When I started to write the life of Frederick West, almost three decades ago, I never imagined that it would change my life forever – but it did, completely.
Until that moment I had never written about a serial killer. But now I had the chance to look into the face of evil, the life of a man who I believe was the most relentless killer this country has ever produced, who may well have killed sixty young women.
The experience changed me forever – though it took me a little time to realise it. By the time I started to write about him the gregarious, talkative little jobbing Gloucester-based builder had been dead for ten months, after hanging himself in his cell at HMP Winson Green in Birmingham on 1 January 1995. But his influence on my life was dramatic.
Quite suddenly I found myself plunged into the darkest side of man’s inhumanity to man in the most vivid way imaginable. I was given extraordinary access to the full details of West’s crimes, life and writings – an opportunity very few writers have ever been granted and one which I did not feel I could refuse. I listened to his lilting voice for hour after hour in his police interviews and conversations with his solicitor, all the time trying to comprehend what made West the monster that he most certainly was.
But that gave me the chance to write what I believe is the most detailed examination of a British serial killer that has ever been published, based largely on his own words.West’s is a story of incest and child abuse, a horrifying account of murder, lust and depravity that sullied this country forever.
The reason I was given that opportunity to write his story was the result of a decision by the then Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court, who was West’s executor. He decided to exploit West’s estate for the benefit of five of his children, who were by now in local authority care. They had been removed from West’s home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester in the wake of child abuse allegations made against him in 1993.
The decision to allow me access to West’s papers, his police interviews, his prison diaries, his interviews with his original solicitor, his private videotapes and the police interviews of his wife Rosemary was deeply controversial. It provoked angry scenes in the House of Commons, when the then prime minister, John Major, was forced to defend the decision against criticism from all sides that no killer should benefit financially from his crimes.
But the decision stood and I was granted access to every part of the material, as well as given the right to attend the trial of West’s wife Rosemary at Winchester Crown Court in October and November 1995. At the end of the trial she was convicted for her part in ten murders and received a life sentence which will ensure that she will never be released.
As I began I took one further important decision. I wanted to paint his crimes in all their ugly, depraved detail to leave no doubt that he was a man with no respect for human life – the very epitome of evil, ‘a sadistic killer who had opted out of the human race’, in the words of the late Richard Ferguson QC, who defended Rosemary West. I did not want to leave any doubt about.
This book was first written during the winter and spring of 1996 and published in hardback that autumn. The Independent commented that it ‘relentlessly pursues the truth through the maze of West’s many deceptions’, while the Sunday Telegraph added: ‘It is unlikely that much will ever be added to Mr Wansell’s portrait’. One other reviewer called it ‘the definitive account of West’s life and crimes’.
In fact I added more in the paperback version after I attended the trial of West’s younger brother John on rape and indecent assault charges in November 1996. Like his brother, John West escaped justice by committing suicide – on the night before the jury were to retire to decide on his fate.
Ironically, both brothers killed themselves using an identical method of hanging and neither left a suicide note. Though Frederick West did leave a whole string of letters to his wife Rose in his prison cell before he killed himself.
This book introduced me to the world of true crime writing and television, which has played an ever increasing part in my life ever since. I have made countless television documentaries about West, but many more about all manner of other evil killers in Britain and around the world – more than 250 hours in total. I was also consultant producer on a recent Netflix documentary about Denis Nilsen.
True crime came to fascinate me and I also wrote a biography of another British serial killer, Levi Bellfield, convicted of the murder of Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and a book on murderers who have been sentenced to ‘whole life terms’ of imprisonment for their crimes, called Pure Evil.
But this book is where it all began, and the images that it left in my mind of the depravity of West’s crimes is a legacy that has never left me. If you write and read about the horrors that we as a society are capable of, the memories never leave you. The images of what wicked men, and even women, are capable of remain with you, lodged in a compartment in your mind that it is best kept securely locked.
Almost thirty years have passed since West’s heinous crimes first surfaced from the garden of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, but they have reverberated throughout the country ever since.That was clear only last year, when police excavated the cellar of a shop in Gloucester in the hope they might locate the remains of fifteen-year-old waitress Mary Bastholm, who disappeared from a bus stop nearby in January 1968 and has long been believed to be another of his victims.
There can be no question that West was a truly evil man. Reading the book again now, after all these years, just reminds me of that. It is sometimes a painful story to read, so harrowing that it still brings tears to my eyes, but it is also a restorative one, for it reminds us that to confront evil is to encourage every one of us to recall that great beauty is to be cherished as its counterpoint.
The story never dies, nor should it be allowed to. No one should ever forget that the cheerful, gregarious jobbing builder hid his evil deeds in plain sight. He was a monster who was also a cheerful, welcoming next-door neighbour, and it is all the more chilling for that.
Geoffrey Wansell
London, April 2022