Until now, Ipswich was a truly unremarkable place - drab, concrete, unexciting. Then a terrifying serial killer chose this town as his target. The Northern Echo's Olivia Richwald reports from an area she knows well.

I WASN'T even a teenager when I lived in a small village near Ipswich. Even then I could see the town's concrete vista held little to draw me.

Throughout Suffolk there are quaint villages, with flint churches, pink thatched cottages, scented gardens and antiques shops. It's a countryside cliche where - bar the clothes and the cars - it could be any time, any year in the past century.

But the Suffolk idyll is tarnished by the county capital - as ordinary as a town can get and like many across the south, filled with chain stores, chavs and commuters. It's a second-tier town with a second-tier football team.

Locals surely agree that Ipswich is an unremarkable town - or it was until it became the centre of the hunt for a serial killer.

I step off the train at Ipswich station and immediately pass two policemen in fluorescent jackets. I am to pass a dozen more during my visit.

"Bridge Too Far for the Murderer" and "Was Killer Caught on Camera?" scream the local newspapers at the station shop.

Until the killings started, the biggest story in Ipswich this year had been hospital cuts.

"Are you selling more papers than usual," I ask the shopkeeper.

"Yes, a lot more," she sighs.

"I'm so sick of it. It's on the television and in the papers. It's just terrifying. I don't want to read any more."

Outside the station, and in the greying afternoon light, Ipswich Town Football Club can be seen lit up on the horizon, over the Princes Street Bridge, which spans the River Orwell.

The football club is in the centre of the town's red light district, but today the area is populated only by rubbish blowing in the wind.

I meet a friend who works in Ipswich and insists: "I can't let you walk around there on your own."

As we head past the Portman Road ground and through the dozen or so residential streets that make up the red light district, there are a few people heading home already.

Round the corner, where one of the girls vanished, a group of schoolchildren are walking home. Everyone is walking in pairs.

My friend, who works for the local newspaper, says: "The town is subdued and there are fewer people out and about at night.

"The general feeling is one of fear and sympathy. It doesn't seem to matter that these women were prostitutes."

He adds, as we squeeze past a Merseyside Police car parked on the pavement: "You find yourself looking at people suspiciously,"

To date, 26 police forces and 250 police have become involved in the hunt for the monster carrying out these killings. This figure is rising all the time, and people become acutely aware that he is still to be snared.

"Welcome to Ipswich," say the broken Christmas lights inviting customers into the town centre.

Shoppers are bustling about, and if it wasn't for the police posters in shops and news bills boasting "12-page murder update", you might not know the country's police and press had descended on this town.

"£300,000 reward to find killer", says a bill, "£250,000 News of the World reward", says another poster.

Locals are already weary of the notoriety.

"A few days ago it was all anyone could talk about," says a girl in a coffee shop. "Now we are all just tired of it. It's so frightening. It's a nightmare."

The Suffolk Strangler is a murder story as intriguing as the plot of a TV crime drama.

Crime dramas are usually set in big British cities or small idyllic villages.

Ipswich is neither - but that fact didn't stop the town from being upgraded to a city on the front page of The Times this week. The mistake was soon realised and Ipswich lost its city status.

At the local newspaper headquarters, where Sky TV rolls continuously in the corner, you get the impression the town won't lose its serial killer infamy quite as quickly.

Hungerford, Lockerbie, Dunblane, Soham - now Ipswich too will be added to this list.

From now on the unremarkable Suffolk town that I had barely thought about since I left will be synonymous with tragedy.

Like everyone else, I'm just hoping that tragedy ends here in Ipswich and stops now.