Alun Kyte

In December 1993, Kyte picked up 20-year-old sex worker Samo Paull from Birmingham's Balsall Heath red light district.[4] She was a single parent.[7] She was reported missing on 4 December and was missing for more than three weeks before her partially-clothed body was noticed by a horse rider on 31 December.[8] It was lying in a water-filled ditch near a lay-by outside of Swinford, Leicestershire.[7][8] This was 38 miles from where she was last seen in Birmingham.[7] The site was near to junction 20 of the M1 motorway.[9] Because of the remoteness of the location, there was no CCTV evidence, nor any people living nearby who could provide information.[8] All of Paull's possessions had been stolen.[8] Detectives originally focused their investigation on Paull's boyfriend.[8]

A key witness was a woman who had seen a man in a brown-coloured Ford Sierra car, driving through Swinford in early December with a woman in the back seat who appeared to be dead.[8] The witness had previously worked as a pathologist, and had experience in examining dead bodies.[8] The woman was sitting "bolt upright" and had strange marks on her face.[2] The car was covered in mud and the driver appeared to not want to be seen, pulling a hat over his face.[2] When Paull was found dead on 31 December, the witness insisted to police that the dead woman she had seen being driven around was Paull.[8]

On 2 March 1994, Central Television broadcast a reconstruction of Paull's murder. Kyte saw the broadcast, and it fuelled his desire to attack another victim.[2] Shortly after the broadcast, he abducted 30-year-old Tracey Turner from Hilton Park Services on the M6 Motorway.[8][2] Turner regularly solicited customers from motorway service stations across the country.[4][7] Turner had a disability: she was virtually deaf.[4] She was found dead the next day at Bitteswell, near Lutterworth, 52 miles from where she was last seen.[7][8] Similarly to Paull, she had been dumped near the M1 motorway, this time near to junction 19.[9] She had been raped, stripped of her clothing and strangled.[7] She was dumped by the side of the road and was found about six miles from where Paull had been found dead.[8][3] Police concluded that she had been transported to the location by car and dumped at the side of the road by the killer.[8] Initially, the police made no connection between this new discovery and the murder of Samo Paull three months earlier.[7] The first suspect to be questioned was a man who was believed to have been seen speaking to Turner at Hilton Park services.[8] His car's registration was checked; he was traced to Glasgow, but, after speaking with him, investigators found no evidence to link him to the murder, and he was released.[8]

Two days after the murder, Kyte was seen at the service station posing as a newspaper reporter.[4] He told staff he was conducting an investigation into prostitution.[4]

Initial inquiries into the murders of Paull and Turner yielded few clues, and Kyte was not apprehended during this period.[4]

It is known that Kyte also attacked a second woman in 1994.[5] That March, he again picked up a sex worker from the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham and drove to a dark area, before pulling out a Stanley knife and holding it to her neck.[2] He ordered her to give him her belongings and remove her clothes, but, when she begged for her life and told him that she was three months pregnant, Kyte told her to get out, throwing her clothes after her.[2] The victim reported the attack to the police; Kyte was not apprehended for this offence.[5]

On 22 April 1994, it was reported in the Staffordshire Sentinel that a man had been charged with kidnapping Kyte from his Stafford home and robbing him of £55.[10] At this stage, it was still not known that Kyte had murdered and attacked several victims.

In January 1995 Kyte, still not known to have committed the murders and attacks on women, pleaded guilty at a magistrates' court to two counts of theft, having stolen a vehicle he said he was working on for a client, and also stealing an £800 welding equipment set, after lying and claiming he had already given the equipment back to its rightful owners.[11] At this time, Kyte, recorded as being of Plant Crescent, Stafford, was also charged with a number of other petty offences.[11]

In December 1997, Kyte committed a violent attack and rape of a woman at knife-point in Weston-super-Mare.[5][8] The victim had been staying in the same hostel as Kyte, and was attacked by him there at night.[8] She managed to escape and report the incident to the police.[8] Police were dispatched to the hostel, where they arrested Kyte.[8] Kyte was ultimately found guilty of the attack at trial and sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment.[2]

At the time, police in Britain were often ineffective at solving the murders of prostitutes.[8] The victims received markedly less sympathy from detectives, their murders were rarely featured prominently in the media, and sex workers were often blamed for making themselves vulnerable.[8] In the six months after Paull's death, four other sex workers, including Tracey Turner, were murdered across Britain, and Leicestershire Police detectives asked for a cross-force investigation. Many of Kyte's crimes were committed across force boundaries, and there was often difficulties in running investigations into such crimes and in sharing resources between forces.[12] The increasing number of unexplained prostitute deaths in the 90s eventually led to the creation in 1996 of Operation Enigma, which was intended to review the unsolved murders of up to 207 women dating back to 1986 which were committed against sex workers or women who "could have been mistaken for sex workers".[8][4][9] The operation was run by the National Crime Faculty in Hampshire, and made use of tracking and data analysis techniques from Canada as well as new forensic techniques which detectives hoped would upgrade crime scene samples.[2] Enigma was one of the first steps towards a database for violent crime analysis, and many of its features influence present-day police investigations.[13]

Detectives concluded that many murders of sex workers in the 1990s appeared to have been committed by the same person and investigated the theory that a serial killer or serial killers could be at large.[14] 14 murders were in particular said to have similarities and Enigma concluded that up to four serial killers could be at large.[9] Many of the unsolved murders Enigma investigated were clustered in the Midlands and in Merseyside.[8] Information was shared between police forces around Britain.[8] Detectives concluded that the similar murders of Paull and Turner were likely linked.[8]

When Kyte was arrested in December 1997 for the attack on the woman in Weston-super-Mare, his DNA was taken as part of standard procedure when arresting individuals suspected of a crime.[8] This DNA profile was uploaded onto the national DNA database in March 1998, which revealed a match to a sample taken from the scene of Tracey Turner's murder in 1994.[8][2] Both Turner's and Paull's murder investigations were then re-opened by Enigma investigators.[8] Kyte was interviewed by these detectives, who decided not to disclose that they had found a DNA link in order to see what his defence would be.[8] He subsequently denied ever using prostitutes.[8] He denied ever having pretended to be a newspaper reporter at Hilton Park Services, but CCTV had captured him doing it.[15] He then revealed that he owned a brown Ford Sierra car, the same type as had been seen by the witness transporting a dead body near to where Samo Paull was found dead.[8] Soon after, Kyte was charged with the murders of both Turner and Paull.[8][2]

At trial, forensic experts stated that the likelihood of the DNA found on Turner belonging to anyone other than Kyte was "one in 33,000 million" (one in 33 billion).[4] Kyte's fellow prison inmates testified that he had boasted of the murders while imprisoned for his 1997 attack.[16][17] They stated that he had told them that he killed Turner because she laughed at him during sex, infuriating him.[15] The prosecution asserted that the two murders were linked by "type, origin and disposal".[15] Kyte put in a last-minute defence that the reason his semen was found on Turner was because he regularly used prostitutes (despite his earlier declaration that he had never used them) and had had consensual sex with her, saying: "You meet people and have sex with them or a one-night stand and you don't remember it".[16][4] He was found guilty of both murders by unanimous decision.[16][13] He was given a minimum 25-year tariff.[8][3]

In news media coverage of his offences, Kyte was labelled the "Midlands Ripper", in part because he was also suspected of having multiple other victims.[2][8][18][19]

• In 2001, criminal profiler Paul Britton, who worked with detectives on the case, released a book titled Picking up the Pieces which included a section on the case.[44]
• In 2007, author Nigel Cawthorne published a book titled The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large which featured a chapter on Operation Enigma.[45]
• In 2009, author Vanessa Howard published a book which featured a chapter noting possible links between Kyte and the murder of Birmingham sex worker Janine Downes in 1991. The book was titled Britain's Ten Most Wanted: The Truth Behind the Most Shocking Unsolved Murders.[46]
• In 2012, author Stephen Wade included a chapter on Kyte in his book DNA Crime Investigations: Solving Murder and Serious Crime Through DNA and Modern Forensics.[13]

• In 2013, Channel 5 broadcast a documentary with high-profile criminologist David Wilson which covered the murder of Dawn Shields, one of Kyte's suspected victims. The episode was part of the Killers Behind Bars: The Untold Story series and was focused on possible links between unsolved crimes and Stephen Griffiths (although Wilson concluded links to Griffiths were unlikely). Wilson spoke to investigators who were on the Shields case and visited the site she was found.[30]
• In 2019, Quest released a documentary on Kyte titled Alun Kyte: The Midlands Ripper. It was released as part of the British Police: Our Toughest Cases series and was the fifth episode of series 1.[8] It featured interviews with detectives who investigated Kyte.
• In 2020, retired detective Jackie Malton released a documentary on Kyte on CBS Reality as part of her The Real Prime Suspect series. The episode was the fourth episode of series two and was titled A Serial Killer in the Making?.[47]