17

UNDER THE PATIO

In August 1993, Gloucester social services contacted the police to emphasise their concern over the whereabouts of Heather West. They could find no trace of the girl, and were concerned for her safety because of the repeated family ‘joke’ about her body being under the patio. As a result of this, Detective Constable Hazel Savage was officially appointed to investigate Heather’s disappearance further.

Hazel could still find no record of Heather, despite renewed checking with the Inland Revenue, the Department of Social Security and other official sources. She began to fear that Fred and Rose’s eldest daughter was dead, and that she was most probably buried under the patio of 25 Cromwell Street – as one of their younger children had said. Everything Hazel had learned about the couple during the recent child abuse investigation told her that the Wests were quite capable of this, the most heinous of crimes. Although only months remained until Hazel was due to retire, she tried to convince her senior officers at Gloucester police headquarters to apply for a warrant to look under the patio.

Her enthusiasm was not immediately encouraged. The word of a child did not necessarily constitute enough evidence upon which to launch an inquiry. The Wests had already beaten one set of charges, and were adept at claiming to be victims of harassment. There were also financial considerations: the cost of excavating the back garden would be enormous, and if Hazel was wrong, and there was no body, the Wests might be able to claim considerable compensation.

As months passed without any further action being taken against them, Fred and Rose had reason to hope they were in the clear. Both heartily disliked Hazel, but did not appear afraid of her now that they thought she was making no progress. The Wests told everybody that the charges against them had been a pack of lies, and that Hazel Savage was pursuing a vendetta. ‘Fred was never frightened of Hazel. He used to laugh and shrug her off,’ says Rob Williams. ‘Rose would call her a bitch and an arsehole and say she was going out of her way to make trouble.’

But this was bravado. In reality Fred and Rose were worried and chastened people.

Fear had the effect of bringing man and wife closer. They behaved like young lovers, holding hands and sitting together in the evening, watching television or playing cards. As they were curled up on the sofa, Fred sometimes tickled Rose’s feet. On summer evenings they walked the dogs in The Park. Fred bought a heart-shaped glass ornament decorated with doves for Rose’s birthday, which she treasured; when it was accidentally broken, Rose was anxious that Fred did not find out, ‘because it would hurt his affections’.

Rose’s five younger children did not return to Cromwell Street, although the social services had no power to keep them after the child abuse case collapsed. It seemed to Rose that Tara, Louise, Barry, Rosemary Junior and Lucyanna were happier in an institutional home than with their own mother, and this had a devastating effect on her morale. Rose broke down and wept when she was told they were not coming home – it was yet another rejection that convinced her she could rely only on Fred. When the younger children did eventually try and make contact with Rose, she turned them away.

Most of the Wests’ relations had long since stopped talking to them. Rose had not seen her mother since 1988, when she and Fred had visited Daisy’s flat in Berkshire. She had told her mother at the time that she was happy with Fred and that they were hoping to have more children, but Rose’s prostitution, together with the fact that she had several children by other men, had put an intolerable strain on her relationship with Daisy and they did not see each other again. Neither was Rose in contact with her sisters, one of whom had become a devout Christian and was scandalised by Rose’s lifestyle. Rose did not even know that her eldest sister, Patricia, had Alzheimer’s disease and was dying.

Fred too was now estranged from virtually all his brothers and sisters. Since Walter’s funeral he had not even spoken to John West, whom he had always been closest to.

Rejected by their own families, Fred and Rose decided to start a new life and have more children. This was a problem, because Rose had been sterilised after the birth of her daughter Lucyanna in 1983. She would not be dissuaded, however, and attended the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital in the summer of 1993 to undergo an operation to reverse the sterilisation. Rose succeeded in becoming pregnant just a few months before her fortieth birthday, but her happiness was not to last. She miscarried during the winter of 1993, and later visited her doctor complaining of depression.

The Wests became increasingly paranoid about who they could trust, and who was talking about them to the police. They knew that Anna Marie, for one, was helping Hazel, so Fred and Rose decided it would be wise to sever all remaining links with their families. Even Graham Letts found himself turned away at the door. The last to be rejected was Graham’s wife, Barbara, who had been Rose’s closest friend in recent years and had stood by her throughout the child abuse case. Shortly after Christmas 1993, Barbara and her two children were visiting 25 Cromwell Street when Rose suddenly ordered them to get their coats and leave. Barbara believes it was Fred’s idea. ‘He didn’t like her having any friends. She had told Fred that she wanted to keep me as a friend. She had no others that I know of. Then she told me that Fred didn’t like me and didn’t want me around. She started being funny, telling us to go.’

At the beginning of 1994, one of the five West children who were living in care again said that they were scared to talk about what went on at Cromwell Street. Their father had threatened that, if they betrayed his secrets, they would be murdered and buried under the patio like Heather. When Hazel was told about this, she knew there could be no further delay.

She went back to her senior officers and argued strongly for a warrant to dig up the garden. Hazel detailed the checks she had made that showed no trace of Heather, explaining precisely what the children had said, and this time she succeeded in persuading her bosses to apply for a warrant. Colleagues later said that if Hazel had not been held in such high esteem within the force, and had not been so persistent, nothing would ever have been done.

The police appeared before Gloucester magistrates on Wednesday 23 February 1994 to apply for a Section Eight search warrant. The warrant was granted, allowing them to search the house and garden of 25 Cromwell Street for the remains of Heather West. This was officially recorded as Day One of the investigation. It came over a year after social workers had first heard that Heather might be buried there, and six months after the police had officially been asked to investigate the case.

The practical problems of searching Cromwell Street were considerable. The garden was approximately sixty feet long by fifteen feet wide. Most of the area was covered by concrete slabs, and the police did not know where under the patio Heather was supposed to be buried. There were more complications: an extension to the main house had been built (without planning permission) covering another portion of the garden. This might have to be demolished. There was a large Wendy house-cum-toolshed obscuring another section, and the boundaries of the property had also changed over the years. The only course of action would be to start digging at the bottom and work up to the house: a task which would involve a large team of police officers and the hire of mechanical equipment. The whole enterprise would be extremely expensive, and could not fail to attract the attention of the local press.

The investigation would be based at Gloucester’s police headquarters, a large modern office block known as Bearland situated next to the law courts near the River Severn, a short walk from Cromwell Street. A thoroughly reliable man was sought to lead this problematic inquiry, an officer who would conduct the investigation strictly according to the rules. The man chosen was Detective Superintendent John Bennett.

Tall, slim, with fine, sandy-coloured hair that lies flat across his head, John Bennett has blue eyes with brows so pale they are almost invisible. He has rather prominent teeth, fleshy lips and an open expression. As a detective, he does not wear a uniform to work, but a blue business suit, discreetly patterned shirt and tie and shiny black shoes.

Born and brought up in the nearby Cotswold town of Stroud, John Bennett speaks with an unaffected Gloucestershire accent, not dissimilar to Fred’s, and is a little sensitive to being thought unsophisticated. After leaving grammar school he joined the police cadets and went on to serve as a beat Constable and then Detective Constable in Cheltenham and Stroud. For fourteen years he was a police scuba diver. He was promoted through the ranks, becoming a Detective Sergeant and eventually, in 1991, a Detective Superintendent. He was approaching his forty-ninth birthday when the inquiry began.

Day Two of the investigation, Thursday 24 February, was damp and bitterly cold. The sky above Gloucester was malevolently grey, threatening rain. Fred had left the house early, to treat wood timbers in the loft of a building near Stroud. Rose and their eldest son, Steve, were at home when a police van with four officers pulled up outside. It was not unusual to see police in Cromwell Street; a patrol car had been at Number 25 only a few days before, and hardly a week went by without the police being called to a disturbance at one of the houses in the street.

‘Get Fred!’ yelled Rose to her son when, at 1:25 P.M., the police told her they had a warrant to dig up the garden. She was hysterical. Steve attempted to reach his father on his mobile phone, but could not get through. With Rose still screaming for her husband, Steve telephoned Fred’s employer, Derek Thompson of Carson Contractors. It was he who reached Fred, on a land line. ‘I told him to ring Rose straight away. I didn’t tell him what it was about,’ says Thompson. It was the last time he would ever speak to his employee.

Fred telephoned Cromwell Street and was told by Steve that the police were about to dig up the garden. Steve said he would try to delay them until Fred returned.

Fred could have driven back to Cromwell Street within thirty minutes, but there was still no sign of him a full hour later, by which time a small team of police officers, wearing blue protective overalls, had already started lifting the patio slabs at the bottom of the garden. Steve again dialled his father’s mobile phone. When Fred answered, he sweetly asked ‘Who’s that?’ as if nothing were wrong, and then reassured his excited son that he was on his way. Fred said he was in the nearby council estate of White City, where Anna Marie lived, and would be home soon.

The wooden fence at the bottom of the Wests’ garden was pulled down and thrown on to a patch of wasteland behind the house. Police were trying to manoeuvre in a small mechanical digger, via a strip of land behind Cromwell Street where the Wests’ neighbours parked their cars. Several vehicles had been double-parked by college students who rented flats near to the house, and the police went to the GLOSCAT campus to find the owners. Neighbours assumed that the men in blue overalls were preparing to work on the street’s drains, which were notoriously troublesome.

Lamps were set up to illuminate the garden. At about 4 P.M., as the daylight was fading to gloom, the search team started to dig a hole at the farthest point from the house, while Rose and the older children watched from an upstairs window. When the police found a bone that turned out to be from a chicken, Steve clowned about making clucking noises. Work was stopped for the day after about an hour.

Fred finally arrived home just before six, by which time the detectives had left the house. Almost four hours had passed since he had been alerted to what the police were doing, yet he gave no explanation of where he had been or what he had been up to. ‘Thinking time, perhaps,’ suggests Superintendent Bennett.

Fred made his own way to the police station, where he spoke to Hazel Savage. Fred was angry and excited. The police were harassing him, he said. He complained that they wanted to put him back in prison on another false charge. The detectives explained, in the dry language of police work, that they were executing a search warrant for evidence concerning the disappearance of Heather West. At no point did they accuse Fred of killing his daughter, or even suggest that she had been murdered. Yet Fred decided to announce, unprompted, that he had not murdered his daughter, repeating this to a local newspaper reporter who later called at the house to ask what was going on. ‘Basically they are accusing me of killing my daughter, but I wouldn’t do that,’ he said.

Steve and Mae went to the station to offer statements, and detectives returned to the house to speak to Rose. At 7:55 that evening she grudgingly invited two officers, Detective Sergeant Terry Onions and WPC Debbie Willetts, upstairs to the Black Magic bar. Rose was nervous, and spoke to the detectives in a jittery, excited way. During the interview that followed she was aggressive, often shouting and swearing, and even storming out of the room at one stage.

The questions all concerned Heather: how the child had left home and where she was now. The police asked what Rose thought of her:

POLICE: What’s your feelings towards your first-born?

ROSE WEST: Well, I’m her mother. What do you think?… But I’m afraid we didn’t hit it off that well … she didn’t seem to want to know me that much, she was all her father, not me.

This was the exact opposite of what Rose had said when she was interviewed in 1992 by Hazel Savage: at that time Rose claimed that Heather telephoned her because the teenager did not get on with her father. Rose said there had been a family row the night before her daughter left, and that she had given her £600 to help her start a new life. Rose again said that Heather was a lesbian. When she was asked for details of the bank account from which the money had been drawn, so her story could be corroborated, she shrieked indignantly, ‘No, I was upset at the time, I cannot fucking remember!… It’s a bloody long time ago … What do you think I am, a bloody computer?… If you had any brains, you could find her … It can’t be that bloody difficult.’

Rose gave an unflattering assessment of her daughter’s character, saying she was a stubborn, negative child. ‘You imagine the flipping work I put [in], and then they turn around and just turn their back on you and say I don’t want to talk to you any more,’ she complained in a shrill voice. ‘She has always been an obstinate child. She wanted to do the opposite to what everybody else was doing.’ Asked again why she had not troubled to at least report Heather as missing, Rose sneered: ‘So I have to snitch on my own daughter now, do I?’ DS Onions enquired what Rose had done to discipline her children if they had been unruly. ‘Just sent them to bed,’ answered Rose.

Rose went on to say that she had nothing to worry about. The interview continued:

POLICE: They are going to dig up the patio. The whole patio … and everything …

ROSE WEST: Sick!

POLICE: It might sound stupid …

ROSE WEST: There’s nothing you’ll stop at is there, hey?

WPC Willetts suggested that surely Rose wanted to see her daughter again. Rose was enraged by this, and replied angrily that it was not only Heather who did not want to see her, but her other children too. ‘They don’t want to see me!’ she said, and then stormed out of the room.

When she came back, Terry Onions asked if Rose thought that Heather was dead, and received this reply: ‘Not unless something horrible has happened to her.’

POLICE: Well, she’s disappeared for …

ROSE WEST: But come on, there’s hundreds and thousands of kids go flipping missing.

Ever mindful of the financial cost of the inquiry, the detectives said they were spending expensive resources. Rose retorted that nobody had asked them to. Terry Onions rounded up the interview by telling Rose that he simply did not believe her; he felt that Heather had been dead for a long time, and was buried either under the floorboards or in the garden. He said that Rose knew this but had shut her mind to it, and now Heather was ‘dust or bones’. Even the use of this vivid phrase failed to move Rose, who sneered sarcastically, ‘Oh, you’re lovely, aren’t you?’

The police had found no evidence to hold Fred, so he was allowed home later that evening. A uniformed officer was guarding the excavation at the bottom of the garden. Fred and Rose could see the hole from the kitchen window, and whispered together conspiratorially as Rose washed up. They then discussed the events of the day with Mae and Steve: Fred was concerned about the damage done to his patio and said that the police had better put it back the way they had found it; Rose and the children discussed the possibility that they might all be on the television news. Towards midnight Fred and Rose switched off the lights and climbed the stairs to their room. The pact they had made many years before, to keep the terrible secret of murder between them, must have exercised their minds that night as seldom before.

The team of diggers returned shortly after dawn, resuming their work with a methodical purpose that impressed Fred, who was watching from an upstairs window. This was the sort of manual labour he had done all his life, and he calculated that it would not be long before they found what they were looking for. He realised that the patio would be destroyed in the process, and that they might well stumble upon other graves – those of Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers, whose remains were also buried out there.

Fred pulled on a patterned blue sweater and quilted nylon body-warmer. When he was dressed, he hunted around the house for items last used in the hostel in Birmingham, including his ‘prison lighter’, a stripped-down wick and flint that gave a tiny, economical glow. He looked up and saw that Steve was watching him curiously from the doorway. As they regarded one another, father and son could hear shovels biting the earth outside.

‘Son, I will be going away for a while,’ said Fred. ‘Look after Mum and sell the house … I’ve done something really bad. I want you to go to the papers and make as much money as you can and start a new life.’ He went to the bathroom window to take another look at the diggers. Steve stood in the hall and watched him, confused by what his father had said. When Fred turned away from the window, his face was contorted with malevolence. ‘He looked at me so evil and so cold. That look went right through me,’ remembers Steve.

At around eleven o’clock that morning Hazel Savage arrived back at the house. Rose became angry when Hazel asked for details of Rose’s mother, so she could interview her as well. Fred mediated between the women, telling the police he would ‘go and have a word with Rose quietly’; he took her aside and told her to go upstairs and keep out of the way. Then he came back into the corridor, where Hazel was waiting, and told the police to take him with them. Shouting and bawling his innocence, Fred was led out of the house to the police car waiting outside. He caused a commotion in the street, bringing many of the neighbours out to watch, yelling ‘I didn’t kill her!’ But when he got in the CID car, Fred said for the first time that he had killed Heather, but the police were looking for her in the wrong place.

Fred was arrested and taken to the Bearland police headquarters, where Hazel urged him to tell the truth. It was explained to him that the police were prepared to dig up the whole garden.

Fred was in an impossible situation. All he could do now was try and protect Rose by taking the blame for Heather, and hope they did not find the others. At about 5 P.M. that afternoon Fred decided to offer a full confession about the killing of his daughter. He said he had buried her remains under the patio near the back door, and wearily agreed to go back to the house and show them exactly where. He made a number of lewd comments about Heather’s sexual conduct, claiming that she did not use underwear and often wore revealing tops to show off her breasts. In fact, once he had decided to talk about his crime he seemed unable to stop, and confessed not only to Hazel Savage and the other interviewing detectives, but to his solicitor and even his cell guard as well.

He said he had strangled her and then chopped her up with a special knife used for cutting ice and frozen meat. Hazel asked what he had done with Heather’s clothes and belongings; Fred replied that he had stuffed all her things into a black bin bag, and left it with other rubbish outside a vet’s surgery in St Michael’s Square because it was ‘bin day’. He added that he had not killed Heather ‘intentionally’ – it was not murder, he had just lost his temper with her.

FRED WEST: I just wanted to shake her, or wanted to take that smirk off her face.

HAZEL SAVAGE: But as a result of what you did … she died.

FRED WEST: Yeah, and that’s the bad part of it.

When he was told that his son Steve had come to the police station to see what was going on, Fred became extremely excited and told the police to keep the boy away from him. ‘Be careful with him,’ he ranted. ‘I mean, I don’t want to fight with him … I’m not going to stand there and let nobody knock me about. I mean, so what if I injure one of them badly?’ A few minutes later he was talking about giving the house to Rose, Mae and Steve, so they would have something to sell and make money.

Before the police could bring Fred back to Cromwell Street, they wanted to get Rose away. Detective Sergeant Onions and other officers arrested Rose and took her into custody. So that there could be no chance of her communicating with Fred, Rose would be interviewed in Cheltenham, within the office block that was the county headquarters of the Gloucestershire Constabulary.

Fred returned home with a group of officers. He was shocked to discover that the police were no longer just digging at the back of the garden – they had extended the search area, and he noticed to his dismay that they had almost stumbled upon the grave of Alison Chambers, the teenager from Jordan’s Brook House whose remains he had buried near the bathroom wall. Fred told the detectives that they were digging in completely the wrong place. He pointed to a general area behind the back door of the kitchen, several feet away, and said that this was where they would find his daughter. He told them to dig down about four feet, and not to waste their time looking anywhere else.

There was relief, particularly for Hazel Savage, that progress was being made, but there was not great excitement within the police team. ‘What we had was a domestic murder. We’d had two in Gloucestershire already that year,’ says John Bennett.

Fred was taken back to Bearland and asked if he wanted legal advice. He chose Howard Ogden, a well-known duty solicitor who had represented him during the 1992 child abuse investigation. Ogden is an overweight, bespectacled man who runs a small private practice in Cheltenham High Street. He makes a modest living by being on-call twenty-four hours a day to represent the burglars, car thieves and drunks who are brought into local police stations and ask for a solicitor on legal aid. It often means he is called out of bed in the middle of the night. In an attempt to drum up new business, he had recently advertised his services on local radio with the catch phrase: ‘If you’ve been nicked, call Oggie.’ He had never represented a man facing a murder charge before.

The police were concerned about Fred’s sanity. Because of this, John Bennett’s team were obliged to call in an ‘appropriate adult’ who would attend Fred’s interviews; that is, an independent observer whose presence is required under the terms of the Mental Health Act when the sanity of the prisoner is an issue. The observer would monitor Fred’s state of mind and look out for his mental well-being.

Rose was interviewed at Cheltenham police headquarters that afternoon. Although she did not know that Fred had confessed, Rose was well aware that she had been arrested in connection with a murder investigation, and the seriousness of her situation had subdued her. She answered questions almost timidly, and sobbed whenever she was put under any pressure.

She spoke in a pathetic way about how she felt rejected by her family. She said she had not seen her younger children for eighteen months, and had lost contact with Anna Marie. When she was questioned about Heather’s disappearance, Rose replied, ‘Past experience told me … that once a child does cut you off, there’s not a lot you’re going to do about getting them back.’

Asked again about when Heather had last been in contact with the family, Rose said that she believed Heather had visited Fred in the bail hostel in Birmingham within the past eighteen months, and that Fred had said she looked ‘rough’. Rose said that she hoped Heather was alive somewhere in the ‘big bad world’.

The detectives then solemnly informed Rose that there had been a major development in the case. They told her that Fred had confessed to murdering Heather. Rose, who had been speaking almost in a whisper, gasped aloud, ‘What?’

‘So you know where she is?’ she added.

‘He’s told us where she is,’ replied Terry Onions.

In a high-pitched, almost hysterical voice, Rose asked, ‘So she’s dead? Is that right?’

Rose was told she was involved.

‘Why does it automatically implicate me?’

‘Our suspicions are aroused that you are implicated in it, that you are involved in it.’

Rose screamed, ‘It’s a lie!’

Sobbing loudly, she would answer no more questions for the time being and was allowed to take a break.

The interview started again approximately three and a half hours later. It was suggested to her that, if she really did not know that Heather had been murdered, she was either blind, extremely naïve, or a liar. But Rose had another explanation. ‘Or I was sent out,’ she suggested, adding that Fred had often made her spend the night with other men. ‘I was more or less given a certain time to come back in.’ This would be Rose’s alibi: she had been completely oblivious to her husband’s murderous activities because she had not been there when they happened. The police wondered aloud what this said about their marriage. ‘Well, put it this way,’ said Rose. ‘I feel like a bit of a cunt, to be blunt with it.’

POLICE: What’s your feelings towards Fred now then, now that you know he’s slain your eldest daughter?

ROSE WEST: Put it this way, he’s a dead man if I ever get my hands on him.