Steve Wright, currently on trial for the murder of five prostitutes in Suffolk, England in 2006, attended school in Malta when his father served on the islands as a Royal Air Force military policeman.
Mr Wright, who has been nicknamed the “Suffolk Strangler” and the “Ipswich Killer”, began giving testimony in Ipswich Crown Court on Thursday.
According to his testimony, Mr Wright said he was the son of an RAF police officer, a certain Conrad Wright, who was based in Norfolk, Malta and later Singapore, and that he went to school in Malta and Singapore – only to drop out of school at the age of 16.
Mr Wright is now 49 years old, which places his time in Malta at anytime between 1963, when he was five, and 1974. The exact time span in which he lived and went to school in Malta was not mentioned in court, nor was the name of the school he attended.
Mr Wright, a forklift driver who lives in Ipswich, Suffolk denies carrying out the grisly murders of Gemma Adams, 25, Tania Nicol, 19, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24, and Annette Nicholls, 29. The bodies of all five women, who worked on the streets of Ipswich, were found in isolated locations near the town over a 10-day period in December 2006.
Mr Wright was arrested on 19 December 2006 after samples, collected from sites where the bodies of some of the murdered prostitutes were discovered, was found to match his DNA.
The details came out as Mr Wright told jurors about his unhappy childhood, bankruptcy and failed marriages. He had been paying for sex, he said, from the time when he worked as a steward on the QE2 luxury cruise liner 25 years ago
He told the court this week he had been using prostitutes ever since joining the merchant navy in his early 20s and that it was “quite normal” for crew on the QE2, where he worked as a steward for six years, to pay for sex. He told the court he had visited massage parlours in Britain and abroad.
The defendant said he left school at the age of 16 without any qualifications and joined the merchant navy. He began the first of two marriages shortly afterwards. The marriage lasted some eight years, until his wife entered into another relationship. After being made redundant from the QE2, he began working in the pub trade, managing premises in the south-east and East Anglia while landlords were on holiday. He also remarried but at the same time entered into a year-long affair with a woman in London.
The court heard that by the late 1990s, Mr Wright found himself mired in debt incurred by gambling on horses. He said:” Because of the jobs I had, I wasn’t paid very much. My father suggested I made myself bankrupt to get rid of the debt.”
In 2003, Mr Wright admitted stealing £80 from a bar where he was working and it was a DNA sample taken in connection with that conviction which led to police matching samples taken from the dead women.
He is expected to spend a total of three days telling his side of the story to the jury of nine men and three women.