LONDON — Dread mounted that the peaceful east coast of England had given birth to a new "Ripper," as police hunted Tuesday for the killer of five women whose bodies have been discovered over the last two weeks.
In recent days, police said three nude bodies had been found around the city of Ipswich in Suffolk County. On Tuesday afternoon, Det. Chief Supt. Stewart Gull, head of the Suffolk police crime management team, told journalists that two more bodies had been discovered.
Gull said all of the women were believed to have been prostitutes, although the bodies found Tuesday had yet to be identified.
The grisly discoveries revived memories of Peter Sutcliffe, "the Yorkshire Ripper," who killed 13 women, many of them prostitutes, in northern England in the late 1970s. Nearly a century earlier, Jack the Ripper slit the throats of five prostitutes in London's East End; his identity remains a mystery.
On Tuesday, helicopters and divers searched fields, rivers and woods that dot a countryside known more for its pastoral tranquillity than as a backdrop to murder. Police were racing to track down a criminal they would not yet call a serial killer.
"We have to keep an open mind.... It's such a fast-moving inquiry, I would almost describe it as a crime in action," Gull told the BBC.
Police acknowledged that they faced a formidable task.
"To have this number of murders in such a short time is unprecedented," Suffolk Chief Constable Alistair McWhirter told the BBC.
Media and police reports indicate that all five bodies were found near a major road that leads from the nearby port of Felixstowe to central England.
Computer records tracking port traffic and truckers are being examined. Psychologists have worked on a message that asks the killer to surrender. Botanists have been called to examine the grass and weeds around the bodies.
Police were first alerted Nov. 25 by the partner of a missing woman named Gemma Adams, a 25-year-old known to work as a prostitute. A week later, a passerby discovered her nude body in a stream in the nearby countryside.
Tania Nicol, 19, was reported missing by her mother. She had left home in Ipswich on Oct. 30 to work in the town's red-light district. Her naked body was found Friday in a nearby river. Police said they had yet to establish the cause of death of the two women.
