Killer Couples (22 page)

Every week when his social worker came to see him, he just said everything was OK. He didn’t want to get his friends into trouble: he was a grown-up now – he could manage.

Neighbours’ complaints about the noise coming from Steven’s flat fell on deaf ears. Sarah Bullock’s mum and stepfather started to hear rumours about what was going on and tried to persuade her to stop seeing Darren Stewart. He was so much older, they were sure he was getting her involved in all sorts of trouble… You only had to look at her pasty complexion and lank hair to know that it wasn’t vitamin pills she was popping those nights when she didn’t come home.

‘Yeah, well, you can’t tell me what to do,’ Sarah sneered at them,
hardly recognisable as the smiling young girl in her school photos just a few short years before. ‘Anyway, I’m moving in with Daz.’

Despite their objections, Darren Stewart turned up at the door to pick up Sarah’s things, laughing in the face of her parents’ protestations. And then the two of them were gone.

Now Steven Hoskin had two flatmates – and his life was about to descend into hell.

The combination of bullies and boredom is always an explosive one, and Darren and Sarah, with long empty days and nights stretching ahead of them, amused themselves by inventing a new game: torturing Steve.

‘Sorry, did that burn you?’ they’d laugh, as Steven whelped with pain, rubbing his arm where a cigarette had just been stubbed out on his skin. Other friends who came to the flat to take advantage of Steven’s hospitality also joined in the new sport.

‘Come here and lick this up,’ they’d order their host, forcing him down on his hands and knees next to a puddle of spilled drink.

Humiliated, scared and uncomprehending, Steven would put his face to the ground and tentatively put his tongue out towards the puddle of liquid.

‘Look at him,’ his guests would scoff. ‘Licking the floor like a dog!’

That gave Sarah an idea. Bending down to Steven’s pet terrier, she unbuckled its collar and then she reached up and secured it around Steven’s neck. Hardly able to speak for laughing, she picked up the little creature’s lead.

‘Walkies!’ she cried, clipping it onto the collar around Steven’s neck. And, to snorts of derision from the assembled hangers-on, she began pulling her host around the room. ‘Fetch!’ she ordered him. ‘Beg!’

‘Please, Madam,’ Steve obliged wretchedly, earning himself a roar of laughter from the assembled company. He’d learned long ago to be sure to address Darren as ‘Sir’ and to call Sarah ‘Madam’.

He was miserable, but he didn’t know what to do. They were the only friends he had there and he was completely terrified of them. When Darren told him to tell his social worker that he didn’t want to see anyone from the social services department any more, he complied. By this stage he’d do anything to avoid another beating.

Sarah Bullock’s mother too had been in touch with social services, anxious to see what could be done about her increasingly distant daughter. She also called the police: ‘Can’t you just go in there and arrest her for anything? I don’t care what it is, just as long as she gets away from Darren Stewart!’

But nothing was done.

Wednesday, 5 July 2006 was another long, aimless day for the occupants of Blowing House Close. Time hangs heavily on your hands when you’re sitting in a tiny, cramped room, where the summer sun barely filters through the cloud of cigarette smoke in the alcohol-soaked air. By the time night fell, they were restless and looking for some entertainment.

‘See him, he’s a paedophile, he is,’ Darren was talking to his friend Martin Pollard and gesturing his head towards a
nervous-looking
Steve. ‘Aren’t you? Admit it, you’re a paedophile.’

Steven Hoskin, whose IQ ranked him in the bottom half per cent of the population, didn’t even know what a paedophile was.

Now Sarah Bullock was catching onto the game.

‘Go on, admit it,’ she said, advancing menacingly towards Steven. ‘Admit you’re a nonce!’

And so began the final, most harrowing part of the game that started with boredom and ended in murder: over the course of that evening, Steven Hoskin was beaten and tortured like never before. Forced under duress to confess to being a paedophile, he was then made to sit against the wall under graffiti spelling out messages such as ‘should be hung’ and ‘scum’.

Martin Pollard really did believe Sarah and Darren’s lies about their host. As the alcohol flowed what started out as a bit of fun was deadly serious.

‘Paedophiles like you are disgusting – you don’t deserve to live!’

Who was it who said that? No matter. The little court of three was quick to agree: Steven Hoskin should die.

‘Here, swallow these. Come on, do it!’

Steven, by now in terrible pain and terrified of what was going to happen, looked in confusion at the handful of white pills he was being offered.

‘I… I don’t want to…’

‘Who cares what you want, just swallow them!’

Whimpering softly, Steven began to swallow the paracetamol tablets one by one, gagging as he forced them down his dry throat. Fifty pills. Sixty. And still they kept coming.

When he’d taken about seventy pills, the helpless man
was frog-marched through the door of the flat out into the July night.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked, wonderingly as the group headed towards the viaduct at the top of the town. ‘I don’t want to go up there!’

In truth Steven was terrified of heights, a fact his tormentors knew very well.

‘Keep moving and don’t make a sound,’ they warned him, knowing only too well how gullible he was. ‘There are snipers everywhere and they’ll shoot you if they hear you.’

A vulnerable, terrified man, his body sluggish with painkillers, was made to walk up to a viaduct and climb over the railings, his legs dangling thirty metres above the town. Then a 16-year-old girl, high on power, stamped on his hands where they gripped onto the bars, his knuckles white and straining with the effort of clinging on.

Steven Hoskin plummeted to the ground, his body slamming down onto the roof of a car parked underneath. He died instantly.

Afterwards, Sarah Bullock and Darren Stewart returned to the flat, still exhilarated by what they’d just done.

Darren wanted to tidy the place up, but his young girlfriend had other ideas.

‘Let’s have a bit of playtime,’ she said suggestively. ‘Come on, I want to play.’

So they had sex in the very flat where just hours before they’d sentenced an innocent man to death, under walls still dripping with painted messages of hate.

At their trial exactly one year later, Darren Stewart and Sarah Bullock were both found guilty of murder and sentenced to twenty-five and ten years respectively. Martin Pollard received an eight-year sentence for manslaughter. In court, Darren Stewart recounted how he had called police claiming he was worried about Steven who had been tormented and taken away by ‘vicious strangers’. But under questioning they all soon confessed to having taken part in tormenting him, although they blamed one another for his actual death.

The judge at Truro Crown Court was damning in his summing-up of the couple whose relationship had been cemented by their mutual sadism and power-lust. ‘Your victim was highly vulnerable,’ he told them. ‘He was subjected to sustained physical and mental attack, in which he was violently assaulted, degraded and humiliated.

‘You literally bullied him to death!’

T
he man and the woman stand together in the dock. He is middle-aged and short with startling curly hair that adds extra weight to his already disproportionately large head. His features are strange, curiously unformed, like those of a child whose looks have yet to be defined. When he gives a nervous smile, his pale blue eyes are swallowed up in the soft, pasty pillow of his face. Even the gap between his two front teeth seems child-like – the kind of smile you see in a million
gap-toothed
school photos. The cheap suit he wears looks incongruous, like a small boy forced to dress up for a wedding he doesn’t wish to attend.

The woman, on the other hand, is solid, heavy, and though a decade younger than the man, her bulky presence and drab, shapeless navy cardigan make her seem older than her years. Her
pale, doughy face is dominated by huge purple-framed glasses, through which her large, dull brown eyes stare out impassively around the courtroom. Every now and then a pudgy hand goes up to smooth back her straight, mousy brown hair, cut unflatteringly just below the ears. The small mouth, a tiny slit in the wide, flat expanse of her face, is set hard as her gaze slides almost disinterestedly over the court officials. The one person she never looks at is the man sharing the dock with her.

As the proceedings draw to a close, the police officers flanking the man prepare to lead him away, but he resists and his blue eyes fix with desperate, silent appeal on the woman slightly in front of him. Tentatively, just like the over-grown child he resembles, he reaches a hand out towards her. Immediately the police officers step forward to push him away – but not before he has seen her reaction.

The woman in the dock has recoiled from his touch.

Six months later, the man is dead, his heart as broken as the lives of all the people he harmed. He has hung himself with a noose made up of strips of his bed-sheets attached to a ventilation grille above his prison cell door; he leaves behind a note for the woman: ‘All I have is my life,’ he tells her. ‘I will give it to you, my darling. When you are ready, come to me. I will be waiting for you.’

To the outside world, Fred and Rose West were a travesty of humanity, a stain on the lives of all who came into contact with them, but in their eyes they were the two star players in the greatest love story ever told. This was to prove the most deadly delusion.
‘Come on, let’s do it again.’ Rose’s deft, questing hands, were already working their way expertly over his body, but Fred West was spent. Lying back on the unmade bed in the cramped, shabby caravan, he glanced over at the girl by his side. Lumpy, with the pallid complexion of a person whose diet relies more on sweets than fruit and vegetables, she wasn’t the most attractive lover he’d had, but Rose Letts had something else, something worth more to Fred than looks or sparkling conversation. Just 15, she was only girl he’d ever met whose sexual appetite equalled, even surpassed, his own.

Rose’s libido was so high that sometimes they even had to draft in other men to come to the caravan to satisfy her. The extra money these blokes paid to lie down in the narrow bunk came in handy, but she’d have done it for nothing – Rose was just like that.

Fred wasn’t born yesterday. He knew the rumours about Rose – that she wasn’t quite there and her own family called her ‘Dozy Rosie’ on account of the way she’d rock quietly to herself when she was alone; also, that her father was a violent bully who might even had slept with his own daughter, but none of that mattered to him. What Fred West liked more than anything else in the world, was sex. And in Rose, he’d met his match.

By this stage, in 1968, Fred was already 27, with two small children to look after – one of his own, the other the result of his wife Rena’s affair with an Asian bus conductor – and a deep, dark secret. The year before he’d got into, what he called to himself ‘a bit of bother’: he’d entered into a relationship with a
woman called Anna McFall, who’d acted as an unofficial nanny for his children after his prostitute wife Rena had gone back to her native Scotland.

Problems started when Rena was brought back to Gloucester in November 1966 to face petty theft charges and she and Fred got back together. Instead of quietly withdrawing from the scene, Anna became more and more possessive, wanting him to kick Rena out and commit to her. The final straw came when Anna got pregnant and began pushing to become the next Mrs West. She wrote letters to her family in Scotland, boasting about her wonderful new boyfriend and how happy they were together. Fred couldn’t afford another baby, and he certainly didn’t want to be married again. He panicked.

In July 1967, Anna McFall disappeared. It would be more than a quarter of a century later before the world heard any more about her – when her dismembered bones were dug up in Finger Post Field, just inside the Gloucestershire county border. The skeleton of her unborn baby was by her side. They were Fred West’s first victims.

So this was the man the young Rose Letts fell in love with: a man living in a caravan with two small children he didn’t know what to do with; a man many locals considered to have been irreversibly brain-damaged by a motorbike accident when he was just 17; a man of prodigious sexual appetite but little or no understanding of human relationships, a man who had already killed… who had realised two important things as a result. First, that sometimes the dead can just disappear without seeming to
be missed, like a stone dropping soundlessly through the surface of the water, and second, that murder was exciting.

In November 1969, to the disapproval of her parents, Rose moved in with Fred. By this stage Rena had disappeared again and he was once more on his own with the two children –
6-year-old
Charmaine and 5-year-old Anna Marie. Rose was put in charge of them, but at just 16 herself and emotionally immature, she was incapable of looking after anyone. Everything the little girls did annoyed her – why did they have to make so much noise? And did they have to be so messy?

Charmaine, in particular, wound her up. ‘She’s not even your own daughter,’ Rose would complain to Fred. ‘And yet you’re supposed to look after her, feed her and put up with her moods. It’s not right!’

At just 17, Rose gave birth to a baby of her own, a dark-haired child called Heather, and the family moved to a shabby rented flat in a draughty old house in Midland Road, Gloucester. Once there, the situation got even worse. Fred was sent to prison for a spell for theft and Rose, left on her own with three small children, found it impossible to cope. Increasingly she took her temper out on Charmaine, moving on from slapping her round the face to hitting her with kitchen implements or smashing crockery over her head. With her sexual playmate out of reach behind bars, devising punishments for Charmaine became one of Rose’s secret pleasures. She’d tie the little girl’s hands behind her back with a leather belt and beat her trembling legs with a wooden spoon or leave her tied to the bed, unattended, for hours. On one occasion
the little girl was admitted to hospital with a bizarre wound on her left ankle that was never fully explained. Teachers who’d dismissed Rose Letts as unimaginative and dull would have been shocked at the inventiveness the girl displayed when it came to the chastisement of 8-year-old Charmaine.

‘Darling, about Char,’ Rose wrote in May 1971 in one of her frequent love letters to Fred. ‘I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it?’ Rose was just 17 at this point, but already she was showing signs of the woman she would become. A woman with so little empathy for the suffering of others that she thought 8-year-old girls enjoyed being brutalised, a woman with so great a level of
self-pity
that she considered herself to be the only victim in the increasingly sadistic punishments she doled out.

One day, just as with Anna McFall, little Charmaine went missing from home. When her sister Anna Marie came home from school and asked where she was, Rose told her that Rena, her mother, had come for her during the day. The same story was repeated to the girl’s school and anyone else who bothered to ask, although in reality there were precious few who were interested enough.

But Charmaine was dead, a victim of one of Rose’s rages that had spiralled out of control. Her corpse was hidden in the cellar. Fred didn’t mind very much. His was a world in which children were plentiful and disposable, a world where people came and went and no one cared much either way. When he was released from prison a short while later, he and Rose took the child’s
body and buried it outside in the muddy yard near the back door. A builder by trade, neighbours were used to seeing Fred tinkering about with tools in the back yard, and he knew how and where to dig a hole without raising suspicion.

And so death becomes a glue that binds a couple together, murder an unremarkable fact of life, and other people just bit players to be manipulated at will, then cast aside. A twisted kind of love is cultivated from the rotten carcass of anger, bloodlust and contempt, and weeds grow over a forgotten child.

Now both Fred and Rose had killed, each of them learning three important lessons along the way: that murder was easier than you might think, that your mind cuts off from it allowing you to sleep at night, and that even while a body moulders in a dank basement, the world won’t notice a thing.

Life at Midland Road became increasingly chaotic. Rose, who’d developed a taste for prostitution back in the caravan, entertained clients in one room of the house. Fred found it exciting to listen to the noises coming through the thin walls and he even installed spy holes so he could watch her ‘at work’. He introduced Rose to bondage, to sex toys, to lesbian sex, to threesomes… and she took to it all, with a greed that surpassed even his own.

Little Anna Marie grew used to the comings and goings of strange men in the night, but she never accustomed herself to Rose’s temper that could flare up in seconds, like a lit match on a petrol-soaked rag.

‘Can’t I come with you?’ she’d beg her father if she saw him
getting ready to leave, desperate not to be alone with her stepmother. But though Fred loved his daughter almost as much as he was capable of loving anyone, he’d never, ever take her side against his lover, his Rosie.

No wonder poor Anna Marie, trying hard to make herself invisible so as not to incur Rose’s wrath, would dream of her real mother coming to find her, just as she had Charmaine. Maybe Fred would come with them and the four of them could be a proper family again like the other kids at school seemed to have, with mums who helped you with your homework and invited your friends round for tea, who didn’t go mad if you dropped something or wet the bed or just happened to look at them in a way they didn’t like.

Though her heart thumped expectantly at every knock at the door, Anna Marie was always disappointed. Her real mum would never turn up on the doorstep with arms open wide and Charmaine grinning by her side, but it wasn’t that she didn’t care. Rena West (née Costello) did indeed come from Scotland and was looking for her daughters in August 1971. She asked around in the village of Much Marcle, where Fred had grown up close, some said unnaturally so, to his mother Daisy. Now Daisy was dead, but her husband and another son still lived there and they told Fred that his estranged wife was looking for him.

‘What’ll I tell Rena?’ Fred asked Rose anxiously. ‘She’s bound to ask all about Char.’ Deep down, they both knew the answer to that one.

Some time in August 1971, Fred arranged to pick up Rena
and take her to see her daughters. Climbing into his car, she was full of anticipation for the emotional reunion ahead. But when the car eventually pulled up in front of Midland Road in the middle of the night, Rena didn’t watch anxiously out of the window, patting her hair nervously and hoping to make a good impression on the daughters she’d travelled so far to see, nor did she leap out before the engine was even stilled, calling their names. Rena West was already dead.

More than two decades later, her body would be found buried in a field not far from Fred’s childhood home. She’d been dismembered, limb sliced neatly from limb, head from neck.

Fred and Rose were married in January 1972 and shortly afterwards moved to a new home: 25 Cromwell Street, later known throughout the world as the House of Horrors. A tall, narrow and ramshackle house in a shabby inner city street peopled by students, transients and prostitutes, drug users and dole fraudsters, its long, narrow back garden was bordered on one side by the red brick wall of a Seventh Day Adventist Church, and on the other by a row of tall fir trees, whose long shadows cast the garden into almost permanent twilight. Once full of family homes, most of the houses in the street had now been converted into flats or bed-sits. They were temporary, uncared-for places, where people closed their curtains against the daylight and tried not to meet anyone’s eye as they stood on their doorstep, fumbling with their keys. For more than twenty years, this would be home to the Wests.

To outsiders, the West family at number 25 were the epitome
of an ordinary working-class family. Dad was out at work most of the time and whenever he wasn’t, he was often to be spotted making alterations and home improvements on the first property they’d ever owned. The children – and there seemed to be a new one born every year – were taken to school on time and collected every day by their mother, a plain,
matronly-looking
woman in tent-like dresses with little-girl socks.

True, there were a lot people coming in and out at strange hours, but that could be explained by the fact that the Wests took in lodgers in the upper rooms – the extra income helped pay off the mortgage on the house. Like many hard-working families, they appeared to be doing what they could to better themselves, and who could blame them?

In reality, the Wests were unlike any other family. Inside number 25, children were growing up in a house that was far from a home. Rose now had a special room where she entertained her male clients – equipped with sex aids, pornographic videos and, of course, a spy hole through which her husband could watch what went on. If she was bored, she might wander
half-dressed
up to the lodgers’ rooms to have sex with one of the young men whose meagre rent helped to boost the family coffers.