Kurtis Pratt is around the same age now as his mum was when she vanished – he issued a desperate demand to one of Britain’s worst serial killers
The son of a woman feared to have been a victim of serial killer Steve Wright is urging the lifer to come clean over her disappearance.
Kurtis Pratt, 30, grew up bouncing around foster homes after his mum Kellie vanished. Her body has never been found. Against all odds the bright civil servant prospered but he is now hoping the Suffolk Strangler will give his family and others he hurt, the “peace” they crave. He urged the inmate, who is serving a whole life tariff, to break his silence about Kellie Pratt’s fate, saying: “Do you know where my mum’s body is?”, adding all Wright’s gruesome secrets must be “eating him alive”.
Kurtis, who lives in Newcastle, opened up about the impact it had on his childhood and told The Mirror : “I grew up scared of the world. “If she was alive she would have reached out at some point and said something to me, so I think I’ve made peace with the fact that she’s gone. I am around the same age as my mum was when she went missing. It’s now 26 years later and I have been given the opportunity to come forward for the first time in my life to appeal on behalf of my mum, my family and on behalf of other potential victims.
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“I want to reach out to Steve Wright directly and ask that if Steve himself wanted to rectify – even a little bit of damage he caused to his victims – it would be really important. I think now is the time to come forward to give the victims’ families and friends the peace they deserve.
He said he just needed “resolution” adding: “Where is she? If we could get any information on where he put her after he did whatever he did to her, then that would bring a lot of peace to a lot of people’s lives.
“It’s not going to do him any good to keep this to himself, it must be eating him alive after all his time. So it’s for his own good and for everyone else’s good involved, for him to just open up and own up to what he’s done.
“My grandmother, Kellie’s mum, sadly passed away before finding out what happened to her daughter. Even though she’s not here any more, knowing what happened to her would bring a lot of peace to us all.”
Steve Wright, 67, this week admitted the killing of 17 year old Victoria Hall, who was last seen alive at the end of a night out in Felixstowe in September 1999. He will be sentenced on Friday.
It was the first time he’s ever admitted murder, despite being in jail for killing five women from Ipswich’s red light area at the end of 2006.
Wright is serving a full life tariff for five murders in Ipswich all in 2006; Tania Nicol, 19, Gemma Adams, 25, Anneli Alderton, 24, Paula Clennell, 24, and Annette Nicholls, 29. But it is believed he could be behind at least five more, including three sex workers from Norwich.
Jeannette Kempton, aged 32 from Brixton, whose body was found in a ditch in 1989, She had been strangled, Natalie Pearman, 16, who died of asphyxia in Norwich in 1992, Amanda Duncan, 26, from Ipswich went missing a year later in 1993, Kellie Pratt, 28, last seen in Norwich in 2000 and Michelle Bettles aged 22 from Norwich who was strangled in 2002.
Kellie vanished a year after Victoria was killed. She was last seen in Norfolk almost 26 years ago. She had split from his dad Michael two years earlier and had moved from Newcastle to Norwich to be nearer her mum.
Just weeks before she went missing, presumed dead, she had written to him begging to see their two sons and he’d agreed she could during the school summer holidays, in July 2000.
But tragically Kellie, 28, vanished before she could be reunited with her two boys. Kurtis was a teenager when he started to “properly discover” what had happened to his mum.
In 1998, Kellie moved away from Newcastle to Norwich to be closer to her own mum, where she tragically developed a heroin habit and was eventually jailed for shoplifting. Then following her release from prison she turned to sex work to survive, working on the streets of Norwich.
She was last seen outside the Rose Inn public house, at the junction of Queen’s Road and City Road in Norwich, at 11:30pm on June 11th 2000.
Kellie received a call on her Nokia 6100 phone at 11.30pm which was ten minutes after being seen outside the pub. She said she was with ‘a punter’.
She was later reported missing by friends after she failed to meet them for a pre-arranged lift and neither she, nor her mobile phone have ever been found. At the time of her disappearance Kellie was wearing a black mini skirt, black T-shirt and a light blue coat.
Police have previously looked into links between Kellie’s case and the unsolved murder of 16-year-old Natalie Pearman, which took place in 1992, She was also a sex worker in the same area who died of ‘asphyxia’.
Two years after Kellie vanished, 22-year-old Michelle Bettles, also disappeared on March 29th, 2002, from the Norwich red light district. She was found in woodland and had been strangled.
Wright knew the area these women vanished intimately, having run a pub in the heart of the red light district with his ex wife, Diane Cole, who said he would often vanish leaving her to look after the pub.
When approached by The Mirror this week, Kurtis told our reporter he was relieved to speak to somebody about his mum’s disappearance and revealed not even the police had ever been in touch with him.
He said: “I am now 30 years old. You are the very first person to ever speak to me about this case, about my mum, about anything? I think I’ve spent so much of my life so numb to the fact that my mum has been missing because of my own tumultuous upbringing.
He urged Wright to tell the truth adding: “He could bring peace to so many people and I think a lot of people don’t realise they need it, including me!
“It would have such a huge positive impact on me. I’d be able to move forward with that information. To know exactly what happened to my mum. If he was going to do one positive thing from all of the damage that he’s caused, all of the lives that he has ended, it would be to come forward and just own up to everyone that he is hurt or damaged in some way’.
“If that includes my mother or if that does include my mother, that makes no difference because I think the best thing that he can do now is just come forward and admit to what he’s done. All he can do now is cooperate to the best of his ability and try and get some kind of good karma out of this by letting us all know what’s happened and who the victims are, where they are.
“It’s not just that we want it, we need it and we deserve it and I think who is he to keep that from us after all this time.” I believe that this man has been on a journey long enough now that whatever hatred and damage was in his heart has now at least lifted. “
From the age of four or five Kurtis has been in the care system until he was 21. “I have no memory of my mum really apart from what my dad told me and a few photos. In the picture she has a gentle face and long bushy curly hair.
“To be honest I don’t know how I didn’t end up choosing the wrong path, I feel like I have made it out of here in a pretty decent state considering everything that I’ve been through so I’m pretty proud of myself to be fair – I don’t know how I did it .
“It wasn’t until I was like a teenager that I actually properly started to discover what had happened. I really didn’t know for a long long time because social services didn’t tell me much at all. I didn’t have my own voice a lot growing up, people spoke for me.
“I started doing my own research but spelt her name with a y and not an ie, so nothing came up for a long time. That goes to show how little I knew my mum. I didn’t even know how to spell her name.
“But I always think of her. I tell people I’ve got her curly hair and I’ve got the same initials as her, it’s just little things like that. I just learned to live with the mystery of what happened to her and where she went but I now realise it would help me to know.”
