Cold Blooded Evil. Neil Root
more than a ditch. What kind of evil could be behind this?
Unfortunately, it was only the beginning. Surrounded by sleepy villages and traditional agricultural land, Ipswich is the county town of Suffolk, with a population of 140,000 people in 2006. Looking like many a provincial British town of the twenty-first century, with the predictable chain stores and shops, gradually losing individual identity as the years pass, it is now an expanding commercial centre. Yet there are still many historical points of interest, even if it lacks the excitement and glamour of a major city or the magnetism of a cathedral city.
Founded at the tip of the Orwell estuary, the site on which Ipswich stands has been inhabited since the Stone Age. Like many other places, the river that runs through it was always an important trade route. The River Orwell is also well known for giving a young aspiring writer named Eric Blair his new name in the early twentieth century. He would of course become the internationally respected author George Orwell.
During the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries the town was known as Gippeswic. It was actually the first and most famous Anglo-Saxon port and one of the most important trading communities in the country.
There are many surviving traces of the medieval period in the town, from the layout of the streets to a number of historic churches from that time. The major industry of the town in this period was the very lucrative trade in Suffolk cloth, but this market went into sharp decline as England moved into the Georgian period, and this lack of prosperity helps to explain the fact that there is little Georgian architecture in Ipswich.
In the early twentieth century, the largest wet dock in the Europe of the time was built there, and along with rail transport links for trade and the setting up of new industries during the Industrial Revolution, Ipswich was pulled into the modern world. This return to economic prosperity in turn produced much building in the Victorian period and many fine examples can still be seen in the town today.
The two World Wars of the twentieth century hit the town hard however. The excellent rail network, engineering works and the port were prime targets for German bombs. In the First World War several Zeppelin raids led to the destruction of many buildings, and in the Second World War the Luftwaffe carried out over fifty bombing raids over the town, which sadly resulted in dozens of deaths.
Football has long played a major part in town life, with Ipswich Town FC its focus, operating from the Portman Road stadium. The club can boast that it had the 1966 England World Cup winning manager Sir Alf Ramsey at the helm from 1955 until 1963. Ramsey took Ipswich Town to the top of the game, winning the First Division title in 1962. The pride and affection in which he is held are best symbolised by the elegant statue of him outside the ground. Ramsey continued to live in Ipswich until his death in April 1999.
All of these layers of history help to explain the sense of community to be found in Ipswich. The Suffolk character is simple and direct in the best possible sense. Honest, loyal and stubborn, the native Suffolk people embody the characteristics of an ancient community which has seen much change, but the direct approach to life has been passed down from generation to generation. The people of Ipswich tend to take people at face value until given a reason not to, but there is an underlying core of shrewdness that should not be underestimated.
Through the addition to this native character of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century immigration, a collective identity and a unique spirit have been forged. There is a definite provincial air in Ipswich, a feeling of self-reliance built through a tumultuous history. More intimate than a larger town or city, people communicate more and know more about each other. There is a feeling that there would be a ‘pulling together’ of the community in the face of collective adversity. This would be proven to be the case over those horrible weeks in December 2006, when at various moments time seemed to slow down, stand still and then race along.
For any loving parent, the death of a child is too frightening to imagine and even more painful in reality. When that child has predeceased a parent through a violent act, the hollow sense of loss is further complicated by powerful feelings of anger, frustration, bitterness and sometimes guilt. The cold reality of day is exposing and cruel. The parents of Gemma Adams now experienced this onslaught of emotions.
Like many parents they described their daughter as ‘bright and bubbly’ in media interviews. And photographs of Gemma certainly support this description. Blonde, blue-eyed and with a peachy complexion, her sweet smile makes her seem younger than her twenty-five years. She certainly does not look like the popular preconception of a prostitute, but then Gemma’s background was very different from that of the ‘average’ prostitute.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph on 12 December 2006, ten days after Gemma’s body was pulled from Burstall Brook, her father Brian Adams expanded on his feelings for his daughter: ‘We never knew she was working as a prostitute until she went missing. It’s just every parent’s worst nightmare. If we’d known, we would have done everything in our power to stop her, just like we tried to get her off drugs. But I don’t want people to think of her only as a prostitute. The Gemma we want to remember was a loving, beautiful and wonderful girl.’
These are the moving words of a loving, heartbroken father, but of course the word that stands out is ‘drugs’. And an examination of Gemma’s upbringing makes her descent into addiction and then prostitution even more tragic. There were no underlying factors that could have predicted the route of her life. It must be remembered too that if she had had the chance to live, she may well have taken a better path in the future.
The Adams’ family home is a large detached house in the wealthy village of Kesgrave, on the eastern fringes of Ipswich. Brian and Gail Adams have two other children apart from Gemma and they have all been brought up in a comfortable and loving environment. Gemma was always an animal-lover, very close to the family’s pet dog Holly, and a keen horse rider. Like many young girls, Gemma was also a Brownie and thrived on group activities. As well as this she took piano lessons. It would be almost impossible to paint a rosier family portrait. There were never any signs in her childhood of what the future held for Gemma and she seemed destined for a bright future.
At the age of sixteen, Gemma left Kesgrave High School, where she had been a popular student, and entered Suffolk College in Ipswich, a major educational and vocational training institution. Gemma completed a GNVQ course in Health and Social Care there.
But small cracks were beginning to appear in her life and her parents are sure that it was at about this time that she fell in with ‘the wrong crowd’. In the Sun newspaper on 13 December, her father Brian said: ‘She had everything going for her, yet at some point she was offered drugs, and it went from there.’
It seems that Gemma graduated from cannabis to heroin, and became quickly addicted. While the tabloid media tends to emphasise the link between these two drugs and liberal opinion likes to dissociate the two, in Gemma’s case there was a definite escalation.
After leaving college, Gemma got a job at a local insurance company. But it was at this time in her early twenties that her heroin and crack cocaine addiction was beginning to take a firm hold. Her dependency soon became public knowledge at the insurance company as her attendance record rapidly worsened and when she was in the office she was sometimes not in a suitable state to fulfil her duties. She was eventually fired from the company in 2004.
This probably cut her final tie to the conventional life that she had aspired to as a girl and had been brought up to aim for. An addict needs their next fix and desperation usually leads to two well-trodden routes: burglary and prostitution. It seems that Gemma now took the latter option. By now Gemma was living away from her parents in rented accommodation in Ipswich with her boyfriend.
Her parents made numerous attempts to get her off drugs, but they could not get through to her. Eventually they lost all contact with her. Their frustrated and loving need to help her was now permanently thwarted.
In the same interview, Brian Adams, fifty-three, said: ‘Once your child is involved in hard drugs, your heart is already broken. It’s just like we’ve been in a nightmare and even closing your eyes does not give you relief. You close your eyes and it’s still there. Normally,