Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (22 page)

However, having eight children in the household took its toll on Rose’s temper. She became increasingly irrational and beat them without provocation. This began to loosen the children’s bond of loyalty. Their continued silence was the Wests’ only protection. In May 1987, 16-year-old Heather told a girlfriend about her father’s sexual abuse and the beatings, and her mother’s profession. The girl told her parents, who were friends of the Wests. When Fred and Rose heard of this, they murdered Heather and told the other children that she left home. However, Fred asked his 13-year-old son Stephen to help him dig a hole in the back garden where he later buried Heather’s dismembered body.

Fred and Rose set out to expand the prostitution business by advertising in specialist magazines. They were on the lookout for young women to pimp, who might also be willing to join in their sadistic perversions. A prostitute named Katherine Halliday joined the household. But when she was introduced to the Wests’ collection of whips and chains, the black bondage suits and masks, she took fright and left.

The Wests’ campaign of rape and murder had been going on for 25 years, but only now did they begin to run out of luck. One of the very young girls that they had abducted and raped told her girlfriend what happened. The girl went to the police and the case was assigned to Hazel Savage, now a detective constable. She knew of Fred from 1966 when Rena had told her about his sexual perversions.

On 6 August 1992, the police arrived at 25 Cromwell Street with a search warrant. They were looking for evidence of child abuse, found a mountain of distasteful pornography and arrested both Fred and Rose. Fred was charged with the rape and sodomy of a minor and Rose was charged with assisting him.

DC Savage set about interviewing the Wests’ friends and family members. Anne-Marie talked openly about the abuse she had suffered at Fred’s hands. She also expressed her suspicions about the fate of Charmaine, who Savage had known from her investigations in 1966. Rena, it seemed, had also gone missing. Savage checked tax and national insurance records which showed that Heather had not been employed, drawn benefits or visited a doctor in five years. Either she had moved abroad or she was dead.

The younger children were taken into care. Unable to cope without Fred, Rose tried to kill herself by taking an overdose of pills. But her son Stephen found her in time and saved her life. In jail Fred became self-pitying and depressed. But still his luck held. The case against him collapsed when two key witnesses decided not to testify against them and he was released.

However, DC Savage now launched an inquiry into the whereabouts of Heather. The West children joked that she was under the patio. They said Fred had threatened them that if they did not keep their mouths shut about the goings-on in 25 Cromwell Street they would end up under the patio like Heather.

Digging up a 900-square-foot garden was a huge undertaking and was bound to attract media attention, especially since the extension to the house had been built over part of the garden. But Detective Superintendent John Bennett eventually got a warrant.

Fred West knew that it was only a matter of time before the evidence of his long murder spree would be unearthed. He told his son that he had done something really bad and would be going away for a while.

‘He looked at me so evil and so cold,’ said Stephen. ‘That look went right through me.’

After the discovery of the bones in the garden, Fred was charged with the murder of Heather, Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers. To protect Rose, Fred took full responsibility for the murders.

The police now broadened the investigation to look into the disappearance of Rena and Charmaine. Fred was assigned an ‘appropriate adult’ named Janet Leach. She was usually assigned to befriend and assist juveniles or the mentally subnormal when they were taken into custody. Fred West was thought to fall into this second category. Leach asked Fred whether there were any more bodies. West admitted that there were and sketched a map of the cellar and bathroom, showing where six more bodies lay. He admitted to murdering the girls he had buried there, but not to raping them. The girls, he insisted, wanted to have sex with him. However, he did not even know the names of some of his victims. One he called simply ‘Scar Hand’ because of a burn on her hand. Therese Siegenthaler he referred to as ‘Tulip’ under the mistaken impression that she was Dutch, though she was, in fact, Swiss. This made it difficult for the police to identify the bodies. With large numbers of people being reported missing each year, it was a mammoth task to match a set of remains to a missing person’s report.

Of course, Fred West did know the names of some of his victims. He admitted to murdering his first wife Rena and his lover Anne McFall and burying their bodies in the fields near Much Marcle. He also admitted to the murder of Charmaine, Rena’s eldest daughter. With his help the bodies of Rena, Anne McFall and Charmaine were found. However, he refused to cooperate with the Mary Bastholm case and her body has never been located.

From the start the police were convinced that Rose West was involved in the murders, even though she feigned shock at her husband’s confessions and denied everything. She played the naive and innocent victim of a murderous and manipulative man. Along with Stephen and her eldest daughter Mae, she was moved to a police safe house in Cheltenham. The house was bugged by police but she never said anything which implicated herself. However, on 18 April 1994 she was charged with a sex offence and taken into custody. The murder charges would come later.

By this time the world’s media had turned up in Gloucester. TV crews from America and Japan filmed interviews in the street and journalists quickly dubbed 25 Cromwell Street the ‘House of Horrors’.

The fact that a serial killer had been operating in Gloucester for over 25 years came as a shock to its citizens. They had got away with it because, with the exception of Lucy Partington, the Wests had deliberately targeted people who drifted in and out of society and whose disappearance would not be noticed. Nevertheless the international attention the Wests had brought the city came as a terrible blow to Gloucester’s civic pride.

On 13 December 1994, Fred West was charged with 12 murders. He and Rose appeared together in court. In the dock, Fred tried to comfort Rose, but she pulled back from him, telling the police that he made her sick. Fred found the rejection devastating. He wrote to her, saying: ‘We will always be in love… You will always be Mrs West, all over the world. That is important to me and to you.’ She did not respond.

Just before noon on New Year’s Day at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, 54-year-old Fred West hanged himself with strips of bedsheet. He had picked his moment well. The guards were at lunch and he had clearly planned his suicide so that he would not be discovered and resuscitated.

This left Rose alone to face ten counts of murder. Clearly she could not have been involved in the murder of Rena and Anne McFall as they had been killed before she knew Fred. Her trial opened on 3 October 1995. However, there was little direct evidence to link her to the murders. Instead the prosecution, led by Brian Leveson QC, aimed to construct a tight web of circumstantial evidence to prove Rose’s guilt.

A number of key witnesses – including Caroline Owens, Miss A and Anne-Marie – testified to Rose’s sadistic assaults on young women. The most damning evidence came from Anne-Marie, who fixed her stepmother with a withering stare as she described how she and Fred had embarked on a campaign of sexual abuse when she was eight.

Another witness, Caroline Raine, a former beauty queen, told the court of the night in 1972 when Fred and Rose abducted her when she was hitchhiking across Gloucestershire and sexually assaulted her. The prosecution suggested that this was a blueprint for how the Wests picked up their victims. In this case, Caroline Raine escaped with her life and the Wests were prosecuted and fined over the incident at the time. From then on, it was clear that Fred and Rose had made up their minds that future victims would not be allowed to live to tell the tale.

Fred’s confidante Janet Leach also gave crucial evidence. She testified that Fred had told her privately that Rose was involved in the murders – and that Rose had murdered Charmaine and Shirley Robinson by herself. However, he said that he made a deal with Rose to take all the blame himself. At the time, this confession, given in confidence, had put her under so much stress that she suffered a stroke. It was only after Fred’s suicide that she felt the bond of confidentiality had been lifted and she told the police what he had said to her. Giving testimony put her under enormous stress. She collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital, and the trial was adjourned for several days.

The defence, led by Richard Ferguson QC, maintained that evidence of sexual assault was not the same thing as evidence of murder. He made the case that Rose did not know that Fred was murdering the girls they had abused and burying them around the house.

Ferguson made the mistake of putting Rose on the witness stand. She did not impress the jury. The prosecution rattled her by making her angry. She appeared obstructive and defiant. The prosecution also managed to force her to confess how badly she had treated the children and she gave the general impression of being unscrupulous and dishonest.

The defence played taped interviews with Fred West, where he said that he had murdered his victims when Rose was out of the house. But it was not difficult for the prosecution to show that Fred was an inveterate liar, so everything he said was open to doubt.

In his closing speech, Leveson maintained Rose was the dominant force in the Wests’ murderous partnership. She was, he told the jury, the ‘strategist’.

‘The evidence that Rosemary West knew nothing is not worthy of belief,’ he said.

Ferguson, closing for the defence, maintained that the evidence for murder only pointed to Fred. There was no proof that Rose had known anything, let alone participated. The jury did not believe him. It quickly came to the unanimous verdict that Rosemary West was guilty of the murders of Charmaine West, Heather West, Shirley Robinson and the other girls buried at the house. The judge sentenced her to life imprisonment on each of the ten counts of murder. In 1996, her request to appeal was turned down. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary during this period, later told Rosemary West that she would never be allowed out

In October 1996, Gloucester City Council demolished 25 Cromwell Street. There were calls to create a memorial garden on the site, but there were fears that it would be turned into a ghoulish shrine, so it was left as a landscaped footpath leading to the city centre.

Four years after Rose West was sentenced her son Stephen revealed to the police that he was convinced that his father had killed 15-year-old Mary Bastholm. He said that, while visiting his father in prison shortly before he died, West had boasted that Bastholm’s body would never be found. He also talked of a number of other victims and crowed: ‘They are not going to find them all, you know, never.’

When Stephen asked specifically asked him about Mary Bastholm, West replied: ‘I will never tell anyone where she is.’

However, to the police, West had continued strenuously denying that he had killed Bastholm, although she had been seen in his car. Mary Bastholm’s brother Peter said he was relieved by the news, though his parents had both died without learning the fate of their only daughter.

Later in 1998, Fred West’s cousin William Hill was jailed for four years after being convicted of one count of rape and three charges of indecent assaults. Like West, Hill preyed on young women and one of his convictions was for a series of indecent assault on a 15-year-old girl over an extended period in the early 1980s. He tried to kill himself in jail but failed. Fred West’s brother John succeeded in hanging himself in jail while awaiting the verdict after being tried for raping Anne-Marie.

Anne-Marie tried to kill herself by throwing herself from a bridge near Gloucester, but was rescued. She had previously tried to kill herself during the trial by taking an overdose, but was rushed to hospital and had her stomach pumped. Stephen West tried to hang himself at his home in Bussage, near Stroud, after his girlfriend left him. He survived when the rope snapped.

In December 1998, Gordon Burn, the author of
Happy Like Murderers
, another book about the Wests, claimed that the bones removed from the victims’ bodies – usually fingers, toes, but in some cases kneecaps and entire shoulder blades – had been buried near Pittville Park in Cheltenham, close to the bus stop where Fred first met Rose in 1970. Burn said that the location held an ‘almost spiritual’ significance for the Wests.

He was interviewed by Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Tony Butler, and Detective Chief Inspector Terry Moore who had taken over the case after Detective Superintendent John Bennett had retired.

‘Out of all the books it’s probably the best written and the most interesting,’ said Moore. ‘He has got some things right and some things wrong.”

As to the bones, Moore said: ‘There are various theories but nothing has come to light. The secret has gone to the grave with Fred and Rose is not saying anything.’

In 2000, Rosemary West secured legal aid to launch a new appeal. Her lawyer, Leo Goatley, said that West may ‘unearth new photographic evidence, which would prove that her husband, Fred West, was the sole killer’. The hope was that she would ‘be cleared by anatomical photographs of women which were taken by Fred West and seized by police during an earlier investigation in 1992’. The photographs, he asserted, were time stamped and would help his client prove she was not present at the time. The originals, he said, had been destroyed, but Goatley was confident that ‘copies would have been made or details of the photographs chronicled by police’. He also said that excessive publicity and chequebook journalism prevented her getting a fair trial, and an application was made to the Criminal Cases Review Commission on 20 October 2000.

But the application was doomed to failure when a TV documentary aired an interview with Janet Leach who revealed that Fred West had confessed to killing many more than the 12 victims he had been charged with murdering.