Alun Kyte
Alun Kyte, known as the Midlands Ripper, is an English double murderer, serial rapist, child rapist, paedophile and suspected serial killer. He was convicted in 2000 of the murders of two sex workers, 20-year-old Samo Paull and 30-year-old Tracey Turner, whom he killed in December 1993 and March 1994 respectively. After his conviction, investigators announced their suspicions that Kyte could have been behind a number of other unsolved murders of sex workers across Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. He was apprehended due to the ground-breaking investigations of a wider police inquiry named Operation Enigma, which was launched in 1996 in response to the murders of Paull, Turner and of a large number of other sex workers. Kyte was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years imprisonment for the murders of Paull and Turner.
Operation Enigma, which reviewed the unsolved murders of more than 200 sex workers and vulnerable women across Britain since 1986, continues to influence police investigations today and was described as the first step towards the creation of a violent crime database in Britain.
In February 2023, Kyte was further convicted of historical sexual offences against a 9-year-old boy, which he committed in a violent campaign of rape, indecency, and threats which began in the late 1980s and continued for five years. Kyte is imprisoned at HM Prison Onley as of May 2023 and continues to refuse to accept his guilt for any serious crime of which he has been convicted, except for one murder which was verified with a DNA link to him and which he eventually 'accepted his culpability' in.
Early life
Kyte was born in Tittensor, Stoke-on-Trent in 1964. He grew up in Stafford. Kyte was said to be a sickly youngster who suffered from severe asthma, and his family doted on him constantly. After leaving school, he worked in a series of odd jobs and eventually became a lorry driver. He was described as a loner and was said to have a violent hatred of women and an unusual interest in prostitutes. He was rarely seen with women and often lived in hostels or bed and breakfasts. He would regularly travel hundreds of miles across Britain, telling acquaintances he was looking for work. He was known at several hospitals and surgeries, as he would seek medication for a number of medical complaints as he drove lorries around the country.Criminal activity in the 1990s
Kyte's itinerant lifestyle allowed him to travel the country in order to scout out prostitutes, his chosen victims. He would in particular frequent motorway service stations. He would ask for services from prostitutes, then attack and rob them. He was also a prolific conman, involving himself in petty fraud in cheating car owners by claiming he'd 're-tuned' their cars when he had not. He would frequently replace his own personal car, while also using the cars belonging to his would-be customers to trawl the motorways for women. He would occasionally drive as many as 1,000 miles in his customers' cars, then return them to the unwitting customers.In January 1991, the Staffordshire Newsletter reported that Kyte had been convicted of stealing more than £700 from his father's bank account to feed his gambling addiction. Kyte, then of Rickerscote Avenue in Stafford, went on the run once his father had discovered the theft, and was reported as a missing person prior to being apprehended by police. During this time, Kyte was also convicted of deceiving a couple, whose car had broken down, out of £35 claiming he was going to buy them a spare part, and also for driving off without paying for petrol at a garage. He pleaded guilty to two counts of deception, one count of theft and one count of making off without payment and was also found guilty of failing to surrender to bail. He was given two years' probation. His defence claimed that, following an examination by a psychiatrist, the clinician had "found nothing clinically wrong with him". Kyte claimed to have remorse, and stated, "I have given up gambling and enrolled at an addiction control centre".
Murder of Samo Paull
In December 1993, Kyte picked up 20-year-old sex worker Samo Paull from Birmingham's Balsall Heath red light district. She was a single parent. 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. Paull's remains were lying in a water-filled ditch near a lay-by outside of Swinford, Leicestershire. This was 38 miles from where she was last seen in Birmingham. The site was near junction 20 of the M1 motorway. Because of the remoteness of the location, there was no CCTV evidence, nor were there any people living nearby who could provide information. All of Paull's possessions had been stolen. Detectives originally focused their investigation on Paull's boyfriend.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. The witness had previously worked as a pathologist, and had experience in examining dead bodies. The woman was sitting "bolt upright" and had strange marks on her face. The car was covered in mud and the driver appeared to not want to be seen, pulling a hat over his face. 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.
Murder of Tracey Turner
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. Shortly after the broadcast, he abducted 30-year-old Tracey Turner from Hilton Park Services on the M6 Motorway. Turner regularly solicited customers from motorway service stations across the country. Turner had a disability: she was virtually deaf. She was found dead the next day at Bitteswell, near Lutterworth, 52 miles from where she was last seen. Similarly to Paull, she had been dumped near the M1 motorway, this time near to junction 19. She had been raped, stripped of her clothing and strangled. She was dumped by the side of the road and was found about six miles from where Paull had been found dead. Police concluded that she had been transported to the location by car and dumped at the side of the road by the killer. Initially, the police made no connection between this new discovery and the murder of Samo Paull three months earlier.The first suspect to be questioned was a man who was believed to have been seen speaking to Turner at Hilton Park services. 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.
Two days after the murder, Kyte was seen at the service station posing as a newspaper reporter. He told staff he was conducting an investigation into prostitution.
Initial inquiries into the murders of Paull and Turner yielded few clues, and Kyte was not apprehended during this period.
Further events of 1994
It is known that Kyte also attacked a second woman in 1994. 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. 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. The victim reported the attack to the police; Kyte was not apprehended for this offence.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. At this stage, it was still not known that Kyte had murdered and attacked several victims.
1995 theft convictions
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. At this time, Kyte, recorded as being of Plant Crescent, Stafford, was also charged with a number of other petty offences.1997 attack and imprisonment
In December 1997, Kyte committed a violent attack and rape of a woman at knife-point in Weston-super-Mare. The victim had been staying in the same hostel as Kyte, and was attacked by him there at night. She managed to escape and report the incident to the police. Police were dispatched to the hostel, where they arrested Kyte. Kyte was ultimately found guilty of the attack at trial and sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment.Murder investigations
Operation Enigma
At the time, police in Britain were often ineffective at solving the murders of prostitutes. 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. In the six months after Paull's death, four other sex workers, including Tracey Turner, were murdered across Britain, and Leicestershire Constabulary detectives asked for a cross-force investigation. Many of Kyte's crimes were committed across force boundaries, and there were often difficulties in running investigations into such crimes and in sharing resources between forces. 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". 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. Enigma was one of the first steps towards a database for violent crime analysis, and many of its features influence present-day police investigations.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 murders were in particular said to have similarities and Enigma concluded that up to four serial killers could be at large. Many of the unsolved murders Enigma investigated were clustered in the Midlands and in Merseyside. Information was shared between police forces around Britain. Detectives concluded that the similar murders of Paull and Turner were likely linked.