Cold Blooded Evil. Neil Root
is ongoing.’
A moving tribute to Gemma was left on a local Ipswich newspaper’s website during those terrible days. The poster was Gemma’s sixteen-year-old brother Jack: ‘Gem, you will never be forgotten. I know you’re in a better place now, and I’ll always love you. There is now a massive hole in our family that will never be filled.’
Touching words from a close-knit family now estranged from their beautiful sister and daughter forever. Her father Brian summed it all up in the Sun on 13 December: ‘We are going through Hell. We are just praying that the madman who did this is caught soon.’
On the night of Tuesday, 14 November, Gemma and her boyfriend had left their home in Blenheim Road on the edge of Ipswich’s red light district. They walked into one of the areas of the district where Gemma did business. She was soon alone on the streets. After the discovery of her body on 2 December, a witness came forward with the last known sighting of Gemma. This was at 1.15am on Wednesday 15 November outside a BMW car dealership on West End Road, close to the junction with Handford Road. The latter is a major road close to the Portman Road football stadium.
Gemma was reported missing at 2.55am, an hour and forty minutes after the last sighting. Her boyfriend Jon Simpson called the police after she had failed to respond to two text messages he had sent to her mobile phone. It would be seventeen days before her body was found 7 miles (11.3km) away.
The streets where Gemma spent her last free moments are tough ones. They are almost a universe away from the affluent village of Kesgrave where she was brought up. This network of streets near to the football ground would come under increasingly intense scrutiny over the following weeks. The spotlight would be firmly on this home of Ipswich subculture.
The red light district of Ipswich is situated to the west of the town centre itself, around the Portman Road football ground. The street that leads into the area from the main shopping centre has a seedy, neglected atmosphere. There are takeaway restaurants, tattoo and piercing parlours and small grocery shops. But the actual red light activities take place slightly further to the west, in what is primarily a residential area.
The houses here are in a variety of architectural styles, ranging greatly in size, age and price. A small network of streets and roads that are connected to and run between London Road, Handford Road and West End Road make up the red light area. London Road and Handford Road are also part of the A1214, which leads out of Ipswich and has good links to the A14 and A12. In this sense it is a crossroads area in and out of the town.
In the nineteenth century, when Ipswich was a busy port, there were almost forty brothels in the area, but there is nothing like that now. The overwhelming activity now is that of street prostitution and this is, as always, linked with drug dealing. A local resident of the Ipswich red light district says: ‘I live in the red light area of Ipswich and regularly overhear early morning exchanges between local prostitutes, their dealers and the odd client.’
Of course, most of the kerb-crawling takes place in the twilight and dark and on most nights the classic image of a prostitute leaning into a car window can readily be seen. There are between thirty and forty prostitutes who regularly work in this area, despite police operations having cleared some streets.
Societies throughout history have never found a long-term solution for what is often called ‘the oldest profession’. The dangers faced by these vulnerable women (and sometimes men) are massive. There are the obvious dangers of physical attack and sexually transmitted diseases, but also the hidden risks of psychological damage. The trigger for entry into ‘the game’ is usually desperation for money. But there are other factors that keep prostitutes working: a single parent needing to support children, fear of violence from a pimp or trafficking gang, and drugs. It is the last of these that saturates this story.
Drug addiction, specifically of the Class A kind, is a terrible sickness. The habit must be fed, the next fix paid for by any means necessary. Sometimes a habit can be exorbitantly expensive, and the relatively high and immediate payment that prostitution offers is often the only way an addict feels they can survive. Drug dealers are only too aware of this and so where there are prostitutes there are usually drug dealers, and vice versa. This is the case in the red light district of Ipswich.
If drugs are the root cause of much prostitution, then that is the problem that our society has to tackle. Especially in a rich country such as Britain – collectively as a nation we have let these human beings down. Vulnerable and fragile people cannot survive intact in a harsh, predatory environment; a snowball does not stand a chance in an oven.
According to Home Office figures, sixty prostitutes are known to have been murdered in Britain in the decade between 1996 and 2006 – an average of six a year, or one every two months. In 2006 alone, there were 766 known murders in Britain and 2.4 million violent attacks. The UK achieved an impressive murder conviction rate in 2006 of over 75 per cent. But the UK murder conviction rate where the victims were prostitutes was only 26 per cent for the same year.
On the very day that Gemma Adams took her last walk to work in Ipswich’s red light district, Tuesday 14 November 2006, there was a news item on page fifteen of the Ipswich Evening Star, the headline reading ‘Campaign on Prostitution a Failure – Claim’. Gemma would be reported missing within hours of this edition of the newspaper going on sale.
As recorded on the Ipswich Labour Party’s website, a survey had been carried out in August 2006 by Labour Party councillors and Chris Mole, MP. The results showed that ‘90% of people living in and around Ipswich’s red light district said their lives were affected by street prostitution’. Prompted by this finding the Labour Group called on Ipswich Borough Council, Suffolk County Council, the primary care trust and Suffolk Police to crack down on street prostitution.
Three months later, the leader of the Labour Group, Councillor David Ellesmere, reported that ‘the response had been disappointing’.
Councillor Ellesmere said: ‘Leading politicians at the borough and county councils do not appear to have taken much interest in the issue. There has been little or no action on the majority of our proposed programme. No mobile CCTV cameras have been deployed, there’s been no commitment to a programme of alley-gating, no improvement on reporting procedures for prostitution and kerb-crawling, no increase in cleaning resources or improvement in reporting procedures for needles and condoms, no increase in the use of ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) for offenders and no extra help to get women out of prostitution or increased drug treatment.’
Councillor Ellesmere did however reserve some praise for Suffolk Police, saying that visible patrols had increased and some plain-clothes work had started. This was the state of affairs when Gemma Adams disappeared.
In the Guardian newspaper of 22 March 2007, Liz Harsant, the leader of Ipswich Borough Council, was reported as saying: ‘The red light district is actually a nice residential area and many of the residents have had enough of the girls, the needles, the foul language and fights.’ She went on to say that Ipswich Borough Council was now taking ‘a zero tolerance approach’ to street prostitution. By July 2007 more CCTV and better lighting had been installed in the red light district.
But by then it was eight months too late.
The discovery of the body of Gemma Adams made the front page of the Ipswich Evening Star, under the headline ‘Somebody’s Daughter’. A shockwave went around the local community, especially in Hintlesham where she was found.
But at this stage it seemed like an isolated event. A woman had been murdered, a prostitute. There probably would have been greater fear if the woman had not been a prostitute. Some people see working girls as putting themselves in the path of danger on a daily basis. The same had been seen in the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, more than twenty-five years earlier. Sutcliffe had brutally murdered thirteen women and attacked seven others, most of them prostitutes. There had been real terror on city streets in Yorkshire at the time. But this fear had escalated as soon as he killed his first non-prostitute victim.
However, the people of Ipswich were taken aback by the sheer callous inhumanity