‘LOVED BY AN ANGEL’
‘Brisk Confidence still best with woman copes: Pique her and soothe her in turn – soon Passion crowns thy hopes.’
BYRON, CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE
Back in his natural habitat, Frederick West wasted no time in returning to his old ways. There may have been women who fell victim to his seduction in Glasgow, but there he was always just a little out of place. ‘When I got back I went round all my old girlfriends,’ he told the police jauntily almost thirty years later, even ‘making love to one on the altar of the church down the road’. But, as ever, West did not restrict himself only to girls whom he knew. Like a predator returning to its hunting-ground, he lost no time in searching for prey. In the first weeks of 1966 two young women found themselves pursued by a dark-haired man who never stopped grinning or talking.
West’s methods had not changed. He would tour the area in a car, looking for a young woman whom he would follow until he decided she might be tempted, or physically persuaded, to have sex with him. One sixteen-year-old recalled almost thirty years later that she was stalked by West in Gloucester, and when she ran away he followed her on foot until she managed to escape.‘I didn’t know what fear was until then,’ she explained.Two nights later West followed her again in his car, and she froze. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream.’ It was only the arrival of her younger sister that frightened him away.‘She ran up and banged on the car and told him to get lost.’
At about the same time, another young woman accepted a lift from West when she was hitchhiking to Cheltenham to see her boyfriend. During the journey he pulled into a lane and stopped the car. West told the girl to remove her knickers, but she refused. He then exposed himself, but when she tried to get out of the car to run, he hauled her back by throwing his arm around her throat. Afterwards, ‘he was charming, pleasant, laughing’. The smile remained on his face when he returned to Moorcourt Cottage. For although both young women reported to the police the attacks on them, no policeman found his way up the road from Dymock towards Much Marcle and the Wests’ cottage. There was still nothing, and no one, to stop him. And as far as Frederick West was concerned, every young woman was still ‘begging for it’, no matter what she said.
West was convinced that he was irresistible to women, and he had no intention whatever of allowing his wife to remain the one woman who could prove him wrong. He was already planning to return to Glasgow to collect her, and thereby bring to an end her affair with McLachlan. The only question was: where were they going to live? West wanted somewhere that the Children’s Department would consider suitable enough for them to allow him to reclaim his daughters from care, because he knew that Rena West would not consider joining him in England if she were not reunited with her children. West could not afford a house, but he rapidly came up with an alternative: a caravan. If he could raise £600, he could buy one and put it on a site in Gloucester.The only difficulty was that he did not have £600.
West asked his parents if they would agree to guarantee a hire-purchase agreement that would allow him to buy a new caravan, but Daisy West refused point-blank. Her husband might have been persuaded, but she would not even consider helping him. He had got himself into these difficulties, and he could get himself out. An angry and disappointed Frederick West stormed out of Moorcourt Cottage and went to stay with his eldest sister Daisy, who was now married with her own child. Perhaps she could help, if his parents would not.
A persuasive Frederick West explained his plan to his sister. It was his family’s chance to be together again, the children needed their mother, it was their only hope. He even took Daisy to see his children in Hereford in the slaughterhouse lorry. If he could buy a caravan, then Rena could join him from Scotland and the children could come out of care. The persuasion worked. After a little thought, and to his obvious relief, Daisy and her husband Frank agreed to act as guarantors, and West sold the blue Vauxhall Viva he had bought in Scotland in part-exchange for a new caravan in Hereford, the hire-purchase agreement making up the rest. He then arranged to have the caravan delivered to a site at Sandhurst Lane on the outskirts of Gloucester. West did not intend to be too near his mother’s enquiring eye, and yet he could not bring himself to remove himself altogether from Much Marcle. Just as it had been five years before, Gloucester was the natural place.
One Saturday afternoon in early February 1966, Frederick West watched as his newly acquired brown-and-white caravan arrived at the Sandhurst Lane site, barely a mile north-west of the city centre. Sandhurst Lane was right beside one of his old routes from Ledbury, a runnel hidden in the flat-lands of the Vale of Gloucester, alongside the River Severn’s burgeoning East Channel. It was as inconspicuous as it was anonymous, the perfect place to hide in.
A few days later West drove the abattoir lorry north to Glasgow to collect his wife. Reluctantly, Rena West agreed to come south with him, on condition that Isa McNeill could come as well. She could help to look after the children and provide moral support. Rena West’s affair with John McLachlan had already begun to wane, and she wanted to see her children again. Besides, her friend Isa was not going to be the only friend to rely on.Anna McFall had asked if she could join them and ‘start a new life’ in the south.The three girls sat in the back of the lorry, the stench of the hides filling their nostrils, as West drove them back to Gloucester.
Life in Glasgow without Isa McNeill or Rena West did not seem all that attractive to the frail young girl.They had become the most important people in her life, after her mother, and she had come to depend on them. Anna McFall’s childhood had not been happy. Born on 8 April 1949 in Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow, her father was Thomas McFall, a baths attendant at the Parkhead Baths in the city, as well as a street bookmaker. But McFall was not married to her mother, Jane Hunter. In fact, he had a wife and another family in another part of the city. Brought up in Malcolm Street in Parkhead, and a Catholic,Anna had a brother three years older than she was, who was also called Thomas. But both their parents were alcoholics and refused to take any responsibility for their children, McFall often returning to his other family for months at a time, leaving Jane Hunter to fend for herself.When Anna McFall left Nazareth House children’s home in July 1964, she could not bring herself to go back to live with her alcoholic mother. She elected instead to stay with friends around Glasgow, and it was then that she worked with Isa McNeill at Livingstone Knitwear. Some time after that both girls befriended Rena West.
Though she was not living with her, Ann McFall was still trying to look after her alcoholic mother throughout 1965, but nothing she did seemed to make any difference, and it often led to arguments.Though she tried to conceal it,Ann McFall was looking for someone to love, and someone to look after her. Though she had only hinted at it to her friend Isa McNeill, the person she had chosen was Frederick West.
By the spring of 1966, when they set off for Gloucester in the back of the slaughterhouse lorry, Ann McFall was almost seventeen years of age, five-feet, two-inches in height, with brown eyes and straight, dark brown hair almost long enough for her to sit on. A slight, vulnerable but attractive girl with a reedy nervous laugh, she wanted nothing more than to find a family that she could call her own, and she was obviously impressed by Frederick West’s endless relentless chatter. Her first boyfriend had been just that, a boy, and she was flattered by the attention of a man of twenty-four. As Isa McNeill was to recall,‘she kinda flaunted herself at him’.
They had hardly settled into the caravan on The Willows site, as Sandhurst Lane was known officially, when Isa McNeill and Ann McFall realised that life would be very little different from McLellan Street. Fred and Rena shared the small bedroom at the front of the van, while Isa and Ann were expected to sleep on the U-shaped sofa built into the cramped lounge. Nevertheless, Charmaine and Anna-Marie were returned to their parents by the Herefordshire Children’s Department on 23 February, and Frederick West and his wife put them to sleep together in a single bed that unfolded from the caravan’s wall. The next morning West set off for work shortly after seven, leaving the three women with strict instructions not to take the children far off the caravan site.
Though there were no slats across their bunk beds this time, the two little girls were still supposed to be kept in this new ‘prison’ unless Frederick West said they could be released. They were his children, and he would decide exactly what was to happen to them. He told his wife, Isa and Ann that he would pop back at odd times during the day to make sure they were there, and took great pleasure in doing so. If they were not where he expected them to be, he would scream at all three women.
Whatever Rena West may have hoped, it did not take long for the regime of beatings and violence to return.The presence of the two other young Scottish women did not inhibit Frederick West in the least. He would return from work, his overalls covered in blood and his black wellington boots smeared with offal, stinking of the slaughterhouse and demanding his supper. If it was not ready immediately, he would hit his wife without warning. Even if it were, he would sometimes smile slowly and then hit her anyway. If Rena West tried to stop him slapping Charmaine for being naughty, he would hit her even harder, and the two Scottish girls would take the children out into the site itself until the beatings stopped.
Within six weeks Rena West had decided she could not stand the situation any longer. Isa McNeill telephoned the Victoria café from the call box at the entrance to the caravan site and left a message for John McLachlan, asking him to phone her back on that number later that evening. When he did so, she asked him to come to collect her and Rena and the children as soon as he could. And she told him to come at a time when Frederick West was sure to be out at work. A few days later McLachlan phoned again, at a pre-arranged time, and told her that he and John Trotter would be down later that week, and asked her to meet them beside the telephone box at the entrance to the caravan site.
But Rena West and Isa McNeill had reckoned without Ann McFall’s infatuation with Frederick West. In spite of the beatings, in spite of the abuse of his children, in spite of his boasting about how attractive other women found him, the young Scottish woman had convinced herself that she alone could change him. She was the one woman who could make him happy. When Isa McNeill had confided in her, telling her of the plan for them all to return to Glasgow together, Ann McFall had listened intently. She had then told Frederick West.
When John McLachlan and John Trotter arrived at the entrance to the Sandhurst Lane site on that April morning in 1966, in a borrowed Mini, Rena West and Isa McNeill were ready, and had packed for Charmaine and Anna-Marie. But Ann McFall seemed slower, less enthusiastic than her friends, dragging her heels as the other two women carried their stuff out towards the waiting car. Within a quarter of an hour, the reason became all too clear. Frederick West suddenly appeared, walking calmly on to the site.
An argument broke out at once. Everybody screamed at everybody else. Rena disappeared into the caravan to collect her coat, but Fred West followed her inside and started hitting her. John McLachlan shouted at him to stop, and eventually punched him in the stomach when he came back out of the caravan clutching Charmaine in his arms. But nothing anyone said or did altered West’s demeanour. He was not going to see the two girls removed from his care. Isa McNeill accepted the inevitable and set off for the Mini, carrying her suitcase. She was expecting Ann McFall to follow her. But the young Scottish girl just stood at the entrance to the caravan with the twenty-two-month-old Anna-Marie in her arms.
Desperate to reclaim her daughter, Rena West started pulling at Charmaine, trying to prise the child out of her husband’s grasp, but the harder she pulled the more firmly Frederick West held on. Not even another punch from McLachlan would persuade him to give her up. Meanwhile, Ann McFall looked on, cradling his other daughter in her arms. When Isa McNeill shouted at her friend to come with them, Ann McFall slowly shook her head. She was going to stay and be the girls’‘nanny’, she said quietly.
A uniformed police constable suddenly appeared, riding a bicycle, and the argument came to an abrupt halt. Rena West and Isa McNeill climbed into the back of the Mini, while John McLachlan and John Trotter got into the front.The Mini disappeared down the muddy track between the caravans before the policeman got off his bicycle.Through the rear window, Rena West watched her husband put on his familiar obsequious smile, to explain to the officer that there was nothing to worry about. It was merely a family argument. She cried most of the way back to Glasgow, frantic that Charmaine might be hurt.
In the last weeks of his life, Frederick West wrote his own version of these events, and it paints a slightly different picture. In particular, though there is no evidence to corroborate it, West insisted that Rena had first turned up in Much Marcle with Isa McNeill and ‘three of the yobs’ in January 1966, while he was still living there with his mother and father, and before he had bought the caravan. The object of the visit, he maintained, was revenge for his taking the children without telling his wife. West insisted that his mother had telephoned him at work to warn him, telling him not to go home, but that he had ignored the advice. He went on:
I went and got a piece of timber about three foot long and went home. Rena and the yobs were asleep in the car. I stopped alongside and said ‘Follow me’. My mother was at the door and called to me to get the police, but I went down the road to the church . . . It was a moonlit night . . . There was a lot of shouting . . . I said to Rena to come to me and say what she come down for. So she did. I had the piece of timber in my hand. She said: ‘What you going to do with that?’ I said: ‘Whatever I have to. No one is going to get me.’ . . . She said:‘We have come to get you for getting the children out of Glasgow and beating Anna up.’ I said I was sorry for what I did to Anna . . . I could not put Anna in danger . . . Rena said: ‘Charmaine is my daughter and Anna-Marie is yours.’ I said: ‘They are sisters and they will stay together.’ So we came to an agreement that she would write to me and sort it out. Rena went back to Glasgow. I went home.
In a subsequent interview West even elaborated on that version, suggesting that he ‘hammered the shit’ out of the yobs, using a knife he had picked up from a rack at the slaughterhouse against their bayonets, and injuring two so badly that he had to deliver them to Ledbury Hospital. ‘I finally won, and they went,’ he said, although there is no evidence to support his allegation that the fight ever took place. There is also little doubt that West’s natural cowardice when it came to violence with men had not deserted him.
Frederick West then agrees, however, that a few weeks later his wife came down ‘with Anna’, and they went to reclaim their daughters from care.‘Anna got hold of Anna-Marie and was kissing her for about twenty minutes and was looking at me. She loved the girls, I knew that, but why was she looking at me and smiling . . . I felt wonderful and marvellous. I could feel her love. But I said to myself, No, Rena is my wife.’
According to West’s version, the experience of life in the caravan with his wife was a disaster. But it had nothing to do with his own violent nature; it was the result of her inability to give up prostitution and drinking.‘Nothing changed. Rena was always out, and came back drunk, if she came at all . . . It went on for about two months. Then Rena took the children back to Glasgow and left Anna with me . . . So I lived in the caravan. Anna slept in the bedroom at the back of the van and I slept in the front.’
Life with Ann McFall was quite different,West wrote, explaining: ‘Anna was happy and contented and joyful . . . All Anna was me. When I came home Anna was always stood in the doorway. She always made sure she touched me . . . When I looked at her she would always give me a smile. I knew love was in the air.’ But, he went on, ‘I was married with a wife and two daughters, three and four years old. My marriage was a disaster, which was putting it mildly, so my daughters was the love of my life. Anna was more of a mother than Rena. I was about to let an angel love me.’
One evening, after West had given Ann McFall ‘money to buy new clothes’, she would not let him see what she had bought; instead, the young Scottish girl sat combing her hair. He went on to say:
We knew we were in love, but who was going to move first? . . .We kept looking at each other and smiling. I said to Anna, ‘Can I comb your hair?’ . . . I was combing her hair for two hours. It is now about nine-thirty on a Saturday, so we went out for a walk by the river . . .The moon was up and shining on the water. It was beautiful and romantic. We chatted about the girls. How much she loved Charmaine and Anna-Marie. I said: ‘I will bring them back from Glasgow. Rena will not have the girls long. They will get in her way. Rena loves the children and me, but also needs to be free to do her own thing.’ . . . We walked home side by side, not saying no more . . . just having our own thoughts.
Back at the caravan,West recalled:
I went in and Anna had made a cup of coffee for me and gone to bed. I said ‘good night’ to Anna and Anna said ‘good night’. My bed was made up by Anna. I undressed and lay on the bed.The moon was shining in the window. My only thoughts were of Anna. It was so peaceful, as if the world had stopped for me to be loved by an angel . . . I had never felt like this before . . . Anna was so beautiful. I had no right to her love.
It was about eighteen months. I had not made love to my wife. She was always too drunk or gone. I was in love with Anna, but was Anna in love with me? It was twelve-thirty now. What I did not know I was minutes away from knowing. Anna’s bedroom door opened. Anna stood in the doorway. She had on a black negligé night-dress . . . and said: ‘Do you like it?’ I said: ‘Yes, you are stunning.’ Anna said: ‘That’s not me, that’s my night-dress.’ I was not sure what she meant by that. Anna moved to the bed. My heart was beating so fast. Anna said: ‘I am in love with you and have loved you from the first time I seen you. I loved chatting to you in Glasgow. When I went to bed I said my prayers and asked God for you to love me.’
In spite of the obvious lies, that his children had not gone back to Glasgow, and that he had certainly made love to the pregnant Margaret McAvoy, if not to his wife, in the previous eighteen months, there is perhaps a strain of honesty in part of his account of his seduction by Ann McFall. There is little doubt that he liked to cast himself as a glamorous and romantic figure to the young Scottish girl and that she in turn was prepared to accept the fantasy. He sustained that in the final part of his account of the start of their affair:
I said:‘But I am married.’ Anna said:‘Is that what you call it?’ I pulled back the bed covering and said ‘Get in’. Anna did not move . . . ‘You are not looking at me.You are looking at a night-dress.That’s not me.’‘Well, remove it then.’Anna said: ‘No, that’s up to you to do that. From this day on I belong to you. No man will ever touch me or see me as you will.’ . . . So I got out of bed and undressed Anna slowly . . . Anna’s body felt like silk and a smell of spring flowers . . . I put my arms around Anna and kissed her on the lips. It was wonderful but strange to be kissed by an angel that loved you.
The following morning, according to West’s account,‘I got out my guitar and sat on the step of the van. Anna sat by me. I played and sang to Anna . . .“Kiss an angel, good, good morning” . . . From then on I always sang to Anna . . . We always had tears in our eyes, tears of happiness and love. Anna would wipe the tear from my eyes and I would from her eyes.’ West did not reveal in his memoir that the next line of the song after ‘Kiss the little angel in the morning’ was ‘And we love her like a devil in the evening’.
Although there is no evidence to suggest that Frederick West ever used any form of contraception in any sexual encounter, he maintained that Ann McFall soon began to pester him to make her pregnant. ‘Anna said: “Can I have your baby?” I said: “Not just now. Let’s get the girls back and get a house.”’ But this did not satisfy the seventeen-year-old girl, who told him soon afterwards: ‘All you have to do is to marry me, so I can be Mrs Fred West and the mother of your children and ours.’
In West’s version of events in the spring of 1966, he then took a week’s holiday and went to Scotland himself to bring his children back to the caravan site, and was even helped to recover them from a brothel by the Govan police, although yet again there is no evidence to corroborate his story. Nevertheless, it is certain that at the beginning of May 1966 Ann McFall was indeed looking after Charmaine and Anna-Marie West at the caravan site on Sandhurst Lane.Their relationship was not, however, exactly as West chose to paint it more than twenty-eight years later.
For no matter what Frederick West cared to suggest in the last months of his life, there is compelling independent evidence that far from he and Ann McFall being wrapped in each other’s arms as the perfect loving couple he was later to characterise, they were, in fact, arguing relentlessly. Certainly, by July 1966 the twenty-four-year-old lorry-driver and his seventeen-year-old companion had come to the attention of the Gloucester Children’s Department, where an internal memorandum suggested that Ann McFall was being difficult and that Frederick West was anxious for her to leave the caravan as there was not much room. The same memorandum also suggested that although Rena West had left the family home in the caravan, she was planning to return.
In fact, Rena West had spent part of the intervening months living with Isa McNeill in a tiny flat in Arden Street in Maryhill, Glasgow, and had taken a job as a bus conductor at the same depot that McLachlan worked from as a driver. But she had not settled. Her old habits were hard to break, and she rapidly got herself a dubious reputation at the bus depot by offering to have sex with any driver or conductor who was interested. The peroxide-blonde woman, with the strong, vigorous open face, seemed almost to crave some element of her husband’s brutality: loathing it at one moment, craving it the next. There was something in her relationship with Frederick West that she could not quite throw off.
By the end of July 1966 Rena West had decided to go back to Fred West. At the age of twenty-two, she even tried to persuade Isa McNeill to go with her again, but her friend was getting married and refused. At the beginning of August Rena West was reunited with her husband and children at Sandhurst Lane. Meanwhile, Gloucester Children’s Department reported that Fred West’s ‘little angel’ had returned to Glasgow.
Ann McFall had kept in touch with her mother throughout her time in the south. She had sent postcards, letters and photographs regularly, including one of a large house in which she said she was living, and describing the man who was looking after her as ‘tremendous’. Frederick West’s own version sustains the same adolescent fantasy, the fantasy of a young man and woman infatuated with one another, an infatuation that could not possibly last.
West’s account of his time with McFall in the caravan at The Willows, however, also reveals one of the contradictions in his own character. He recalled, for example, that either he or the slight Scottish girl ‘always said prayers with the children. That had come special to us.’ Indeed, he maintained to the end of his life that ‘she was God’s gift to me and my daughters . . . her smiles lit up the heavens’. West also insisted that for two months ‘we all had a wonderful life of love and happiness . . . then disaster hit us. Rena and the yobs came down’, and to his amazement Rena threw Ann McFall out of the caravan. ‘I felt so sorry for Anna. The only thing Anna had done wrong in her life was to fall in love with me.’
At the time, according to West, his daughters preferred Ann McFall to their mother. He insisted that he tried to reassure McFall that his first wife would not be staying for long in Gloucester, but he also warned her that she could be dangerous. ‘I never knew what Rena was up to . . . She drank too much and when Rena was drunk she could be violent. Rena always had a open razor and a dagger in her handbag . . . and would use it. So I told Anna to keep away from Rena.’
In fact,West suggested that Ann McFall should stay at a friend’s caravan on the site while his wife was back with him. The girl not only did so, but she also found herself a job in a bakery in Court’s Road, Gloucester, telling West, ‘I am saving up for our baby.’ Finally, West maintained that he decided to try to escape from his wife altogether.Taking advantage of one of her trips back to Scotland, on August Bank Holiday Monday in 1966 he seized the opportunity to tow his caravan to another site, one where he hoped his wife would not be able to find him. The site he chose was behind the Flying Machine pub at Brockworth, about six miles away across Gloucester, and was called Watermead. And it was here, according to West, that he finally agreed that Ann McFall could have his child.
‘It was to time to sort out what we were going to do with our life as man and wife,’ he wrote in the last months of his life. ‘This was love that was for ever and ever.Anna and I could work together and build a home for our children and us, but I had to slow things down.’ He accepted that ‘Anna had to have her baby. It was not fair to Anna to have my two children and not have one of her own.’ He decided ‘to make Anna my life . . . I had to get a divorce from Rena’.
‘At least I would be getting married for love,’ he wrote. ‘Not as I had with Rena to get her out of trouble with the police. Rena had said she would divorce me when I wanted her to, but it was no good trying to sort it out with Rena until she stopped drinking so much.’
In September 1966 West changed jobs, partly in the hope of making it difficult for Rena to find him, leaving the slaughterhouse and turning instead to driving a sewage lorry, emptying septic tanks. At one stage during the summer he had been doing both a night and a day delivery run, leaving his children, wife and ‘nanny’ for hours at a time on the Sandhurst Lane site. It was then that he had first become friendly with a young local lad called Robin Holt, whom he said he found ‘crying’ one night on his way home to Sandhurst Lane.West had told Anna McFall that Holt was ‘unhappy at home’, and started to take the fifteen-year-old boy out with him in the lorry. There is little doubt that the boy was every bit as impressed by Frederick West’s bluster and bragging as McFall herself had been.
Only Rena West remained immune to West’s vain, chattering charm, a situation that obviously infuriated him. His account of the days at the Sandhurst Lane caravan site are punctuated with references to his first wife’s dangerous habits. ‘I was always nervous about what Rena was up to and where she was.’ She would dress up and go out in the evenings, not returning until ‘five-thirty or six’ the following morning, when she would be drunk. He suggested repeatedly that she was working as a prostitute in Gloucester at the time, and would regularly be picked up from the caravan site by a man called Rolf with ‘a flash car’, a man who was to reappear a number of times in his description of events in the years to come.
‘Anna was no match for Rena,’ West wrote. ‘But Anna would have a go; that was what was dangerous.Anna was not hard; she was gentle, kind and pleasant. She was my angel. Rena could be the devil if she wanted to be . . . I did not just love Anna, I worshipped her. If Anna had my baby that would be the answer to all my prayers.’
In late September 1966 Frederick West’s plan to evade his wife fell apart. Rena West turned up at the Watermead site, and West went to great pains to disguise his relationship with Ann McFall. Once again he sent McFall to stay with a friend, incidentally a woman who had followed them to Watermead from Sandhurst Lane. In the weeks to come West shuttled between the two Gloucester caravan sites, spending part of the evening with Ann McFall at a smaller caravan at Sandhurst Lane and part with Rena and their two daughters at Watermead. He still regularly took the six-feet-tall, fifteen-year-old Robin Holt out on runs with him in the sewage lorry.
More important still, whatever his commitments to Rena and Ann McFall,West had also lost none of his appetite for touring the countryside in search of young women.There were more than half a dozen violent sexual assaults on young women in the Gloucester area during the time that West was resident at Sandhurst Lane and Watermead, including one on a fifteen-year-old girl in the city. Many of them were carried out by men whose description fitted Frederick West, but the smiling lorry-driver was never suspected of anything.
Rena West’s wildness had not disappeared with her return to England. On 11 October 1966 she stole an iron, some cigarettes and money from another caravan at Watermead, and fled to Scotland in the hope of evading the police. The ruse did not work. She was arrested in Glasgow in mid-November, and a twenty-two-year-old woman police constable, Hazel Savage, who had joined the Gloucester Constabulary just two years previously, was dispatched to collect Rena and bring her back for trial. On the journey back to England, Rena West told the young policewoman how much she disliked her ‘cruel’ husband, who was always having affairs, and that she had committed the offences to ‘spite him’. (Nearly twenty-eight years later, Savage would be one of the five officers who knocked on the front door of 25 Cromwell Street on that Thursday afternoon in February.)
When Rena West stood trial for housebreaking and theft on 29 November 1966, her counsel maintained exactly the same line of argument, saying in his plea for leniency that the offences were ‘the actions of a jealous woman’, and adding that if she were sent to prison ‘her children must go into care’. Frederick West appeared before the court himself, admitting his relationship with Ann McFall, but adding that he intended to pay his wife’s fare back to Scotland. The pleas for leniency succeeded. Rena West was placed on probation, but she did not return to look after her children. Instead, she went back to Scotland. A delighted Ann McFall moved back from Sandhurst Lane to Watermead, and life with Frederick West.
In West’s version of their next few months together, he and Ann McFall were idyllically happy once again. They often made love on top of a concrete bunker that lay just above the Watermead site, and which West called ‘our heaven’. It was there, in late November 1966, that West said he made Ann McFall pregnant.‘Home to Anna was in my arms,’ he wrote at the end of his life. ‘Anna said: “I am going to have a baby just like you and name him Fred Junior.”’
‘I was proud of Anna and my daughters,’ West was to write. ‘The girls liked Dad to cook their dinner, because I would make a face on their plate. I would put the chips as hair, two eggs for the eyes.The nose and mouth was bacon, and beans for a beard.’Then he and Ann McFall would ‘put the girls to bed and say prayers with the girls’.
Shortly after her pregnancy was confirmed,West took the slight young woman with a broad Scottish accent to visit his parents in Much Marcle together with his two daughters. He drove them all there in his grain tanker, then went off to make a series of deliveries before coming back to collect them again. When he arrived back, ‘Anna was talking to my mother in the front room’, and that took him by surprise. ‘You had to be special for my mother to let you in there. Rena had never been in the front room. We were never allowed in there.’
His daughters were in the fields outside Moorcourt Cottage, playing with his sister’s rabbits, the family’s dogs and a goose.‘I had a chat with my father. He could not get over the size of the tanker I was driving.’ Ann McFall and his mother ‘got on well. That was the first girl I had my mother took to. I felt wonderful about it.’ His mother had prepared supper for the family. Afterwards, ‘Dad went out and came back with a bottle of home-made wine.We all got a glass full, and the two girls.Then Mother said a toast to Anna being pregnant.Anna looked at me and smiled . . . I smiled back.We both had tears in our eyes.’When he got back to the caravan site in Gloucester that evening, West remembered that he thought, ‘Now . . . it was time to start looking for a house or flat with a garden.’
What makes FrederickWest’s idealised version of his life with Ann McFall so chilling is how far it departs from reality. In December 1966, barely a month before her pregnancy was to be diagnosed, she told one social worker that there was ‘now nothing between them’ and suggested that the best thing ‘was to leave the caravan’. She even told the astonished social worker that West had planned to ‘artificially inseminate’ her, but there had been no need. For a time, Ann McFall moved back to Sandhurst Lane. But Frederick West knew that his two daughters were too strong a tie for the young Scot to break. By the middle of January McFall was again back with them at Watermead.
Frederick West practised his talent for manipulating young women on Ann McFall in a way that he had never been allowed to do by his wife Rena. McFall was his pupil, someone who would not question the wisdom of what he said or did, someone who could be moulded into the woman that he wanted. The only drawback was probably that she did not share his wife’s appetite for sexual experiment. Rena West’s sexual experience, and her willingness to deviate from the conventional forms of sexual intercourse, was one reason why her husband was always prepared to take her back – to the annoyance and anger of Ann McFall.
RenaWest’s overt sexuality is the hidden theme inWest’s memoirs of his time with Ann McFall.When he does describe it, he does so with a sense of awe, almost bewilderment, and casts himself in the role of the innocent rather than the fascinated, rapacious voyeur. At one point, for example, he describes going to the Bamboo Club in Bristol with his wife, and her friend Rolf, where they ‘had a drink and a dance’. His account continues:
Rena and Rolf were at the bar. I walked over to Rena and put my hand on her arm. A man grabbed me and said: ‘You touch her, you’re dead.’ Rena said,‘That’s my husband.’ So he put me down. He was Greek, six foot and four foot across, the biggest man I ever seen. I said to Rena:‘Who’s he?’ She said:‘My bodyguard.’
West was clearly enthralled. His wife then led him out of the club on the way to the party that she had announced she was taking him to.
Rena said: ‘You will have to be blindfolded.’ So I said: ‘All right.’ . . . We went down some steps and in a basement of a house. Rena took off the blindfold. I could not see, it was so dark. There were flashing lights, red, blue and yellow. It was full of black people and a smell of drugs.
There were four small tables in two rooms with what looked like Christmas cakes made with Christmas paper [on them]. Two spotlights came on. The paper was ripped off. There was young girls in them. They were drugged. They were handed round to drugged and drunken men.
In his prison memoir West maintained that all he wanted was to go back to ‘Anna, my angel’, although he also admits that ‘I got out of there after fourteen hours’.
Though he refused to admit it in his own writings, by this time Frederick West’s appetite for deviant sexuality was already formed. It had been shaped in Moorcourt Cottage and refined in the lanes of Gloucestershire. He had learned it peering through the keyholes and windows of Herefordshire cottages, and practised it in the orchards and fields that he worked in alongside his father. He had indulged it by acting as a minder for his prostitute wife among the cobbled alleys and stone closes of Glasgow, and returned to it in his native habitat of Gloucester, where she remained a prostitute. It was an appetite that could never be satisfied, one that demanded constant, relentless gratification; an appetite that craved the illicit, the unsuspecting, an appetite as powerful as a tyrant’s taste for blood.
It may well have been an appetite that Frederick West revealed and then demonstrated to Robin Holt, the ‘nice-looking’ fifteen-year-old that West found ‘sat on a gate crying’ in the lane that led to The Willows caravan site in Sandhurst Lane in the summer of 1966. He may well have treated him ‘like a son’, just as he had the three-year-old killed beneath the wheels of his ice-cream van in Glasgow, taking him out with him regularly in his lorry in the evenings. In his own account of those months, West reveals that he introduced the boy to his family, and ‘Robin got on well with my sister’, just as he welcomed the boy on to the caravan site with Ann McFall.
Late in February 1967 Robin Holt went missing from his home in Gloucester, but was seen shortly afterwards in Much Marcle. Nine days later, on 1 March 1967, the boy’s body was found hanged in a disused cow-shed not far from the Sandhurst Lane site. Pornographic magazines were found beside his body, with nooses drawn around the necks of the young women in their pages. At the inquest, the jury returned a verdict of suicide, and so it may well have been, a suicide brought on by guilt at what he had learned at the side of the small bushy-haired man who took him out night after night. Looking back, however, it is a little curious that the boy should choose to kill himself with a method that the man who had all but adopted him would himself choose almost twenty-eight years later.
Perhaps the only person who fully appreciated the darkness at the heart of Frederick West’s soul was his wife. She had seen it at first hand, and survived it. She had also sensed how she could control it, with the judicious use of her own sexual experience. It is the only consistent explanation for their intermittent marriage, he at once appalling her with his violence and sexual greed, she nevertheless never quite able to abandon her fixation for the swarthy stoat of a man whom she had first married five years before.
One person whom Frederick West may have confided in was his brother John.The two were still as close as they had been as children, and in the year since his return to Gloucester from Glasgow West had taken to visiting his brother regularly, usually to hold lengthy private conversations with him out of earshot of John’s new wife Catherine. West may even have boasted to his brother that he and Rena had developed a technique for befriending young girls in order to tempt them into prostitution, and that together they were supplying the girls for the parties that West described in Bristol.
No one can say for certain where Frederick West’s appetite for sexual bondage came from. It is entirely possible that it first appeared in adolescence, during apparently harmless games in the Much Marcle fields. But by the time he had reached maturity, it had come to express itself in a darker form. For West, bondage represented complete control over a sexual partner, whether willing or unwilling, the absolute acceptance that anything was possible, that nothing could or would ever be denied. It may well have been Rena West, then still Rena Costello, the experienced street prostitute from Glasgow, who first excited West to its significance and its potential, but there is little doubt that he rapidly became its devotee and advocate. For bondage allowed Frederick West to reveal his true feelings towards women, a loathing that he could not quite contain, a loathing that was symbolised in the violence implicit in the act of binding a woman until she was entirely powerless.
The victims cannot flee, for they have been rendered powerless; they can only wait and anticipate their fate. Bondage may lie at the heart of the death of Robin Holt, significantly hanging with a noose around his neck, for by then it had become the latest variation in Frederick West’s fascination with sex. Holt may have become West’s prey, or acted as his accomplice, as Rena had done, but the fact that he died in a form of bondage cannot be ignored. Bondage was to become one of the fingerprints of Frederick West’s sexuality, a deviation that he never lost the appetite for. Once captured, the prey was to be kept helpless, to be devoured as and when the predator chooses, in whatever way he chooses.
In his reminiscences at the end of his life, West makes not one single mention of his sexual appetites beyond saying that he would ‘make love’ to his ‘angel’ Ann McFall in their ‘heaven’ behind the Watermead caravan park. His true desires towards her are concealed beneath the sickly words and saccharine sentimentalism of his ‘eyes filling with tears’. But, as it was throughout his life, the truth was infinitely more terrifying. He wanted nothing more than utterly to control the pregnant seventeen-year-old Scottish girl, rendering her helpless to refuse him anything he desired.
There must have been an ever-present smile on Frederick West’s face as he began slowly to reveal to the pregnant girl exactly what sexual experiments were in his mind. Her letters to her alcoholic mother Jane merely peddled the fantasies that he had so carefully fed her, and her dislike of Rena meant there was no chance she could turn to her. She might argue with him but she could not shake off his hold upon her; her pride would never allow it, not now that she was pregnant.
Ann McFall could not have brought herself to admit to the local authority what was going on, even though she was being visited regularly, because of Charmaine and Anna-Marie. Shortly after her eighteenth birthday in April, however, the Gloucester authorities were indicating their concern in writing. A local official reported that they were ‘extremely worried about these children, who are being looked after by Annie McFall, who is expecting Mr West’s baby’. But they did not intervene, or suggest that they might take the children into care. Their report merely noted that the caravan ‘had become dilapidated’.
Four weeks later Rena West was back at Watermead caravan park, living in the now dilapidated caravan with her husband and looking after her two daughters. When the local authority enquired what had happened to Ann McFall, Frederick West simply told them that she was living in another caravan at the site. It was a technique of cheerfully helpful obeisance that he would perfect in the years to come whenever a local authority officer presented himself at his door. On this occasion it worked as it would work on so many other occasions in the years to come. The local authority official left satisfied that everything was in hand. The fact that Rena West stayed less than a fortnight, and Ann McFall again took her place, did not matter at all. When it found out, the local authority department suggested only that the children ‘are now thoroughly confused’. So, too, was the local authority. It was exactly what Frederick West intended.
When Rena West returned to Watermead again in July 1967, Frederick West did exactly as he had done twice before: he moved Ann McFall back to the small caravan he had rented specifically for her at Sandhurst Lane. She complained bitterly, suggesting that she was not going to put up with it, and reminding him that she was nearly seven months’ pregnant with his child. But he smoothed her ruffled feathers as he had done so many times in the past, and told her there was nothing to worry about. He would ‘sort everything out’. In the meantime it was best to ‘keep out of Rena’s way’. The explanation was partly true, as it was in so many of his lies, but the reality was also that a move to Sandhurst Lane meant that no one would know precisely what had happened to her.
If Ann McFall were now to disappear, who would be in the least surprised?