Alun Kyte

Alun Kyte (born 7 July 1964), known as the Midlands Ripper, is an English double murderer, serial rapist, child rapist, paedophile and suspected serial killer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

He was apprehended due to the ground-breaking investigations of a wider police enquiry 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.

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.