A SCOTTISH MARRIAGE
‘The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.’
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIMS
There was now a distinct swagger in Frederick West’s limping stride, and the smile in his startling blue eyes grew ever brighter. He was a young blood, a twenty-year-old with a criminal record, someone who had walked free from Hereford Assizes, and he took to carrying a sheath knife in his belt to prove it. Aunt Violet’s cottage in Much Marcle was no longer big enough for him. It was time to return to Gloucester, and West announced to his parents that he was going to move back into the city, ‘to get bigger money on the building sites’.There was even the possibility of going back to sea.
Shortly after Christmas in 1961, West moved into the flat of a friend above an ice-cream parlour in Wellesley Street, Gloucester, a short walk from the city’s cemetery, and went to work at the local power-station as a labourer. But no matter how confident he may have appeared, his private world had not changed. His poacher’s instinct when it came to young women had not dimmed. In the dark winter evenings after work, he took to driving out to Newent on his motorcycle, to creep around the garden of the girl he had raped. As it turned out, Frederick West had no need to prowl around the girl’s house at night. A few weeks after his first attack on her, she turned up at the flat in Wellesley Street to see her sister, who was now going out with the friend with whom West was sharing.
When West returned to the flat from work late one afternoon, he found the fifteen-year-old he had delivered home to Newent in his Ford Popular waiting there for her sister. Once again, he did not hesitate. ‘He pushed his way into the flat, threw me on to the bed and raped me,’ as the girl was to remember more than thirty years later. And once again Frederick West did not appear to feel that he had done anything wrong. Quite the reverse: as soon as the attack was over, he suggested that they both sit and wait for the girl’s sister to arrive. It was as if the rape had never taken place.And once again, it went unreported.
In the last year of his life, West himself insisted that the girl ‘was mad in love with me, mind’, and had become ‘one of the first big sex symbols for me . . . I had other girls but she was my first serious girlfriend . . . I was going to marry her, live in her house’. He was certainly also convinced that ‘we made love three or four times a night, over a couple of years’.The self-delusion and deceit that had begun to form in Frederick West’s mind had grown ever stronger. So, too, had his restlessness.
The job at the power-station did not satisfy him for long. He wanted something that would allow him to indulge his appetite for movement, to roam the lanes of Herefordshire and the streets of Gloucester, and discover whatever that might bring by way of girls. He had heard that lorry-drivers were always picking up pretty young hitchhikers, so that was the obvious answer. In the early spring of 1962 West took a job driving a lorry for Ledbury Farmers, a local cooperative, collecting and delivering grain from his old stamping ground at Avonmouth Docks to and from farms throughout Herefordshire. To save money he moved back into Moorcourt Cottage with his family. Several months had passed since Hereford Assizes, and as far as Walter and Daisy West were concerned the incest case was forgotten.
Frederick West had been driving for Ledbury Farmers for only a ‘few months’ when he stopped in the town centre one afternoon in the autumn of 1962 for a cup of tea and a sandwich at a café ‘opposite the hospital . . . I had ten ton of wheat on’. One of the waitresses was a nineteen-year-old girl he knew called Margaret Mackintosh. ‘She went to school with me when she was little’, and he always called her ‘Haggis’ because she had spent so much of her life in Scotland. Indeed, she had only recently returned to Herefordshire, after a period of time in a borstal in Greenock on the Clyde. She had been released on parole to her mother’s home in Ledbury. Another waitress in the café was a friend of Margaret’s from the Greenock borstal, who had just come down from Scotland to join her. Her name was Catherine Costello, but she was known as Rena.
‘Margaret was serving, and Rena was on a half-day off,’ West recalled in the last months of his life. ‘She said, “This is my mate Rena”, and Rena looked a fair picture. Fair play, she was a beautiful-looking woman, girl, like. Well, Rena said, “Can I come with you, like?” and she did. I delivered, then picked up another load, then went back to the café and dropped her off.’ It was the beginning of a relationship that would eventually lead to the young Scottish woman’s death, and the discovery of her dismembered body in a field barely five miles away from that café in Ledbury.
Catherine Bernadette Costello was born on 14 April 1944, the fourth of five sisters, and had spent her childhood in Calder Street, Coatbridge, just outside Glasgow. Her mother Mary left the family home when Catherine was still a child, going to live in Belfast, and by the age of thirteen Cathy, as she was then called, was in a children’s home in Port Glasgow. She returned to her father and sisters after a year, but was soon working as a street prostitute in Glasgow itself, and was warned by the police for ‘importuning’ in November 1960. A month or so later she was sentenced to seventeen months ‘borstal training’ for attempted burglary. When she first met Margaret Mackintosh she was serving the sentence at Gateside Borstal in Greenock. Well built, but only five-feet, three-inches in height, she peroxided her hair, turning it straw blonde from mid-brown and usually cut in curls on the top of her head. Strong-willed and naturally rebellious, she had left Glasgow just a few weeks before meeting Frederick West, suspecting that she was pregnant by her pimp. But for the moment, that was something West was unaware of.
The day after their first meeting, West agreed to take Rena Costello with him in the cab of his van for a second time. He drove down to Avonmouth on the Severn to deliver his load of grain, and on the way back stopped in a lay-by. ‘Rena told me she was “on the run” from a convent in Glasgow’, where she was supposed to be living under the terms of her parole,‘and that she was pregnant’. Rena Costello then, almost certainly, had sex in the lorry’s cab with the man who was shortly to become her first husband, and sex in a less inhibited way than he had ever truly experienced before. For his part, once it was over, the ever-helpful Frederick West told her that he had ‘learned to do abortions’ during his time ‘away at sea’, and that he could ‘help her out’.
One Sunday afternoon a few days later, Margaret Mackintosh, Rena Costello and Frederick West went to Dog Hill, near Much Marcle, and he tried to abort the child Rena Costello was carrying. West may well have used one of the horrifying, extemporary tools that he was later to display proudly to friends, including a twelve-inch metal pipe with what resembled a corkscrew attached to the top of it, but whatever the instrument, the abortion attempt failed. West’s vanity was pricked. He had failed, and by then he was also besotted with this sexually experienced young Scottish woman. She had already begun to open his eyes to the deviations that sexual intercourse could offer. Frederick West did not hesitate: he asked her to marry him.
For her part, Rena Costello could see the attraction of the tousle-haired young man who seemed to have an insatiable sexual appetite. She was used to satisfying men, and she thought that he was a man she could control. If she accepted the proposal, he could also provide a means of escape from the attentions of the police over her breach of parole, and, if they went back to Glasgow together, perhaps even protection from some of her former associates in prostitution. By the time that the police caught up with her a week or so later, in early October 1962, and a police surgeon had confirmed that she was pregnant, Rena Costello had agreed to his proposal. For Rena Costello, her husband was a way out; for Frederick West, she was the first entry point into a different world, even if he did insist later it: ‘was only to get her out of the shit’. She recognised in him something of her own disdain for the law and all it stood for, and he had discovered with her a fierce, unquenchable and deviant sexual energy that his earlier experiments had only hinted at. Frederick West and Rena Costello decided to marry a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, in November 1962.
‘My mother wouldn’t come to the wedding, and my father wouldn’t have anything to do with it,’ West remembered later. ‘Mam went mad about it, calling Rena a lot of names, because my mother knew I wasn’t going with Rena and she could see she was pregnant.’ Daisy West loathed her prospective daughter-in-law on sight, calling her ‘filthy and common’. Her son remembered that she ‘even cleaned the toilet seat as soon as she’d left the house’. Another reason for Daisy West’s dislike of her future daughter-in-law was that she was a Catholic, and there was no prospect, therefore, of a marriage in Much Marcle church. She and the rest of the family were convinced that the only reason Freddie was marrying was because she was pregnant by him, and Frederick West did not trouble to dissuade them. Not every member of the West family took quite such a strong exception to Rena Costello, however. Walter West for one took a shine to the girl whom he would call ‘Cath’.
It was hardly a marriage made in heaven. ‘I’d be lying if I said I loved her,’ West was to say. Five minutes before the ceremony he even offered his brother £5 if he would marry her in his place, ‘with a smile on me face’. But John West refused. He was the only member of the West family to attend the brief ceremony on 17 November 1962 at the Ledbury Register Office. Walter and Daisy West had gone apple-picking, although Rena had managed to borrow a blue dress from Fred’s sister Daisy for the occasion as she had hardly any clothes of her own. John West and Margaret Mackintosh were the only witnesses. The bridegroom gave his occupation as ‘lorry-driver’ and his new wife described herself as a ‘waitress’. The ceremony was over in a matter of minutes. ‘There was no reception. My brother just bought a bottle of Bristol Cream sherry and we stood outside in the street and drank it. Then we went back to work.’
Frederick West wanted his new wife to move into Moorcourt Cottage with him, but Daisy West put her foot down: ‘She refused to have her in the house.’ So after ten days staying at the tiny flat Rena shared with Margaret Mackintosh above the New Inn at Ledbury, the new Mr and Mrs Frederick West decided to move to Glasgow. John West drove them to Birmingham to catch the train.
Frederick West never revealed precisely what Rena Costello told him about her life in Glasgow before they married, but it seems certain that she promised that he would be well looked after if he went back there with her. She may have suggested that he would profit from her prostitution, even that he could watch whenever he wanted to. In the years to come West would maintain that the father of her unborn child, ‘a Pakistani that ran a string of corner shops’, had ‘offered him a job as her minder’ before they left Ledbury. Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that Frederick and Rena West moved into a tenement flat at 46 Hospital Street in her native Coatbridge in the first week of December 1962, and West started working for someone she knew, saying that he was:‘driving a Vauxhall Cresta . . . with two big fins on the back. There were two big aerials on the back with flags. One Pakistani, one Indian, I think. I thought this was a good life.’
Frederick West gave so many conflicting accounts of his life in Glasgow that it is difficult to piece together exactly what happened during his time there over the next three years. Nevertheless, certain things remained constant. He kept in touch with his parents – though it was Rena who wrote the letters rather than he, as he was still unable to write – and regularly returned to Much Marcle to see them. The influence of his father, and mother, remained at the core of his life, no matter where life took him.
It is also certain that the strain of violence in his father’s marriage surfaced quickly in his own. Frederick West started to beat his pregnant wife within a matter of weeks of their marriage, not because he drank – for by now he was ‘almost teetotal’ – nor because she did, even though ‘she could sink a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label a day’, but because she refused to become his puppet. Rena West was not prepared to stand by and do only what he wanted. As he put it in the last months of his life: ‘That was when I realised that I was the bloody keeper of her. I didn’t own her.’ He demonstrated his frustration by ‘bruising’ her around the face.‘I was mixed up with these bloody Indians and that. But I got the motor and the money, and I played it through.’
In fact, West was apparently expected to abide by the rules that Rena’s lover, and the father of her child, laid down for him.The six-foot tall Pakistani, whom West nicknamed ‘Billy Boy’, reportedly told him: ‘I couldn’t make love to her, and I had to leave when I was told to leave and not ask questions, and not be caught snooping about. He gave me a list as long as your arm.’ On the surface at least, West was prepared to oblige. He thought ‘it was better to know nothing with these people . . . ’cause they used to cut your throat first and ask your name afterwards’. Besides, there were other compensations: the Pakistani would tell him ‘where I could go where there would be a woman for me. He never charged me, like.’
Rena West had been in Scotland for only eight weeks when she wrote to Walter and Daisy West to tell them that she had ‘lost the baby’ she had been expecting. Then, barely a month later, she wrote again, this time to tell the Wests that she and her husband had ‘adopted’ another baby, a mixed race child whom they had christened Charmaine. In reality, of course, Rena West had given birth to the child she had been carrying all along; the story about the ‘adoption’ was one of Frederick West’s elaborate fantasies to ‘protect’ his parents. The little mixed race girl was born on 22 March 1963 at the Alexander Hospital in Coatbridge. But her ‘father’ was not there to see the birth. Frederick West spent the night of his wife’s confinement in bed with one of her four sisters.
The birth of the child did not affect Frederick West. He took no interest in the baby, and for a time even refused to register the birth of the little girl, whom his wife wanted to christen Charmaine Carol Mary (Mary in honour of her own mother).
Meanwhile, Frederick West’s sexual demands on her mother increased. He would demand sex at any time of the day, no matter what she was doing or what mood she was in. If she refused he would hit her, repeatedly, taunting her that ‘she only liked doing it with other men’, though he also seemed to find that arousing. Rena West went back to working for ‘Billy Boy’, but Fred West soon ‘got bored’.
‘Rena kept disappearing for a week or a fortnight at a time.’ He retaliated by answering an advertisement for drivers for ‘Mr Whippy’ ice-cream vans, to operate from a depot at Coatbridge. They then moved to a dilapidated tenement flat at 25 Savoy Street, Bridgeton, one of the decayed areas at the city’s heart, not far from St Enoch’s station.
The birth of Charmaine West did nothing to improve the marriage. West would still beat his wife around the face when he lost his temper, and she would still disappear to her former lover’s flat in Coatbridge. Nevertheless, there was also an implicit respect between the now eighteen-year-old Scottish girl and the black-haired young man not quite three years her senior. In spite of the fights and the brutal sexual demands: ‘Me and Rena got on well together, because we stuck to our agreement for a long while. She didn’t want no children by me. She just wanted to have the one.’ Certainly, when he was not working on his ice-cream van on his round in the Shettleston area of Glasgow,West would drive his wife to her clients, leaving one of her sisters, or a friend, to look after Charmaine. ‘Whenever these certain blokes walked in I was given £5 to fuck off, and I went.’
West was a little in awe of his young wife.Even though he assaulted her with agonising regularity, he knew that she could give as good as she got.‘She knocked me out cold on three occasions, with one blow.’ He also noticed that she was now carrying a cut-throat razor in her handbag, a weapon favoured among the Glasgow gangs, as well as another knife.‘You didn’t mess with Rena. Nobody did. No matter how big they were, she’d drop ’em. She was a vicious type if she wanted to be.’ But Frederick West also acknowledged that his wife ‘looked after me. She was never unkind to me in any way. Me and Rena had no bad feelings towards each other at all, because it was accepted the way she lived.’
Rena West also accepted the way her husband lived. She was well aware that his rounds behind the wheel of his Mr Whippy van meant that he met a great many young women, many of them with young children, and many of them bored. His old habits had not died away. Frederick West would park in a side-street, look out for a particular young woman that took his fancy, observe her for a while until he knew her habits, then engage her in conversation and offer her a lift in his ice-cream van.‘I had masses of girlfriends at the time,’ he boasted later. ‘Hundreds of them.’ By the time Frederick West took his wife and daughter back to Much Marcle for Christmas, Rena West was pregnant with his first child.
Rena was not altogether happy to find herself pregnant only a few months after the birth of Charmaine. In any event, this time she attempted an abortion without her husband’s help. ‘I think she shoved a knitting-needle up herself,’ West said coldly long after-wards. Rena West was taken to Bells Hill Maternity Hospital, where the staff saved the baby. The attempted termination was an action that Frederick West would never forgive. Afraid of his violent reprisals, not sure where else to turn, and by now heavily pregnant, Rena West decided to leave Glasgow for Much Marcle shortly afterwards to visit her husband’s sister Daisy.
Her husband paid not the slightest notice. He drove his wife to Much Marcle, then drove back to Glasgow, where he ‘spent the rest of the week in bed with one of the beautifulest women in Scotland’, a girl he later boasted was ‘a mate of the pop singer Lulu’. As far as he knew his wife was going to be away for a fortnight. In fact, conscious that her child was due at any time, she changed her mind and returned to Scotland early, to give birth. It turned out to be a wise decision. On the way back to Glasgow on the train she went into labour. But she did not take a taxi to Bells Hill Hospital; instead, she took it home.
When Rena West walked in she found her husband in bed with the woman he had spent the week with. The memory of it delighted West until his dying day. ‘She says: “You two better get out of that bloody bed and let me in.” Rena lay on the bed and the baby started coming.’ By the time the girl had returned from calling the midwife from a nearby telephone box,West himself had delivered his first child. ‘I brought Anna-Marie into the world,’ he would announce proudly. It was shortly after nine o’clock in the morning of 6 July 1964.
According to Frederick West, in the months that followed, Rena West ‘stayed off her’ second daughter ‘straight from the word go’, because ‘she’d only had the child most reluctantly’. But that did not affect him; unlike his attitude to her one-year-old stepsister Charmaine, he doted on his own daughter, whom he christened Anna-Marie Kathleen Daisy (Daisy in honour of his own mother), and whose birth Frederick West registered without a moment’s hesitation. And he would think nothing of slapping her stepsister if ever she annoyed him. Rena fought to defend her firstborn against his violent attacks, but he would merely smile as he told his wife ‘she deserved it’. Life at 25 Savoy Street returned to its pattern of fights and beatings, bitter arguments and separations followed by reconciliation and sex.‘Me and Rena would always make love after,’ West would insist at the end of his life, ‘no matter how bad we fell out with each other’. Rena West was ‘drinking heavily – a bottle of Scotch a day, mind’. But he encouraged his wife to drink. ‘She never got aggressive with drink. She was rather loving actually. It did actually change her nature, take her off her guard, ’cause she was very much on her guard all the time.’
It was a marriage of opposites: the country boy and the city girl, the poacher and the prostitute, bound together by a fascination with sex. But there was an intensity in the relationship of Frederick and Rena West that everyone who met them remarked on. It could burn white-hot for weeks at a time before suddenly turning cold, and the sparks of violence in both of them fanned the flames. To the outside world he was a placid, slightly humble man ‘eager to please’ his customers on the Mr Whippy van, but alone in the privacy of his house with his own wife the obsequious ice-cream salesman became a vicious bully. But Rena West was not a rabbit in the moonlight, freezing at the sight of a fox; she was not afraid of Frederick West.
Not long after Anna-Marie’s birth, Rena West again returned to the comparative tranquillity of Much Marcle, taking Anna-Marie with her.The new baby was the first grandchild, as Charmaine had been ‘adopted’, and she wanted to show her off to Walter and Daisy West. A strange bond began to develop between the tall, silent farm labourer and the short, pretty Scottish girl with an accent that was difficult to understand.Whether Walter West sensed what she might be suffering at his son’s hands, or whether he, too, nursed a sexual desire for her is not clear, but whatever the reason, the relationship between Walter West and the girl he always called ‘Cath’ grew steadily, until it was clear enough to the rest of the family.
At Christmas West took his family back to Much Marcle, as he always did, and was introduced to his brother John’s fiancée. The girl had just been badly burned in an accident when her night-dress had caught fire at home, and West took his brother to see her in hospital in Birmingham, where she had been sent because of the severity of her injuries. His first remark when he saw the young girl lying in the hospital bed was:‘Christ, you’re not marrying that, are you?’ Even Frederick West himself admitted later:‘It meant that she didn’t much care for me.’ Rena West told the girl privately that she should be thankful she was engaged to John, not his brother Fred.
In the first weeks of 1965 Frederick and Rena West moved for the third time. They rented a tenement flat at 241 McLellan Street in Kinning Park, one of the longest streets in Glasgow. Beyond it was a set of allotments, small plots of land for hire, on which families could grow vegetables and flowers.West hired an allotment and took advantage of the small shed which came with it, returning there at night whenever he could, more often than not to have sex with a girl he had picked up on his round.
Life went on as it had always done for Rena West. She would be at home in the morning and usually out working in the evening. When she was not working she would sometimes visit the local bookmaker’s, Telky’s, not far away from the flat in McLellan Street. It was here, one morning that winter, she met the man to whom she was eventually to turn to protect her from her husband’s violence, John McLachlan, at the time a bus-driver for Glasgow Corporation, working out of the nearby Possilpark garage. McLachlan was married but liked the young woman, who now sported a new beehive haircut. He met her again, shortly afterwards, at the ground-floor flat beneath her own, where they had a drink together.Then, as Andrew O’Hagan reports in his book The Missing: ‘John remembers seeing a face at the window, a dark face, a head of curly hair, and he opened the door to see who it was. It was Fred. He came charging in and grabbed Rena, and pulled her up the stairs. He was belting her on the way up.’
John McLachlan steadily began to see more and more of Rena West. He would take her for drives to Loch Lomond in his green Ford Zephyr, and he would protect her whenever he could. An amateur boxer, McLachlan remembers having to pull West off his young blonde wife on a number of occasions, ‘because he was beating the shit oot a her’. But West took care never to get involved in a fight with McLachlan. Once, when he found the bus-driver kissing his wife in Kinning Park, West pulled out the knife he still carried at his belt and drew it across McLachlan’s stomach, but when the Scot hit him again West turned away, unwilling to fight a man, but punching his wife as he dragged her across the park.
FrederickWest may not have wanted to be faithful to his wife, and he may have been more than prepared to profit from her earnings as a prostitute, but he was still proprietorial towards her. He did not want ‘to be made a fool of ’. She in turn resorted to spending more and more time away from the flat, partly with McLachlan, but also looking for company, and for people she could invite to her home.
That spring Rena West met two young women at the nearby Victoria café in Scotland Street, where she met friends, whose company provided refuge from Fred’s attacks. Isa McNeill and Anna McFall worked together at Livingstone Knitwear on Kilmarnock Road, and had known each other since childhood. Isa was the elder of the two, a brunette of eighteen, brought up a Protestant, while Anna (who always preferred to be called Ann) was just sixteen, and a Catholic. Nevertheless, they were very close friends, and they quickly became Rena West’s allies and supporters. The two girls would wheel Anna-Marie in her pram and hold Charmaine’s hand as they walked up McLellan Street together, and they would go for walks with Rena when the children got fed up with sitting in the Victoria café.
Isa McNeill was going out with a friend of John McLachlan’s called John Trotter, and she and Rena West started going out together in the evenings to the pubs along Paisley Road with their boyfriends. In July 1965 Rena West invited Isa McNeill to come to stay with her at 241 McLellan Street. Ostensibly, she wanted her to work as her ‘nanny’ and help to look after the children, but the reality was that she hoped Isa might protect her from the excesses of her husband’s temper. Isa McNeill had barely lived there a week when she told her friends that Frederick West was like ‘Jekyll and Hyde’, violent towards his wife and Charmaine, but never to his own daughter, Anna-Marie.
What Isa McNeill did not know until she arrived at McLellan Street was that Frederick West insisted that his daughters should sleep together on the bottom of a pair of bunk beds, and that he had nailed a set of vertical slats across the space between the upper and lower bunks so that they could not get out. As soon as she arrived, West instructed his wife’s new ‘nanny’ that he wanted the two baby girls to ‘stay in there’ while he was in the flat, and that they should be fed, changed and made to play there. He would sometimes allow his own daughter Anna-Marie out of ‘the prison’ for a time, but two-year-old Charmaine West was never to be allowed out while he was at home.
Rena West clung increasingly to John McLachlan for support, and their sexual relationship, which had begun that summer, contributed to the breakup of his marriage. Rena West talked about moving in with him, and would confide in him about her husband’s obsession with sex, and how he would never get home until three or four in the morning. She would tell him time after time that all she wanted was to be allowed to live in peace with her kids. But, usually, the determined young Scottish woman would return reluctantly to McLellan Street, anxious about her daughters.
Not that her husband was always there. In the past few months Frederick West had taken to spending the entire night away from home, rather than simply the early hours of the morning. One reason was that he was increasingly involved with one of the young women he had picked up on his rounds, a twenty-year-old Scottish girl called Margaret McAvoy. ‘She’d walk hundreds of miles just to be with me,’ he would boast later, and she had started to ‘help on the van at nights when I was busy.’ In the autumn of 1965 she became pregnant by West. It was to be one reason why he would decide shortly to leave Glasgow and return to Gloucester and the familiar territory of Much Marcle. But there was another reason: fear.
On the afternoon of 4 November 1965 Frederick West ran over and killed a three-year-old boy in his ice-cream van in a cul-de-sac on the south side of Glasgow.West had got to know the boy in the preceding few months and had even bought him a ‘bright-coloured ball . . . about four or five inches’ to play with. He had even told him that he would ‘have a firework for him’ if he came back that afternoon.‘The mother brought the child down and led him across the road,’ West would recall. ‘When I came into the cul-de-sac he was playing with his ball, and he bounced his ball and it went over the hedge, and he went through the gate. He was round behind the hedge when I came in . . . I used to go in and turn round . . . and wait for the kids to come. I went into the cul-de-sac, looked it was all clear. I came back a matter of two or three foot and there was an almighty bang and I stopped there.’
West had backed his four-ton ice-cream van over the boy. He said: ‘I could see the child was lying underneath the van under the back axle.’ West said that he had ‘passed out’ immediately, and someone took him into their house. But he also admitted that ‘the father came down. He was going to kill me or summat . . . There was a load of people there fighting to stop him getting to me.’ When the police and ambulance arrived, West was taken to hospital. ‘I was put under sedatives in Glasgow Royal, and then I discharged myself after a while and I went home.’
In the years to come Frederick West would increasingly embroider his version of the fatal accident with the ice-cream van. But he always insisted that he returned to McLellan Street after discharging himself from hospital, only to find the flat full of a motorcycle gang called the Skulls, ‘the weirdest-looking blokes’, whose members, he alleged, included John McLachlan and John Trotter. He then found his wife ‘starkers’ in bed with two of the gang’s members, ‘with two more sat on the bottom of the bed’. West said he tried to hit one of the men, but ‘accidentally’ ended up hitting his wife instead, and ‘she went out cold’, at which point he also fainted. ‘The next thing, the gang’s disappeared and the police and the ambulance turn up’ and the police took him away and ‘locked me up’.
In West’s subsequent version of events, the police let him go but told him to go back to the hospital. But when he got there he was so upset that he ‘assaulted a nurse’, which led to his being arrested for a second time, ‘and put in Barlinnie prison for the night’. In court the following morning,West insisted, the ‘judge’ cleared him but advised him to ‘get legal advice on my matrimonial problems’. But outside the court ‘I runs into the Skulls and Rena, and they tell me I’m a dead man’. In this version West was so terrified that he went to live with Margaret McAvoy, and took a job delivering timber for a timberyard rather than return to the ice-cream van.
It was this version of his being ‘hounded out’ of Glasgow by a motorcycle gang called the Skulls that Frederick West was eventually to convince himself was the explanation for his return to Gloucestershire. In the final weeks of his life, Frederick West was even to write it down in his own ‘book’, a version of his life. He wrote the story in his own hand on lined prison paper, poring over it for hours at a time, struggling as he did so to teach himself to write for the first time in his life, and he was working on it in Winson Green Prison when he was found hanged in his cell shortly before lunch on Sunday 1 January 1995.
Here is the second page of his book, exactly as he wrote it, describing the events of that November day:
I workd 7 dats a a Week 16 hrs a day as a self employed icecream salesma. I Love Workin With the public you got to kno wow the OTHER 1/2 lives ther ar always sumone Worse of then you. but Disaster hit me. I had a fatal accident and kill a 3 to 4 year old Boy with My icecream Van the Boy was a god customer I see him Ever day. I love him as a son. I had no son at that time. I Wonted a son but that Was no time for one. so I spoil him by giving him presented a Boll and Badge and allway a icecream sunday. the accideent Was on 4 of November at TEN PAST three I had a firework for him. U told him I Wood bring them the day befor so was that Way he ream in to the back of the VAN I did not see him. I was in shock. I Went Backwards over a fence in to a garden sumone tuck me in ther home the police tuck me to hospital I Was Given Drugs and was taken home by the police. I went into my home it was full of yobs.
My wife Rean was in Bad With two of them. One of them went for me so I Went to hit him My Wife went to stop me I hit her in the eye. I did Not Mean to it was a accident. I was arrested and charged Withg Wife Assault and Was put in prison for 24 HRS. I Went to court and Was clard, and told by the Judge to see a Solciitor and sort My Marriage out, as I left the court My Wife and the yobs were out side and I Was told by My Wife if I Went home I Wood be killed.
In another version of events in the city at the end of 1965, however, West maintained that Rena’s former lover, the Pakistani ‘Billy Boy’ had thrown him out of the house when he discovered that Anna-Marie was not of mixed race and could not therefore be his child.‘Rena had pulled the wool over his eyes that her second daughter was his child, just as Charmaine had been.’ (West’s explanation for the fact that the child was by then almost eighteen months old was that the Pakistani had ‘been away at sea all that time’.) The Pakistani, according to this second version of events,‘chucked the baby’s clothes into the car’ while his wife had come down with Anna-Marie and ‘chucked her in through the window to me and said, “Get out before he gets you”.’
West gave another, third version of the events in the book he wrote in Winson Green Prison in the last months of his life. This version begins with the words ‘I Was Loved by an Angel’, but the angel to whom Frederick West was referring was not his first wife Rena, nor the newly pregnant Margaret McAvoy. His angel was the sixteen-year-old Glaswegian Anna McFall, who, together with Isa McNeill, had befriended his wife Rena. In this version of events it was, in fact, his ‘angel’, Anna McFall, who helped him to leave Scotland and to remove his children from his wife:
She sead she Wood help Me get the Girls out and back to England so I gave ana a PHON number the nex day ana Rang Me and sed Rena had gon out with the yobs. so I got the car and Went to my home ana was ther We gopt the first out ana sead you Will have to beet Me up. I sead no way you can say I did. so we agreed that ana Wood tell Rena and the yobs I had.
In this version of events Anna McFall, whom West called Annie, stayed in Glasgow and agreed to tell Rena West that he had punched her in the stomach and had taken her two daughters with him ‘to my farther and Mother in Muck Marcle’.
In West’s diary he remembers that he ‘made a bed in the car’ and ‘drove all night, arriving at Much Marcle at six o’clock in the morning’, just as his parents were getting up. He asked his mother and sister to look after the two girls, so that he could get a job and ‘pay them to do it’.
In Scotland, however, the story of Frederick West’s return to England is more mundane, and infinitely more believable. Rather than having to escape from the Skulls motorcycle gang and taking his two daughters with him,West simply informed his wife and Isa McNeill, who was still living with them, that he had decided to take them all back to England. He was going to get a job, and in the meantime he was going to give notice to Glasgow Corporation that he no longer wanted the flat in McLellan Street. His decision certainly provoked a heated argument, and led Rena West to tell him he could go on his own. She would decide whether she would join him when he came back.
There are elements of truth in all three of the differing versions of the events in the life of Frederick West and his family in Glasgow in the final weeks of 1965. But there is no doubt whatever that by the middle of December, West had arrived back in Much Marcle together with Charmaine and Anna-Marie, but without his wife. He told his parents about his accident with the ice-cream van and the death of the boy, and then asked his mother and sisters if they would look after his two daughters while he went out and got a job to pay them for doing so. But Daisy West refused to accept the little mixed race girl. ‘Mother did not like Charmaine’. So Frederick West told his mother:‘You have to have the two girls or none of them.’ Daisy West did not hesitate. She would not house either of them.
On 29 December 1965, at Frederick West’s instigation, both Charmaine and Anna-Marie West, at the ages of a little over two-and-a-half and just eighteen months, were taken into care by the Herefordshire Children’s Department.The two little girls were in ‘a deplorable state’, and the council found that it had to ‘clothe them pretty well from scratch’. With his daughters in care, Frederick West went back to living at home and found the perfect job – at Clenches Field Farm in Longford – picking up hides and skins from a local slaughterhouse.