SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
‘Great crimes come never singly; they are linked to sins that went before.’
RACINE, PHAEDRE
Frederick West was his father’s son, and so it was probably inevitable that one of the first people he would choose to abuse in the cellar of his house in Cromwell Street would be his eldest daughter. He had created her. She was his of right, his to do with as he chose.That was how it had always been in his family. He would hear no argument on the matter. In his mind,Anna-Marie West had to be prepared for her sexual role, the bearer of the next generation of Wests, and at the same time she could satisfy his own lust for her. The fact that she was only eight-and-a-half years of age, a plain, innocent, rather reserved little girl, made no difference whatever. If she screamed, the new blue polythene membrane he had used to line the cellar’s walls and ceiling, to protect against the damp, would muffle any sound.
As West confided to one of his new lodgers in the first weeks of 1973, he had decided to convert the ‘cellar into a dungeon’ for sex parties. The Carol Raine court case had brought him ‘loads of kinky letters’, he told him, which had convinced him there was an appetite for ‘parties’. In his spare time on the night shift at Permali’s factory, he constructed a four-feet long metal bar shaped in a U, with two small wings at either end of the U.To an outsider it might have looked harmless enough, a decoration for a gate perhaps, or the first part of an elaborate signpost, but in fact it had a far more sinister purpose.
It was a purposeful Frederick West who led his daughter and his wife down the wooden steps into the cellar of Cromwell Street early in 1973. Rosemary West shut and bolted the door behind them. As Anna-Marie was to write almost twenty-five years later: ‘As the three of us stood at the bottom of the stairs I suddenly began to get nervous. All of a sudden there was an atmosphere I couldn’t fathom.’ The girl had been in the cellar before, but ‘had never actually played there – I was kept too busy doing the housework for that’.When she asked her father what was going on, he said nothing and looked across at his wife. ‘Rose had a strange smile on her face as if she was really going to enjoy herself but wasn’t going to say why.’
As another of his daughters, May, would recall after his death: ‘Dad used to say the first-born child to a daughter should be the father’s’, adding: ‘Dad didn’t like us pushing him away. If you did, he used to get quite violent. He had a look which was really scary.’ Like many other incestuous fathers before him,West harboured the desire to create another generation of incestuous children. For her part, Rosemary West made no secret of her dislike for her stepchild Anna-Marie. Her own two daughters, Heather and May June (who was to change her name to Mae) were now both walking.To Rosemary, the plain little girl who slept in the ground-floor back room at Cromwell Street was more of a nuisance than a child to be protected and nurtured. Anna-Marie was not hers, and Rosemary West saw no reason why she should not suffer. If she did, she might learn a little more respect for her stepmother.
West told his daughter: ‘Just do as you are told. Take your clothes off and put them on the floor.’ But the child was not quick enough for his wife. In one movement, Rosemary West ripped her stepdaughter’s dress off. Then she and her husband pinned the child down on a mattress on the floor and tied her hands and ankles to the U-shaped metal frame West had constructed. He tore up old sheets into strips to tie her to it. When the child asked what they were doing, she was told to ‘shut up and be quiet’. It did nothing to reassure the eight-year-old, who started to scream. Her stepmother sat on her head to stop her, but when the child panicked at being unable to breathe, she took some of the sheeting strips and gagged her.
It is almost impossible to imagine the terrifying impact that this ugly, perverted assault must have had on the eight-year-old child. But the Wests justified it by telling the sobbing girl that she ‘should be very grateful, and feel very lucky that I had such caring parents that thought of me’. She was even led to believe that ‘all loving parents were acting the same’. In particular, Frederick West told her it would make sure she could satisfy her husband when she married: ‘It’s going to help you in later life. I’m just doing what all fathers have to do. It’s a normal thing, so stop carrying on. This will make sure you get a husband when you’re older.You’ll be ready for him, and you’ll be able to have children.’ West then proceeded to take a smooth white plastic vibrator out of a clear Pyrex bowl of water on the floor beside the mattress and insert it into his daughter’s vagina.
‘I remember the pain as they inserted something inside me,’ Anna-Marie was to write in 1995. ‘It hurt so much I just wanted to die.’ She could neither move nor speak, and she had no idea what was happening, or why. There was also a buzzing noise that she did not understand. While it was happening, her stepmother started ‘rubbing and scratching’ her breasts. The ordeal ‘seemed to take for ever and the pain was so bad I almost lost consciousness’. As it went on, she remembered ‘looking at the glass bowl on the floor’ and seeing that had filled with what looked like frog-spawn. ‘It was all red. It frightened me.’ Eventually, Frederick West and his wife removed the vibrator and left their daughter in the cellar. But they did not release her. They merely removed the rudimentary gag, so that she could breathe more easily. ‘They just upped and went, leaving me bound hand and foot.’ She lay there motionless, save from shivering occasionally with fear and cold.
Unspeakable though it is, the child’s ordeal was not over. After a time the Wests returned and assaulted the helpless little girl, tied to a frame on a mattress in the cellar, for a second time, repeating the previous process. Only this time, after they had finished, they released her. But not before they had threatened her with ‘a good hiding’ if she told anyone about what had happened. Frederick West left his wife to untie the girl. In Anna-Marie West’s own words: ‘It was the beginning of the agony I was to endure for many years to come. They didn’t help me as I struggled towards the daylight, barely able to walk. In fact, Rose laughed at my predicament. She seemed to find the whole thing incredibly funny.’ Rosemary West told her stepdaughter:‘Everybody does it to every girl. It’s a father’s job. It’s something everybody does but nobody talks about.’
Over the next few years Frederick West would steadily refine the abuse he subjected his eldest child to, reminding her repeatedly how lucky she was to have this ‘preparation’ for adulthood. Anna-Marie West accepted the abuse unquestioningly, which almost certainly saved her life. Her acceptance meant that she did not suffer the fate of her fiery, rebellious half-sister Charmaine. West calmly and relentlessly abused his daughter until she was unable to refuse. He trained her as expertly, and as tirelessly, as a circus trainer might tame a wild beast, making her his creature every bit as completely as he had the young woman who was only eleven years her senior, her stepmother.West systematically abused his daughter, as determined to subjugate her as he had been to subjugate Rosemary Letts. West carefully shaped both their sexual appetites, malevolently encouraging them both to lose any sense of right or wrong, and then he cast them as rivals for his affection.
In the years to come Frederick West reworked the horrifying metal contraption he tied his eldest child to that afternoon in early 1973. His later device was a cylindrical cup, once again with small brackets at each side, designed to attach to a belt around her waist, so that she could wear it all the time, rather than being tied to it immobile. He would place a vibrator inside the metal cup, which was then inserted into her vagina, and force the girl to walk around the house wearing it, dressed only in a little miniskirt. The device ‘used to hurt and pinch because it was metal’, she would remember later, but ‘Rose would get a real kick out of it, and if Dad came home from work and found me in it he would just laugh with her’.
Frederick West had sexual intercourse with his eldest daughter repeatedly throughout her childhood, on one occasion coming down to the cellar after his wife had again tied the young girl naked to the U-shaped metal bar. ‘Rose started hitting me with her fists,’ Anna-Marie recalled, ‘and swearing at me and calling me names.’ Her stepmother then hit her with a leather belt, before once again abusing her with a vibrator, ‘pushing it deep inside’. Then: ‘I remember my father being there. He had work overalls on. I remember looking at my dad, pleading with him with my eyes.’The appeal did no good.‘My dad had sexual intercourse with me, and then he went. I presume it was his lunch hour.’ On 6 July 1973, her ninth birthday, Anna-Marie fainted at the swimming-baths at school and was taken to Gloucester Royal Hospital, where she was detained overnight for observation.The staff noticed small cuts and bruises on the child’s tiny unformed breasts, but accepted her explanation that they were the result of an accident.
West would also take his eldest daughter out with him in the evenings to steal ‘sand and gravel that was on the side of the road’, or he took her out at the weekends to the small building jobs he had agreed to do, including the flats he would ‘do up’ in his spare time after work.‘On other occasions he would do it in the back of the van he used to transport his tools. He would park somewhere remote.’West kept a mattress in the back of the van for the purpose. Afterwards, ‘He would ask me not to tell Rose and he would give me a few pounds to buy sweets.’
Anna-Marie West wrote many years later:
When my father did these things to me there was almost a sense of affection about it. He would kiss me on the mouth, which I hated. It was almost as if I were his girlfriend, not his daughter. But it was the only kind of love I knew from him, and I never complained. I didn’t mind keeping it a secret from Rose. In a way it was something I had over her, something I knew and she didn’t.
That was precisely Frederick West’s strategy, and his wife responded to it as he predicted she would, by abusing her rival for his affections still further. On one occasion Rosemary West forced her stepdaughter into a boiling bath, then spent ‘an age’ smothering the scalded girl in baby oil, and on another she made Anna-Marie stand naked against a blank wall so that she could take a photograph of her young but developing body. The child was encouraged to believe that she deserved this relentless mixture of punishment and abuse. ‘I believed them and so I tried harder to please everyone,’ Anna-Marie wrote later. The child, no matter how abused, still wanted to love and admire her parents, and particularly her father. Frederick West’s obsession with sexual experiment knew no bounds. The abuse of his daughter merely fuelled the flames. In the floors above the cellar at Cromwell Street, West watched in fascination as a string of young girls came and went from the upstairs rooms, visitors and girlfriends of his four male lodgers. Ever the voyeur, and yet also consumed by a ludicrous jealousy that convinced him every girl should want to make love to him before any other man, he took to creeping around the house at night to see who was sleeping where, and with whom. He would sit on the wall outside the house to engage the girls in conversation as they came and went, inviting them into his own rooms on the ground floor ‘for a cup of tea’ and to ‘meet Rose’. Each and every young girl West saw he wanted to possess.
Rosemary West was keen to encourage him. Her own sexual awareness, too, had been groomed to obsession. She was as anxious as he was to discover new experiences.The men he invited to their house to share her bed, either with him or without him in it, were a part of her daily life: now not only prostitution but also fascination. But now there were female as well as male partners. She knew how much the idea of watching her make love to a woman excited her husband, but making love to a woman for her husband’s benefit – even with his participation – was not enough. She had learned of his passion to possess and subjugate every woman, and realised, too, that the most explicit form of subjugation, the one form of sexuality that was guaranteed to please him, involved placing the woman in some kind of bondage.
At first Rosemary West may have been cajoled or bullied by her violent husband to experiment with bondage, but as her own sexual awareness developed so her pleasure in sadomasochism flowered, until she became as hypnotised by it as he had become. ‘I knew Rose was vicious,’ Frederick West admitted just before his death. He had seen her viciousness in action. ‘Rose was fucking cruel,’ he would insist. She had harnessed her own desire, and used it in turn to manipulate her husband with his own obsession. The combination of their two passions was to be far more powerful even than his alone.
At first the extent of his wife’s enthusiasm for bondage may have taken Frederick West by surprise. Certainly, towards the end of his life he would tell his solicitor:‘Rose wanted to be tied up, hung up, left in the fields, everything.’At that time he denied that he had ever done so, even though he had told the police two years previously that he had tied her to a five-barred gate near the Gloucestershire village of Minchinhampton late at night and made love to her.‘She wanted me to,’ he confessed,‘but there was other blokes doing it to her. Sometimes she came home and she’d been well fucking beaten, mind. She had some deep fucking cuts in her arse and back and that, where she’d been whipped.’
This violent sexuality was to pervade their life together in the years to come. Once Rosemary West had learned of that violence, she had wanted to experience it for herself. West had complied willingly. First the act of bondage between them was probably enough. But as her experience had grown, and her confidence increased, so her desire had grown to violently subdue young women, willing or not, thereby only further fuelling her husband’s desire. Carol Raine was lucky enough to survive the experience. But it was a turning-point. Although Frederick West continued to believe that he could always escape punishment for his sexual crimes, Rosemary West was not prepared to take the risk of appearing in court again. If there was the slightest doubt in either of their minds about the safety of letting their victim go, they would urge each other not to take it.
Not that West allowed an atmosphere of violence to permeate life at Cromwell Street. He was too careful to make such an elementary mistake. Bondage and sadomasochism were to be kept under ground, buried deep within his secret world, never to be allowed too near the surface. They were the dark side of his sexual life, to be concealed behind a healthier mask. To his lodgers he presented himself only as an approachable, hardworking labourer and landlord, proud of his house and his family, but nevertheless with a perfectly healthy interest in anything to do with sex.‘There were so many girls and so many blokes going in and out of the house that I hadn’t got a bloody clue who they were,’ he explained at the end of his life.‘All the girls, all the blokes, in Cromwell Street, if they wanted to run somewhere, I would take them. All the girls I got on great with. I used to talk fucking dirty to them, and they’d talk dirty back.’The role of the smutty but affable landlord was one of Frederick West’s favourites.
Lodgers of all kinds would find their way to the modest square house in the centre of Gloucester. Young men or women might stay for one night only, sleeping on one of three mattresses on the floor of the front room on the first-floor. Or they might share temporarily with a friend or friends in another of the rooms. ‘People used to come and go at all hours of the day and night,’ one lodger recalled many years later. ‘And Fred never seemed in the least concerned.There were girls on the run from local homes, boys who had nowhere to go for the night: endless parties.’ At one point that winter about twenty members of the Scorpions motorcycle gang stayed at Cromwell Street for a time. ‘And there were always drugs if you wanted them.’
With Frederick West’s active encouragement, sex in all its forms permeated the house, and Rosemary West was its principal participant.‘It would be easier if people asked me who Rose didn’t have sex with, not who she did,’West said in the last year of his life.‘I mean, there were so many.When I was in Permali’s, the blokes were taking an hour off and going up and fucking Rose. I never thought nothing of it.’What West did not say was that he was also charging them for his wife’s sexual services. But West’s fellow workers were not his wife’s only lovers. There were also his lodgers and their friends. Frederick West did not object if they smoked marijuana in their rooms, or took hallucinogenic drugs, just as he did not object if they made love to his wife. He even informed one of them that if she looked ‘moody’ when he paid the rent to her, he ‘should take her to bed’.The young man thought he was joking, but found out that he was not.
Another lodger was not so fortunate. Propositioned by his landlady, he ‘regularly had sex with Rose’ while Frederick West was at work. ‘Fred knew all about it, just like he knew all about everyone else.’ But that did not prevent West trying to strangle the young man one evening, after he had found him asleep in his lounge after clearly having made love to his wife. Waking to find West’s hands tight around his throat, a fight had broken out, which resulted in the lodger being charged, and fined, for an assault on his landlord.
On the surface at least, Frederick West would not react so violently towards the stream of young women who increasingly found their way to Cromwell Street. He would make them welcome, grinning as they confided their problems to him, and he suggested they should ‘talk it all over with Rose’, gently drawing them into the sexual net that he was carefully constructing. Rosemary West played her part to the full, participating in group sex with three of the male lodgers on more than one occasion, sexually propositioning the more amenable girls who came to the house looking for a room for a night or a week.
Lynda Gough was one of the young women who found her way to 25 Cromwell Street in the first weeks of 1973. Five-feet, three-inches in height, with long, straight, light brown hair, which she often tied back in a bun, and large framed glasses, she was nineteen at the time, exactly six months older than Rosemary West. An impetuous, friendly girl, who had suffered some learning difficulties as a child, she had lost the tip of one finger in a childhood accident, as well as one of her front teeth, which meant that she wore a dental plate, but that did nothing to curtail her outgoing open smile. The eldest daughter of a city fireman, she had worked as a seamstress at the Co-op in Gloucester since leaving school two years before, where one of her contemporaries had been the missing Gloucester girl Mary Bastholm. Indeed, it is possible that Lynda Gough and Rosemary West may have even worked together as seamstresses at one point, although that was not the reason she arrived at Cromwell Street. The reason was much more straightforward. Lynda Gough had become Ben Stanniland’s girlfriend, and she came to the house to visit him.
Lynda Gough and Rosemary West could almost have been sisters. Born within a few months of each other, both had left school without academic qualifications, both shared the same long hair, largish breasts, the same large-framed glasses and slightly surprised smile, and the same interest in sex. Rosemary West would have watched with interest as Lynda Gough’s relationship with Ben Stanniland foundered, and Gough transferred her affections to his fellow lodger, Alan Davis. Before long she had sampled the sexual appetites of some of the other lodgers as well, and Rosemary West knew that it would only be a matter of time before she would come to depend on her for help and advice. Young, rebellious and with a streak of mischief, eager to explore the world around her, Lynda Gough rapidly became Rosemary’s friend, and a confidante. Frederick West was working long shifts for Permali’s, and then going on to help Frank Zygmunt in an effort to pay off the loan, and, on the surface at least, the open-minded, high-spirited fireman’s daughter was exactly the sort of friend Rosemary West craved. She could help with the children, babysit for her from time to time, and share her life. As the weeks passed, she saw less and less of the lodgers and more and more of Rosemary West. But Lynda Gough was to become more than a friend. In the early spring of 1973 Rosemary West seduced her.
‘Rose was knocking off Lynda before I was,’ Frederick West recalled in the last months of his life. ‘She used to come there a lot.’ In mid-March his wife told him that Lynda Gough wanted a room, and West was only too happy to agree to her moving in, even though he already had four male lodgers sharing the top two rooms at Cromwell Street. The prospect of a pretty young girl, whom his wife suggested privately that she might be able to pass on to him, was too good an opportunity to miss. ‘She had a massive bust on her, but the rest of her body was skinny,’ West would comment appreciatively years later. Once again he offered a job as their nanny. She could share the room with Anna-Marie, as Carol Raine had done a few months before.
In early April, just as he had done for Carol Raine, West drove his wife out to their new nanny’s home, although this time it was to take the girl out for a drink rather than to satisfy her parents that they were a suitable couple for their daughter to live with, and he took care to stay in the car out of sight when his wife went to knock at the girl’s front door to collect her.A fortnight later, during the morning of 19 April 1973, Frederick West went back again to her home near the Oval in Gloucester, this time to help her to move her belongings. Once again he was careful not to be seen. Neither of Lynda Gough’s parents were at home. Their daughter left them a simple note: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, Please don’t worry about me. I have got a flat and I will come and see you some time. Love Lin.’ It was to be the last contact that Mr and Mrs Gough would ever have with their eldest daughter.
‘Lynda was a bit kinked in different ways,’ Frederick West recalled years later, ‘because she had black magic magazines. She was into virgin’s blood and God knows what. She was a bit fucking weird.’ In fact, it was no more than the natural curiosity of many young people, but West and his wife ruthlessly exploited it. Lynda Gough became their willing slave in a series of bizarre sexual experiments. Seduced first into sex with Rosemary, and then with both of them, the Wests then relentlessly proceeded to extend their sexual experiments with Lynda Gough into bondage and sadomasochism. Though the nineteen-year-old could not possibly have foreseen the outcome, it was to lead to her torture, mutilation, dismemberment and decapitation.
It is impossible to say with absolute certainty how Lynda Carol Gough met her death, but Frederick West went into considerable detail in his first confessions to the police. He started by suggesting: ‘It was their fantasies I set up for them,’ and went on to say, ‘It was new to me, I hadn’t had anything to do with that sort of thing much before.’ West said the young fireman’s daughter wanted to ‘bathe in a virgin’s blood. That was her fantasy and she was hell-bent on that’. This, he insisted, ‘was building up for about three weeks and she was getting obsessed about it by the day’.
Lynda Gough had ‘just moved in as a tenant’, when West decided to fulfil what he was later to describe as her fantasies. ‘She was heavy into this kinky sex and all that, so we worked out . . . or she worked out a bizarre thing to do with tying up, hanging up . . . She wanted to use her hair to bond herself with. She had such long hair.’ West recalled that they had ‘tried to several times, different ways and that’, but ‘the problem was the basement wasn’t high enough’. West had already cut a slot in one of the beams in the cellar – ‘for her hands and that to tie up to’, but when he did so ‘she was standing on the floor’. So he ‘dug a big piece out’ of the bricks and stones that lay on the cellar floor at the time, so that he could suspend the girl from the cellar beam. But Frederick West did not hang Lynda Gough up by her hands. He suspended the nineteen-year-old by her ankles, with her head hanging into the hole he had dug in the cellar floor.
‘The bondage sex thing was planned up with Lynda. She had no jewellery or glasses or nothing, they were all left in her room, ’cause she came down practically naked,’West explained twenty years later. ‘She stripped off and oiled herself, and put funny markings on her face and body . . . off these books she had’, using different coloured lipsticks.‘Anyway, she said,“I’m all ready and all this”, but then she wanted her bust tied up, massive bust she had on her.’West duly did so. ‘Anyway, she was all roped up, and she kept laughing her head off, making weird noises and God knows what.’
By this time, according to West, Lynda Gough was tied up across this hole. West had attached a rope to her ankles, and she was hanging on to it, supporting herself with her arms. ‘She had a rope round her neck and her arms were just up in the air for some reason, she was holding herself up like that . . . ’cause then her legs went up and . . . she dropped down on her arms to hold her.’ Frederick West pulled the rope tied around Lynda Gough’s ankles and lifted the young woman up until she was suspended over the hole in the brick and ash floor in the cellar. ‘So anyway, she was just hanging there . . . and she was enjoying every minute of it. Then she wanted me to pour oil over her, and water, and God knows what over her, jelly and something she got, supposed to be love potions.’
Until this point,West’s version of the events surrounding Lynda Gough’s death may bear some resemblance to reality. But from this moment onwards Frederick West concealed from the police, and from everyone else, the precise details of the ordeal that the adventurous nineteen-year-old suffered in that damp, dark cave beneath the paving-stones of Gloucester. The horrifying truth is that she was almost certainly kept captive in the cellar for several days, and regularly tortured and abused, until she was finally killed. Lynda Gough may have started out fulfilling her own ‘fantasy’, and she ended up part of Frederick and Rosemary West’s ‘fantasy’, but she could never have suspected the sexual abuse, degradation, torture and mutilation that she would be subjected to in the gloom of that sinister basement. The Wests may even have told her that they loved her, but it was not a love that any human being would recognise.
Gagged, tied and hanging naked by her ankles, Lynda Gough was abused sexually by both Frederick and Rosemary West. Indeed, she may well have been expecting some kind of sexual experience. But what she could not have been expecting was the relentless sadistic extension of that experience.Their sexual intercourse with her would probably have been followed by abuse with a vibrator and a dildo, a rubber phallus, in both her vagina and her anus. But the sexual abuse would not have stopped there. Other people may well have been invited to have sexual intercourse with the helpless girl as she hung there in the cellar like a carcass in a slaughterhouse. And the more she twisted and turned to avoid the humiliation and the pain, the greater pleasure Frederick West would have taken from her plight. The greater her agony, the harsher would Rosemary West’s actions have become. Then her sexual torment would have been followed by physical torture.
In the hours, even days, before her eventual death, Lynda Gough was reduced to nothing more than a slab of meat. Her fingers and toes were almost certainly cut off while she was conscious, as were her hands and wrists shortly afterwards. Both her kneecaps were removed, as were seven ribs and her breastbone. But she could not speak, she could not protest; she was utterly helpless. She was condemned only to suffer. And the longer she remained alive, the more tempted Frederick West would probably have been to try to keep her so, to extend the experience. The sexual excitement he felt would have grown as the time passed, as would his wife’s. Lynda Gough’s stricken body was part of the ritual of their unspeakably evil love.
The Wests did not stop.They would never stop, no matter how much their victim pleaded with her eyes. Neither Rosemary nor Frederick West showed any mercy whatever to the helpless young women who had fallen into their clutches, just as they showed not a moment’s remorse or contrition. Theirs was a satanic devotion to the pursuit of pain in others, a devotion so fierce that it almost defies description. There was an element of ritual involved in her killing, as West was eventually to hint to the police. Indeed, it may well have been Frederick and Rosemary West, rather than their victim, who wanted to drink blood, as West made love to the mutilated young girl’s body as she hung dead in front of him.
Frederick West would never admit exactly what happened to Lynda Gough. At one stage he explained that she was ‘getting unbearable’ and that he just ‘lost his head . . . put a rope round her neck and strangled her’, but at another he suggested rather that she had strangled herself by accident. Neither explanation rings true, but in his second version of events West insisted that he was interrupted shortly after he had pulled the helpless girl over the hole in the cellar floor.
‘Somebody rang the bell, and somebody answered the door and somebody shouted “Fred”. So I thought, Bloody hell, I shall have to go up and see, ’cause they knew I was there . . . they could probably hear us. So anyway I went up, and it was somebody come to see me . . . and I stood there talking to them for about twenty minutes, almost half an hour, I suppose.’ Significantly, Frederick West did not recall who the person was he had spent half an hour talking to at the front door; all he could remember was:‘I’m trying to get from them to get back to her because I had no shirt on. I only had just me jeans on, and anyway I finally got away . . . When I got back down, the flipping rope that was holding her legs . . . had snapped and she was hanging there. She was strangled. Hanging by the neck into this hole.’
The story is as much of a lie as West’s insistence while he was telling it that ‘There is nobody else involved. I did it all on my own.’ Indeed, it was a lie which he was to retract in the final months of his life, suggesting instead that his wife ‘and another person or persons’ had been responsible – that he had had nothing to do with the nineteen-year-old’s death. In fact, there is little doubt that Frederick and Rosemary West systematically sexually abused Lynda Gough’s helpless body, just as they removed more than 120 of her bones after they had done so.As for her ‘laughing’, that would have been impossible, as the Wests had placed a surgical plaster over her mouth, and then covered that with a length of two-inch-wide brown parcel tape, which they had wrapped around her head completely, to gag her. Nor was she tied only with rope: strips of fabric were also knotted and tied around her, as was a long length of string.
When Lynda Gough’s lifeless body was eventually cut down from the beam, Frederick West set about disposing of it with the same calm, methodical care that he had brought to the bodies of his first wife, his ‘angel’ Ann McFall, and his stepchild, Charmaine. He cut her head off, disarticulated both her legs at the hips, leaving knife-marks in the upper thighs, and removed the bones he wanted as trophies. But he did not dig a small, narrow hole for her remains, as he had done for Rena West and Ann McFall. Instead, he painstakingly removed her dismembered body from the cellar piece by piece, presumably by pushing it through the small vent at the rear (‘There was no back entrance to the cellar at that time’), and threw it into an inspection pit beneath the elderly garage attached to the back of the house. (‘It just had a board on top of it’.) West discarded Lynda Gough as if she were no more than another piece of junk that had once littered the cellar floor. He even threw the dental plate she wore into the hole with its one tooth attached, though not her glasses. Frederick West then filled in the pit with the loose earth and rubble from his excavations in the cellar to cover his tracks. And it is hard to believe that there would not have been a smile on his face as he did so.
West would also have made sure he could help himself to whatever money Lynda Gough had in the house. He never neglected an opportunity to steal, no matter the circumstances, and he would not have done so now. Like a modern-day Fagin, he studiously went through her belongings, taking what he fancied for himself, as he did wherever he went, and collecting almost three plastic bags full of other clothing and possessions as he did so. West remembered later that he discarded about twenty ‘witchcraft’ books at the time, but ‘Lynda’s bra and pants and all that got flushed down the toilet’.
For her part, Rosemary West took some of Lynda Gough’s clothes for herself, just as she helped herself to some of the girl’s collection of cheap rings and necklaces. Those clothes that were too bloodstained to wash were pushed into the plastic bags her husband had filled and left out with the household rubbish for collection.Those that were not, she put into the washing-machine, to clean and wear herself.The action appalled even Frederick West. ‘I thought, Fuck me, she’d killed her and had her fucking clothes on. She’s wearing the girl’s shoes and she’d killed her, and her dressing-gown,’West explained in the last months of his life. ‘I said, “You wore her fucking clothes after you killed her.” She said, “I washed ’em”.’
Unlike Ann McFall and Rena West, Lynda Gough was missed after her disappearance into the hands of the Wests. Her parents, John and June Gough, were more than a little concerned about their daughter and her whereabouts, although, as Mrs Gough would explain years afterwards: ‘Both her father and I felt, “Let her have her head for a bit, she’ll be back.”’ The Goughs simply wanted to know if their eldest child was happy, and all right. For a time the Goughs did nothing, but about a fortnight after finding her daughter’s note Mrs Gough went in search of her. She visited her daughter’s workroom at the Co-op in Barton Street, only to discover that Lynda was not there. Eventually, she discovered that Lynda had been visiting 25 Cromwell Street.
On the first Saturday morning in May 1973, June Gough walked down the side of the Wests’ drab, narrow, three-storey house in the heart of Gloucester in pursuit of her daughter Lynda. The door was opened by Rosemary West, whom Mrs Gough immediately recognised as ‘the lady who called for Lynda when she went out for a drink’ only a matter of weeks before. But she was rapidly joined on the front doorstep by her husband, Frederick West, who told Mrs Gough in no uncertain terms that her daughter was not there.
‘I told her mother she’d left,’West admitted at the end of his life. ‘I told her, “She’s gone to Weston”.’ But Mrs Gough noticed that Rosemary West looked as though she was wearing her daughter’s cardigan, and she was definite that Rosemary was wearing her daughter’s shoes.‘But those are Lynda’s slippers you’re wearing,’ she told the nineteen-year-old Mrs West. ‘And there’s some of Lynda’s things on the washing-line in the garden.’ Frederick West did not flinch.‘I told her she’d left ’em behind.’
‘There wasn’t a great deal of conversation forthcoming’ after that, Mrs Gough would recall in 1995. She and her husband would go to visit Weston-super-Mare in search of their daughter, just as they would consult a policeman neighbour, telling him of Mrs Gough’s experience at Cromwell Street, but they would never officially report their daughter Lynda as missing. Like thousands of other parents with missing daughters, they would simply hope that one day she would walk up the path to their front door. It was a hope that was to be destroyed when Lynda Gough’s remains were recovered from beneath the bathroom extension of the Wests’ ugly, square little house at 2.25 p.m. on Monday 7 March 1994. As Frederick West himself admitted in the last months of his life:‘That was the first one at Cromwell Street. There ain’t no doubt about that, because the basement was stones then, bricks, just bricks laid on that ash stuff.’ But it would not be the last.
Lynda Gough’s disappearance was explained to the lodgers by Rosemary West. She went upstairs shortly after eight o’clock one morning and told one of them that she had ‘hit our daughter while she was babysitting’ and that ‘she wouldn’t be coming round to the house again’. Not one of the lodgers questioned her explanation for a moment. Why should they? By this time there were eight young men living in the four rooms on the top two floors of Cromwell Street, each paying £3 a week, and to every one of them Frederick West seemed every bit as harmless as he must have done to the police. Always grinning, always cheerful, he was nothing more than an unexceptional, ordinary bloke. As one lodger put it more than twenty years later:‘He was a very placid man’, although ‘totally obsessed with sex. He never tired of talking about it, and he was unable to hold a conversation on any other subject’.Young women might be coming and going constantly in the house, but all the while Frederick West was simply ‘hammering’,‘doing do-it-yourself ’ and working ‘down the cellar’.The lodgers did not pay all that much attention to him.
For a moment, just for a moment, the Wests must have held their breath in the summer of 1973. Lynda Gough had been missed, and her mother knew that she had been at Cromwell Street. The chances had to be that a policeman would arrive before too long to ask questions. In fact, not one but two policemen did arrive that summer, but it was not to investigate the disappearance of the Gloucester fireman’s daughter. Instead, Detective Constables Castle and Price raided the house, and the lodgers, for drugs: ‘Two or three times a month for years’, Frederick West would recall years later. ‘That’s where I come to know him [DC Castle] very well.’ West maintained that they had come round after Lynda Gough’s disappearance to search one of her lovers’ rooms, ‘and they found heroin needles’.
The drugs raids were the beginning of West’s long relationship with the police, a relationship that would lead to his convincing almost every officer he ever dealt with that he was no more than a small-scale thief and fence, who ran a ‘relaxed’ lodging-house in the city centre, a place where the lodgers sometimes smoked cannabis and experimented with other drugs. Frederick West’s deliberately humble, self-effacing approach to all forms of authority drew the police into his net just as effectively as it drew in impressionable young women. What neither group suspected was how great the degree of arrogance that humility concealed.
Astonishing though it may seem in retrospect, the fact that West was almost certainly supplying young girls for prostitution in Gloucester and Bristol; the fact that he was encouraging his wife to act as a prostitute in his own house, and charging his workmates for her services; the fact that he was prepared to keep young women prisoners in his cellar until they agreed to provide him and his friends and clients with sexual services; and the fact that a number of young women went missing from his house – all went unnoticed.
Detectives came and went regularly in the upper part of Cromwell Street, looking for drugs, and on one occasion actually arrested one of the lodgers for possession of cannabis, but they did not sense that the landlord may have had entirely different, and much more frightening, criminal ambitions. As the psychiatrist and child-abuse expert Dr EileenVizard put it after his death:‘Frederick West must have learned quickly how to ingratiate himself with the authorities who became such a familiar part of his daily life, grooming them just as he had groomed Rosemary West to trust him, and – in their case – to underestimate him.’
Frederick West’s docile servility served only to underline how insignificant he was, how little notice needed to be taken of him, how little regard he seemed to deserve. As the years passed, and no policemen arrived at his door to enquire about the whereabouts of missing young girls, so his approach to the police became more and more confident and more sophisticated. Still humble, West may have considered offering titbits of information about the Gloucester underworld to officers he felt comfortable with, and whom he wanted to trust him. He may even have considered offering police officers his wife’s sexual favours, but it would not have been an obvious bribe, more the offer of friendship. It would have been exactly the same technique that he used to entice young women into his house: Frederick West took exceptional care never to appear dangerous.