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The Suffolk Strangler — A Town Is Terrified
Why did the prolific user of sex workers become a serial killer?
In 2006, the sleepy Suffolk city of Ipswich went from being a low-crime low-risk backwater place to being a crime hot spot, and this all happened in just a few months.
The 30 to 40 women sex workers who were selling sex on the street were more at risk of crime than the average population.
Studies into the risks of street prostitution show that whilst all sex workers are more at risk of rape and violent crime than the average population, these number increase still further for those who work outdoors.
In one study, whilst 48 per cent of indoor sex workers reported suffering violence at the hands of customers, that number rose to 81 per cent for those working on the street.
Many sex workers, male and female, are drug addicts who sell sex to buy drugs.
In Ipswich, one man was responsible for the series of brutal and extraordinary crimes. These were not the run-of-the-mill offending sex workers routinely suffer from, horrendous though they may be: Even compared to the violence street prostitutes encounter, his offending was different by an order of magnitude. Women first started going missing, and then started turning up dead.
