11

THE CHARNEL-HOUSE

Carol Ann Cooper was not a very happy fifteen-year-old. Her parents separated when she was three. She lived with her mother at first, but when Mrs Cooper died, Carol went to live with her father, Colin, in Worcester. He had been in the Royal Air Force, had remarried and was working as an insurance salesman, but soon found that he was unable to look after Carol and placed her into care. By 1973, she was living at the Pines Children’s Home in Bilton Road, Worcester, and had the distinct feeling that nobody loved her. A pretty, intelligent teenager with bright blue eyes, she was known as ‘Caz’ and had used a needle and ink to tattoo that nickname on her forearm.

On Saturday 10 November 1973, Carol, her boyfriend Andrew Jones and a large group of friends visited the Odeon cinema in the Warndon area of Worcester. After the film, they all had fish and chips and then went to a pub, where Carol drank bitter orange. At around 9 P.M. Andrew took Carol to the bus stop: she was spending the weekend with her grandmother and he was going to see her off. ‘Carol and me had been getting a bit niggly with each other,’ he said later. ‘She put her arms around me and asked me to kiss her, but I wouldn’t. I was still feeling a bit niggly. She was standing opposite me. I think she was crying and I went over to her and made it up.’ Andrew then gave his girlfriend eighteen and a half pence to pay for her bus fare and to buy some cigarettes; Carol climbed aboard a number 15 bus and the teenagers waved goodbye to each other, looking forward to their next date. It was 9:15 P.M.; Andrew never saw Caz again.

It is not known for sure how she vanished; Carol did not live to tell the story. But it seems likely that a young couple offered her a lift that winter night. What happened next can be deduced from the condition of Carol’s remains, found at 25 Cromwell Street more than twenty years later.

If there were strange noises that night from the cellar of the house, then the lodgers who lived upstairs thought little of it. The landlord, Fred, was an industrious man who often worked at odd hours. He had recently been enlarging the cellar, and had dug down past the foundations to the main drain. Now a man could stand upright in the cellar without banging his head. He had carried out all the work himself, using just a pick and shovel to move literally tons of earth. He was also in the process of pulling down the garage behind the house to build an extension using, among other oddments he picked up, a railway sleeper as part of the foundations. To save time and work, he also built directly on to the wall of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Fred never seemed to stop, and loud noises were common at all hours of the night.

When the cellar door was closed, a band of surgical tape was wrapped around Carol’s head, gagging the terrified girl. Her limbs were bound with cord and pieces of braided cloth were fastened under her arms. Heavy wooden beams supported the ceiling, and in one of these were a number of neatly drilled holes. Fred later claimed that he fixed hooks into the holes and thereby suspended the bodies of his live victims. Carol may well have been strung up on a hook so that she was suspended above the floor. How long she dangled there, and what manner of torture she suffered, can only be imagined. She was undoubtedly used as a sexual toy by Fred and Rose, and subjected to extreme sado-masochistic perversions. She eventually died, probably by suffocation or strangulation, either as a result of what had been done to her, or because Fred and Rose could not risk setting her free.

There are two theories as to where Fred dismembered the bodies of his victims. Fred’s son Steve claims his father told him this was done at a derelict farmhouse outside Cheltenham, explaining that he could make as much noise and mess as he liked there. Steve further claims that Fred said he transported the corpses between Cromwell Street and the farmhouse in large fibreglass water tanks stolen from the Wingate factory where he worked. There has also been an unproved allegation that he committed sex acts on the bodies at the farmhouse.

But the police, and their forensic advisers, believe the victims were killed and dismembered at Cromwell Street, over the holes that had been dug for their burial. This is what Fred himself said in contradictory conversations while in custody.

The ‘farmhouse theory’, if it can be called that, is an interesting one, however. Like much of what Fred said, it is probably part fact and part fiction, and therefore contains an intriguing element of truth. The victims found at Cromwell Street, including Carol Cooper, were almost certainly murdered and dismembered at the house, but it seems likely that a farmhouse did figure in Fred’s crimes in some way, and may indeed have been the scene of other murders that have never been discovered.

He removed her legs at the hip, leaving deep gouge marks in her left upper thighbone, and cut off her head between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. An unusual gouge mark in the skull suggests that Carol was stabbed in the head – this could have happened either before she died or while Fred was dismembering her. He had already dug a pit on the right-hand side of the cellar, three feet deep with a step halfway down. He placed her jumbled remains, and the means of her torture, into this hole. The gag that had prevented her screams was still wrapped around her head; pieces of rope and knotted binds were also buried. As with the earlier victims, Fred did not bury all of Carol’s remains: parts of her hands and feet, one of the cervical vertebrae and a breastbone were kept back.

Carol’s sudden disappearance was suspicious. She had run away several times before, as her stepmother told the police, but it was odd that she had not taken any of her belongings with her this time. Carol was properly registered as a missing person, and West Mercia police made extensive enquiries in the Worcester area, but they found no trace. There was no reason to think she had met her end almost thirty miles away in Gloucester.

Lucy Partington was from an upper-middle-class background, very different to Carol Ann Cooper’s. Her father, Roger, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Margaret, worked as an architect. One of Lucy’s uncles was the novelist Kingsley Amis, later Sir Kingsley, and she had played as a child with his son, Martin, who also became a famous writer. By the Christmas of 1973 Lucy was aged twenty-one, and in her final year at Exeter University where she was studying medieval English. She was a serious, pious young woman who had recently converted to the Roman Catholic faith. She did not have a boyfriend. The only factor that Lucy had in common with Carol Ann Cooper was that both sets of parents had separated.

That Christmas Lucy returned home to spend the holiday at her mother’s house in the picturesque Cotswold village of Gretton, near Cheltenham. She went to a party at a neighbour’s house, watched a rugby match with her family, and attended midnight mass, but mostly Lucy spent her evenings at home, curled up in front of the log fire, reading Wuthering Heights and savouring the peace and quiet. On the morning of 27 December 1973, Margaret Partington briefly looked in on her daughter before leaving for work. Lucy was asleep, enjoying a lay-in. Her mother never saw her again.

Later that day Lucy rose and dressed in pink flared denim jeans, a pink shirt, sweater, brown shoes, knee-length socks and a rust-coloured raincoat, and went into the centre of Cheltenham with her brother, David. They split up, and at about eight o’clock that evening, Lucy went to visit her friend, Helen Render, at her home in the suburb of Pittville, not far from the Cheltenham racecourse.

Helen had been disabled from birth, and was confined to a wheelchair. She and Lucy, whom she knew affectionately as ‘Luce the Moose’, had been close friends since meeting at Pates’ Grammar School’s history group four years earlier. Lucy had been very active at Pates’, appearing in the school’s 1968 production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

Lucy thought of Helen’s house as her second home, and had been going out of her way to see Helen during the holidays because her friend had not been feeling well. On the evening of 27 December, the girls talked about their shared interest in medieval art, and Lucy composed a letter of application for a postgraduate course at London’s Courtauld Institute, admitting that she did not expect to be accepted. Helen’s mother gave her a stamp, and Lucy left the house at 10:15 P.M. to walk to the bus stop on the Evesham Road, planning to post her application on the way. It was understood that if she missed the bus home to Gretton she could come back to the house and Lucy’s father would give her a lift home.

The bus stop was only a three-minute walk from the Render house, but it was a lonely spot next to Marle Hill Park and Lucy was often the only person waiting there. Sometimes the bus drivers did not see her in the dark and drove straight past. Lucy could have gone back to the house and asked Helen’s father for a lift, but it was late and she did not want to bother him.

As fate would have it, she was waiting on the A435 trunk road, the route Fred and Rose used when they travelled between Gloucester and Bishop’s Cleeve. They often visited the village, especially during Christmas week, and were probably driving home with their children when they saw Lucy standing at the bus stop. It is unlikely that Lucy would have accepted a lift unless she felt confident they were a normal family group. She was a cautious girl, and would have been particularly wary of lone men because another of her old school friends, Ruth Owen, had been frightened a few years earlier when a dark-haired man fitting the general description of Fred tried to lure her into his car.

Neither was she the sort of girl who would have gone to Cromwell Street willingly, so what happened to her in that car is probably similar to what happened to Caroline Owens: she may have been knocked unconscious and then gagged and held down by Rose as they drove into the city. She was then no doubt quickly bundled inside. It was not a very festive house that Lucy found herself in, nothing like her own cosy home at Gretton. It was a seedy sort of place, decorated in a hodge-podge of half-finished alterations distinctly lacking in Christmas cheer.

Lucy was pushed down into the cellar, where she was bound and gagged with lengths of adhesive surgical tape, three-quarters of an inch wide, together with pieces of cloth. The surgical tape was wrapped around her head until it formed an oval mask over her face. Her limbs were restrained with cord, knotted in place. There is little doubt that Lucy was sexually tortured, as the other girls had been, and again died either as a result of her injuries or because the Wests could not risk letting her go.

Lucy’s ordeal may have carried on for a very long time. Part of the Crown’s case against Rose would later be that she and Fred kept Lucy tied up in the cellar, and used her as a sexual plaything, for anything up to seven days before she was finally murdered. The cellar at the time was a dark, dank hole; the floor was earth and there were puddles of water dotted about. There was no electricity and the only natural light came from a small metal grille.

The evidence for this long period of captivity is that a week after Lucy’s abduction, at twenty-five minutes past midnight on the morning of 3 January 1974, Fred walked into the casualty unit of the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital with a serious laceration to his right hand. It was extremely unusual for Fred to attend a hospital; he feared hospitals, even refusing to visit his own mother when she was dying. ‘It was very rare that you could get him inside [one] because of his motorcycle accident,’ says his younger brother, Doug. Also, as a builder, Fred was used to cutting himself, so it must have been a major injury for him to voluntarily attend, and one wonders what he had been doing at midnight to cut himself so badly. The most likely explanation is that he had been dismembering Lucy’s body.

Before he set to work, Fred had dug a hole in the part of the cellar later described by police as the ‘nursery alcove’, because of the nursery-style pattern of the wallpaper. Then, when the rest of the household had gone to bed, he began to cut up the corpse, using a knife from the selection he kept on a kitchen shelf.

The knife he used was a cheap stainless steel kitchen model with a riveted wooden handle, manufactured by Richards of Sheffield as part of a set given away to mail order customers. The blade had been worn away by vigorous sharpening until it ended almost in a point, and had come to look like a flexible dagger. Fred used this, and possibly heavier knives, to decapitate Lucy, disarticulate her legs and remove other body parts including her toes (a total of sixty-six foot and hand bones), ribs, vertebrae, the left kneecap and left shoulder blade.

The shoulder blade would have been particularly difficult for a non-surgeon to remove, and it was probably while Fred was struggling with this that he cut himself, gashing his hand so badly that he dropped the knife into the grave. After being treated at hospital he filled in the grave, forgetting to pick up the knife again. There it remained until 1994. (Rose later admitted in court that she had probably been the one who had sharpened the knife.)

Lucy was quickly reported to police as a missing person and an extensive search was launched. It was clear to detectives that this was not the sort of girl to run away, and as the days went by without word from her, it seemed increasingly likely that she had met a violent end. Teams of police officers, divers (again, including John Bennett) and sniffer dogs were all used in the search; there was even a reconstruction of Lucy’s last trip to the bus stop. Her mother, Margaret, said at the time, ‘How anybody could disappear and just vanish completely in three minutes baffles me.’ Television appeals were made, some of which were no doubt seen by Fred, who made a point of watching the news every evening. But nothing was found, and the police had no reason to look in the direction of 25 Cromwell Street, where Lucy had died just one month after Carol Ann Cooper.

While the newspapers and television reported daily on the mystery of Lucy’s disappearance, Fred and Rose continued to live a remarkably ordered life and seemed untroubled by the fuss they had caused. Rose was nursing their first son, Stephen, who had been born the previous August, bringing the number of their genetic children to three (Fred’s illegitimate son, Steven, and Anna Marie were also still at home, making five children in all). Fred was busy negotiating a £5,000 mortgage to buy 25 Cromwell Street from Frank Zygmunt, becoming the first member of his family in several generations to own his own home. The mortgage was guaranteed by Fred’s Jamaican-born friend Ronalzo Harrison, who had no doubts about trusting the Wests.

They continued to take in lodgers to help meet the financial burden of the repayments. These were now almost exclusively young women, attracted by the low rents on offer. One tenant was a teenager named Juanita Mott, who would soon play a larger part in their lives.

There were now the remains of two bodies in the cellar of Cromwell Street, and a third in the inspection pit by the kitchen, all victims of Fred and Rose’s lust. But still they were not satisfied.

Thérèse Siegenthaler was born in Trub, Switzerland, and had been brought up in the German-speaking Bern area. In 1974, Thérèse was a 21-year-old sociology student at the Woolwich College of Further Education in South-East London, living in a flat five miles away in Caterham Road, Lewisham. She had a weekend job in the Bally shoe shop at the Swiss Centre in London’s West End. Thérèse was a strongly-built brunette of medium height, who wore glasses and little make-up. She was a highly principled and intelligent woman, with firm political beliefs and considerable self-confidence. She was fluent in English, but spoke with a distinct Germanic accent.

In April 1974 Thérèse attended a party in Deptford, South London, and the next day left to hitch-hike to Holyhead in North Wales. She intended to catch the ferry to Ireland and there meet a Catholic priest with whom she shared an interest in South African politics. As she prepared for her journey, a friend warned Thérèse about the perils of hitch-hiking. She laughingly replied, ‘I can look after myself. I’m a judo expert.’

But Thérèse met her match on that journey between London and Holyhead. She was picked up, probably by Fred and Rose together, and taken to Cromwell Street. Fred misunderstood her accent and decided she was Dutch, so he nicknamed her ‘Tulip’.

They gagged her with a brown scarf tied behind her head and fastened with a bow, bound her arms and legs with rope and raped her. When they had killed her, Fred set to work slicing at the hip joints, leaving distinct cuts on her left upper femur. He also cut off her head, again ‘to make sure she was dead’. Other parts of her body, including a collarbone, fourteen wrist and ankle bones, and twenty-four finger and toe bones, were also removed. Thérèse’s remains were jumbled into a sump-like hole in the cellar; Fred later disguised the grave by building a false chimney breast over it.

Her disappearance was reported to London’s Metropolitan Police, and it was obvious to Scotland Yard that she had not intended to run away. Thérèse’s bank account, containing 3,600 Swiss francs, was untouched. She had also written to her father, Fritz, in Switzerland, saying she would spend Easter in Ireland but would return to London after a week. Thérèse had even booked West End theatre tickets and an airline ticket to Zurich to see her family later in the year. Her family and the police made vigorous efforts to trace her, but they were not to know that she had gone missing, not in London or Ireland, but in an obscure back street of Gloucester, a city she did not even have to pass through on her projected journey.

Four months later Rose was admitted to the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital with an unusual wound – reminiscent of the injury Fred had suffered while dismembering Lucy Partington. Rose arrived at the hospital at 10:55 P.M. on 13 August with a deep laceration across the ring and middle fingers of her right hand. On admission, the cause of the cut was given as ‘playing about with knives’, but by the time Rose had been transferred to a ward, this had changed to ‘cutting wood’. Her wound was treated and she was kept in hospital for two nights.

If Rose had been helping Fred to dismember a body, or had been involved in torture, it is hard to see who the victim might be, as months had elapsed since their last known murder. It is possible that the injury was caused during a game, or a row, with Fred; Rose intimated to her mother, Daisy, that she had been cut in this way on at least one occasion. But maybe there was another victim at this time, the details of whom have never been discovered.

Incredibly, Fred and Rose still did not stop killing. Three months after Rose’s hospitalisation yet another young girl found her way into their cellar.

Born Shirley Lloyd in Birmingham in 1959, Shirley Hubbard was a strikingly attractive teenager who had been taken into care at the age of two, following her parents’ separation. When she was six she was fostered by council workman Jim Hubbard and his wife, and went to live with them in their large, double-fronted villa in Ombersley Road, Droitwich. It was from this family that Shirley adopted the surname Hubbard, although her name was never legally changed.

Shirley was a rebellious girl, who knew she was attractive to men and often flirted with them. She attended Droitwich High School, and first ran away from home in October 1974 – on that occasion she was found camping in a field with a soldier. A short time after this Shirley met a boy named Daniel Davis at a funfair. Daniel was a salesman at John Collier, the tailors. He made a date to take Shirley to the cinema. (Coincidentally, his older brother Alan, who worked on the fair, had formerly dated Carol Ann Cooper, but the two girls did not know each other.) They ate ice cream while the film played, and kissed and cuddled. Afterwards they had hot dogs. Other dates followed: Daniel went shopping with Shirley and she had tea with his parents. On 14 November 1974, when Shirley was aged fifteen and a half years old, she spent the day working at the make-up counter at Debenhams in Worcester, where she had been employed for a month on work experience. Shirley left the store in high spirits because she had a date. She met up with Daniel, they bought a bag of chips and went and sat by the River Severn in Worcester, watching the boats go by. At 9:30 P.M. Daniel saw his girlfriend on to the Droitwich bus, arranging to meet her the next day at the bus stop.

But when the next day came, Shirley was not on the bus she said she would catch, or the next one, or even the one after that. Daniel decided she had probably made other arrangements and walked away, slightly upset. He never saw her again.

It is not known how Shirley came into the clutches of Fred and Rose. She was not acquainted with the Wests, and had no connection with Cromwell Street. She was probably picked up at a bus stop, offered a lift in the same way as Lucy Partington, and must then have been taken to Cromwell Street where she became a toy for Fred and Rose’s sexual games. In their search for excitement, Fred and Rose subjected this slight fifteen-year-old to an even more extreme form of bondage.

They wrapped tape around her head eleven or twelve times to create a shiny brown mask which stopped just beneath her eyes, with a strap of tape under her chin. A transparent plastic tube with an internal diameter of one eighth of an inch was inserted through the mask. It extended for three inches up through one of her nostrils into the nasal cavity, while twelve inches extended outside the mask. This device was an extreme variation on the bondage pornography that Fred and Rose collected. In this unusual fetish, women are strapped into rubber or plastic suits with tiny holes, or constricted, often zipped, openings. Invariably they are also tied up. Sometimes the mouth and nostrils are covered over and tubes inserted through the masks to allow breathing. The idea is to confine the victim and sexually excite the participants by making the victim helpless to resist the sex act that follows. In Shirley’s case, the device had a secondary purpose of keeping her absolutely silent, and yet still alive. Without the tube, Shirley would simply have been suffocated by the mask.

After her inevitable death, Shirley’s naked body was dismembered and her remains concealed in the cellar, her decapitated head, which had been cut off from front to back, still encased in its mask with the tube lolling out. She was buried – minus a section of her trunk, including the third thoracic vertebrae, seven wrist bones and thirteen finger and toe bones – in what became known to police as the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ area of the cellar, so named because of the wallpaper which featured pictures of the film star. The cellar had now become a charnel-house, with four dismembered corpses buried within feet of each other.

Shirley’s disappearance was reported, and enquiries were made, but the police could not pick up the trail. There were several ‘sightings’ of Shirley in later years, but it is now apparent they were tragically inaccurate.

To kill and cut up a human being is, as has been stated, no easy task, and one wonders why nobody noticed four young women being murdered in the house within a space of twelve months. Professor Bernard Knight estimates that a non-medical man like Fred might be able to remove a head and legs fairly easily within half an hour, and would become more adept at the work with practice. But the problems of disposing of the bodies would be formidable. Even if the victims had been left for several hours, or days, after death (which is very unlikely), the amount of blood caused by dismemberment would have been considerable, and not all of it can have soaked into the ground. The professor confirms that, when cut up, corpses ooze blood even after the heart has stopped pumping. This blood would have been on Fred’s hands and all over his clothes, and there would have been stains in the cellar. The smell of rotting human flesh is also distinctive.

At the same time there were also the victims’ clothes and personal effects to dispose of. The remains of Lynda Gough, Carol Ann Cooper, Lucy Partington, Thérèse Siegenthaler and Shirley Hubbard were all found virtually naked, and there were neither purses nor handbags in their graves – in fact hardly any personal possessions at all.

Several people, including children and lodgers, continued to live at 25 Cromwell Street while this mayhem was going on. It is true that Cromwell Street was badly lit at night, and that Number 25 was in a particularly dark part of the street, but it seems odd that nobody noticed young girls being forcibly bundled into the house, no doubt kicking and struggling to get away. Nobody saw women’s clothes being burned on the bonfire, as they probably were, or strange items of jewellery appearing in the house. The only complaint by lodgers was of a slight fusty smell, and of bangings and crashings in the cellar late at night. In retrospect, it is all too clear what those noises were.