A WASHBROOK barn commonly used by prostitutes could hold vital clues for officers investigating the red light murders, The Evening Star can exclusively reveal.

A WASHBROOK barn commonly used by prostitutes could hold vital clues for officers investigating the red light murders, The Evening Star can exclusively reveal.

Residents in the village say a small driveway off Pigeons Lane is a notorious hangout for prostitutes and their clients.

Vice girls regularly guide men to the location for sex and in the past few months have taken to jumping over the gate at the end of the driveway to make use of a small 18ft by 10ft steel outbuilding in the adjoining field.

Chillingly the land, which is used to keep horses, backs onto Belstead Brook just 100 yards away and is less than a mile in each direction from where the bodies of Gemma Adams and Tania Nicol were found.

A small road bridge also carries Pigeons Lane across the stream.

As our pictures show, the secluded driveway area is littered with used condoms and condom wrappers and a make up compact was found not far away.

Despite police finding five bodies at different locations, the man leading the investigation Det Ch Supt Stewart Gull has said he believes officers are yet to discover a murder scene.

A spokesman for Suffolk police today told The Evening Star officers will be looking into the new lead.

Owner of the field, Laura Butters, said she felt that if the killer had been using prostitutes for some time it was almost definite he would have been taken to the site in the past.

Mrs Butters, a Copdock and Washbrook parish councillor, said: “The entrance driveway of my field has been frequented by prostitutes and used by them for years.

“I have found condoms and other things down there but recently they have been going over the gate at the end of the driveway and using the building for cover.

“It is used by a lot of people and there is fresh evidence there every day.

“If he [the killer] is a regular I think he will almost definitely have been there.”

Mrs Butters' concern about the site is shared by others in the area.

Paul Easton, 53, owner of Washbrook Service Station on London Road, in Washbrook, said there had been some “odd goings-on” in the village over the past couple of months with fires breaking out in some of the barns in the area.

The first blaze took place in Mrs Butters' barn off Pigeons Lane on October 18, twelve days prior to the disappearance of Tania Nicol on October 30 followed by one on Thursday November 2 in a small barn on Wenham Road, in Copdock.

Mrs Butters said the fire in her steel outbuilding took hold in hay on the floor and left the building “structurally unsound”.

Police investigated the suspicious blaze and told Mrs Butters they would increase patrols of Pigeons Lane as a result.