The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (53 page)

The next day, when the police returned, Fred West unexpectedly volunteered to accompany them to the police station.
In the car, he suddenly confessed to the murder of his daughter Heather.
He claimed that Heather had been jeering at him so he put his hands on her throat ‘to wipe the smirk off her face’, then realised she was dead.
He had cut up the body with a freezer knife, and later buried it at the bottom of the garden.
He even went back to show the police where he had buried it.
He told them they were wasting their time digging outside the bathroom, and directed them to the bottom of the garden.

It was not until the next day, Saturday, that the diggers smelt decaying flesh, and knew they had finally found Heather.
She had, as Fred had claimed, been dismembered; her nails, found apart from the skeleton, suggesting that they had been pulled out, either before or after death.
Certain fingers and toes were also missing.

What puzzled pathologist Dr Bernard Knight was that when he had reassembled the bones, like a jigsaw puzzle, he had a femur (thigh bone) left over.
There had to be another body down there.

Told about this, West admitted that there were two more bodies buried in the garden – one of them a former lodger, Shirley Anne Robinson, a bisexual who had been carrying his baby.
He was not sure of the name of the other, but referred to her as ‘Shirley’s mate’.
She was buried near the bathroom wall – the spot he had tried to direct the police away from.

What had happened seems clear.
Fred West had been hoping that only Heather’s remains would be found, and that he would be able to claim that it was an accident, and serve a few years in prison for manslaughter.
Now they had found the extra femur, he had to perform a quick exercise in damage limitation.
They
knew
there had to be a second body, and would certainly go on looking after they found it.
So it would be better to admit to a third body, and then hope they would stop there . . .

More digging uncovered ‘Shirley’s mate’ – in fact a schoolgirl called Alison Chambers, who had disappeared in 1979 (and who, in fact, had never known Shirley), and Shirley Anne Robinson.
Both bodies had been decapitated, both had missing fingers and toes, and Shirley’s baby had been cut from the womb.
It was becoming increasingly clear that Fred West had some morbid obsession about mutilation and dismemberment – a kind of ‘butchery complex’.

Strongly suspecting that there were more bodies, the police now decided to dig up the basement of 25 Cromwell Street – to the disgust of Rose West, who threatened to sue for damage to her property.
Five more bodies were found in the basement, and another under the floor of the outside bath-room, in what had once been the inspection pit of a garage.

West continued to insist that Rose knew nothing of the murders.
But the police had reason to believe otherwise.
In January 1973, both Wests had appeared in court on a charge of sexually assaulting and causing bodily harm to a seventeen-year-old girl called Caroline Raine.
In November 1972, Caroline had been given a lift by the Wests and offered a job as their live-in nanny.
She stayed only six weeks, because Fred talked endlessly about sex – abortion, lesbianism and group orgies – while Rose made passes at her and walked into the bathroom when she was naked.
Soon after leaving, Caroline had seen the Wests in Tewkesbury, and had accepted a lift.
Rose got in the back with her and began caressing her breasts.
When Caroline objected, Fred stopped the car and punched her unconscious.
She woke up with her hands tied with a scarf and her mouth taped.
She was taken back to Cromwell Street and stripped naked.
Fred flogged her between the thighs with the buckle end of a belt, then, while Rose performed oral sex, Fred had sex with Rose from behind.
Later, when Rose left the room, Fred raped Caroline.
But the next morning they begged her to return as their nanny.
Caroline agreed because she saw that as her only chance to escape, but called on a friend and told her what had happened.
At home, her mother, noticing her condition, persuaded her to tell the story, then rang the police.

But when Fred and Rose West appeared in court in January 1973, Caroline decided not to go through the public ordeal.
The Wests were not charged with rape, but merely with assault, and fined £50 each.

The case of Caroline Raine convinced the police that Rose was an aggressive lesbian who had probably played an active part in the murders.
This seemed confirmed by the evidence of another girl – known at the trial only as ‘Miss X’ – who had been in a children’s home in Gloucester, and met the Wests when she was thirteen.
She had regarded Rose as a kind of elder sister, and often went to 25 Cromwell Street for tea and sympathy.
Two years later, after running away from the home, she called on the Wests, and was taken by Rose into a bedroom with two naked girls.
There she was stripped by Rose, and watched while one of the girls was taped, face downward, on the bed, and penetrated anally with a vibrator.
After that, Fred West raped the girl, who was obviously terrified.
Then it was Miss X’s turn; she was also taped down to the bed, and some hard object inserted in her anus, causing her to bleed.
After that, Fred raped her vaginally, while Rose held his penis.
Eventually, Miss X was allowed to go.
She felt so angry and betrayed that six weeks later she took a can of petrol to the house, intending to set it on fire, but was unable to go through with it.

By now the police were looking into other disappearances – that of Fred’s first wife Catherine (known as Rena), Rena’s daughter Charmaine (who had last been seen in 1971, when she was eight), and that of a friend of Rena’s named Anna McFall, who had lived with Fred in a caravan in the mid-1960s, and become pregnant by him.

Fred eventually admitted to these three murders, and led the police to the bodies.
Charmaine was found buried under the floor at their previous lodging, 25 Midland Road, in Gloucester – only a stone’s throw from Cromwell Street.
Rena and Anna McFall were found buried in two adjoining fields near Fred’s childhood home in Much Marcle, Herefordshire.

When it became clear that Fred West had been in prison – for theft – at the time when Charmaine vanished, detectives concluded that Rose must have killed her, and left Fred to bury her when he came out of prison in June 1971.
It also began to seem likely that West had murdered his first wife Rena because she was trying to find out what had happened to Charmaine.

All the bodies showed signs of Fred West’s strange ‘butchery complex’, with missing fingers and toes, as well as – occasionally – other bones like kneecaps or vertebrae.

But who were the victims at Cromwell Street?
At first it was assumed that all had been lodgers of the Wests, but little by little it became clear that this was not so.

Nineteen-year-old Lynda Gough, whose body was found in the old ‘inspection pit’, was a rebellious girl who objected to her father’s attempt to dictate the kind of boyfriends she ought to go out with.
In the autumn of 1972 – when the Wests first moved into Cromwell Street – she had met one of their lodgers, Ben Stanniland, in a local cafe.
She returned to Cromwell Street and had sex with him.
Later she had sex with other lodgers.
She also became friendly with the Wests, who offered her a job as a nanny.

On 19 April 1973, she left a note for her parents saying she had found a flat, and would come and see them.
But they never saw her again.
When her mother, June Gough, heard that she knew the Wests, she called at 25 Cromwell Street.
Rose West came to the door, and Mrs Gough recognised the slippers she was wearing as Lynda’s.
But Rose claimed that Lynda had left and gone to find a job in Weston-super-Mare.

According to Geoffrey Wansell in
An Evil Love,
based on West’s own confessions, Lynda Gough became at first a willing partner in the Wests’ sexual experiments.
These soon extended into sadism and masochism.
Finally, Lynda was suspended by her ankles over a hole in the cellar floor, and sexually abused.
‘Other people may well have been invited to have sexual intercourse with this helpless girl,’ Wansell says.
Finally, Lynda was tortured.
‘Her fingers and toes were almost certainly cut off while she was conscious, and her hands and wrists shortly afterwards.
Both her kneecaps were removed, as were seven ribs and her breastbone.’ Wansell believes all this happened while she was alive – but the simple truth is that no one knows.

Not long after murdering Lynda, the Wests deflowered eight-year-old Anne Marie.
She was Fred’s eldest daughter; her mother was his first wife Rena.
One day in the summer of 1973, Anne Marie was taken down to the basement and undressed.
There, her hands were tied above her head and attached to some iron object, a gag was tied round her mouth, and her legs were tied apart.
She was in the classic pose that sadists love: the helpless victim.
Then a vibrator was inserted inside her, causing pain that seemed to go on for ever.
She looked down at a glass bowl between her legs, into which blood was dripping.
Then they left her like that while they vanished upstairs – almost certainly to have sex – before returning and repeating the torture.
When finally released, she limped away, hardly able to walk.
Rose laughed, finding it funny.
Later, she told Anne Marie: ‘All parents do it to their daughters – it’s a father’s job.’

A few weeks later, after her ninth birthday, her father began having sex with her.

The Wests’ next victim was picked up that November, as she was walking home to her grandmother’s after a visit to the cinema with a boyfriend.
She was fifteen-year-old Carole Anne Cooper, known as Caz.
Like so many of the Wests’ victims, she was the child of a broken home, and her father and stepmother had placed her in a children’s home in Worcester.
After being taken back to 25 Cromwell Street and bundled into the basement, she had been used as a sexual plaything, and probably flogged and tortured.
She was killed – most likely by a violent blow to the back of the head – and then buried in the cellar where Anne Marie had been deflowered.

The next murder seems to have been a crime of opportunity.
Twenty-one-year-old Lucy Partington was a student of medieval literature at Exeter University, and a niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis.
Her parents had separated, and she had spent Christmas with her mother and stepfather in the pleasant village of Gretton, Gloucestershire.
Gretton happens to be a few miles from Bishop’s Cleeve, where Rose West’s parents lived.
Lucy had spent the evening of 27 December 1973 with a friend in Cheltenham, and was waiting for the last bus when the Wests drove by, almost certainly returning from a day at Bishop’s Cleeve.
Lucy was offered a lift, or perhaps dragged into the car, and taken back to Cromwell Street.
It is possible that she was kept alive for several days, for on 3 January 1974, Fred West went to the local hospital with a bad cut on his hand, which may have been sustained when he was hacking up Lucy’s body.
Lucy was also buried in the cellar.
West explained the increasing stench to lodgers by blaming a broken sewer.

During the next two years, three more victims joined Caroline Cooper and Lucy Partington under the floor: 21-year-old Therese Seigenthaler, a Swiss sociology student who was hitch-hiking to north Wales, who vanished on 16 April 1974; fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard, a shop assistant, who vanished on 14 November 1974; and eighteen-year-old Juanita Mott, a factory worker who vanished on 12 April 1975.
In the past, Juanita had visited a boyfriend who lodged at 25 Cromwell Street, and may well have called there on the day she vanished.
When her body was found, she had been elaborately gagged with nylon tights and a bra, and bound with a plastic clothes line in a manner that suggested she had been suspended from a beam in the ceiling.
(Later, the police would discover holes in two beams in the Wests’ basement.)

There was now no room for any more bodies in the cellar, and we do not know whether, during the rest of 1975 and in 1976 and 1977, the Wests went on killing and buried the victims elsewhere.
But we do know that in the spring of 1977, Rose West picked up a teenage prostitute named Shirley Anne Robinson in a Gloucester pub.
Shirley was yet another product of a broken home who had been taken into care, then turned to shoplifting and prostitution.
She had had lesbian girlfriends but, like Rose, was bisexual.
Rose invited her to move into 25 Cromwell Street, where she became the lover of both Fred and Rose.
In October 1977, she realised she was pregnant, and Fred was delighted.
He told one visitor: ‘This is my wife, and this’ (pointing to Shirley) ‘is my lover.’ Shirley wrote to her father in Germany, saying that she had never been so happy, and enclosed a photograph of her and Fred, with the comment: ‘This is the man I am going to marry.’

This, fairly certainly, is why Shirley became the next victim – the first to be buried in the garden.
Fred told his brother-in-law: ‘Shirley’s mooning about me all the time . . .
She’s got to fucking go.’ On 10 May 1978, when Shirley was eight months pregnant, she vanished.
The Wests told the other lodgers that she had gone to join her father in Germany.

Sixteen-year-old Alison Chambers was the last of the Wests’ murder victims in the 1970s.
Again, she was the child of a broken home, and had been taken into care.
She ran away from the children’s home a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, and moved in with the Wests.
From there she wrote to her family saying that she had met a ‘nice, homely family’, and that when she was seventeen, she would go to live on a farm they owned.
But Alison did not live to see her seventeenth birthday.
When her body was found in the garden in 1994, many bones were missing, including her kneecaps, two ribs, ankles and toes, and some vertebrae.
West had obviously enjoyed practising his perverse trade of human butchery once more.

It was their next – possibly their final – victim who was to lead to their downfall.
Heather was the eldest child of Fred and Rose West, and – for many years – their favourite.
But when she was thirteen, her father began to ask when she intended to get rid of her virginity, and to suggest that he was the right person to do it.
He was also making advances to Heather’s sister Mae, who stopped wearing a skirt because of her father’s habit of putting his hand up it.
He also liked to remove her blouse and bra, and caress her breasts.
Heather and Mae kept watch for one another when they had a shower, for their father liked to come in and caress them around the shower curtain.
He also filled their bedroom walls with holes, so he could watch them undressing.
(Mae had lost her virginity to a male visitor when she was eight.)