Addiction leads women to mean streets

There is only one reason why women take to the derelict streets just yards from Bradford's city centre to sell sex - to buy the drugs on which most have been dependent since they were teenagers.

The urgent need for heroin - either smoked or injected - and crack, normally topped up with a prescription of methadone and further fuelled with strong cheap alcohol, is what drives them out to take risks by climbing into a stranger's car.

And at least three paid the ultimate price. Susan Blamires, 36, Shelley Armitage, 31, and Susan Rushworth, a 43-year-old grandmother were murdered in the past year.

Stephen Griffiths, 40, a PhD student in criminology - whose research included Jack the Ripper - has been charged with the murders. Griffiths had previously been treated for psychiatric problems at the high-security Rampton hospital.

The case has, unsurprisingly, been compared to that of the Yorkshire Ripper who terrorised these streets more than 30 years ago. It has also highlighted a world that is often overlooked until those that inhabit it meet with tragedy such as the 2006 Ipswich murders of five prostitutes by Steve Wright.

Stick thin, with her black hair scraped back off her face, disintegrating teeth and stained lips, Mary (not her real name) looks at least two decades older than her 26 years, due to a seven-year hard drug problem. She said she was too scared to sell sex to strangers herself, but she knows what it feels like to be desperate.

"They normally come here when they start feeling ill, when they are withdrawing. It's like a really bad flu, you feel cold and have hot flushes. Sweating like. Some have been on it for years. Shelley [Armitage] was doing it since she was 15. They do it for the money. It is as simple as that. They might want to keep a bit of extra for the day after but it is all about drugs, everyone is on something and that is why they are here. She didn't deserve to die. She was a nice person," she said in a lilting mix of Irish and Yorkshire.

It is a refrain that is all too common among the people that, until the arrival of police on Monday night, lived and worked in the midst of the city's notorious sex industry.

In the mid 1990s, Bradford's prostitution problem was physically moved on by Asian elders from its traditional home on Lumb Lane. At busy times on a Friday and Saturday night up to 20 women line the streets off Thornton Road where Griffiths lived in a converted mill.

Griffiths, who was studying serial killers as part of criminology course at the University of Bradford, was arrested after police were called to the block of flats where he lived.

The building's caretaker had found CCTV images of a woman, believed to be Blamires, being attacked and knocked unconscious by a man before being finished off with a crossbow. Her dismembered remains were later found in the north of the city in the River Aire. She was friends and a close neighbour of Armitage, who had not been seen since last month.

Griffiths was also charged last night with killing Rushworth who disappeared nearly a year ago.

Peter Mann, from the Crown Prosecution Service said he had brought charges after carefully considering all of the evidence in the case.

Neighbours described yesterday how Griffiths spoke of his solitary existence.

They said he was rarely seen in the company of others instead preferring to communicate through social networking sites on the internet where he styled himself "Ven Pariah" and posted bare-chested pictures of himself.

The red-light area around his flat consists of boarded-up houses and warehouses. It is as run down as it gets in a city which has some of the worst poverty and drugs problems in Britain.

But here the women can earn $400 a night from having sex with up to 10 men that travel not just from Bradford but from all over the north of England.

Since the migration of the sex trade there are no pimps and the women work for themselves - keeping all their earnings before they hand it over to their predominantly male drug dealers.

Sex workers said that the latest murders were tragedies waiting to happen claiming that a series of laws passed by the previous government had made the business more dangerous than it used to be.

Cari Mitchell, from the English Collective of Prostitutes, said: "During Labour there was a government-led moral crusade against prostitution which viewed all sex work as violence against women. Raids are on the increase and women are being forced further underground and into danger because of them," she said.

Top of her complaints list is a law which increased police powers to arrest and detain sex workers who were deemed to be loitering or soliciting, and coerce them into "rehabilitation" programmes under the threat of imprisonment.

When the bill was making its way through Parliament, Chris Huhne, then the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman and now a member of the coalition cabinet, said it would "drive sex workers underground, into less safety and greater isolation".

The English Collective of Prostitutes said increased raids had led to the closure of brothels, forcing women on to the streets to sell sex, often alone and without support.

There are complaints that "proceeds of crime" legislation, which enables police forces to seize and use portions of money gained from a criminal activity, has given officers financial incentive to raid brothels, which are classified as any place where two or more women are selling sex.

Laura Lee, an escort who works out of her flat in Glasgow, said prostitutes were being discriminated against by the legal system.

"The state has blood on its hands. If three female accountants were killed there would be an absolute uproar, the Government would do everything it could to make their work safer. But there will be nothing done about three prostitutes."

Back in Bradford those that knew the dead women yesterday said the police seemed to prefer to contain the problem rather than crack down on it.

They said they were shocked by the deaths of these women who were part of their community no matter how troubled they were.

Emile (no surname), 27, who worked in a local soup kitchen said Armitage was "bubbly and lovely, a really nice person".

"She would always say hi, always doing something, always got friends," he said.

- INDEPENDENT