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Killer may have struck in 1992
14/12/2006 08:07 - (SA)
London - British police were examining
items of clothing on Thursday for possible links to the murders
of five women, as the mother of a prostitute killed 14 years ago
said she could have been the serial killer's first victim.
A massive manhunt is under way across the eastern English
port town of Ipswich after the discovery of five naked bodies.
Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull said police
would on Thursday reveal the results of a post-mortem
examination on one of the victims and hopefully her identity.
A second body was still being examined. Police said they
feared the two most recent corpses, discovered on Tuesday, may
be of prostitutes who had been reported missing.
Paula Clennell, 24, has not been seen since Saturday and
Annette Nicholls, 29, has been missing for at least a week.
Detectives have confirmed that three of the dead women were
sex workers.
Gull said clothing had been found in different locations
across Ipswich. "We will now take our time to analyse that and see if it is of any relevance," he told BBC News.
"Clearly we are still looking for confirmed sightings of
where the girls were and what they were actually wearing."
'The police have contacted me...'
One woman still working the streets in Ipswich's red-light
district was quoted in several newspapers as saying she saw the
killer's third victim, Anneli Alderton, being driven off last
Thursday in a blue BMW.
"A blue BMW went into the car park and Anneli went up to it
and got in and it drove out," the woman, named simply as Lou,
was quoted in the Daily Telegraph as saying. "The driver was
chubby, with glasses and dark hair."
A police spokesperson was not immediately available to comment.
In a further twist, Lin Pearman, whose 16-year-old daughter
Natalie was murdered in 1992, told the Daily Mail there could be
a link to the latest spate of killings.
"The police have contacted me. I believe there may have been
things done to the bodies of the women that could link them to
what happened to Natalie," she said. The teenager was killed in Norwich, 50 miles (80 km) north of Ipswich, the newspaper said.
On the ground, reinforcements have been drafted in to help
the small Suffolk police force in its largest inquiry.
With most prostitutes now staying off the streets, fears are
rising that the killer may look elsewhere, experts said.
"What maybe an issue is that when he starts running out of
prostitutes, he will see any woman who's out on the street at
night on their own as a prostitute and target them as a possible
victim," Dr Ian Stephen, a consultant forensic psychiatrist, who
has worked on past serial killer cases, told the Independent.
- Reuters
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