On 1 November 2006, Kerry Nicol was worried. She hadn’t heard from her 19-year-old daughter Tania since she’d left their house just 2 nights earlier. The family lived on the outskirts of Ipswich, the biggest town in the county of Suffolk, in the East Anglia region of southeast England. The fact Tania hadn’t been in contact gave Kerry further cause to be concerned. She’d known for some time that Tania was an injecting drug user, and at one stage had even found syringes in her bedroom. Tania had sought help for her drug dependency, but the pull of addiction was strong. Tania soon found that sex work paid the money she needed to fund her habit, and she joined the group of around 30 to 40 street sex workers who worked the red-light district of Ipswich.

Sometimes Tania stayed out with friends and didn’t come home until the next day. Which was why Kerry was so troubled when Tania didn’t return home or call like she usually did. Kerry reported her missing daughter to the police. There were conflicting reports that Tania was last seen around 12.30am on 31 October in Burlington Road, and also outside a petrol station. Either way, she’d last been spotted in the red-light district, but hadn’t been seen again. Sadly, in the coming months, Kerry wouldn’t be the only mother in the area to never see her daughter again. A man named Steve Wright saw to that.

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CW: drug use, sexual assault, family violence

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