He said the woman "widely portrayed across the media" was the product of drugs and the "massive hold they can, and do, take".

Last seen on November 15 outside a BMW dealership in West End Road, Ipswich, 25-year-old Ms Adams' boyfriend reported her missing after she failed to return text messages.

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She grew up with her parents, older sister and younger brother in Kesgrave, a village near Ipswich. Her parents have described her as a "bright and bubbly" girl who was in the Brownies and grew up playing the piano and riding horses.

"She was good company - bright and intelligent," her father, Brian, said. "If you asked her to do anything she would do it well. We never had any rows with her at home."

A friend from this period left a message with the Evening Star describing someone who "always had a smile on her face … She was the girl that all girls wanted to be: beautiful, confident and with her whole life ahead of her."

The friend said that smile had been taken from her by drugs and the "cruelness she had to face each night" to fund her habit.

After school and a taking a part-time GNVQ in administration, Ms Adams had worked for a time at an insurance company but had drifted into "the wrong crowd", her father said. She gradually lost touch with her family, getting involved with drugs at around the age of 17.

A reader who had himself had a drug problem said he had known her when she was an addict. "I met Gemma a few years ago," he wrote, "and at the time I was having trouble with drugs. The only thing I know is that the whole time I was mixed up in that nasty world Gemma and [her boyfriend] Jon were the only good, trustworthy people I met."

Ms Adams and Jon Simpson, a heroin user, had been together for 10 years.

She is believed to have been addicted to heroin and crack. At one time her parents took her to see doctors and a community drug rehabilitation team. But she was later sacked from her job, and over the past two years the family had little contact with their daughter.

Her body, the first of the five, was discovered on December 2 close to where Tania Nicol's body would later be found. Her parents did not know she was working in the sex industry before she died.

A woman who said she had worked as a prostitute with Ms Adams wrote on the Evening Star's website that she was no longer working on the street. It was, she said, "a damn shame that it has taken your death for me to realise" how dangerous it was.

"I will never, ever forget you, Gemma. You were a good friend who was there when I needed you. I know some people judge what we do and think that it is wrong, but we are still human beings and nobody has the right to take our lives, no matter what we do for a living."