Attempted Kidnap the Night Before
The horror nearly repeated itself the previous evening. Doherty, separated from friends and her husband at the same nightclub, was walking alone when Wright tried to seize her.
“She was too alert and too quick,” the judge said, recounting how Doherty escaped by pounding on a couple’s front door until they called police.
“I am sure that if you had managed to abduct her you would have killed her,” Mr Justice Bennathan said, pointing to Wright’s crimes the following night and the Ipswich murders in 2006.
“There is no way you would have set her free to have you arrested.”
In a victim impact statement, Doherty described raw terror.
“I have never been so scared in my life. I thought my heart was going to explode in my chest,” she said. “I had never ran so fast or jumped over walls like that.”
She told the court officers failed to record her account properly, questioned how much she had drunk and did not believe her. “To this day, I am furious,” she said. “I wasn’t taken serious. I was made to feel like a silly little girl.”
The judge said she had lived with lasting anxiety and misplaced guilt, wrongly blaming herself for not pushing harder for police action.
