Diane Cole speaks to our reporter about finding out your ex is a serial killer and how she knew he was about to be arrested.
I have no idea how you deal with finding out your twisted-ex is a serial killer but Diane Cole tells me she took it ‘quite calmly’.
I’m chatting with the former wife of the ‘Suffolk Strangler’ over coffee in her bungalow kitchen, the news quietly playing in the background.
She is 71 and in a wheelchair now but her memory is still remarkable. Probably because it’s hard to forget living with a “monster” who went on to kill at least six women.
She told me that back in 2006, it was the TV news that delivered the shocking news that Steve Wright, the man she’d met on board the QE2, travelled the world with and then married, was one of Britain’s worst killers.
Di said she’d had ‘premonitions’ he was going to be arrested for the murders of five sex workers in Ipswich. The nation had been gripped by the killings during a 40-day reign of terror in the red light district of Ipswich.
“I had a premonition the day before he was caught. It was big news that five women had been killed and it was all over the telly. But then they wrongly arrested Tom Stevens.
“It came on the telly and I said to my friend Mary; ‘Oh no, I think they’ve got the wrong man’. I put my hands over my face and said; ‘ignore me Mary my husband lives in London last I heard’. I hadn’t got divorced by then, I don’t think so, but he was well out of my life. I was in hiding from him.”
Tom Stevens was a 37 year old supermarket worker and special constable who was wrongly arrested in a dawn raid on Monday, December 18th 2006
Wright, 48 at the time, was arrested the following day, on Tuesday, December 19th 2006. Police raided his home on London Road in Ipswich at approximately 5:00 am.
READ MORE: Serial killer’s ex-wife begs him to ‘tell the truth’ over missing estate agentREAD MORE: Real killers who inspired Silence of the Lambs monsters including little-known Mexican ‘doctor’
“I knew he was a wrong-un so when it came up on the telly the next day that they’d arrested Steve I took it quite calmly. Because it was like I expected it. It was just intuition. I think I was relieved,” she tells me.
“He just used to ignore me when I was talking about these girls who had been killed and he’d disappear out of sight, same as he did about Suzy.” Di is talking about Suzy Lamplugh’s disappearance in 1986, after they had all worked together on the luxury liner.
She tells me how Wright was “always disappearing” when they ran a pub together in Norwich. But she thought it had been to have a fling with their barmaid. But instead she fears he was out prowling the streets.
“He even disappeared four days before our wedding when I was in Halstead.” Asked how she felt about the news he was in custody, she said: I think I was more annoyed. Because of people’s lives he was messing with.”
Wearing her long grey hair in plaits, her home is full of photographs of her glamorous years, when she worked on luxury liners. She’d caught Wright’s eye as she worked as a shop dresser on the QE2.
Even in those early days of dating, she said there was a “sense of evil” about him. “I was always attracted to the dodgy fellas,” she sighs.
Di and Wright left the ship in 1986 months apart and got married in 1987, running a pub together in the red light district of Norwich. Di suffered various beatings at his hands.
Talking about the end of their marriage, she said: “He’d be in the back bar with all the younger ones and I was in the front bar. He was always brushing his hair and combing it, always looking in the mirror.
“I knew he was having an affair with the barmaid. You could just tell the closeness between the two of them was weird. But I didn’t dare ask because he would flare up.
“Then he crashed the car and ended up in hospital. When I went to him he pushed me away and said ‘nothing changes.’
“I said I wanted out of the pub so he said ‘we don’t have to get divorce you know!’ and he said ‘yes we do.’”
She said he left her with nothing and she returned to the north east to be near her family: “I went into hiding. Nobody knew my name then because I changed it. Because he was Wright and it was all wrong. I wanted nothing to do with him. He made my skin crawl in the end because of the violence. He was a bully, a control freak.”
In 2008, after he was convicted and given a full life tariff, Di was finally able to stop hiding in the shadows and came to the Mirror to tell her story.
Even all those years ago she was warning the nation, there could be even more victims. She told my colleague Jeremy Armstrong, how she’d worked with Suzy Lamplugh on the QE2 and feared he was behind her disappearance too.
Di says she’s happy to speak to the police about her fears and her life with Wright. I hope they jump at the chance. Because his life should have been ripped apart years ago.
Every worker who knew Wright and missing Suzy when they worked together on the QE2 should have been tracked down and spoken to. Every pub he ever ran should have been checked out.
No stone should be left unturned for the sake of families who are still waiting for answers.
For the sake of remarkable people like Kurtis Pratt, who I spoke to recently about his missing mum – who may or may not be another victim of serial killer Wright.
He touchingly thanked me for contacting him, as I was the first person who had ever asked him about his mum Kellie. She vanished when he was a toddler and her body has never been found.
He told how he grew up bouncing around foster homes after his mum vanished, feeling like he didn’t have a voice.
I was stunned to learn that he is now 30 years old but has never once spoken to a police officer about his mum’s disappearance. How can that be possible? The police have to give these families a voice.
