ADDICTION THAT DROVE VICTIMS TO LIFE ON THE STREET

A Desperate Craving For Heroin Or Crack Drove All Five Victims To Sell
Sex.

Stacey Rolfe is resolved to remember the good times with her friend
Netty, when she lived across the road from her and they would have
waterfights in the garden with her daughter and her friend's little
boy. Or the times when they were at beauty college together, and Netty
would lend Stacey clothes and do her eyebrows and makeup before they
all went clubbing in Ipswich town centre. Not the bare, sorry facts of
an almost unrecognisable friend, reduced to climbing into strangers'
cars in a desperate attempt to buy heroin.

"I just keep thinking why, why it all happened," she says. "She didn't
need to do that. She was so lovely. She didn't need to do that."

Annette Nicholls - Netty to those who loved her - was yesterday
confirmed as the last of the five women whose bodies have been dumped
in the past six weeks in the countryside around Ipswich. But while
police look for the murderer, for the families and friends of the five
women, almost as pressing a question this week has been that terrible
why. Why five young girls, remembered again and again by
schoolfriends, siblings and parents as lively and loving young people,
grew up to become sex workers, some of them homeless, vulnerable to a
monstrous killer.

The crude answer to that question is what Tania Nicol's grieving
parents yesterday called the "secret world" of drugs. All five of the
women were addicted to drugs, mostly heroin, though Anneli Alderton is
reported to have avoided opiates in favour of crack cocaine. Netty
Nicholls, by the end, was so desperate for heroin that even her fellow
sex workers disapproved of the lengths she would go to in order to get
it.

Two days before she was last seen, she stole a phone from a customer
and sold it for ?20 to a dealer. On one occasion she agreed to join
Paula Clennell, another of the murdered women, in "doing the double"
with a client whom Ms Clennell had robbed to buy drugs in an attempt
to placate him. Her friend Suzanne, another sex worker, had fallen out
with her shortly before her death because she offered to sleep with
Suzanne's boyfriend if he would just give her heroin. She had a "sugar
daddy", says one of the women, and sometimes would stay with him. At
other times she would have nowhere to sleep at night.

It was a simple question of survival, says Brian Tobin, manager of
Iceni, an independent drugs treatment centre in Ipswich. Like others
working in drugs services in the town, he wants to respect the women's
privacy after their deaths and prefers not to say if any of the five
had used the centre's services. But while they treat 60 people at any
one time, and between 20 and 30 women each year working in the sex
industry, including escorts and parlour workers, only five or six
street workers would come for treatment in any one year.

"They are tremendously difficult people to connect with, just because
of the desperation of their circumstances," he says. "Men can commit
the physical crimes, burglary for instance, if they are desperate for
money. But with these women, if they have sunk this low, all they have
left is their bodies. People have got to understand the potency of
addiction."

Ipswich has had sex workers for decades, says Mr Tobin, and they have
always used drugs in some form. The difference in the past three to
five years is that dealers from London and other big cities have come
to regard small, rural market towns as their next big opportunity.
Ipswich is the second cheapest place in the country to buy crack, at
?20 for a rock, according to the national drugs charity Drugscope.
Heroin is ?20 a bag. A 10ml dose of methadone, sold on by someone
supposedly withdrawing but apparently still desperate for heroin,
costs ?1. In September the charity identified a rise in the town of
"speedballing" - mixing crack and heroin together before injecting.
Since the effects of crack wear off quickly, users find themselves
injecting more often, and in greater amounts.

Ten or 15 years ago the people he saw with serious drugs addictions
were 40 or 42, Mr Tobin says. Today they have terrible problems by
their 20s. "For some I would say the average life, once you're a heavy
heroin user, is about five years. Death isn't rock bottom for most of
our clients. I have seen the desolation and the lack of hope. There's
no life left in some of these girls."

Since drug-using sex workers started being murdered, Ipswich's drugs
services have begun to fast-track those who want treatment; instead of
having to wait up to three weeks to get a methadone prescription,
those who want one can now get it within a day.

But, says Harry Shapiro, editor of Druglink magazine, helping women
like these out of heroin addiction is much more complex than simply
getting them on a "script". "It's not life-threatening to withdraw
from heroin, but for people who have little or no support, it's
something many of them cannot face trying to go through. The problems
are what happens afterwards."

Sex workers can access sexual health services, drug addicts can get
drug treatment, homeless people can find hostel accommodation. But if
you have all three problems, and especially if you throw mental health
issues into the mix, your problems can quickly appear too complex to
manage. Most women's hostels, for instance, will not accept drug
users. Addicts who are verbally or physically abusive to their doctors
can find themselves barred from the surgeries and thus denied medical
treatment.

"The system breaks down when you have people with these kinds of
problems together," says Mr Shapiro. In Ipswich, a survey two years
ago found that more than half the street sex workers were homeless,
93% were heroin users, 82% used crack. Of 21 women with children, only
three had not lost them to the care system or placed them with
families. More than half were being treated for depression. Some of
the murdered women took part in the survey.

Neither Annette Nicholls's large, close-knit family, her many friends,
nor the women with whom she worked will ever really know how she found
herself in the terrible position she did before her death. Her cousin
Tanya has described the change in Annette as "like flicking a switch".
Sue Hindle, who knew her from when their children were at nursery
together, noticed when she saw her a few months ago that she had lost
a lot of weight. Her uncle, David Nicholls, blames an old boyfriend
who, he says, introduced her to heroin before he was jailed a couple
of years ago.

Adrian Carpenter, another old friend, last saw her a couple of months
ago when she called round at his house. "She had been a really
stunning woman. When she knocked at the door I said, 'Is that the same
woman?'

What did he think had happened? "I didn't want to think about it."