Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home

by Cawthorne Nigel

  DS Bennett said that he was surprised how small the garden was for a large Victorian house. It was 25–30ft long and no more that 15–20ft wide, and enclosed by a high wall and trees. Once the concrete slabs had been lifted, a mini-digger was brought in down a pathway to the rear. But when it dug down more than the depth of a spade, they came across a layer of thick, black mud that smelled of sewage. As they dug deeper, this oozed in, filling the hole.

  A scene-of-crime tent was brought in to cover the garden. As the excavation team removed the topsoil, they found small bones and bone fragments. A local anthropologist examined them and said they belonged to small animals.

  Just below the surface, near the ramshackle extension West had added to the house, they found a larger bone that looked suspiciously human. During his long career with the police force, DS Bennett had come across bones like this before, only to be told they were of Roman origin. But still, it would be checked out.

  The fire brigade turned up with a pump to remove the water from the hole that was now surrounded by planks. As the water level dropped, a new smell emanated from the pit. It was adipocere, the smelly, waxy substance that comes from rotting flesh. Bennett had smelt it many times before. Earlier in his career, he had been a police diver and had recovered decomposing bodies. Then the diggers found what looked like human hair.

  As the mud was pumped from the hole, the edges began to crumble, but more bones became visible, including a large one that could have come from an arm or a leg. Bennett then called a halt to the excavation and called in the top Home Office pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight.

  Bennett put the bone they had found near the extension in an evidence bag and took it back to the station. When Professor Knight arrived, he identified it as a human thighbone – a femur. It came from a young woman aged between 15–25.

  Professor Knight arrived in the Wests’ back garden at 7.00pm; it was dark and drizzling. He quickly identified the bones in the pit as human. Although the professor had lost his sense of smell many years before, he could see the soapy, grey adipocere in the soil. He began removing the bones and reassembling them. Under the torso, there was a black bin-liner. The head had been separated, although the hair was still in place; the water-sodden soil had preserved it. But no fragments of material were found – no buttons or zips. It was clear that the girl had been buried naked.

  When West was told what they had found, he again confessed to murdering his daughter, but it had been an accident, he said. Heather was headstrong; there had been a row; he had slapped her for insolence, but she had simply laughed in his face. So he grabbed her by the throat, but he had gripped her too hard and she stopped breathing. He had tried to resuscitate her, but had no medical training. So he dragged her to the bathroom to douse her with cold water. When this did not revive her, he took her clothes off and dried her. Now he had a corpse to dispose of. He tried putting her body in the large rubbish bin, but it would not fit, so he had to dismember her. First, though, he had to make sure that she was dead, so he strangled her with her tights.

  ‘I didn’t want to touch her while she was alive,’ said West. ‘I mean, if I’d have started cutting her leg or her throat and she’d have suddenly come alive …’

  Before he began his gruesome task, West closed Heather’s eyes. According to his own account, he was squeamish. ‘If somebody’s sat there looking at you, you’re not going to use a knife on that person, are you?’ he said.

  West then gave a detailed description of the process. When he cut off her head, it made a ‘horrible noise … like scrunching’. Cutting her legs off was more problematic. Twisting one of her feet, he heard ‘one almighty crack and the leg came loose’.

  Once the head and legs had been cut off, the dismembered corpse fitted neatly into the rubbish bin. That night, once everyone had gone to bed, he had buried the body in the back garden. It had lain undiscovered for seven years and that was the end of the story – or so he said.

  But it was far from over. Professor Knight had retrieved a full set of bones from the pit in Fred West’s back garden. But the femur found near the extension had to be accounted for. ‘Either we’ve found the world’s first three-legged woman,’ said Knight, ‘or there’s another victim around here somewhere.’ Clearly, there was more than one body buried in the back garden at 25 Cromwell Street.

  When Fred West was interviewed again, he reprised the story of the murder and dismemberment of his daughter at some length.

  ‘Heather didn’t have three legs,’ said a detective. ‘Is there anyone else buried in your garden?’

  ‘Only Heather,’ West insisted, falling silent.

  After a long pause, he was asked whether he had any idea where the other bone might have come from. There was another long pause and, finally, West said softly, ‘Yes … Shirley.’

  ‘Shirley who?’

  ‘Robinson. The girl that caused the problem.’

  According to West, he had had an affair with 18-year-old Shirley Robinson and made her pregnant. She wanted to marry him and was going to tell Rosemary. He could not let that happen, so he strangled her, cut her up and buried her under the patio.

  Then West admitted to another murder. The victim this time was 17-year-old Alison Chambers. She was Shirley Robinson’s lesbian lover, West said. She had come looking for her. He had told her that Shirley no longer lived there. Alison seemed to accept that, he said, but she came back three weeks later and said she was going to tell the police. West said he persuaded her not to and offered her a lift back to Bristol. On the way, he stopped in a lay-by and strangled her. Her dismembered body would also be found in the back garden. West had now admitted to having buried three bodies in the back garden. But there was much more to come.

  Born in 1941 in the village of Much Marcle, some 14 miles north-west of Gloucester, Fred West was the last of a long line of Herefordshire farm labourers. His parents, Walter and Daisy West, had six children over a ten-year period whom they brought up in rural poverty. Fred had been a beautiful baby with blond hair and piercing blue eyes; he was his mother’s favourite. A doting son, he did everything she asked. He also enjoyed a good relationship with his father, whom he regarded as a role model. His father, he said, had liberal ideas when it came to sex. ‘If it’s on offer, take, son … that was my father’s idea,’ he said. ‘Whatever you enjoy, do … only make sure you don’t get caught doing it.’

  However, as he grew up Fred West lost his childish good looks. His blond hair turned dark brown and curly. He had inherited some of his mother’s less attractive features – narrow eyes and a big mouth with a large gap between his front teeth. Some put this down to gypsy blood. Sterner critics called him simian.

  Scruffy and unkempt, West did not do well at school. He was a troublesome pupil and was thrashed regularly. His mother, now seriously overweight and always badly dressed, would turn up at his school to remonstrate with the teachers. This led to him being teased as a ‘mummy’s boy’. He left school at 15, practically illiterate, and went to work, like his father before him, as a farmhand.

  By the time he was 16, West had begun to take an interest in girls. He tidied himself up a bit and aggressively pursued any woman who took his fancy. This included close relatives, and he claimed to have made his sister pregnant. He also alleged that his father had committed incest with his daughters. ‘I made you so I’m entitled to have you,’ West suggests his father said to them. But then, West was a practised liar. He also claimed that his mother had taken him to bed before his 13th birthday. As far as sex was concerned, anything went.

  At 17, Fred got a job in a cider factory and bought a motorbike. One night, he ran over a pushbike that had been left in the road and crashed into a brick wall. One leg was broken and was left permanently shorter than the other. A wound to his head took weeks to heal, but he did not have a steel plate surgically inserted as he claimed later. However, after the accident he was prone to sudden fits of rage and seems to have lost control over his emotions.
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  He spent three years as a seaman and travelled the world, although he avoided dockside prostitutes for fear of sexually transmitted diseases. ‘I wasn’t paying for it. I got it for nothing,’ he said. ‘These girls loved it. There were times when I slept with three or four girls twice in the same night, all in the same bed. That’s what sex is all about – pleasure.’

  Returning to Gloucester, he hooked up with a pretty 16-year-old girl named Catherine Bernadette Costello, nicknamed Rena. A street prostitute in Glasgow from an early age, she had been warned by the police about soliciting at the age of 16. Soon afterwards, she was sent to borstal for attempted burglary. Fleeing her pimp, she came south to Gloucester where she met Fred. The two misfits quickly became lovers, but the relationship was halted when Rena returned home to Scotland a few months later.

  Eager for more sex, Fred became ever more forcefully promiscuous. One night while standing on a fire escape outside a local youth club, he stuck his hand up a young woman’s skirt. She reacted furiously, knocking him over the balustrade. In the fall, he banged his head again and lost consciousness. This may well have aggravated the frontal lobe damage caused by the motorcycle accident.

  Fred West then embarked on a career in petty theft. In 1961, he and a friend stole cigarette cases and a watchstrap from a local jeweller’s shop. They were caught red-handed with the stolen goods and were fined. A few months later, he was accused of getting a 13-year-old girl, a friend of the family, pregnant. Fred was unrepentant. He did not see anything wrong in molesting underage girls. ‘Doesn’t everyone do it?’ he said.

  He was convicted but, at his trial, West’s GP claimed that he suffered from epileptic fits. This saved him from serving a jail sentence but, by the age of 20, Fred West was already a convicted thief and child molester. And he showed no sign of changing his ways. His family threw him out and he went to work on building sites where, again, he was caught stealing. And there were more allegations that he was having sex with underage girls.

  West’s parents eventually relented and let him return to the family home in Much Marcle. Then, in the summer of 1962, Rena Costello returned from Scotland and took up with Fred again. This time she was pregnant by her pimp. West boasted that during the time he was away at sea he had learnt to perform abortions. He tried it out on her – and failed.

  Rena had breached the conditions of her parole and the police caught up with her. To get her out of trouble, Fred proposed – and she accepted. His parents did not approve of the marriage and, at the last minute, Fred got cold feet and offered his brother John £5 to marry her instead. He refused. Nevertheless, Fred went ahead.

  His parents would not allow Rena in the house, so the couple moved to Scotland. There, the father of Rena’s child, ‘a Pakistani who ran a string of corner shops’, Fred said, took him on as Rena’s ‘minder’. There were strict rules about what he could and couldn’t do with Rena, although West claimed that the boss let him go with his other girls free of charge. Even so, he began beating Rena.

  When Rena’s daughter Charmaine was born in March 1963, Fred got Rena to write to his mother, explaining that their baby had died and they had adopted a mixed-race child. West took little interest in the infant and left her with a childminder while he drove Rena to meet her clients. Meanwhile, his interest in straightforward vaginal sex had waned. Instead, he would insist on oral sex, bondage and sodomy at all hours of the day and night.

  Rena was not always willing to comply with Fred’s urges, but he had easy access to other women and was unfaithful on a daily basis. Their marriage went through a number of rocky patches with frequent separations. But in 1964, Rena gave birth to West’s child, Anne-Marie.

  West took a job driving an ice-cream truck, and was involved in an accident that resulted in the death of a four-year-old boy. It had not been his fault, but he was concerned that he might lose his job. Around that time, Fred and Rena had met a young Scottish woman named Ann McFall, whose boyfriend had been killed in an accident. Together, the three of them, plus Rena’s two children, moved to Gloucester, where West said he began to do the rounds with his old girlfriends again, even claiming to have had sex with one on the altar of a nearby church.

  He also became predatory. Thirty years later, one woman recalled being stalked by him when she was sixteen. Another, who accepted a lift from him when hitch-hiking, said he stopped in a lane and told her to remove her knickers. When she refused, he exposed himself. She fled, but he caught up with her and dragged her back to the car with his arm around her throat. Then suddenly he became pleasant and charming. Both women reported him to the police, but no action was taken.

  West then got a job in a slaughterhouse. According to Colin Wilson, it was while working there that West developed a morbid obsession with corpses, blood and dismemberment. ‘There is no evidence that he had shown any such interest so far,’ said Wilson. ‘It seems, then, that Fred West’s sexual perversion became slowly more obsessive in the period following his marriage, and the evidence suggests that necrophilia and desire to mutilate corpses began during his period as a butcher,’ he wrote in The Corpse Garden.

  West’s marriage became increasingly unstable. Rena was repeatedly beaten and fled back to Scotland but Fred refused to let her take the two children with her. Missing her daughters, Rena returned to Gloucester in July 1966 to find Fred and Ann McFall living together in a caravan. Around that time, there had been eight sexual assaults in the area committed by a man answering West’s description.

  Rena then stole some cigarettes and an iron from another caravan on the site and fled back to Scotland to escape the police. It did not work. She was arrested and 22-year-old PC Hazel Savage, who had joined the Gloucester Constabulary two years earlier, was sent to fetch her. On the way back, Rena told PC Savage about her cruel and perverted husband who was always having affairs and said that she had only resorted to theft to spite him. It was Hazel Savage’s first brush with Fred West.

  By the beginning of 1967, McFall was pregnant with West’s child. Even though she was pregnant, he persuaded her to indulge in bondage. But at six months, fearing for her child, she began to deny him. Nothing made Fred West angrier than a woman who said no. West responded by killing McFall and burying her in Letterbox Field in Much Marcle, near the caravan site and right behind Moorcourt Cottage, his childhood home.

  West not only murdered his lover and their unborn child, he painstakingly dismembered the corpse, removing the foetus, which he buried alongside McFall’s body parts – although some were missing. When the corpse was unearthed in 1994, the fingers and toes could not be found. This was to be his hallmark in future crimes. Nevertheless, West went to his death denying that he had killed McFall, repeatedly blaming Rena for Ann’s death, although he admitted helping bury her. Again, when Ann’s body was found, the hands were tied and a long length of rope was twisted around her arms. This would be another familiar feature in later murders.

  Despite her gruesome end, West memorialised her in his handwritten memoir that he wrote in prison in the last days of his life. It is called I Was Loved by an Angel. That angel was Ann McFall.

  After Ann McFall’s disappearance, Rena moved into the caravan with West. With his encouragement, she went to work as a prostitute again. Meanwhile, he began openly molesting four-year-old Charmaine and looked for a nanny who might be persuaded to work as a prostitute with his wife.

  On 6 January 1968, pretty 15-year-old Mary Bastholm was abducted from a bus stop in Gloucester. She had been on the way to see her boyfriend and was carrying a Monopoly game. The pieces were found strewn around the bus stop. West always denied abducting Mary Bastholm, but he admitted knowing her. He was a customer at the Pop-In Café, where Mary worked. She had often served him tea when he had been employed to do some building work behind the café. Mary had also been seen with a woman answering the description of Ann McFall. Later, with his second wife Rosemary, he regularly abducted young women from bus stops and one witness claimed to have seen Mary in West
’s car. West’s son Stephen said that, while in jail, his father boasted of killing Bastholm. Her body has never been found.

  A month after Mary Bastholm went missing, West’s mother died after a routine gallbladder operation and West became seriously unstable. He changed jobs several times and committed a series of petty thefts. Then his life changed. On 29 November 1968, while working as a delivery driver for a local bakery, he met the 15-year-old girl who would become his second wife and would help him dispose of the bodies in the back garden of 25 Cromwell Street.

  Rosemary Letts was born in November 1953 in Devon. Her background was disturbed; her father, Bill Letts, was a paranoid schizophrenic. He demanded total obedience from his wife and children, and used violence to get his way. ‘If he felt we were in bed too late,’ said Rose’s brother Andrew, ‘he would throw a bucket of cold water over us. He would order us to dig the garden, and that meant the whole garden. Then he would inspect it like an army officer and, if he was not satisfied, we would have to do it all over again.’

  A martinet, he enjoyed disciplining his children and was always on the lookout for reasons to beat them. ‘We were not allowed to speak and play like normal children,’ said Andrew. ‘If we were noisy, he would go for us with a belt or chunk of wood.’

  His wife Daisy also suffered during these violent outbursts. ‘He would beat you black and blue until Mum got in between us,’ Andrew said. ‘Then she would get a good hiding.’

  His savagery and his mental instability did little to recommend him to employers and he drifted through a series of low-paid, unskilled jobs. Short of housekeeping money and in the thrall of a violent husband, Daisy Letts suffered from severe depression. She had already given birth to three daughters and a son when she was hospitalised in 1953 and given electroshock therapy (now referred to as electroconvulsive therapy). At the time, she was pregnant with Rosemary and it is thought that these shocks could have had an effect on the child’s development in her mother’s womb.