Cold Blooded Evil. Neil Root
was a truly wonderful girl, so quiet and nice to everyone. She was so pretty and always wore nice clothes.’
It is true that Tania had an almost classical beauty; the long, angular face and dark features with dark eyes and striking black hair are very distinctive in her photographs. The writer Libby Purves has described Tania as looking like a ‘Renaissance angel’. This seems a fitting description.
Although the link between hard drug use and prostitution can be made here, at the time of her disappearance, unlike Gemma Adams, Tania was still living at home. However, her mother and brother had no idea about her activities as a prostitute, and it seems that Tania kept the two parts of her life very separate. Her mother Kerry told the Sun: ‘She got in with the wrong crowd and that should be a warning to anyone. I knew nothing of her secret life until the police told me. I’m finding it hard to come to terms with her getting into cars with strangers. To me and Aaron she was a caring member of our family. Seeing her being labelled a prostitute is horrible and makes her seem like she’s not a person.’
The media loves labels, and most coverage would emphasise the prostitution angle. But to get a true sense of Tania, the online condolence book set up on the website of the Ipswich Evening Star is helpful. Family, friends and acquaintances left messages of affection and loss:
‘I am Tania’s grandmother. Me and my other children are very upset by the news of her death. She was a very beautiful woman and had everything to live for.’
‘Tania was my beautiful niece. She was loved by all our family. I just can’t understand why some evil person would want to hurt her and her friend. I hope the police catch whoever did this soon.’
‘I knew Tania when we were younger, and we had some good times. I remember making up dances with her… She was a beautiful young girl, very smiley, and wouldn’t hurt anyone.’
‘Tania used to braid my hair when I was pregnant. She was so talented. A group of us went on holiday to the New Forest and had such a laugh. She was such an outgoing, loving girl.’
‘I would just like to say how sad it is to hear about Tania. She often walked past my house and she went through school with my daughter of the same age. I did not know her personally but she will be missed. My thoughts are with her family.’
For Tania’s father, Jim Duell, comfort could only come from a higher source. The pure evil that had befallen his daughter could only be rationalised by his Christian beliefs. The religious vision he had had made him sure that God had been with Tania at the end. Mr Duell told BBC Suffolk: ‘In that moment of fear and terror that Tania must have been going through, He intervened.’
Mr Duell turned to the Bible to help console himself and Tania’s friends in church as they prayed for Tania after her body was discovered. He said: ‘I read in John 14 that when Jesus was explaining to his disciples that something was going to happen to Jesus, that he was about to leave them, they couldn’t comprehend that. What he said was, “When I go you will have a helper, the counsellor will come to you. I have to do this in order for you to have this helper – which is the Holy Spirit”.’
Jim Duell related this to Tania’s friends to offer them comfort in their grief and shock. He explained: ‘I wanted to get the message across to all her friends at church that the holy spirit does all the workings on this earth and that Tania was rescued from her own self, and that she’s safe and well.’
In the weeks and months after his daughter’s murder, Mr Duell was able to find solace and emotional support in his faith. He continued: ‘When I became a born-again Christian I was given a peace. I experienced a peace that you can’t get at Tesco, you can’t get it at the Post Office, you can’t get it at the bank. You can’t fill in an application form for it. It’s a peace given by God – as Jesus says “I give to you a peace that the world cannot give”.’
Murder is one of the hardest events that loved ones and friends could ever have to deal with. Whether interpreted as an act of compassionate rescue by God or an act of cold-blooded evil by a killer perhaps does not really matter. The fact is that the murder occurred and the powerful emotions of loss, anger and bitterness have to be dealt with. Getting through it is surely all that is important in the end.
It was becoming clear by this stage that there was a serial element to the murders. Both Gemma Adams and Tania Nicol had been found naked, in the same waterway and geographically close together and neither had any visible external injuries. This is one of the stranger aspects of the killings – they were not bloody or gruesome, but clinical and callous. There was a dark psychopathic edge to them: a total lack of conventional conscience or empathy for other human beings; a cold-blooded detachment. The way in which the victims were dumped, naked to the elements, but lying apparently peacefully, almost as if sleeping, is perhaps just as unsettling as an emotional, frenzied attack.
The fact that Gemma and Tania worked as street prostitutes in the same red light area of Ipswich, knew each other, and perhaps sometimes had the same clients is also revealing. For a murderer with a sexual motive, prostitutes are naturally easy targets. With their professional activities technically illegal in Britain, it is often necessary for street prostitutes to carry out their transactions in secluded, lonely places. Inevitably this compromises them and if a client’s motives are violent or murderous there is little chance of escape or rescue.
Every serial killer has a modus operandi, a way of working, and this particular killer’s method appeared to be highly efficient. When profiling, some experts divide killers into two broad groups based on the killer’s methods and the meticulous analysis of any unusual quirks they may display. Through the way they operate, a killer can reveal a great deal about their personality, needs and motives.
The two general groups into which a killer can be placed first are ‘organised’ or ‘disorganised’. The organised killer will probably have reasonably logical thought processes and show a degree of planning, premeditation or forethought. The disorganised killer is more irregular in his thought processes, is more impulsive and may display more obvious signs of mental illness. He is usually more random in his targets, or perhaps kills in a frenzy, with emotion much more evident in his profile. Sometimes, a killer can fit both of these profiles. The Whitechapel murderer of 1888, ‘Jack the Ripper’, is one such example. Although his murders (of at least five London prostitutes) were carried out in a frenzied way, with much mutilation, there was a method to his particular madness. He removed internal organs from several victims, and did it so expertly that he was thought to have medical knowledge.
The way in which Jack the Ripper chose his targets and knew his murderous patch was also highly organised. He managed to evade capture every time, despite there being a huge police presence on the streets as the terror grew. A disorganised killer would probably have been caught. But the last murder committed by Jack the Ripper, that of Mary Kelly in Miller’s Court, appeared to be very disorganised. The level of frenzy was almost unbelievable and contemporary police photographs of the crime scene reveal a scene of unimaginable horror. This was the only murder he committed indoors, so he had more time to carry out his terrible mutilations, but the escalation of violence suggests that his mind may have given way. This could explain why this was the last murder, if afterwards the killer had either been committed to a mental asylum or had committed suicide.
The modus operandi of the Ipswich killer was of course very different. All of the traits and methods this killer displayed pointed to an organised offender, especially in the disposal of the bodies. Whether he knew the women as a client or stalked and selected them over a period of time was not known. However, a key issue was the long length of time that elapsed between the disappearances of Gemma and Tania and the discovery of their bodies, just over two weeks and five weeks respectively, and this had to be explained. Where had they been in the interim?
It was not known exactly how long the bodies had been in Belstead Brook, but neither of the bodies showed an advanced state of decomposition. Had they been kept alive in captivity before being killed, or murdered immediately and then stored (perhaps in a freezer to preserve the bodies) and dumped later? This could not be ascertained at this stage, but another serial murder case from the past can perhaps offer some