Few cases in the twentieth century attracted as much media coverage as that of Fred and Rose West, the couple from Gloucester who ensnared, kidnapped, raped and killed at least ten young women and certainly many others over a period of more than twenty years. Never before or since had so many potential witnesses been approached by the press and never before had so much money been offered for their stories.
It was in March 1994 that the Daily Mirror published two brief paragraphs under the headline ‘Dad Faces Death Case’ after the bones of Heather West, the Wests’ teenage daughter, had been found in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street. A few days later, when it became apparent that at least two more women had been buried there, the headline was ‘Garden of Evil’. Howard Sounes of the Sunday Mirror, who worked on the story with the paper’s crime reporter Chris House, and later wrote the first full account of the case, Fred & Rose, recalled being tipped off by a source in Gloucestershire that there were certainly more bodies buried in the cellar, so the story then moved from the back garden and became and remained ‘The House of Horrors’. From then until the trial of Rosemary West, which ended in Winchester Crown Court in November 1995, the press was to play a major part in the case.
Fred West was a consummate liar, as was shown throughout the trial by the way in which he and Rose had managed to slip their way out of any inquiries about the missing women. He continued to lie to people who visited him in prison and whom he knew would pass on tit-bits to the press. He was envious of the amount of money – some of it highly exaggerated – that he had heard was being made by his relatives and acquaintances signing deals with reporters. A number of newspapers had placed ads in the local press asking anyone who knew the Wests to call a number if they thought they could ‘help with enquiries’. This infuriated the detectives working on the case because it was phrased to sound as though it was the police asking for potential witnesses to come forward.
Before he could stand trial, on New Year’s day in 1995, Fred West disobligingly hanged himself in his cell in Winson Green prison. He obviously knew he was going to be convicted and perhaps, in his twisted way, he thought that he might remove some of the pressure from his wife by absenting himself from the dock. His death did at least spare the relatives of the murdered women from having to hear the lies and claims he had made to the police after his arrest – that it was all their fault, that they had made advances to him and he had swatted them away and killed them by mistake.
There was fierce competition between the Sun, the Daily Star and the News of the World over the coverage of his funeral. The body was eventually removed clandestinely from Birmingham morgue and there was a tussle between photographers fighting to get pictures of the hearse.
When Rosemary West appeared for her committal hearing at Dursley magistrates’ court the following month, children were handed eggs by reporters to throw at the van in which she was transported. Some of the camera crews and photographers missed the moment of her arrival so the jeering bystanders helpfully restaged it, although she was by now inside the court. At the hearing the defence counsel Sasha Wass argued that her client had little chance of a fair hearing because of the ‘unremitting, sensational, inaccurate and misleading’ coverage in the media. She suggested that the press had already accepted as fact the story of one of the Wests’ victims, Caroline Owens, which had been published just after Fred’s suicide, and that the public must already believe that her client was guilty.
Caroline Owens, who had worked briefly for the Wests as a nanny, was one of their early victims and might be counted as lucky to have escaped with her life. At the age of sixteen, in 1972, she was hired by the Wests, both of whom tried to seduce her. When she tried to leave they attacked and stripped her. Fred told her that if she did not agree to what he wanted he could ‘keep you in the cellar and let my black friends have you and when we’ve finished we’ll kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester’. She managed to escape and her mother called the police who arrested the Wests but, amazingly, they received only a fine when they appeared in the magistrates’ court and there was only a very brief account of their case in the Gloucestershire Citizen; Rose West kept the clipping amongst her private possessions. After the Wests were arrested a second time, Caroline Owens contacted the police again.
Shortly afterwards, she was surprised to see two men in Wellington boots and Barbour jackets on her Gloucestershire doorstep. They informed her that they were from the Sun and were going to be writing her story. In The Lost Girl, her book on the case published in 2005 under her current name of Caroline Roberts, she says she told them she did not want her story to be in the papers but they said someone would do it anyway and she may as well take the Sun’s fee as compensation.
The Sun’s first offer of £500 quickly went up to £10,000 – and she agreed to it. The Sun informed her that other reporters had tracked her down and were on their way so she should come with them to the upmarket Chase Hotel near Ross-on-Wye, where they would hide her. She was not allowed to tell her family where she was in case they tipped off the pursuing pack. By the time she got back home, other reporters and photographers had arrived and camped outside her home, so she used a friend as a decoy to distract them.
The Sunday Mirror came in with an offer of £50,000 but by then she had signed a contract with the Sun. One photographer refused to depart, saying that his editor had told him he could not leave until he had a photo of her and he had children to support and needed the job. ‘He was using emotional blackmail on me,’ she wrote. ‘I told him to tell his editor to go to hell and slammed the phone down.’
Thus the day after Fred West’s suicide, the Sun ran a double-page spread under the headline, ‘I Was Fred West’s Sex Slave’, complete with photos from Owens’ modelling career. ‘I was furious with them for publishing such a story without first telling me so that I would be forewarned and forearmed.’ She charged nothing for an interview with the Guardian in which she expressed her sadness that the police had not followed up her case more vigorously at the time as the Wests went on to carry out so many rapes and murders. She talked about the effect of the publicity: ‘Blokes who’ve had a few come up and say, “You slept with Fred West, didn’t you?” Other people go “Oh, there’s Caroline, £75,000 richer,” which is a load of nonsense.’ She confronted one local newspaperman who made a big deal of the money. ‘I said, “If I offered you £1 million to let your daughter go through what I went through would you accept it?” He said, “No.”’
Apart from the publicity generated by the Caroline Owens story, Sasha Wass suggested that there was now a catalogue of factors that meant that Rose West could never receive a fair trial. For instance, the News of World had published the supposed confessions of Fred West that he had carried out abortions in the house. In addition, the suggestion in the Daily Mirror that there was a possibility that Rose West might make £10 million from selling her story – if acquitted, of course – was juxtaposed with a story that the mother of one of the murdered girls was unable to afford the costs of a proper burial for her daughter. Many of these cases were referred to the attorney general but he declined to intervene.
For the prosecution, Neil Butterfield QC argued that, in fact, the prosecution had suffered more from the pre-trial coverage in the media in that Fred West had supposedly told the News of the World, before he hanged himself in his cell, that his wife had nothing to do with the murders. The magistrate, Peter Badge, declined to delay proceedings.
The trial of Rosemary West took place in Winchester Crown Court in October that year. It lasted eight weeks and was attended by dozens of journalists from all over the world; more than 150 applied for accreditation. Such was the demand for places in court that there was an overspill room and reporters were warned that if they failed to take up their assigned place for a single day, they would lose it for the rest of the trial. I covered it for the Guardian.
As each witness appeared, I would make a note beside their names so that I could recall them afterwards. Most notes just had observations like ‘fair hair/pony-tail/leather jacket’ or ‘smart/black hair/fringe/Welsh’ but looking through seven notebooks from the trial, I noticed how often the phrase ‘dead eyes’ cropped up. These were the ‘lucky’ ones, the people who had been sexually abused, gagged with masking tape, tied up or raped by the Wests but who had escaped with their lives and were now having to relive the experience in front of the world’s media.
It is a tradition that newspapers often send a ‘colour’ writer down to the big set-piece trials. Their arrival is usually resented by the reporter covering the case on a day-to-day basis as they take over the allotted seat in the press box and then write a piece of suitably purple prose – sometimes cheerfully inaccurate – before heading off into the sunset. There was no shortage of such writers for the West case, possibly the last time that the press, still in pre-digital days, would be able to marshal such a battalion of reporters able to work on nothing else for two months. What emerges in such a long trial is the mundane detail, such as that the Wests signed letters to each other with the words ‘ever-worshipping’. They were not the traditional serial-killing ‘loners’, strange, remote characters like Dennis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady or Colin Ireland – who had read in the press that you needed to kill at least five people to rate as a serial killer and duly murdered five men whom he picked up in gay bars. The Wests lived on a busy street, had children at the local schools and, to a young woman hitch-hiking in Gloucestershire, must have seemed like the perfect lift: a married couple with a couple of nippers in the back seat.
During the trial, the jury asked to be shown round the ‘House of Horrors’ – for once the cliché seemed appropriate. The judge, Mr Justice Mantell, said that one journalist could accompany them and mine was the name picked out of the hat. The deal in these situations is that the journalist concerned has to produce a ‘pooled report’ which he or she gives to everyone who wants it for use at the end of the trial. We had to don hard hats, no talking or dallying was permitted and we were not allowed to take notes, so the visit became like Kim’s game – how much could you remember?
Was the mural in the room with the bar a Hawaiian or Caribbean scene? What struck me was how small the house was, how tiny the rooms, how close everyone must have been to the violence and how confident the Wests must have been to rape, kill and bury their victims when there were so many children and lodgers in such close proximity.
There were at least half a dozen authors covering the trial, among them the late Gordon Burn, Brian Masters, Geoffrey Wansell, Andrew O’Hagan and Howard Sounes. ‘They were both so odd, in so many ways,’ said Sounes of the Wests, looking back on the case in 2015. ‘Not just wicked and bloodthirsty, but madly weird, even comically weird in the case of Fred, who had the appearance of a music hall maniac with his Marx Brothers hair, bug out eyes and gappy teeth. It dawned on me in the first couple of weeks that I was gathering too much material for use in the newspaper, even for the backgrounder after the trial. I had always wanted to write books, and here was the makings of a book. In that sense it turned into a fascinating and rewarding project, one that changed my life in that it allowed me to get out of newspapers and write full time, which I have ever since. Now almost twenty years later, I still have the mugshot photos of Fred and Rose the police handed out. I often think of having them framed, to hang in my flat as a reminder of what I owe the couple – but I suppose that would be considered bad taste.’
Once again, as in the committal hearing, the media’s role in the case was prominent. The argument put forward by West’s defence team, the dashing and charming Ulsterman, Richard Ferguson QC, and Sasha Wass, was that the offers of money to witnesses had poisoned the well: the witnesses concerned would know that their story would be worthless if Rosemary West was acquitted and so had every incentive to gild the lily. At one stage, Ferguson unsuccessfully requested the judge to order both the editors of the Sun and the Daily Mirror to attend court and to provide documentation of what the witnesses had told them, so that there could then be a comparison between what they had told the papers and what they would tell the court. Lord Wakeham, the then chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, said it was one of the most serious issues his organisation had faced. The prosecutor, one Brian Leveson QC, was getting a very early lesson in the ways of the press.
Caroline Owens was one of the most riveting witnesses. Described by Brian Masters in his book, She Must Have Known, as ‘formidably attractive’, he said that reporters covering the case ‘felt like intruders on her intimacy just as her assailants had been’. She was asked about her dealings with the press and explained that she had contacted the police as soon as she heard of Fred West’s arrest and had then been in negotiations with the press and was due to receive a total of £20,000 – the Sun had doubled their original offer. When, in re-examination, she was asked why she had agreed to give evidence if it was not for commercial gain through a newspaper story, she broke down in a way that affected everyone in court and said: ‘I want to get justice for those girls who didn’t make it because I feel it was my fault.’ Masters noted that ‘at that moment those of us who had doubted her felt ashamed’.
An even more remarkable witness, in some ways, was Janet Leach. She, then aged thirty-eight, had been called in by the police to be an ‘appropriate adult’ because Fred West was deemed to have learning difficulties and would need to have someone to explain things to him. ‘Appropriate adults’ were taken from a list of volunteers, prepared to sit in on police interviews with children or vulnerable grown-ups.
It transpired that she had a verbal agreement with the Mirror for £100,000 for her story. She was certainly well placed to spill the beans as she had spent a total of 400 hours listening to Fred West’s grim confessions and boasts. Her story was turned into an ITV two-part drama in 2011, with Dominic West playing Fred and Emily Watson as Leach. Until then most film companies had shied away from touching the story.
When Anne Marie, Fred West’s daughter, gave her devastating account of how she had been raped by her father with her stepmother, Rose, watching and making sarcastic remarks, there was a chill in the court. Should such details have been passed on to rattle around in people’s heads? Was it pornography? ‘We are none of us untainted,’ Gordon Burn observed at the time. The Sky crime correspondent, Martin Brunt, described it as ‘the grimmest, saddest story I ever covered’. I have never reported a case about which so many people told me that they could not read what I had written. At the end, I asked one of the prosecution witnesses, a woman who had had an affair with Rose, for her reaction to the verdict. She was with a minder and would not speak for less than £200.
Rose West continued to protest her innocence all the way to an unsuccessful appeal. Her lawyer, Leo Goatley, claimed that ‘intrusive media activities’ had blighted the trial. He said that ‘The kind of money offered to some witnesses represents for them the source of their material well-being in the future which they could not otherwise have dreamed of.’
There were widespread political ramifications. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, announced that he had asked for a report into payments made by journalists to witnesses. The attorney general, Nicholas Lyell, said that ‘more witnesses have been offered money than in any other modern case’. Tony Butler, chief constable of Gloucestershire, said that he and his officers were constantly fearful that the press coverage could have ‘blown the case out of the water’. At one press conference, he asked, ‘Are we running the criminal justice system as an entertainment business?’ and suggested that the behaviour of some of the press had turned the case into a game of Russian roulette. There was talk of making it illegal to pay witnesses for their stories because there was no legal sanction against the press unless it could be shown that they intended to interfere with the course of justice. This would have meant that it had to be shown that the press was coaching the witnesses to exaggerate their tale.
This was not the first occasion when payments to witnesses had been an issue. In 1966, in the trial of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, for the Moors Murders, it transpired that a key prosecution witness, David Smith, was due to earn £1,000 from the News of the World, who had already paid for him and his wife to holiday in France and had ‘minded’ him for months before the trial. The paper was not penalised as Smith’s fee was not dependent on a conviction. This led to the Press Council, then under Lord Devlin, arriving at a principle that witnesses should neither be paid in advance of a trial nor interviewed until after the trial and that nobody involved in a crime should be paid, unless it was in the public interest to do so.
The subject was raised again when Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was finally arrested for murdering thirteen women and stood trial in 1981. Roger Ratcliffe, who covered the case for the Sunday Times, recorded in a Guardian article in 2006 that the race for a media deal with his wife, Sonia, was ‘the main sport in town for several months. The popular estimate of its worth at the time was £1 million.’ Sutcliffe’s father had already been bought up by the Daily Mail and the News of the World started bidding for Sonia at £80,000, with the Mail and Express offering her jointly £50,000. The Express topped that with £80,000 and the News of the World with £110,000. Sonia did not sell her story but passed on the many offers she received to the Press Council. She also sued Private Eye for suggesting she had taken money and was awarded £600,000 in damages, reduced on appeal to an agreed £160,000. She also successfully sued other publications.
At the bottom end of the scale was a camera-shy acquaintance of Sutcliffe’s who told tales to the press through his letter-box in exchange for a tenner for every useable quote. The People was censured for paying £12,500 to a woman Sutcliffe met in Glasgow. The mother of one of the murdered women described all such deals as ‘blood money’ and there were many official pledges that this sort of behaviour must end.
After the trial, the Press Council stepped in again with a 70,000-word report published in February 1983, noting many acts in breach of the 1966 principles. ‘Newspapers had fooled their readers by denying that they would ever pay the wife of a mass murderer,’ wrote Roy Greenslade in Press Gang. ‘They were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to cover up their duplicity and they did so while knowingly defying the Press Council’s strictures.’ All this was forgotten in the frenzy created by the Wests.
In October 1996, Gloucester Council decided to demolish 25 Cromwell Street because it had become a macabre tourist attraction and doubtless, in a world of selfies, would be even more so today. The destruction was organised as a public spectacle as a symbol of the end of the Wests as part of the city. The actual contents of the house, including the Wests’ fourposter bed, the bar and the 25 Cromwell Street sign, had already been removed, taken to RAF Quedgeley and destroyed in a bid to frustrate souvenir hunters. The entire house was demolished by a local firm, taken to a tip and crushed to dust. It was a farewell for the media to both the House of Horrors and the Garden of Evil.
Counselling was offered to reporters who had covered the case. One reporter, on being asked about it, lifted his pint of beer and said ‘this is my counselling’. Stephen Wright, who covered the case for the Daily Mail, said, ‘The evidence was very harrowing. I think we all self-censored. I think two or three journalists did take the counselling offered and I think there was a bit of sniggering about that because of the macho press pack. When I was in New York for 9/11 in 2001 there was a similarly macho attitude about the horrors that we, as journalists, witnessed. Personally I found the story difficult, people begging for help to find their missing loved ones, but it was years before I was open about that.’
A year after the trial, a group of reporters and writers who covered the case met in a London club for a reunion dinner. The instruction on the invitation was that there should be no mention of the Wests after ten minutes. It was not observed.