Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Back in Glasgow Rena got a job working on the buses and shared what they called a room-and-kitchen flat with Isa McNeill. But then Isa started going about with John Trotter who she was marrying and Rena started doing it for drinks and money in closes and back alleys with a lot of different men and John McLachlan dropped out of the picture. She got herself in with a rough crowd and didn’t turn up at Isa’s wedding in July and, like her previous best friend Ann McFall had, drifted away out of Isa’s life.

  By July Rena was in Gloucester once again, living with Fred and Charmaine and Anna-Marie in the caravan at Sandhurst Lane. Rena was back and Ann McFall was out. Ann was farmed out to a neighbour on the site until Rena took off on her travels again. Rena had this thing in her where she couldn’t live with one person for any length of time. She had to go on her way. She would go off living with different men and come back to him in between times. It would go on like that for a year. Rena back, Ann out. The kids are calling different ladies mummy and nobody really knows where they are. Ann back, Rena out. Ann would come and stay. Then Rena would come back and just chuck Ann out. It could be five, half-past five in the morning. She’d be well oiled. Oh, she was a goer, Rena. ‘Right you, out.’

  Rena, the kind of girl who would let a man she had just met, a stranger, introduce things into her body in a public place in an attempt to abort the baby she didn’t want. ‘Anything considered.’ He had black-and-white pornographic pictures of Rena – Rena in explicit poses. Rena had an extensive repertoire of sexual numbers. She didn’t particularly care where she did them or who with. Straight, oral, anal, sadomasochistic. And she let him watch. He was a peeper. He could be there in a so-called security capacity as her protector or her pimp. Standing guard. Looking out. When really he was just looking. Such an appetite he had for looking.

  If he took the children to a safari park he would stop the van to watch animals mating. The children would get bored and didn’t know anything about it but he could get excited watching animals having sex. Go on about their testicles. How long they could keep at it. The size of their parts. To them it was weird sex stuff, and meant nothing. They wanted to get moving. Get going. But he wouldn’t move.

  Whoever was with Rose in their early years together, he would usually stay while the man was undressing ‘to see that Rose was all right’. Only to go off and watch secretly though a peep-hole in the door.

  Rena let him look. She was the first. Rena was his whore. So Ann could be his madonna. His angel. His temple of perfection. ‘Ann was not hard; she was gentle, kind and pleasant,’ as he once said. ‘She was my angel. Rena could be the devil if she wanted to be.’ I Was Loved by an Angel was the name he gave to the saccharine prison scribblings which describe his brief time with Ann McFall. ‘Ann [he actually refers to her as ‘Anna’] was happy and contented and joyful … I got out my guitar and sat on the step of the van. Ann sat by me. I played and sang to Ann … “Kiss an angel good, good, morning” … We always had tears in our eyes, tears of happiness and love. Ann would wipe the tear from my eyes and I would from her eyes … I said to Ann, “Can I comb your hair?” I was combing her hair for two hours … her smile lit up the heavens.’ And endlessly on in this vein.

  In an unintentionally revealing passage he claims that they slept in separate berths in the trailer for the first one or two weeks after Rena had gone, presumably because Ann was too ‘angelic’ to be besmirched. A temple of perfection. She had to make the first move: ‘I said “good night” to Ann and Ann said “good night”. My bed was made up by Ann. I undressed and lay on the bed. The moon was shining in the window … It was about eighteen months. I had not made love to my wife. She was always too drunk or gone. I was in love with Ann, but was Ann in love with me? It was twelve thirty now … Ann’s bedroom door opened. Ann stood in the doorway. She had on a black négligé nightdress … and said, “Do you like it?” I said, “Yes … But I am married.” Ann said, “Is that what you call it?” I pulled back the bed covering and said, “Get in.”’

  Ann McFall was seventeen. Robin Holt, the boy who would be found hanging by his neck in a cowshed with a semi-circle of pornographic pictures at his feet, was a fifteen-year-old. These were Fred West’s companions in 1966. His acolytes. His audience. Robin Holt would be dead, apparently a suicide, by February the following year. Ann would be dead by the summer. And meanwhile the caravan, delivered new from the factory only eight months earlier, was filling up with spanners, starting cranks, hacksaws, circular saws, electric cable, cold chisels, oily rags and rubble. The caravan was becoming dilapidated. It was turning into a filthy tip, the usual thing with him.

  On August Bank Holiday Monday in 1966, in an effort to throw Rena off the trail, he towed the caravan to another site called Watermead, six miles away in Brockworth right on the other side of Gloucester. At the same time he changed jobs, moving from the abattoir lorry to emptying septic tanks in order to make it doubly difficult for Rena to track down him and her children. She kept wanting to grab Charmaine and take her, and leave Anna-Marie. Once they were settled he changed jobs for a third time, moving from the sewage lorry to a grain tanker which impressed his father with its size. His father couldn’t get over the size of the tanker he was driving.

  Unusually, his mother took to a girl he had brought home to meet her. She liked Ann and even took her into her front room. Rena had never been in the front room. You had to be special for his mother to let you in there. It was the first girl he had had his mother took to and he felt wonderful about it. The additional good news was that Ann was pregnant. He didn’t think it was fair to Ann to have his children and not have one of her own. And now she was going to have his baby and she had told him it was going to look just like him and she was going to call him Fred Junior. His father went out and came back with a bottle of home-made wine and they all got a glassful, and the two girls. His mother said a toast to Ann being pregnant. Ann looked at him and smiled. He smiled back. They both had tears in their eyes.

  Rena found them. It couldn’t have been difficult. Social Services had to know the whereabouts of the children and she was their mother so all she had to do was go to them. He always claimed to be frightened of Rena and it was probably true. Ann’s pregnancy was still too early to be showing and Rena kicked her out of the caravan and he allowed it to go on. He transferred Ann to the other site many miles away at Sandhurst Lane. He rented her a small ’van and put her in it and spent the time while Rena was around shuttling from site to site between them. He’d spend part of the evening with Ann in the smaller caravan at Sandhurst Lane and part of it with Rena and the two girls at Watermead.

  It was a hard one. It was difficult. Fortunately the untamed part of Rena came to his rescue. At the beginning of October she burgled another caravan on the site at Watermead then took off for Glasgow in an attempt to escape the police. By 29 November 1966 she was standing in front of Gloucester magistrates charged with housebreaking and theft. She had been arrested in Glasgow in mid-November and a WPC had been sent to collect her and bring her back to face trial. Her counsel made a plea for leniency on the grounds that her offences were ‘the actions of a jealous woman’, adding that if she was sent to prison ‘her children must go into care’. Fred West appeared before the court himself, admitting his relationship with Ann McFall. The pleas for leniency succeeded. Rena was placed on probation, but she didn’t return to look after the children. She went back up to Scotland and Ann again moved from Sandhurst Lane to Watermead, ready to resume her life with Fred West.

  It was a life that it is hard to recognize from the soft-focus version memorialized by him in I Was Loved by an Angel twenty-eight years later. The ’van was cramped and filthy and the children were fractious and giving concern to their social worker who disclosed in a report that Ann, the young woman who was looking after them, had told her that Fred had planned to ‘artificially inseminate’ her if she didn’t fall pregnant quickly, but that there had been no need.

  It was a mark of her naïvety that
Ann would say such a thing to a person who had authority over them. And it is easy to guess that the signs of her youth and inexperience – the things that had made her attractive to him in the first place – would begin to grate with Fred. Her submissiveness and dependence. They were gratifying but they were not exciting. And he was looking for things to excite and fire him, that he found sexually exciting, all the time at this time. There were eight violent sexual assaults against girls and young women in the Gloucester area during the time that he was living at Sandhurst Lane and Watermead with Ann McFall. And after he was dead a string of middle-aged women would come forward to identify Fred West as the man who attacked and sexually assaulted them – terrified and in some cases physically injured them – when they were waiting at bus stops or on the way home from school or trying to get home at night when they were still young girls.

  It seems that the eroticized excitement that had always formed the basis of his relationship with Rena probably wasn’t there with Ann McFall. The danger and the voyeurism and the deviant sex. The straight kinky sex, as he called it. The delirium of dangerous pleasure. And that if the time ever came for him to choose between whore and angel the choice was not going to be a hard one for him to make. He was conscious of being compelled to do things that were secretive and risky and of not feeling sinful and wicked. In fact the opposite. He felt elated. He felt different and brave for what he was doing rather than perverted and ashamed.

  In the meantime though he was proud to show off his pregnant young girlfriend at Moorcourt Cottage and at Bush Cottage in Much Marcle where his brother John lived with his own baby daughter and his wife. Kitty West couldn’t stand him because of what she had heard him say eighteen months earlier while she was lying in the burns unit in hospital believing herself to be close to death. And although they were close, there had always been a strong competitive element in his relationship with John. For Fred his brother had always been ‘too forward’ when it came to girls: ‘hand on the bottom … kiss ’em before he even knew their name’. John was always top monkey. He had gone out with Rena’s pal, Margaret Mackintosh, and therefore had been the one responsible for Fred meeting Rena. They had gone around as a foursome for a while in the black Ford Popular John shared with Fred. He couldn’t do anything but he had plenty of talk. Now they were older Fred liked to stop round every so often and show John the latest goody he had collected on his travels. Incite John’s jealousy with the latest catch.

  Fred and John were alike in having daughters, although both were hoping for sons. When his daughter Amanda was born in September 1966 and he had gone to see the baby in hospital, John had made it plain that he had wanted a boy and was not happy with a girl. He caused such a fuss that the hospital staff in the end had asked him to go. He had been thrown out of the hospital. All through her pregnancy Kitty West had been having problems in her marriage with John’s behaviour towards her which was very stressful. During the period she was away having the baby she believed John was having an affair with another woman. Rose West would claim that on the day she came home with May, her second baby, she went next door and found Fred in bed with Mrs Agius, a neighbour. So Fred and John had these and many other things in common. John had been the only family member present when Fred married Rena. He would be the only member of the family present when Fred married Rose. You couldn’t discount the element of competition and rivalry between them but Fred and John were close.

  Little Amanda West was six or seven months old in spring 1967. Anna-Marie was nearly three, Charmaine was four. And Ann McFall was pregnant. Only three years out of Nazareth House, the Catholic children’s home in Aberdeen, and already expecting a baby of her own. The baby was due in September and because she was such a small girl she was starting to show. Ann was only a little tiny girl while Rena was big. She was pretty. She might have been very pretty but for the fact that her teeth protruded slightly. That was made up for by her hair. She had beautiful hair, as everybody who met her remarked. It was hair of the kind young girls used to iron on a board under brown paper with an electric iron in those days. She had pretty hair and she was quiet and pretty and in her own way full of presence. And Fred’s mother even took her into her front room and you had to be special for his mother to let you in there.

  Fred sometimes stopped round to see John at Bush Cottage when he was in the area. He would call in with Ann and the children and Ann was already pregnant in spring 1967, the first time they met her. He stopped round once or twice as the pregnancy progressed in the first half of 1967. And there was only a month or two of the pregnancy to go by July, the last time they remembered seeing Ann.

  A few weeks, perhaps as much as two months, had passed since the last time they had seen her when John’s mother came up to Bush Cottage to find them and tell them that Fred had killed the girl and buried her in Kempley woods. Kitty West had never seen her mother-in-law cry before. But she was sitting at the kitchen table and crying and telling them this about Fred and the girl. It was possibly late August; one evening. And John and Kitty went and sat down with her in the kitchen and she then broke down and was very upset and distraught. ‘Freddie’s killed the girl and buried her in Kempley woods.’ Which as of course they knew was near by. It was very close. Of course they were stunned. John told his mother not to be so stupid. Kitty made a cup of tea and John was talking to his mother. She stayed for about an hour and had calmed down, she wasn’t crying anyway, by the time she left. Kitty remembers asking John did his mother mean the girl who was pregnant. John told her Fred had thrown her out after she had packed her bags. Kitty kept on to John about it – who did his mother mean and why would she say that. But John wouldn’t discuss it. He would never discuss it. Mrs West, his mother, never mentioned the matter again and nobody else in the family mentioned it. It was never talked about.

  *

  When Ann McFall’s remains were disinterred from Fingerpost Field in Much Marcle in June 1994, twenty-seven years after Fred West had put them there, two plastic bags were recovered with them. One bag contained blue-coloured pieces of curtains or sheets and a flower-patterned quilt. In the other bag was a round-necked, long-sleeved cardigan. He claimed that Ann used to be waiting for him in bed at her caravan every night wearing only a cardigan. The contents of the bags suggest that Ann McFall was murdered in the caravan at Sandhurst Lane and brought by Fred West to Much Marcle to be buried, although ‘disposed of’ is closer to the truth of what he did.

  It was a small hole. Two and a half feet by a foot and a half across, and not quite four feet deep. Vertical rather than horizontal. A small, deep, well-dug hole. A vertical shaft. He pressed what remained of Ann into the ground, and fitted her legs in around her.

  It was brutal and savage and what we would call psychopathic but not panicked. A set of horizontal marks on the thigh bone, the femur, would show that a sharp knife had been used for dismemberment and that the work had been even and methodical. The work of somebody assured in what they were doing.

  Ann McFall’s may have been the first known murder that Fred West committed, but already the signs of what would become a perverse ritual are apparent: the decapitation; the dismemberment of the legs at the hips; the carrying away of the kneecaps and of a number of fingers and toes (thirty-six of an expected seventy-six toe-and finger-joints were missing); the digging of a narrow shaft. And, with Ann McFall, something else that would become recognized as part of the signature of these murders: a ligature or binding. In this case a length of rope or what could have been a dressing-gown cord, tied around her hands and twisted around her arms almost certainly as a restraint.

  He dug a hole. The ground was rock hard. It was the middle of summer. Using a pickaxe and a spade he made a hole close to a cattle ramp where the ground would be considerably softer. A concrete ramp he had poured and made with his father. He dug a hole where the water ran over into the field and where the cattle trod it night and morning, and he put Ann’s remains – her legs, her head, her torso – in it. Also the
eight-month-old foetus that Ann was carrying whose tiny bones would survive for more than a quarter of a century in the ground. A child conceived on concrete, at the place he called ‘our heaven’, a concrete bunker that lay just above the Watermead caravan site. Conceived on top of a concrete bunker in the country and buried in open country under a concrete ramp.

  It was the cruelty of the man who looked after animals. A cruelty that the writer V. S. Naipaul, who lived in a house in Gloucester for a period in the eighties, came to recognize: ‘Not absolute cruelty; more a casualness, the attitude of a man who looked after lesser, dependent creatures, superintending the entire cycle of their lives; capable of tenderness, yet living easily with the knowledge that though a cow might have produced so many calves and given so much milk, it would one day have to be dispatched to the slaughterhouse in a covered trailer.’

  Fred West was unable to understand the difference between killing a farmyard animal and killing a human being. To him there was no difference. He would remember the names of almost none of the people he murdered. They weren’t flesh-and-bones people with memories and stories who were hurtable and capable of feeling pain, but ‘Newent Girl’; ‘Worcester Girl One’, ‘Worcester Girl Two’; ‘the one with the crinkly hair’. Carcasses to be disposed of once their usefulness to him had finished.

  In his many weeks of police interviews after his arrest in 1994, he would repeatedly refer to the body of a murdered person as ‘it’ and to inanimate objects and materials and pieces of equipment – a cattle ramp, a paddling pool, a patio slab – as ‘him’. ‘As the end of the slab sunk, you put more soil under, or gravel, to level him. As the body sinks, then the slab was tipping … Pea gravel.’