Serial Killer Investigations (44 page)

When Rose returned, her daughter told her that she had been raped by her father. Rose’s only comment was: ‘Oh well, you were asking for it.’

The daughter told a school friend, who in turn mentioned it to a policeman. On the morning of 6 August 1992, police made a thorough search of 25 Cromwell Street, and found an extraordinary assortment of pornographic videos and sex aids, including whips, dildos, chains and handcuffs.

The following day, the police arrived with a social worker to take the children into care. They arrested Fred West. Detective Constable Hazel

Savage, the policewoman who was dealing with the case, went to call on the West’s eldest daughter, Anne Marie, who had left home when she was 15 because her father had made her pregnant. At the police station, Anne Marie described how Fred had raped her for the first time when she was nine years old. Her stepmother, Rose, had looked on, laughing. After that, her father had regular sexual intercourse with her, and also allowed his younger brother John, a dustman, to join in. Anne Marie also mentioned that she was worried about her younger half-sister, Heather, who had vanished from her home in May 1987. Fred sometimes joked that she was buried under the patio. But by the time the rape case came up in court, Anne Marie had changed her mind about giving evidence in court, and Fred West was acquitted.

Hazel Savage now tried to persuade her superiors to dig up the garden and look under the patio. Finally, with a great deal of difficulty—they were afraid of being sued—she succeeded. On 24 February 1994, four policemen with a warrant arrived at 25 Cromwell Street. They told West’s daughter Mae that they intended to dig up the garden in search of Heather’s body.

Fred was arrested the following day. That evening, he admitted to murdering his 16-year-old daughter, Heather. The next morning, the police uncovered Heather’s remains. But the pathologist was puzzled to discover an extra femur—a thighbone—among the remains. Another body had to be buried somewhere.

Confronted with this, Fred now admitted that, in fact, there were two more bodies buried in the garden. The police soon uncovered these, and identified them as Shirley Ann Robinson, a former lodger of the Wests, and Alison Chambers, a 16-year-old schoolgirl who had vanished in 1979. Shirley Ann had been the lover of both Fred and Rose, and a foetus found nearby was later admitted by Fred to be his own child.

The police now moved into the basement, and found five more dismembered corpses under the floor. Another was discovered under the bathroom floor, and identified as Lynda Carol Gough, who had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ home before she vanished in April 1973. That brought the total up to nine bodies.

The search was moved to a field near West’s former home in the village of Much Marcle, and located the body of West’s first wife, Rena. They also found the body of Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, underneath the kitchen of their former home at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. Finally, another body, that of one of West’s former girlfriends, Anne McFall, was found buried in a field, bringing the body count up to 12.

As Fred West’s story began to emerge, it became clear that he had been operating longer than any serial killer in criminal history. His first murder—that of Anne McFall—seems to have taken place 18 years earlier, in 1967.

Fred had been born in a farm cottage in Much Marcle, a small Herefordshire village, in 1941, the son of a farm labourer. It later emerged that, in the West household, incest was common, and that his father frequently told his three daughters, ‘I made you—I’m entitled to touch you.’ West was later to take exactly the same attitude towards his own daughters. West’s mother retaliated by seducing Fred when he was only 12 years old.

Fred was a mild and unaggressive teenager. When he was 17, he swerved his motorbike to avoid a girl on a bicycle, and hit his head against a wall. He was unconscious for almost a week, and one leg healed permanently shorter than the other. It was after this accident that his brothers observed a change in his disposition. He became moody, and had sudden fits of rage.

Two years later, when he was 19, he was standing on the platform of a fire escape outside a youth club and tried to put his hand up the skirt of a girl he had invited outside; she gave him a push and he fell over the rails, striking his head. He was unconscious for 24 hours.

Shortly before this accident, he had met a 16-year-old Glasgow delinquent named Katherine Costello, known as Rena, who, even at that age, had worked as a prostitute. Soon they were having sex in fields, and Rena was convinced that she was in love. Nevertheless, she went back to Glasgow, returned to prostitution, and was soon pregnant by her black pimp.

Unhappy at the unwanted pregnancy, she returned to Gloucestershire, and Fred tried to abort her, without success. Apparently unconcerned that she was pregnant by another man he married her in November 1962. He had always been excited at the idea of women being possessed by other men—preferably while he was watching.

They went back to Glasgow, where he ran an ice cream van, but their marriage quickly deteriorated, and he began to beat her. Rena also confided to a friend that Fred’s sexual demands were ‘weird’. She may have meant that he liked to tie her up.

After accidentally killing a child when backing his ice cream van, West returned to Much Marcle, and found work as a butcher in an abattoir. This job may also have influenced his sexuality—a friend at the time says that West plied a trade as an abortionist, and had a collection of ‘gruesome Polaroid photographs of blood-stained women’. West obviously found blood exciting.

Soon, Rena came to rejoin her husband, bringing with her two Scots girlfriends, one of whom was the teenaged Anne McFall. All four of them—and Rena’s baby, Charmaine—went to live in a small trailer. And although Fred frequently beat Rena, Anne nevertheless fell in love with him. When Rena decided to return to Glasgow, Anne stayed behind, and soon became Fred’s mistress.

Why he murdered Anne is uncertain, since he later described her as ‘an angel’. It may possibly have been because she told him she was pregnant. He strangled her in July 1967, and buried her in a field nearby.

Rena now came back to live with him. And in January 1968, West committed another murder. The victim was a 15-year-old waitress called Mary Bastholm, who knew West through the cafe where she worked—he had done some decorating there. On the night of 6 January 1968, she waited at a bus stop on her way to see her boyfriend, and then simply disappeared. Mary’s body was never found, but when West was in prison, he told his son Stephen that he had killed her.

In November that year, West and Rena were again living apart, and Fred was occupying a trailer near the village of Bishop’s Cleeve. It was there that he met Rose Letts, a 15-year-old schoolgirl who, it became clear, was already something of a nymphomaniac, and West had little trouble seducing her. In spite of the violent opposition of her parents—it later emerged that she had had an incestuous relationship with her father—she moved into the caravan with Fred as soon as she was 16. Rose’s younger brother, Graham, later described how she had seduced him when he was 12.

When she and Fred moved in together, he was soon persuading her to have sex with other men while he looked on. When they moved together into Gloucester, Fred put advertisements into sex magazines, with photographs of Rose showing her naked breasts. Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, and Fred’s first daughter, Anne Marie, moved in with them. But Charmaine intensely disliked her stepmother, who reciprocated by beating her.

In the New Year of 1971, West was sent to prison for theft and fraud at a garage where he had worked, and it was while he was there that Charmaine disappeared. There seems to be little doubt that Rose killed her. From now on, Fred and Rose were bound together by their knowledge that the other was a killer.

At their first home, at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester, they made the acquaintance of a young married woman, Liz Agius, whose Maltese husband worked abroad. She began to make a habit of taking tea with them, and one day felt strangely drowsy; she woke up to find herself naked in bed between Fred and Rose—and Fred admitted that he had raped her. Oddly enough, it does not seem to have disturbed the friendship. It was also at about this time that Fred’s wife, Rena, came to call on them at Midland Road, and simply disappeared. Her body was eventually found buried not far from that of Anne McFall.

The Wests’ life seems to have become a non-stop sexual orgy. In September 1972, Fred and Rose, now married, moved to 25 Cromwell Street. They rented out cheap rooms to teenagers, and Rose was soon having sex with the male lodgers. Fred had no objection—when his wife returned from another man’s bed, he flung himself on her with intense excitement. Rose also enjoyed sex with other women.

A teenage au pair, Caroline Raine, was hired, but when both Fred and Rose made sexual advances, she decided to move back to her parents. Four weeks later, on 6 December 1972, the Wests saw Caroline in nearby Tewkesbury, and offered her a lift home. She accepted, but soon regretted it as Rose, sitting on the back seat with her, tried to kiss her on the mouth. When it was clear she was going to be uncooperative, Fred stopped the car, and punched her until she lost consciousness.

Back at 25 Cromwell Street, West dragged her upstairs, and Rose sat beside her on the settee and began fondling her breasts. Caroline was given a cup of tea, which made her sleepy. Then the Wests tied her hands behind her, and gagged her with cotton wool. She was stripped naked and laid on the floor, where West beat her between the legs with the buckle end of a belt. After that, Rose, who had obviously become sexually excited, lay between her legs and performed oral sex, Fred meanwhile lying on top of Rose, having sex with her.

Later, while Rose was in the bathroom, Fred raped Caroline. He raped her a second time the next morning, when someone came to the door and Rose went downstairs to answer it.

The Wests now told her that they wanted her to return as their au pair, and Caroline, realising this was her only chance of escape, agreed. In fact, she confessed what had happened to her mother as soon as she got home, and the Wests were arrested. But in court on 12 January 1973, they were charged only with indecent assault, the magistrate obviously believing their story that nothing more serious had taken place. Caroline had felt too traumatised to attend the hearing. The Wests were fined £25 and returned home with the knowledge that if they intended to silence future victims, it would be simpler to murder them.

This is exactly what they did. Lynda Gough, 19, was a girlfriend of one of their male lodgers, and had also slept with his roommate. (Rose had climbed into bed with both of the men on the first night they moved in.) In April 1973, Lynda left home, leaving her parents a note saying that she had found herself a flat. They never saw her again, although when Mrs Gough called on the Wests to ask if they knew where her daughter was, she noticed that Rose was wearing Lynda’s slippers. The Wests insisted that Lynda had simply gone to Weston-Super-Mare looking for a job.

It was at about this time—mid-1973—that West began having sex with his nine-year-old daughter, Anne Marie. She was taken to the basement and hung up from the ceiling by her hands, while a dildo was inserted inside of her. After that, her father raped her regularly, sometimes even when she came home from school for lunch. Anne Marie was also made to submit to many of Rose’s lovers while her father spied through a hole in the wall. At 15, Anne Marie became pregnant by her father, but had a miscarriage. It was at this point that she decided to leave home, and lived by prostitution.

During the next two years, the Wests murdered five more girls, and Fred concreted their bodies under the basement floor. These were:

Carol Ann Cooper, 15, who vanished on 10 November 1973, after going to the cinema with friends. It seems certain that the Wests offered her a lift, then took her home and killed her after forcing her to join their usual ‘sex games’.

Lucy Partington, 21, was a student at Exeter University and a niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis. She vanished on 27 December 1973, after spending the afternoon with a disabled friend. It seems likely that the Wests kept her prisoner for several days, raping and torturing her before killing her.

Therese Siegenthaler, 21, was a Swiss student, who set out hitchhiking on 15 April 1974, to see a friend in Ireland. She disappeared, and her body was found in the West’s cellar 20 years later.

Shirley Ann Hubbard, 15, had, like so many of the Wests’ victims, been in care. She was working as a trainee shop assistant in Worcester, and disappeared on 5 November 1974, on her way to see her foster parents in Droitwich. When her body was found, her skull was completely covered with black adhesive tape, and plastic tubes had been inserted in her nostrils to enable her to breathe.

Juanita Mott, 18, was also the child of a broken home. She had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ house in Cromwell Street, and it seems likely that she returned there one day to see a friend, and was raped and murdered.

There was a three-year gap between the death of Juanita Mott in April 1975 and that of the next victim, Shirley Ann Robinson, another child of a broken home who came to the Wests’ house as a lodger, began a lesbian affair with Rose, and also became pregnant by Fred. She was obviously hoping to persuade Fred to abandon Rose and marry her. Shirley disappeared on 9 May 1977, and was buried in the garden, since there was now no more room in the basement.

Alison Chambers, 16, had spent years in a children’s home after her parents split up. In September 1979, she wrote a letter to her mother saying that she was living with ‘a really nice homely family’. Her body was one of those found in the Wests’ garden.

The last known victim was the Wests’ own daughter Heather, 16, whose virginity West had taken when she was 14. She became deeply depressed, and it is conceivable that West thought she might start telling friends about the incest he continued to force on her. On 19 June 1987, West took the day off from his building work, and some time during that day, he and Rose murdered Heather. Her body was the last to be buried in the back garden.