Originally Posted by Strange Famous

I'll start off by saying I dont exactly know why I'm writing this, but a recent topic I posted in made me think of it. I dont know what any of this means.

I live in the UK, in a medium sized town called Ipswich. In the winter of 2006 5 women who earned their living through prostitution were murdered by a serial killer named Stephen Wright (who was sentenced to life, with a whole life tarrif earlier this year for the murders), one of the victims was a girl called Gemma Adams, who I knew, and went to school with.

She was a few years below me at school, but I knew her. She lived in the housing estate just behind my street, and her best friend was the younger sister of a kid I knew quite well. I used to walk to school and so did she, and so I remember seeing her quite a lot, talking to her occasionally.

After she died all the news was full of stories that growing up she was a good middle class girl and heroin fucked her up... but that wasnt my recollection. Even at 13/14 she hung around with the "bad boys" and was known to sleep around. I am not for a second saying anything she did meant she deserved in any sense to end up where she did - but she always hung out with the wrong people and was smoking cigarette's and weed at a young age, drinking at a young age with certain pricks from my year who used to hang round with younger girls because no one else would be impressed by the fact they had the ability to procure weed. I remember at 15 beating up the "leader" of the kind of gang she hung around with because he spat on a plastic ruler and then flicked a gob of phlegm onto my shirt in science class... apparentally he did it cos he thought my reaction would be "funny"

In no sense was I friends with her, and I couldnt even say I ever had a genuine conversation with her, she was a several years below me, and hung out with different people. I dont know what I feel, if I feel anything - about her death. Of course, I wish things hadnt worked out like they did, I wish she hadnt been killed - but only in the general sense I would feel the same about anyone in that situation or anyone who had such a bad end. From what I read in the papers she got a job in telesales, but drifted into heroin abuse and dropped out and ended up working as a prostitute cos of it. Its just so hard to connect... the image I have of her from school, walking from the walkway past my house on her way to school - to a corpse dumped in the words by some monster.

Obviously she made mistakes in her life, and obviously she ran across the wrong path. But there were so many other lives ahead of her... so many other paths she could have been pulled down. I dont know whether to think that she was just a random victim of a terrible force, or if destruction was more fixed in the path she took. You could blame life, her parents, the world, the drugs, the sick fuck that killed her: or all of the above. I've known people who have died through drugs, Ive known people who died cos they were sick from cancer, three of my grandparents died from being old, my sister died from being born sick, I went to school with a kid who died from getting in a car wreck when he was joy riding with another kid who was fucked up on E and booze... but sometimes I cant get my head round the girl who was murdered.

As I sit here typing all this I can litreally picture her in her school uniform, and I always picture her smiling, and I dont know what it means or what I mean by typing all this. By no means is this grief, she was someone I could barely remember and who I hadnt seen or thought of for 10 years. But what strikes me is that the nature of the crime is so awful, so foul... and the killer came over as so banal, in his trial he seemed nothing more than a complete prat, a pompous and clownish arse, a buffoon. How can such bad things be reconciled to a man like that?