Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Danny Knight, the landlord of the Bristol Hotel on Bristol Road in Gloucester, used to have the blue films on a Sunday. The stag films and the strippers in the blacked-out room in the afternoon. Part of a ritual folk tradition of the Gloucester male in the late-fifties. The gangs used to come in on motorbikes, and Fred West used to join them on his grey Triumph, his small body at full stretch astride the big frame and the massive tank.

  With the gang but not of the gang. Aside from the ritual bonding. He was never a joiner. ‘I enjoy my own company,’ he admitted many years later. ‘I don’t like parties and things. I don’t like being clammed up to people.’

  Even now he was one who preferred to watch. At the stag afternoons liked to watch the watchers as much as the show. Watching sex was good. Watching the others get off on the sex without them realizing he was watching was better. That kind of giving yourself up to the moment which he could never do. These kinds of disinhibitors. It was important that they didn’t know they were being watched. So he watched. A cat who walked by himself.

  He was marking out new territories. Real maps and mental maps. Places to avoid and places he wanted to go. Because of his various jobs and the mobility that owning the bike had given him, he had gained a useful knowledge of the countryside and the roads around Worcester and Hereford and Gloucester. The patch around his home patch. When he went home at the end of 1960, after an absence of almost two years, he was able to place his family and Much Marcle into the bigger picture. He wasn’t covered in building dirt this time. There was nothing so noticeable about him. No sign that the time away had changed him. No hint of any secrets he might be keeping. He fitted straight back into life at Moorcourt Cottage, returning to work in the fields with his father.

  Then Fred passed his car driving test, and he and his brother John bought an old Ford Popular between them. Two months later, he was arrested for the first time, for theft. The items in question were women’s items: two ladies’ cigarette cases and a rolled-gold watch strap taken from Tilley and Son, a stationer’s, and Dudfield and Gaynan’s, a jeweller’s, in Ledbury. ‘Christ, these are nice,’ Fred said to the friend he was with when he spotted the cigarette cases on a display card, and slipped them in his pocket. A week later, in April 1961, he pleaded guilty to two charges of theft at Ledbury Magistrates Court and was fined £4. It made three paragraphs on page 1 of the Ledbury Reporter.

  His first court appearance at the age of nineteen. And three months later he would again be in trouble with the police. Serious trouble this time, of the kind it would take more than the vicar and the headmaster and the village policeman to drag him out of. His thirteen-year-old sister was pregnant, and they accused him of having had sex with her on a regular basis since his return home at Christmas. Well, of course he had. Wasn’t that what her was there for? What did they think, that she was one of them lesbians? Of course he had. He didn’t try to deny it. The case was set down for trial at Hereford Assizes in the coming November.

  His mother and father wanted him out of the house. His father refused to go on working alongside him. He was sent to live with his mother’s sister, Violet, and her husband Ernie at Daisy Cottage in Much Marcle, and he found a job on a building site at Newent. But he hadn’t been there long when he was caught stealing tools and equipment. He was only bemused when his thieving was uncovered: he was doing nothing that the other builders weren’t doing. He was found guilty at Newent Magistrates Court on 18 October 1961 and fined £20.

  He appeared at Hereford Assizes three weeks later on the charge of ‘having unlawful carnal knowledge’ of his thirteen-year-old sister. His mother had agreed to give evidence in his defence. The other defence witness was the Wests’ family doctor, Dr Hardy, who told the jury that the head injuries Fred West had sustained in the motorcycle accident three years earlier might mean that he was possibly an epileptic ‘given to blackouts’. Although it wasn’t mentioned, he had suffered a more recent serious injury to the head. Having apparently lunged at a girl on the fire escape outside the Ledbury Youth Club one night – he had been trying to get his hand up her skirt – he had toppled over the iron railing, falling ten feet and landing on his head. He stayed unconscious for twenty-four hours, but otherwise seems to have been more or less unhurt.

  When the time came for his sister to go in the witness box she refused to say anything incriminating against Fred. In fact she refused to speak, or even to write down, without speaking, the name of the father of her baby. The judge had no alternative but to dismiss the case against him. Because it had been dismissed, it did not appear on his criminal record: that still simply showed that he was a petty thief.

  Quite soon after this, in early 1962, Fred West was giving a fifteen-year-old girlfriend a lift home through the Herefordshire countryside in the early evening when he suddenly stopped the car at a farm gate and got out. When the girl, a part-time waitress at the Rendezvous café in Newent, followed him, he forced her on to the grass bank by the gate and raped her. Then he fell over on to his back, she remembered, and seemed to be unwell. He apologized to her for what had happened and told her not to be frightened because he ‘had blackouts’. She didn’t tell anybody about the incident for more than thirty years.

  *

  Rena, born Catherine Costello in 1944 in Coatbridge outside Glasgow, followed her borstal pal Margaret Mackintosh to Ledbury to live in 1962. It was the summer and they waitressed together at the Milk Bar close to the Tudor Market Hall in the High Street in Ledbury and had a high time lodging together at the New Inn and ruining the furniture in their room there with hair lacquer. The day Rena lay down on Dog Hill and Margaret stood look-out for her while Fred West from Marcle tampered with her and tried to abort the baby she had found herself carrying probably didn’t count in her eyes as much more than larking about. Having a lark. She was a bit of a girl, Rena. She was a goer. Shapely and blonde. She was up for anything.

  It was an unusual start to a relationship. But there was no doubt in the minds of anybody who saw Fred and Rena together at that time that a relationship was what it was. He had taken a job with Ledbury Farmers by then, working as a lorry driver, delivering animal feed to farms all around the area. Cattle cake, pellets, turkey food. And Rena started riding in the lorry with him after work, travelling high up, along the narrow country lanes. The ride occasionally took them to the home farm in Much Marcle and, although he could have guessed the reaction, he eventually took Rena – pregnant, lipsticked, slum-born, blonde – in to meet his mother. His mother was affronted. She went mad about it. Called Rena a lot of names and so on after she had gone. Filthy. Common. Sanitation had improved at Moorcourt Cottage. They had an indoor toilet by then. And Fred’s mother made a great performance of cleaning the seat after Rena had left the house. She hated Rena. Hated everything she stood for. So Fred asked Rena, eighteen to his twenty-one and expecting another man’s baby, to marry him.

  Fred’s brother John was the only member of the West family to attend the perfunctory ceremony on 17 November 1962 at the Ledbury Register Office. There was no reception. John West brought a bottle of Bristol Cream sherry, and four of them – Fred, John, Rena and Rena’s friend Margaret – stood outside in the street and drank it. Then they went back to work.

  He had gone back to living at home after the dust surrounding the incest charge against him a few months earlier had settled. But now his mother, who had gone apple-picking on the day of the wedding, refused to have his new wife in the house and so he was homeless. They tried living in the tiny room Rena shared with Margaret at the New Inn in Ledbury but that was hopeless. All they could think of doing was to go back to the only place where Rena had friends, which was Glasgow. Back to the thrown-together kind of life that she had limped along in before her spell in the south. The life she had led between her many spells away in borstal. Her mother was gone. Her mother had left home when Rena was only young. Her first appearance at Coatbridge Juvenile Court had been in May 1955, when she was eleven, for thieving. But she stil
l knew people in Scotland. John West drove them to Birmingham to catch the train.

  At first they lived in Coatbridge: 46 Hospital Street, Coatbridge. Charmaine was born at the Alexander Hospital there in March 1963. Originally she was going to be ‘Mary’. But by the time of her christening in September, she was Charmaine. Charmaine Carol Mary West. From then on they lived in Corporation-owned flats in Glasgow. Areas that were a mixture of industrial use and tenement living. One flat, in Savoy Street, was next door to a sweet factory. Another, in McLellan Street, was opposite the McLellan steel works. Closes along the whole of one side of this very long street, the steel works along the other.

  It was town living at its most compressed and chaotic. So many people living so closely together, and yet there was a freedom in the chaos and closeness; a way of being private and unobserved. You could get lost in the crowd if that was what you chose to do. Dissolve into the crowd and draw no attention to yourself. The crowd was his element. And of course it was a boozy life. Glasgow was famous for it. For its slums and for the drinking life. Drink was Rena’s medicine. She liked to drink and stayed at least halfway drunk a lot of the time. Always topping up. She liked a drink and so did her friends and Fred used to drink as well then. He was drunk the night she tattooed her name on to his arm with a darning needle. She was drunk the night he tattooed his name in a heart on to hers.

  But he quite soon gave up drinking. Perhaps because he realized this gave him something over Rena and the others stewing around him. It was a way of acquiring the sort of knowledge about people he was always seeking. What they said and did when their guard was down and their tongues were loosened. He didn’t mind Rena drinking. He encouraged it. ‘It did actually change her nature, take her off her guard, ’cause she was very much on her guard all the time.’ In later years he would claim that Rena was drunk on the occasion that Anna-Marie was conceived. ‘She got drunk, or near as. That was after three bottles, I think. So anyway, going back home in the car, she started lyin’ about and messin’ about with me, so I stopped the car and sorted her out an’ [throaty chuckle] put her in the family way.’

  Rena tried to abort this baby using a knitting needle. But Anna-Marie was born in July 1964, delivered at home, so he would always maintain, by her father. Charmaine was then sixteen months old and he had never taken to her. He took no interest in her and for a long time had refused to register her birth. Only the threat of legal action in the end made him do it. People commented on how he didn’t seem to care much for Charmaine. But Anna-Marie was his, and when she was still a baby he would take her around in his van with him. He’d got a job driving a Mr Whippy van which was rented from Wall’s Ice-Cream, who had a main yard in Paisley. He made the baby a cot out of a wooden box and kept her on a shelf under the window he sold ice-creams from. He also had girls in the van, and it would be in character for him to use the baby as a lure. A girl magnet. Most of the drivers returned their vans to the depot by eleven or twelve at night, but he was out in his until three or four. He would be away all hours. He’d talk to the girls and, in the words of somebody who knew him then, ‘fanny about’.

  The honeymoon period with Rena started to show signs of being over around this time. He started to hit her. He would come in in the middle of the night and pull her out of bed and knock her around. He would use his feet and leave marks on her face and body where it showed. He started taking swipes at Charmaine. Yelling at the little girl and treating her roughly. He brought in a regime for the two children which was intended to keep them caged up. There were two sets of bunk beds and he wanted Charmaine and Anna-Marie kept penned up in the bottom parts of them. He improvised bars between the upper and lower bunks and gave instructions that he wanted them kept there: fed and changed and forced to play there, as well as sleep. One of the people he gave these instructions to was a friend of Rena’s, a woman called Isa, who had started helping out as a ‘nanny’. But as soon as his van turned the corner she would lift the children out of their ‘jail’ and let them play.

  There were allotments at the end of McLellan Street and Fred West took one of these. It had a shed where he kept a collection of tools, and he spent a lot of time in the shed when he wasn’t selling ice-cream around the poorer districts of Glasgow from the van. Rena didn’t see much of him. If he wasn’t at the allotment he was out in the van. When she did see him there was the risk that he might beat her. He saw her through the window of their downstair neighbour’s flat one day and he burst in and flew at her. She was sitting having some drinks with her neighbour and another man when they saw a face at the street window watching them. He dragged her upstairs and kicked and battered her. They could hear it going on above them.

  The other man’s name was John McLachlan. He used Telky’s bookmaker’s next to their close in McLellan Street and he was sweet on Rena. She liked him and, although he was married, they started seeing one another. They would sometimes go into Kinning Park and one night they were kissing in the park when Fred came up on them from behind. He lunged at Rena and threw a punch at her. John McLachlan set about Fred, and Fred slashed his stomach with a knife or some other sharp object, drawing blood. McLachlan had tattooed her name on to his left forearm, just above the wrist, or maybe she had done it to him just the way she had done it to Fred. In small letters: R–e–n–a. They were always fighting over Rena.

  Fred West had been living in Glasgow for nearly three years when, in October 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were arrested for what were to become known as the Moors Murders. Brady was a Glasgow boy. He had been brought up in the Gorbals and then on an estate in Pollok. Winter arrived early that year and the papers were filled with macabre pictures of police activity on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester where a number of children’s bodies had been found in shallow graves. Many people saw it as the dark side – even the consequence – of the permissive, ‘swinging’ years that Britain had been having and grim pictures of Brady and Hindley were all over the papers.

  Brady and Hindley appeared at a preliminary hearing on Thursday, 21 October 1965, charged with the murders of two children. The same day the police discovered the body of a third child on Saddleworth Moor. The case continued to dominate the radio and television news and the front pages of the newspapers. On 4 November 1965, two Thursdays later, and a week before Brady and Hindley were remanded on a charge of multiple murder, Fred West killed a child, apparently by accident.

  At ten past three in the afternoon he backed over a three-year-old boy in a cul-de-sac in Castlemilk and killed him with the ice-cream van. He knew the boy. He had bought him a ball and had promised him a firework to play with – it was the day before Guy Fawkes’ – if he came back that afternoon. The boy’s ball rolled under a hedge and he went after it to retrieve it. It was a four-tonne van. It had a heavy engine in the back for making ice-cream. Fred West reversed it about three feet, and he said he drove over the boy without seeing him. There was a loud bang and he got out of the van to find him lying under the back axle. He said he fainted then and fell straight over the top of a fence into a garden. The man whose garden it was took him in and had to protect him from the child’s father and a mob that had quickly gathered. Feelings were running high because of the horrific headlines and the bloody details being reported from the magistrates’ hearings against Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and a crowd outside was baying for him. He was taken to Glasgow Royal Infirmary, where he was put under sedation.

  In his prison jottings, made in the last months of his life, Fred West would claim that he had loved this little boy ‘as a son’. He had no son of his own at that time and he wanted one and he had thought of the little boy as an adopted son. He spoke in the same way about another boy who would die in peculiar circumstances fifteen months later.

  Robin Holt wasn’t a child. He was fifteen, and Fred West described him as ‘nice looking’. Helluva nice lad. Tall. He had first encountered Robin Holt, he said, sitting on a gate close to the caravan site in Gloucester where he was then living. H
e was sitting on the gate and he was crying. He stopped and invited him to the ’van, and after that the boy started going with him places in the lorry. He was working for Clenches then, going around slaughterhouses late at night picking up hides and skins and offal. It was a night run and his route included Tredegar, Newport in Monmouthshire, Ross-on-Wye, and Ensor’s in Cinderford, and Robin Holt started going with him. When he changed jobs towards the end of 1966, leaving the slaughterhouse and turning instead to driving a sewage lorry, emptying septic tanks, the boy continued sometimes going with him. He got to know Rena and the children, and Fred would take him with him sometimes to Moor-court Cottage. He was at Moorcourt Cottage one day in February 1967 and was seen there by Fred’s sister and other members of his family. And then, two days later, on 22 February, Robin Holt disappeared. On 3 March his body was discovered by a farm worker while he was looking for firewood at the old cowshed next to the Longford Inn on the Tewkesbury road near Gloucester, less than a mile from the Sandhurst Lane caravan site where Fred West was living. He was half naked and hanging by a rope from a beam and, according to the pathologist who inspected the body, had been dead for about ten days. Spread out on a manger underneath him were pornographic pictures of women. Each woman had a biro marking around her neck in the form of a noose. A verdict of suicide was recorded, but local people would always be suspicious about the official reason given for Robin Holt’s death.

  After running the little boy over with his van on Guy Fawkes’ in 1965, Fred West said he couldn’t face going back on the round. The Wall’s people came to ask if he would consider going out with the van again at night. There had been blood all over the wheel, and they had scrubbed the wheels and repainted them. But he couldn’t go near the van. So he got a job driving a timber lorry, hauling timber, instead. Still, though, he couldn’t shake off the feeling that, as a result of the death of the little boy, people in Glasgow were out to get him. He stayed away from the flat in McLellan Street and stopped with friends for a while because, he told them, he was frightened the parents were going to come and get him. And then there was Rena’s boyfriend, the man she had taken up with, John McLachlan. He was a member of a motorcycle gang called the Skulls, and he had come home to find Rena ‘starkers’ in bed one night with McLachlan and other members of the Skulls. Rena had become a member of this gang and he was on the books to be killed. Rena was quite capable of killing. Carried a cut-throat razor and a knife in her bag. She was certainly mixed up with the right crowd.