UNNATURAL DEEDS
‘It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.’
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, THE COPPER BEECHES
The Herefordshire village of Much Marcle, barely a mile from the Gloucestershire border, is not quite a picture postcard. Straggling and a little disjointed, it meanders across the fields seven miles north-east of the ancient town of Ross-on-Wye rather than nestles round a duck-filled pond. There is no tiny thatched post office, nor black-and-white timber framed high street; in their place lies a pub at the crossroads, a cider-making factory and a substantial church. But the poet John Masefield, who was born nearby, described the area as ‘paradise’, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived there a century before, celebrated it in her poem ‘The Deserted Garden’.
Frederick Walter Stephen West was born and raised in the village, and his father, Walter Stephen West, was born nearby in 1914, the grandson of a wagoner who tended horses for the plough. Educated at the tiny village school, Walter West worked in the Much Marcle fields throughout the seventy-eight years of his life, and raised his family of six children in a cottage there, where one of his sons remains to this day. The shallow valleys of the ‘narrow country’ between the Severn and the Wye, the Cotswolds and the Malvern Hills, were then, as they remain, lush and fertile, although the great orchards of apples, pears and plums that graced the fields throughout Walter West’s childhood have been replaced with grain and dairy cattle.
Much Marcle and Walter West shaped the life of Frederick West more decisively and completely than even he knew. It was Walter West, more than anyone, who taught his son to love the countryside and to obey its laws. Walter West taught him to poach in a land where the gamekeeper saw to it that it was almost ‘safer to kill a man than to kill a hare’, and to bow the knee in proper ‘obeisance’ to his betters. In turn, Frederick West worshipped his father and aped his attitude to life.‘My father was a fantastic man,’ he told the police in 1994. ‘He was the most understanding man you’d ever meet.’ His was an influence that was to remain with Frederick West until the last day of his life.
As a young man Walter West worked as a farm labourer at Preston, a mile-and-a-half away from Much Marcle, and it was there that he married for the first time. In 1937, at the age of twenty-three, West took the unusual step of marrying a forty-five-year-old spinster, Gertrude Maddocks, one of twin sisters. It was an unlikely match for a young farm labourer, and one that was not destined to last. Within two years Gertrude West had died in mysterious circumstances, apparently stung by a bee in the garden of their cottage. West reported her death when he found the body. Shortly after his wife’s death, Walter West decided to return to the local orphanage a year-old boy that he and his first wife were about to adopt.
Walter West kept his first wife’s Bible, with her photograph inside it, for the rest of his life, but there is no denying that it provides an extraordinary parallel with his son’s life. The death of Gertrude West in mysterious circumstances, and without any witnesses, after what may have been an argument over an adopted child, set an eerie pattern that was to repeat itself time after time in the life of Frederick West. It was not to be the only parallel.
Just two-and-a-half months after the death of his first wife, Walter West settled upon the young woman who was to become his second wife, and the mother of Frederick West. He had known Daisy Hannah Hill, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a cowherd, since childhood, and now he set about courting her with a passion that his son would come to emulate. Daisy Hill came from a famous Much Marcle family, sometimes mocked in the village for their simple-mindedness, and she had been ‘put to service’ in the nearby town of Ledbury, four miles away, as soon as she left school. Living in during the week, she returned home only on Sundays, but she now found herself being courted by the tall farm labourer. There is no doubt she must have been flattered, and seduced, by the attractions of a widower ten years older than herself.
WalterWest married Daisy Hill in the Much Marcle village church of St Bartholomew’s on 27 January 1940. The bride wore white and carried a bouquet of tulips, while her new husband sported a carnation in the lapel of his only suit, and his own father’s pocket watch on a gold chain in his waistcoat pocket. The bridegroom signed the parish register in block capitals, and together he and his new bride posed for a black-and-white photograph at the church door.The new Mrs West was already pregnant with their first child.
But once again Walter West’s family life was to take a mysterious, even macabre, turn. Early in August 1940, almost eight months into her pregnancy, Daisy West was disturbed at home one afternoon by the arrival of a uniformed police constable. He was reportedly enquiring about a road accident nearby. But according to Walter West’s version of events, his young and unsophisticated wife had been so upset by the constable’s appearance at her door that she had gone into labour that evening, and the child had been born prematurely. There is no doubt that the fragile grip on life of the baby daughter born later that same night, whom the new Mrs West named Violet, lasted only a matter of hours. The child died the following day, 7 August 1940.
The story of the terrifying of Daisy West bears a remarkable similarity to some of the stories that Frederick West later invented to explain the disappearances of his victims. Like the bee-sting that accounted for Gertrude West, it stretches credulity to the limit. For a start, Daisy Hill was brought up in Much Marcle, where the village’s uniformed police constable was part of everyday life, so much a part that Frederick West could remember his name from his own childhood. There is also no doubt that Daisy West never again demonstrated any sign whatever of such a frailty; quite the reverse, according to her son Frederick. But equally there is little doubt that Walter West was a powerfully built man with a fierce temper, much taller and stronger than his tiny seventeen-year-old wife.There seems every probability that Walter West violently attacked both his wives.
Family violence was hardly discussed in the villages of Herefordshire in 1941. A husband who beat his wife was nobody’s business but the couple’s own. Each village kept its secrets, never revealing them to outsiders. Those secrets could be a ‘half-witted’ child, a girl ‘made pregnant’ by the squire, a labourer who took his sexual satisfaction from animals, or a husband who beat and abused his wife.They were secrets that were to be kept away from the prying eyes of authority, and if, by chance, the local policeman were to hear of it he could be persuaded to turn a blind eye more often than not.
It was the natural secretiveness of the village that nurtured Walter and Daisy West.The secrets that they kept behind the door of their small cottage were not to be discussed with anyone – except the other members of the family.A wife was there to satisfy her husband in every way he might demand, and there is little doubt that Walter West demanded sexual satisfaction regularly. If he did not receive it, his response was quick and violent. He took the naive young girl he had sought out, and groomed her to fulfil his every expectation in a way that his son was to emulate thirty years later.
The truth of precisely what happened to Daisy West and her first-born child Violet will never be known. But with her death the first strand in the life of Frederick West and his family emerged. It was a family in which violence, and in particular violence towards children, was a natural and accepted part of life. In his turn, Walter West may have been physically beaten by his own father, a sergeant during the First World War, but it seems certain that the cycle of abuse and violence was well established in Walter West’s own home by the time Daisy West was pregnant for the second time.
Walter West moved his wife into Bickerton Cottage in Much Marcle to wait for the birth. Already more than a century old, the tied cottage, like almost every other in the village, lacked electricity and gas, and what water it had came from a well in the garden. Cooking was done on a black range, and there were just two upstairs bedrooms.The garden boasted a few apple trees and a willow in front of the outhouse where Walter West decided to keep the family’s chickens and a pig for food. Behind that lay the cesspit into which, every morning and evening, Walter West emptied the bucket that served as their only lavatory.
It was into this world that Daisy West bore her first live child, and first-born son, at eight-thirty in the morning of 29 September 1941. She and her husband named him Frederick Walter Stephen West, and a few weeks later she carried him down to St Bartholomew’s to be christened, just as she had been.Whatever the secrets of their life together,Walter and Daisy West maintained the proper dignities the village demanded. They were members of the congregation each Sunday morning, and were determined to ensure that their son should follow their example.
The boy Daisy West always called Freddie was born with curly blond hair and piercing blue eyes. It was to be almost three years before his hair would turn black, and by that time his mother had given birth to a brother, John, just twelve months and three days after his own birth. In the years to come, the two brothers were to become allies against an inquisitive world, sharing their secrets as the years passed.
Whether from remorse at his own actions or not, Walter West took to drink after the death of his first child. ‘That was how my mother came to take over the family and everything,’ his eldest son was to explain in 1994, and in the next handful of years Daisy West was to emerge as a strong, even violent woman. After John’s birth she bore a third son, David, one year later, but the boy suffered from a weak heart and died within a month. By that time she had taken to wearing a wide leather belt around her waist, a match for the one her husband wore around his.
It was Daisy West who engineered the move that brought her new family of two sons to the slightly larger Moorcourt Cottage, tied to Moorcourt Farm, where her husband now worked as a cowman and general labourer. Walter West had to get up at four-thirty every morning and milk the dairy herd twice a day by hand before rolling the churns up to the road to await collection. The three-bedroomed cottage, which had electricity and a view out across open country to Letterbox and Fingerpost Fields, Yewtree Coppice and Stone Redding, lay on the outskirts of Much Marcle at a bend on the Dymock road, and it was here, at the age of barely twenty, that she bore her fourth child, and her first daughter, whom she called Little Daisy.
‘And that was it, the old man was back to normal,’ as Frederick West was to recall years later.‘He used to take her miles in the pram for walks. I mean, Daisy was his idol.’The daughter that Walter West had always wanted was followed by a third son, Douglas, and then two further daughters, Kathleen – always known as Kitty – and, in 1951, Gwendoline, named after the midwife who helped deliver all the children at home. In barely eleven years, Daisy West had produced eight children, and had grown into a fierce, thickly set dumpling of a woman, with a temper to match her husband’s.
Life at Moorcourt Cottage was shepherded by the seasons. From dawn to dusk Walter and Daisy West would work on the farm. In the autumn they would turn out together, to collect apples for the village cider factory, and in the summer harvest she would help wherever she could. As soon as they were old enough to walk, the children would help, whether in the fields or with the pigs, sheep and cows. Daisy West dressed her sons in simple clothes and provided them with just one pair of shoes, a stout pair of hobnail boots, which could be repaired easily. By the time Freddie West got to Much Marcle school in the autumn of 1946, he ‘stunk of pig’s muck’, but that did not seem to bother him in the least. Neither did the taunts of the cleaner, tidier children who shared the school’s one classroom with him.
In the evenings Daisy West would put her children to bed early. Freddie and John shared a double bed, while their new young brother Douglas slept in a small single in the room with them; her daughters shared a double bed and another single in Moorcourt Cottage’s third and last bedroom. She would usually keep her latest child in bed with her for a time, the baby lying between her and her husband in their own narrow double bed, and Walter West offered not the slightest objection. Once his wife had presented him with a daughter, his interest in and attitude towards his children changed.
Daisy West was a firm, strict disciplinarian. She would beat her children with her belt if she felt they deserved it, and would not hesitate to throw them out into the garden in the winter if they ‘got under her feet’. But Freddie was her favourite,‘Mammy’s blue-eyed boy’, in the words of his brother. For his part Frederick West liked to tease her and then run away. ‘We used to have a fir tree by our back door, and we had the top cut out where the electric came through and we made a house up in there.When my mother used to get at us we’d shoot straight up this tree. My mother was a big woman, and she used to say: “You’ll come down when you’re getting hungry.” She wouldn’t bother with you, but when you came down, she’d have you.’
‘Whatever Mother said went,’ Frederick West would explain. ‘You didn’t answer Mother back or she grabbed you and wopped you a bit quick. I mean, sixteen or sixty, didn’t matter. She was a pillar of steel. There was no messing. She’d sort anything out. No problem.’ West was a little afraid of her. ‘Mother was a bit of a neurotic about things. She used to shout a lot really when she was talking to you. She was very dominant, like, and you didn’t get a chance to get a word in. She would tell you and that was the story, like.’ For her part Daisy West doted on her eldest son, although she also recognised his tendency to lie.‘My mother knew exactly what was going on.You could tell her the biggest lie you ever thought up, my mother would just listen and tell you the truth.’
In contrast, Frederick West idolised his father Walter, following him into the fields whenever he got the chance, helping with the lambing, herding the cows, piling the corn in sheaves for the harvest. ‘Me and my father got on great together.There was no doubt about that. He was a massive man, mind, big man, tall, you know, massive hands on him. But he wouldn’t hurt a fly,’West was to insist after his father’s death. ‘He was the most understanding person you’d ever met. You could go to Dad and ask him anything. He was always calm, and he always understood you.’
Though Walter West enjoyed his son’s company, he may not have been quite as enamoured of his son as he was of his daughters. Freddie was his wife’s favourite, and Walter West had come to believe that she favoured him at his expense. Besides, his eldest son was a scruffy, unkempt child, his curly hair always sticking up like a bramble bush on the top of his head, while Walter West had always taken a pride in his appearance, taking care to shave carefully on a Saturday evening before walking down to the Wallwyn Arms in the village.
Walter West became one of Much Marcle’s respected sons. Each May, he helped to organise the annual day-trip to Barry Island on the South Wales coast, the only holiday most of the villagers could afford, and he wanted his son to inherit his mantle. Walter West even hoped that Frederick would take over Moorcourt Cottage in his own right in the years to come. In the village, that was what was expected of the first-born son, that was the tradition to be respected, a tradition that had to be maintained in public. In private it was another matter. There Walter and Daisy West, like every other couple in the village, worked out their own compromise, his violence and his sexual appetite kept under control by his wife.
Sex was one area of his life which Walter West shared with his son.‘My mother was very old-fashioned in her ways about sex and things like that. Dad was different altogether. If it’s on offer, take it, son, that was my father’s idea. Whatever you enjoy do, only make sure you don’t get caught doing it. That was Dad, like.’ It was a sexual lesson that his son was never to forget. And it was not the only one. Walter West may also have told him that it was a father’s duty to ‘break in’ his own daughters at an early age. Incest was another of the secrets kept by Much Marcle, and the West family.
‘Dad got on with anybody, he didn’t judge nobody,’ his eldest son remembered.‘If you went to the old man and said,“So-and-so is doing something”, he would say,“That’s their business, son.What you worrying about? You’re not doing it.” That was his attitude to life. Just did his own thing . . . He was so placid it was unreal.’ It was an attitude that stood Walter West in good stead in Much Marcle in the years just after the Second World War.You kept yourself to yourself, and you kept your own secrets, as well as those of the people around you.
Although he joined Much Marcle school at the age of five, what learning Frederick West did was at his father’s knee. ‘I was thick as two short planks, and I wasn’t interested in school at all. All I was interested in was farming.’The boy went lambing with his father – ‘learning to blow into a lamb’s mouth to give it life’ – went hunting with him – ‘although I didn’t like ripping the fox apart after’ – and watched while some of the other village children were ‘blooded’ with the fox’s paw.
Dirty, dishevelled, and always getting into trouble, Frederick West was an outsider at the village school, but it did not concern him. He took his pleasures in the fields with his father, a boy anxious to become a man, impatient with childhood. If ever he was caned for misbehaviour, he would simply complain to his mother, and the now formidable Daisy West would march down to remonstrate at the top of her voice with his teacher. The grin that would come to mark his adult life began gradually to appear as he realised that, no matter what his classmates thought, he could get his own way. If they called him a ‘mummy’s boy’ behind his back, it could not matter less.They would not dare say it to his face.
In return Daisy West expected every one of her children to work in the house, making up the fire in the kitchen, feeding the chickens, chasing the rats away from the sewage pit. They would be given a raw turnip or parsnip for their lunch at school, and on Sundays they would be expected to troop down to church behind their parents, wearing their Sunday best, a dress for the girls, grey flannel shorts and a Fair Isle sweater for the boys. Looking back, Frederick West would insist: ‘We were a close-knit family, a very happy family.’
Moorcourt Cottage was full of animals. Walter West had five dogs,‘Lassie, Ben, Brandy,Whisky and Lad, each one had a different job’. There were also the hens for fresh eggs, and, more often than not, a pet pig, which Walter West would slaughter in the autumn, to help feed his family throughout the winter.‘Mother used to get very attached to it, like, ’cause she would give it a pet name like Sally or something.’ His son would never forget how his father ‘would cut the animal’s throat and hang it up for twelve hours to allow the blood to drain out.’
Inside the cottage Frederick West felt safe, cocooned against the world. There was no need for anyone else. ‘As the seasons changed you just did the same things, like.’ In the spring they would pick wild daffodils from the fields outside their window, to sell at the side of the road. In the summer there was hop-picking in the nearby hop-fields, then the harvest, chasing the rabbits out of the corn and clubbing them with a stick, before taking them home and skinning them for the family table. In the autumn there was apple-picking for the cider factory. But as the light began to fail the family would retreat behind the lath-and-plaster walls of their cottage to endure the winter.
There would still be milking night and morning, and gradually the arrival of the first lambs to chase Walter West and his family out into the fields around them, and to ensure the strength of next year’s flock. As he grew older Frederick West went with his father whenever he could, conscious of what was expected of him. By the age of eleven, he was being paid half a crown (121/2p) a week, and he would give his mother two shillings (10p) and keep the sixpence for himself.
What went on at Moorcourt Cottage concerned only the West family, and Frederick West preferred it that way. He never lost his temper, and disliked fights, unlike his younger brother John, but most of all he ‘hated the fact that everybody knew what was going on in the village all the time’. He especially disliked the postman, who ‘always knew what was in every letter he delivered’. There were West family secrets which he wanted to keep, not least about sex.
Frederick Walter Stephen West reached puberty early. His first erections took place shortly after his twelfth birthday, and they could hardly be concealed in the cramped bedrooms of Moorcourt Cottage. Both Walter and Daisy West realised the change that was taking place in their eldest child, and they responded to it as generations of other villagers had done before them in the wilds of the Herefordshire countryside. They took his sexual initiation into their own hands. Just as Walter West had groomed his sixteen-year-old bride to satisfy his own desires, and just as she had realised how she could in turn control him by the skilful use of her own sexuality, so between them Walter and Daisy West groomed their first-born son. Sex became the first important secret of Frederick West’s life.
Daisy West almost certainly took her son into her bed one winter night before his thirteenth birthday. The experience was to colour the rest of Frederick West’s life. The illicitness, and yet the force of his desire, uncertain at first, then rapidly catching fire, fascinated him. Sex became his only hobby, his consuming passion. It was a passion fanned by his father. For Walter West’s sexuality was as powerful as his son’s was to become, and he had quenched it both with animals and with young children. West recalled years later that his father had first told him that it was possible to have sex with a sheep by putting its rear legs down the front of your own wellington boots, and he would laugh at the memory of his own first attempts to do so. As Frederick West’s own son was to say:‘Dad was obsessed by sex.’ It was an obsession that he indulged as often as he could.
Sexuality was a constant strand in the life of every member of the West family, something that could never be ignored or forgotten. Frederick West’s incestuous relationship with his mother was almost certainly matched by some sort of sexual relationship with his father. Whether Walter West let him watch while he abused young girls, or whether he encouraged his son to take his place, or whether, in fact, he abused him directly Frederick West was never to reveal. But there is no doubt that his father’s example, in the sexual abuse of children, and his own son in particular, led Frederick West to the conviction that ‘Everybody does it’.
Frederick West became his parents’ able and devoted pupil. Sexuality came to overwhelm his every waking moment, the one reason for his very existence. The cycle of child abuse that was to re-emerge at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester two decades later was forged a dozen miles away across the Severn at Moorcourt Cottage, Much Marcle. It was the first evil love that Frederick West fell victim to, the inspiration for each and every one of his subsequent actions.
Not that children were the only focus for Frederick West’s rapidly burgeoning sexuality. There were some village girls of his own age prepared for a fumbling experiment in the fields after school on a summer day. But soon those were not enough to satisfy the blue-eyed young man with a gypsy’s face and hobnail boots. He wanted sexual intercourse, and he did not want to wait for it.There was no courtship, no affection in his mind when it came to any consideration of sex. It was a matter of animal desire, to be satisfied, extinguished, then explored again. Girls were to satisfy the lust as readily and as simply as the sheep in his father’s flock.‘And you kept quiet about it.’
Morality was satisfied by church on Sunday morning, and preparation for confirmation.There was no contradiction in Walter or Daisy West’s mind between preparing their son to become a confirmed member of the Church of England and preparing him for sexual life. To be confirmed ‘was tradition’, he was to explain later, as much a part of the family tradition as buying the eldest son a twelve-bore shotgun ‘for rabbiting and crows’ for his fourteenth birthday.And in the autumn of 1955 Frederick West was confirmed into the Anglican communion at St Bartholomew’s Church, Much Marcle, in the presence of his entire family. After school the next day he went rabbiting with his new shotgun.
In September 1956, to celebrate his fifteenth birthday, Daisy and Walter West took their son to Gloucester and bought him a brown double-breasted suit at Burton’s the Tailors, together with his first pair of proper leather shoes.Then they took him to a fish-and-chip shop in the city for his first ‘meal out’.Walter West’s father had done exactly the same for him in the year that he left school, and it was another tradition to be kept up, a mark that ‘the boy’ was about to leave school and start work. A worker, even a farm labourer, had to have a suit for Sunday best.
Frederick Walter Stephen West ‘couldn’t spell or nothing’ when he left school in December 1956. He had no need to. What little reading he needed he taught himself in the years to come,‘though writing was always beyond me’, but he had little need of either. What pay there was would be delivered in a brown envelope on Friday morning. Active, and growing in strength, West worked long hours in the fields, just as his father did, returning to Moorcourt Cottage at dusk. ‘I thought nothing of staying up all night with a cow or a pig or whatever it was’, and he ‘got used to watching pigs being butchered’, just as he accepted that now he was expected to kill the West family’s latest pet pig in his fifteenth year. He took the knife to its throat in the kitchen, watching it run round squealing for a moment before dropping to the floor. He helped his mother hang it up to let the blood drain away.
At the age of fifteen, West was being paid ten shillings (50p) a week for his work on the farm. He gave five shillings (25p) to his mother, kept half a crown for himself, and put the remaining half a crown into a post office savings account. He was saving for a motorbike. On Saturday evenings he and his brother John used to meet some of the other young men from the village ‘for five Woodbines and a pint of cider’. In his spare time he would shoot squirrels with his shotgun and sell the tails. And on rare occasions there would be a trip into Ledbury, five miles away, at the foot of the Malvern Hills, but only if there was someone to offer them a lift.
One attraction of Ledbury was the possibility of meeting girls, for by now Frederick West’s appetite for sex could not be quenched solely in the privacy of his own home. Together with his brother John, he set out for the small Herefordshire town with increasing regularity, to visit a café and the cinema, or to go to the local youth club.At sixteen, he had learned little sophistication, but he knew instinctively that some girls fell for his direct approach. As John West was to put it later: ‘Fred was always a ladies’ man. I never stood much of a chance.’ But there was no flattery in his manner, or his voice, when he approached a girl in Ledbury; no payment of even the most rudimentary compliment. Instead, his assumption was that girls were ‘begging for it’ if they were there in the first place.
Four decades later, in the last year of his life, Frederick West made a list of the girls he had seduced in Ledbury and Much Marcle as a young man. He could remember them all, in detail, and took pride in recounting his experiences. At one stage he had even kept a diary of all their names, but ‘once you forget a few you lose interest’. Every local girl in Ledbury, if he was to be believed, had had some kind of sexual encounter with him. Not that he was always telling the truth. He took refuge in bragging to conceal his failures, going to elaborate lengths on many occasions to make up ‘stories’ about the girls he had seduced, the women who could not resist him. Some young women in the area could not stand his ignorant, lascivious bragging, complete with its distinctive brand of innuendo that insisted every girl ‘would be much better off with me’.
Frederick West would think nothing of stealing another boy’s girl, or of grabbing someone he fancied off the floor at a local dance. If her boyfriend objected, his brother John was expected to step in and defend him, for West did not like getting into a fight, especially with a man. He dressed a little more smartly now, often wearing the double-breasted suit his parents had bought for his fifteenth birthday. ‘Girls were impressed by a suit. They didn’t see one that often.’ It made him a raffish figure in the small country town, the sort of young man that some mothers would warn their daughters against, a man to be kept secret.
Frederick West knew the rules. He taught himself never to use a girl’s name when he made love to her. ‘I once went and called the wrong one, the wrong name . . . and she whipped her shoe off and smacked me straight in the face with it, and said, “Oh, you’ve been with that bitch”. So I learned from that lesson, like. I never ever used their names.’ It was not the only rule he taught himself to abide by. ‘You weren’t allowed to go home and say that’s my girlfriend because you weren’t allowed a girlfriend until you was twenty-one; that was the whole village way of life, like. Everything was done hush hush.’ That suited him only too well. ‘I mean, you couldn’t take a girl home when you were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen and say to your parents I’m going with this girl, because you were in big trouble. The first thing lights started flashing in their head that you were having sex and you could have a baby and you’d be a disgrace to the village.’
He learned to conduct his sexual life covertly. ‘Whenever opportunities came up with different girls they would, exactly the same as we would, meet you somewhere in the woods, or anywhere quiet in the fields, anywhere.You just went with them, and that was it.You enjoyed yourself that time, and then it was finished until you met them again.’
Not every local girl would succumb at once, but that ‘only made me more determined’. Even at the age of sixteen, he did not like to fail, and the more reluctant the girl the more he would talk. It was his way of hypnotising any girl he met, and as the years passed it became his trademark. Frederick West became the braggart, the boaster, the story-teller, the fantasist, but above all the talker, a man never at a loss for words, ready to use language as his defence against a hostile world. Daisy West’s ‘young Freddie’ might be almost illiterate, but ‘he talked and talked and talked’, in the words of one friend.‘Never stopped for a moment.Telling the girls he had a motorbike “that was being repaired”. Telling them that he “was just about to get a job in Hereford”. Telling them they were the “prettiest girl he ever met”.’ West would talk as fast and as quickly as he could in pursuit of his prize, and it was not the only tactic he adopted to seduce young women.
Another trick was even more ingenious. West would offer the girl he fancied an ‘engagement ring’. ‘No sex, no ring used to be the thing in the old days. So I gave them a ring,’ West admitted at the end of his life. ‘I started that when I was about sixteen I think. The engagement rings got better, mind, over the years.’ At one stage he had collected ‘anything up to a hundred’ of them. ‘I carried engagement rings for special occasions. I mean, I couldn’t see the difference, making love with a ring on or a ring off . . . no difference, is there? But it was what they wanted.’ It was also what Frederick West wanted. There was nothing to lose, besides: ‘They always threw it back at you when it was over.’
As the sixteen-year-old Frederick West’s appetite for young girls grew, so his mother grew increasingly more irritated. She may also have been more than a little jealous. Then only thirty-two, Daisy West was, after all, just twice her son’s age, and was still his lover. One girl in particular, whose father Daisy herself had had a sexual relationship with as a young girl, irritated her so much that she gave her son ‘some stick over it’. And on New Year’s Eve 1957 he left Moorcourt Cottage for a few days to stay with the girl and her parents, the first time he had ever stayed away from home.