British serial killer Steve Wright, widely known as the “Suffolk Strangler,” has been handed a new prison sentence for the 1999 kidnapping and murder of a teenage girl, more than 25 years after the crime was committed.
Wright, 67, who is already serving a whole-life sentence for the murders of five women in 2006, was sentenced on Friday at London’s Old Bailey after admitting to the killing of 17-year-old Victoria Hall. The conviction closes one of Suffolk’s longest-running unsolved murder cases.
Prosecutors said Wright abducted Hall in September 1999 after she left a nightclub in the coastal town of Felixstowe in eastern England. Her body was discovered five days later in a nearby stream. The case remained unresolved until Wright confessed earlier this year.
In addition to Hall’s murder, Wright also pleaded guilty to the attempted abduction of Emily Doherty, who was 22 at the time. Prosecutors said the attempted kidnapping occurred the night before Hall was killed, marking the first time Wright had admitted to any crimes outside his 2006 killing spree.
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Addressing the court, prosecutor Jocelyn Ledward said Wright had been “on the prowl” across Suffolk during the weekend of the crimes. After Doherty managed to escape, Wright “was undeterred and struck again the following night,” she told the court.
Sentencing Wright, Judge Joel Bennathan described the murder as a brutal and senseless act. “For reasons only you know, and which most people will never begin to comprehend, you snatched her away and crushed that young life,” the judge said.
Wright was given a minimum sentence of 40 years for Hall’s murder, though the judge stressed that the term would not alter the reality that Wright is almost certain to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Wright was convicted in 2008 of murdering five women — Gemma Adams, Tania Nicol, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell, and Annette Nicholls — whose bodies were found around the town of Ipswich over a 10-day period in late 2006.
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The killings caused widespread fear across Suffolk and drew national attention. Investigators said Wright strangled the victims and posed two of their bodies with arms outstretched, a detail that fueled comparisons in the media to the 19th-century serial killer Jack the Ripper.
The sentencing brings long-awaited closure to Hall’s family more than two decades after her death.