THE ABORTIONIST
‘No one ever suddenly became depraved.’
JUVENAL, SATIRES
The sexual frenzy that had swept over Frederick West in adolescence had become an addiction. He could think of nothing else. Women were objects to satisfy his desires, and if they said no they could not really mean it. His wife Rena understood that, and he had tried to explain it to Ann McFall. He had even enticed her into experimenting in bondage in the small rented caravan at Sandhurst Lane. But she was now almost seven months’ pregnant, her unborn child inhibiting both her sexuality and her freedom of movement. She was tired, she was fractious, and she was only eighteen years old. But there was nothing that angered Frederick West more than a woman who said no.
Alone in the small caravan in the first days of August 1967, Ann McFall decided to leave Gloucester and Frederick West. Rena was back, and there was her own child to think about. She was not prepared to shuttle back and forth between Watermead and Sandhurst Lane any longer, only stepping into the gap in his life when Rena disappeared. She would pack her bags and return to Glasgow.That was the obvious thing to do. She could stay with her mother for a time – after all, she had kept in touch with her – and there was still her friend Isa McNeill; even if she were married now, she would help. Ann McFall slowly packed her belongings into a small suitcase and prepared to leave Sandhurst Lane, and Gloucester, for ever.
When Frederick West came to visit her that evening, as he usually did after seeing Rena and his daughters at Watermead, Ann McFall told him she was leaving, and he lost his temper completely. The obsequious little man, who made sure to smile at anyone in authority, revealed again the violence that lay beneath the surface. He screamed and shouted at the pregnant girl, throwing things around the caravan, and threatening her with the knife that he always wore at his belt.
Frederick West may even have stabbed and killed Ann McFall in the caravan on that August evening. No one can be absolutely sure. For West went to his grave denying forcefully that he had killed the pregnant young Glaswegian. Time after time he would sob that he had ‘nothing whatever to do with her death’, repeating it in interview after interview, insisting that someone else had killed her, and inventing endless variations of what had happened. In particular, he repeatedly blamed his wife Rena for Ann’s death.
Nevertheless, after insisting in hours of police interviews that he knew nothing whatever about her death, West admitted to his solicitor Howard Ogden in July 1994 that he had actually been present when she died. It was the first occasion on which he accepted that he had been involved. But West’s version of the death of Ann McFall, like so many of his other explanations of his actions, contained both fantasy and fiction, as well as a kernel of truth.
‘Ann to me was perfect,’ he explained in Winson Green Prison in July 1994. ‘She was prepared to give her life for me . . . But she used to accuse me of thinking of Rena all the time. We had plans for me and Ann to just disappear . . . drift away.’ But West did not have the courage to leave his wife and children. ‘When I was with Ann I was all for it, but I wasn’t, I wasn’t, if you know what I mean . . . I didn’t know what to do.’
West told his wife that Ann McFall had ‘gone and left me’, even though he had simply moved her to Sandhurst Lane. One night, he ‘got back to Sandhurst, must have been about half-past eleven at night. I parked the lorry in the road . . . and came through the back way straight into the caravan.There’s Rolf and Rena in there. Rena’s absolutely out of her brains. She hadn’t got a clue where she was, what she’d done.’
‘So, of course, I said, “Where’s Ann?” and Rolf said, “Come outside.” So we went round the back of the caravan and he said, “Rena’s stabbed Ann – by mistake”.
‘Now I quite believed that. I don’t think that Rena would have done it absolutely deliberate. I think she was so drugged out of her brains and everything else, drink and everything else, that she stabbed Ann.
‘Anyway I said to Rolf:“What the bloody hell we going to do?” And he said: “You ain’t got no choice.” And I thought, Fuck me. I knew exactly what he meant.
‘Whether Rolf was actually there when Rena stabbed Ann, I don’t know. Or whether she rung him and he came to her, and bring that case to her. I’d never seen that case . . . It was a massive bloody case. He said: “We’re going to take her and put her on the tip, Gloucester tip.”
‘By this time ‘I am literally brain dead. The mind’s just gone. I hadn’t got a clue what I was thinking, or saying, or nothing.’
None the less West was capable of saying, according to his version of events:‘No, the only place you can put her is in our special place at Marcle.’
‘We drove out there, and me and him dug the hole together, and Rena was sat in the car, watching Ann. Then we both walked back up the field, and then him and Rena went down with the car and put Ann in and covered her up, and come back to me. I was sat on the tank beside the gate splashing water on me face. And that was it.’
‘As far as I know she wasn’t touched,’West insisted in his version of events, a version that he embellished and altered repeatedly.
At one stage Rena West had ‘gone off for two or three days at the time Ann disappeared’, leaving a hugely fat female friend to look after Charmaine and Anna-Marie. Then his wife had ‘forged a letter’ from Ann McFall telling him that she had ‘gone back to Scotland’, so that he would not look for her. ‘She was a brilliant forger, mind.’ Then Rena had gone off and killed her on her own. In another version his father had told him that a neighbour in Much Marcle had seen ‘his wife and a man’ in a nearby field one night that month.
As ever, the reality was quite different. For although he would deny it until the day of his own death, the murder of Ann McFall carries the unmistakable signature of Frederick West, a signature that was to be found on every other murder that he was to commit in the next twenty-seven years. The death and dismemberment of the girl he called ‘a dainty little piece’ was to be repeated almost exactly at least eleven more times during the rest of his life.
By West’s own admission, the young Scottish woman was in the habit of waiting for him in bed at her caravan every evening wearing ‘only a cardigan’. They would make love, and then West would leave to return to his wife at Watermead. He relished the opportunity, but there is no doubt that Rena West had discovered that Ann McFall had not ‘gone off ’ as her husband had told her she had, and was extremely angry. There is also no doubt that Ann McFall was planning to return to Scotland, to give birth to her child in two months’ time. Frederick West seized the opportunity to rid himself of a troublesome problem.
On the night of her death in August 1967,West may have argued with his young lover in her caravan at Sandhurst Lane, and it is possible that – as he later suggested – she was ‘stabbed through the heart’ during a quarrel, although by West himself rather than his wife Rena. But it is far more likely that his sugary words would have worked their charm on her, and she would have welcomed him back into her bed. For in spite of her experiences, Ann McFall was still a young and impressionable girl, the same girl who had written to her mother for months past to tell her about the wonderful man she was going to marry. In her mind, even though she may have threatened that she was going to leave him, there was still hope. She was younger, more attractive than his wife, and she was prepared to agree to experiment sexually. What she could not know was that West had lost patience and decided to kill her. It seems almost certain that Ann, wearing only a blue patterned round-necked cardigan, agreed to make love to Frederick West that night, and died, literally, in bondage.
When her body was eventually discovered, more than a quarter of a century later, her hands were still tied, and a long length of rope was twisted around her arms.Whether West overpowered her and forced her to submit to being tied up, or whether she allowed herself to be tied up willingly as part of her desire to satisfy her lover, no one will ever know. But it is highly likely that she died during the act of intercourse, either strangled by her lover or, more probably, stabbed in the heart immediately after his own orgasm.
Frederick West had already worked out what he was going to do. There was no panic in his actions that night, no sense that he had stepped across a boundary in his life that he would never be able to re-cross. He calmly wrapped her lifeless body in the quilt from the bed they were lying on and carried it out to his lorry. It was an experience that he did not enjoy, and would make sure never to repeat. In future he would never transport a dead body any distance.
West then drove Ann McFall’s body to Much Marcle to a place he knew, a place that was quiet, and a place that even if he was seen at no one would ask any questions. He trusted Much Marcle to keep his secrets, just as his father had done. Frederick West had already decided to bury the remains, just as a poacher would have done. His prey had served its purpose. But he was a countryman, and he did not believe in throwing a carcass carelessly away to be discovered by a wandering fox. That was an amateur’s mistake, a mistake that any decent gamekeeper would see in an instant. No one would discover a deep, well-dug hole, especially a small one. A patch of earth could conceal a thousand secrets. The countryside, especially his own native countryside, looked after its own. A body was to return to the soil, as it had done for centuries.
West chose the site with infinite care. He wanted the body to be within sight of his home at Moorcourt Cottage in Much Marcle, but he also wanted it to be in Gloucestershire, for that was the county he now identified himself with. He had known since childhood exactly where the county boundary with Herefordshire ran, and he chose a site just on the Gloucestershire side, in Fingerpost Field, where he had worked with his father as a boy.
He also knew that it was August, and the ground would be hard from the summer sun, so West had carefully chosen a place where the ground would be softer, but where the disturbance to the earth would not be noticed, because cattle trod it night and morning as they came to drink.West and his father had constructed a ‘concrete ramp which we put in there, years and years ago, and the water builds up just in front of it, and then runs over it, and the cattle get in there and drink’. In the darkness of the night, Frederick West dug a hole in the damp earth where the water ran over into the field, and he did so exactly as he had done countless times in the past to plant a tree or a stake.
With Ann McFall’s body hidden just inside the wood at his back, still wrapped in her rose-patterned quilt, West dug a small deep oblong hole, a place to hide remains, not a grave for a human being. It was fifteen inches wide and twenty-eight inches long, and a little over three feet deep, and it took him less than half an hour.
Used to hard physical labour, and to the sight of blood, West then put his experience in the slaughterhouse to good effect.With the body over the hole, West set about dismembering it, allowing the escaping blood to seep into the hole. He used the knife he kept in his belt to cut off the pregnant young woman’s legs at the hip, twisting her thighs out of their sockets; then he pushed what remained of her body into the hole, pelvis first, shoving the thigh bones down each side after her.There was no frenzy in his actions; he worked as methodically as a slaughterhouse man would have done, and with exactly the same matter-of-factness. The body passing through his hands was no longer a living being but simply a piece of meat to be stored out of sight.
Ann McFall’s body held one fascination for West, however. It contained an unborn child. And, like any predator, he took exceptional interest in a pregnant victim, anxious to root out the foetus, to satisfy a morbid curiosity. West had become fascinated with female anatomy, steadily taking a greater and greater interest in the genital organs, even to the extent of boasting that he could perform abortions, so intimately did he ‘understand the workings of the womb’. Frederick West would not have been able to resist the temptation to breach one of the last taboos, and dissect the young Scottish woman’s stomach: not least to determine whether she would have given birth to the son that they had discussed so often. When Ann McFall’s remains were eventually unearthed in that Gloucestershire field, the unborn child’s tiny, barely formed bones were found by her side.
But the remains were more than a fascination; they were also a trophy, proof that Frederick West was no ordinary man. From now on Ann McFall was condemned to remain within his power and control, even within his sight when he went to visit his mother and father. And just as he buried her remains, he buried the few remaining mementoes of her life alongside her. West threw the floral quilt into the narrow hole after her, along with the cardigan she had been wearing, wrapped in two plastic bags that he had in the lorry because there had been so much blood on it.As he swiftly shovelled the damp earth on top of her on that warm August night, the only thing the eighteen-year-old girl was wearing was a small cross-patterned ring that he had given to her. Her unborn child was her only companion.
West also took his own mementoes from Fingerpost Field. Before he interred the young woman’s dismembered body, he removed forty-two of Ann McFall’s bones. Mostly they were her fingers and toes, as well as some of the bones from her ankle and wrist, but he also took the upper half of the left shin, the slenderest bone in the body, and the right twelfth rib. Part of his reason lay in a desire to eliminate any possibility that she could be identified if, by chance, the body were ever discovered. But there was another, grimmer reason. The bones were the ultimate proof of West’s dominance over the inanimate woman in the ground; elements that only he would understand; trophies of his power. Ann McFall’s bones carried no fear for the tiny wiry man, as he collected them and washed his arms and chest clean in the field’s cattle trough. Frederick West was only too familiar with the smell of blood, just as he was with the bones of a slaughtered calf.
There is not much doubt that there would have been a small, sly grin on his face as he opened the door to his caravan on the Watermead site in the early hours of the morning, pulled off the soiled overalls and climbed into bed with his wife. On his way, he would certainly have kissed his children good night as they slept, for he did so every other night, just as he may well have demanded to make love to her, as he did on almost every other night. Why should this be an exception?
The following morning Frederick West returned to Fingerpost Field. From the cab of his lorry he probably admired his handiwork, noticing that it was impossible to see where the ground had been disturbed in the muddy footprints of the cattle. Then he did as he so often did when he drove the road from Dymock to Much Marcle: he went in search of the man whose approval he wanted more than any other, his father. Almost twenty-seven years later Frederick West would confess: ‘I went to my father and told him what had happened. I asked him to go up there with me, ’cause I couldn’t go up there on me own. So he walked up there with me, and we’re stood there talking.’
‘I set myself up round me father,’ West explained. ‘My old man was great. Me and him got on ace. He was my God, like. Me and him never ever fell out in our life. If I ever had a problem – straight to Dad. When I buried Ann I went straight to Dad. Same thing. I wanted to be my father. I admired all he stood for.’ Certainly,Walter West did not condemn his son in the August of 1967. Instead he told him:‘I’m your father. I’m not going to turn you in or nothing. If you can live with it I’ll say nothing, leave it.’ The family’s secrets were still not to be revealed to the outside world. Frederick West went to see his father ‘every day for about a month’ thereafter, because, as he was to explain many years later,‘you know me, I got to talk about it’.
The other person West certainly talked to was his wife. Rena West may have been horrified by her husband’s confession, but it is far more likely that it merely confirmed her worst fears. She knew his appetite for violence, and the cruelty that he was capable of towards women. She had suffered it for five years, and had told John McLachlan about it in Glasgow. She knew that he liked to tie up young girls and sexually abuse them; he had even encouraged her to help him do it. Killing them was simply the next step. Now, just as Walter West agreed to keep the secret, so too did Rena West.
FrederickWest may have told his father that Rena was responsible for Ann McFall’s death, just as he may well have told his wife that it was an accident. To lie, for him, was as automatic as breathing. Secrets were power. If no one knew everything, no one could harm him. And, as his family knew only too well, Frederick West was not a man to volunteer information. People had to ask, and they had to ask the right question, before he would consider telling them anything. If they did not ask the right questions, then he would simply spin them a story, as he had always done. That way no one could threaten him.
‘When that accident happened that Ann got killed,’West would recall at the end of his life, ‘it give a sort of grip of Rena for a while.’ Rena West’s attitude to her husband changed after the death of Ann McFall. ‘Rena made me a load of promises . . . That she was going to stay with me, look after the children, never mess about and all that.’ One explanation was that she was terrified that the same fate might befall her, or that he might implicate her in the murder, as at the very least a willing accomplice. Whatever the precise explanation, from then on ‘She was with me for about twelve months, living on and off, gone, come back, gone, come back’. It was the longest period she had consistently spent with her husband since their marriage.
Rena West was no innocent bystander in the life of Frederick West. By his account she had even used Ann McFall to help her to entice girls into prostitution. ‘That’s what Ann was used for, to mingle among these girls, in Manchester, Salford, Bristol, Reading, talking to them, starting on the game.That’s why Rena came every so often and took her,’ West maintained. ‘Rena used to get these young girls for these bloody parties. They used to get these young girls from homes – runaways from homes – take ’em to these parties and give ’em a right rough time.And then they used to beat the life out of them, then put them on the game, drugs, whatever.’
West’s version of events could be an exaggeration, even a fabrication, but there is no doubt that Rena West knew and exploited her husband’s appetite for sex with young and vulnerable women, including Ann McFall.As West was to put it himself,‘Rena would come and stay with me for a while, then she’d piss off.Then Ann would come and stay. Then Rena would come back and just chuck Ann out. She’d say, “Right you, out”.’ Rena West could not have failed to take an interest in what happened to the girl she would so often ‘chuck out’.
No one missed Ann McFall.Though West insisted on more than one occasion that he had reported her missing to the police, the police themselves can find no record that he did so. West cleared out the caravan he had rented for her, telling the Sandhurst Lane site that she had gone back to Glasgow, and her friends in Glasgow assumed that the end of the letters she habitually used to send meant only that she had sorted out a new life for herself in England. Her father was already dead himself when she disappeared from Sandhurst Lane, and her mother was to die of malnutrition barely eighteen months later. Her daughter did not return for the funeral, but no one took much notice. By then there was no one to grieve, or search, for the dainty girl with a ‘braw Scots accent’.
With Rena West now more settled at Watermead than she had ever been, Frederick West went back to work, confident that his secret was safe within his two families. And so it was, even though his mother Daisy West discovered within a few days that her son had killed Ann McFall.Walter West himself must have told her one night at Moorcourt Cottage, but no matter how great the shock, the family’s loyalty to each other held. In Daisy West’s eyes, her Freddie was still the blue-eyed boy he had been as a child; she would not disclose anything he might have done to anyone outside the family. She had not even done so during the incest case against him six years before.
Daisy West kept the secret to herself, until one evening later in the month she broke down and cried at the kitchen table, telling her son John: ‘Freddie’s killed the girl and buried her in Kempley Woods.’ But she went no further, and no one pressed her to. In spite of the accusation, neither she nor her husband, nor any other member of the West family, discussed the matter with the police or with anyone else. And none of them went to search the fields near Kempley Woods for the body.
Frederick West did, however, take the precaution of leaving Watermead caravan site. It was already scheduled for conversion to a housing estate, and builders had begun work on part of the site early in 1967. Now the development was to press ahead, and West seized the opportunity to leave without arousing any suspicion. But he did not return to Sandhurst Lane in Gloucester. Instead, for the first time since leaving Much Marcle, he moved to somewhere else altogether. To Bishop’s Cleeve, almost ten miles away, and just over three miles north of the neighbouring town of Cheltenham. It was one of the biggest geographical moves West had ever made, almost as large as his move into Gloucester from Much Marcle. To a man used to treading familiar paths, retracing his steps whenever he could, Bishop’s Cleeve was a significant distance away from his favourite stamping-grounds. But he had worked there before, as a bakery roundsman.
This time West rented a permanent caravan, rather than transporting his own, taking number 17 on the Lake House site off Stoke Road at the edge of Bishop’s Cleeve. Like most of the others on the site, the caravan looked like one of the prefabs put up at the end of the war to accommodate some of the returning troops. It had no wheels, stood on a firm concrete base, and had a small garden. A little over twenty feet long, with two bedrooms, a lounge and small dining area, it also boasted an indoor bathroom and lavatory. West moved his wife and their two daughters in during the first week of October 1967, and subsequently he got a job as a labourer at Oldacres, a flour and animal feed manufacturer in Bishop’s Cleeve.
Not that his job was his only interest. At West’s encouragement, Rena went back to prostitution at Bishop’s Cleeve, sometimes using the caravan at Lake House as her base, and he took some delight in suggesting to any likely young woman whom he came across that she ‘could make a fortune’ on the streets of Cheltenham. ‘Women are sitting on a fortune,’ he would say with a smirk.‘Thing is, they don’t always know it.’ Within a few weeks Frederick West had turned up at his parents’ cottage in Much Marcle with another young woman who was not his wife, but no one made the slightest comment.This time the girl was short and blonde, with hair rather shorter than Ann McFall’s, but once again she was fifteen or sixteen years old, and Frederick West had the familiar sly grin on his face.
The deceit that characterised West’s attitude to women extended into every other area of his life. Everyone, man or woman, was to be taken advantage of, if an opportunity presented itself. The rules were there to be bent, the law to be evaded. All that was necessary to get away with it was a fast tongue and the ability to keep moving. West was certainly not above deceiving his own family. The hire-purchase agreement which he had taken out for his caravan on Sandhurst Lane at the beginning of 1966 had been guaranteed by his brother-in-law but, typically, Frederick West had ‘forgotten’ to keep up the payments, and the company had started to pursue him. It proved no easy task, for every time the company searched for him at Sandhurst Lane, the neighbours would insist he was at Watermead, but every time the company arrived there he was, of course, at Sandhurst Lane. In desperation, the hire-purchase company began to pursue West’s sister and her husband. But when they asked him,West insisted he had been paying, showing a set of receipts, which later turned out to be false. Eventually, the company repossessed the caravan, which was one reason for his decision to rent one at Bishop’s Cleeve, but West’s disregard for the truth, and the law, never left him.
Now almost twenty-seven,West had become a character worthy of Dickens, an apparently humble man only too adept at concealing his true desires, and intentions, behind an obsequious grin and a careful ordinariness. He would brag that he could ‘help any woman out’, if they had a problem, and insinuate that he knew more about sex than their boyfriends did. At the Lake House site he would invite local girls to see his ‘pictures’, locking the door quickly behind them as they climbed into the caravan after peering out to see if anyone had watched them go in. More often than not the ‘pictures’ showed his wife in sexually explicit poses.West took care to make sure that the curtains were always drawn.
There were plenty of opportunities forWest to find a replacement for Ann McFall, to groom another young woman to become his sexual apprentice. Just as he had done in Ledbury five years before, he spent his spare time in the Gloucester cafés, talking to the young waitresses, impressing them with his experience, enticing them to take a trip with him in his newly purchased green van. One café West visited regularly was the Pop-In in Southgate Street, only a few yards from the city’s docks and quays alongside the Sharpness Canal. The café attracted motorcycle gangs, and West was more than willing to brag about his 1000-cc Triumph and the accident that led to him ‘waking up on a mortuary slab’. He also liked to try to beat its one-armed bandit. ‘I was a bit addicted to that actually at one time.’ One of the young waitresses at the Pop-In was a short, slim girl of fifteen, whose straight shoulder-length blonde hair was usually parted in the middle. Her name was Mary Bastholm.
Shortly after seven o’clock in the evening of Saturday 6 January 1968, Mary Bastholm disappeared. She was last seen standing at a bus stop in Bristol Road in Gloucester, not far from the café and the youth club she attended at Quedgeley.The night she went missing she was on her way to visit her boyfriend, who lived about five miles away, and was carrying a white plastic carrier-bag with a Monopoly set in it, presumably to play that evening. She never reached her boyfriend’s home. Indeed, she was never seen again. Mary Bastholm simply disappeared off the face of the earth on that January night in 1968.
No one can say for certain that Mary Bastholm went out with Frederick West. He denied repeatedly before his death that he had been in any way involved in her disappearance, although he did recall that he and Rena, together with the children, had been stopped at a police checkpoint during the search for the missing girl. Rena was driving a ‘blue Beetle’, he remembered, that ‘she’d driven down in from Scotland’. West insisted that he ‘didn’t have a vehicle at that time’, even though his family remember him arriving at Much Marcle in an old green van. Indeed, Rena West taught his sister Gwen to drive in the van a few months later.
West must certainly have seen Mary Bastholm at the Pop-In. He was even employed there for a short time on some straightforward building work. It is almost certain that Mary knew Ann McFall, and that she was the slim blonde girl he took to Much Marcle not long after McFall’s disappearance. Shortly before his death, West hinted both to his son and to his first solicitor that he was responsible for her disappearance, but gave little more away. Although he made a habit of picking up young waitresses, and had even married one, there is nothing to prove conclusively that he had abducted and killed the young blonde waitress. Rena West may have met Mary Bastholm on a visit to Lake House to see West’s pictures, or she may have been with her husband when he offered the fifteen-year-old a lift at the bus stop on Bristol Road on that Saturday evening in 1968. But she, too, is not alive to tell us.
The hunt for Mary Bastholm was extensive and relentless. Gloucester police sought the assistance of Scotland Yard.Volunteers searched local waste land.There was even a television appeal, which Walter and Daisy West would have seen on their set at Much Marcle. But no trace of the girl, her clothing, or her bag with its Monopoly set was ever found. She disappeared into thin air, never to be seen or heard from again, one of the many mysteries that haunt the life of Frederick Walter Stephen West.
There is absolutely no doubt, however, that the disappearance of Mary Bastholm bears every hallmark of the actions of Frederick West. She was young, impressionable, attractive and a little naive. To her West would have seemed a worldly figure, prepared to treat her like a woman rather than a child, intriguing her with his discussions of a sexuality that she had yet to experience fully. It was a lure that he would return to time after time throughout his life, and it would always serve him well. Ugly though the thought may be, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that he raped and killed the young Gloucester girl and buried her, as he had buried Ann McFall, in a place that he knew well. The fields and woods of Gloucestershire within sight of Moorcourt Cottage may hold many secrets still. The fact that West was not prepared to divulge them only underlines how little he was ever prepared to give away – until he was ready to.
Daisy West may well have suspected as much. For while the police hunt for Mary Bastholm was at its height, she was taken to Hereford Hospital suffering from a suspected heart-attack. The woman who had burst into tears just five months before with the words ‘Freddie’s killed the girl and buried her in Kempley Woods’ may well have wondered whether the same fate had overtaken the slim blonde girl the police were looking for on television.Two days later, on 6 February 1968, Daisy West died at the age of forty-four, after another sudden heart-attack.
One person who did not shed a single tear at her funeral three days later was Daisy West’s eldest son. ‘I thought I got to be brave here. It’s not good me bawling me eyes out with them,’ Frederick West insisted later. But as he stood in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s, in the shade of one of the oldest yew trees in England, Frederick West whispered to his wife, who was standing beside him:‘We should sell her clothes.’The rest of the West family were horrified.