ABSTRACT
Most sex worker homicides are committed by people not known to have killed anyone else. However, as the Ipswich murders of 2006 demonstrated, it takes a ‘serial’ killer to interest the media. At least seven other sex workers died in other places around Britain during 2006, but their deaths went largely unnoticed. At least 118 died between 1990 and 2006, but their deaths had no such impact, except for brief ripples of media excitement when it seemed possible that one killer was responsible for several murders. 1 Multiple sex worker murders, because they receive the most attention in popular culture, inevitably exert a disproportionate influence on public perceptions, not just of violence in the sex industry but of the sex industry itself. At the beginning of this book I challenged the conceptual orthodoxies that have arisen around Peter Sutcliffe and I end this section with a rather different perspective on Steve Wright than emerged at his trial, or in the immediate aftermath. First, however, I will look at all the cases involving multiple killers between 1990 and 2006.
