The Serial Killers

by Colin Wilson

  But who were the victims at Cromwell Street? At first it was assumed that all had been lodgers of the Wests, but little by little it became clear that this was not so.

  Nineteen-year-old Lynda Gough, whose body was found in the old ‘inspection pit’, was a rebellious girl who objected to her father’s attempt to dictate the kind of boyfriends she ought to go out with. In the autumn of 1972 – when the Wests first moved into Cromwell Street – she had met one of their lodgers, Ben Stanniland, in a local cafe. She returned to Cromwell Street and had sex with him. Later she had sex with other lodgers. She also became friendly with the Wests, who offered her a job as a nanny.

  On 19 April 1973, she left a note for her parents saying she had found a flat, and would come and see them. But they never saw her again. When her mother, June Gough, heard that she knew the Wests, she called at 25 Cromwell Street. Rose West came to the door, and Mrs Gough recognised the slippers she was wearing as Lynda’s. But Rose claimed that Lynda had left and gone to find a job in Weston-super-Mare.

  According to Geoffrey Wansell in An Evil Love, based on West’s own confessions, Lynda Gough became at first a willing partner in the Wests’ sexual experiments. These soon extended into sadism and masochism. Finally, Lynda was suspended by her ankles over a hole in the cellar floor, and sexually abused. ‘Other people may well have been invited to have sexual intercourse with this helpless girl,’ Wansell says. Finally, Lynda was tortured. ‘Her fingers and toes were almost certainly cut off while she was conscious, and her hands and wrists shortly afterwards. Both her kneecaps were removed, as were seven ribs and her breastbone.’ Wansell believes all this happened while she was alive – but the simple truth is that no one knows.

  Not long after murdering Lynda, the Wests deflowered eight-year-old Anne Marie. She was Fred’s eldest daughter; her mother was his first wife Rena. One day in the summer of 1973, Anne Marie was taken down to the basement and undressed. There, her hands were tied above her head and attached to some iron object, a gag was tied round her mouth, and her legs were tied apart. She was in the classic pose that sadists love: the helpless victim. Then a vibrator was inserted inside her, causing pain that seemed to go on for ever. She looked down at a glass bowl between her legs, into which blood was dripping. Then they left her like that while they vanished upstairs – almost certainly to have sex – before returning and repeating the torture. When finally released, she limped away, hardly able to walk. Rose laughed, finding it funny. Later, she told Anne Marie: ‘All parents do it to their daughters – it’s a father’s job.’

  A few weeks later, after her ninth birthday, her father began having sex with her.

  The Wests’ next victim was picked up that November, as she was walking home to her grandmother’s after a visit to the cinema with a boyfriend. She was fifteen-year-old Carole Anne Cooper, known as Caz. Like so many of the Wests’ victims, she was the child of a broken home, and her father and stepmother had placed her in a children’s home in Worcester. After being taken back to 25 Cromwell Street and bundled into the basement, she had been used as a sexual plaything, and probably flogged and tortured. She was killed – most likely by a violent blow to the back of the head – and then buried in the cellar where Anne Marie had been deflowered.

  The next murder seems to have been a crime of opportunity. Twenty-one-year-old Lucy Partington was a student of medieval literature at Exeter University, and a niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis. Her parents had separated, and she had spent Christmas with her mother and stepfather in the pleasant village of Gretton, Gloucestershire. Gretton happens to be a few miles from Bishop’s Cleeve, where Rose West’s parents lived. Lucy had spent the evening of 27 December 1973 with a friend in Cheltenham, and was waiting for the last bus when the Wests drove by, almost certainly returning from a day at Bishop’s Cleeve. Lucy was offered a lift, or perhaps dragged into the car, and taken back to Cromwell Street. It is possible that she was kept alive for several days, for on 3 January 1974, Fred West went to the local hospital with a bad cut on his hand, which may have been sustained when he was hacking up Lucy’s body. Lucy was also buried in the cellar. West explained the increasing stench to lodgers by blaming a broken sewer.

  During the next two years, three more victims joined Caroline Cooper and Lucy Partington under the floor: 21-year-old Therese Seigenthaler, a Swiss sociology student who was hitch-hiking to north Wales, who vanished on 16 April 1974; fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard, a shop assistant, who vanished on 14 November 1974; and eighteen-year-old Juanita Mott, a factory worker who vanished on 12 April 1975. In the past, Juanita had visited a boyfriend who lodged at 25 Cromwell Street, and may well have called there on the day she vanished. When her body was found, she had been elaborately gagged with nylon tights and a bra, and bound with a plastic clothes line in a manner that suggested she had been suspended from a beam in the ceiling. (Later, the police would discover holes in two beams in the Wests’ basement.)

  There was now no room for any more bodies in the cellar, and we do not know whether, during the rest of 1975 and in 1976 and 1977, the Wests went on killing and buried the victims elsewhere. But we do know that in the spring of 1977, Rose West picked up a teenage prostitute named Shirley Anne Robinson in a Gloucester pub. Shirley was yet another product of a broken home who had been taken into care, then turned to shoplifting and prostitution. She had had lesbian girlfriends but, like Rose, was bisexual. Rose invited her to move into 25 Cromwell Street, where she became the lover of both Fred and Rose. In October 1977, she realised she was pregnant, and Fred was delighted. He told one visitor: ‘This is my wife, and this’ (pointing to Shirley) ‘is my lover.’ Shirley wrote to her father in Germany, saying that she had never been so happy, and enclosed a photograph of her and Fred, with the comment: ‘This is the man I am going to marry.’

  This, fairly certainly, is why Shirley became the next victim – the first to be buried in the garden. Fred told his brother-in-law: ‘Shirley’s mooning about me all the time . . . She’s got to fucking go.’ On 10 May 1978, when Shirley was eight months pregnant, she vanished. The Wests told the other lodgers that she had gone to join her father in Germany.

  Sixteen-year-old Alison Chambers was the last of the Wests’ murder victims in the 1970s. Again, she was the child of a broken home, and had been taken into care. She ran away from the children’s home a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, and moved in with the Wests. From there she wrote to her family saying that she had met a ‘nice, homely family’, and that when she was seventeen, she would go to live on a farm they owned. But Alison did not live to see her seventeenth birthday. When her body was found in the garden in 1994, many bones were missing, including her kneecaps, two ribs, ankles and toes, and some vertebrae. West had obviously enjoyed practising his perverse trade of human butchery once more.

  It was their next – possibly their final – victim who was to lead to their downfall. Heather was the eldest child of Fred and Rose West, and – for many years – their favourite. But when she was thirteen, her father began to ask when she intended to get rid of her virginity, and to suggest that he was the right person to do it. He was also making advances to Heather’s sister Mae, who stopped wearing a skirt because of her father’s habit of putting his hand up it. He also liked to remove her blouse and bra, and caress her breasts. Heather and Mae kept watch for one another when they had a shower, for their father liked to come in and caress them around the shower curtain. He also filled their bedroom walls with holes, so he could watch them undressing. (Mae had lost her virginity to a male visitor when she was eight.)

  When she was sixteen, Heather confided to a schoolfriend that her father made a habit of coming into her bedroom at night and forcing sex on her. When she left school, she hoped to find a job in a holiday camp in Torquay, and when this fell through, she cried all night. The following day – 19 June 1987 – she vanished. Her parents told her brothers and sisters that she had run away with a lesbian, and occasionally Rose pretended to answer t
he phone to Heather, and held long conversations with her.

  And so life continued, apparently normally, until that day in August 1992, when West raped another of his daughters, and was arrested. The children were taken into care, and one of them was overheard to say that his sister was buried under the patio . . .

  Now Fred West was under arrest, the newspapers lost no time in exploring his background. They learned that he had been born in 1941 and brought up on a farm cottage in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, until he was forced to leave home at the age of nineteen after being charged with impregnating his thirteen-year-old sister. West’s father Walter had, it seemed, also felt that his daughters were his own sexual property, often telling them: ‘I made you; I can do what I like with you.’ West’s mother, Daisy, had retaliated by taking her son into her bed when he was twelve.

  But the crucial events of Fred West’s adolescence were undoubtedly two head accidents, the first of which took place when he was seventeen, and crashed into a wall on his motorbike. He was unconscious for nearly a week, and his family noticed the change in his disposition: he became broody and silent, with explosive outbursts of temper. When he was nineteen, he put his hand up the skirt of a girl as they were standing on the platform of a fire escape; she pushed him down, and he was unconscious for 24 hours.

  Head injury has played an important part in the lives of many murderers, including Joseph Vacher, Fritz Haarmann, Earle Nelson, Albert Fish, Raymond Fernandez, Richard Speck, Gary Heidnik, John Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas and Randy Kraft, and one writer states that Ted Bundy was injured at birth by a forceps delivery. It seems certain that the two head injuries were responsible for turning Fred West into a serial killer.

  It was unfortunate that a sex maniac like Fred West should have met a nymphomaniac like Rose Letts. Twelve years his junior, she was born in Devon in 1953; her father, an electrician, was a typical ‘Right Man’ who treated his wife and family with brutal harshness. Bill Letts was also a pedophile who is believed to have initiated a sexual relationship with his daughter in her early years. When Rose was fourteen, she seduced her eleven-year-old brother Graham. Soon after this, she had an affair with a 30-year-old man. Rose was already fully sexually experienced when she met Fred West at the age of fifteen, in 1969.

  He had been married to Scots born Rena Costello since 1962; she had been a juvenile delinquent and a prostitute. After a period of living in Glasgow, where Fred worked as an ice-cream vendor, they had moved to a caravan near Gloucester. It was there that West took a job as a butcher – a job that must have intensified his obsession with dismemberment.

  Rena was already pregnant – with Charmaine – when she met Fred; Charmaine’s father was an Asian bus driver. When, in the spring of 1966, Rena returned to Glasgow because of Fred’s violence and brutality, her friend Anna McFall stayed behind and became West’s mistress. She was pregnant with West’s baby when she vanished in the spring of 1967; her body was found in Fingerpost Field, near Much Marcle, in June 1994. She was almost certainly the first of West’s victims.

  The second, West later confessed, was a fifteen-year-old waitress named Mary Bastholm, who worked in a Gloucester cafe where West was doing some building work; she vanished on 6 January 1968, and her body has never been found.

  In the following year, West met Rosemary Letts, who had just left school. He was living in a caravan in her home village, Bishop’s Cleeve, and she soon became his mistress. She seems to have agreed to take part in West’s favourite perversion, voyeurism, in this case allowing Fred to watch while she had sex with his workmates. By the time they moved into 25 Midland Road, Gloucester, in the spring of 1970, the sixteen-year-old Rose was already a prostitute. She confided this to a neighbour, Liz Agius, a young mother who lived next door. Fred also confided to Liz that he would like to tie her up, beat her, and make love to her.

  One day, after a cup of tea, Liz Agius felt oddly drowsy and fell deeply asleep. When she woke up, she was naked in bed with both the Wests, and Fred admitted that he had raped her while she was drugged. Apparently Mrs Agius was not too offended, for she remained a friend of the Wests for long after.

  In November 1970, West was sentenced to prison for the theft of some tyres. It was while he was in prison that eight-year-old Charmaine vanished – almost certainly strangled by Rose in a fit of temper. (Rose’s own children, Stephen and Mae, later wrote a book called Inside 25 Cromwell Street, in which they talk about her ungovernable temper, and how she would administer brutal beatings to both of them – apparently achieving some sexual enjoyment from it.)

  In September 1972, the Wests moved into 25 Cromwell Street. Just over two months later, they abducted Caroline Raine, beginning their career of sadism and rape.

  After West’s arrest, his son Stephen often visited him in prison. West had become lachrymose and sentimental. At first he seemed to believe that he might escape with a ten-year sentence, and be back living in Cromwell Street in seven years. As he finally came to grasp that he faced a life in prison, he became increasingly depressed. He admitted to Stephen that there were many bodies buried elsewhere, and claimed that he had tortured and raped his victims on a farm, only having sex with them after they were dead. But this could well have been an attempt to protect Rose, who had by now been charged with ten of the murders, although West insisted that she knew nothing about them. He was also upset that Rose seemed to have turned against him, announcing publicly that she hated him and wished him dead.

  On New Year’s Day, 1995, West made the ultimate sacrifice for Rose, and hanged himself in Winson Green prison, Birmingham. He told her in a letter found in his cell: ‘I haven’t got you a present. All I have is my life. I will give it to you . . .’

  Rose West’s solicitor announced to the press that the case against her had always been flimsy, and that now it was flimsier still. It certainly seemed that the evidence against her was purely circumstantial. But the police knew something of which the general public were unaware: that Rose had taken part in the rape of Caroline Raine and ‘Miss X’, as well as playing an active part in sexual assaults on Anne Marie. The DPP was fairly certain that when these facts were known, a jury would have no difficulty in deciding that Rose West had played an active part in the murders.

  They were correct. When the trial opened in Winchester on 3 October 1995, the defence, led by Richard Ferguson QC, made a determined attempt to have this evidence excluded. The judge, Mr Justice Mantell, rejected this, pointing out that if one of Bluebeard’s wives had escaped, her evidence would have been highly relevant to the prosecution’s case.

  This decision was the turning point of the trial. It would last seven weeks, until 22 November, but in effect it was all over. Once these three women gave their evidence, revealing Rose West as an active participant in sadism and rape, it became impossible to believe that she had known nothing of the murders at Cromwell Street. On 22 November 1995, she was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Inevitably, the West case brings to mind that of Gerald Gallego and Charlene Williams (described in Chapter 6). When this book was written, the only account of the case was a book called All His Father’s Sins, by Ray Biondi and Walt Hecox. Since then, Venom in the Blood by Eric van Hoffmann offers an in-depth study that makes it clear that Charlene was not the innocent victim that Biondi and Hecox suggest – that, on the contrary, her part in the murders was not unlike that of Rosemary West in the Gloucester case. According to Hoffmann, Charlene Williams was a bisexual nymphomaniac, and it was she who suggested kidnapping girls. All the victims were forced to have sex with Charlene as well as Gallego – Charlene liked to bite one of the girls while the other brought her to climax with oral sex, and in one case bit off the victim’s nipple. As absurd as it sounds, Gallego emerges at the end of the book as her victim.

  Ivan Milat

  Between December 1989 and April 1992, seven hitch-hikers disappeared in southern Australia. They were a Melbourne couple, James Gibson and Deborah Everist (both 19), who vanished on 30 Decembe
r 1989, German backpacker Simone Schmidl, 20, who vanished on 20 January 1991, German backpackers Gabor Neugebauer, 21, and Anja Habscheid, 20, who vanished on 26 December 1991, and British backpackers Caroline Clarke and Joanne Walters (both 22), who vanished on 18 April 1992. The bodies of the two British victims were found six months later, on 19 and 20 September, in the Belanglo State Forest, near Bowral; Caroline had been shot ten times in the head, and Joanne stabbed fourteen times in the chest and neck – suggesting two murderers. Both had been raped, and the fact that there were no defensive wounds on the hands suggested that they had been tied up.

  A year later, on 5 October 1993, the skeletal remains of James Gibson and Deborah Everist were discovered near a fire trail in the Belanglo State Forest, and a task force to hunt the ‘Backpacker Killer’ was set up. On 1 November 1993, sniffer dogs discovered Simone Schmidl’s badly decomposed body, and three days later, the bodies of Gabor Neugebauer and Anja Habscheid were found. Anja had been decapitated, and it seemed that she had been forced to kneel while the killer cut off her head in a kind of ritual execution.

  The hunt for the Backpacker Killer made headlines for the next six months, but little progress was made. The break in the case came when 40-year-old Richard Milat commented at work that there were more bodies still to be found, and that killing a woman was like cutting a loaf of bread. The workmate reported this comment to the police, and as a result, on 22 May 1994, police surrounded the home of Ivan Milat, Richard Milat’s 50-year-old brother, in Eaglevale, a Sydney suburb, and arrested him. A week later he was charged with the backpacker murders. In his garage, police found evidence to link Milat to the murders, including a bloodstained rope of a type used to bind some of the victims, a sleeping bag belonging to Deborah Everist, a camera like the one owned by Caroline Clarke, and spent cartridges like those found near Caroline Clarke. Then a crucial witness came forward. On 25 January 1990, 24-year-old Paul Onions, a British student from Birmingham, was offered a lift by a short, stocky man in his 40s, with narrow, slit-like eyes and a drooping moustache. This man identified himself as ‘Bill’ and said he was Yugoslavian. Onions was on his way to Victoria to do some fruit picking, and ‘Bill’ said he could take him as far as Canberra. As they neared the Belanglo State Forest, the driver brought his four-wheel-drive car to a halt and produced a revolver, which he pointed at his passenger, announcing: ‘This is a robbery.’ As he bent and produced a box containing rope from under the seat, Onions leapt out and ran. The man chased him, firing a shot and screaming for him to stop. Just as Onions thought he had lost him, he felt a hand grab his shoulder, and they rolled on the ground.