Serial Killer Steve Wright - "The Suffolk Strangler" ---
Uploader: forthedishwasher ---
She was shaking. A killer was on the loose and Jane was convinced she must have had sex with him.“I know, I know, it coulda been me, I keep thinking about that,” she said as we sat in a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken near the football ground in Ipswich and she ripped open one sachet of sugar after another to pour into her tea. Twelve times. But it was the fear and not the sugar rush that was making her tremble.

This was the winter of 2006 and the Suffolk Strangler was making headlines. The police had yet to catch him. Five women had been found dead and naked in rivers and woodland in the days before we met, and Jane had known them all. Maybe she would be next.

They had all worked in the same shadows along the London Road, waiting for punters to come along and pay £40 a time for sex. Once in the car and under some stranger’s body, there was no escape, she said. “You are trapped. There is nothing you can do, not even move. You’re just his. He can do anything he wants. It’s perfect for a killer.”

I have no idea where Jane is now, but her gaunt face came instantly to mind when I saw the poster for the new film London Road. “Too soon,” I thought. “Too soon. The murders only happened nine years ago. How can anyone want to make a film about this?”

The mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, friends and former lovers of those five women must still be so raw and their grief so easily stirred. Never mind that London Road stars Olivia Colman, Tom Hardy, and the entire cast of the award-winning National Theatre production from which it sprang.

It is only seven years since the lorry driver Steve Wright was convicted of killing Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clenell and Annette Nicholls, who were aged between 19 and 29. How can their deaths possibly be material for a musical?

That was what I thought, but then I saw the film.

There is a screening on 8 June in Ipswich, a live premiere with the cast and crew in London that will be shown in cinemas around the country on 8 June, and then a general release at the end of the week. It is superb: a powerful, unsettling piece of work built from words that were actually spoken by the people who were there at the time.

The dialogue and lyrics are taken verbatim from interviews with local residents, police officers, reporters and sex workers. Every hesitation, every repetition, every “um” and “er” is used.

“Everyone is very, very nervous and very uncertain of everything,” sing the cast in the opening scenes that show what a fearful, paranoid place Ipswich was as the bodies began to turn up and every man came under suspicion.

That was the atmosphere playwright Alecky Blythe found when she pitched up in Ipswich and asked people to talk to her. She had already been working with prostitutes in Bournemouth on a piece of verbatim theatre that became The Girlfriend Experience, staged at the Young Vic in London. “They told me to get up to Ipswich, because that was where it was all happening,” she says.

The first person who answered the door to her was Ron Alder, chairman of the London Road residents association, who is disarmingly frank about why he agreed to co-operate. “I’m a sucker for a pretty face. The first thing she said was: ‘Don’t worry, I’m not press!’”

That was a winning line for a man who felt harassed by the world’s media on his doorstep and angry that his road was now being described as the Ipswich red-light district. “There were four cherry-picker cranes within 20 yards of my front door, with cameras on the top. They would start up their generator at five in the morning. There was such a stream of people coming up my garden path that I said I should start charging admission.”

Other reporters were offering small fortunes to the women that the police insisted on calling “working girls”, but Jane resisted that, despite her dire circumstances. “It’s blood money,” she said, asking for no other payment from me than a bag of chips, a couple of bits of greasy chicken and a cup of super-sweet tea. “I’m talking for my own sanity. I want to get it straight in my head and maybe help other girls stay safe.”

Jane looked older than 50 but had only just turned 30. Her eyes were hooded and her speech was slurred that night from the drugs she said she took to numb the pain of being a prostitute, although she had started doing it in the first place to feed a heroin addiction. Jane said she was on methadone now, and had stopped working the streets a few weeks earlier. “I know I must have been with him. The killer. I got out just in time, didn’t I? Not like the others.”

Flashes of eloquence showed the woman she had once been, and maybe could be again. I feared for how the film would portray women like her, whose lives are all too often demonised or romanticised, if they are thought about at all.