Cold Case Killer - A Police Blunder To Beggar Belief

The Trial

The Crime Desk

True Crime

4.2 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode Caroline and Jack reveal the catalogue of police blunders which may have left the serial killer Steve Wright free to murder five women in Ipswich and raises questions about whether his latest victim, Vicky Hall, could have been saved too. A judge demanded today that Suffolk Police investigate what went wrong, after it emerged police ignored key evidence from another woman who reported Steve Wright tried to kidnap her the night before he succeeded in abducting and murdering 17-year-old Vicky in 1999. Steve Wright, who is known as The Suffolk Strangler, was then handed a life sentence with a minimum of 40 years for the cold case killing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the trial UK Cold Case Killer. I'm Caroline Cheatham. And I'm Jack Hardy. Welcome to episode three. A police blunder to beggar belief. We'll be back in a second. So, Jack, you and I are back recording today. You're at the old Bailey. Now, we brought two episodes
0:44.5	early this week about the case of Steve Wright. He was a serial killer, already serving a whole
0:50.0	life term in prison for targeting and killing women in Ipswich in 2006. And earlier this week,
0:58.2	26 years later, he pleaded guilty to the kidnap and murder of 17-year-old Vicky Hall and
1:05.7	to the attempt to kidnap of another girl at around the same time the night before. Now, the response
1:14.0	we've had from you this week has been profound. We've had thousands and thousands of you
1:19.1	listening to the episodes. It's really impacted so many people because this was horrific.
1:26.6	But actually, today, Jack, what we've heard today
1:30.6	and the reason for our title, it beggars belief what we've just heard in court today because
1:36.0	we'll come to it, won't we? But just outline for us at the top here why this never should
1:43.8	have happened. What we found out really is, could Vicky Hall have been
1:48.6	saved? And really, should those women in Ipswich have been saved? The answer to the second question,
1:56.1	I think, is right is yes. They could have been saved. And the answer to whether Vicky Hall could have been
2:02.1	saved, we'll never know. But certainly, things went wrong from that very first night when he
2:10.6	attempted to kidnap another woman, a young woman, in 1999, the night before he then went on to kidnap and murder, Vicky Hall.
2:21.2	Yeah, and look, whenever we kind of cover a murder case or you follow any kind of murder case in the press,
2:27.2	there's usually some kind of suggestion that there was a missed opportunity to stop these things,
2:30.9	but I have to say that this particular one is order of magnitudes
2:34.2	bigger than anyone I could remember seeing, because there was a very real chance that Steve
2:40.4	Wright shouldn't have even got as far as kidnapping Victoria Hall, because there was a very
2:45.0	real chance that if police had just followed up on the evidence that had been given to him,
2:49.0	given to the night earlier by Emily Doherty,
	...

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