by Colin Wilson
In November that year, 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 15-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 16. Rose’s younger brother, Graham, later described how she had seduced him when he was 12.
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 showing 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 non-stop 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 6 December 1972, the Wests saw Caroline in nearby Tewkesbury, and offered her a lift home. She accepted, but soon regretted it as Rose, sitting on 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 her upstairs, and Rose sat beside her on the settee and began fondling her breasts. Caroline 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, realising this was her only chance of escape, agreed. In fact, she confessed what had happened to her mother as soon as she got home, and the Wests were arrested. But in court on 12 January 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 traumatised 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, 19, 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 Weston-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 15, 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, 15, who vanished on 10 November 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, 21, was a student at Exeter University and a niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis. She vanished on 27 December 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, 21, was a Swiss student, who set out hitchhiking on 15 April 1974, to see a friend in Ireland. She disappeared, and her body was found in the West’s cellar 20 years later.
Shirley Ann Hubbard, 15, had, like so many of the Wests’ victims, been in care. She was working as a trainee shop assistant in Worcester, and disappeared on 5 November 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 in her nostrils to enable her to breathe.
Juanita Mott, 18, 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, began 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 disappeared on 9 May 1977, and was buried in the garden, since there was now no more room in the basement.
Alison Chambers, 16, 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, 16, whose virginity West had taken when she was 14. 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 19 June 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 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 ti
me. 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, Bill Letts, 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 his brother 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 12 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 3 October 1995, and it was obvious that the defence 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, their ex-au pair) and a married neighbour 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 sodomised her.
Rose made a bad impression on the jury by a blanket denial of knowing anything whatsoever 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 21 November 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 13-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 Dr 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 24 June 1998. Mrs Grundy had apparently 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 favour 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 realised 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 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 he would have learned that he had been arrested 20 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 post-mortem showed that she had died of a morphine overdose. Another 14 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 15 murders on 31 January 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.’
When a man is as arrogant and impatient as Shipman, it seems obvious that he has an inflated opinion of himself. Shipman seems to have been the kind of person who urgently needed reasons for a high level of selfesteem, but simply lacked such reasons. The accounts of people he upset—always people who were weaker than himself—make it clear that he was a classic case of a Right Man. He had tried working in a practice with other doctors, but they found his self-opinionatedness intolerable.
But how do we make the leap from arrogance and frustrated craving for self-esteem to murdering patients with overdoses of morphine?
The first step is to recognise that Shipman was a member of the dominant 5 per cent, while his wife, Primrose, was undoubtedly of medium to low dominance. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied the role of dominance in sexual partnerships, observed that such an extreme mixture of high and low dominance seldom works.
So how did this curious relationship come about? Shipman’s background offers a few clues. He was born in Nottingham in January 1946 of working class parents. Harold, his mother’s favourite, was not obviously talented, and less than brilliant at school; but his mother’s expectations turned him into a hard worker, a ‘plodder’. He was distinguished in only one respect—on the rugby field, where, a friend commented, he ‘would do anything to win’.
When his mother died of cancer he was 17, and expressed his grief by running all night in the rain; but he did not even mention her loss at school. During his mother’s painful last days Shipman watched the family doctor administering increasingly large doses of morphine.
After an initial failure, hard work got Shipman into Leeds University Medical School. There he acquired himself a girlfriend who was living in the same students’ lodging. Primrose Oxtoby was three years his junior, and has been described by writers on the case as ‘frumpish’ and ‘a plain Jane’; even then she had a tendency to put on weight. Her background was even narrower than his; her parents had been so strict that she was not even allowed to go to the local youth club. But in less than a year, Shipman had—as he himself said later—‘made a mistake’; Primrose was pregnant. Her parents immediately broke with her. But she married him, and as more children followed, any hopes Shipman had entertained for an interesting future evaporated. Primrose was not even a good housekeeper, and policemen who came later to search their house were shocked by the dirt and general untidiness.
The Shipmans moved to Pontefract, where h
e became a junior houseman at the General Infirmary. Three years later, in 1974, they moved to Todmorden, in the Pennines, and he began injecting himself with pethidine, obtained on forged prescriptions, to stave off depression. When he was caught two years later, he was suspended, and Primrose and the children were forced to live with her parents. Shipman fought hard to save his job, but was fired from the practice. He obviously felt that he had been treated unfairly.
After his trial in 1976 for forging prescriptions, he was fined £658. He must have felt that fate was grinding him into the ground. In the following year he became part of a practice in Hyde, Cheshire, and—the evidence seems to show—began his career as a murderer.
When he was questioned on suspicion of 15 murders, Shipman angrily denied any wrongdoing, sure that he had covered his trail so carefully that he was safe. But the investigators soon discovered that he had made extensive changes in his patients’ notes, to make them seem more seriously ill than they were. On 7 October 1998, Shipman was full of self-confidence during the police interview. But when a detective constable began to question him about changes he had made in the patients’ records, he began to falter and flounder. That evening he broke down and sobbed. But he still refused to confess.
Why did Shipman kill? Could it have been because the Right Man needs a fantasy to justify his immense self-esteem, and dealing out death with a syringe provided that fantasy—the self-effacing GP who is actually one of the world’s most prolific serial killers?
Or could it have been something as simple as a psychological addiction, like the escalating sadism the BSU noted in so many serial killers? At least one man in Todmorden, the husband of Eva Lyons—who was dying of cancer—believed that Shipman injected his elderly wife with an overdose of morphine in a mercy killing. Soon thereafter, eight more elderly patients were found dead after Shipman had been to see them. Had he discovered that watching someone die peacefully produced in him a sense of relief that was not unlike the effect of morphine? And was this ability to deal out death a godlike sensation that compensated for the failure of his life?