Police refuse to label murderer as serial killer

POLICE hunting the murderer of the Ipswich prostitutes have repeatedly avoided the use of the term “serial killer”.

Detective Chief Superintendent Stewart Gull, who is leading the Suffolk Police investigation, said yesterday that there were significant differences from murderers such as Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe.

Although coined in the US in the 1970s, the term “serial killer” is regularly applied to historical figures such as Jack the Ripper.

The expression is commonly understood to refer to someone who commits a series of murders, as distinct from other mass killers who wipe out several people in one “spree” or mass attack.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a serial killer as a person who commits a sequence of murders with no apparent motive, but a second OED definition adds that serial offenders typically follow a “characteristic, predictable behaviour pattern”.

There are clear similarities between the Suffolk murders — five victims, all prostitutes from the Ipswich red light zone, all found naked and dumped in rural locations within a restricted geographical area.

But police have raised the possibility that there may have been more than one killer and DCS Gull said there were “great differences” between the Ipswich killings and the crimes of murderers such as the Yorkshire Ripper.

There are also differences between the individual circumstances, such as the fact that two bodies were found in water.

DCS Gull said that unlike victims of other serial killers, the five young women were not mutilated. He also rebuffed reports that the women had their body hair shaved off.