Six Women, Two Trials, and the Twenty-Six-Year Hunt for the Full Truth

In October 2006, five women disappeared from the streets of Ipswich in six weeks. Their naked bodies were found in the waterways and woodland of Suffolk, and the man who killed them - a quiet forklift driver named Steven Wright - was arrested after a national DNA database matched his profile to biological samples recovered from three of his victims. He was convicted of all five murders in February 2008 and sentenced to die in prison.

But Wright's story did not begin in 2006, and it did not end in 2008.

In February 2026, Wright pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to the kidnapping and murder of seventeen-year-old Victoria Hall, killed in Felixstowe in September 1999 - seven years before the Ipswich campaign, and seven years before he should ever have had the opportunity to kill again. A witness had described his car and his face to police the night before Hall's murder. The database search that would have identified him was never run.

Drawing on the full forensic, legal, and criminological record of both proceedings, The Suffolk Strangler reconstructs Wright's career from Norfolk childhood to Long Lartin, examines the institutional failures that allowed him to kill for decades, and restores to the centre of the account the six women whose names the killer's story has too often obscured.

This is not a book about Steven Wright. It is a book about what we owe the dead.