BLOODY PARTNERSHIP
‘Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone, The wild are constant and the cunning known.’
ALEXANDER POPE, EPISTLES TO SEVERAL PERSONS, ‘TO LORD COBHAM’
When her daughter Charmaine died, Rena West was not in Scotland but in Reading, and she was travelling regularly to Gloucester.‘She would visit Charmaine at school, and take her out for the day,’ Frederick West would recount later, ‘’cause she was running some sort of prostitute ring in Gloucester from a pub in Barton Street.’ His wife was also visiting Rosemary Letts at Midland Road, possibly to recruit her sexual services and provide her with clients, but also, perhaps, for sexual reasons of her own. ‘Whether Rose and Rena was having an affair, I don’t know,’West himself explained. ‘Could have been. I wasn’t there.’
Certainly, Rosemary Letts knew Rena West a great deal more intimately than she would admit almost a quarter of a century later.The Scottish woman was a familiar part of both her own and Frederick West’s life. Far from being someone whom Rosemary Letts had never met, as she would insist at her trial, Rena West had shared with her the caravan at Lake House, the room at Clarence Road in Cheltenham, and the flat at Midland Road from time to time. Rena West was no stranger to Rosemary Letts, any more than she was to the West family.
But Rena West was almost certainly not at Midland Road when her daughter Charmaine was murdered. In all probability she was busy elsewhere, working as a prostitute, hoping, no doubt, that her daughter was being looked after. Though she may have suspected, or known, the fate of Ann McFall, it is unlikely that she would have suspected that Frederick West would harm her first-born child. He had shown no inclination to do so before, even bringing her back with him from Scotland in the winter of 1965. But Rena West had not reckoned with Rosemary Letts.
For the determined young woman from Bishop’s Cleeve, Frederick West was everything she wanted.What was past was past. Now they were going to make a new life together. And there was no room in their relationship for a third partner, certainly no room for Rena West.The woman intent on ‘having their son’, as West had put it in his letter from prison, would not allow anyone to interfere with her plan. And by the beginning of August 1971 there was the added danger that Rena West might come to realise exactly what had happened to her daughter Charmaine. There seems no doubt whatever that Rosemary Letts demanded Rena West be killed in case she went to the police about Charmaine.
Fear for the fate of the child may have been the reason for Rena West’s going once again to consult Walter West in Much Marcle. Several members of the West family saw her drive out to Moorcourt Cottage one afternoon in August 1971 and walk down to the fields to where West was working. The two of them remained there in conversation for the rest of the afternoon. It could very well be that Rena West went to tell Walter West that she suspected that his son had killed a second time, and that this time she would not cover up for him. But whether Walter West then warned his son that his wife was about to report the disappearance of Charmaine to the police can only be a matter for speculation.
Whatever the truth, one thing is certain. Shortly after her visit to his father, Frederick West decided to kill his wife. She now posed too great a threat to his relationship with Rosemary Letts, and she knew enough to threaten his freedom. Rena West’s visit to Much Marcle was the last time that anyone in the West family, including Walter West, saw the twenty-eight-year-old Scottish woman alive. Significantly, near the end of his life West admitted:‘My father and Rena were close. Whether the old man was having an affair with her I don’t know.’
In late August 1971, shortly after her visit to Much Marcle, West arranged to meet his wife at the East End Tavern in Barton Street in Gloucester at nine-thirty one evening. ‘She was with a gang of Irish blokes’ and was drunk by the time he got there, he recalled twenty-five years later. ‘Now Rena was always very loving when she got drunk, and that was how we came to go out there – to our favourite spot near Much Marcle.’ Frederick West offered her a lift in a car that he had borrowed from Rolf, the pimp who was now helping him to find clients for Rosemary Letts, and he helped her into the front passenger seat. Halfway to Much Marcle, however, West stopped to help her into the back, ‘’cause she was so drunk’.
It was dark when they arrived at the entrance to Letterbox Field, on the road between Dymock and Much Marcle, but there was enough moonlight for Frederick West’s purpose. He helped his drunken wife out of the car, took a rug out of the boot, and walked up the side of the cornfield in the moonlight to an oak tree on its western edge. ‘I woke her up and we got out and we made love against . . . by the tree there, just on the edge of the field,’ West told the police twenty-one years later. Shortly afterwards they walked halfway back towards the car, sat on the bank ‘and made love again there’.
‘Then we went back to the car, and then I lost my head with her a bit and we had a right set-to, and a right row . . . and that was when she ended up getting killed . . . I just smashed her against the gate.’ And ended her life, he said, by kicking his wife to death on the ground.
The confession bears the hallmark of every one of Frederick West’s many and varied confessions. It attempts to portray him as a man suddenly overtaken by events, a man who acts spontaneously, a man to whom murder simply happens as if by accident. As ever, it is a gross distortion, but one built on a flimsy fabric of truth. In fact, Frederick West had chosen the site at which to kill his wife with considerable care, just as he had enticed her to the spot by preying on her remaining affection for him.There would have been a winning smile on his face as he made love to her twice in that moonlit field in Gloucestershire, a field alongside the one in which he had already buried his former girlfriend, Ann McFall.
It is almost impossible to believe that Rena West would have agreed to go out to Letterbox Field with him on that August evening if she had known for certain that Ann McFall’s body was buried within a few hundred yards of the point at which they made love, although it is just possible that she may have convinced herself that she was still his only true partner, the one woman whom he truly loved. It is far more probable that her affection for West was far greater than even he would admit, and that she expressed it in the only way she knew – in the act of intercourse. It is all the more possible, therefore, that Frederick West killed his wife, as he had killed Ann McFall, in the actual act of sexual intercourse.
After his arrest Frederick West maintained at one point that ‘I didn’t know what to do then. It was the first time I’d been ever mixed up in anything like that, so the only thing I could think of was to bury her in the field’. Though it hardly fits into this ‘spontaneous’ explanation of her death, West then added that he happened to have a pickaxe and a spade, both of them needed to bury the body, in the boot of the car, as well as a curved two-and-a-half-feet-long Jamaican sabre knife, which he could use to dismember the body: ‘I had that give me some years back for chopping nettles,’ he said.
‘It was in the middle of summer and the ground was rock-hard,’ he explained, so the process of digging a hole took him half an hour.‘Then the problem was it wasn’t half big enough . . . and then I realised that I couldn’t get her in there, so I then decided to cut her up and put her in there.’ Shortly after eleven o’clock that night, Frederick West ‘took her legs off and her head off ’, and buried his wife’s body in the hole in Letterbox Field.
One reason why he decapitated his wife may lie in West’s experience in the slaughterhouses of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, as well as his determination not to leave traces of blood either on the side of the road or even in the field itself. He chose a method which he had seen when he had worked as a driver for the slaughterhouse, because he knew how effective it could be in ensuring that as little blood as possible was spilled on the ground. Near the end of his life West would explain to his first solicitor, Howard Ogden:‘When you kill veal, you must cut the head straight off – alive. They don’t stun them or nothing, because every bit of blood’s got to be got out.’ There is every possibility that he laid Rena West’s body over the small narrow shaft he had dug for her, and let the blood flow from her neck into the hole.
After he had finished he went back to the cattle trough in the field and washed his hands and upper body, because he had been working dressed only in his trousers. ‘It was hot digging, and I was used to not wearing a shirt.’Then, after ‘a cigarette’, he ‘tied all her clothes in a big chunky sweater she wore’ and ‘chucked them over into a fire’ that he insisted was blazing in a nearby field, which West knew as ‘The Allotments’.
Letterbox Field, like Fingerpost Field, where Ann McFall’s body was buried, was within sight of Moorcourt Cottage. It was a field that he had helped to plough and reap as a child. ‘The reason I know all these fields there are because I worked on them when I was a young kiddy . . . I was the only one that would mow it,’West recalled. He also planned with some thought an exact location for her body, burying her remains at the side of the field under an oak tree, not least because the ripe metre-high corn would shield him from any passing car. Besides, West maintained, ‘being a farmer all my life, the last thing I wanted to do was destroy the crop . . . so where you get a tree the grain wouldn’t grow.’
Though West would insist that he ‘hadn’t gone out there to kill Rena’, and had gone only because ‘we always went up there to sit on this bridge and watch badgers. It was quite a romantic little place to sit, actually.You could see foxes and all that, various animals’, there is no doubt that he had chosen Letterbox Field for exactly the same reason he had chosen the next field as the final burial site for Ann McFall.
Rena West, like Ann McFall, had served her purpose for Frederick West; each had given him her own version of love. In his mind their deaths were to be his tributes to them, his works of art. For they bore his signature as surely and unmistakably as if they had been canvases he had painted. Both graves were to be within his sight whenever he wanted to see them, both within his control, set beside each other like tombstones in his own personal country churchyard.
West buried his wife within a hundred yards or so of the young Scottish woman’s body, and he buried them both in an identical manner. Both Rena West and Ann McFall were buried in thin narrow shafts of almost identical shape and size: twenty-eight inches by fifteen across, and a little over three-and-a-half feet deep. And both women were naked and dismembered when they were shoved unceremoniously into the Gloucestershire soil. Like Ann McFall, Rena West’s body was also interred with a number of bones missing, a total of forty-one in all. Her left kneecap was missing, as were a large number of hand and foot bones.Those bones may well have found their way into the boot of the car West had borrowed for the evening, to be taken back to Gloucester, to the small shed he had recently hired alongside his new allotment at Podmore, the allotment where he may really have destroyed his wife’s few remaining clothes.
Only one stray item found its way into Rena West’s narrow grave: a child’s small red plastic boomerang with ‘Woomerang, Boomerang’ written on it. It almost certainly belonged to her daughter Charmaine, and was West’s way of burying the newly dead child with her mother, a grim memento of his power over them both. Frederick West gave his own version of how the four-inch-long red plastic boomerang had found its way into his wife’s grave. ‘She must have had it in her pocket or something when I took her clothes off. It must have fell in.’The explanation does not hold water, not least because only moments before he had insisted she hardly had any clothes on when they made love – ‘only a grey skirt, I think; she never wore much anyway’ – and because he took pains to remove everything else that could possibly have identified the body of his wife. It was to be almost twenty-three years before the body of the young Scottish woman was recovered by the police, just four days before what would have been her fiftieth birthday.
Frederick West did not go to visit his father in Moorcourt Cottage the night on which he killed his wife, although he admitted later: ‘If there had been a light on, I would have went in.’ Instead, he took the car back to Gloucester, and went home to Rosemary Letts, the woman whom he had called ‘His Darling Wife’ just three months before in a letter which ended ‘Mr and Mrs R West forever’. Rena West had been the first woman to expand his sexual horizons, introduced him to the pleasures, and profits, to be had from prostitution, as well as to the excitement to be gathered from more and more deviant forms of sexuality, but now her role had been usurped by a woman whom Frederick West admitted ‘was just as vicious as what Rena was’, Rosemary Pauline Letts.
Frederick West and Rosemary Letts would maintain steadfastly for almost two-and-a-half decades that Rena and Charmaine West had gone off together to Scotland, to London or to Saudi Arabia to start a new life together. And no one suspected that it was not the truth. Why should they? Rena West had been coming and going to and from Gloucester for several years, disappearing to Scotland, Reading, London or Manchester whenever she pleased, and certainly not remaining with her children.The local Children’s Department had been aware of that since West’s return from Scotland almost five years earlier. Charmaine, too, had made no secret of her desire to return to her mother, and she had certainly said so repeatedly at school. Who would be surprised, therefore, if both were to disappear within a few weeks of each other? It was a simple matter for Rosemary Letts to tell St James’s School that Charmaine had left for London with her mother, and for Frederick West to back up her story by telling anyone who asked: ‘All her aunties and uncles and that live there.’
That was the version of events that Frederick West stuck to until the last few months of his life. But then, just as he retracted his other confessions, so he retracted the confession that he had killed his wife Rena.Then, instead of accepting the blame himself, he put it all on Rosemary Letts, just as he put the blame for Ann McFall’s death on Rena West.
In this revised version of the killing of his wife, which Frederick West gave originally to his first solicitor, Howard Ogden, West insisted that Rosemary Letts had been assisted in the killing of his first wife by the ubiquitous Rolf, whom he had also implicated in the death of Ann McFall. West claimed that Rena West had been killed in their small flat in Midland Road while he was in Leyhill Prison, and then ‘dumped in this bloody tank . . . in plastic bags, in the garage and covered up. It was an old water-tank’. In the last few months of his life he told Howard Ogden:‘Rolf cut Rena up with that sabre knife he had – that’s how Rose got the notion of cutting them up, because Rolf showed her how to do it.’
Frederick West insisted that Rosemary Letts had told him that she had killed Rena West herself, after Rena had demanded to take both Charmaine ‘and Anna-Marie as well’. ‘Rena was killed for two reasons, I reckon,’West claimed.‘One was that she caught Rose with them kids tied up’, and the other was that ‘Rena was getting drunk and getting a bit loose-mouthed, and Rolf was getting sick of her because she wasn’t toeing the line.’
In this version Rena West had been dismembered in Midland Road and placed in an old water-tank in the garage at the side of the flat. ‘She could’ve laid in that bloody garage for two years or more,’ West insisted. ‘The body was actually in plastic bags, and there was a piece of asbestos on top of the bin, and then mattresses and blankets and all that. When I lifted the piece of asbestos, the stink was unreal, even with the plastic bags.’ The tank was filled with battery acid and copper piping. ‘But I wasn’t going to put Rose in prison, having just come out, and I didn’t wanna go back,’ West maintained. So when Rolf had come round, he, together with Rosemary Letts and West, had taken the body out to Kempley.‘Me and him dug the hole again, and Rose sat in the car. But Rose and Rolf buried her.They tipped her out of the plastic bags.’
This second version of the death of Rena West is only partly convincing, although it is certain that Rena West’s remains were the most decayed of any of Frederick West’s victims when they were eventually recovered. It is possible that a dismembered body was dumped in the old water-tank in the garage of 25 Midland Road, wrapped in plastic bags, but there is at least a chance that that body in fact belonged not to Rena West but to her daughter Charmaine.
It seems only too likely that West did not bury the child immediately after her death, and did so only after considering for some time where exactly would be the best place to conceal her body. Indeed, it is also possible that he may not have finally buried the girl’s body until some months after her death, and shortly before he was due to leave Midland Road.There is no doubt, for example, that his neighbours in Midland Road were banned from the rear garden months later, in 1972, so that he ‘could build an extension to the kitchen area’, and at the same time encase his young daughter in what amounted to a bunker of a grave, hidden beneath five feet of concrete.
In the space of barely two months, Frederick West had killed twice more. But he showed no outward sign of any difference whatever. Neither he nor Rosemary Letts gave the slightest hint to anyone that anything untoward had happened in their lives. West found himself a new job, at Simon Gloster SARO in the town, where he started work on 2 August 1971, and was to remain for more than a year, while Rosemary continued acting as a part-time prostitute. As far as anyone who knew them at the time was concerned, life returned to what West and his partner liked to think of as ‘normal’.
What that meant can be judged from the experience of a young woman who moved in next door to Frederick West and Rosemary Letts in the early autumn of 1971. Elizabeth Agius was then nineteen and the mother of two young children, one a baby of only two months. Not long after she moved in, she was struggling down the front steps of 24 Midland Road with a large pram when she encountered West. He introduced himself, helped her down the steep steps with her pram, asked if she had just moved in, and where her husband was.The young woman said he was abroad.When she saw West a couple of days later, he invited her to ‘come in and have a cup of tea’ and ‘meet his wife’.
In fact, when West introduced Liz Agius to Rosemary Letts that afternoon, he called Rose his ‘girlfriend’. And Mrs Agius recalled later: ‘She looked about fourteen, and I took it that she could have been his daughter.’ Over the next weeks, Mrs Agius became friendly with them both, and offered to act as their babysitter, and West would regularly pop in to her flat in the evenings to ask her if she was ‘coming across for tea’. She also noticed that when he did so, West would often ‘flick my backside with his hand’, even when Rosemary Letts was present.
The search for sexual prey was still the dominant theme in Frederick West’s life. On one occasion when Liz Agius babysat for them at the weekend, she asked her next-door neighbours whether they had had a ‘nice evening’ when they got home in the early hours of the morning.West told her,‘No, we only went driving and looking for young girls’, and went on to explain that it was better if he took Rosemary Letts with him, because having another woman in the car meant the girls would think it was safe. He preferred young runaways, ‘because they had nowhere to go’, and was particularly keen to pick up ‘girls between fifteen and seventeen’ because ‘hopefully they would be a virgin and he could get more money for a virgin’ and they could ‘come and live with them and go on the game if they wanted to’. Mrs Agius was a little shocked, but took it as a joke, one of West’s relentless sexual nudges and winks.When he went on to tell her that he went out on his own as well ‘to see what I can find and bring home’, she dismissed it.‘Fred always made a joke about sex.’ He had even smiled and said to her: ‘Oh, what I could do to you!’
In fact, it was not long before the seventeen-year-old Rosemary Letts told her nineteen-year-old next-door neighbour that Frederick West was actually telling the truth, and went on to tell her that she was a prostitute. She earned ‘extra money that way’ and ‘Fred didn’t mind a bit’, she told her. In fact, he ‘liked to watch and listen’ to know exactly what she did with her clients. ‘There was a hole through the wall’ so that he could watch whenever he wanted to, but if he was at work ‘she’d tell him exactly what happened’. Then Rosemary Letts told Liz Agius that her husband wanted to have sex with her, and said ‘she did not mind a bit’. She even asked if she would consider going to bed with them both at the same time. In the weeks that followed she repeated the suggestion several more times, but each time Mrs Agius refused.
The sexual suggestions did nothing to affect the friendship. ‘They were such a nice couple. The type of people who don’t hide anything from one another,’ Mrs Agius recalled years later. Indeed, the two young women, each with two children, continued to see each other regularly, just as Frederick West continued to try to persuade Mrs Agius to go to bed with him. ‘He said he would tie me up, and do all sorts of things to me’, and always added, ‘I could tie him up if I wanted to’, or whip him and burn him with cigarettes. West’s endless banter would rarely cease. ‘He was a real sweet talker; he could charm most women,’ she would remember. But she could only watch in fascination as Rosemary Letts fed his unashamed and ever-increasing interest in sex.
One afternoon Rosemary Letts showed Liz Agius two small shoe-boxes that she kept under the double bed in the front room at Midland Road. One contained an assortment of different-coloured capsules, while the other was filled with sugar cubes wrapped in silver paper. Rosemary Letts told her that they were both ‘for protection against disease’, although it is much more likely that the capsules were some form of sleeping-tablet, and the sugar cubes were a form of hallucinogenic drug. Frederick West’s experiences among the hippies of Cheltenham, and the details of the drug culture that he had discovered then, were now being put to use, as Liz Agius was to discover herself.When she visited Rosemary Letts on the ground floor of Midland Road soon afterwards, she began to feel drowsy shortly after having a cup of tea they had given her. The next thing she remembered, she was to confess to the police two decades afterwards, was ‘coming to’ naked in bed with Rosemary and Frederick West.
By the time that Rosemary Letts celebrated her eighteenth birthday, on 29 November 1971, she was pregnant again. Anna-Marie was now seven, and her daughter Heather just one. She and Frederick West were hoping for ‘their son’, and now they were free to marry without her parents’ consent. Rosemary Letts would tell her daughter many years later that she had thought they had ‘better get married to make things legal’, although it seems far more likely that West himself would have proposed they marry, aware that a wife cannot give evidence against her husband.
As West remembered in the last months of his life: ‘Rose went to see her parents, because I had nothing to do with her parents through that time, and her father and mother said to her, “Look, he’ll just give you a family of kids, then leave you, and not marry you”, and Rose came back and said that to me. I said, “Right, let’s get married”, and that was it.’West booked the register office for the following Saturday morning. The marriage certificate was certainly more important to him than the ceremony, however.
As he did so often, Frederick West aped his father. He chose to marry Rosemary Letts on 29 January 1972, just two days after what would have been his parents’ thirty-second wedding anniversary. The wedding was scheduled for eleven o’clock in the morning. ‘But I was working until five to, and I was absolutely covered in oil, ’cause I was changing an engine up in White City for a bloke.’ Rosemary Letts had to ‘beg him to take off his overalls’.
Just as there had been for his first marriage to Rena, there were only two witnesses, and his wife would recall later that one was a friend of her husband’s who ‘had so many aliases that he had to scribble out the first name he wrote on the certificate’. For his part West would recall simply: ‘I was there with my brother and Mick Thorney-brook. They were the witnesses. We came back home. My brother bought a bottle of Bristol Cream sherry. We had a quick drink and went straight back to work.’ Frederick West signed the marriage certificate without a qualm, describing himself on it as a ‘bachelor’.
The new Mrs Rosemary West watched Frederick West describe himself as a bachelor on his second marriage certificate, and signed the certificate alongside him as a true record of his status. There could hardly be a clearer indication that she knew only too well that Rena West had not gone back to Scotland, or to Saudi Arabia, or to London.
For if Rosemary Letts had seen Rena West take Charmaine away, as she was later to suggest at her trial, why would she not have enquired about her whereabouts when she saw her husband enter the word bachelor on their marriage certificate? The only conclusion is that she knew she was dead. Equally, if Rena West had come to ‘collect’ Charmaine from Midland Road, as the new Mrs West insisted at her trial, how could she possibly have agreed to take part in the marriage that she clearly craved – unless she knew that her rival could not possibly object? The only answer is that Rosemary West knew very well that both Rena West and her daughter Charmaine had met a violent death, and knew, too, that it was a secret that bound Frederick West to her for ever.
Marriage gave Rosemary West what she wanted: formal recognition that she alone was her husband’s legal partner. It acknowledged that she had replaced Rena and become a woman in her own right – something of considerable importance to a child brought up to think of herself as her father’s ‘baby’. The marriage certificate anointed her adulthood and provided her with a mature confidence that she had lacked before the ceremony. And it demonstrated to the world, and in particular to her father, Frederick’s and her love for one another. But their love, a love that they never ceased to proclaim for the next twenty years, was not born of joy, affection or respect, or of romance. It was born of blood, pain, suffering and death, and it craved those dark passions to sustain it.
On the way back from the ceremony, ‘Fred found some money in the park which covered the cost of the marriage licence’, Rosemary West was to tell her daughter many years afterwards. ‘I remember he was over the moon.We had no honeymoon.We just went to the Wellington pub and bought one drink. He asked me what I wanted, and I said a lager and lime. He said: “You have a bloody Coke and like it”.’
At the time of his marriage West was still working during the day for Simon Gloster and, after work, for his landlord Frank Zygmunt. It was a routine of two jobs that he would maintain, with only one or two interruptions, throughout the rest of his life. Two jobs satisfied his desire to ‘keep busy’, and to increase his family’s income. Working as an odd-job man, labourer and part-time builder for Zygmunt also meant that he could always be on the move, ‘shooting down’ to look at something at any time of the day or night, for ever able to conceal his movements. If there was nothing to do, Frederick West would quickly become restive, dissatisfied at being idle, desperate to keep himself busy as if he were trying to keep a demon at bay.
One afternoon not long after his wedding, West burst into the kitchen at Midland Road, after being told that there was no work that evening. The new Mrs Rosemary West, now more than six months’ pregnant, was having tea with Liz Agius. Seeing the two women, Frederick West disappeared into the front bedroom, only to reappear minutes later with a pair of handcuffs. Without warning,West grabbed Mrs Agius’s left hand, yanked it towards him and clapped the handcuff around her wrist. ‘Now I’ve fucking got you,’ he shouted, with a smile. But his new wife was not amused. ‘Get them off her,’ Rosemary West shouted back across the kitchen. West removed the handcuff, the smile still on his face.
But West was not always so easy-going. When Liz Agius introduced him to her husband in her next-door flat one evening, he stormed off into the kitchen in a rage. When she followed and asked him what the matter was,West told her bitterly: ‘He’s able to have you whenever he wants and I can’t.’ A few days later, back in his own flat, he told his astonished neighbour:‘I’ll kill him and put him right down there . . . Your husband should be six feet under there. If I can’t have you, why should he?’ But once again, Liz Agius took it as a joke, another of Frederick West’s suggestions not to be taken seriously.
All the visitors to 25 Midland Road were equally forgiving. They had every reason to be. Even though she was now several months’ pregnant, Rosemary West was still entertaining her male ‘clients’ in the afternoons, just as she had done in the past. They were still usually from the local bus garage, although she would also make love with one or two of her husband’s friends, including a well-known local burglar, who had stayed with them in the flat from time to time, and their landlord. Sometimes she would suggest someone new, like a man she worked alongside as a barmaid in a local pub, and her husband would make no objection.
Whoever it was, Frederick West would usually stay while the man undressed – ‘to see that Rose was all right’ – and then disappear, often to watch covertly his wife making love – only to reappear later to join her and her ‘client’ in the small double bed in the ground-floor front room. Whether he took part or not, West insisted that his wife make as much noise as possible, and talk suggestively, throughout the act of intercourse.‘And I always made love to her again, after they’d gone, like.That was part of the deal.’
One or two of the Wests’ neighbours at Midland Road were less enthusiastic about events in the ground-floor flat. But they were less concerned about the stream of visitors than the noisy arguments that would break out suddenly between Frederick West and his new young wife. One source of friction was West’s continuing friendship with Liz Agius; another was his habit of disappearing in the evening for hours at a time, leaving Rosemary alone to look after Anna-Marie and Heather. But when one set of neighbours complained to the Wests, they were told to mind their own business.The Wests simply ignored anyone who disagreed with them. And Frederick West did exactly as he pleased. Indeed, he had also started to build a bathroom extension out from the back of his flat over the old coal cellar, just as a few months before he had bricked up the entrance to the basement from the garden. It was as if Frederick West were the owner of the house rather than simply one of the tenants.
In fact,West’s relationship with his landlord Frank Zygmunt had grown steadily closer in the two years since he had first moved into Midland Road, and in the early summer of 1972, shortly after Rosemary West gave birth to her second child on 1 June, a daughter they named May June, Zygmunt suggested they should move.There was a house for sale on the other side of the park, nearer the town centre, which had been split up into bed-sitting-rooms, but which was now derelict and to be sold as a single dwelling.The price was £6500, and Zygmunt agreed to lend Frederick West £500 as the deposit, just as he agreed to help him apply to Gloucester City Council for a mortgage for the remainder.
Not that the prospect of becoming a houseowner at the age of thirty did anything to alter West’s habits. About four days after the birth of their new daughter May June, Rosemary West wanted to be taken home from the hospital, her husband ‘more or less wasn’t allowing me to’. She discharged herself, and returned to the ground-floor flat at 25 Midland Road, but there was no sign of Frederick West. She recalled later: ‘Anna-Marie was dirty and Heather was a mess.’ Sensing the inevitable, Rosemary West went round and hammered on the door of a neighbour. There was a lengthy silence until, eventually, her husband emerged ‘flushed and hassled’. Frederick West was unrepentant. He just smiled his naughty boy’s smile.
In late July 1972, with Frank Zygmunt’s help, Frederick West became the owner of the house that was to remain his home for the rest of his life, as well as his proudest possession, number 25 Cromwell Street. It was all but uninhabitable when the purchase was completed, but one of the first people a delighted Frederick and Rosemary West took to see it was their neighbour from Midland Road, Liz Agius. The couple ‘who didn’t hide anything from each other’, in Liz Agius’s words, told her they were going to rent rooms to ‘single mothers or single girls as long as they were on Social Security because then the rent got paid’.
It was not the only plan they revealed to their young neighbour, as they showed her around the three-floored semi-detached house. ‘There was a cellar with a little catch-door in the floor inside the house,’ Liz Agius remembered years later. ‘I went down just a couple of steps. Fred said it would make a good playroom for the children when they had parties’, if he were to soundproof it. But then West turned to his neighbour and added:‘Or I could make this my torture-chamber.’ Mrs Agius did not go down the rest of the steps into this cold, damp cave. Instead, she turned and told him: ‘You’re dreaming.’
They were macabre dreams, but very soon they were to come true.