The team of diggers returned shortly after dawn, resuming their work with a methodical purpose that impressed Fred, who was watching from an upstairs window. This was the sort of manual labour he had done all his life, and he calculated that it would not be long before they found what they were looking for. He realised that the patio would be destroyed in the process, and that they might well stumble upon other graves – those of Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers, whose remains were also buried out there.
Fred pulled on a patterned blue sweater and quilted nylon body-warmer. When he was dressed, he hunted around the house for items last used in the hostel in Birmingham, including his ‘prison lighter’, a stripped-down wick and flint that gave a tiny, economical glow. He looked up and saw that Steve was watching him curiously from the doorway. As they regarded one another, father and son could hear shovels biting the earth outside.
‘Son, I will be going away for a while,’ said Fred. ‘Look after Mum and sell the house … I’ve done something really bad. I want you to go to the papers and make as much money as you can and start a new life.’ He went to the bathroom window to take another look at the diggers. Steve stood in the hall and watched him, confused by what his father had said. When Fred turned away from the window, his face was contorted with malevolence. ‘He looked at me so evil and so cold. That look went right through me,’ remembers Steve.
At around eleven o’clock that morning Hazel Savage arrived back at the house. Rose became angry when Hazel asked for details of Rose’s mother, so she could interview her as well. Fred mediated between the women, telling the police he would ‘go and have a word with Rose quietly’; he took her aside and told her to go upstairs and keep out of the way. Then he came back into the corridor, where Hazel was waiting, and told the police to take him with them. Shouting and bawling his innocence, Fred was led out of the house to the police car waiting outside. He caused a commotion in the street, bringing many of the neighbours out to watch, yelling ‘I didn’t kill her!’ But when he got in the CID car, Fred said for the first time that he had killed Heather, but the police were looking for her in the wrong place.
Fred was arrested and taken to the Bearland police headquarters, where Hazel urged him to tell the truth. It was explained to him that the police were prepared to dig up the whole garden.
Fred was in an impossible situation. All he could do now was try and protect Rose by taking the blame for Heather, and hope they did not find the others. At about 5 P.M. that afternoon Fred decided to offer a full confession about the killing of his daughter. He said he had buried her remains under the patio near the back door, and wearily agreed to go back to the house and show them exactly where. He made a number of lewd comments about Heather’s sexual conduct, claiming that she did not use underwear and often wore revealing tops to show off her breasts. In fact, once he had decided to talk about his crime he seemed unable to stop, and confessed not only to Hazel Savage and the other interviewing detectives, but to his solicitor and even his cell guard as well.
He said he had strangled her and then chopped her up with a special knife used for cutting ice and frozen meat. Hazel asked what he had done with Heather’s clothes and belongings; Fred replied that he had stuffed all her things into a black bin bag, and left it with other rubbish outside a vet’s surgery in St Michael’s Square because it was ‘bin day’. He added that he had not killed Heather ‘intentionally’ – it was not murder, he had just lost his temper with her.
FRED WEST: I just wanted to shake her, or wanted to take that smirk off her face.
HAZEL SAVAGE: But as a result of what you did … she died.
FRED WEST: Yeah, and that’s the bad part of it.
When he was told that his son Steve had come to the police station to see what was going on, Fred became extremely excited and told the police to keep the boy away from him. ‘Be careful with him,’ he ranted. ‘I mean, I don’t want to fight with him … I’m not going to stand there and let nobody knock me about. I mean, so what if I injure one of them badly?’ A few minutes later he was talking about giving the house to Rose, Mae and Steve, so they would have something to sell and make money.
Before the police could bring Fred back to Cromwell Street, they wanted to get Rose away. Detective Sergeant Onions and other officers arrested Rose and took her into custody. So that there could be no chance of her communicating with Fred, Rose would be interviewed in Cheltenham, within the office block that was the county headquarters of the Gloucestershire Constabulary.
Fred returned home with a group of officers. He was shocked to discover that the police were no longer just digging at the back of the garden – they had extended the search area, and he noticed to his dismay that they had almost stumbled upon the grave of Alison Chambers, the teenager from Jordan’s Brook House whose remains he had buried near the bathroom wall. Fred told the detectives that they were digging in completely the wrong place. He pointed to a general area behind the back door of the kitchen, several feet away, and said that this was where they would find his daughter. He told them to dig down about four feet, and not to waste their time looking anywhere else.
There was relief, particularly for Hazel Savage, that progress was being made, but there was not great excitement within the police team. ‘What we had was a domestic murder. We’d had two in Gloucestershire already that year,’ says John Bennett.
Fred was taken back to Bearland and asked if he wanted legal advice. He chose Howard Ogden, a well-known duty solicitor who had represented him during the 1992 child abuse investigation. Ogden is an overweight, bespectacled man who runs a small private practice in Cheltenham High Street. He makes a modest living by being on-call twenty-four hours a day to represent the burglars, car thieves and drunks who are brought into local police stations and ask for a solicitor on legal aid. It often means he is called out of bed in the middle of the night. In an attempt to drum up new business, he had recently advertised his services on local radio with the catch phrase: ‘If you’ve been nicked, call Oggie.’ He had never represented a man facing a murder charge before.
The police were concerned about Fred’s sanity. Because of this, John Bennett’s team were obliged to call in an ‘appropriate adult’ who would attend Fred’s interviews; that is, an independent observer whose presence is required under the terms of the Mental Health Act when the sanity of the prisoner is an issue. The observer would monitor Fred’s state of mind and look out for his mental well-being.
Rose was interviewed at Cheltenham police headquarters that afternoon. Although she did not know that Fred had confessed, Rose was well aware that she had been arrested in connection with a murder investigation, and the seriousness of her situation had subdued her. She answered questions almost timidly, and sobbed whenever she was put under any pressure.
She spoke in a pathetic way about how she felt rejected by her family. She said she had not seen her younger children for eighteen months, and had lost contact with Anna Marie. When she was questioned about Heather’s disappearance, Rose replied, ‘Past experience told me … that once a child does cut you off, there’s not a lot you’re going to do about getting them back.’
Asked again about when Heather had last been in contact with the family, Rose said that she believed Heather had visited Fred in the bail hostel in Birmingham within the past eighteen months, and that Fred had said she looked ‘rough’. Rose said that she hoped Heather was alive somewhere in the ‘big bad world’.
The detectives then solemnly informed Rose that there had been a major development in the case. They told her that Fred had confessed to murdering Heather. Rose, who had been speaking almost in a whisper, gasped aloud, ‘What?’
‘So you know where she is?’ she added.
‘He’s told us where she is,’ replied Terry Onions.
In a high-pitched, almost hysterical voice, Rose asked, ‘So she’s dead? Is that right?’
Rose was told she was involved.
‘Why does it automatically implicate
me?’
‘Our suspicions are aroused that you are implicated in it, that you are involved in it.’
Rose screamed, ‘It’s a lie!’
Sobbing loudly, she would answer no more questions for the time being and was allowed to take a break.
The interview started again approximately three and a half hours later. It was suggested to her that, if she really did not know that Heather had been murdered, she was either blind, extremely naïve, or a liar. But Rose had another explanation. ‘Or I was sent out,’ she suggested, adding that Fred had often made her spend the night with other men. ‘I was more or less given a certain time to come back in.’ This would be Rose’s alibi: she had been completely oblivious to her husband’s murderous activities because she had not been there when they happened. The police wondered aloud what this said about their marriage. ‘Well, put it this way,’ said Rose. ‘I feel like a bit of a cunt, to be blunt with it.’
POLICE: What’s your feelings towards Fred now then, now that you know he’s slain your eldest daughter?
ROSE WEST: Put it this way, he’s a dead man if I ever get my hands on him.
18
THE HOUSE OF HORRORS
On the morning of Saturday 26 February 1994, the police search team began to excavate a hole in the back garden of 25 Cromwell Street – the place where Fred had said they would find Heather.
The garden was a claustrophobic place in which to work. The red brick wall of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church hemmed it in on one side, and there was a row of tall evergreen fir trees on the other. The narrow strip of earth between was crowded by the search team and their equipment, and there was barely enough room left to operate the small mechanical digger that had been brought in. Conditions became even more uncomfortable when it started to rain and the trampled garden turned to mud.
John Bennett had called upon one of the Home Office’s most eminent scientists to help identify the human remains he expected to find. Professor Bernard Knight was aged sixty-two when the murder investigation began. Knight, who trained as a barrister and writes crime novels in his spare time, is a professor of forensic pathology. From examining human remains, he attempts to describe the victim in life, and, where possible, to give an opinion on how and when they died. The professor estimates that he has performed over twenty-five thousand autopsies on men, women and children who have met every type of violent death. He is an atheist who claims to prefer the company of animals to people. In a revealing interview for the radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, he said, ‘I think the human race is pretty rotten. The more I see of it, the more rotten it becomes … We are a malignancy on the face of the earth.’ The task before him could only reinforce those beliefs.
The professor and John Bennett were obliged to wait at the police station while the search team, now wearing bright yellow coveralls with the hoods up, laboured under the pouring rain. It had been hoped that digging the pit would be straightforward, but as the hole deepened, its water-logged sides crumbled and caved in. The bottom was also obscured by a dirty brown puddle, making it hard to see what progress was being made.
Despite Fred’s advice that they should not bother looking elsewhere in the garden, the police persisted in searching the general area. This seemed to be a sensible approach, particularly as – several hours after the main team had started digging – they still had not found Heather’s remains. It was while the police were probing an area by the back door of the house, near the church wall, that just after 4 P.M. they stumbled upon what they thought might be a piece of human bone. Because it was found on its own, some distance from where Fred had said to look, the discovery was not deemed important enough to move the focus of the dig. ‘Gloucester is built on a number of Roman burial grounds, and it is not unusual to find human remains,’ says John Bennett. Nevertheless, the bone was sent back to the station for Professor Knight’s investigation.
But because Heather’s grave remained elusive, the search area was widened. Later that afternoon, when a secondary hole on the left-hand side of the patio by the fir trees had reached a depth of two feet, a member of the team spotted a large dark-brown object. It was carefully removed by Professor Knight and washed clean of mud. The professor identified it as a human thighbone, discoloured after years in the ground. The hole was filled with glutinous black matter – decomposed human flesh and bodily organs mixed with earth. The smell was appalling. Professor Knight (who, luckily for him, has no sense of smell) reached down and began cautiously probing the ‘quagmire’, as he describes it, where the femur had been found, and uncovered a mass of human bones all jumbled together in a tiny hole just a foot across. Fragments of a black bin bag were under the ribs; large teeth and clumps of hair lay near a skull. Professor Knight also recovered fingernails and two short lengths of rope.
The bones were washed and taken in dustbins to Gloucester police headquarters for closer examination. Professor Knight told John Bennett that, from examining the size of the skull and the pelvis, he suspected that these were the remains of a young woman, and the early signs were that she had been dismembered and decapitated before burial. It was almost a complete skeleton when put together, but the professor noticed that curious body parts, notably the kneecaps, several bones from one foot and some from the hands, were missing.
It was then confirmed that the other bone found earlier in the day was also a human remain, but not a part of the main skeleton. Neither was it an ancient artefact of Roman Glevum. John Bennett now realised there might be a second victim buried in the garden.
That evening Rose was told that the police had found Heather’s grave, but she did not appear to be shocked by this news. She was then told that the search team had come across evidence of another murder victim, which did excite her: she exclaimed, ‘Oh, this is all getting too much!’
At the Bearland police headquarters, Fred told detectives he had strangled Heather in the hallway of the house after the other children had gone to school. He said he had stored her body in a dustbin while he waited for an opportunity to dig her grave. Fred seemed fairly relaxed as he spoke about this, although he frequently stopped to smoke cigarettes. He would not give an explanation for the missing parts of Heather’s skeleton.
It was put to him that Heather was not the only murder victim in the garden. The detectives told Fred that they had found another human remain.
It is difficult to know what motivated Fred to go further in his confession. Possibly it was a relief to unburden himself, or maybe he was just caught off-balance by this piece of news. Whatever went through Fred’s mind, he decided to admit that there were two more victims in the garden. It emerged that one was a former tenant at the house, a young woman named Shirley Robinson. Fred admitted that she had been pregnant with his baby, and also said she was a lesbian. The third victim was another young woman, but Fred was unable to provide her name and referred to her only as ‘Shirley’s mate’. He said he had buried her near the bathroom wall.
Fred was asked about his criminal history, particularly the attack on Caroline Owens in 1972. (The police had actually found a faded local newspaper clipping about the case when they searched the house, as well as Fred and Rose’s rather incriminating love letters in a box in the attic.) The detectives were curious to know about Rose’s involvement in the attack. Fred agreed that Rose had been an accomplice, and that the kidnap of Caroline Owens had been a test to see if he could make the women have lesbian sex together. He had hoped that this would develop into bondage sex and that the outcome would be Caroline’s murder, because Fred admitted he would almost certainly have gone ‘too far again’.
By this time it was obvious that the scope of the murder inquiry had changed dramatically. ‘We knew we weren’t looking for one any more, for certain,’ says John Bennett.
Following Fred’s interview, Rose was also put under arrest for the murders of Shirley Robinson and the second, unknown female. At lunchtime on Sunday she was questioned about these murders and told that Fre
d had ‘seen sense and told the police all’. It was suggested that she did the same. Rose was obviously unsettled by this, and in a quavering voice, remarked that there was ‘something wrong with the bloke altogether’.
Fred was officially charged with Heather’s murder on Sunday night. He appeared before Gloucester magistrates the next morning, still dressed in his patterned jumper and blue body-warmer. He had been in custody for almost seventy-two hours, and his beard had grown dark. His solicitor, Howard Ogden, told the court that Fred had admitted to killing his daughter, was being ‘utterly co-operative’, and was also helping police with two other murder inquiries. Fred was formally remanded into custody and taken back to the cells.
Rose was released on police bail and returned home, where she watched the dig from behind net curtains. She had been interviewed for a total of just four hours; this short period of time was partly because her answers were so terse and unhelpful. She had refused food throughout her time in custody, and had consequently been given a medical examination before leaving the station. Mae and Steve stayed at the house with her. Steve had already spoken to the local newspaper, saying that he and Mae supported their parents and did not think it was possible that they had killed anybody.
It had continued to rain hard, and large puddles of muddy water had formed in the back garden and the alley behind Cromwell Street. The police brought in pumping equipment to drain the site and erected a large yellow tarpaulin. Screens had also been set up to hide the work from curious passers-by.
Fred & Rose Page 24