5

THE SCOTTISH CONNECTION

Each Saturday evening Fred West’s family put on their best clothes and ambled down the lane to the Wallwyn Arms public house in Much Marcle. They ordered tankards of beer from the landlord, Tony Davies, and went and sat in the corner of the bar, nodding hello to their neighbours when they came in, scraping their boots on the stone floor. Fred had been banished from Moorcourt Cottage since being charged with having sex with the thirteen-year-old girl. But after a year with his uncle and aunt at Daisy Cottage, his parents decided they wanted Fred home again. In the summer of 1962, before the harvest was brought in and the village lanes were filled with hay dust, Fred was reconciled with his parents and started to join them on these Saturday nights in the Wallwyn Arms. They sat together as a family and left together at the end of the evening, silent and united.

Fred was living at Moorcourt Cottage and working as a building labourer when he was reunited with his old girlfriend, Rena Costello. She returned to Ledbury from Scotland in the late summer of 1962, and was serving as a waitress in a café known as the Milk Bar in Ledbury High Street. Fred had not been alone in her affections in the two years she had been away, as a new tattoo on her right forearm showed. It read: ‘Rena, John – True Love’ and was accompanied by a heart and two arrows.

When she went back to Scotland in the autumn of 1960 Rena had moved to Glasgow, where she became one of the band of girls who walked the canyon-like streets around the Central Station. They were a pitiable sight, instantly recognisable as street prostitutes. They wore cheap, revealing clothes, no matter what the weather, and the white skin they displayed was often marked with sores. The girls smoked cigarettes as they dawdled along in the shadows of Glasgow’s granite office buildings, stopping every few yards to look flirtatiously into the windows of passing cars. It was a miserable, dangerous occupation which inevitably ended in arrest. Rena was picked up by Glasgow Central police on 19 November that year, and was warned for importuning. She was still only sixteen years old.

A few weeks later Rena and a girlfriend were convicted of attempted burglary. Rena was sentenced at Airdrie Juvenile Court to borstal training, and served seventeen months until May 1962, being released shortly before her eighteenth birthday. She made an attempt to get away from petty crime, found new lodging in Glasgow’s Florence Street and began training to become a nurse, but she was back in court in July, convicted of theft and fined £2. She then found work as a bus conductress in the northern suburbs of Glasgow. Rena had a brief affair with an Asian bus driver who worked out of her depot, becoming pregnant with his child, but there was no prospect of the relationship continuing further so she decided to travel back to England.

The girl who returned from Scotland after these experiences was a wild and uninhibited delinquent, the perfect partner for Fred. She had also changed her looks by dying her hair peroxide blonde.

Fred and Rena dated in Ledbury, sleeping together in the back of Fred’s van. Fred soon discovered she was pregnant with a mixed-race child, and convinced Rena to let him try and abort it himself. A friend of theirs, Margaret Clarke, agreed to act as look-out while this was done. The three of them went up to a wood by Dog Hill near Ledbury, and Fred began his bizarre operation – but they were seen while he was at work, the police were called and Fred was forced to abandon the termination.

According to Margaret Clarke they then decided to marry, because Rena now had to keep the baby and they were ‘besotted’ with each other anyway. Rena had met Daisy West on two occasions, but Fred did not think his mother would approve of the match between him and this brash Scot. It would have to be done in secret. They decided to wait until Fred reached his twenty-first birthday, when they could have their wedding without needing his parents’ permission.

On 17 November 1962, at Ledbury Register Office, Fred married for the first time. His bride, Catherine Bernadette Costello, wore a blue dress. Her hair was bleached almost white. The groom wore a white shirt, a dark tie and a suit jacket that was too big for him. The only guest was his younger brother, John, who acted as witness and took the one wedding photograph, which shows the grinning youngsters holding hands. Thirty-two years later, during the height of the murder inquiry, that same wedding photograph would be printed on posters labelled: MISSING.

Daisy was unhappy about the secrecy involved when Fred told her that he had married, but Walter was less concerned, telling his wife, ‘It’s up to Fred. He’s got his own mind.’ The newly-weds spent their wedding night, and the following few days, on the sofa at Moorcourt Cottage. They would have stayed longer, but with Fred’s brother Doug and his sisters Daisy, Kitty and Gwen all still living at home, it was uncomfortably cramped in the cottage. Fred and Rena announced that they would start their married life in Scotland.

They moved into a small flat in Hospital Street, Coatbridge, near where Rena had been brought up. It was Fred’s first experience of urban life, and the grimy industrial town was difficult to get used to after the slow pace of Much Marcle. Rena, on the other hand, was happy to see her sisters and friends again, especially now she was expecting her first child.

The marriage was in trouble from the beginning, partly because of Fred’s sexual appetite. His lovemaking was short and brutal and he wanted sex at the most inappropriate times. Rena might be washing up or peeling potatoes when Fred demanded sex. He did so in such an insistent, uncaring way that the act which followed was more like rape than any normal form of intercourse. Sometimes Rena would be sitting reading a magazine when he would begin, often wanting oral sex. There was never any foreplay, and when they did have full intercourse, it would be over in seconds, with Rena often reduced to tears.

His brutal behaviour degenerated into sadism. Fred took pleasure from pinching intimate parts of Rena’s body extremely hard while they were having sex. He also tried to tie her hands together, but Rena was frightened and would not allow him to do this.

Rena had already made her living as a prostitute. Years later, when Fred spoke about his time in Scotland, he said that he had encouraged Rena to go back on the game. He bragged that when she went out to work, she always left another girl in bed to keep him company, and that he made a lot of money from being a pimp. This conflicts with his complaints that Rena’s prostitution brought him ‘trouble’. The truth is that he probably felt he could not satisfy his wife sexually, but was powerless to prevent her from seeing other men. Her prostitution therefore both aroused and annoyed him.

Any rejection angered Fred. He slapped Rena around the face when she refused to perform a sex act with him. He also flew into a rage if his dinner was not ready on time or if there was something wrong with the flat. Rena was left with bruises and marks all over her body where Fred mauled at and beat her. Violence, and increasingly bizarre, frightening sex became part of daily life at Hospital Street.

On the afternoon of 22 March 1963, at the Alexander Hospital in Coatbridge, Rena gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. The baby was coloured, and obviously of mixed race, with the dark skin and brown eyes of her Asian-born father. Some members of Rena’s family were shocked and displeased by this, and it appears that Fred and Rena decided to concoct a story that would explain the baby to his parents in Much Marcle, thereby avoiding the wrath of the other side of the family. Shortly after the birth, Rena wrote to Daisy West, saying she had unfortunately miscarried Fred’s child and they had decided to adopt a little coloured girl to take its place. They had chosen the name Charmaine Carol Mary; the name Mary was in honour of Rena’s mother.

The letter Rena sent to Daisy West may have been instigated by Fred because he was angry and embarrassed that his wife had given birth to another man’s baby. He took an immediate dislike to the child, and it appears that he briefly left Rena at this time. It was a crucial stage in the development of his attitude towards both women and the children that came into his care. In the years to come, Fred never mentioned the adoption of Charmaine, or how the child had come into the family. His sister-in-law Christine West says it was all ‘swept under the carpet’.

Certain members of Rena’s family were also intolerant of the scandalous birth, and it was partly because of their negative reaction that Rena moved from Coatbridge into the centre of nearby Glasgow. She rented a flat in the Bridgeton area of the city and, at first, lived there on her own with Charmaine.

Number 25 Savoy Street was a one-bedroom ground-floor flat in a grey sandstone tenement block. There were three other blocks in Savoy Street of exactly the same design, each with six flats on three levels, most of them rented out by private landlords. The tenements dated back to the Victorian era and were primitive by the standards of the 1960s, forming one of the worst slums of Glasgow’s South Side. Very few of the residents of Savoy Street owned cars, so the street in front of the tenements was used by the neighbourhood children as a play area. On hot summer days they forced open the pavement fire hydrants and danced about in the jets of cool water until the council workmen came to shut them off.

Despite the area’s rudimentary conditions, there was still almost full employment, with the men mostly working in the local steel mills or as dockers at the busy shipyards on the River Clyde. A small sweet factory in the adjoining Ellsworth Street employed about twenty women from the tenements.

Savoy Street was the first of three addresses where Fred was to live for an extended period which were numbered twenty-five; the other two being the houses he would later occupy in Gloucester: 25 Midland Road and 25 Cromwell Street. The recurrence of this number is no more than coincidence. Although twenty-five is significant to numerologists (adding the two and the five makes seven, which is said to indicate an interest in the occult), Fred was neither adept at arithmetic nor particularly superstitious.

Each tenement had a central opening, or ‘close’, at the front of the building. The door of 25 Savoy Street was on the right side of the close as one walked in. Directly opposite was the front door of steel-worker Archie Jackson and his wife, May. The Jacksons came to know Rena quite well and considered her to be an exceptionally good neighbour, but they never saw Fred and did not even know that Rena was married. ‘As far as we were concerned, she was just a single parent,’ says Archie Jackson. ‘We never saw a man at the house at all.’

For a short while an older woman with an Irish accent stayed at the flat, looking after Charmaine while Rena went out at nights. It seems that Rena and Fred had temporarily split up, and it is likely that Rena was working as a prostitute in the evenings to pay the rent.

But the separation did not last long. At Christmas, Fred took his young family home to Much Marcle, boasting of how much money he was making and what an important man he was in Scotland. He hinted at associations with the underworld, talked about making money from dealing in hard drugs, and boasted that so much cash was coming in that he dressed in silk shirts. He became ostentatious with the little he had and bragged that he ‘ran’ a number of prostitutes. He never tired of talking about his time in Glasgow and, many years later, spoke darkly about it, saying ‘I still have my Scottish connection.’

The reality was ridiculously far from this. Fred was not a gangster in silk shirts – he drove a Mr Whippy ice cream van for the Wall’s company. Each morning Fred travelled across the city to a depot in Paisley, where he collected a yellow van decorated with four large blue beacons. He then spent the day touring the South Side of Glasgow selling the white whipped-up ice cream that was dispensed from a machine into sugary cones.

A large number of ice cream vans and other mobile shops worked Glasgow’s sprawling estates, and there was fierce competition among the drivers for custom. Fred kept a selection of sweets to give to children, so they would remember him and buy a cone when he next came to their street. His van was also stocked with cigarettes, drinks and crisps, so the round could continue throughout the winter.

The ice cream van also allowed Fred to meet the sort of teenage girls he found most attractive. He told them elaborate stories about his adventures and tried to entice them to take a ride with him. Fred was licensed to work until ten at night, but if he had met a girl during the day he often did not return home to Savoy Street until the early hours of the morning.

In 1964 Rena again became pregnant. She gave birth at the flat in Savoy Street in July, to a baby girl with the same luminous pale blue eyes as Fred. She named the child Anna Marie, after the romantic song of that name by Jim Reeves, one of her favourite entertainers. The child was given the middle names Kathleen Daisy, in honour of Fred’s mother.

Fred doted on Anna Marie, his first child. He sat her on his knee and made a fuss of the baby, while Charmaine received only criticism and the brunt of his bad temper. Once, when Charmaine asked her father for an ice cream from his van, she was answered with a slap.

The family moved from Savoy Street to Maclellan Street, near Kinning Park. Maclellan Street was, at that time, one of the longest in Glasgow, an uninterrupted arcade of tenement buildings stretching for many hundreds of yards. The Wests took a flat in the last block at the southern end of the street, in a tenement opposite the Maclellan Steel Works. The flat was on the first floor and had its own inside toilet – a comparative luxury.

Beyond the tenements at the end of the street was an area of garden allotments, or ‘plots’ as they were known. Money was tight in the area, and men hired a plot to grow vegetables for their families. Fred decided to do the same, but it was noticed by the other plot-holders that the Englishman only cultivated a small section of his allotment, growing a few potatoes and cabbages. The rest of the plot had been raked over as if he were going to plant something, but he never did. When they asked why, Fred replied, ‘I’m keeping it for something special.’ He began to visit the plot late at night after he had finished work, and often took girls with him to have sex in the shed.

Hundreds of young women are reported missing in Glasgow each year. At least four young girls of the type that Fred was later accused of murdering disappeared at the time he lived in the city, and it is quite possible that Fred began his murderous career in Scotland. The allotment was a perfect burial ground for his victims, similar to those he would later use in England. It also had a shed, where he kept a collection of tools that could be used to dismember the bodies and dig their graves.

But it will never be known for certain whether Fred did bury any bodies here: the allotment and shed were bulldozed when the area was redeveloped. His plot has since been obliterated by the thousands of tons of concrete that form junction 22 of the M8 motorway, where it joins the M77 to Kilmarnock. Thirteen lanes of traffic now sweep relentlessly back and forth over the patch of earth that Fred said he was keeping for ‘something special’.

Fred was having affairs with several women at this time. Years later he boasted about how many women he seduced in Glasgow and how many children he had fathered. Some of these stories are no doubt simply fantasies, like the night he claimed to have had sex with a girl in the middle of the Celtic football stadium. But there is some truth in a lot of what he said. One of Fred’s most significant affairs was with a twenty-year-old girl from the Gorbals, who worked in a factory bottling mineral water. She became pregnant by Fred, and in July 1966 at Glasgow Maternity Hospital gave birth to a son she named Steven. There is also evidence that another of Fred’s Scottish girlfriends became pregnant by him, and that they had a son named Gareth. But Fred’s name did not appear on either birth certificate, and he had little to do with their upbringing.

Rena knew that Fred was being unfaithful, even catching him with another woman on one occasion, so she saw no reason why she should not see other men. She began an affair with a bus driver named John McLachlan, who frequented Telky’s bookmakers next to their tenement in Maclellan Street. McLachlan was married, but was about to divorce his wife. He and Rena had sex together while Fred was out on his ice cream round, and Rena told her lover of the violence and abuse she was suffering.

One night, Rena and John were kissing in Kinning Park when they saw the shadowy figure of Fred coming towards them across the grass. The lovers split up and John McLachlan watched as Fred came closer and barked at his wife: ‘Up to the house!’ He then punched her, making her scream. John McLachlan came out into the open and punched Fred, who drew a knife, or some other sharp instrument, and grazed it across his rival’s stomach, drawing blood. When McLachlan realised he had been cut, he hit Fred again. Fred made no further attempt to defend himself. ‘He couldn’t tackle a man, but he was not so slow in attacking women,’ McLachlan says.

Rena and her lover did not end their relationship there; if anything, it intensified. Using Indian ink and a needle, John tattooed Rena’s name on his left wrist. He added his name to Rena’s arm and scored out the tattoo: FRED. When Fred found out about this, he was eaten up with jealousy and insecurity.

McLachlan was playing cards in the flat below Rena’s one night when he saw Fred’s face pressed up against the living room window. A few seconds later he heard a door bang on the landing above, followed by shouting and screaming. McLachlan went upstairs and found Fred attacking Rena. ‘He was kicking the shit out of her. She had bruises everywhere. It was sadism.’

When Rena went out of the flat it was often to go to one of the local cafés, such as the Bluebird or the Victoria, where younger people from Kinning Park socialised. It was in one of these cafés that Rena met a brunette named Isa McNeill, who had been working at the Livingston Industrial Clothing factory on the Dalmarnock Road, making knitwear, but was now unemployed and looking for a job. The Wests decided they wanted somebody to look after the children full-time while they were out. Isa was offered bed and board at Maclellan Street if she would care for Charmaine and the baby, Anna Marie, and she took the job.

Isa could not help noticing oddities in the West household, particularly the way in which Fred treated the children. Both Anna Marie and Charmaine were made to sleep in the bottom of a bunk-bed. Slats from a cot were secured across the space between the bunks, effectively penning the girls in like animals. If Fred were in the house, even during the day, he insisted that the children were put into this gaol-like space and only ever let out when he was at work. Charmaine, in particular, was caged in for hours on end.

Isa introduced the Wests to a childhood friend of hers, an attractive teenager named Anna McFall. Born in April 1949, Anna had grown up on Glasgow’s South Side, and worked in the knitwear factory with Isa after leaving school. The girls were best friends, despite Anna being a Catholic and Isa a Protestant: a cultural and religious difference which was enough to divide whole sections of Glasgow’s community. Like Rena and Isa, Anna had suffered an unhappy upbringing, did not get on with her mother, Jeannie, who was a cleaner, and was discontented and restless at home. It was not a happy household: Anna’s parents were unmarried, and Tom McFall kept another family, including his legal wife, in another part of the city. Anna’s brother, ‘Scarface’ McFall, was also frequently in trouble with the police. Anna’s boyfriend, Duncan McLeish – whose nickname, ‘Kelly’, she had tattooed on her arm – had recently been killed in an accident at work, electrocuted while climbing into the cabin of a crane. The voltage was so high that the coins in his pockets were burned into his thighs. Anna was despondent partly because of this gruesome death, and, for company, began to spend a great deal of time visiting the Maclellan Street flat.

One day, during the first half of 1965, Fred was driving his ice cream van in the southern suburbs of Glasgow when he had an accident. His van had large blue beacons that lit up and a mechanical chime to attract children. As Fred was driving down one of the streets he often visited, he ran over a small boy, leaving him lying motionless on the road. A large crowd gathered, angrily accusing Fred of careless driving. The boy was dead.

Fred was interviewed by police, but fatal accidents involving children and ice cream vans were, curiously, fairly common in Glasgow. A three-year-old boy named Michael O’Keefe died outside his home in Linwood around the same time, when an ice cream van backed into him as it was trying to turn round. In light of this and other tragedies, it was decided that the boy’s death was probably accidental and Fred was released without charges. But if it were no more than an accident, it was nevertheless strangely reminiscent of the autumn night several years before when Fred had run down Pat Manns. This time he had actually killed somebody.

Despite being cleared by the police, Fred was scared of the hostile reaction of local people, as he depended on their goodwill to make a living. Knowing he could stay in the city no longer, Fred gathered up his belongings and left Maclellan Street. But Rena would not go with him.

Fred and the children arrived back in Much Marcle tired and short of money, with nowhere to live. Fred told his parents about the death of the boy and asked if they could stay. (Years later, Fred adapted this story to explain why he did not see his illegitimate son Steven, saying that this had been the boy run over and killed by the ice cream van. This was a complete fiction, as Steven is alive and well. He also later told his daughter Anna Marie that the family had been ‘thrown out’ of Glasgow because of Rena’s prostitution – yet another lie.) His brothers and sisters were still at home, including his recently married sister Daisy, who had brought her husband Frank Phillips home to live. Consequently there were only three bedrooms for ten adults and two children, and once again Fred had to sleep in the front room.

Some time later he collected Rena from Gloucester railway station, and the reunited family went to live at The Willows caravan site in the village of Sandhurst. Rena worked serving tea from a café on the newly-built M5 motorway, while Fred was hired to drive a lorry for an abattoir, calling at local farms to collect the carcasses of animals and their offal, stored in forty-gallon steel drums.

Fred and Rena’s relationship was very unstable, and she only stayed at the caravan intermittently, spending much of her time back in Scotland. On one trip home to Glasgow she asked her friend Isa McNeill if she would like to come back to England with her. Isa agreed, since she was not getting on with her parents and the idea of moving away appealed to her. Her friend Anna McFall also asked to come, because she too was unhappy at home and felt she was at a ‘dead end’. They also hoped to find work in England.

The three women and Rena’s two children travelled south together, their destination being the bus station in Gloucester opposite the mainline railway terminal. They were met there by Fred, who invited them all to clamber into the cab of his blue abattoir lorry for the bumpy ride out of the city to Sandhurst. The lorry was loaded with bones and cow hides, and the stench was almost overpowering.

The caravan was claustrophobic with four adults and two children. Fred and Rena shared the main bedroom, which had a view over the fields; the children slept together in a tiny room next to their parents; and Anna McFall and Isa McNeill had to make do with the U-shaped couch in the dining area, taking an end each. It was not comfortable, and living in the country was a big change for the three city girls. They could not find work, became bored and soon wished that they had not come south at all.

The relationship between Rena and Fred continued to be tense and difficult. Before Fred set out each morning for the abattoir, he warned Rena not to venture off the site. Isa believes he was paranoid that Rena was going to leave him. While Fred was out at work, the girls whiled away the hours chatting and flicking through magazines. Isa looked after the children, leaving Rena and Anna with nothing to do other than occasional baby-sitting jobs for neighbours, for which they were paid in cigarettes and food rather than cash. When he returned home in the evening, Fred was still wearing his overalls and Wellington boots from the abattoir, by now splattered with blood and offal. His hands were scarlet and there was blood on his face where he wiped his brow.

His temperament was unpredictable; he was either full of vulgar good cheer or in a black and dangerous mood. After a few weeks in the caravan, the women learned to be nervous of this volatile personality. If his food was not ready on the table when he came in, Fred did not hesitate to slap Rena around the face. Isa bravely tried to intervene, but Fred snarled that he would kill her if she did not get out of the way.

Isa and Rena secretly planned to leave, and Rena sent a letter to John McLachlan’s neighbour in Glasgow asking him to pass on the message that John should come and collect them. Rena’s lover then telephoned the girls and said he would pick them up by the telephone box on the caravan site.

After a long overnight drive south in a hired Mini, John McLachlan arrived at the site shortly after dawn. The girls took the children for a walk, and when they returned, they saw McLachlan’s car parked in the lane. McLachlan was with his friend, John Trotter. The plan had been to take the girls and children away while Fred was at work, but Fred returned home unexpectedly while they were still packing. Both Isa and John McLachlan now believe that Anna had told Fred of their scheme; she had become very friendly with him in recent weeks. When Fred saw his rival, a violent scene erupted. ‘Everybody screamed and bawled at each other,’ says John McLachlan. Rena went into the bedroom to put on her coat, and Fred went in after her. ‘I heard him at it again, giving her a couple of slaps.’ McLachlan asked Isa if she was coming with them and she said she was, quickly packing a bag. Rena turned to her young friend Anna McFall and entreated her to escape with them, but Anna was oddly calm. She said that she would stay and work as Fred’s ‘nanny’.

As the others were about to leave, Rena decided she could not abandon her children, but Fred held Charmaine in his arms and, no matter how hard Rena tugged at the girl, he would not let her go. McLachlan punched Fred in the stomach, but still Fred hung on. He hissed at Rena, ‘I’ll kill you if you ever show your face again!’

One of the neighbours had called the police because of the commotion, and as the Mini drove away, a police officer appeared on a bicycle. He called for them to stop, but the car kept going.

In the back seat, Rena was sobbing, desperately worried about leaving her children behind. She turned to her friends, wailing, ‘But something might happen to them!’