Uk Police Arrest Second Suspect

The Age

Wednesday December 20, 2006

JAMES BUTTON, EUROPE CORRESPONDENT, LONDON

POLICE have arrested a second man on suspicion of murdering five prostitutes in Ipswich, a day after arresting 37-year old supermarket worker Tom Stephens in one of the largest manhunts in British history.

The second man, 48, was arrested at 5am at his home just two streets from Ipswich's red light district, where the five women worked to support their drug addictions. Their bodies were found naked in countryside. All appear to have been strangled or suffocated.

Police had until 7pm last night (British time) to charge Mr Stephens, a former special constable who is being interviewed at an undisclosed police station.

However, they can apply for further time to question him. As searches of his home in the village of Trimley St Martin continued yesterday, police in white forensics suits began working outside the Ipswich property where the second suspect was arrested.

The case of the "Suffolk Strangler", which has drawn in 500 police, appeared to have been solved with the arrest of Mr Stephens, who in an interview with the Sunday Mirror the day before had tearfully admitted to having had sex with some of the girls but denied he had killed them.

A former Ipswich sex worker, Jackie Goldsmith, was adamant that Mr Stephens, a regular client in the red light district, could not have killed the women. "It's not him, no way. He's just Tom. He would rather help them than kill him," she told The Guardian.

Ms Goldsmith said she last saw Mr Stephens on Friday night when he visited her flat to talk about the murders. "He just wanted to chat because he was upset and pretty down," she said. "Most of the girls who were working would have known Tom. The girls trusted him."

And none of the women appear to have been sexually assaulted, whereas Ms Goldsmith said Mr Stephens was "after sex, he's all for sex".

He told the Sunday Mirror: "If I was out there tonight, if there was a girl working, I would try to watch over her . . . I'd try to give her some support. Some of them have nobody else."

The Times and The Sun reported unidentified police sources as saying detectives were less than 50 per cent certain that Mr Stephens was the killer.

"Stephens is probably no more than midway on a scale of 10 - about four or five," an unnamed senior detective told The Times.

Mr Stephens invited all five victims to his home for a party weeks before the first of them went missing, the Mirror reported.

The newspaper said police were trying to trace all the men who attended it.

Under British law, police can detain a suspect for up to four days before either charging him or releasing him, although they must seek a judge's permission to go beyond the second day.

Most of the women who worked in Ipswich knew Mr Stephens well, said Ms Goldsmith, and would call him frequently to ask him to drive them to their dealers to buy drugs, or just let them sit in his car to warm up.

Some women would have sex with him in return, others would not. On other occasions, he would pay for sex. She was shocked at the news of the arrest.

The women who Mr Stephens met in Ipswich's red light area, a place he began to frequent 18 months ago, knew little of his respectable middle-class background.

It was only a few days before she died that Annette Nicholls, one of the victims, told Ms Goldsmith: "Did you know Tom was a copper?"

Mr Stephens was born in Ipswich on May 27, 1969. His mother, Ellen, and father, Douglas, divorced when he was a young boy, and he moved with his mother and brother Jack, a year his junior, to Blowfield, near Norwich, where Mrs Stephens was a primary school teacher.

He was known as a quiet boy by his schoolfriends. "He used to wear really tight trousers, he was very uncool," one said yesterday. "He would hang around on the outside of groups, a bit of a nerd." As a young boy he loved sport, particularly football.

By the age of 23, he was living in Norwich and working as a special constable (volunteer policeman) with Norfolk police. He would patrol central Norwich, which includes the red light district, and was said by a friend to love the job.

In 1997, he left the force and the area, moving to Ipswich where in February 1998 he married Judith Kirk, a nurse. A fitness fanatic, Mr Stephens said on his MySpace website that he loved sport.

He and his wife lived in a semi-detached Victorian house on the eastern outskirts of Ipswich, but they separated around 2003, and Mr Stephens moved to a flat, sharing with three others and paying #280 ($A700) a month for a single room.

"He was an ordinary tenant," said Stuart Kantor, the estate manager. "He never held parties, he was never noisy. We are all amazed that anyone like that could be arrested."

In September of this year, he moved to a 1960s, semi-detached home in Trimley St Martin, close to Felixstowe. He would drive his purple, two-door Renault Clio up the A14 to the supermarket, a few hundred metres from the Suffolk police headquarters.

Neighbours said they did not know Mr Stephens well. His ex-wife stayed away from her home yesterday. -- GUARDIAN, AGENCIES

© 2006 The Age

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