Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  Lucy Partington’s remains were found in the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street at nine o’clock on Sunday morning, 6 March 1994. Her body had been dismembered, decapitated and many of the bones from her toes and fingers had been taken away. Pieces of cord and rope were recovered from the hole where she had been roughly buried – a sewer pipe running through the hole had made the process unusually difficult – together with a mask or gag made out of strong plastic-backed tape. But in this case another item – a knife – was also excavated from the grave. It was a kitchen knife, black-handled and mass-produced in Sheffield, with an eight-inch blade which had been sharpened to a point. It begins to look almost certain that this was the knife used to dismember Lucy Partington’s body when a fact is mentioned alongside the discovery of the knife. At 00.25 on the morning of 3 January 1974, which was seven days after Lucy’s disappearance, Fred West presented himself at Gloucester Royal Hospital for emergency medical treatment on a laceration of his right hand. The significance of this would be spelled out many years later by the prosecuting counsel at Rose West’s trial: it indicated that, once taken, Lucy Partington had been not only bound and gagged but almost certainly kept alive but helpless ‘for whatever hideous purpose’ for some days. There were no clothes found with the jumbled parts of her body or remains of clothes.

  Lucy Partington was buried in the part of the cellar that was immediately under the front door at Cromwell Street; under the front hall. Her remains were found in what the police diggers called ‘the nursery alcove’ on account of the children’s drawings that had been made straight on to the plaster of the walls. Shirley Hubbard, another of the Wests’ victims, would be buried against what became known as the ‘Marilyn Monroe wall’. She was murdered eleven months after Lucy Partington and buried in the front cellar room at Cromwell Street, the one nearest the street. Fred West then created a false chimney-breast around where she was buried in the floor and some time afterwards decorated it and the walls around it and adjacent to it with wallpaper bearing the image of Marilyn Monroe – silver foil-backed paper with popular images of Marilyn Monroe repeating in a shiny pattern across it. There were four images from four films, and the juxtaposition of the tinselly glamour with the depravity and inhuman cruelty with which the cellar had quickly become associated disturbed everybody who saw it. The excavated hole filled with liquid mud and the black slurry of decomposed body tissue surrounded by shiny images of Hollywood glamour was disturbing and very shocking. In addition to the pin-up poses the pattern of the paper included the titles of the films from which they had been taken. They were Niagara, The Seven Year Itch, The Misfits and Bus Stop.

  Like Carol Cooper, Shirley Hubbard had last been seen by her boyfriend getting on a bus in the centre of Worcester. Carol Cooper and Shirley Hubbard both boarded buses at The Trinity in the centre of Worcester and were never seen again. Mary Bastholm was last seen waiting at a bus stop on Bristol Road in Gloucester. Lucy Partington of course disappeared from a bus stop on the Evesham road. She had written a poem called ‘Bus Stop’ and Rose had been ‘raped’ after being chased from the same bus stop and Fred would take Stephen and introduce him to the bus stop where he had met his mother as if it was a shrine. As if he thought it was part of history, as Stephen would say. And now here were these two words blocked out in silver against black – ‘Bus STOP’ – the first thing you saw as you came down into the cellar, all over the fireplace wall.

  When money worries were less pressing and they had cleared out the lodgers, Fred West would turn the first-floor front room at Cromwell Street into a bar. Paste up a mural of the Canary Islands foregrounded with spiky orange strelitzia flowers and put in a sofa and a video-player and a tiger-pattern rug and a chandelier and the dark-oak, hand-crafted, four-posted ‘Black Magic’ bar. It gave the name in painted letters complete with a palm-tree motif – ‘Black Magic’ – on a sign above the bar. On the pelmet above the bar in the same position as the ‘Cunt’ sign was on the pelmet of the dark-oak, hand-crafted four-poster bed in the room immediately overhead. On the one hand it was a reference to the brand of chocolates Rose liked best. On the other it was a reference to the black male visitors, pictures of whose naked bodies and erections she put up around the frame of the bar. Part of the private language Fred and Rose had evolved. A private and complex, and by that time almost subliminal, language of signals and cues. ‘Black Magic’. ‘My Black Hole’. ‘Cunt’.

  Another of the little secrets they had between them, and one of Fred’s most prized possessions, was his Roses Chocolates jar. Rose didn’t wear knickers at home, he told the police, she ‘only wore them to go out for sex’. One of the rituals he evolved was that when she came in after having sex, she had to put her soiled knickers in a glass storage jar. She had to put her knickers in the glass jar as soon as she got home ‘as souvenirs of her sex life’, and date them in ink. ‘At the end of an era, at the end of the passion, when it faded out,’ Fred said, ‘then they’d be burned and put in another jar.’ The charred remains of Rose’s underthings were kept in tiny pots on the mantelpiece in her special room and in the Black Magic bar. ‘The idea was that in years to come we could say – well, that represents so-and-so, and that represents so-and-so … It was just something we thought up between us – to have these knickers in these jars – and then when you’re sixty or seventy years old, like, you could say, “Well, there’s twenty in there” … They were nice pots, and the tops were sealed on, glued on.’

  Rose’s black men. Rose’s chocolates. ‘Roses Chocolates’. Fred’s most prized jar. The jar containing the semen-soaked knickers from Rose’s encounters with her Jamaican men. ‘Black Magic’. A private and complex, and by that time almost subliminal, language of signals and cues. A private language between them and nobody else quite in on this.

  Not one of the many bones that Fred West took away from the women they murdered – kneecaps, a collarbone, dozens and probably hundreds of ankle and toe and finger bones – has ever been recovered. One of the biggest mysteries he left when he killed himself was why these bones and not other bones and where these totems and horrible trophies, as he obviously saw them, were hoarded and stored.

  The indirect language of codes and signals that operated inside 25 Cromwell Street offers a possible clue. Among all the layered meanings of the Black Magic bar it is perhaps possible to peel another one away. ‘That Ol’ Black Magic’ is a song that has been recorded by many people. Marilyn Monroe is one of them. She sang it in one of her films and the film was Bus Stop.

  Another trail that seems to lead us from Gloucester to Cheltenham and away from the centre of Cheltenham and once again out to Pittville Park and almost up towards the race-course roundabout along the Evesham road.

  *

  Fred West became skilled at indirection. Tortuousness and indirection. Talking palaver while apparently talking the truth. Laying out and simultaneously covering up. Very little of what he said or did was ever straightforward. None of it could be assumed to be what it seemed. Only once in the 151 interviews he did with the police after his arrest did he come close to admitting this fundamental truth about himself. ‘What happens is’, he said, ‘I’m talking away to them … and suddenly it comes into my mind, shit, I’m telling them the truth – you know, what’s been going on … So then I shove something in there … to get away from it.’

  It would be in character for Fred West to want to take his oldest son and expose him to a place that was so heavily charged with meaning for him. Their first son and the first of their babies to be conceived in Cromwell Street. It would also be in character, when it came to it, for him to back away from full disclosure; to retreat to what in the end turned out to be only a near boast – a near confession. There were two bus stops, both places charged with a strong past event, but from which the event itself was absent. And he took Stephen to the one in the centre of Cheltenham when it came to it. They stood in this faintly rank and urine-smelling place, and his father tried to convey to Stephen the deep sig
nificance it had for him. This prefabricated, pebble-finished stand. Wind traps set around in a circle. This stop and not the other stop which, according to Graham Letts’s mother-in-law, Mrs White, Stephen drove up to in their van with them on the night they abducted Lucy Partington when he was aged just four months. As if it was a shrine. As if he thought it was part of history, as Stephen would say.

  Seventy-two of Lucy Partington’s bones were found to be missing when her remains were recovered from underneath the cellar in Cromwell Street. The forensic pathologist Bernard Knight ruled out everything except deliberate dismemberment as an explanation for how this could have happened when he appeared as an expert witness at Rose West’s trial in 1995. The bones were not missing as a result of degeneration (the bones that had survived, especially those under the cellar, were in very good condition) or as a result of a failure to excavate properly (he had witnessed the excavation himself) or because the bodies had at some time been moved from one burial site to another and some bones had fallen off in the process: the black soil that surrounded the remains proved that there had been a substantial quantity of soft tissue present, which meant that the limbs must have been whole when buried, that is to say with flesh and the strong ligaments and tendons still intact. The only way the bones could have gone missing is if they had been removed as a result of deliberate dismemberment and mutilation. ‘Fingers and toes are very easy to remove,’ Knight said, ‘and a kneecap is quite possible to remove with a sharp knife.’

  In common with the remains of everybody murdered by Fred West, a number of Lucy Partington’s fingers and toes were amputated and taken away. It was part of his method. It was a part of his ‘signature’. Part of his perverse ritual. Her left kneecap was also missing and so were three of her ribs. A shoulderblade, Bernard Knight pointed out, is a large and very difficult part of the body to remove. It would take time and a degree of expertise to do it. But Lucy Partington’s right shoulderblade was missing and, like all the bones taken from all the bodies, has never been found.

  People tend to bury bodies near their homes or other places they know well. He buried bodies under his feet in the back garden. He buried bodies under his house in the cellar. He put bodies in the fields as close to his childhood home in Much Marcle as he could get away with. That was about feeling safe and secure. It was also about control and possession. About staying in a position of ownership and power, not only over his ‘girls’ but over the people who couldn’t see who he was and what he was doing. Having one over on the rest of the world who he was running rings around and making a monkey of and fooling and tricking.

  People tend to bury bodies and other things they might want to find again in a physically recognizable place rather than in the middle of nowhere. And like a tree in a field – the tree standing by itself in Letterbox Field, for example, marking the site of Rena’s grave – a bus stop is an urban marker. Lucy had written a poem about it. The bus stop just at the top of that brow there. Written about the many wet and cold afternoons she had stood by it waiting for a bus, the park at her back and the Pump Room directly opposite, her school beyond that, giving the poem the title ‘Bus Stop’. It was a stop charged with a strong past event: a girl had disappeared while waiting for a bus there during the Christmas holiday of 1973 and was never seen again. But it was also a stop that crowds of people surged past in their thousands several times a year, separating from each other like water around a boulder and joining up again without having their attention snagged by anything they are passing.

  On big race days – and Cheltenham Gold Cup Day is one of the biggest days in the international racing calendar – racegoers are disgorged from the hotels and pubs in the centre of Cheltenham and course on foot in their thousands along the Evesham road towards the races. Cheltenham race course is a ten-minute walk north of Pittville Park at the foot of Cleeve Hill, and on the three-day National Hunt Festival in March forty thousand people every day descend on it. It is one of those events that every year features on the local television news and in the newspapers. Thousands of people surging past the bus stop from where Lucy Partington disappeared and from which Rose Letts claimed to have been chased and raped and that part of the park that so clearly resonated for Rose and Fred and where perhaps – maybe – Fred West’s terrible collection of bones and body pieces, his ossuary, lies buried. The pleasure of a secret is enhanced by the heightened possibility of discovery. So many people coming so close to it and yet staying so far away.

  Is it a place that Fred and Rose would visit? (‘The idea was that in years to come we could say – well, that represents so-and-so, and that represents so-and-so … It was just something we thought up between us.’) Or where they would all go together as a family and play and picnic together and the look would pass between Fred and Rose because of the secret that they shared and, like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley who made recreational visits to the graves of the children they had murdered on Saddleworth Moor complete with flasks and cameras, were literally sitting on?

  In the years after they had murdered Heather and he had buried her in the back garden Fred West used to go out there at night and sit for hours on a stool just by where Heather was buried. There was a stool put there by him and he was just sat alone in the dark. Rose would be upstairs doing something and he just used to walk out there, take the dogs out, sit with the dogs. And before the dogs, the cats. Topper and Potter and all them. He used to sit out there with them. Whenever it got on his mind too much. He would get up in the night and go out there at night and stand by her. Nobody ever saw him.

  When the floor of the cellar had been filled up with bodies and concreted over and made into a bedroom for the children, he would spend many hours sitting on the edge of their beds drinking tea and talking. Talking if there was anybody with him but sitting for hour after hour down there anyway where five bodies were buried and the floor came a foot and more higher up the walls than it had when they moved in because of the volume of concrete that had been poured. The height between the bottom of the beams to the floor had been more than seven feet when they moved in to the house. But by the time it was being used as a bedroom for the children the ceiling in the cellar was probably no more than five foot nine. It was very low and towards the front where Heather and May slept two notches had been cut into the top of two of the beams that the children, unaware of any sinister purpose, looped strong nylon ropes through and used the ropes for hauling themselves up with and swinging on.

  The park was a contemplative place, so quiet and yet so close to the world rushing by on the other side of the railings. So many people so close and yet so far away. The cellar was a quiet place where little of the larger world was allowed to enter. Only the muffled sound of footsteps and traffic and intermittent radio noise and the congregation and choir of the next-door Seventh-day Adventists’ church on a Saturday morning, which is their sabbath, milling and chattering, unaware of how close they were to defiled and desecrated human remains and worse – a bound and gagged and helpless and struggling human being.

  *

  Thérèse Siegenthaler was also bespectacled and also a student and she also was murdered by the Wests three months after they had murdered Lucy Partington, during the Easter holiday of 1974, Fred West’s next holiday from work.

  Thérèse Siegenthaler was twenty-one and was studying sociology at Woolwich College and living in lodgings in Deptford in south-east London when she disappeared. She had been born and brought up in Switzerland, where her family still lived, and possibly through that connection had got a part-time job at the Bally shoe shop in the Swiss Centre on Leicester Square, in the heart of London’s West End. She had set out to hitch-hike to Holyhead to catch a ferry to Ireland where she had arranged to meet up with a priest friend in April 1974. They had a shared interest in the politics of South Africa. She was going to be away for only a week because she had tickets for the theatre in London on her return. She didn’t go to the theatre. One of her friends warned her about the perils of hitc
h-hiking. She assured her that she could look after herself because she had trained in judo. If she was hitch-hiking across the country to Fishguard or Holyhead she could well have been picked up around Gloucester. She was never seen again.

  Her body was buried adjacent to Lucy Partington’s body, on the other side of ‘the nursery alcove’ in the cellar at Cromwell Street, the third body in five months to be buried there. Again it was the same pattern of finger and toe and ankle and wrist bones missing; a great many of these bones missing altogether. Again also the evidence of dismemberment and decapitation and the circular, silencing mask or gag, although this time made of a rolled and looped scarf square tied in a bow that could be undone, but not by Thérèse Siegenthaler whose hands, like her feet, certainly would have been bound. The bones had been chopped and compressed into a roughly cubical area about two to three feet in each direction. There were no clothes although some hair remained.

  *

  The floor in the cellar wasn’t even. The floor was red brick. It was a brick floor which you could just pull out whenever you wanted to. He’d just lock off the doors and do what he was doing. He’d just bolt them shut and they would hear the sound of work being carried out. For years he would say he was going down to see to the drains in the basement to stop this water coming up. Doors banging and constant digging, demolition, excavation. Then they had a massive thunderstorm, and the basement filled half up with water, the sewers couldn’t take it. And it just busted the floor – he just lifted up and broke up. From the beginning the many possibilities of the cellar excited him.

  Carol Cooper’s body was buried in the back part of the cellar near the garden. The heavy wooden trapdoor was still there and the stone steps leading up into the garden, with the new high brick wall of the church on one side and the long low pier of the kitchen-plus-bathroom extension on the other giving excellent cover. It was possible to back a van in along the side of the house and unload things through the trapdoor entrance to the cellar, as Mr Cook the coalman had, without attracting any attention, especially at night.