Britain:A former police chief has stressed the urgency of catching serial killer, writes Frank Millar.
The Ipswich serial killer will at some point move beyond his current "comfort zone" and attack again unless identified and captured within the next two weeks, Britain's former top police chief has warned.
Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, made his chilling forecast yesterday as police questioned hundreds of drivers and pedestrians in an area where one of the killer's five victims, Paula Clennell, was last seen. The 24-year-old prostitute was thought to have been working on Handford Road in the town's red light district last weekend.
With more than 10,000 calls from members of the public already received, officers were also processing hundreds more offers of help and information following the release of CCTV images of another victim, Anneli Alderton, on a train journey to Ipswich on Saturday, December 3rd.
With none of the actual murder sites yet uncovered, police are desperately hoping the released details of what Ms Alderton was wearing at the time of her disappearance will speed the discovery of her clothes and yield vital clues.
It was reported at the weekend that Ms Alderton's three-month pregnancy only became apparent during the post-mortem examination and that Ipswich police had to break this news to her family.
The police manhunt, meanwhile, was spreading across Europe after the establishment of formal contact between the Suffolk constabulary and Interpol.
Detectives are believed to have identified between 50 and 100 "interesting individuals", and have not ruled out the possibility that some potential suspects might have fled.
Suffolk's assistant chief constable, Jacqui Cheer, meanwhile, declined to comment on a newspaper claim yesterday that a senior police officer from a neighbouring force had been a regular client of Ms Clennell and another of the five murdered prostitutes. "We've said repeatedly that we have not interviewed anybody. We have spoken to a number of people," Ms Cheer told the BBC. "I'm not prepared to be drawn into how many and who and what types of people we are speaking to."
The man heading the police inquiry, Det Chief Supt Stewart Gull, continued his cautious approach, meanwhile, refusing to second-guess the killer, while acknowledging that "until the killer or killers are detained they will continue to pose a risk".
However Lord Stevens, a figure of immense experience and authority, voiced the obvious and widespread fear that the killer would ultimately prove unable to stop himself striking again unless caught quickly.
Lord Stevens suggested it was likely the "Suffolk Strangler" lived within half a mile of where he killed his first victim and probably within a mile of where he dumped her body. "He still lives there and has a carefully chosen bolthole, a 'killing room', where he takes his victims to kill and keep at his pleasure," the former commissioner wrote in yesterday's News of the World.
Lord Stevens ventured the killer would likely be "clean, relatively smartly dressed, in his 30s with a job and a good IQ", was possibly married and probably "quite well thought of by those who know him". Lord Stevens also suggested it was likely that, at the very least, he would have attacked or even killed women before the murders in the current series of linked slayings. "I fear the five murders we know of in Ipswich are the climax of his orgy of violence, not the start."
Voicing aloud a fear that must haunt the Ipswich inquiry team, Lord Stevens said: "He [the killer] is so clever he may now lay low because of the current police hue and cry and not kill again for some time. But the former commissioner was in little doubt: "He will, eventually, have to start killing again . . . " However, Lord Stevens said he believed "it is highly likely he will be captured within the next days", before adding that, if not, "it could take years".
None of this was based on guesswork but rather on his years of expertise both as a detective and a senior police commander overseeing serial murder inquiries, and on the insight gained during the decade he spent heading the Home Office inquiry team that travelled the world trying to discover what made a serial killer.
Serial killers, he said, "almost always . . . operate first in a 'comfort zone' where they begin their hunting before later becoming bolder and moving out of it". Surviving now would be everything "because above all he will want to hunt again", said Lord Stevens, noting that the killer would not want to draw attention to himself in the middle of the current investigation by moving from where he has spent much of his life.
But Lord Stevens said the statistics showed that most serial killers were caught - relatively quickly - concluding with the prediction that this one too would be caught in time: "If that breakthrough doesn't happen, and he can control himself not to strike again too soon, it could take years to nail him. But at some point he will be incapable of stopping himself attacking again. This time it will be outside his comfort zone, so the chances of catching him will rise. He'll make a mistake and will be caught."