19

THE TOOTH FAIRY

‘The main part of the investigation was the identification. We had no idea who they were,’ admits John Bennett.

The remains of Fred and Rose’s victims amounted to no more than piles of broken and decaying bones. They were not even complete skeletons. The remains were numbered in order of their discovery and passed into the care of Professor Bernard Knight, who was able to say what gender they were, give an idea of their physical build and approximate age at death. But to put names to these young women was quite another matter.

Fred could help to a certain extent: he said that the remains known as Number One were those of Heather, and there was little reason to doubt him. He said that Number Three was Shirley Robinson. But as to the other seven found at Cromwell Street, Fred could give only the vaguest clues. Several were hitch-hikers or girls he had picked up at bus stops. He had called one hitchhiker ‘Tulip’ because she had a foreign accent and another girl ‘Truck’ because she wore a badge in the shape of a lorry. But, like many of the others, he had never known her real name.

The inquiry team consulted Gloucestershire’s missing persons files and came up with several names, including those of the university student Lucy Partington and the waitress Mary Bastholm. The Gloucestershire force had been involved in large-scale searches for both girls. When their names were put to Fred, he indicated that one of his victims might be Lucy Partington, but was unhelpful in the case of Mary Bastholm.

Then Fred said that at least two of the victims were from the Worcester area, but he also invented bizarre stories about them, telling police at one point: ‘What all these girls apparently was doing, as I said, [was] prostituting.’ He got their names and descriptions mixed up, confusing ‘the Dutch girl’ with a German girl, and told police that he had rarely seen their faces in daylight.

When asked if he had cut his victims up before burial, Fred became oddly coy and said he could not remember for certain. For example, this is how Fred replied to one particular question about dismemberment:

POLICE: Was she [one of the as-yet-unidentified victims] all in one piece or did you cut her up?

FRED WEST: I ain’t sure.

POLICE: Do you remember what you did?

FRED WEST: I ain’t sure, no … I don’t think any of them were cut up … I wouldn’t be one hundred per cent on that one, mind.

John Bennett contacted West Mercia Police to see what missing persons they had on their files. West Mercia came back with several names, including Carol Ann Cooper, who had been living in the Pines Children’s Home, and Shirley Hubbard, who had been on the work experience course at Debenhams in Worcester.

Now that it was clear that not all the victims were local to Gloucester, John Bennett decided to contact all the neighbouring police forces and the Missing Persons Bureau in London. He asked for details of any young girls who had gone missing since the late 1960s and who might have been to the Gloucester area. The response was almost overwhelming – hundreds of names came back.

These were fed into the HOLMES computer at the incident room in Bearland. Then the inquiry team began to work through the mass of information, trying to compile a shortlist of names which were then put to Fred. He continued to be co-operative, looked at photographs he was shown and even helped draw portraits of his victims from memory. In fact, Fred was so genial that the officers who watched his cell were told to stop chatting with him. But he simply did not know the names of most of the girls he had killed.

The murder squad was faced with the problematic fact that thousands of young people go missing every year. Many more disappear but are never officially reported, as their families either care little about them or assume they do not wish to be troubled. John Bennett’s team feared they would never succeed in identifying all the victims.

When it became known that 25 Cromwell Street was a charnel-house of missing girls, dozens of telephone calls came in from families who had lost their daughters. Many were confused by press reports of ‘bodies’ being found, and begged to come in to the station just in case they could recognise their loved ones. They did not understand that the police were dealing with piles of bones rather than corpses with faces.

It was a scientist based at the University of Wales College of Medicine who was to solve the problem. Oral biologist Dr David Whittaker was fifty-four when the investigation began, a slim man who speaks with a distinct Lancashire accent. He divides his work at the university between teaching, research and forensic science.

Dr Whittaker explains: ‘It so happens that the teeth and surrounding structures actually contain more information about the lifestyle of the individual than any other part of the body.’ This is because teeth grow sequentially over a period of years, starting before birth and ending in the twenties, and once mature do not renew themselves, as human bones do. Therefore everything that happens to the body during life is permanently encoded in the teeth.

Dr Whittaker had already received the skulls and lower mandibles of the Cromwell Street victims from Professor Knight. He began to study these in his office within the Dental School at the University of Wales.

The gender of the victim is recorded in chromosomes preserved in tooth pulp. The precise age of the victim at death can be discovered by extracting amino-acids from the teeth, and then working out the ratio of molecules (which change in a standard way as the body matures).

Dr Whittaker was even able to discover what illnesses the victims had suffered as children, as the drugs they had been prescribed leave traces in the teeth. It is possible to say exactly when the illness occurred, from the position of these traces. ‘One removes all this information scientifically, and builds up a dossier on the individual. This enables the police to narrow down on, let’s say, half a dozen putative missing people of the right age and sex,’ explains Dr Whittaker.

‘What we do then is get the police to produce as many photographic records of those individuals as possible, and as close to the time of death as possible.’ This is so the doctor can carry out the process of Facial Superimposition. It is this which brought about the positive identification of the victims of Fred and Rose West.

Dr Whittaker’s team of technical experts analysed the photographs given to them by police. In each case, they worked out the focal length of the cameras used to take the pictures. This is essential because, contrary to the aphorism, the camera does lie. All classical photography distorts the image, and cameras lie in different ways depending on the focal length of the lens used. Once the technicians had worked out which type of lens had taken the picture they had been given, an electronic camera was set up, programmed with exactly the same degree of distortion. This would be used to photograph the skull.

Each skull was fixed to a goniometer. This is a complex stand, with calibrations, that allows the skull to be positioned at any angle through 360 degrees. This is necessary because the skull had to be photographed in exactly the same position as in the picture the police had provided of the victim in life: if the girl’s head was slightly bowed forward in the snapshot, for example, then the skull must be bowed forward. When the angle was exactly right, the electronic camera took its picture.

The camera then took a second picture of the original snapshot. When this had been done, Dr Whittaker had an image of both the skull and the original photograph taken with a camera set at precisely the same focal length and at exactly the same angle. If the skull did belong to the girl in the picture, then they should match up.

The image of the skull was printed on to blue transparency film, like the type used for overhead projectors. The girl’s face in life was printed on another transparency film and coloured sepia. ‘Then we merge the two together to see if they fit. We check about fifteen or sixteen separate points around the face: eye sockets, the bridge of the nose, the sides of the jaws and so on,’ says Dr Whittaker.

To see the blue death’s-head grinning through the sepia-coloured face of a smiling girl was a shocking experience for the detectives working on the case.

By the middle of March, Dr Whittaker with his remarkable computer technology was able to identify positively the skull of victim Number Nine as that of Carol Ann Cooper. The grateful detectives awarded the biologist the affectionate nickname of ‘The Tooth Fairy’.

Carol’s stepmother, Barbara Cooper, had already been warned to expect the news, but it was still disturbing. She said, ‘I never believed she was killed. I always thought she was living somewhere else. She was a rebellious girl and used to say I wasn’t her real mum, but I did my best for her. I’m glad that it’s all over now.’

From interviews the police had conducted with witnesses and members of the West family, it was clear that Rose was both violent and sexually perverse. It was in her character, even more than Fred’s, to lose her temper, beat and strangle somebody. She had done just that many times. The statements of Caroline Owens were particularly telling: she firmly believed the attack had been Rose’s idea. But, after retracting his earlier comments, Fred steadfastly refused to implicate his wife. Whenever he spoke about his crimes, he went out of his way to say that Rose had not been there, even inventing elaborate excuses for her absence.

But Rose had betrayed Fred. She had turned against him in an attempt to save herself. She told police that she ‘didn’t know nothing’ about what had been going on at 25 Cromwell Street and said that Fred was insane. Rose assumed the role of a victim, a woman who had lost a daughter and a stepdaughter to a maniac.

She was not in custody, but living under close observation in the safe-house provided for her in Dursley. Rose was accompanied by her children, Mae and Steve, and her pet dogs, Benji and Oscar. Mother and children soon fell out. When Steve said he wanted to see his father, Rose was furious and told him to leave the house, yelling, ‘You’re as nuts as he is!’ Steve spent several days sleeping rough before he decided to grant an interview to the News of the World newspaper about his parents’ sex life. Shortly afterwards he had acquired a smart suit, mobile phone and an expensive four-wheel drive.

Rose was irritated by the damage that was being done to 25 Cromwell Street. She had been told that the floorboards had been pulled up, wallpaper was being stripped and that internal walls were being demolished. There were also plans to dismantle the extension and send divers down a well beneath the property. The house was in such a weakened state that concrete had to be poured into the basement to stop it falling down. Via her solicitor, Rose suggested that she might seek compensation for the damage.

Public feeling against Rose was running high: John Bennett was regularly stopped in the streets of Gloucester and asked why he had not ‘locked that bitch up yet’. Because of fears for her safety, Rose was moved from Dursley to another police safe-house in Cheltenham. It was sparsely furnished and not particularly comfortable, but once inside Rose was too frightened to leave. She rarely changed out of her dressing gown and wiled away the time smoking, watching cartoons on television and playing her own version of Scrabble, whereby only words to do with sex could be used. Her sister-in-law, Barbara Letts, was asked to visit, and the two women spent several hours together. ‘She didn’t want to know anything about Fred. She hates Fred now,’ said Barbara afterwards. Rose was unaware that the house she had been living in had been bugged by police, with the special authority of the Chief Constable himself, and that every word she uttered in the living room was being tape-recorded.

Juanita Mott’s name had been suggested as one of the victims. She had never been reported to the police as a missing person, but her sister Belinda Moore told the inquiry team that she had been searching for Juanita for years. In a bizarre coincidence, Belinda had actually visited Cromwell Street because one of her friends lodged there. The family gave the police good quality photographs of Juanita, and Dr Whittaker superimposed these over the skull of Number Seven. They matched.

By the end of March the inquiry team were able to announce that they believed Lucy Partington, Juanita Mott, Lynda Gough and Alison Chambers were among the dead of Cromwell Street. For the families it was the end they had long expected, but there was still pain. ‘I didn’t want to believe she could be one of the bodies, but now the police have said they are sure she is, I feel numb,’ said Juanita’s sister. Alison Chambers’ mother, Joan Owen, said, ‘It’s going to take a long time to sink in, even after all these years. Alison will always be with me.’ Lucy Partington’s father, Roger, said, ‘The grief is still there, but uncertainty is worse.’ Lynda Gough’s parents, John and June Gough, issued a joint statement, which read: ‘We have lived in the hope that she would come home. Now we know she will not.’

Fred was taken out to Much Marcle to show the police where he had buried Rena Costello and where he believed Anna McFall’s grave was (although he insisted he had not killed her). He helped detectives mark out parts of Letterbox and Finger Post fields, but had difficulty saying exactly where they should look because the topography of the area had changed since he had dug the graves.

Fred had also been taken on a tour of other places in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire where he had lived and worked. It was hoped that, if there were more graves, then he would show them where. But what little Fred did say was too vague to warrant digging.

It had been noticed that the information Fred was giving was becoming less reliable, if not bizarre. Fred broke off from interviews to talk about the weather, or wonder about his garden and the welfare of his tropical fish. At one stage he told the detectives of his ‘friendship’ with the singer Lulu – in his fantasy, Fred believed they had travelled around the world together. He had also started to contradict his earlier confessions about the murders, and talked about the deaths of Rena, Anna McFall and Charmaine as if he were a bereaved victim, rather than their killer.

Despite these problems with believing what Fred said, John Bennett decided to lead a second search team to the windswept fields between Much Marcle and neighbouring hamlet of Kempley. They set up camp in Letterbox Field on Monday 28 March. The police referred to this site as Kempley A, because it is just inside the Gloucestershire border and Kempley is the nearest Gloucestershire village. The ‘A’ is because the police also planned to excavate a second site nearby.

A large blue and white tent was erected over an area near a hedgerow where Fred had said they should find Rena’s remains. Three officers started to dig a trench three feet wide and four feet deep. The earth was shovelled on to conveyor belts, where two more officers inspected the sticky clods with their fingers. The earth would later be sieved, literally, so that tiny bones – and the all-important teeth – were not overlooked.

Fred was reunited with his son Steve after another remand court appearance on 8 April. ‘Sorry was the first thing I expected him to say, and he didn’t,’ said his son afterwards. Fred was emotional, and instructed Steve to pass on his love to Rose.

A chance telephone call had solved the mystery of the victim known as ‘Tulip’. A police detective from London called the incident room at Bearland and suggested that Tulip might be Thérèse Siegenthaler, a missing Swiss student whose case he had worked on in 1974. John Bennett contacted the Swiss bureau of Interpol and applied for a commission rogotoire, a letter of introduction, to enlist the help of the Swiss police. It was they who contacted Therese’s brother, Jürg, who had been to Britain several times over the years to search for his sister. Thérèse’s father, Fritz, had died four years earlier, apparently of a broken heart. ‘Thérèse was my husband’s liebling,’ said his widow. The inquiry team were also able to name the Worcester Debenhams girl, Shirley Hubbard, as a victim.

On Sunday 10 April, after digging a trench 135 feet long and 6 feet deep, the search team at Letterbox Field found human remains. The police were confident that they were the bones of Rena Costello. The discovery of a child’s boomerang within her bones provided police with a macabre and inexplicable mystery. The team then moved a couple of hundred yards across the fields and started digging at Yewtree Coppice in Finger Post Field. Fred had said that they would find the remains of his nanny and former lover Anna McFall here. The site was named Kempley B.

Although Rose continued to live at the Cheltenham safe-house on bail, John Bennett’s detectives had been busy collecting evidence about her part in the crimes. They had found ample testimony to Rose’s sexual sadism, and it was this that initially put her behind bars.

Rose was brought before magistrates in Gloucester on 21 April. She was jointly charged, alongside a 67-year-old coloured man, of raping an eleven-year-old girl at Cromwell Street in the 1970s. She was also charged with assaulting a small boy at the house in 1974. The charges were enough to deprive Rose of her liberty: she was refused bail and later transferred to Pucklechurch Prison near Bristol – the first time she had ever been inside a gaol. Three days later another man appeared in court charged with raping the same girl.

Rose was now questioned more closely about the murders, particularly those of Heather West and Lynda Gough. She was asked about the day when Lynda’s mother had come to Cromwell Street and found Rose wearing the girl’s slippers. Rose could not explain this; nor could she explain why Lynda’s clothes had been hanging on her washing line. Her only reply was to say, ‘I’m innocent’ – and apart from this she said nothing at all. The next day she was charged with Lynda’s murder.

On 25 April John Bennett’s men began to search the ground-floor flat and basement of 25 Midland Road. The address was as plain and unlovely as it had been when Fred and Rose had lived there, more than twenty years before. If anything, it had become even less salubrious, due to the increased traffic on nearby Trier Way. Fred had been back to 25 Midland Road with detectives to look at an extension at the rear of the property. He said that he had originally buried Charmaine behind the back door, but that the extension, which he had helped to build in 1976, now covered the area.

While these operations continued, the case against Rose was growing in strength. A number of women who had been sexually abused at Cromwell Street had come forward, and their statements helped make John Bennett feel confident enough to charge her additionally with the murders of Carol Ann Cooper and Lucy Partington. Again Rose said ‘I’m innocent,’ but added not a word more.

Charmaine’s remains were found on 5 May under the extension at the back of 25 Midland Road, when the top of a child’s skull was uncovered. Despite what Fred had said about not dismembering her body, the skeleton was in pieces (although it is possible that this could have been caused accidentally when the extension was built). There were no clothes with the remains, suggesting that Charmaine was probably naked when she was killed and may have been sexually abused. Her remains were ceremoniously carried from the house in a box covered by a black cloth. Members of the search team left flowers on the doorstep.

Police had questioned several members of the extended West family, including Graham Letts, Barbara Letts and Fred’s dustman brother, John. All three of them had been close to Fred and Rose and had frequently visited Cromwell Street. Like his brother, who was one year older, John West was a powerfully built man, but his shock of hair had turned completely white. Police searched his home in the Abbeydale area of Gloucester, and towards the end of the month, charged him with raping two under-age girls in the 1970s. Rose was already charged with raping one of these children.

The dig at Finger Post Field dragged on without success. At one stage the search team were flooded out by storms; by June, they were sweating under a blazing sun. An enormous amount of earth had been moved, and the field looked like the site of an archaeological dig, partly because the farmer who owned the land had raised the level of the field in the years since Fred had buried his lover. John Bennett was criticised by the press for using police officers for manual work – it was suggested that the search had gone on too long and was costing too much money. After all, they had already found the remains of eleven bodies.

Everybody connected with the case knew that there were more, possibly very many more victims. Even the cautious John Bennett says that he believes the police never found them all. ‘I have never made a secret of the fact that I think there are more,’ he says. As Fred was being led down to the cells one day after a court appearance, he told a guard: ‘They think they know it all, but they don’t know the half of it.’ He had even tantalised the murder squad by saying that he had ‘done one’ in Birmingham when he was in the hostel there, and hinted at other bodies in Scotland, as well as more in Herefordshire. He told prison visitors that he had killed Mary Bastholm, and many others, and that he would tell the police about these only when he was good and ready.

The police noticed that several of the known victims had been murdered within a short space of time. There were suspiciously long periods between the other crimes.

Assuming that Anna McFall was the first woman Fred killed, then the murders started in 1967. Mary Bastholm disappeared in 1968. There then followed a three-year gap until 1971, when Charmaine and Rena both disappeared. Caroline Owens was attacked in late 1972. Two girls died in 1973, three died in 1974 alone, and a further one in 1975. This made a total of eight girls murdered by Fred and Rose within four years. Then came another long gap until 1978, when Shirley Robinson was killed. Alison Chambers went missing the following year, and after her murder, there was an eight-year gap until Heather West was killed in 1987.

An examination of these dates shows that Fred and Rose killed a great many people within apparently isolated, short periods of time. It seems highly unlikely that such a craving for murder could then be left unsatisfied for periods of up to eight years.

Then there is the rate of killing to be considered. Fred and Rose killed as many as three women in one year, and Fred’s first known murder was committed in 1967. If he, and later he and Rose, had killed once a year on average until 1994, they might be responsible for as many as twenty or thirty murders, and were quite capable of killing twice or three times a year. It is anybody’s guess how many of the hundreds of missing girls on file at Bearland Fred and Rose really accounted for.

Detectives from Gloucestershire looked at several sites around the country where Fred may have buried these unknown victims. They visited Glasgow, where the M8 motorway had been built over Fred’s allotment. The detectives also looked at the caravan sites where Fred had lived, the café where Mary Bastholm had worked and the Stroud Court Community Trust where Fred had worked as an odd-job man. But the truth was that unless Fred himself confessed and led them to the precise spot where he had buried these other victims, there was nothing that could realistically be done. The cynical view within the murder squad was that there had only ever been one person in charge of the investigation – and that person’s name was Fred.

Finally there was success at Finger Post Field. A member of the search team came across human remains at 6:15 in the evening on Tuesday 7 June. These would later be identified as the bones of Anna McFall. Bindings, similar to those found at Cromwell Street, were in the grave, and the skeleton of a near full-term foetus was by her side.

All digging work officially ceased on 17 June – one hundred and fifteen days after John Bennett had been granted a search warrant for 25 Cromwell Street. The past months had been a unique police investigation. Never before had so many officers dug up so much of the countryside looking for bodies. Police forces from all over Britain and abroad had helped identify the remains. The inquiry team at Gloucester had comprised a core of between thirty and forty officers, rising to approximately eighty when the investigation was at its height – even more had been employed carrying out clerical work. The scars of the investigation were plain to see: 25 Cromwell Street was a shell of a building; the extension had been demolished and taken away; the garden was a rutted building site strewn with rubble; the windows had been blocked in and the front gate chained. The distinctive wrought-iron address sign had been taken down from the front of the building, to foil souvenir hunters who had already stolen street signs. In the fields outside Much Marcle, mounds of red earth were piled up like the work of giant moles.

There were disappointments, not least for Peter Bastholm, whose sister, Mary, had not been found despite high hopes. The reasons were explained to him in patient telephone calls by John Bennett, and he accepted that – although the police strongly suspected that Fred had murdered Mary – Fred had chosen not to co-operate, and they simply did not know where to look.

Fred and Rose were reunited when they made a joint appearance at Gloucester Magistrates Court on 30 June; the first time they had seen each other since February.

There was a fascinated silence as Fred was led up from the cells into court Number Two. His mouth hung slightly open as he glanced around at the journalists, police officers, officials and curious onlookers – a crowd of at least eighty people. It was as though he were an animal in a zoo looking out at the visitors. Rose was led up next: a plump, dowdy woman wearing large spectacles with purple frames. Husband and wife had to stand together in the same tiny dock. As Rose squeezed past, Fred laid his right hand gently on her shoulder. Rose shrank from his touch.

The Wests were told that they stood jointly charged with nine murders, and that Fred was charged with the additional murders of his first wife, Rena Costello, and Rena’s daughter, Charmaine.^* Rose sat down for the few minutes it took to discuss the remand arrangements. Fred stood behind her, swaying slightly. His son, Steve, was in the crowd and tried to catch his eye, but Fred was only concerned with Rose. They were told to stand again for the magistrate to formally remand them into custody. The hearing was finished.

As a police officer tried to lead Fred away, he resisted, and moved towards Rose. Again she shrank from him, and when he raised a hand to touch her, it was pushed away by an officer. Rose later said that being next to Fred had made her feel sick.

^*Fred had not yet been charged with Anna McFall’s murder because Dr Whittaker had not finished identifying her remains.