Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (20 page)

Chapter 17

The House of Horrors

Name: Fred West

Accomplice: Rosemary West

Nationality: English

Number of victims: Fred was charged with 12 murders, Rosemary with 10

Favoured method of killing: rape, strangulation, dismemberment, buried the bodies in the garden

Reign of terror: 1967–94

Motive: sexual perversion

On 24 February 1994, the police turned up at 25 Cromwell Street, an ordinary three-storey house in central Gloucester in the south-west of England, with a warrant to dig up the back garden. The door was answered by Stephen West, the 20-year-old son of the householders Fred and Rosemary West. The police told him that they were looking for the body of his sister Heather, who had disappeared in May 1987 at the age of 16. Stephen’s parents had told him that she had left home to go and work in a holiday camp in Devon and he believed that she was now living in the Midlands.

‘I wanted to know the reasons why they thought Heather was buried there but they wouldn’t tell me,’ said Stephen, disingenuously. Among the surviving West children there was a running joke that Heather was buried under the patio.

‘I told one of the detectives that they were going to end up making fools of themselves,’ said Stephen. ‘He just replied “That’s up to us”.’

As the police went about their business, Stephen and his mother Rosemary tried to contact his father Fred, who was working on a building site about 20 minutes’ drive from Gloucester. Eventually they got through to him on the mobile phone in his van.

‘You’d better get back home,’ Rosemary told Fred. ‘They’re going to dig up the garden, looking for Heather.’

That was at 1.50 p.m. 56-year old Fred did not turn up at home until 5.40 p.m. It has never been explained what he was doing during the intervening four hours. Fred said that he had been painting and that he had taken ill as a result of the fumes while he was driving home. He had had to pull over and passed out at the roadside. Others suspect that he was disposing of evidence.

When Rosemary, 44, was interviewed, she told the police that Heather had been both lazy and disagreeable, and they were well rid of her. Fred said that she was a lesbian who had got involved in drugs and, like his wife, seemed unconcerned with her disappearance.

‘Lots of girls disappear, take a different name and go into prostitution,’ he said, seemingly more concerned about the mess the police were making raising the paving stones of his patio.

That night the middle-aged Fred and Rosemary West stayed up all night, talking. Geoffrey Wansel, author of
Evil Love
based on 150 hours of taped interviews with Fred West, says that they cooked up a deal. Rosemary was to keep silent, while Fred said that ‘he would ‘sort it out’ with the police the following day, and that she had nothing to worry about as he would take all the blame’.

The next morning, Fred stepped into a police car outside and told Detective Constable Hazel Savage, who had instigated the search: ‘I killed her.’

At Gloucester police station, Fred told detectives how he had murdered his daughter, cut her body into three pieces and buried them, adding: ‘The thing I’d like to stress is that Rose knew nothing at all.’

When Rose was told of Fred’s confession, she claimed that Fred had sent her out of the house the day Heather disappeared. She had no knowledge of Heather’s death.

But 20 minutes, after he had confessed, Fred West retracted everything he had said.

‘Heather’s alive and well, right,’ he insisted. ‘She’s possibly at the moment in Bahrain working for a drug cartel. She has a Mercedes, a chauffeur and a new birth certificate.’

West was adamant that the police could dig as much as they liked, but they would not find Heather. However, later that day, the excavation team unearthed human remains. When confronted with this, West again confessed to murdering his daughter. Heather, he said, was headstrong. During an argument he had slapped her for insolence, but she had laughed in his face. So he grabbed her by the throat to stop her. But he gripped too hard. She stopped breathing and turned blue. When he realised what he had done, he tried to resuscitate her, but he did not have any medical training. In desperation, he dragged her over to the bathtub and dowsed her with cold water.

It was then his story struck a disturbing note. To run cold water over her, he said, he found it necessary to take her clothes off. When the cold water treatment did not work he lifted her naked body out of the tub and dried her off. He tried to put the corpse in the large rubbish bin, but she would not fit. He realised that he would have to dismember her, but first he would have to make sure that she was dead, so he strangled her with her tights.

‘I didn’t want to touch her while she was alive,’ said West. ‘I mean, if I’d have started cutting her leg or her throat and she’d have suddenly come alive…’

According to his own account, West was squeamish. Before he began his gruesome task, he closed Heather’s eyes.

‘If somebody’s sat there looking at you, you’re not going to use a knife on that person are you?’ he told the police.

First he cut off her head. This made a ‘horrible noise… like scrunching’. It was very unpleasant. Then he began cutting her legs off. Twisting one of her feet, he heard ‘one almighty crack and the leg come loose’.

With the head and legs removed, Heather’s dismembered corpse fitted neatly into the rubbish bin. That night when the rest of the family was asleep, he said, he buried Heather in the garden, where she had lain undiscovered for seven years. Now the police had found her. But hers was the only body in the garden, he told them, so they could call off the excavation.

However, Professor Bernard Knight, the pathologist the police had called in, soon realised that among the remains the excavation team had unearthed, there were three leg bones. Clearly, there was more than one body buried in the garden at 25 Cromwell Street.

Again, Fred West was forced to make a confession, though again he tried to limit the damage. He agreed to accompany the police back to the garden and show them where he had buried the two other girls – 17-year-old Alison Chambers and 18-year-old Shirley Robinson, who had both disappeared in the late 1970s. However, he did not tell them about the six other bodies he had buried underneath the floor of the cellar and bathroom of the house. West did not want to be labelled a serial killer. He was also house-proud and did not want the police tearing apart his home.

Born in 1941 in the village of Much Marcle, some 14 miles north-west of Gloucester, Fred West was the last of a long line of Herefordshire farm labourers. His parents, Walter and Daisy West, had six children over a ten-year period who they brought up in rural poverty.

A beautiful baby with blond hair and piercing blue eyes, Fred was his mother’s favourite. A doting son, he did everything she asked. He also enjoyed a good relationship with his father, who he took as a role model. However, as he grew, he lost his good looks. His blond hair turned dark brown and curly. He had inherited some of his mother’s less attractive features – narrow eyes and a big mouth with a large gap between his front teeth. Some put this down to gypsy blood. Crueller commentators called him simian.

Scruffy and unkempt, West did not do well at school. He was a troublesome pupil and was thrashed regularly. His mother, now seriously overweight and always badly dressed, would turn up at his school to remonstrate with the teachers. This led to him being teased as a ‘mummy’s boy’. He left at 15, practically illiterate and went to work, like his father before him, as a farmhand.

By the time he was 16, West had begun to take an interest in girls. He tidied himself up a bit and aggressively pursued any woman that took his fancy. This included his next of kin: West claimed to have made his sister pregnant and that his father had committed incest with his daughters.

‘I made you so I’m entitled to have you,’ West claimed his father said. But then, West was a practised liar.

At 17, West was involved in a serious motorcycle accident. One leg was broken and was left permanently shorter than the other. He also suffered a fractured skull that left him in a coma for a week. A metal plate had to be put into his head. Dr Keith Ashcroft of the Centre for Forensic Psychophysiology in Manchester believes that damage to his frontal lobes left West with an insatiable need for sex. After the accident he was prone to sudden fits of rage and seems to have lost control over his emotions.

It was then that he met a pretty 16-year-old girl named Catherine Bernadette Costello, nicknamed Rena. She had been a petty thief since childhood and was constantly in trouble with the police. The two misfits quickly became lovers, but the relationship was halted when Rena returned home to Scotland a few months later.

Eager for more sex, Fred became offensively forward. One night while standing on a fire escape outside a local youth club, he stuck his hand up a young woman’s skirt. She reacted furiously, knocking him over the balustrade. In the fall, he banged his head again and lost consciousness. This may well have aggravated the frontal lobe damage caused by the motorcycle accident.

Fred West then embarked on a career in petty theft. In 1961, he and a friend stole cigarette cases and a watchstrap from a local jewellers. They were caught red-handed with the stolen goods on them and were fined. A few months later, he was accused of getting a 13-year-old girl, a friend of the family, pregnant. Fred was unrepentant. He did not see anything wrong in molesting underage girls.

“Doesn’t everyone do it?” he said.

He was convicted but his general practitioner’s claim that he suffered from epileptic fits saved him from serving a jail sentence. However, he showed no sign of changing his ways. His family threw him out and he went to work on buildings sites where, again, he was caught stealing. There were more allegations that he was having sex with underage girls.

West’s parents eventually relented and let him return to the family home in Much Marcle. Then in the summer of 1962, Rena Costello returned from Scotland and took up with Fred again. By this time Rena had added burglary and prostitution to her rap sheet, which hardly recommended her to his parents.

Fred and Rena married secretly that November and they moved to Scotland. Rena was pregnant and Fred’s parents believed that the baby she was carrying was his. In fact, the child’s father was an Asian bus driver. When Rena’s daughter Charmaine was born in March 1963, Fred got Rena to write to his mother, explaining that their baby had died and they had adopted a mixed-race child.

West’s voracious sexual appetite was also causing problems, though his interest in straightforward vaginal sex was minimal; he preferred bondage, sodomy and oral sex. Although she had been a prostitute, Rena was not always willing to comply with Fred’s urges. However, at the time, West was driving an ice-cream truck, which gave him easy access to other young women and he was unfaithful on a daily basis. Their marriage went through a rocky patch with frequent separations. But in 1964, Rena gave birth to West’s child, Anne-Marie.

West was involved in an accident in the ice-cream truck that had resulted in the death of a young boy. The accident had not been his fault, but he was concerned that he might lose his job. Fred and Rena had also met a young Scottish woman named Anne McFall whose boyfriend had been killed in an accident. Together, the three of them, plus Rena’s two children, moved to Gloucester, where West got a job in a slaughterhouse. It was while working there that West developed a morbid obsession with corpses, blood and dismemberment.

West’s marriage became increasingly unstable. Rena fled back to Scotland but Fred refused to let her take the two children with her. Missing her daughters, Rena returned to Gloucester in July 1966 to find Fred and Anne McFall living together in a caravan. Around the time there had been eight sexual assaults in the area committed by a man who matched West’s description. Increasingly worried about the safety of her children, Rena went to the police and told them that her husband was a sexual pervert and totally unfit to raise her daughters. This was when Constable Hazel Savage first became involved in the case.

By the beginning of 1967, McFall was pregnant with West’s child. She put pressure on him to divorce Rena and marry her. In July, West responded by killing McFall and burying her in Letterbox Field in Much Marcle, near the caravan site. She was eight months pregnant. West not only murdered his lover and their unborn child, he painstakingly dismembered the corpse, removing the foetus, which he buried alongside McFall’s body parts – though some were missing. When the corpse was unearthed in 1994, the fingers and toes could not be found. This was to be his hallmark in future crimes.

After Anne McFall’s disappearance, West was noticeably nervous. But when Rena moved into the caravan with him in 1967, West became his old self again. With West’s encouragement, Rena went to work as a prostitute again. Meanwhile, he began to openly molest four-year-old Charmaine.

On 5 January 1968, pretty 15-year-old Mary Bastholm was abducted from a bus stop in Gloucester. She had been on the way to see her boyfriend and had been carrying a Monopoly game. The pieces were found strewn around the bus stop. West always denied abducting Mary Bastholm, but he knew her. He was a customer at the Pop-In Café, where Mary worked. Mary often served him tea when he had been employed to do some building work behind the café. Mary had also been seen with a woman answering the description of Anne McFall and one witness claimed to have seen Mary in West’s car. Most people who have studied the case are convinced that Mary Bastholm was another of Fred West’s victims.

A month after Mary Bastholm went missing, West’s mother died after a routine gallbladder operation and West became seriously unstable. He changed jobs several times and launched into a series of petty thefts. Then his life changed. On 29 November 1968, while working as a delivery driver for a local baker, he met the 15-year-old girl who would become his second wife and partner in crime.

Rosemary Letts was born in November 1953 in Devon. Her background was disturbed. Her father, Bill Letts, was a schizophrenic. He demanded total obedience from his wife and children, and used violence to get his way.