Blind Dates
COME on down “Ripper suspect” Number Two. What’s your name and where do you come from.
Before the suspect can mumble something about preferring to be called the “Suffolk Strangler”, as the Sun labels him, the Mirror announces that the man in the hottest of hot seats is Steve Wright.
Steve is a truck driver. He is 48-years-old. He drives a Ford Mondeo. And he is said to be a regular user of prostitutes.
A prostitute going under the name Lou says she has had sex with Wright. “He didn’t strike me as weird and never gave me any reason to believe I was in danger,” says she. And the sex? Tell us about the sex… “It was always straight sex – nothing out of the ordinary.”
It was much the same with Tom Stephens, Suffolk Stranger suspect Number One. Although witnesses have spoken of seeing Stephens wearing a pair of Lycra shorts in his garden and riding a bicycle in public.
Can the same be said of Wright? What else do we know of him? The Express’s front page says that Wright is a loner. So too Stephens.
And there is more. Wright is not just any truck driver, but a “fork lift truck driver”, a kink on the norm. He is a former merchant seaman. (We know.) And the Mondeo the paper sees policemen removing from his driveway for forensic tests? It is blue.
Should Wright not be the man responsible for killing five women, readers should know that he is, as the aforesaid Lou tells the Express, “an ordinary-looking guy with a chubby build and is more than 6ft tall, with silver-grey hair and a biggish nose.”
Do you know him? You may recall him, perhaps, from his time as a chef on the QE2. Or you may be his partner of five years, Pamela Goodman. She tells the Mail: “I can provide alibis for him when he is supposed to have killed those women.”
To sharpen this profile of Wright, the Mail investigates more fully and reveals him to the son of an RAF policeman. Moreover, he is a keen golfer.
He is “THE REAL PRIME SUSPCT” of the Star’s front page. He “enjoyed” £40 “romps” with “Ipswich hookers”, says the paper, failing to say how it is able to gauge Wright’s emotional state at the time of his paid-for sex.
The case is building. And then the Sun delivers its exhibit. There on the paper’s front page is a picture of Wight with his hand around a blonde’s neck. The woman is Wright’s second wife Diane Cassell.
Wright and she are both looking at the camera. She smiles. He grimaces a little. His hands are about her throat. He is gripping her neck like he would his nine iron on one of his rounds of golf.
“DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?” asks the Sun, assuming that people have survived the experience. If you do you can call the paper and tell all.
We need to know. Is it him? Is Wright the guilty party? Or is it Stephens? (Remember those Lycra shorts?) Or what about another man?
Is it you..?
Posted: 20th, December 2006 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
