The Jigsaw Man (52 page)

‘You have to understand the nature of their relationship. His bond is enormously powerful. Look at it this way: many men look at pornographic magazines and find themselves indulging in the fantasy of meeting a sexually uninhibited woman; someone who is not only willing but will egg them on and introduce them to activities that their dear wife at home would never engage in.

‘Mr West didn’t have to wish. He had this already. He had a partner who could reinforce, extend, develop and amplify his fantasies almost beyond the imagination of the ordinary person - not just once, but again and again and again. His wife wasn’t just passive, she shared in the thinking and feeling, taking their sexual games to new heights. This makes her an unimaginably valuable asset to him and he would never do anything to harm such an asset. He will never give her up.’

Moore asked, ‘What about Rose? Is she likely to talk?’ ‘I doubt it. From what I’ve seen, she’s more intelligent than he is and more psychologically robust. Everything you’ve told me about her suggests she’s a woman who thinks that if she holds her nerve she’ll get through. She doesn’t have the same need for reinforcement and approval as Mr West. It doesn’t mean that she’s more wicked; it simply means she can go for longer without external praise.’

Hazel asked, ‘Does she know Fred won’t give her away?’

‘Absolutely. I think she knows Fred much better than he knows her. They have plumbed the depths of human depravity together and she knows what she represents to him. She knows that he’ll never give her up.’

Moore said, ‘So she’ll just try to hold on?’

‘I think the only chance of getting her to make any admissions is if Fred West can be helped to acknowledge her participation. If he starts disclosing details about Rose being involved, then she may begin to talk. She won’t confess. She’ll blame him and claim that she was the unwilling, passive, intimidated participant. I doubt if she will ever acknowledge any responsibility - certainly not before being convicted.’

This is one reason why I had fewer concerns about her safety when Bennett asked me whether either suspect was likely to harm themselves. I told him that Rosemary was likely to stick it out to the end, confident that she could beat the charges. Mr West, however, was a different story. While he remained in police custody and enjoyed being centre stage of the interviewing process, he’d be fine, I said, particularly if he thought that Rosemary was still committed to him. But once the interviews were over and he was moved to a remand prison, he would begin to feel increasingly isolated; this would be magnified if he believed that his wife was repudiating him, not in neutral terms but in language that portrayed him as an inhuman monster.

Knowing his personality and his approach to interviewing, particularly the completely implausible but recklessly impassioned way he insisted that Rosemary played no part in the murders - I knew how important she was to him. I explained that when he learned that she was rejecting him and he realized that there would be no contact between them again in their entire lives, I knew the risk of self-harm would increase dramatically.

*

Although Rosemary West had maintained her innocence, I had no doubt of her full involvement. On the purely logistical side, nine bodies had been cut up in her house - probably in the kitchen area - stored for a period of time and then buried in the garden. Each of the holes in the house was up to eight feet deep and dug by hand in heavy black clay. Where was she while all this was happening? She had to know about it - anything else strains the bounds of credibility.

More importantly, there was the firm evidence that she shared the same sexually deviant psychopathy as her husband. She had an enormous sex drive, sleeping with dozens of men and enjoying the knowledge that her husband was listening. She decided when her daughters were ready to be initiated into sex and supervised the penetration. And when Caroline Owens was abducted, it was Mrs West who seemed to be in charge - choreographing the torture and abuse.

On 20 April, Rosemary was arrested and charged with twice raping a 13-year-old girl and also an assault involving an eight-year-old boy. Eventually she would be jointly charged with nine murders, including that of Charmaine West, whose body was found in a former coal bunker at 25 Midland Road on 4 May.

Three weeks earlier the remains of Charmaine’s mother, Rena Costello, had been uncovered in a cornfield near to where the family had been living in a caravan in 1969. Ground penetrating radar had been used in the search.

On my last visit to Gloucester on 18 May I learned of the interviews with Rosemary. As predicted, she gave little away, acknowledging her many lovers but refusing to admit any responsibility for what had taken place in her home. She was able to describe how an ordinary loving mother should behave and claimed this is what she had always been.

When told of the allegations by Anne Marie, her stepdaughter, that she had been raped by her father and sexually abused by her stepmother from the age of eight, Rosemary denied all knowledge and said that Fred might have been involved. Pressed further, she claimed, ‘I only did what I was made to do. Fred organized it all. Fred may have made Anne Marie do it, I didn’t.’

Then she began to say, ‘no comment’ and repeated this answer through hours of interviews. Even so, the interviewers continued questioning her, never browbeating or eroding her will, simply stating their concerns and carefully setting out the case against her.

Meanwhile, Frederick had begun to accept and acknowledge more of what he had done. He was able to describe how he picked up girls in his van and brought them back to the house. But he claimed that sex had been at their request and occasionally they wanted it rough and unfortunately the girls had died. Rosemary had no idea.

Early in June a twelfth body, that of Anna McFall, aged twenty-two, was found on the edge of a massive dig at Fingerpost Field, Kempley, near where West’s first wife had been found. Anna, from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, had worked briefly as the Wests’ nanny after arriving in Gloucester in 1967. A postmortem showed that she was eight months pregnant when she died.

Finally, almost four months after it began, the digging was over.

When the lawnmower engine fell silent I could hear Marilyn calling me to the telephone. From the look on her face I could tell that another Sunday afternoon had been hijacked.

Within twenty minutes, showered and changed, I was on my way to Nottingham. A new-born baby had been abducted from the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) two days earlier, Friday 1 July, and the hunt had become a national story.

Detective Superintendent Harry Shepherd, the officer in charge, hadn’t been able to disguise the urgency in his voice. He was operating in real time, knowing that one wrong decision could lead to the death of a child.

On the fifty mile drive north to Nottingham I felt slightly uncomfortable because I knew so little about the abduction. I hadn’t seen the Sunday papers that morning, which carried the story on the front pages. The parents must be devastated, I thought, and my mind drifted back to when Emma and Ian were born. Both were delivered at home - not so unusual back then before the health service began encouraging women to have their babies in hospital so that complications could be better managed.

We nearly lost Emma. She was born looking like a marble doll showing no signs of life. The midwife, who hadn’t wanted to come out on such a foggy night, put her to one side assuming there was no hope. Marilyn, ill after a complicated labour, sensed something was wrong. I was filled with a deep fear that I was going to lose both my wife and daughter.

The midwife was preparing to remove the baby, when the GP arrived and told her to hold on. He ensured Marilyn was safe and then started working on Emma who had apparently been born in shock with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around her neck. It took a long time as he blew air into her tiny lungs and massaged her chest until finally she breathed and her colour began to change as she came to life.

We invest so much of ourselves into our children; we are wired that way and it makes the sense of loss enormous if something goes wrong. Marilyn didn’t sleep for the first forty-eight hours because she was so afraid that Emma was going to die. I hooked up a bicycle lamp for lighting and she lay by the edge of the cot in our room.

Over the years I’ve had to assess and treat many mothers, and sometimes fathers, who have lost children at birth or shortly afterwards and I know that the consequences can be life-altering. The tragedy can have been decades earlier but the impact is still with them; some are still grieving, others have never been able to grieve openly.

At West Bridgford police station the incident room had been set up on the top floor. Like most of them, it had a makeshift feel as if put together with bits and bobs in a rush. Computer cables snaked across the floor and desks had been pulled together. But most of all I saw paper, piles and piles of paper, and it was clear that it didn’t matter how many people there were, the paper was coming in faster than they could process it.

By comparison, Harry Shepherd’s office looked positively spotless. He is a very gentle, quite heavy-set man - which makes him look shorter than he really is - with a well-trimmed beard mottled with grey. He’s also very softly spoken, sharing one of my idiosyncrasies, which means we sometimes have trouble hearing each other. It does, however, help draw people closer, as they lean forward to catch what’s being said.

‘At ten o’clock last Friday morning, Mrs Karen Humphries, a local community midwife, gave birth to a baby daughter at the Queen’s Medical Centre. Her husband Roger was present and stayed with mother and baby when they were transferred down to a small side-room on ward B27 …’

Shepherd gave a very detailed account, explaining how Roger had left the hospital at 11.30 a.m. and gone to pick up the couple’s three-year-old son Charlie who was eager to see his new baby sister. They returned three hours later and joined Karen in the side-room. The baby, to be called Abbie, lay in a cot at the side of the bed in a cream-coloured hospital nightie and a pink shawl.

Shortly after 3.00 p.m., Karen got out of bed and walked along the corridor to phone her mother. A few seconds later a woman entered the room dressed in what appeared to be a nurse’s uniform. She told Roger that the baby needed a routine hearing test and asked him when Karen was coming back. Then she left, saying that she’d come back in fifteen minutes.

When Karen returned to the room, she went straight to the bathroom before Roger could mention the test. As she disappeared from view, the door opened again and the same nurse said, ‘Is it all right if I do that hearing test now? It will only take a couple of minutes.’ She lifted Abbie out of the cot and calmly walked away.

Karen reappeared and was immediately suspicious. Being a midwife, she knew that new-born babies don’t require hearing tests. She walked along the corridor to the nurses’ station and it soon became clear that Abbie hadn’t been taken by a member of staff.

Shepherd unfolded a plan of the hospital and pointed out the maternity ward and the various corridors and stairwells that led to the main hospital entrance about 270 yards away. I’d visited the QMC before for clinical meetings and knew the general layout.

‘The abductor must have entered the ward through these double doors and passed the nurses’ station to reach the side wards,’ he said and then pointed to a nearby lavatory. ‘We found a discarded blue uniform here.

‘She didn’t waste time. Within five minutes they were searching the hospital room by room and security guards were outside stopping buses and talking to pedestrians.’

A middle-aged couple leaving the hospital, Jim and Julie Morris, had been passed by a woman in the underpass leading from the main entrance to Derby Road at about 3.00 p.m. She had been walking quickly and carrying a baby in an odd way, very low on her stomach.

Mr Morris told police, ‘She was five yards away and I saw a little pink leg sticking out from a blanket and an identity bracelet. The woman seemed nervous but I didn’t think anything was wrong until she made to get into a red car, possibly a Ford Fiesta, but it was a ruse. She carried on walking very fast.’

The Morrises were worried and returned to the hospital to report the incident. By then staff were already looking outside the hospital but didn’t realize the abductor had changed her clothes. She was now wearing a green top, half-length dark grey leggings and a pair of black plastic sunglasses.

Roger Humphries described the woman as white, in her early thirties, five feet two inches to five feet four inches tall with long flowing dark hair - possibly a wig. She had a pale complexion and local accent. He remembered seeing her earlier when he returned to the hospital with Charlie at about 2.30 p.m. As they walked along the main corridor outside ward B27, the nurse was about sixty feet in front of him, walking in the same direction. Although he only saw her for a few seconds, he remembered her because of her distinctive hair. He also noticed she had full or fat calves and thought she was wearing tights but couldn’t remember the colour, although not black.

Shepherd slid two grainy black-and-white photographs across the table. The hospital had twenty-nine security videos and the police had closely studied the footage before isolating two images. The first frame, taken a few minutes after 3.00 p.m., showed the back view of a plump, dark-haired woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform walking along a corridor towards the main doors of the hospital entrance. The second image, taken by the same camera twenty minutes later, appeared to show the same woman, now dressed in civilian clothes and possibly carrying something in front of her.

‘She was probably doing a dry-run …’ said Shepherd, indicating the first picture,’… surveying her escape route.’

Possibly, I thought, but I had my doubts. This woman already knew the hospital. It was entirely possible that she’d been there in the days beforehand, surveying the possibilities. ‘It’s more likely she was building up her confidence,’ I said. ‘Or the moment wasn’t right, so she kept walking because she knows that if she’s static someone is more likely to notice her and ask her questions.’