I UNCOVERED MUM’S MURDER... ON TV
ELLIE HAD NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED TO HER MUM...
For years, Ellie Heil hoped she’d one day be reunited with her mum Paula. After being taken away from her mother at age 5, the now-19-year-old has fond memories of a “chaotic household”.
“I spent a lot of time with my aunty Alice,” Ellie recalls. “But I’d have done anything to stay with my fun, loving mum.”
Ellie, from Lowestoft, Suffolk, in England, often asked her adoptive parents about what happened to her birth mother, but they were strangely uncomfortable with the subject. They assured Ellie that she and her younger sisters would learn the truth when they were older.
However, Ellie’s curiosity soon became too much. So at the age of 13, the schoolgirl decided to research her mother online during an IT class.
Typing in her full name – Paula Clennell – the first result to come up was a 2006 Youtube documentary about the infamous Suffolk Strangler, Steve Wright.
Confused and disturbed, Ellie decided to watch the video.
As the film flickered to life, it revealed a horrific truth: Ellie’s mother was the fifth victim of the vicious serial killer.
“I will never forget that moment,” Ellie says, remembering the trauma. “It was so hard to watch.”
Just days before her own murder, Ellie’s mum Paula had been interviewed for a TV segment about the danger faced by Ipswich sex workers during Wright’s reign of terror.
Paula had told the interviewer she was “worried” about getting into strangers’ cars, but would continue to do so as she needed the money.
“There was my mum on the screen. I remembered her voice and she even looked and sounded like me,” Ellie says.
“It made me so angry that people were speaking to her about the danger she was in and still she wasn’t helped. She may have been a prostitute, and she may have done drugs, but she was still a wonderful woman.”
Paula, a 24-yearold mother-of-three, had been working in the Ipswich area when she went missing on December 10, 2006.
Her naked body was found two days later and a postmortem exam confirmed she had died by asphyxiation.
The other four victims of killer Steve Wright were Ellie’s godmother, Annette Nicholls, 29, Gemma Adams, 25, Tania Nicol, 19, and Anneli Alderton, 24, all of whom he murdered during a six-week period from October 30 2006.
In February 2008, Wright was found guilty of the five murders and he was sentenced to life behind bars.
Ellie had no idea of her
“HE TOOK MY MUM AWAY FROM ME … I HOPE HE ROTS IN PRISON”
mother’s troubled life as a sex worker and was horrified to learn of her brutal death – all while scrolling online.
“Wright, also known as the Ipswich Ripper, had strangled my mum … and snuffed out all hope I’d had of being reunited with her,” Ellie says tearfully.
“I played the tape over and over again. How could I not find out about any of it until I was 13, despite me asking my adoptive parents every day?
“It was comforting to watch her but at the same time, crushing to know I’d never be able to see or talk to my mum again.”
Ellie was bullied by her friends, after sharing her discovery with them, and she spiralled into depression.
She and her two sisters had been adopted into a happy home by a couple in their 40s who both had steady jobs.
But after learning the shocking truth, Ellie ran away and spent a month on the street.
At age 16, Ellie also became pregnant with twins but was made to give them up for adoption.
She then reunited with her aunty Alice, her mother Paula’s sister, and was helped back on her feet. “She told me what my mum was like and about how Steve smiled at her in court,” Ellie says.
Six years on, Ellie is in a loving relationship and has thankfully reconnected with the family she thought she’d lost forever.
“The future is bright, but I’ll never forget the day I discovered Mum’s murder on television,” Ellie says.
But turning over a new leaf has not dulled her anger towards killer Steve Wright, 61, who remains in prison serving his life sentence.
“He took my mum away from me and ruined any chance of me seeing her again. I hope he rots in prison.”