The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (54 page)

When she was sixteen, Heather confided to a schoolfriend that her father made a habit of coming into her bedroom at night and forcing sex on her.
When she left school, she hoped to find a job in a holiday camp in Torquay, and when this fell through, she cried all night.
The following day – 19 June 1987 – she vanished.
Her parents told her brothers and sisters that she had run away with a lesbian, and occasionally Rose pretended to answer the phone to Heather, and held long conversations with her.

And so life continued, apparently normally, until that day in August 1992, when West raped another of his daughters, and was arrested.
The children were taken into care, and one of them was overheard to say that his sister was buried under the patio . . .

Now Fred West was under arrest, the newspapers lost no time in exploring his background.
They learned that he had been born in 1941 and brought up on a farm cottage in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, until he was forced to leave home at the age of nineteen after being charged with impregnating his thirteen-year-old sister.
West’s father Walter had, it seemed, also felt that his daughters were his own sexual property, often telling them: ‘I made you; I can do what I like with you.’ West’s mother, Daisy, had retaliated by taking her son into her bed when he was twelve.

But the crucial events of Fred West’s adolescence were undoubtedly two head accidents, the first of which took place when he was seventeen, and crashed into a wall on his motorbike.
He was unconscious for nearly a week, and his family noticed the change in his disposition: he became broody and silent, with explosive outbursts of temper.
When he was nineteen, he put his hand up the skirt of a girl as they were standing on the platform of a fire escape; she pushed him down, and he was unconscious for 24 hours.

Head injury has played an important part in the lives of many murderers, including Joseph Vacher, Fritz Haarmann, Earle Nelson, Albert Fish, Raymond Fernandez, Richard Speck, Gary Heidnik, John Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas and Randy Kraft, and one writer states that Ted Bundy was injured at birth by a forceps delivery.
It seems certain that the two head injuries were responsible for turning Fred West into a serial killer.

It was unfortunate that a sex maniac like Fred West should have met a nymphomaniac like Rose Letts.
Twelve years his junior, she was born in Devon in 1953; her father, an electrician, was a typical ‘Right Man’ who treated his wife and family with brutal harshness.
Bill Letts was also a pedophile who is believed to have initiated a sexual relationship with his daughter in her early years.
When Rose was fourteen, she seduced her eleven-year-old brother Graham.
Soon after this, she had an affair with a 30-year-old man.
Rose was already fully sexually experienced when she met Fred West at the age of fifteen, in 1969.

He had been married to Scots born Rena Costello since 1962; she had been a juvenile delinquent and a prostitute.
After a period of living in Glasgow, where Fred worked as an ice-cream vendor, they had moved to a caravan near Gloucester.
It was there that West took a job as a butcher – a job that must have intensified his obsession with dismemberment.

Rena was already pregnant – with Charmaine – when she met Fred; Charmaine’s father was an Asian bus driver.
When, in the spring of 1966, Rena returned to Glasgow because of Fred’s violence and brutality, her friend Anna McFall stayed behind and became West’s mistress.
She was pregnant with West’s baby when she vanished in the spring of 1967; her body was found in Fingerpost Field, near Much Marcle, in June 1994.
She was almost certainly the first of West’s victims.

The second, West later confessed, was a fifteen-year-old waitress named Mary Bastholm, who worked in a Gloucester cafe where West was doing some building work; she vanished on 6 January 1968, and her body has never been found.

In the following year, West met Rosemary Letts, who had just left school.
He was living in a caravan in her home village, Bishop’s Cleeve, and she soon became his mistress.
She seems to have agreed to take part in West’s favourite perversion, voyeurism, in this case allowing Fred to watch while she had sex with his workmates.
By the time they moved into 25 Midland Road, Gloucester, in the spring of 1970, the sixteen-year-old Rose was already a prostitute.
She confided this to a neighbour, Liz Agius, a young mother who lived next door.
Fred also confided to Liz that he would like to tie her up, beat her, and make love to her.

One day, after a cup of tea, Liz Agius felt oddly drowsy and fell deeply asleep.
When she woke up, she was naked in bed with both the Wests, and Fred admitted that he had raped her while she was drugged.
Apparently Mrs Agius was not too offended, for she remained a friend of the Wests for long after.

In November 1970, West was sentenced to prison for the theft of some tyres.
It was while he was in prison that eight-year-old Charmaine vanished – almost certainly strangled by Rose in a fit of temper.
(Rose’s own children, Stephen and Mae, later wrote a book called
Inside 25 Cromwell Street,
in which they talk about her ungovernable temper, and how she would administer brutal beatings to both of them – apparently achieving some sexual enjoyment from it.)

In September 1972, the Wests moved into 25 Cromwell Street.
Just over two months later, they abducted Caroline Raine, beginning their career of sadism and rape.

After West’s arrest, his son Stephen often visited him in prison.
West had become lachrymose and sentimental.
At first he seemed to believe that he might escape with a ten-year sentence, and be back living in Cromwell Street in seven years.
As he finally came to grasp that he faced a life in prison, he became increasingly depressed.
He admitted to Stephen that there were many bodies buried elsewhere, and claimed that he had tortured and raped his victims on a farm, only having sex with them after they were dead.
But this could well have been an attempt to protect Rose, who had by now been charged with ten of the murders, although West insisted that she knew nothing about them.
He was also upset that Rose seemed to have turned against him, announcing publicly that she hated him and wished him dead.

On New Year’s Day, 1995, West made the ultimate sacrifice for Rose, and hanged himself in Winson Green prison, Birmingham.
He told her in a letter found in his cell: ‘I haven’t got you a present.
All I have is my life.
I will give it to you . . .’

Rose West’s solicitor announced to the press that the case against her had always been flimsy, and that now it was flimsier still.
It certainly seemed that the evidence against her was purely circumstantial.
But the police knew something of which the general public were unaware: that Rose had taken part in the rape of Caroline Raine and ‘Miss X’, as well as playing an active part in sexual assaults on Anne Marie.
The DPP was fairly certain that when these facts were known, a jury would have no difficulty in deciding that Rose West had played an active part in the murders.

They were correct.
When the trial opened in Winchester on 3 October 1995, the defence, led by Richard Ferguson QC, made a determined attempt to have this evidence excluded.
The judge, Mr Justice Mantell, rejected this, pointing out that if one of Bluebeard’s wives had escaped, her evidence would have been highly relevant to the prosecution’s case.

This decision was the turning point of the trial.
It would last seven weeks, until 22 November, but in effect it was all over.
Once these three women gave their evidence, revealing Rose West as an active participant in sadism and rape, it became impossible to believe that she had known nothing of the murders at Cromwell Street.
On 22 November 1995, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Inevitably, the West case brings to mind that of Gerald Gallego and Charlene Williams (described in Chapter 6).
When this book was written, the only account of the case was a book called
All His Father’s Sins,
by Ray Biondi and Walt Hecox.
Since then,
Venom in the Blood
by Eric van Hoffmann offers an in-depth study that makes it clear that Charlene was not the innocent victim that Biondi and Hecox suggest – that, on the contrary, her part in the murders was not unlike that of Rosemary West in the Gloucester case.
According to Hoffmann, Charlene Williams was a bisexual nymphomaniac, and it was she who suggested kidnapping girls.
All the victims were forced to have sex with Charlene as well as Gallego – Charlene liked to bite one of the girls while the other brought her to climax with oral sex, and in one case bit off the victim’s nipple.
As absurd as it sounds, Gallego emerges at the end of the book as her victim.

Ivan Milat

Between December 1989 and April 1992, seven hitch-hikers disappeared in southern Australia.
They were a Melbourne couple, James Gibson and Deborah Everist (both 19), who vanished on 30 December 1989, German backpacker Simone Schmidl, 20, who vanished on 20 January 1991, German backpackers Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habscheid, 20, who vanished on 26 December 1991, and British backpackers Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters (both 22), who vanished on 18 April 1992.
The bodies of the two British victims were found six months later, on 19 and 20 September, in the Belanglo State Forest, near Bowral; Caroline had been shot ten times in the head, and Joanne stabbed fourteen times in the chest and neck – suggesting two murderers.
Both had been raped, and the fact that there were no defensive wounds on the hands suggested that they had been tied up.

A year later, on 5 October 1993, the skeletal remains of James Gibson and Deborah Everist were discovered near a fire trail in the Belanglo State Forest, and a task force to hunt the ‘Backpacker Killer’ was set up.
On 1 November 1993, sniffer dogs discovered Simone Schmidl’s badly decomposed body, and three days later, the bodies of Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habscheid were found.
Anja had been decapitated, and it seemed that she had been forced to kneel while the killer cut off her head in a kind of ritual execution.

The hunt for the Backpacker Killer made headlines for the next six months, but little progress was made.
The break in the case came when 40-year-old Richard Milat commented at work that there were more bodies still to be found, and that killing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread.
The workmate reported this comment to the police, and as a result, on 22 May 1994, police surrounded the home of Ivan Milat, Richard Milat’s 50-year-old brother, in Eaglevale, a Sydney suburb, and arrested him.
A week later he was charged with the backpacker murders.
In his garage, police found evidence to link Milat to the murders, including a bloodstained rope of a type used to bind some of the victims, a sleeping bag belonging to Deborah Everist, a camera like the one owned by Caroline Clarke, and spent cartridges like those found near Caroline Clarke.
Then a crucial witness came forward.
On 25 January 1990, 24-year-old Paul Onions, a British student from Birmingham, was offered a lift by a short, stocky man in his 40s, with narrow, slit-like eyes and a drooping moustache.
This man identified himself as ‘Bill’ and said he was Yugoslavian.
Onions was on his way to Victoria to do some fruit picking, and ‘Bill’ said he could take him as far as Canberra.
As they neared the Belanglo State Forest, the driver brought his four-wheel-drive car to a halt and produced a revolver, which he pointed at his passenger, announcing: ‘This is a robbery.’ As he bent and produced a box containing rope from under the seat, Onions leapt out and ran.
The man chased him, firing a shot and screaming for him to stop.
Just as Onions thought he had lost him, he felt a hand grab his shoulder, and they rolled on the ground.

At that moment a van came over the hill, and Onions ran in front of it.
The driver, Joanne Berry, with her four children and her sister’s child, was forced to stop.
Onions clambered through a sliding door in the back and begged her to drive on.
‘He’s got a gun.’ As they drove off, they saw the man run to his own car and drive off.

Joanne Berry took Onions to Bowral police station, where he reported the incident.
But, oddly, no action was taken, and when Onions left Australia five months later, he had still not heard a word from the police.
In fact, the report on the attack had been mislaid.

Four years later, Onions heard about the hunt for the backpacker killer, and rang the New South Wales police.
His description of ‘Bill’ proved to fit Ivan Milat, and after Milat’s arrest, Onions flew to Australia and identified Milat as his assailant.
A blue shirt found in Milat’s garage was tentatively identified by Onions as the one he left behind in Milat’s car.

Milat was a roadworker who was apparently obsessed by hunting and guns.
He was born on 27 December 1944, the son of an Australian mother and Croat father.
The family consisted of ten boys and four girls, and the boys were always in trouble with the law.
In his twenties, Milat was charged with car theft and breaking and entering, and went to prison several times.

In 1971 Milat was suddenly in more serious trouble.
He picked up two female hitch-hikers, both in their late teens.
Both women were under medication for depression, and neither noticed when Milat turned off the highway.
He stopped, produced two knives and two pieces of rope, and announced that he intended to have sex with them both, or that he would kill them.
One of the girls, aged eighteen, agreed, and allowed Milat to have sex with her on the front seat.

When Milat stopped at a petrol station, the girl ran inside and told the attendant that she had been raped, and that the driver was holding her friend.
Several employees of the station ran out, and when the other girl scrambled out of the car, Milat drove off at speed.
When he was pulled over later by police, there were no knives in the car, and although he admitted having sex with the girl, he claimed that it was with her consent.
In any case, he said, the girls were both screwy.

Milat, who was already on two charges of armed robbery – one of a bank – now fled to New Zealand, and he was not brought back and tried until 1974.
He was cleared on the various charges and freed.
(One of his brothers went to prison for the bank robbery.)