I looked carefully at her letters and remembered that she loved tea. Tea and teatime. That civilized, comforting ritual, when people take the time to sip and relax, gossip and converse, is one that’s always associated with modern-day England. When Anna, the Seventh Duchess of Bedford, introduced her idea of teatime in the early 1800s, she partook, talked, and then walked with her friends through the pastoral meadows that were then still common in London. Before the introduction of these fashionable, late afternoon sit-downs to tea and cakes and chat, the Brits consumed just two meals each day. Many of the British think that most things can be taken care of with the help of a nicely brewed cup of tea (London protesters against the war in Iraq carried signs through London saying MAKE TEA, NOT WAR). Teas such as Earl Grey and English Breakfast are common at any time here in the United States, and I enjoy them on gloomy, rainy days in Chicago or after a difficult day at work.
But for the victims of Rosemary West, the dowdy partner in crime and wife of serial killer Frederick West, teatime entailed something far more sinister. It was after she and Fred had tortured and raped their quarry that the bespectacled Rosemary would brew some tea in a kettle in an effort to soothe and pacify these traumatized young people and children. These victims included the West’s innocent daughters.
The ghastly story of what the Wests did and how they did it is the story of a particular kind of serial murderer called “partnership killers.” Early in this book, I pointed out the case of Chicago serial killer H. H. Holmes (also known as Herman Mudgett), and his helper, the quiet, brawny Benjamin Pitezel. Pitezel was like a slave to Mudgett in Chicago during the time of the World’s Fair, and he would ultimately be killed by Mudgett. The murders of French hero turned serial murderer Gilles de Rais included a small group of loyal minions in his inner circle. More recently, there was the well-documented Beltway Sniper case of John Allen Mohammad, a former U.S. Army weapons expert and his teenage accomplice, John Lee Malvo. Their actions, which frightened the whole country in late 2002, qualify as partnership killings.
But it’s the husband-and-wife team of partnership killers that often forms the strongest bond. In this case, Fred West was the dominant member of the couple, and Rose was the submissive. Fred killed at least twelve over the course of two decades, from 1967 to 1987. It began with the murder of Ann McFall, the Scottish nanny pregnant with West’s child, and ended with the murder of Heather West, Rose and Fred’s first daughter. Information about as many as twenty more of the dead he held back from the police; West said he would offer the locations of the bodies at the rate of one each year, as though he still had the ability to control things, as if he were still the dominant one.
But one bit of caution before I continue: don’t think of the words dominant and submissive as sexual terms. Though Fred and Rose indulged in violent sex, their relationship shouldn’t be thought of as one that was based purely around Fred’s fantasy world of S-M sex. It’s no secret that there are those in society who indulge in such sex play, using whips and chains and rubber costumes. For these folks, such activity can let off steam or can be a kind of safety valve that releases some of the continual pressures of today’s society. Both partners in S-M sex are willing, consenting adults. While many may not consider it “normal” sex, no one is seriously injured. No one is scarred for life. And no one dies.
I did not get to study the mangled mind of Fred West personally because he did not live very long in his English jail cell. While the guards were changing shifts, West hanged himself with strips of sheeting from his bed long before his trial.
I did, however, have a relationship with Rosemary West. I had been interviewed by the BBC television network about the case for a documentary about the Wests. After the broadcast, as is often the case, I received permission from Rose’s lawyer, Richard Ferguson, to begin a correspondence in which she sent me letters in response to various questions I had about what had gone on in her mind and in her family history. Rose’s lawyers felt that if we exchanged such letters, some fact or series of facts might emerge that would help Rose in her ongoing legal battles. The letters arrived secretly through the hands of messengers, so they would not be viewed by prison officials or anyone who might decide to open the mail. In a very rare development, Rose refused to sign the short document I require of most serial murderers with whom I deal, the one that permits me, for scientific purposes, to write about everything they say and write. Nor will she give permission now. While I can’t reveal the particulars of those many letters, I can write about the murders themselves, murders that took twenty long years to discover. And I can write about the lives so secretly lived within Cromwell Street itself, in the gray fog of Gloucester, England, located on the ancient River Severn. I can analyze most of what went on in what the British press called the “House of Horrors” 114 miles west of London, but it would be unethical of me to write about or excerpt those most private letters from Rose West.
It would have been easy to miss. A casual passerby would have ignored that three-story home at 25 Cromwell Street, beige, nondescript, and on a side street as it was. But that passerby might have noticed the fancy wrought-iron sign that heralded its address in black and white. Bold and almost brazen, it showed Frederick West’s pride in his awful little kingdom, as it seemed to say, “This is my property to do with what I want to do. The same goes for what’s inside, including my wife and my daughters. My property…and no one else’s.”
The star-crossed relationship between Fred and Rose started off simply enough in 1969. Fred had the kind of square-faced, rugged appeal of a farm worker. He mastered the gift of gab early on in life and he used it on fifteen-year-old Rose Letts at a bus stop. Nervously waiting there, she looked even younger than her years, with her white dress, curly black hair, and short white socks. In fact, she looked like a little girl, cute and round-faced, and a little chubby. She had come from a poor family and began working at a bakery at the age of twelve, giving her mother ten dollars of her wages each week. Her father, Bill, ruled his family with an iron fist, and Rose lived in fear of him, although he treated her better than the rest.
By the time Rose met Fred, she had dated and lived for a short time with an older man with whom she had sex. Already well into his twenties, Fred played into Rose’s love for children by saying he had two daughters, Anna Marie and Charmaine, from a previous marriage, who desperately needed minding. Rose soon moved in with Fred and obeyed his every order, as she thought a good future wife should. She did not know that Fred had already been arrested for impregnating a thirteen-year-old girl.
By the time the two were married in 1972, Rose had had a daughter with Fred called Heather, who would grow up to look much like her father. Also, Rose was pregnant with a second child, who would be named Mae June West. Immediately after their marriage and even while she was carrying Heather, Fred began prodding Rose to have sex with other men.
It was not just the goading to see Rose in bed with other men in which Fred indulged. He was up to far more unpleasant things. Fred had decided to dismember and murder his previous wife, Rena, and their daughter Charmaine, who lived with the murdering couple. (Charmaine was in reality the daughter of an Asian bus driver. Fred knew this, and Fred accepted the child, although he didn’t like the idea of having a mixed race baby in the house. He referred to her as adopted.) Rose took part in the beatings of Charmaine that led up to her murder, sometimes whacking her with a wooden spoon, but likely not killing her.
Previous to this, in 1967, Fred had murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, Scottish nanny Ann McFall, who would have given birth, in one month, to their child. He also removed a number of Ann’s fingers and toes before burying her in a field near his hometown of Much Marcle, a tiny farming community. Fred did the same with Charmaine, and chopped off her patella (the kneecap) as well. Later, he would kill the mother of his child again. When Fred had relations with Shirley Robinson, a lodger at Cromwell Street, she become pregnant and threatened to tell Rose. On hearing this, the enraged West killed Shirley by strangulation, cut her up with a serrated bread knife and a cleaver, removed her baby from her womb, and dumped the two into a hole in his backyard. Even the sturdy femur, the thighbone, had been chopped through, not one but nine times.
As for Rose, she gave in fairly quickly to Fred’s ceaseless coaxing and began prostituting herself at the couple’s new home at 25 Cromwell Street. Fred took a provocative snapshot of Rose in a bra and low-riding pants and placed it in a newspaper so she could readily hear from clients. The Wests installed no separate phone line for these services, and their children often answered the phone to hear the foul requests. The address became a kind of brothel and hostel with hippieish young white men and West Indian immigrants moving in and out at all hours of the day and night. It was a more liberal time in which the “do-your-own-thing” style of living was popular in Britain as well as in the United States. Yet what they were creating at Cromwell Street wasn’t just about smoking some pot, making love, and listening to the music of Woodstock.
It was about savagery: savage rape, savage murder, and what in Western society is the most unspeakable savagery, incest. Unusual as it is for serial murderers to attack members of their families, don’t forget that they were not all his biological children. It’s not an unheard-of idea for parents to fawn over their biological children and mistreat their adopted children. On top of that, Fred believed that his daughters, biological or not, were his possessions and that he had a father’s right to have sex with them before anyone else touched them. And Rose helped him. In one instance, she held down and used a vibrator on her gagged stepdaughter Anna Marie before Fred raped her. Rose told Anna Marie that this was a good thing, that she was fortunate to have such caring parents who would take time to prepare her for relationships with men.
The round-faced child was just eight years old.
After the attack, Rose gave her a bath to soothe her and probably made her some tea to sip. But poor Anna Marie suffered such pain from the rape that she couldn’t attend school for some time. Rape such as she endured creates a tremendous amount of irritation of the vaginal walls, and sometimes vaginal tearing. Simply, if you have a small space and you’re trying to enlarge that space in a forceful way, you can cause a lot of damage. What Fred did was severely painful for Anna Marie. It would have taken five to seven days for the inflammation to go down. If there was vaginal tearing, it would have taken a much longer time to heal.
Rape like this occurred many times with the West daughters, and lodgers in the house could hear screams and cries of “Daddy, stop it!” emanating from the damp cellar. Yet they did nothing about it. They didn’t call the police. They didn’t call social services. They didn’t talk about it among themselves. They were silent. The way these transient people dealt with incest is really no different from the way others have dealt with it even in the more affluent suburbs here in the United States. It is not mentioned; instead, it is hidden away as though it couldn’t happen, as though it didn’t happen. This appalling silence was an indictment of all of those people. If you know and if you’re denying that it has happened, then you’re just as culpable.
At Cromwell Street, Fred West craved to have sex of any kind at any time. He had Rose pose as she urinated, and he videotaped the act. He poked a peephole in a door to watch Rosemary with her clients. After rigging up a speaker and wires, he blandly watched television and listened to Rose having sex while the TV was turned down. After touching Rose’s genital area, he demanded that his progeny smell his fingers. After sizing up his preteen son, Stephen, West declared that soon he would be old enough to have sex with his mother. He told others that he had had sex with farm animals. At any moment, he might try to fondle any woman who passed by. With Rose in tow, he trolled the streets of Gloucester in his car, searching for unsuspecting targets, hoping they would be virgins.
In her quiet way, Rose served as a procurer for Fred. You’re far more likely to get into a car with a couple than with a single man. Rose’s function was not to be West’s equal partner, not like Bonnie and Clyde, where Bonnie often helped to case banks, fire weapons, and drive the getaway car. Rose was Fred’s loyal, almost simpering helper whose physical presence, whose very femaleness, made getting the girls much easier.
When they picked up a young woman, none older than twenty-one and most in their teens, they would take her back to Cromwell Street, gag her, bind her face tightly with packing tape, and rape her. For these purposes, Fred crafted his own tools of torture as well.
For Fred West, these actions weren’t about getting and having sex per se. It was power and control that motivated West as he moved, seemingly insatiably, from one kind of criminal sex act to another. This horrific man wanted to rule everything and everyone he came into contact with. In his home and on the streets, he made his own laws and felt all should be subject to his decrees. But those whom he raped, from his daughters to hitchhikers he brought to his cellar, said the sex acts themselves lasted for a minute or two, even less. Fred, who wanted to control everyone else, had very little control over himself. In one instance, after he performed for a few moments and had an orgasm early, victim Caroline Owens reported to the courts and police that he began weeping inconsolably. It wasn’t that Fred was sorry for what he had done, nor was he ashamed of performing so poorly. Fred’s tears were a kind of autonomic release, almost a reflex, totally uncontrollable. It had nothing to do with heartfelt emotion.
Certainly he was devoid of any heart, soul, or conscience. What kind of human being would take his daughter’s virginity? Then, when Anna Marie turned thirteen, Rose made her pose for a photograph in the nude, probably as a kind of advertisement for her to become a prostitute like her mother. But, while it might be impossible to believe, he became even more depraved. Fred’s daughter Heather was not as compliant as Anna Marie, and she wanted more than anything to escape her father’s constant fondling. She became introspective, silent, and as Rosemary said, “stubborn.” Perhaps because of Fred’s abuse, she shunned going out with boys, and Fred began to tell his cronies that she was a lesbian. When Heather told others that she had been abused, Fred beat her mercilessly. Then Heather announced that she was going to leave Cromwell Street. And the sixteen-year-old disappeared. Fred said she decided to strike out on her own. The reality was far worse.
Fred had confronted her in the laundry room, where she stood defiantly near the dryer with her hands on her hips. Fred confessed to police, “She had a sort of smirk on her face like you try me and I’ll do the business. I lunged at her…and grabbed her round the throat.” Within minutes, she was dead. Armed with what he described as an “ice saw,” he cut his daughter up in the first-floor bathroom. He sliced around her neck and then began to twist off her head, no easy task. In the middle of the night, he placed Heather’s two legs, her head, and her body in a hole in the garden. Later he poured concrete to extend a patio over her shallow grave. All of this was kept from Rosemary and the family for years. As a cover, Fred constantly lied to Rosemary, saying that he occasionally heard from Heather, who had gotten a job and was all right. I can’t tell you why he lied. I said all along that these people aren’t quite human. If I tried to say, Rose would have left Fred if she knew Fred had killed Heather, it would be explaining it as if Fred were an ordinary person like you and me. I can’t say why he lied because I do not know.
When West completed one of these killing rampages, he sometimes had sex with the dead body. As I have pointed out in previous chapters, Fred West, like John Gacy, may have exhibited signs of necrophilia. But he was not a necrophiliac because, at its most basic, necrophilia refers to having sexual attraction to corpses, not having sex with them. I remember the case of a man who hired pale-looking prostitutes to have intercourse with him in a coffin. Another example was the case of a man who became sexually excited at funerals.
Nor was Fred a pedophile, because pedophiles desire to have sexual relations with children. Nor was he purely a sexual sadist, because a sadist doesn’t always kill. Did he hurt people? Yes. Did he get sexual pleasure from hurting people, that same elation the average person gets from sex with a lover in the missionary position? No.
Fred West was like a robot when he was compelled to torture and rape and kill. Something clicked inside of him, something that even I have yet to fully comprehend. His humanity wasn’t there any more as he acted. I can’t say that he was a monster or an animal either. He was on a kind of autopilot that led him from one level of crime to the next until he succumbed to commit the ultimate crime, murder, over and over again.
But what of Rosemary West? She, I believe, was one step up from the empty shell in which the inhuman serial killer exists. She wasn’t mentally retarded, but Dozy Rosie, as she was nicknamed at school, seemed as though she was as she dutifully fulfilled all of Fred’s requests of her.
It wasn’t so much that Fred brainwashed his wife. The best way to explain the relationship between Fred and Rose is to imagine someone sitting in front of a large television screen with a game controller in hand. That controller is linked to Sony’s PlayStation II, and on the screen is, say, the bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto III. The video game is an alternate world, in the case of this game, a world of crime bosses and bloody death. Here, as the player frantically mashes the buttons to make things work on the screen, fantasies and adventures are experienced so enticingly that they almost feel real. Throughout the experience, there are prostitutes, tortures, maimings, guns, and murders. When people play this game for hours at a time, they often dream about the game at night.
For Fred West, his gift of gab was his controller and the star of his video game, the person who moved around to do his bidding in this world, was Rosemary West. He used her to realize not only his fantasies of the wife as prostitute as he watched her have sex with other men. But he also used her to carry out and consummate acts of abduction, rape, and incest. In the video game, there are various missions to complete before the user gets to the next level, which is always the goal. If the mission was to abduct a young girl to be picked up at a bus stop, Rosemary would help, perhaps by offering the woman some nanny work along with room and board at 25 Cromwell Street. If the mission was the act of rape, Rosemary would hold the woman down. If Fred directed Rosemary to abuse the victim as well, she would do so—without much fuss or semblance of protest. She would argue occasionally, but once she had this verbal release, she would always do what Fred wanted her to do.
And in Fred’s strange world, reality merged with fantasy. Early in his life, he dated a girl who was an amputee. Later in life, he would make amputees of his victims. Early in his life, he worked as a skinner and a tanner. And later, he would use this knowledge to cut up his victims as if they were animals. Precisely how dreams melded into reality for Fred West and other serial murderers, I do not know. But I will tell you this: I am spending a good part of my professional life trying to find out.
Why was Rosemary so obliging about doing things that most of us would never consider doing, even if we were offered everything we’ve ever wanted? There is evidence that both Fred and Rosemary were sexually abused by their own families, that Fred was molested by his obese mother and that Rosemary was raped twice as a child. Fred may have convinced Rosemary, as he tried to do with his daughters, that there was nothing wrong with sleeping with his children. While Rosemary was not exactly a blank slate, she was naive, willing, and not particularly smart. It has also been said that because Rose’s mother had electroconvulsive therapy—once more crudely known as electroshock therapy—when she was pregnant with Rose, Rose became somehow retarded. But a study done in 1994 of three hundred similar cases showed no such thing. The most common complication was one that occurred in twenty-eight of the cases, an arrhythmic heart rate, one that was brief and didn’t recur once the baby was born. She wanted to do right by Fred, even if doing right by Fred meant doing wrong in the eyes of the law and society. Beyond this, Rose may well have been bullied by Fred into believing that what she was doing was perfectly all right. One of the things that psychiatrists know is that kids who have been sexually abused can become more active sexually. For them, sexuality becomes something that doesn’t have a real “do and don’t do” moral code about it. It’s different when a couple like the Wests have no boundaries. It would have been easier for them to sink into the acts of incest. Throughout the years, Rose’s loyalty to Fred was seemingly unshakable, even when the British constabulary showed up at Rosemary’s doorstep after a child reported to her mother that one of the West girls told her there was a body buried in the Wests’ backyard. Though the police didn’t mention the tip, they asked difficult questions about the disappearance of Rose’s daughter, Heather.
“When did you last see her?” “When did she move out?” “Why did she move out?” “What was the buildup to her leaving?” were the questions asked by Detective Sergeant Terence Onions.
And—
“Was there a row before she left?” “Who were her friends?” “Have you seen her since?” “What inquiries have you made (about her disappearance)?”
Rose took umbrage at the invasion of her privacy and at the many probing questions. “I can’t remember” was her favorite reply to Detective Onions. And then, when she was hard up against the wall after being hit with question after accusatory question, this frustrated, confusing answer: “If you had any brains at all, you could find her. It can’t be that difficult.”
Their suspicions aroused, the police came back two days later to begin digging up the patio and garden behind the house on Cromwell Street while a nervous and sobbing Rosemary and the stunned children sat around the kitchen table, drinking tea. As the digging continued, Fred confessed to the police that they would indeed find Heather’s body in the garden. After Fred was taken away to jail in late February 1994, Rose was arrested on suspicion of the murder of her young daughter Heather. Even when Rosemary was taken into custody, Stephen and Mae June, then in their early twenties, remained behind, still drinking tea as the excavation continued.
Yet once Rosemary realized that Heather had been killed and buried mere feet from where she slept, she wanted nothing more to do with Fred. The realization of the murder had quickly shattered her bond with him, and she was able to pull away from his Svengali-like power over her. The fact that police uncovered five remains in less than ten hours must have also jolted her into realizing that Fred had been much more than a player of illegal sex games. He was the murderer of her child. The murderer of others, yes, but mainly the murderer of her child. While she would never implicate Fred, she would never forgive him.
I believe Rosemary didn’t participate in the physical procedure of murder. After looking at the evidence, it was clear to me that there wasn’t enough of it to say for certain that she killed one or some of the victims. I have no doubt that she committed sexual abuse of others with Fred. However, after a trial full of high drama that included witnesses fainting from the strain of testimony, a jury speedily convicted Rose on ten counts of murder. Though there was no direct evidence presented in court, jurors believed the prosecution, which said she was not only an accomplice but also a partner in the murders. She, not the expired Fred, would be held responsible.
Fred’s and Rosemary’s deeds had severe repercussions far beyond the murders. Some say the town of Gloucester never really recovered from the blow it was dealt, not just to the economy but also to the collective psyche of its people. Fred’s daughter Anne Marie (who changed her name from Anna—as if to rid herself partially of an unwanted tattoo) tried to commit suicide a few times, once jumping into the muddy River Severn and nearly drowning before she was rescued. Stephen tried to kill himself when the woman he loved left him. And Fred’s brother, about to be brought to trial for allegedly participating in the murders with Fred, took the lead from his sibling, hanging himself in his jail cell. Rosemary, however, survives, still in her jail cell, serving ten life sentences. She never revealed any more about the murders, and remarkably, began a from-the-jail relationship with bass player Dave Glover from the 1970s British rock group Slade. They even prepared to be married, and Rosemary proudly announced their strange bond in the British press. And then, suddenly within a week, the marriage was off. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that once Slade heard about the possible prison nuptials, Glover was unceremoniously fired from the band.
Of course, there have been other such partnerships: Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka, well-off Canadians who raped, killed, and videotaped together, including the rape and murder of Karla Homolka’s sister. Ian Brady and Myra Hinkley axed their victims, then buried them in Saddleworth Moor, a windswept part of England not far from the areas made famous by the literary works of the Brontë sisters. David and Catherine Birnie had their own “House of Horrors” in Perth, Australia. Gerald and Charlene Gallego kidnapped and murdered ten people, mostly teen girls, in and around Sacramento.
And then there was Alton Coleman and Debra Brown.
I spoke at length with Debra Brown, who with boyfriend Alton Coleman cast a pall of thievery, rape, and murder over Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Wisconsin in the summer of 1984. The African-American pair traveled like the drifting Michael Lee Lockhart, but their reign of terror was more of a short, intense binge. It lasted fifty-three days and placed Coleman and Brown near the top of the FBI’s most wanted list.
In his previous offenses such as rape, Coleman’s handsome looks and nice-guy attitude on the witness stand turned juries in his favor, and he often escaped the grasp of justice. With his mustache and long, carefully trimmed sideburns, he looked more like an R&B star of the day than he did a criminal. In 1983, he was charged with sexual assault after his sister accused him of attempting to rape her eight-year-old daughter. But the case never went to trial, as Coleman’s sister dropped the charges. Coleman felt he was protected against all crimes he could commit, not by a guardian angel, but by a Haitian voodoo god called Baron Samedi he had heard about from his grandmother. Called both the god of eroticism and the lord of death, Baron Samedi is a mythical figure often depicted with a stovepipe hat and a formal coat with tails who zealously guards the entrance to the afterlife. Said to drink rum steeped in hot peppers, the dancing, laughing god is also seen as a protector of children and the critically ill and is the latter’s last best chance at regaining health.
On June 18, 1984, Coleman and Brown spied bright-eyed and carefree seven-year-old Tamika Turks and her nine-year-old aunt, Annie, in Gary, Indiana. They were heading back from a candy store when the pair coaxed them into taking a walk in the woods under the ruse of playing a game. Away from witnesses and covered by the silence of the woods, the two bound and gagged the children. When Tamika whimpered, Coleman jumped up and down on her chest. In an even more depraved turn, the pair forced Annie to carry out acts of oral sex on both of them. Coleman cut and raped Annie, and the two choked her until she passed out. When Annie came to, alive despite tremendous blood loss, she found Tamika’s body tossed in some shrubbery, strangled and dead.
On July 13, Coleman and Brown bicycled to the home of an elderly couple, Marlene and Harry Walters, in Norwood, Ohio, near Cincinnati, claiming they wanted to purchase a camper in the yard. The Walters invited the two in to have lemonade on that hot July day. Once inside, they ransacked the place, stealing things they saw of value. Coleman beat Harry and took to hitting Marlene with various items, including a magazine rack, over twenty times. He also used a pair of Vise-Grip pliers to disfigure her face and scalp before she died. With the couple bound and tied, Coleman and Brown made off with the Walters’ red Plymouth Valiant.
By the time they were apprehended, Coleman and Brown had committed what amounted to a laundry list of crimes, including eight murders, seven rapes, three kidnappings, and fourteen armed robberies. After a tip from one of Coleman’s acquaintances, police spied the two in the bleachers of Mason Park in Evanston, Illinois. They were casually watching a street basketball game.
But what were their excuses?
On the day he was born, Alton Coleman’s mother didn’t want him and gave him up to his grandmother. (Another account says she threw her baby into a garbage can.) Coleman’s grandmother wasn’t the most stable influence a child could have, since she ran a brothel and a gambling parlor. She also beat him more than occasionally. Alton developed slightly feminine mannerisms and the embarrassing habit of peeing his pants. So the local kids, who constantly bullied him in Waukegan, Illinois, came up with a nickname for him: “Pissy.” Later, he would enjoy dressing in women’s clothing.
In an interview with Ohio Public Radio just weeks before his execution in April 2002, Coleman blamed the Walters murder on Debra Brown, claiming that she was “speedy, a little bit high…We was drugged up.” He asserted that they ransacked the Walters’ house because the pair wanted items to sell to buy drugs, and that Brown hit Marlene repeatedly with a candlestick because Mrs. Walters kept fighting back. While Debra was no innocent bystander, it was extremely cowardly but typical of Coleman to protest his innocence and blame Brown in a last-minute effort to escape the death penalty.
Like Rosemary West, Debra Brown was considered a slow learner, so that her intellectual ability was the equivalent of that of a child. Like Rosemary West, she was very much under the thumb of the dominant Alton Coleman. If he told her to go out and get a bag of potato chips in a downpour without a raincoat, she would do just that. And if he told her to kill, she would do just that.
Before my conversations with Debra, I had seen a black-and-white photo of her. She wore a Pennzoil baseball cap placed at an angle on her head, her face tough and hardened, albeit youthful. She would tell a judge that she “had fun” killing, then tempered the statement by saying she was kinder, more understanding and “more lovable” than people believed her to be. On the surface, she seemed very cocky, even brazen, but I found Debra to be a very quiet, relatively passive, yet occasionally hostile person.
“Why are you here?” she whispered. “I’m not crazy.”
I could tell that she indeed was not crazy. Instead, she was in love. “I just want to ask you some questions. Can you tell me a little bit about Alton?”
Her eyes immediately brightened, almost as if thinking about him made her free of prison. “There’s nothing wrong with Alton. Alton’s the best thing in my life. From the minute I met him.”
“Are you in love with him?”
Softly, she said, “You bet I am. I’d do anything for that man.”
“Anything?”
“Just about.”
“What about the bad things you did?”
“If I did anything, I did it because Alton wanted me to.”
“People were killed.”
“Alton took me everywhere. We went all around. All kinds of cars. It was fun. We had fun.”
“How upset are you about what’s happened to Alton?”
“What do you think? I’m upset. Damn upset.”
“Why?”
“What we had was…different. It was exciting. He took me everywhere. He took care of me. Now, who’s gonna do that?”
“What about Marlene Walters?”
“Well.” There was a long pause and she lowered her head a bit. “I did that.”
“You?”
“Not Alton. Me.” She was so small and subdued, and so very much in love that I did not believe her. I felt she was covering for Alton because she didn’t want him to die by lethal injection. Psychiatrists could call the partnership of Alton and Debra one that was “enmeshed.” She felt she couldn’t function without the other person, or at least what she saw as the vivid memory of how well they seemed to work together. Somehow she could deal with his incarceration, but she couldn’t bear to think about his death.
It was the kind of thing I’ve seen in little kids when they’re clinging so much they can’t be independent from the parent figure. In addition, Debra was like the mousy person in a relationship who can’t even seem to move without the permission of the other. Recently Zits, the comic strip about the misadventures of a mom and dad with one teen and one college-age son, ran a series about a couple in a relationship who breathed the same air. They were constantly on each other. Each could not and would not survive without the presence of the other person. That was what the love between Alton Coleman and Debra Brown was like. Not unlike Rose West, Debra accepted what was going on around her. When something like the legal system threatened that relationship, she got very upset about it. But she wasn’t about to do anything about it—because someone else, Alton, had always been the aggressor.
In my mind, the only way Debra could have committed the violent killing of Mrs. Walters (remember, there were over twenty powerful blows that pummeled her) was if she had been doing crack at the time of the murder. Crack is one of the very few drugs that has been known to have the potential to increase the level of violence a human may do. Debra may have had a little speed and some marijuana on that fateful day in Ohio, but that wouldn’t have led her to carry out such a vicious crime. She would need to have been far more irate, and much stronger. Yes, I saw that she had been described as a mean little witch who could lash out verbally, but she was not a brutal murderer.
To me, the partnership killings are like a transmogrification of what John Gacy and even Michael Lockhart had said, that there was always someone there in the room helping them kill. For Gacy, it was Bad Jack. For Lockhart, it was Jamaican people involved in illegal drug deals said to have been in the hotel room with Officer Hulsey. For us, these demons are clearly figments of the imagination, but to them, there really was somebody else there. To some, delusions are real. In the instances of the helpers of Alton Coleman and Fred West, the partner was no imaginary being. She was real, a warm, submissive body there to be directed in living color, not an enabler who stood by and let it happen or a disciple as if she were part of a cult. She was as real, close, and attached as an arm or a leg. But though they were attached in that way, serial killers don’t make terrific husbands. They’re not really loving, caring, or understanding. They don’t share in the hopes and dreams of their spouses. And, with the exception of Rose West, the marriages don’t last long at all. The comment I often get from the wives and former wives is that the serial killer husband wasn’t around that much or didn’t care that much. That’s why these marriages ended. So these were no mystical bonds that could last an eternity. If they hadn’t ended before, they certainly ended when the murderer was convicted in court. So why do some of them, like Debra Brown, say they were deeply in love? It’s probably due to a combination of adequate sex and cold experimentation that was misinterpreted by the partner as the wild adventure of two people together against society. And that misinterpretation may well have become the partner’s idea of love. It didn’t matter that the serial murderer came home late at night or ignored them completely or put work or murder or feeding the dog before love. The stark reality? There was no love at all.
Why didn’t the partners become victims themselves? If they were concrete extensions of the murderer like arms or legs, the murderer wouldn’t see them as potential victims, just as part of himself. But one thing is certain about the partners. There was a hole to be filled inside of Rosemary, Debra, and the others, an emptiness, and it was filled by these dominant murderers. It’s almost as if they were reaching out to grasp in their partners something that they didn’t have inside of themselves. It’s not that they were looking for someone to treat them badly, not at all. They felt they had found a stable force, a man they could, at any time, come to for fulfillment. They may have even made a preconscious decision that the badness in their men didn’t override the comfort they felt in being sheltered and protected. But the women involved in the partnership killings were beyond sad; it’s tragic that Rose or Debra or any woman could feel complete only with a lying serial murderer by her side.