Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  Confronted with this evidence, Fred now admitted that, in fact, there were two more bodies buried in the garden. The police soon uncovered these, and identified them as Shirley Ann Robinson, a former lodger of the Wests, and Alison Chambers, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl called who had vanished in 1979. Shirley Ann had been the lover of both Fred and Rose, and a fetus found nearby was later admitted by Fred to be his own child.

  The police now moved their search to the basement, and found five more dismembered corpses under the floor. Another was discovered under the bathroom floor, and identified as Lynda Carol Gough, who had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ home before she vanished in April 1973. That brought the total up to nine bodies.

  The search was moved to a field near West’s former home in the village of Much Marcle, and located the body of West’s first wife, Rena. They also found the body of Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, underneath the kitchen of their former home at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. Finally, another body, that of one of West’s former girlfriends, Anne McFall, was found buried in a field, bringing the body count up to twelve.

  As Fred West’s story began to emerge, it became clear that he had been operating longer than any serial killer in criminal history. His first murder—that of Anne McFall—seems to have taken place eighteen years earlier, in 1967.

  Fred had been born in a farm cottage in Much Marcle, a small Herefordshire village, in 1941, the son of a farm laborer. It later emerged that, in the West household, incest was common, and that his father frequently told his three daughters, “I made you—I’m entitled to touch you.” West was later to take exactly the same attitude towards his own daughters. West’s mother retaliated by seducing Fred when he was only twelve years old.

  Fred was a mild, unaggressive teenager. When he was seventeen, he swerved his motorbike to avoid a girl on a bicycle, and hit his head against a wall. He was unconscious for almost a week, and one leg healed permanently shorter than the other. It was after this accident that his brothers observed a change in his disposition. He became moody, and had sudden fits of rage.

  Two years later, when he was nineteen, he was standing on the platform of a fire escape outside a youth club and tried to put his hand up the skirt of a girl he had invited outside; she gave him a push and he fell over the rails, striking his head. He was unconscious for twenty-four hours.

  Shortly before this accident, he had met a sixteen-year-old Glasgow delinquent named Katherine Costello, known as Rena, who, even at that age, had worked as a prostitute. Soon they were having sex in fields, and Rena was convinced that she was in love. Nevertheless, she went back to Glasgow, returned to prostitution, and was soon pregnant by her black pimp.

  Unhappy at the unwanted pregnancy, she returned to Gloucestershire, and Fred tried to abort her, without success. Apparently unconcerned that she was pregnant by another man he married her in November 1962. He had always been excited at the idea of women being possessed by other men—preferably while he was watching.

  They went back to Glasgow, where he ran an ice cream van, but their marriage quickly deteriorated, and he began to beat her. Rena also confided to a friend that Fred’s sexual demands were “weird.” She may have meant that he liked to tie her up.

  After accidentally killing a child when backing up in his ice cream van, West returned to Much Marcle, and found work as a butcher in an abattoir. This job may also have influenced his sexuality—a friend at the time recounts that West plied a trade as an abortionist, and had a collection of “gruesome polaroid photographs of blood-stained women.” West obviously found blood exciting.

  Soon, Rena rejoined her husband, bringing with her two Scots girlfriends, one of whom was the teenaged Anne McFall. All four of them—and Rena’s baby, Charmaine—went to live in a small trailer. And although Fred frequently beat Rena, Anne nevertheless fell in love with him. When Rena decided to return to Glasgow, Anne stayed behind, and soon became Fred’s mistress.

  Why he murdered Anne is uncertain, since he later described her as “an angel.” It may possibly have been because she told him she was pregnant. He strangled her in July 1967, and buried her in a nearby field.

  Rena now came back to live with him. And in January 1968, West committed another murder. The victim was a fifteen-year-old waitress called Mary Bastholm, who knew West through the café where she worked—he had done some decorating there. On the night of January 6, 1968, she waited at a bus stop on her way to see her boyfriend, and then simply disappeared. Mary’s body was never found, but when West was in prison, he told his son Stephen that he had killed her.

  In November, West and Rena were again living apart, and Fred was occupying a trailer near the village of Bishop’s Cleeve. It was there that he met Rose Letts, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who, it became clear, was already something of a nymphomaniac, and West had little trouble seducing her. In spite of the violent opposition of her parents—it later emerged that she had had an incestuous relationship with her father—she moved into the caravan with Fred as soon as she was sixteen. Rose’s younger brother, Graham, later described how she had seduced him when he was twelve.

  When she and Fred moved in together, he was soon persuading her to have sex with other men while he looked on. When they moved together into Gloucester, Fred put advertisements into sex magazines, with photographs of Rose displaying her naked breasts. Rena’s daughter, Charmaine, and Fred’s first daughter, Anne Marie, moved in with them. But Charmaine intensely disliked her stepmother, who reciprocated by beating her.

  In the New Year of 1971, West was sent to prison for theft and fraud at a garage where he had worked, and it was while he was there that Charmaine disappeared. There seems to be little doubt that Rose killed her. From now on, Fred and Rose were bound together by their knowledge that the other was a killer.

  At their first home, at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester, they made the acquaintance of a young married woman, Liz Agius, whose Maltese husband worked abroad. She began to make a habit of taking tea with them, and one day felt strangely drowsy; she woke up to find herself naked in bed between Fred and Rose—and Fred admitted that he had raped her. Oddly enough, it does not seem to have disturbed the friendship. It was also at about this time that Fred’s wife, Rena, came to call on them at Midland Road, and simply disappeared. Her body was eventually found buried not far from that of Anne McFall.

  The Wests’ life seems to have become a nonstop sexual orgy. In September 1972, Fred and Rose, now married, moved to 25 Cromwell Street. They rented out cheap rooms to teenagers, and Rose was soon having sex with the male lodgers. Fred had no objection—when his wife returned from another man’s bed, he flung himself on her with intense excitement. Rose also enjoyed sex with other women.

  A teenage au pair, Caroline Raine, was hired, but when both Fred and Rose made sexual advances, she decided to move back to her parents. Four weeks later, on December 6, 1972, the Wests saw Caroline in nearby Tewkesbury, and offered her a lift home. She accepted, but soon regretted it because Rose, sitting in the back seat with her, tried to kiss her on the mouth. When it was clear she was going to be uncooperative, Fred stopped the car, and punched her until she lost consciousness.

  Back at 25 Cromwell Street, West dragged Caroline upstairs, and Rose sat beside her on the settee and began fondling her breasts. She was given a cup of tea, which made her sleepy. Then the Wests tied her hands behind her, and gagged her with cotton wool. She was stripped naked and laid on the floor, where West beat her between the legs with the buckle end of a belt. After that, Rose, who had obviously become sexually excited, lay between her legs and performed oral sex, Fred meanwhile lying on top of Rose, having sex with her.

  Later, while Rose was in the bathroom, Fred raped Caroline. He raped her a second time the next morning, when someone came to the door and Rose went downstairs to answer it.

  The Wests now told her that they wanted her to return as their au pair, and Caroline, realizing this was her only chance of escape, agreed. In fact, she co
nfessed what had happened to her mother as soon as she got home, and the Wests were arrested. But in court on January 12, 1973, they were charged only with indecent assault, the magistrate obviously believing their story that nothing more serious had taken place. Caroline had felt too traumatized to attend the hearing. The Wests were fined £25 and returned home with the knowledge that if they intended to silence future victims, it would be simpler to murder them.

  This is exactly what they did. Lynda Gough, nineteen, was a girlfriend of one of their male lodgers, and had also slept with his roommate. (Rose had climbed into bed with both of the men on the first night they moved in.) In April 1973, Lynda left home, leaving her parents a note saying that she had found herself a flat. They never saw her again, although when Mrs. Gough called on the Wests to ask if they knew where her daughter was, she noticed that Rose was wearing Lynda’s slippers. The Wests insisted that Lynda had simply gone to Western-Super-Mare looking for a job.

  It was at about this time—mid-1973—that West began having sex with his nine-year-old daughter, Anne Marie. She was taken to the basement and hung up from the ceiling by her hands, while a dildo was inserted inside of her. After that, her father raped her regularly, sometimes even when she came home from school for lunch. Anne Marie was also made to submit to many of Rose’s lovers while her father spied through a hole in the wall. At fifteen, Anne Marie became pregnant by her father, but had a miscarriage. It was at this point that she decided to leave home, and lived by prostitution.

  During the next two years, the Wests murdered five more girls, and Fred concreted their bodies under the basement floor. These were:

  Carol Ann Cooper, fifteen, who vanished on November 10, 1973, after going to the cinema with friends. It seems certain that the Wests offered her a lift, then took her home and killed her after forcing her to join their usual “sex games.”

  Lucy Partington, twenty-one, was a student at Exeter University and a niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis. She vanished on December 27, 1973, after spending the afternoon with a disabled friend. It seems likely that the Wests kept her prisoner for several days, raping and torturing her before killing her.

  Therese Siegenthaler, twenty-one, was a Swiss student, who set out hitchhiking on April 15, 1974, to see a friend in Ireland. She disappeared, and her body was found in the Wests’ cellar twenty years later.

  Shirley Ann Hubbard, fifteen, had, like so many of the Wests’ victims, been in foster care. She was working as a trainee shop assistant in Worcester, and disappeared on November 5, 1974, on her way to see her foster parents in Droitwich. When her body was found, her skull was completely covered with black adhesive tape, and plastic tubes had been inserted into her nostrils to enable her to breathe.

  Juanita Mott, eighteen, was also the child of a broken home. She had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ house in Cromwell Street, and it seems likely that she returned there one day to see a friend, and was raped and murdered.

  There was a three-year gap between the death of Juanita Mott in April 1975 and that of the next victim, Shirley Ann Robinson, another child of a broken home who came to the Wests’ house as a lodger. She entered into a lesbian affair with Rose and also became pregnant by Fred. She was obviously hoping to persuade Fred to abandon Rose and marry her. Shirley Ann disappeared on May 9, 1977, and was buried in the garden, since there was now no more room in the basement.

  Alison Chambers, sixteen, had spent years in a children’s home after her parents split up. In September 1979, she wrote a letter to her mother saying that she was living with “a really nice homely family.” Her body was one of those found in the Wests’ garden.

  The last known victim was the Wests’ own daughter Heather, sixteen, whose virginity West had taken when she was fourteen. She became deeply depressed, and it is conceivable that West thought she might start telling friends about the incest he continued to force on her. On June 19, 1987, West took the day off from his building work, and some time during that day, he and Rose murdered Heather. Her body was the last to be buried in the back garden.

  Did West then stop killing? This seems doubtful. On the day the police went to 25 Cromwell Street with a search warrant, his son, Stephen, managed to contact him on his mobile phone, to tell him what had happened. West said that he would be home immediately—but in fact, took several hours. It seems likely that he went to check on bodies buried elsewhere, to make sure that they were not likely to be discovered. He also hinted to his son, when Stephen visited him in prison, that there were still many more bodies to be discovered. The evidence of the children made it quite clear that West’s life revolved around sex. They noted that he thought and talked about sex all the time. Rose was almost as bad—West encouraged her to sleep with his brother John (who also had sex with Anne Marie), to continue her affair with her father, to work as a prostitute, and to take a series of black lovers, by whom she occasionally became pregnant.

  Fred’s second daughter, Mae, was raped at the age of eight, almost certainly by John, who would later commit suicide on the day before the jury was to return its verdict on the charge that he had been raping Anne Marie and “another girl.”

  After Fred’s arrest in 1994, and the discovery of the twelve bodies, Rose was also charged with ten murders.

  On New Year’s Day 1995, Fred West committed suicide by hanging himself in his cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, with strips of blanket from his bed, which he had plaited together. Anne Marie made a suicide attempt after hearing of her father’s death. Rose, on the other hand, declared vociferously that he had got what he deserved. Her own story was that she was innocent, and knew nothing about the various murders committed by her husband when, she claimed, she was out of the house sleeping with clients.

  The trial of Rose West began at Winchester Crown Court on October 3, 1995, and it was obvious that the defense pinned its hopes on the fact that there was no definite evidence to link her to any of the murders. Yet there was still ample evidence that Rose was capable of taking part in the rape of women such as Caroline Raine and a married neighbor named Liz Agius. Another young woman, known at the trial as Miss A, told how, as a teenager, she had called at 25 Cromwell Street, had been undressed by Rose, and then made to take part in an orgy in which she was tied down to a bed, while Fred raped and sodomized her.

  Rose made a bad impression on the jury by a blanket denial of knowing anything whatever about the crimes—she even insisted that she had never met Caroline Raine, in spite of the evidence that she had helped to kidnap and sexually abuse her.

  On November 21, 1995, Rose was found guilty of ten murders, and sentenced to life imprisonment, the judge, Sir Charles Mantell adding: “If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.”

  It seems very clear that what was basically responsible for turning West into a “sex maniac” was being born into a household that became a sexual free-for-all, with the father committing incest with his daughters, the mother with her eldest son, and the brothers and sisters joining in the sex games. (In his late teens Fred impregnated his thirteen-year-old sister.) All this, combined with West’s serious head accidents in his teens, had the effect of turning normal sex into “kinky” sex, then into sadism. It became clear that West used his basement as a torture chamber, suspending the girls by their wrists, and cutting off fingers and toes. Even the body of his eldest daughter had missing fingers. It seems that what we are dealing with here is an extreme version of what Hazelwood meant when he said that sex crime is not about sex but about power. What West was seeking in hanging his victims from the ceiling was a sense of total control, of being the “master.”

  A search for utter control also seems to be the explanation in one of the most puzzling cases of multiple murder in the late 1990s: that of Harold Shipman, who is also Europe’s most prolific serial killer.

  Shipman, of Hyde in Cheshire, came under suspicion after the sudden death of an elderly patient, Kathleen Grundy, on June 24, 1998. Mrs. Grundy had appare
ntly left a will in which her considerable fortune—over £300,000—was left to her doctor, Harold Shipman. But the will was carelessly typed, and two witnesses who had also signed it explained that they had done so as a favor to Dr. Shipman, who had folded the paper so that they could not see what they were signing.

  Mrs. Grundy’s daughter, Angela Woodruff, reported her suspicions to the police. Detective Inspector Stan Egerton noted that this looked like a case of attempted fraud. But could it be more than that? The death rate among Shipman’s patients, especially elderly women, was remarkably high, but there seemed to be no other cases in which Shipman had actually benefited from the death of one of them.

  In fact, the above-average death rate had been noted by one of Shipman’s colleagues, Dr. Linda Reynolds. In 1997, she had realized that Shipman seemed to have been present at the deaths of an unusual number of patients—three times as many as might have been expected—and reported her suspicions to the local coroner. Yet these came to nothing; there seemed to be no logical reason why a popular GP should kill his patients. If the coroner had checked Shipman’s criminal record, however, he would have learned that he had been arrested twenty years earlier, in 1976, for forging prescriptions for the drug pethidine, a morphine derivative, to which he had become addicted.

  Mrs. Grundy’s body was exhumed, and the postmortem showed that she had died of a morphine overdose. Another fourteen exhumations of Shipman’s patients revealed the same cause of death. Moreover, it was clear that these were only a small proportion of Shipman’s victims. After his conviction for fifteen murders on January 31, 2000, further investigation made it clear that the total could be as high as 260.

  Shipman ran his practice alone, and was known to medical colleagues as a rude, overbearing man. His patients, however, found him kindly and patient, always willing to talk to them about their problems. But with people over whom he had authority, he was a bully. He was brutal to a young female pharmaceutical representative, out on her first assignment, and browbeat her until she was in tears. When a receptionist forgot his coffee, he went white with rage. When his wife rang him to say that she and the kids were hungry and waiting to eat dinner, he snapped: “You’ll wait until I get there.”