Where There is Evil (32 page)

I took a short break after my second lot of autumn exams and started to write down all the events of the past few years, which seemed far too outlandish to be true but every one of which had
happened to me.

Only one thing worried me, and that was my mother’s reaction to what I was doing, but as 1995 dawned, and she wished me a happy birthday, I spoke to her of my intentions to see it through.
I waited fearfully but there was no outburst from her, just a deep, heartfelt sigh and a nod.

‘I know there’s no point asking you not to do it. You’re driven, I can see that,’ she said slowly. ‘And I know why it’s important for you that the truth comes
out, but I just hope it isn’t in my lifetime, Sandra. I hope I’m not around to see it.’

I noticed with a wry smile that the sepia photograph of the long-lost fiancé who had drowned had emerged from her box into pride of place on her sideboard. It was her way of letting me
know that she no longer held any allegiance to my father. ‘He saw me as an opportunity, I think,’ she said. ‘His life was in a mess when I came along. He’d got a girl into
trouble, and her baby had to be adopted, but I didn’t know that at the time. The baby was the reason he’d met our minister, which lulled me into a false sense of security. I found out
about her later on – you could tell when you saw them that there had been an affair. But they couldn’t marry.’

‘Why not?’ I asked curiously.

‘She was his aunt – his own mother’s sister. They hushed it all up at the time.’

My mother got her fervent wish. She lived only six weeks or so after having said that she would not wish to witness a book by her own flesh and blood based on the tragic events that had happened
in her life and then in mine.

Many ministers will tell you that it is a common phenomenon for those on the point of death to believe they can see someone dear to them who has already passed on. When my mother died
unexpectedly in March 1995, only a few hours after collapsing without warning, she regained consciousness for long enough to tell my brothers, their wives, and my uncle who stayed with her what she
had been doing that day, what she had eaten for her lunch at her club for the blind in Coatbridge, and she heard that one sister-in-law was doing her best to contact me in Edinburgh. The staff at
the Monklands Hospital were just making arrangements to transfer my mother from the casualty department to a ward, when she had a cardiac arrest. Despite all efforts, the staff could not
resuscitate her, and when I arrived, she had been dead an hour.

While I was upset that I had not been there, the family told me that seconds before the chest pains took hold of her, my mother looked towards the end of the bed and said very clearly,
‘Daddy. There’s my daddy.’

She repeated it, so that they were in no doubt that she was seeing her own father. Knowing how deep their relationship was, those words have given me comfort. It seems entirely appropriate to me
that the one man in her life in whom my mother had implicit trust was there for her at the very end.

Many people will question why I felt it necessary to take up my pen after all other avenues of attempting to obtain justice for Moira and my cousins had failed. It is a duty,
as far as I can see, that I should alert others to look into the darkness that surrounds the world of the abuser, to probe and question how he gets away with such behaviour, and to demand answers
even when it may be easier to shy away from what may be sickening to hear.

It is important to realize that the inquiry I sparked off in the 1990s ran parallel with an even more depraved situation that was investigated in a small English city. Sadly, it will now be for
ever associated with the horror of sex abuse, sudden disappearances, and the murders of young women. In Gloucester, it quickly became obvious to those who followed the trial of Rosemary West, which
followed the suicide of her partner, that over the preceding decades there had not been nearly enough co-operation between all the relevant agencies with whom the family had contact. Warning bells,
we are told, would be heard immediately today. But would they?

Their plausibility and adept deceit helped Fred and Rosemary West evade detection for years, but the couple were aided and abetted by official records being lost, destroyed, never kept or never
passed on, with no one agency being blameless. Not only were children not observed independently or listened to, but the rape and torture of an early victim, Caroline Owens, then seventeen, in
1972, turned into a meaningless farce, where the Wests found rape charges dropped and each was fined £50. Information from surviving victims did not lead to investigations, and women who were
attacked by the two at the roadside in enticement attempts gave descriptions that went nowhere.

There is no such thing as a typical paedophile, but from childhood, both my father and Fred West showed a precocious interest in sex and a love of pornography that grew as they matured. Their
lives followed separate paths, but both became sexual psychopaths. This is a lifelong problem, which in my view only ceases with infirmity or death. My father will be a threat to young women and
children until he is overcome by one or the other.

Both men’s first offences were recorded on police files as sexual assaults on thirteen-year-old girls who lived in their local area. Both were involved in incest within their own family.
Fred West’s sister was taken into care as a pregnant youngster, and there is little doubt that he was the father of her child. My father made his aunt, a woman older than himself, pregnant
with a child who was then adopted.

Both men had a sadistic streak, and were able to hide a complete disregard for the feelings of others and a need to gratify their own sexual demands behind a façade of amiability. A
deep-seated need in both meant presenting an air of hardworking respectability, and they sought token approval from others, whether through working long hours on building projects as West did, or
as my father did, by stopping his bus for old ladies. When they were interviewed by police, neither man showed any desire to clear his conscience or give information that would help the families of
victims.

How differently things might have turned out for my father, had he married a Rosemary, rather than my mother. Fred West used his wife as an ally: her presence in his car lulled young women into
a false sense of security. Behind my mother’s back I, too, was used unknowingly as bait by my father. I have had to confront the fact that I was an unwitting ally on a number of occasions for
my father’s depravity. It never crossed the minds of my friends that anything would happen to them if they played with me. Sexual assailants don’t come with their daughters, do
they?

Finally, both men evaded formal interviews when girls went missing at bus stops. Fred West’s attack on Caroline Owens seems to have been overlooked when it bore similarities to the
assaults other women reported, and there had been disappearances of several women in the area; in 1957 the police chose not to round up all the local suspects in Moira Anderson’s case.

In the final analysis, it is significant that neither man
was
arrested through painstaking paperwork or strokes of insight by dedicated men. Fred West’s undoing was that one of
his children’s statements about the disappearance of their sister, Heather, was finally taken seriously by a social worker, then followed up by a policewoman who checked out that her national
insurance number and other personal identification details had never been used in the United Kingdom. In my father’s case, it was his own startling statements to me after a twenty-seven-year
absence that sowed the seeds of doubt. Detectives only then reopened forgotten files. In the end, the finger was pointed by the flesh and blood of both men.

I think there are other parallels. Like Fred West, I believe my father was able to build up a self-belief system that allowed him to go about his business normally. It has acted like a safety
net, helping him to live with what he has done and enabling him to push aside any stray emotion he may feel from time to time. I cannot be sure what he has been doing over the years he has lived in
Leeds, but all the evidence shows that paedophiles and abusers do not change their spots and in a lifetime may have more than a hundred victims. Retrospectively, Glasgow police are examining the
files of those women and girls who disappeared when Fred West resided in the south side of the city in the 1960s, during his first marriage to Rena Costello.

Despite the open manner of the reporting of Rosemary West’s trial, there would appear to be a conspiracy of silence going on post-Cromwell Street Gloucester. A hundred or so pornographic
videos were mentioned in the 1992 trial in which she and her husband were involved that led to nothing. What happened to them? They could not possibly all have been made by the pair. A video-shop
owner had reported that Fred West had openly offered him film of ‘real murders’. It is fairly clear that the Wests were part of some ring, and although we cannot be sure that all the
facts will emerge, others may have known the secrets of 25 Cromwell Street. Will these others be brought to justice?

The story of the Wests exposes non-intervention, non-pursued lines of inquiry and disregard for child-protection procedures. No one bothered to put the jigsaw together. Did Charmaine
West’s school never query where her records should be sent? Did the local hospital never query that a fifteen-year-old brought to them by her father with an ectopic pregnancy was under age?
The Wests were able to get away with their catalogue of crime because as a society we refused to confront the possibility that such crimes
could
be occurring in the heart of a perfectly
ordinary British community. This was no Stephen King-type
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
horror movie to thrill adolescents. This was real, and far more ghastly for it.

We cannot ignore the fact that everyone, from agencies to institutions to ordinary next-door neighbours, put their heads well below the sand while a large number of young women perished in their
midst. The most chilling aspect is that nobody cared enough to notice. Not one person, despite a church being next door. But if professionals such as social workers, police personnel and childcare
staff do not receive the resources or the training required to deal with the perpetrators of child sexual abuse, what chance have we that members of the public will be able to recognize the
features such deviant people possess?

The wickedest sexual crimes are often carried out by those who look normal, but whose behaviour patterns are a give-away when we take time to observe them closely. We ignore these people at our
peril, and we do our own children no favours by joining the conspiracy of silence on sexual abuse. If we study their behaviour and peer down into the darkness, a disease is revealed that goes so
deep, we begin to realize that we are naïve if we assume it has not spread its roots through the entire fabric of our nation.

We are not alone.

It has come as a huge shock to the people of Belgium, two years on from Gloucester, that they have their counterparts of the Wests, with allies highly placed in the police forces who covered for
them. For those who would suggest that I exaggerate, and insist that Britain is no worse than any other civilized country in its attitudes to child sexual abuse, I would ask if they are aware of
the slow response our government made to the worldwide campaign to end the abuse of children in Asia, created by the demand for child prostitution by Western tourists. We show our true colours by
being out of step with a remarkable number of other world powers who took early action to ensure that their nationals who abuse children in other countries will be pursued, prosecuted, and dealt
with accordingly, despite international crime syndicates who aid and abet paedophiles with information and pornography peddled through the Internet.

We have a choice.

To tolerate such a malignant blight on our society is not the answer. These people – the paedophiles, the abusers, and the Mr Bigs who feed from their unhealthy tastes – must be
exposed for what they are. A positive step would be to listen to what our children are saying. Perhaps the most surprising element in the West case was that someone finally listened to their
children, which our culture does not encourage. Too often, what children say is swept aside as fantasy.

Even professional people accept ancient myths about offenders that are quite untrue; that they are sexually inadequate, disturbed individuals whose behaviour will be noticeably bizarre. Little
is circulated about them being powerful, clever, manipulative and in control, with a system of carefully planned strategies to avoid being caught. There is little about them instilling such deep
fear in their victims that disclosure
can
only surface years later. So thorough has the disparaging of children’s evidence against abusers been, it is no wonder that the typical
pattern shows itself as initial denial, then disclosure, followed by terrified retraction as the possible consequences set in, then reaffirmation when support is given. If there are fears by
children that accusations of malicious fantasy will be aimed at them, it is understandable how adults such as my cousins, who finally summon the courage to reveal childhood abuse and who then find
the legal authorities totally uninterested in doing anything about it, feel as if they have been kicked in the teeth.

Infection spreads when it goes unchecked. All cancers start with an insidious if minor change, but the progress of the disease can be halted if it is treated early. When I look back to the
events I have described that took place in 1957, it is easy to diagnose that something began to go askew in that community. I ask myself why, given all the signs that foul play had occurred and
hints that something was seriously amiss, the investigation was never scaled up from a missing-persons inquiry to a full-scale murder case. The responsibility for that seriously flawed judgement
rests on someone’s conscience.

Repeated deception by the paedophile Thomas Hamilton, the executioner of sixteen five-year-olds and their teacher in Dunblane in March 1996, in retaliation against worried parents who helped
close down his dubiously run boys’ clubs, went unnoticed and unchecked over years. Sloppy police work did not follow up his claims in the mid-eighties that he was a top marksman who competed
throughout the UK. Internal police records (made available, but not brought to attention at the ensuing Cullen Inquiry) show that no effort was ever made to check out to which gun clubs he was
supposed to belong. Negligence is nothing new when it comes to catastrophic outcomes regarding the safety of our children.