DARK IMAGININGS
‘Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.’
SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET
It was twenty minutes before two o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 24 February 1994 when the unmarked police car turned into a narrow street in the centre of the English county town of Gloucester. A light drizzle was falling from the pewter sky, and the plain, flat-fronted houses seemed to huddle together for protection against the wind sweeping up the Severn Estuary from the sea.The lunchtime shoppers, picking their way home past the dustbins and detritus littering the street’s pavement, bent into the squall. Then, as the police car drew quietly to a stop outside a flat, sand-coloured semi-detached, the wind abated and the street seemed to hold its breath.
For a moment none of the police officers moved.They simply sat and stared at the square three-storey house beside them, as if they could not quite believe why they had come to this ordinary-looking abode, in this nondescript street, in this honest English town. But this was no ordinary house. Unlike every other in the street, its entrance was barred by a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates.
With their intricate pattern of whorls and curlicues, the gates looked incongruous amid the rotting sofas and derelict prams cluttering the pavements in this street of bed-sits. They were matched by the sign on the wall beside the ground-floor window, the sign giving the number of the house. It, too, was wrought-iron, every bit as sinuously proud as the gates themselves. It read simply: 25 Cromwell Street. As the five officers pushed open the gates and walked up to the house’s green front door, the sign seemed to challenge them.
The officers had come in search of the man who had fashioned those confident wrought-iron gates and flowing iron sign, a son of Gloucester who was about to join another of the city’s famous sons, Richard Crookback, Richard the Third, King of England, among the folklore of his country’s villainy.They had come to find Frederick Walter Stephen West.
It was not West, however, but his daughter Mae, who answered the ring on the doorbell that Thursday lunchtime.Without waiting for an invitation, the four male officers and a single policewoman walked straight past her, across the narrow hallway, and into the ground-floor sitting room. Frederick West’s wife Rosemary, full-figured, dark-haired, and with a pair of large pearl-rimmed glasses planted firmly on her short nose, was sitting on the sofa watching Neighbours on television. As the officers came in, she stood up, the belligerence in her face only too clear.
The senior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Terry Moore, handed Mrs West a warrant allowing them to search the garden for the body of her first-born child, Heather, who would have been twenty-three, and explained to her that a team of policemen would shortly start to dig up the paved patio behind the house to look for her body. Rosemary West looked back and snapped:‘This is stupid.’ Then she walked across to the telephone, as if the whole event were taking place in slow motion, being filmed by Quentin Tarantino.
The ringing startled Frederick West. For a moment he could not quite work out what it was. But then he opened the door of his small white van and picked up the mobile phone lying on the seat. It was 1.50 p.m., and he was drinking a mug of tea. ‘You’d better get back home,’ he heard a voice say.‘Rose says the police are there. They say they’re going to dig up the garden, looking for Heather.’ The dark, curly-haired man, with such clear blue eyes that they seemed almost out of place against the background of his gypsy’s face, merely grinned: ‘Well, they’d better bloody well put it back when they’ve finished.’
At that moment West was barely a dozen miles from his house in Cromwell Street, working alone on the loft of a house in the village of Frampton Mansell. At the most, it would have taken him twenty minutes to drive home, but he made no move whatever to go. West simply clicked off his mobile phone and went back to his tea. The fact that the police were in his house, threatening to dig up his garden, seemed to worry him not at all.There was plenty of time. He had dealt with the police for years. There was nothing to worry about.
Seventy minutes later, shortly before three o’clock on that grey February afternoon, West pulled out on to the main Cirencester to Stroud road, which winds through the valleys of the Cotswolds back towards Gloucester. Just as he did so, the mobile phone rang again: ‘Dad, it’s Steve. Are you coming home or not?’ West paused for a moment, then told his eldest son calmly:‘I’ll be home shortly – to sort it out.Tell your mam not to worry.’
He was not home shortly. In fact, he disappeared for two-and-a-half hours. Where did he go? In that space of time, while police officers sweated and strained to lift the slabs in his garden at Cromwell Street, he could have driven to Bristol Airport, twenty-five miles to the south-west, or to London’s Heathrow, a hundred miles to the east. He could have boarded a ship at Bristol docks, or driven to Scotland, as he had done almost thirty years before, to start a new life. Or he could have gone somewhere to dispose of evidence that would have linked him to the deaths of many, many more innocent young women. He never explained, and now one will never know. His son’s attempts to speak to him again on his mobile phone never succeeded. Only one thing is certain: it was dark before Frederick West’s small white van turned into Cromwell Street just before twenty minutes to six that evening. There was a distinct spring in his step as he walked towards the house that had been his home for twenty-one years, pushed open the wrought-iron gates, strolled up the path, and into his living room. As the five officers turned to look at him, Frederick West just grinned.
Within an hour, West was on his way to the city’s central police station, a little over half a mile away. ‘Just remember you’ve got to bloody well put it back as you found it,’ he told the two officers travelling beside him in the back of the car. ‘Bloody proud of that garden, I am.’
At ten minutes to eight that evening, Frederick West gave his first official interview to the police. Detective Constable Hazel Savage and Detective Constable Robert Vestey sat opposite him in a first-floor interview room at Gloucester Police Station and reminded him that he had come there ‘voluntarily’. When asked if he wanted the services of a duty solicitor, Fred West replied calmly, ‘I won’t bother at the moment’, and lit a cigarette.
For the next forty-three minutes Frederick West denied any knowledge whatever of his daughter Heather. He could not remember her date of birth or her age, he had ‘no idea’ where she was. All he did know was that she had left home years before to go away with her ‘lesbian friend’, a girl who had come to Cromwell Street to collect her. But he remembered the girl very clearly.‘She had a red miniskirt on just about to the bottom of her knickers,’ he went on. ‘You know, if she bent, it lifted like that – you could see everything.’West winked and took another drag on his cigarette.
‘Heather obviously didn’t want nothing to do with us, or she’d have been back home,’ he told the officers. ‘I mean, Stephen left home, Mae left home, but they’ve all come back.’ But he did not worry about her. He had seen her in Birmingham eighteen months before. He had heard from her on the telephone, when she told him she was ‘mixed up with drugs’, and she had been talking to a newspaper reporter. ‘Lots of girls who disappear,’ West suggested cheerfully,‘take different names and go into prostitution.’ He did not report her as a missing person because as far as he was concerned ‘she wasn’t missing’.
‘Is she under the patio at your home?’ he was asked.
‘No,’ he replied firmly.
There was a long pause until the grey-haired woman detective asked West softly why, if that was the case, there seemed to be ‘a family joke’ among his children that Heather ‘was underneath the patio’. Frederick West’s laughter echoed around the stark interview room.‘Oh, for God’s sake. I mean, you believe it.’ Then he stood up and said: ‘I think we better pack it up, Hazel. We’re talking rubbish, aren’t we? . . . I mean, you’re digging me place up. Carry on doing it.’
‘Where is she, Fred?’
‘You find her and I’ll be happy.That’s all I can say.’
Just five minutes after Frederick West sat down for his interview at Gloucester Police Station, his wife Rosemary began her first official conversation with the police – in the bar room that West had created for them on the first floor of Cromwell Street. Unlike her husband, she had refused to go to the police station, opting instead to answer their questions upstairs. Her conversation was recorded on a portable tape machine, and she sat throughout looking stonily at a huge photograph of a sandy beach on the wall opposite her. When Detective Sergeant Terry Onions and Woman Police Constable Debbie Willats reminded her that she wasn’t under arrest, she barked back: ‘If I’m not under arrest, why are you here?’
Like her husband, Rose West could not remember when Heather had left home. She could not even remember what season of the year it was, though ‘it could have been the summer’, because the girl was forever ‘running away on school trips’, and ‘having arguments with her teachers’. The belligerence of Rose’s manner was softened only by the Devon burr that had lingered in her voice since childhood. Heather had been a ‘stubborn girl’ who didn’t want to do her own washing, or ‘move up off the seat’.
‘We didn’t hit it off that well,’ Rose West told the tall, clean-cut detective interviewing her. ‘She didn’t seem to want to know me that much. She was all her father, not me.’
Then, after about twenty minutes, Rose West echoed her husband’s explanation of her daughter’s disappearance. ‘She was a lesbian as far as I know,’ she said, like a bolt out of the blue. When her daughter had been at infants’ school, her mother said she had known ‘exactly what kind of knickers the women teachers had on’. When the two detectives asked whether she was worried about the daughter she had not seen since 1987, Rose West replied bluntly: ‘She obviously doesn’t want to know me any more, does she?’The whey-faced, dumpy woman, with the manner of an overwrought parking-meter attendant, growled: ‘Ask Fred. He knows all about her . . . I know he had several phone calls off her, but she didn’t want to speak to me.’
Detective Sergeant Onions reminded her gently that she was describing her first-born child, whom she had not seen since the age of sixteen. Rose West exploded:‘Thousands of kids go missing. It’s only a mystery because you wanted it a mystery . . . If you had any brains at all you could find her. It can’t be that bloody difficult.’
‘Is there a body?’
‘There ain’t.’
Shortly before a quarter to nine on that Thursday evening, Detective Sergeant Onions drew the interview to a close: ‘You know in your own mind what’s happened to her.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Rosemary West snarled back.
The two detectives left number 25 Cromwell Street shortly after their interview with Rosemary West. One uniformed officer remained to keep watch on the garden, sitting on a chair and trying to read a book, while another was stationed outside the front door. As the two climbed into their car the rain was falling steadily. Darkness shrouded the house like a cloak.
At Gloucester Police Station, Frederick West was interviewed for a second time. Once again he refused the offer of a solicitor, and once again he launched into a rambling series of reminiscences about his last contacts with his daughter, Heather, and why he had never reported her as missing. ‘She was bringing drugs from somewhere and taking them up to schools, recruiting schoolkids,’ he told one officer confidentially, and he did not want to get her into trouble. For more than forty minutes West provided the police with elaborate descriptions of all the places that he had seen or heard from his daughter, and the reasons why she could not be under the patio in his back garden, until, shortly before nine-thirty, he walked out of the interview room and made his way back across the city to his home.
Not long before ten o’clock that evening, Frederick West walked back into the ground-floor sitting room of his house at Cromwell Street, and there was still a smile on his face. The first thing he did was to re-connect the electricity supply to the meter in the hall: he had been fiddling the electricity meters for years, routing the supply to a faulty meter, and then re-routing it again just before it was due to be read. His son could hardly believe it: ‘God knows why, it was all Dad was concerned about.’
West took a shower, then sat in his underpants watching the television news, as he usually did, drinking a cup of tea.Then, shortly afterwards, he and his wife took their two newly acquired dogs, Benji and Oscar, for a walk in the park at the bottom of Cromwell Street. Neither Stephen nor Mae West could ever remember them doing so before.
As they walked down Cromwell Street together, Frederick and Rosemary West were whispering, and they kept up their private conversation for the rest of the night. There were no phone calls, and no visitors, and the only person Frederick West spoke to was the woman who had been his wife for twenty-two years. He told her what he had told her a thousand times during those years: ‘I’ll sort it out.’ As West put it months later: ‘We sat up all night, never went to bed, never even went to sleep all night.’
By the time dawn broke over Cromwell Street, Frederick West had made a decision. He telephoned his boss and told him that he would not be at work that day, then asked his son Stephen to help him clear out his van.While they were doing it, he told him:‘Look, son, look after your mum. I’m going away for a bit.’
West then packed a few belongings, including what he called his ‘prison lighter’ (a tin of tobacco and cigarette papers), and put them beside the front door.When Detective Constable Hazel Savage returned to Cromwell Street shortly after eleven o’clock on the morning of Friday 25 February 1994, West was ready. As soon as she asked for the address of Rosemary West’s elderly mother, West took her to one side and asked to go back to the police station with her. After a thirty-second private conversation with his wife, West picked up the small bag of belongings he had prepared, walked out of the door of Cromwell Street and climbed into the waiting police car.
Without prompting, and as soon as the driver had started the engine, West turned to Detective Constable Hazel Savage and said in his gentle Herefordshire accent:‘I killed her.’
At eleven-thirty that morning, barely thirteen hours after he had left it, Frederick West walked back into Gloucester Police Station unaided and un-handcuffed. But no sooner had he been asked to empty his pockets than he became unsteady on his feet and had to be helped to sit down on a wooden chair.‘I feel sick and I’ve got a pain in my head,’ he told the officers, who remembered later that his hands ‘became very shaky’ and that he ‘had to be helped to sip from a cup of cool water’.
Shortly before twelve-thirty he was examined by a police doctor, and then allowed into the station’s exercise yard for a cigarette with a uniformed constable. For the next eighty minutes, he walked around the yard holding his head and looking into space.When the young constable asked him if he was all right,West simply told him: ‘My head hurts and I keep seeing stars.’
The other thing West told the young police officer was that he had killed his daughter Heather.
Once again it was raining, but digging continued in the garden of Cromwell Street throughout the day. And just before five o’clock that Friday afternoon, Frederick West confessed formally, during a thirty-eight-minute taped interview, how he had killed his daughter Heather. His voice a monotone, he told the police that he had cut up his daughter’s body into three sections – ‘legs, a head and a body’ – and had buried them in ‘a hole in the ground’ about ‘four, five feet’ deep with a spade. Then he had put all his daughter’s belongings out for the dustmen in St Michael’s Square behind his house.
‘The thing I’d like to stress, I mean, Rose knew nothing at all . . . She hasn’t done anything.’
Shortly after the interview, West and Hazel Savage returned to Cromwell Street. He pointed out the exact spot, halfway down the garden under a line of small fir trees, where he had buried Heather.And later that evening he explained that although he tried to ‘revive’ his daughter for two or three hours he never considered calling an ambulance or a doctor. All he could think to do was to dismember her body and hide it,‘in case Rose came back from the shops or the children came back from school’.
On the surface it looked as though the police case against Frederick Walter Stephen West was closed. He had confessed. All that was left was to find the body.
Meanwhile, seven miles away at Cheltenham Police Station, police officers were once again questioning Rosemary West. Shortly after her husband’s first confession they had arrested her on suspicion of the murder of her daughter Heather, and now they wanted to know the details of what she knew. But once again Rosemary West was a distinctly hostile witness. She was prepared to tell them only what her daughter looked like.
‘Bit shorter than me, about five-foot four,’ she told them, ‘with really dark hair.’ Heather ‘liked to be different to everybody else’ and was always ‘trying to be opposite to everybody else’. Rosemary West could not remember the precise date on which her daughter had left home, although she thought it was in June, and she also could not remember if she had left with anyone. ‘Past experience told me at the time,’ she said bluntly,‘that once a child does cut you off there’s not a lot you’re going to do about getting them back or being able to talk to them.’
Detective Sergeant Onions then told her that her husband had confessed to Heather’s murder.
‘So she’s dead. Is that right?’ Rosemary West said flatly.
‘I’m telling you . . . Fred has confessed to murdering Heather.’
‘What?’
‘That automatically implicates you.’
‘Why does it automatically implicate me?’ Rosemary West snapped back.
‘Our suspicions are that you are implicated.’
‘It’s a lie.’
By lunchtime on Saturday 26 February it looked as though Rosemary West might be right.The police had not found anything. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that the body of Heather West was buried beneath the patio of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Frederick West was interviewed for the sixth time, shortly after one-thirty that afternoon, and when Hazel Savage admitted that her colleagues digging in his garden had found nothing his demeanour changed in an instant.
The grin that had been missing since the previous morning began slowly to spread across his face, and the glint in his blue eyes suddenly seemed to return.
‘Did I ask them to go and dig my garden up?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Let them keep on digging.’ And he broke off the interview after just eight minutes.
Less than half an hour later West asked to resume the interview, and this time he repudiated totally everything he had said in the past twenty-four hours. His daughter was not dead.
‘Heather’s alive and well, right. She’s possibly at this moment in Bahrain, working for a drug cartel,’ he announced. She had a Mercedes, a chauffeur and a new birth certificate. They had even had lunch together recently in Devizes in Wiltshire.‘I have no idea what her name is ’cause I would not let her tell me. She contacts me whenever she’s in this country.’
There was a half-smile on his face as he went on:‘Now whether you believe it or not, that’s entirely up to you . . .There ain’t nothing in my garden. You can dig it for evermore. I’ve never harmed anybody in my life . . . I do not believe in it, hurting people.’
When he was asked what benefit there had been for him in the admission of his daughter’s murder, his smile widened still further. ‘The police are out there digging . . . I feel a lot better for it.’
Was Heather West buried in the garden of Cromwell Street?
‘No. They can dig there for evermore. Nobody or nothing’s under the patio.’
An hour later the police found three human bones in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street. But they did not all belong to Heather Ann West. The twists and turns that were to mark one of the most terrible murder cases in British criminal history had only just begun.
Shortly after half-past four on the Saturday afternoon of 26 February 1994 Frederick Walter Stephen West walked back into the first-floor interview room at Gloucester Police Station. The first thing he did was to apologise to Hazel Savage.
‘I got nothing personal against her at all,’ he said, looking down at the floor. He had taken two diazepam pills. ‘I don’t know what happened.’ What had happened was simpler than two pills. West’s solicitor, Howard Ogden, had informed him that the police had found human remains in the garden at Cromwell Street. Frederick West could not wriggle or talk his way out of the fact.
‘Heather’s where I told you she is,’West confessed, his voice once again flat and monotonal, ‘and I mean they should have found her anyway by now, because she’s there.’
The two officers did not comment and explained that their colleagues had been having difficulty because of the water in the holes they had been digging. The jobbing builder started immediately to tell them that Cromwell Street ‘used to be part of the moat round Gloucester’, and there was an ‘underground spring’ in the garden forcing up the water table.
Detective Constable Savage listened, and then asked whether there were any other bones in the garden. For the first time in two days of interviews, Frederick West hesitated.
‘Well, that’s a peculiar question to ask, ain’t it,’ he said after a long pause. ‘Heather is in there, and there ain’t no more.’
It was almost two hours before the police returned to question either Frederick or Rosemary West. When they did so, Rosemary West denied any knowledge of her daughter’s fate, or her husband’s murder. ‘He just said she’d left,’ she said flatly.
‘We just want to get to the bottom of it,’ Detective Sergeant Onions told her at Cheltenham Police Station.‘There’s no charades now. What do you know about it all? Or what have you known about it over the last eight years?’
Rosemary West did not pause.‘I don’t know anything about it. I was not aware of it.’
When the detective asked about her feelings she said:‘Put it this way. He’s a dead man if I ever get my hands on him.’
‘Are you protecting him?’
‘What’s the point?’ Rosemary West replied flatly.‘Protecting him from what?’
Back in the interview room at Gloucester, Frederick West had recovered his composure. Now he was intent on telling the police the details of his disposal of Heather’s body in the garden. As he had done so many times already, West started to digress, offering longer and longer explanations, building detail upon detail of the night he had buried his daughter. ‘It was raining. It had been absolutely tipping it down all day, and that bottom was like a swamp with water.’
Finally, after almost twenty minutes, Hazel Savage stopped him in his tracks, and told him that the police had found another bone.
‘This is a third femur, a leg bone, Fred. The question is, is there anybody else buried in your garden?’
West did not blink.‘Only Heather.’
DC Savage persisted. He had never told her that Heather was ‘scattered all over the garden’, and besides, ‘Heather didn’t have three legs’.
For the second time that afternoon, Frederick West could not find anything to say. The silence in the interview room wrapped itself around him like a blanket, until his solicitor’s clerk asked whether he knew where this other thigh bone might have come from.
‘Yes. Shirley,’West said softly.
‘Shirley who?’
‘Robinson, the girl who caused the problem.’
It was the first indication that Frederick West was more than simply a domestic murderer, the first indication that he was capable of killing more than one victim. The next chapter in his extraordinary story was about to unfold.
A little over an hour later on that same Saturday evening, West was to admit that there were not one but three bodies in the garden of Cromwell Street. The third victim was ‘Shirley’s mate’ who had ‘turned up at Cromwell Street’ with a photograph he and Shirley had had taken together, and asking where she was. Like so many other horrifying stories that West was to tell the police in the days and weeks to come, it was a lie.
The death of ‘Shirley’s mate’, like those of Shirley Robinson and Heather West, was infinitely more bizarre and terrifying even than Frederick West’s brutal descriptions. They were his particular method of concealing the truth. He would utter the unmentionable, confident that no ordinary man or woman, whether police officer or not, could imagine that the ugly truth he was telling could possibly be an invention.
In reality they were simply another layer of the lies that he heaped upon lies, another fabrication to conceal the true nature of the horrors that lay beyond. Indeed, Frederick West would not have made this third admission had he not visited his garden the night before and seen the full extent of the police excavation.
When the first sets of remains were discovered he calculated, in his characteristic fashion, that if he admitted to three killings they would probably give up the search, and that his house would be left intact. It was that careful measuring of possibilities, not the onset of remorse, that persuaded him to confess. For no matter what the officers sitting in the tiny interview room in Gloucester Police Station may have thought,West was still not telling the truth.
The next afternoon West firmly denied there were any other victims.And in an effort to convince the police that they had finally got to the bottom of his crimes, he embarked on a description of precisely how and why he had killed his daughter Heather.
It was a description that was to sicken the hearts of the officers who listened to it, and enough to make Janet Leach, the thirty-eight-year-old woman who had agreed to act as West’s impartial ‘appropriate adult’ during his police interviews ‘turn green’. It was also the first clear indication of the depth of his evil love.
On that Friday morning in mid-June 1987, West explained, his wife had gone shopping and Heather West was upstairs when he shouted up to her. She had expected to be leaving home that morning, to take a job at a holiday camp near Weston-super-Mare, but the night before had received a telephone call saying the job had fallen through. Nevertheless, she had assembled all her clothes and personal belongings in a suitcase and a set of plastic carrier-bags, and put them by the front door of 25 Cromwell Street.
‘I called her into the hallway,’ West told the police on that Sunday afternoon in February 1994, ‘and I said to her . . . now what’s this about your leaving home . . .You know you’re too young. You’re a lesbian and there’s AIDS and all that. I mean, you’re vulnerable for anything.’
But Heather ‘just stood there and looked at me’.
‘I said,“Well, Heather, I’m not going to let you go” and she said, “If you don’t fucking let me go I’ll give all the kids acid and they’ll all jump off the church roof and be dead on the floor”.’
The sixteen-year-old girl then tried to get past West, but he grabbed her. ‘First of all I went to slap her across the face. Then I suddenly stopped and thought on a previous occasion me and Rose had had an argument and I slapped her across the face and I dislocated her jaw . . . so I mean the last thing on my mind was to hurt Heather in any way.
‘But Heather’s standing there grinning all over her face, with her hands in her pockets shaking her trousers. So then I grabbed her by the throat and I’m shouting at her in anger really, you know, “How dare you say that about your brothers and sisters?”’
West told the police that he kept his hands on his daughter’s throat and she still ‘had this grin on her face’ until it got to a point where ‘I was actually still looking at her but couldn’t see her for some reason’.
‘Then all of a sudden I spotted she’d gone blue. So I let go of her quick and, of course, she just started to fall backwards on to the washing-machine and slide forward.’
West tried to give his daughter mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ‘I tried, you know, pressing her chest and that to make her breathe again.’ But, as he confessed to the police, although he had ‘seen it on the telly’ he had ‘never actually gone to classes or learned how to do this type of thing . . . and there was no way I could get anything out of Heather’.
‘She was making funny noises, whether it was coming from her throat or her chest for a little while’, and West dragged her into the living room of Cromwell Street and got some wet cloths to put on his daughter’s face. He even ‘tried to get a drink of water into her mouth’.
‘By this time I’m panicking like anything. I mean, I’m literally a nervous wreck at this stage because of what had happened. I had no intention whatsoever of hurting Heather because I think the world of her.’ But West did not call an ambulance, nor did he telephone the police. Instead he took a brass mirror off the living-room wall ‘and put it over her mouth’ to see if she was breathing, ‘and there was nothing on it’.
He then dragged her inert body into the bathroom near the kitchen on the ground floor of Cromwell Street and as he did so ‘she wet all over the floor’, he told the police.‘I put her in the bath and I ran the cold water on her and I still couldn’t get nothing, no life out of her. So I can remember standing there and thinking, how do you know when somebody’s dead?’
Heather West was now lying naked in the bath at 25 Cromwell Street. Her father told the police that he had removed the culottes his daughter had been wearing because they were ‘soaking wet’, and he had previously taken off her blouse in the living room. Heather had not been wearing a bra or pants. He took his daughter’s naked body out of the bath and dried it.
Frederick West then told the police that he ‘put something round her neck . . . to make sure she was dead’. He thought he had used a pair of tights which had been lying around in the bathroom. ‘I didn’t want to touch her while she was alive. I mean . . . if I’d have started cutting her leg or her throat or something and she’d have suddenly come alive . . . that’s what I was thinking.
‘I can still see her. I can see her sat there in the bath,’ he told the police.
West went to get a dustbin from the garden. ‘I put the dustbin flat . . . tipped on its side on the floor . . . and I folded Heather and tried to slide her in . . . and lift the dustbin back up.’
But the plan did not work. When he lifted the dustbin back on to its base, Heather West’s body was sticking out.‘No way you’d get the lid on or nothing. I mean, she was a good foot, two foot above, above the thing, and I mean her legs were even farther up than that.
‘So then I . . . put her back on the floor and pulled the dustbin back off her and then rolled her back into the bath and then I . . . then I did the rest.’
What West then told the police was exactly how he had dismembered his daughter. He began by closing his daughter’s eyes before he started.‘If somebody’s sat there looking at you, you’re not going to use a knife on a person are you?’
Frederick West had intended to use an ‘ice knife’ but it was not sharp enough, so he threw the knife to one side and found another, sharper knife in the kitchen of Cromwell Street to use in its place.
West cut and twisted off his daughter’s head. He described the sound.‘I remember it made a heck of a noise when it was breaking, horrible noise . . . like scrunching . . . I suppose . . . I had my eyes closed. I just couldn’t look at her face and do it to her, you know what I mean. I just couldn’t look at her . . . how I cut round I’ve no real idea.’
He then cut off his daughter’s legs, cutting her groin with a knife and then twisting her foot until he heard ‘one almighty crack and the leg come loose, like’.Then he left his daughter’s two legs in the bath, and lifted her ‘main body and put it in the bin’. She ‘filled the bin shoulder-ways’.
When the police officers asked him how he felt,West told them: ‘I was absolutely dead. I couldn’t think of nothing. I mean, I was trembling. I mean, I was absolutely trembling.’
Nevertheless, he was able to put the lid on the dustbin, which now contained his daughter’s dismembered body, and ‘using it like a steering wheel to roll him out down into the garden . . . Then I spotted this rope hanging out of the tree, so I went down and cut two pieces off it and then tied the handles on the bin.’ West rolled the dustbin ‘down the garden round to the back of the Wendy house, covered her over with a sheet’.
‘Then I went back in the house and washed everything . . .There was no blood anywhere . . . no marks anywhere.’ As soon as he had finished, and had cleaned the urine from the living-room floor with a dishcloth from the kitchen sink,West picked up the case and plastic carrier-bags containing all his daughter’s belongings, which were sitting in the hall, stuffed everything into black plastic bags and ‘put them out for the dustman’.
‘Then Rose came back, must have been an hour or more later,’ West told the police, and shortly afterwards his other children started coming home from school.
That night, after his children had gone to bed, West told the police he sent his wife out for the evening and set about burying his daughter’s body in the back garden. He started digging a hole, after putting polythene around the sides to protect his clothes. He wore wellington boots. But before he got far, he hit water.
‘The wind was blowing like anything and the amount of water that was in there. I mean the water was making a noise.’ West pushed his daughter’s naked and dismembered body into this small hole, about four feet deep, with water at the bottom, with his spade. ‘I then back-filled the hole, levelled it out . . . rolled this big piece of plastic out and put it on the top.’ He did that ‘to cover up the digging’.
Heather West’s body had remained in that hole for almost seven years, until the Gloucester police discovered it late on Saturday 26 February 1994, the day before Frederick West’s third confession, a confession he was later to retract.
As West was escorted back to his cell beneath the police station on that Saturday afternoon in February 1994, he looked for all the world as though nothing whatever had happened. What the police could not have suspected was that even this horrifying story concealed an even darker, bleaker truth. The two police officers may have suspected they had spent the last forty-five minutes in the company of evil. What they could not know was how much more there was to know.
To discover that, they would have had to retrace West’s steps since childhood. They were to begin that process a few days later, after Hazel Savage suggested to Frederick West: ‘Imagine you’re writing a book about your life, Fred, and we’re the ghostwriters.’
For a moment the tiny gnome of a man looked perplexed, and then the grin returned to his face.