Couples Who Kill (23 page)

When the other lodgers queried Linda’s sudden disappearance, Rose told them that the teenager had started to hit nine-year-old Anne Marie so Rose had thrown her out. In reality, Rose remained the hardest hitter of the household, striking Anne Marie with a belt, knife, household implements and her fists.

There’s a common misperception that an angry act always gets the rage out of a person’s system. Unfortunately this isn’t true of pathologically dangerous men and women like Fred & Rose West. Neither had dealt with the sexual and physical abuse suffered during their childhoods, so violence now suffused their childrearing and their lust.

That August, Rose gave birth to Stephen and for a few months she was busy nursing him, but by November the Wests were ready to kill again. They saw fifteen-year-old Carol Anne Cooper waiting for a bus and probably offered her a lift.

Carol’s mother had died when she was eight and she’d been unhappy living with her father and his second wife, so had ended up in a children’s home. She was a tall, healthy girl but would have been no match for Fred and Rose. It’s
possible that they stabbed her through the head during the initial struggle because a deep indentation was found in her skull. Or the injury might have taken place post-mortem as Fred attempted dismemberment. She, too, was gagged with surgical tape which covered her mouth, jaw and the back of her head. Further tape was wound around her upper head and fabric was bound around her arms. A clothesline was also involved in the abuse.

After the torture, her naked body was decapitated and the bones were chopped up, with several of the smaller ones being taken away. She too was buried under the cellar floor and would remain there for over twenty years, finally being unearthed – the gag and bondage still intact – on 8th March 1994.

A month later they abducted their most high profile victim, Lucy Partington, a cousin of the novelist Martin Amis. It was evening on the 27th December 1973 and Lucy, a medieval studies student, was visiting a friend. She walked to a quiet country bus stop to catch the bus home – but by the time it arrived ten minutes later than scheduled, she was gone.

Lucy would never have voluntarily accompanied the couple, so its likely that they physically forced her into the car. Fred later suggested, obscenely, that he and she had been lovers but the academic Lucy would have had nothing in common with the illiterate labourer, and she wouldn’t have had casual sex with anyone, having converted to Roman Catholicism three months before.

The twenty-one-year-old was taken to the cellar in Cromwell Street where she was doubtless bound and
gagged: leastways her makeshift grave included a long length of plastic rope and the type of masking tape which the Wests liked to wrap around their victim’s faces. She may have been abused for several days, as a week after her disappearance Fred West visited the local casualty department at midnight with a lacerated right hand, presumably injured whilst cutting up her flesh.

Lucy’s corpse was decapitated and extensively dismembered: three of her ribs were removed as were her left kneecap, right shoulderblade and seventy-two of her bones, including her fingers and toes.

Twenty years later her body was found in the Wests’ cellar, buried alongside the knife used to dismember her. The gag and bondage materials also remained in the grave alongside two hair pins.

Lucy’s family were devastated by her disappearance and began to distribute posters throughout the area. Perhaps for this reason, for the next few months the Wests kept a lower profile. They didn’t murder any more young women, instead contenting themselves by having sex with children from the nearby girls home. Fred would park outside the orphanage and offer the young girls cigarettes then tell them that his wife could help them with their female problems. Many of the girls, anxious for a mother figure in their lives, accepted an invite back to Cromwell Street.

At first Rose was suitably maternal, offering them juice and cakes and listening to their problems. But after a few visits she’d begin to stroke their hair, then progress to touching their thighs. Most of the children were too
embarrassed to protest – and two, used to such sexual abuse, allowed themselves to be led up to the bedroom. There the sex immediately became terrifying as they were tied down and sodomised with large vibrators until they bled.

Rose also forced Anne Marie to take part in these sex sessions, some of which involved her clients, and others including Rose’s father Bill Letts.

By April 1974 the Wests felt sure that they weren’t going to be implicated in Lucy Partington’s disappearance so they picked up another twenty-one-year-old, sociology student Therese Siegenthaler. She felt safe hitchhiking during the Easter holidays, as she was trained in self-defence.

But Theresa was overpowered by the Wests on her way to see a priest friend and was taken to Cromwell Street where her hands and feet were bound and a silk gag or mask was wound around her face. Her head was also bound with a knotted loop of nylon cloth. After the abuse and murder, her naked corpse was dismembered and many of her finger, wrist, toe and ankle bones taken away. Her longer bones where chopped up in order that she could fit into a three feet hole in the cellar, near to the children’s playroom. Not that the children were allowed to play normal noisy childhood games – if they made any noise they were beaten by Rose, the hymns from the adjoining church drowning out their cries of pain.

Seven months later – in November 1974 – the couple offered fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard a lift home. The attractive teenager had been in and out of foster care,
though she’d recently started a work experience course as a beautician and seemed more settled than she had for some time.

It’s likely that dumpy twenty-one-year-old Rose took an instant dislike to slender, groomed Shirley Hubbard. Leastways, she suffered the most appalling treatment, having a mask wound around her face which completely obliterated her features, leaving only her eyes uncovered. Someone then inserted a slender straw three inches into each nostril through which she had to breath. One of the tubes later fell out or was deliberately removed during the torture and would later be found loose in the grave.

Again, her naked body was eventually decapitated and her legs were cut from her body before she was buried under the cellar. Many of the toes and fingers were taken away.

Another five months elapsed, then the couple abducted another of their former lodgers, eighteen-year-old Juanita Mott. She was hitchhiking to a friend’s house when one or both of the Wests picked her up. In their cellar, she was gagged with her own tights and socks and was tied hand and foot with seventeen feet of plastic rope. The amount of rope used suggests that the Wests might have been trying out a particularly complex or severe form of bondage on the teenager.

At some stage her skull was caved in by a hammer blow – and after death her body was dismembered and the kneecaps and many of the smaller bones taken away before she was buried in the infamous cellar.

Juanita was murdered in April 1975, after which Fred renovated Cromwell Street and built a garden extension. His energy was phenomenal as he’d do his regular manual job all day, come home and work on his house late into the night. He’d always had difficulty sleeping and preferred to work himself into an exhausted state.

Rose also worked hard at what she did, prostituting herself for her regular clients and deliberately becoming pregnant by one of them. In the same timeframe, the couple got to know another prostitute called Shirley Robinson and invited her to move into Cromwell Street as a babysitter. The pretty, animated young woman was bisexual, so probably formed a
ménage à trois
with Fred and Rose.

But by the autumn of 1977, Shirley had become pregnant with Fred’s baby and began to tell the other lodgers that she loved him. Rose was jealous and made it clear that Shirley had better watch out. Unfortunately the teenager had nowhere to go, so contented herself with sleeping in another lodger’s room in Cromwell Street in the hope that Rose wouldn’t assault her in front of witnesses.

Sadly, her attempts to protect herself failed and in May 1978 she disappeared, probably taken to the cellar and strangled. She wasn’t tied up or gagged like the other victims, but her body was dismembered and the eight-
and-a
-half-month-old foetus was cut from her womb. Her kneecaps were also cut out, as were her fingers and toes, before she was buried in the garden near the back door.

Rose threw out Shirley’s clothes then told the other lodgers that the teenager was visiting relatives in Germany and that she’d gone for good. The other lodgers noticed that both Wests looked particularly happy that day.

Rose now gave birth to her first mixed race child, a little girl. The following year she had another mixed-race daughter. (She would eventually have four mixed-race children, and her mother Daisy disowned her because adultery went against her moral code.) Fred was especially proud of these children and invited his workmates round to admire them. He saw black men as genetically superior and believed that they were more fertile than white men like himself.

But Rose and Fred continued to fight for power in their own relationship. By now she was in charge of the family finances – rent from the lodgers, cash from her prostitution and Fred’s wages. However Fred continued to determine who she slept with, and when. He still liked to look and listen, recording the noises that his wife and her sexual partners made. He also continued to measure the amount of semen that her lovers left in condoms, and generally took a quasi-scientific interest in her sexual life.

Sometimes she was tired and wanted a break from the sex, whereupon he occasionally hit her. At other times she hit him, once stabbing him accidentally with a knife.

Shortly after Rose gave birth for the sixth time, the couple asked seventeen-year-old Alison Chambers to become their nanny. Alison had previously run away from an orphanage in Wales and had been relocated to Jordan’s Brook, a home for troubled adolescent females. She was bullied there as she was more ladylike than most of the other girls, wearing a skirt suit and carrying a briefcase to school.

Alison wrote to family members telling them that she was starting a new life with a loving family in the countryside, and enclosing a photo of her supposed rural home. In truth, the photo was taken from an estate agents details and she was really living in the cramped confines of Cromwell Street and helping Rose with the kids.

But in September 1979 she became their latest victim, as they gagged her with a belt, stripped her and tied her up. After the sexual abuse, she was murdered and decapitated. Her body was dismembered and several of the fingers and toes were taken away. She was buried in the garden beneath the bathroom window, on the site where the Wests’ children had previously had a paddling pool.

That year, Fred West got his daughter Anne Marie pregnant. Not quite fifteen, she was taken into hospital to have the ectopic pregnancy aborted, though the couple gave her the impression that she was simply having a gynaecological operation. Shortly afterwards, following yet another beating from Rose, she ran away and slept rough for several days.

In May 1979, Rose’s father Bill Letts died of lung cancer. After this, no further bodies were buried under their Cromwell Street premises for eight years. But the sexual abuse continued within the house, with Fred constantly grabbing at his daughters. And Stephen, Heather’s brother, would later say that Fred raped Heather for years.

Heather left school in May 1987 and applied for a job cleaning holiday chalets in Torquay. When she was turned down, she cried for hours. Fred and Rose West were alarmed, knowing that if she left the house she might tell
about what went on there – the constant beatings and sexual abuse.

On 19th June 1987 she was strangled by either Rose or Fred. Rose had previously almost strangled Stephen and Anne Marie into unconsciousness during arguments so may have done the same thing to Heather, only going further. Her remains were naked when found, suggesting sexual abuse, but she hadn’t been gagged.

Both parents told the children that Heather had gone off with another lesbian. (In truth, the years of abuse had left the teenager determinedly asexual.) Later they pretended to receive a phone-call from her. Both were tearful after her supposed desertion, but later Rose told her relatives never to mention Heather’s name again. Yet she seemed genuinely shocked when the detectives eventually informed her that Heather’s remains had been found in the Cromwell Street garden.

In turn, Fred would eventually explain the murder to detectives by saying that he’d ordered Heather to stay in the house, but that she’d tried to defy him. He’d caught her around the neck with his hands, only realising how strongly he’d been holding her when she turned blue. He’d then tied a pair of tights around her neck to make sure that she was dead before cutting her up, twisting her head off and burying her beneath the patio.

After Heather’s disappearance, Rose continued to have sex with both men and women – and Fred continued to listen or to watch them. He made home movies of these marathon sex sessions, some of which he rented out to friends. He remained obsessed with sex and with car
crashes, describing seeing bodies smashed into bits, lying by the roadside.

But as Rose moved into her thirties she tired of this home-based life and Fred’s increasingly bizarre conversations. She wanted to go out in the evenings but fifty-year-old Fred remained wedded to his work and to Cromwell Street, so after numerous violent arguments, Rose started going out to a country and western bar on her own. She was soon having an enthusiastic affair with one of the barmen, and would disappear upstairs with him for hours at a time.