserved for his daughter.

  Finally, on 28 August 1984, he put his plan into operation and began Elizabeth Fritzl’s twenty-four-year nightmare. He ordered the eighteen-year-old girl to help him carry a new door down to the basement. She was used to obeying and immediately did as he was asked. She had already tried to escape him, but she had been picked up by police in Vienna after being on the run for a month. He feared she would eventually get away and he was going to prevent that happening. As she helped put the heavy door in place downstairs, little did she know she was helping him install the door to her own prison cell and that she would not see daylight again for twenty-four years. He sedated her with ether and locked the door with her on the other side.

  Rosemarie Fritzl reported her daughter’s dis-appearance to the police a day after the door in the basement closed behind her, but a month later, Josef Fritzl gave them a letter which he had forced Elizabeth to write. Postmarked Braunau, it said that she was staying with a friend and no longer wanted to live with her family. It warned them not to instigate a search for her or she would leave the country. Fritzl suggested that she had probably joined a religious sect and the police took his word for it. They never looked for her.

  From that time on, letters would occasionally arrive at the Fritzl house from Elizab
eth. One warned, ‘Do not search for me; it would be pointless and would only increase my and my children's suffering. Too many children and an education are not wanted there.’

  She lived alone in this tiny world for five years. There were no windows, no books and no fresh air. Just a bed on which her father raped her time and time again. Then, her first baby, Kerstin, was born in 1988. Stefan followed in 1990 and two years later, Lisa. Fritzl smuggled Lisa out of the basement when she was still very young, pretending to anyone who asked, that she was Elizabeth’s baby and that she had abandoned her. No one though to check on the truth of this story. The Fritzls adopted Lisa and she lived upstairs as their own daughter. It is thought that Fritzl would take certain children upstairs because he was worried their crying would be heard from above ground.

  In the next twelve years, officials from the childcare section of the local social services department visited the Fritzl house at least twenty-one times but astonishingly, no one thought to follow up on any of the things they were told. Fritzl was often not there when he should have been, which should have aroused suspicion, but one would have thought his criminal record alone would have made them curious. They simply thought that he was a good, solid family man who deserved praise for taking in his wayward daughter’s children.

  His tenents noticed nothing untoward either, although they were warned that if they ever went anywhere near the cellar they would be evicted immediately. As a friend later said, no one stopped to wonder why he was so afraid of people going down there.

  They followed the usual formula with Monika who was born in 1994, taking her upstairs and adopting her. Three days after the birth of twins in 1996, one of them, Michael died, Fritzl callously disposing of his body in the household furnace. The other twin, Alexander moved upstairs when he was fifteen months old to add to the growing Fritzl family, or at least the one that everyone knew about. In 2002, Elizabeth gave birth to Felix who remained downstairs with his mother and sister, Kerstin, who had not seen daylight for the entire fourteen years of her life. Elizabeth Fritzl was now thirty-six years old and had spent half her life underground, a prisoner of the monster who was her father.