SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS
‘Alas, that spring should vanish with the rose!
That youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close.’
OMAR KHAYYÁM, RUBÁIYÁT
Dirty and dishevelled, his hair caked with sweat, his fingernails filled with the fibreglass of Permali’s factory, his overalls dark with grease and stains, Frederick West was never clean and tidy. ‘It was impossible to persuade him to take a bath,’ his daughter Mae remembered after his death, ‘absolutely impossible.’ With his gypsy looks and his smutty conversation, he was a filthy, leering little gnome of a man, a man whom some women might find repulsive rather than attractive.
And yet, and yet, he was so much more than that. West’s appearance was but his first camouflage, for like a chameleon he would change coat and colour whenever it suited him. He would not have looked out of place in the costume of Mr Punch or the court jester, because his eyes would have glinted with the same devilment, and he would have waved his truncheon or his staff with exactly the same abandon. In spite of the grimy overalls, he was the likeable rogue, and one who could charm a woman.
For no matter how unattractive Frederick West may have appeared, there can be no doubt that he had a powerful impact on many young women. Nor did he have to rely for his success on violence or abduction. There was something in him that attracted women anxious to mother him, and to participate in what they might have seen as his ‘naughtiness’, unaware that his perpetual grin concealed a far, far darker truth than they can possibly have imagined. No matter what we now know of West’s murderous record, there were many young women who found him, in his own daughter’s words after his death, ‘great fun to be with’.
Frederick West was no haunted loner, brooding in his room for days at a time, prepared to venture out only at night, like some modern-day Mr Hyde. He was no Jack the Ripper, Dennis Nilsen, or even Hannibal Lecter. West was a gregarious man who took pleasure in sitting outside his house in the evening engaging passers-by in conversation, a man who was for ever taking complete strangers into his living room for ‘a cup of tea’ and to meet his wife. West thought nothing of talking to people in the street, or in the park, nothing of engaging in lengthy conversation the waitress in the café he had just ‘slipped into’ for a moment, nothing of smiling broadly and complimenting a girl on the colour of her dress or the sheen in her hair. And it was not only vulnerable, unhappy young women, the refugees of care, who fell for his particular, devilish charm.
Lucy Partington was not a runaway, nor was she a waif and stray who had once been in care: quite the opposite. Born in March 1952 and educated at Pates Grammar School for Girls in Cheltenham, she was a twenty-one-year-old third-year undergraduate at the University of Exeter, studying medieval history and English, when she encountered Frederick West. Her parents were divorced; her father Roger, a PhD from Oxford, was a research scientist with ICI in the north of England, and her mother Margaret worked in an architect’s office in Cheltenham. Lucy was the third of their four children, and the novelist Sir Kingsley Amis was her uncle. Bright, serious and dedicated, she was a member of the university’s medieval music group, the Musica Ficta, and was hoping to do a further degree at the Courtauld Institute in London. In November 1973 Lucy Partington had converted to Roman Catholicism after undergoing instruction from a priest in Exeter. She could hardly have been a less likely victim for Frederick West.
But unfortunately for her she looked astonishingly like Rosemary Pauline West. They shared the same dark shoulder-length hair, parted in the middle, the same shy and slightly surprised smile. More than that, she had exactly the same long hair and glasses as Lynda Gough. It was a look that particularly appealed to West.
On 20 December 1973 Lucy Partington returned to her mother’s home in Gretton, a few miles north-east of Cheltenham, for the holidays. She spent Christmas with her mother and brothers, and had planned to set off to visit her father on Teeside on the morning of Friday 28 December. But the evening before she went to visit her friend Helen Render at her home near Pittville Park in Cheltenham. Disabled and all but confined to a wheelchair, Helen Render was one of Lucy Partington’s oldest friends, who called her ‘Luce the Moose’, and the two young women spent the evening discussing the future. While they were together, Lucy Partington even composed a letter to the Courtauld Institute applying to study for an MA in medieval art. She took the letter with her when she left Helen shortly before ten-fifteen that evening. Lucy Partington was never seen again.
It was sleeting on the evening of 27 December 1973, and Lucy would no doubt have pulled up her collar against the wind as she walked down Culrose Close and Albemarle Gate towards the bus stop on the Evesham road to catch the last bus to her mother’s house in Gretton. But, like Mary Bastholm before her, Lucy Partington disappeared from somewhere near a bus stop, although this time one on the Evesham road in Cheltenham rather than one on Bristol Road in Gloucester.What exactly happened to her remains one of the most unhappy mysteries in Frederick West’s murderous career. For the twenty-one-year-old student was not to be found for more than twenty years, when, at last, her remains were unearthed from beneath the cellar floor at 25 Cromwell Street.
What is not clear is how, precisely, they came to be there. For Lucy Partington had no known connection with Cromwell Street or Frederick West. She was certainly sensible enough not to accept a lift from a man, or a man and woman, at night without a considerable amount of thought. She had not visited the Wests. She had not visited their lodgers. She was not a resident of a local children’s home. She was not a vulnerable teenage girl who might fall for the blandishments of a man who seemed to want to help her. And yet Lucy Partington must have accepted a lift from Frederick West at some point on that December evening in 1973.
Frederick West himself insisted that he had known Lucy Partington for some months before she disappeared. He also insisted that they used to make love regularly in Cheltenham’s nearby Pittville Park, and that he had even given her a nickname, ‘Juicy Lucy’. According to West’s first version of events, on this particular December evening in 1973 he had been waiting for her when she left her friend, and Lucy Partington had been sitting in his van waiting for the bus to arrive when they had started to argue. ‘She said she wanted me to run her out near her home or summat, and what she was actually saying was “Come and meet my parents”.’
In his first confessions to the police,West maintained:
So I met her this night, and picked her up, and what she’d done, she’d found my phone number . . . ’cause she come the loving racket . . . and wanted to come and live with me and all this rubbish . . . anyway, we had a row over it . . . I mean, it was always made clear to these girls that there was no affair, it was purely sex, end of story, and if they ever tried to threaten to tell my wife . . . they could be in serious trouble.
Anyway, I reminded her that I said . . . like, any messing with my home and you’re in deep trouble . . . and, oh, she got quite nasty about it. She said I wanna come and live with you and all this crap, and I just grabbed her by the throat.
West then suggested that he had killed Lucy Partington in his van that evening, driven her body back to Cromwell Street, and pushed it down into his cellar through the vent in the back wall.
Though it is difficult to believe, FrederickWest insisted repeatedly, throughout his police interviews that he and Lucy Partington had been ‘having an affair’ for several months, and that he had first met her ‘in the early summer’ when he had taken his children to the boating-lake in Pittville Park on a Sunday afternoon. ‘I got going with her after,’West said firmly. ‘It was all secret, hush, hush.’
I met Lucy as I said in the first place, in the park, right, in Pittville Park . . . when I was walking the children. I was sat on the seat talking to her, and they were playing, throwing stuff in the lake, you know, and feeding the ducks and all that. And then I took the children home and I arranged to meet her back at night, and I came and met her on that hill, and, um, we had a bit of sex romp and that, and that was it. Then I didn’t see her again for a long time, for a while, quite some time, then I met her again, that was on the other side of the park . . . I was there with the children then again, and Rose was there somewhere. But I think Rose was down on the swings . . . and I took them up to see the peacocks up the top and . . . I seen her and I went across and had a chat to her . . . and then I met her the following night again.Then I didn’t see her for a while after that.
West remembered the twenty-one-year-old well. ‘Fairly slim, shoulder-length black hair, a student,’ he explained in the last year of his life. ‘I had the children with me when I met her, and that’s what fascinated her towards me. I think it was the children; she came talking to them and that.’ Certainly West knew that she ‘used to catch a bus from Pittville Park’, because ‘she had a mate up there’, and he maintained steadfastly that she would meet him either before or after she ‘had been to see her mate’.West said that he used to ‘park in Pittville Park and wait for her . . . I met her quite a few times’, keeping the van out of sight.
‘I mean when we met, like . . . it was sex and virtually straight away, and then had a chat, used to lie on the grass and have a chat, and then probably sex again . . . because we only met more or less in the dark, like, in late evening . . . She was a very talkative girl, actually; she used to try and cram I suppose a week’s news into a couple of hours, like . . . ’cause we get on well together, I mean, too well, that was the problem.’West agreed to meet Lucy Partington in the park, he claimed, because he was afraid that his wife’s parents, or her brothers, might see him. ‘Her brother used to walk that road regular, all hours of the day and night, to his girlfriends in Cheltenham . . . and he did catch me and Rose once in the park, or seen us, and went back and reported it to his parents . . .And the last thing I wanted them to do was to go and tell Rose I was meeting another girl in Cheltenham.’
As a result, West claimed, he would never risk taking Lucy Partington to a pub or a café, or indeed to anywhere else in Cheltenham, for fear of encountering his brother-in-law. It was this fear of discovery that had caused the difficulties that night. He said that the twenty-one-year-old undergraduate had ‘got my phone number and address from somewhere, and if I didn’t go with her properly or something, her wanted me to see her parents, her wanted me to do bloody everything. Then she was going to ring up Rose, go and see my wife, tell her we were having an affair . . . because she reckoned I was taking advantage of her.’ It was this threat, West maintained fiercely, that led to his strangling her in the park, putting her body in the van, and taking her back to Cromwell Street.
Yet again this was not to be Frederick West’s only explanation for the death of one of his victims. Ever anxious to portray himself as a fertile man who fathered children whenever he had even a brief sexual relationship, West went on to suggest that Lucy Partington was pregnant when she confronted him on that December evening in Pittville Park. In this expanded version West said they made love, and then she told him: ‘I’m pregnant and I want a thousand pound off you . . . or eight hundred pound . . . for an abortion.’West went on to explain:‘That’s where the row took up there, because I don’t reckon she was pregnant. I think she was having me on. So then we had a violent row, and that’s how it all happened . . . All I can remember,’ he added,‘we had one almighty row . . . argument and practically a fight in the back of that park, ’cause she was threatening me.’
Both versions of Lucy Partington’s death are difficult to believe. After Frederick West’s death, for example, her mother, Margaret Partington, explained that her daughter had ‘barely spent any time’ in Gloucestershire or Cheltenham during 1973, and certainly not long enough either to have met West or to have embarked on an affair with him. Her mother insisted that she had simply been too involved in her work, and in travelling throughout the year, to have had even the opportunity to consider it.
Shortly before his death, however, West remained adamant that he knew Lucy Partington well. ‘I mean, I ought to know when I met somebody . . . We used to meet in the park . . . and then whatever we’d be doing we done, and that was it, and then she would go off up across the bank.’ West accepted, however, that he probably had not used his real name. ‘She knew me as Steve . . . I used the name Steve quite often . . . Never used no surname.’
Lucy Partington’s friends and family are also convinced that she was a virgin when she encountered West on that snowy night in December 1973. Indeed, they believe that she had a firm set of moral principles that would have prevented her from embarking on any kind of sexual affair, let alone with someone as unlikely as Frederick West.
Nevertheless, West never once chose a victim by accident. He was a painstaking and careful man,and preferred to target his victims after observing them carefully. Also, although he was to change his version of the events surrounding the deaths of his victims, he never once retracted his explanation that he had met Lucy Partington before the night she disappeared in December 1973. It is possible, therefore, that West did meet her in Pittville Park, and that she did indeed talk to him when he was with his children. West might, for example, have engaged her in conversation, and discovered that she had recently become a Catholic. Religion was a subject that he liked to discuss, and he would no doubt have told her about the baptism of his own children.The topic could hardly have been less threatening; indeed, his interest in it may well have intrigued the undergraduate.
It is also possible that Lucy Partington met Frederick West more than once, but that she did not embark on any kind of sexual relationship with him – and that in turn led him to want to possess her sexually. It is only too likely that she made it very clear that she had no interest in him as a sexual partner, and that it was her very rejection of his sexual advances at their meeting or meetings that led to his targeting her as a potential victim. But Lucy Partington could hardly have sensed any danger from West. If she had done, she would certainly not have accepted a lift as she knew that one of her friends, Ruth Owen, had been propositioned by a white-skinned, dark-haired man about ten or fifteen years older than she was, at a bus stop in the area only a few years earlier
In the circumstances, it seems reasonable to assume that Frederick West had, in fact, met Lucy Partington before that wintry night in December 1973, and, therefore, that she would get into his A35 van. He may have been waiting opposite the stop, knowing that she went to see her friend in the evenings and often caught the last bus home. She would not have known what was in his mind, and seen him only as a man she had met with his children. The friendly smile from a man she knew, someone who had always seemed harmless enough, only ever anxious ‘to help out’, would have eased any suspicions that she might have had.That may well have been the technique that he had used five years earlier with Mary Bastholm, whom he had first met in the Pop-In café, probably with Ann McFall.
So it is difficult to believe that Frederick West did not know Lucy Partington, but it is still just possible. In that case he may have used the system he had pioneered with Carol Raine fifteen months earlier, and taken Rosemary West with him in the van that night, knowing that any young woman would feel safer if she saw another woman of the same age in the car too.That was the technique that West had explained to Liz Agius in Midland Road, and which the Wests had then applied to Carol Raine.
It is also possible that West may have slightly amended his system in the light of his experience, and that instead of pulling up at a bus stop with his wife beside him in the front seat, he had deliberately dropped his wife off beforehand to stand at the stop and pretend to wait for the bus.When Lucy Partington, or whomever the intended victim might be, arrived at the stop, she would find Rosemary West already standing there.
If Rosemary West were then to engage the girl in conversation while they were both standing at the bus stop – for example, by suggesting that they must have just missed the bus – and then ‘by chance’ her husband happened to drive past, what could be more natural than for the young woman to offer her companion a lift in her husband’s car? Lucy Partington might even have recognised her companion at the bus stop as a young woman who had caught the bus from Bishop’s Cleeve to Cheltenham and back over the past few years. Certainly, Rosemary West would have been careful to talk about her children, and how anxious she was to get back to them. What could possibly be the danger in accepting a lift with a young woman like that? What could be more persuasive than a young companion of the same age? What could be more reassuring to a girl alone?
FrederickWest had dedicated himself to appearing unfrightening. It was his finest disguise, the one subterfuge guaranteed to succeed. It was only when he returned to the safety of his own house, and, in particular, to the security of his cellar, that he would reveal himself in his true colours. To any young woman unfortunate enough to fall into his clutches, the effect must have been truly terrifying.The man who had pretended so effectively to be nothing more than someone ‘anxious to help out’ was suddenly revealed as someone who could only be called a monster. But by that time the young woman was almost certainly bound and gagged, and could do nothing more than watch in terror as her captor used her to live out his fantasies.
In the final months of his life, West would try to deny all knowledge of the killing of Lucy Partington, and place the blame for her death firmly on his wife. ‘I never seen her in me life,’ he would tell his original solicitor, Howard Ogden. ‘Rose’s old man picked her up on the way through.’ He then went on to suggest that Lucy had been ‘supplied’ by his father-in-law and his wife ‘to a fucking party or something. I don’t know if Rose was supplying these girls to the same lot that Rena was in Bristol’. But West maintained: ‘Half the time I didn’t know who was in the bloody place. Rose was putting them in and taking them out, letting them stay, enticing them. They were bloody young girls . . . Rose was having casual sex with some of them but she never mentioned that to me.’
As he did so often, Frederick West may have used a small sliver of the truth to conceal the ugly reality of what actually happened to the unfortunate undergraduate when she found herself his prisoner in the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street. His father-in-law, Bill Letts, for example, may have been involved in some way,‘’cause Rose’s father spent most Christmases over at our place then’. And there is no doubt that West preferred to hold his own ‘parties’ in the basement of his house rather than ‘supply’ girls to anyone else’s; just as his wife’s violent sexual appetite would have been heightened by her newly discovered pregnancy. Equally, West would also have taken a particular delight in the humiliation of a girl who was his social and intellectual superior.
The possibility must be that on this occasion, for the first time, Frederick West indulged his passion for photography. He had recently acquired an eight-millimetre movie camera, and had made no secret among his friends that he ‘wanted to make movies’. But the movies he wanted to make were not cheerful representations of his growing family. West wanted to make pornographic films, using his wife and friends as the actors, and almost certainly featuring the plight of the young women who fell into his hands as victims. Though West was to deny it firmly in the last months of his life, there must be a suspicion that he filmed the torture of some of the young women who died at Cromwell Street, hiding the film under the floorboards, and taking it out to watch with his wife after his children had gone to bed. Whether he actually filmed the death of his victims can now be no more than a matter for speculation, but there must at least be every possibility that he created what later were to become known as ‘snuff movies’ – films of the deaths of his victims. The one person who would never feature in his home-made pornographic films was West himself; he was too cautious a man for that, too determined never to lose control of events.
Certainly Frederick and Rosemary West’s sexual horizons had expanded still further, now that they were confident that they had succeeded in getting away with the murders of both Lynda Gough and Carol Ann Cooper. The Wests by now used their victims to demonstrate their love for one another. ‘If you really love me, you will kill her,’ Rosemary West would have said to her husband. ‘If you don’t want me to leave you for her, then you’ll have to kill her,’ Frederick West would have replied, both demanding that their partner kill to secure the strength of their mutual love. Each encouraged the other to greater and greater excess, exciting the other to demonstrate and prove their love for one another.
After her arrest the police suggested to Rosemary West that she had become fascinated by Lynda Gough’s interest in black magic and satanism, which led them to want to torture and humiliate their victims as part of a ritual in which other people who shared their views participated. There is no clear proof that this took place, but Rosemary West’s declared interest in ‘bathing in virgin’s blood’ to ‘make herself more beautiful’, and in washing in ‘virgin’s urine’ for the same purpose, suggests that a ritual element may have played some part in their killing. The fact that Lucy Partington was a virgin when she fell into the hands of the Wests may have substantially increased her attraction to them both, adding an extra tragic dimension to the abuse that she was subjected to at their hands.
Whatever the precise truth, there can be little doubt that Lucy Partington, too, found herself in the cellar of Cromwell Street, just as Carol Ann Cooper and Lynda Gough had done before her. But this time the Wests almost certainly kept Lucy Partington alive for considerably longer than they had their previous victims. Part of the evidence for this is that Frederick West remembered it was snowing on the night that he and the twenty-one-year-old undergraduate had their row in Pittville Park, whereas in fact snow did not fall in Cheltenham until three days later. But more significantly still, though he had nursed a hatred of hospitals since his motorcycle accident at the age of seventeen, Frederick West suddenly presented himself at the casualty department of Gloucester Royal Hospital at twenty-five minutes after midnight on the morning of 3 January 1974 – seven nights after Lucy Partington’s disappearance – for treatment to lacerations of his right hand. It seems only too probable that West had not started to dismember the body of the poor young woman until that evening.
What exactly happened to Lucy Partington during those seven days can only be guessed at. But there can be no doubt that the Wests made sure she could neither move nor cry out when they abused her. An oval band of sticky tape some sixteen inches in circumference was found wrapped around her skull when her remains were unearthed from the familiar two-feet-by-two-feet narrow shaft that West had dug for her three feet below the cellar floor at Cromwell Street. Two hairgrips and many fragments of hair were found stuck to the tape, and once again some additional surgical tape seemed to have been used to form a gag.
Just as with their other victims, a gag alone was not the only restraint the Wests resorted to.Two pieces of cord, knotted beneath the jaw, were also found with Lucy Partington’s remains, acting as what may have been some kind of rudimentary noose around her neck, and there were also other pieces of rope found with her skeleton. The only possible conclusion is that this peaceful, serious girl found herself hanging helpless in the Wests’ cellar in the days after Christmas 1973. It seems likely that she, too, was mercilessly abused just as her predecessors had been abused, with the addition of new and even more horrifying variations.
It seems only too possible that she was kept alive for several days in the cellar of Cromwell Street, the door locked from the hallway above and the only keys in the hands of Frederick and Rosemary West. They must have taken a grim delight in her imprisonment, for they probably chose quite deliberately to suspend the naked undergraduate by her arms in a corner of the cellar wallpapered with nursery characters. Certainly, no mercy can have been shown, for once again after the sexual abuse had ended, torture would have begun.The police suggested to Rosemary West after her arrest that parts of her skin had been removed while she was alive, and she had been subjected to other forms of horrifying sadistic abuse involving the use of fire.
No fewer than seventy-two of Lucy Partington’s bones were removed. Her right shoulder-blade and left kneecap were missing when her remains were recovered from the semi-liquid clay beneath the floor of Cromwell Street; so were three of her ribs. Not one of these bones was ever discovered. The only possible conclusion is that Frederick West removed them, as he had removed the bones of each and every one of his other victims. West also removed fifty-two foot and toe bones from the seventy-six in her body, as well as eleven of her fourteen ankle bones and three of her sixteen wrist bones. It seems only too possible that he did all this while she was alive.
Once again Frederick West chose to decapitate his naked victim before burying her.When it was eventually recovered, Lucy Partington’s skull was found upside-down in the narrow shaft that he always dug, with the knotted ‘loop of tape’ noose beneath it. Her legs had been disarticulated at the hips and shoved into the hole on either side of her torso. Indeed, her body had had to be manoeuvred into the hole, as there was a sewage pipe running across it which would have made the task even more difficult. No clothes or belongings of any kind were discovered with her skeleton; not her rust-coloured knee-length raincoat, nor her pink, flared brushed-denim jeans, not even the brown canvas satchel with the name L. K. Partington stencilled on it that she had been carrying on the night she disappeared. Nothing whatever was found with her remains when they were discovered twenty years later.
There was, however, one extra element in her narrow grave: an eight-inch-long, black-handled kitchen knife with a specially sharpened blade and a rounded tip.The only possible conclusion is that it had been used to dismember her body, thereby making the fine cut-marks that appeared on some of her bones, and that it had then been thrown into the hole in disgust when it had slipped and inflicted the lacerations to Frederick West’s right hand that led him to hospital in Gloucester.
In the first days of January 1974 Lucy Partington became the second body to be buried beneath the cellar of Cromwell Street by Frederick West, his third victim within a year. Killing had become an addiction for him, one that he would never be able to break, and one that he had, in turn, seduced his wife Rosemary into joining. Their love for one another had been sealed in the blood of three innocent young women in Cromwell Street. They were now for ever bound to one another by this evil love.
Margaret Partington quickly reported her daughter Lucy’s disappearance to the police, and an extensive search was mounted for her throughout the New Year holiday in 1974. Just as they had been in the case of Mary Bastholm almost exactly six years before, teams of officers were recruited to search the area and to question motorists and pedestrians to see if they may have seen the missing undergraduate. Officers combed Pittville Park, a television appeal was launched, and a reconstruction staged of her trip to the bus stop, all in the hope of jogging the memory of any passer-by, but to no avail. As a distraught Margaret Partington said at the time: ‘How anybody could disappear and just vanish completely in three minutes baffles me.’ It would continue to baffle the police for twenty years.
Frederick and Rosemary West could not fail to have been aware of the police hunt for Lucy Partington. The details were reported extensively in their local paper, the Gloucester Citizen, and recounted on the local television news.West himself admitted later that he had seen ‘photographs of her on lampposts’ and heard the details on television. He may well also have turned up to watch, with a sly smile on his face. There is even some evidence that within a few years West would actually volunteer to take part in the search for a missing girl, so intrigued was he by the procedure – and so anxious to see that his concealment of her body had been successful.
An interest in the search for every missing young woman was almost certainly the reason that the only television programmes Frederick West watched with any regularity were news bulletins. ‘Dad always came home in time to see News at Ten,’ his son Stephen would recall after his father’s death,‘and we all had to keep quiet while it was on.’ That was not the only news programme he watched. ‘If he was at home he would look at the six o’clock, the seven o’clock, the nine o’clock, the ten o’clock and the one at midnight,’ his daughter Mae would remember. ‘They were the only programmes he was ever interested in.’ In contrast, West did everything he could to prevent his children watching television soap operas as they grew up.‘He told us they were too depressing,’ Stephen West remembered,‘especially EastEnders.’
Frederick West himself had no need of soap operas. His life was drama enough. He had now killed two young women, Carol Ann Cooper and Lucy Partington, within six weeks of each other. But once again he reacted cautiously, anxious not to draw any unnecessary attention to himself. After the Christmas and New Year break, West quietly returned to Permali’s and to his part-time building work, for all the world the personification of innocent endeavour. The fact that, by then, his previous two murders had gone undetected served only to increase his confidence. That did not mean, however, that he was not careful. He decided to leave the next killing until the next public holiday from work, Easter 1974.
But now, for the first time since Carol Raine, Frederick West picked up a girl he had not specifically targeted, a girl he did not know. Nevertheless, Thérèse Siegenthaler fitted the pattern that he had come to look for. She was another student, another twenty-one-year-old, another slim girl with shoulder-length straight dark brown hair, another girl who wore glasses and was a little shorter than he was, at about five-feet, four-inches, and another hitchhiker. Born in Switzerland, one of five children whose parents had divorced when she was eleven, Thérèse Siegenthaler spoke fluent English, although with a Swiss-German accent, and was studying sociology at the Woolwich Polytechnic in south-east London. Though she looked a little younger than her years, and wore no make-up, she was none the less physically self-assured and more than capable of looking after herself. A student of judo, she worked at weekends in the Bally shoe shop at the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square, London, to supplement her income, and was well used to hitchhiking. She was also sexually aware.
Thérèse Siegenthaler had planned to visit Ireland during her Easter vacation in 1974 to meet a Catholic priest. She had gone to a party at a friend’s house in London on the night of 15 April, and the following morning had gone back to her lodgings in Deptford, London, to collect her belongings. She had then set off to catch a ferry to Ireland, although whether she was intending to travel from Fishguard or Holyhead is not entirely clear. When she was last seen, Thérèse Siegenthaler was wearing a black PVC three-quarter-length jacket and carrying only a small bag, her Swiss passport, as well as enough money for the week she intended to be away. She already had tickets for the theatre in London in the final week of April, and did not intend to miss it. But Thérèse Siegenthaler never fulfilled her plan. Like Lucy Partington four months before her, she disappeared. The whereabouts of the twenty-one-year-old Swiss girl remained a mystery for two decades, until her remains, too, were discovered buried beneath the cellar floor of 25 Cromwell Street.
Yet again, Frederick West provided an elaborate series of conflicting versions of the events surrounding the death of Thérèse Siegenthaler. But, as usual, certain elements in his description of the killing never changed. He admitted throughout, for example, that he had given Thérèse a lift in his van, that he had taken her back to Cromwell Street alive, that she had been involved in a sexual experiment with him, and that he had buried her beneath the cellar floor once the experiment had gone wrong. As ever, he was also at pains to suggest that he had never intended to murder her; it was all an unfortunate accident.West was as anxious as he had been in the case of Lucy Partington to insist that he and Thérèse Siegenthaler had been lovers. It was part of a carefully conceived smokescreen to conceal the true depths of his inhumanity.
‘I had an affair with her. She was on holiday over here, and she threatened to tell Rose,’ West told the police shortly after he had first admitted killing the Swiss girl, and once again he offered his tried and tested motive for her death.‘It was made quite clear that I was married to Rose . . . and every one of ’em did exactly the same thing . . .“I love you, I’m pregnant, I’m gonna tell Rose, I want you to come and live with me” . . . and that was the problem.’
Frederick West maintained that the sociology student had a ‘nice figure, petite’ with ‘blondish/mousy hair’ and that he had picked her up ‘just outside Worcester’. Indeed, in this first version of events West went on to suggest that they had then twice made love in a lay-by, and that shortly afterwards she had asked him for money. ‘I just lost me head with her,’ he said, explaining that he had hit her, and then taken her home to Cromwell Street ‘after Rose had gone out to the Bamboo Club.’ West suggested that he had driven his green A35 van round to the back of his house in Cromwell Street, and had put the Swiss girl’s unconscious body through the vent into the cellar at the back of the house. Soon after he had joined her there,West explained that he strangled her ‘to make sure she was dead’.
Within a matter of hours,West was to alter that version of events, and explain instead that he had picked up the girl ‘outside Evesham’ and that she was heading for Cheltenham. In this second version the Swiss girl had told him about Amsterdam, and tulips, and had then told him that ‘she fancied sex’. As a result they had ‘pulled off down a lane. It was dark’. Afterwards, he had asked her:‘Where do you want me to take you? The other side of Gloucester? Because it would be easier to get a lift.’ But the student had replied:‘Oh no, I’ll just come home and stay with you . . . because I’ve got nowhere to go.’ West maintained that he had protested, but the young Swiss girl had threatened him, saying:‘I’m the one with the wet knickers . . . I’ve only to say you’ve raped me . . . you’re in big trouble.’ As a result he had agreed to take her home to Cromwell Street. After they arrived he decided to strangle her – but only after he had ‘made her a cup of tea and they’d made love again’.
Under interrogation, however, Frederick West admitted that even this second version of events did not represent the truth. When it was suggested to him, for example, that Thérèse Siegenthaler may have been gagged with tape,West suddenly volunteered the fact that ‘it was . . . I think it was grey tape . . . what you seal boxes with’, and went on to admit, unprompted, that some of his victims were tied up. A matter of hours later he even expanded on that explanation and said ‘the Dutch girl [as he called Thérèse Siegenthaler] was the one I had the kinky bondage with . . . because that was what she wanted to do . . . She wanted a mask made on her face . . . and her nose trussed up and all this.’
A few hours later West refined his version of events still further, this time to explain that he had picked up the twenty-one-year-old in his van in Evesham, and had given her a lift to the Trustee Savings Bank in Barton Street, Gloucester, so that she could change some money. He had then arranged to meet her again a week later: ‘She said: “I’ll go on to Monmouth and that and then I’ll meet you back at the end of the week.” . . . She was going touring, like.’ It was only when she had come back that he had taken her to Cromwell Street,‘where it all went wrong’. In this version Thérèse Siegenthaler ‘walked in’ to Cromwell Street because she ‘wanted bondage, and I mean that was arranged and we did it’.
Frederick West maintained firmly that the Swiss girl ‘was too excited to get this flipping bondage thing going. I mean, she was all sort of geared up when she come back. I mean, when we finally got into the basement . . . I mean I looked round and she was absolutely starkers except for her ear-rings . . . I mean, that’s how geared up she was.’West now claimed that every single one of the victims that he buried in the cellar had ‘wanted to have bondage sex, or kinky sex, and that’s all it was . . . It was their thing.They wanted to try or do it . . . Each one was their own fantasy.’
In this version the fantasy had once again got out of hand, and as a result West had taken Thérèse Siegenthaler into the front room of the cellar in Cromwell Street and laid her on the floor.‘I tried to get the taping off. I couldn’t even get it off her. I don’t have nothing to rip it with . . . When you get two or three pieces together you can’t rip it, and by this time she’s in, you know, looking as though she’s in some pain and that – so I just strangled her.’ Frederick West even gave his reason.‘I don’t believe in suffering, anybody suffering, like myself. If anything happened to me I would rather somebody just end me there and then, than let me lie there and suffer, ’cause suffering is a thing I can’t take, like with animals . . . Anything that’s suffering should be put to sleep, not allowed to suffer.’
Once more Frederick West was at pains to portray himself as no more than somebody who had only wanted ‘to help out these girls’. He even told the police: ‘After anything happened, when the girls died, I mean my stomach used to knot up and I felt sick and giddy and felt really ill, and I just wanted to get out from home like, get out altogether, give myself a chance to try and get control of myself again.’ Indeed, West explained: ‘When I buried the girl and got rid of her clothes and that . . . I had to dive for it, the door, go out for a long ride somewhere.’
This was, yet again, a carefully sanitised version of the truth of what had actually happened to the young women who had fallen into his hands. Frederick West would never accept the pain and suffering he had clearly subjected any of his victims to, baldly claiming instead: ‘I couldn’t let anybody suffer for a few seconds if I could help it . . . I don’t believe in suffering anyway . . . I mean, I couldn’t torture anybody or anything.’
The truth was very different. No matter precisely how Thérèse Siegenthaler found her way to 25 Cromwell Street, and it seems possible that, for once,West had picked up a hitchhiker at random (though he may have arranged to meet her on a second occasion), she, like Lucy Partington, Carol Ann Cooper and Lynda Gough before her, found herself a helpless prisoner in the Wests’ locked cellar. The confident Swiss girl may have been tempted to visit the house on some entirely harmless pretext, just as some form of drug to make her drowsy may have been slipped into the tea that Frederick West so kindly made for her when she arrived.
None of the Wests’ four children, even Anna-Marie who was almost ten, would have taken the slightest notice of another young woman in a house that was regularly populated by a stream of unknown young women at all hours of the day and night. After his children had disappeared to bed, Frederick West and his wife would no doubt have led the by now pliant and drugged young girl through the locked door that opened on to the stairs into the cellar. Thérèse Siegenthaler was never to climb back up those stairs, or be seen again by anyone, until, almost exactly twenty years later, her remains would be unearthed from beneath a false fireplace in the front corner of the cellar’s front room, the one nearest Cromwell Street.
No one can be sure how Thérèse Siegenthaler came to die, but Frederick West’s own admission that some form of sexual bondage played its part in her death hardly seems open to dispute. A knotted loop of cloth was found very near her skull, which, when it was cleaned, was found to be a cloth scarf that had been folded or rolled and then tied to form a loop of almost fourteen inches in circumference. There were brown hair fragments in the knot, and there seems no doubt that it formed a gag around her mouth. Even though the knot could have been pulled free, the Swiss girl would have needed a free hand to be able to do so. No ropes were found with her remains, although West himself suggested that some of the girls had been ‘anxious to try out a harness’ that he had made out of plastic. West would not have thrown away something that he had gone to some trouble to make. Indeed, a large number of sexual harnesses of varying sizes and strengths were finally recovered from Cromwell Street.
The pattern of the previous deaths makes it almost inevitable that Thérèse Siegenthaler suffered a fate similar to that of her predecessors in that damp, dark cave beneath the paving-stones of Gloucester. Once again a number of bones were missing when her jumbled skeleton was recovered from its tiny two-feet-by-two-feet hole dug three feet or more beneath the cellar floor. Her left collar-bone was missing, as were five ankle and nine wrist bones, as well as twenty-four of her seventy-six finger and toe bones, a total of thirty-nine missing bones in all. Like Lucy Partington before her, the Swiss girl had fine knife-cuts on the upper end of her thigh bones, which may have been made when her legs were disarticulated from her pelvis at the hips; and, like Lucy Partington, she had been decapitated.
Frederick West confirmed that that had been her fate, and even went on to describe in grim detail what he did. ‘I used to put their head over the hole and cut their head off,’ he told the police, adding,‘And of course that was most, the bulk, of the blood gone . . . it would just rush out . . . Once you’ve cut the jugular vein, blood just rushes out.’ West told the police that he made sure ‘always’ to cut his victims’ heads off first, because that way he kept the bloodstains to a minimum.
But then West tried to convince the police that he did not enjoy this horrifying task, trying to confuse them, as he had confused so many in the past, into believing that he was an ordinary man.‘There are no words to describe it, actually.You feel terrible. There is just no words to explain what you go through . . . Both mentally and physically, like, you are absolutely shattered,’West said a month after his arrest. He went on: ‘Once you go to try and cut somebody’s head off, you then freeze mentally, and you just carry on and . . . from then on you don’t know what you’re doing . . . your mind is gone . . . and you’re in so much pain in your stomach and you’re shaking so much . . . I mean, like people say once you’ve done a thing it becomes easier. It does not – believe me, I can tell you that it does not get easier.’ In retrospect such claims are revealed as being pathetic lies, lies that not even the guards at Belsen would have attempted to sustain. There was no conceivable justification for the mutilation of the bodies of these innocent young women, no claim of medical experiment, or the demands of national pride or sovereignty. West disarticulated and decapitated his victims for no other reason than convenience, once he had achieved his own gratification at their expense.
When Rosemary West was finally questioned about the death of the twenty-one-year-old Swiss student two decades after her disappearance in April 1974, she steadfastly refused to make any comment whatsoever; just as she denied any recollection of her at her trial. During her police interviews, Rosemary West simply sat and stared at the ground when she was asked at length about the events that may have led to Thérèse Siegenthaler’s death. She refused even to comment on the suggestions that the girl might have been drugged, then bound and gagged by the Wests, then held prisoner in the cellar of Cromwell Street. She refused to comment on whether the young student’s fingers and toes had been removed while she was still alive. She also refused to acknowledge that she would have known that Thérèse was almost exactly a year older than she was.
But Rosemary West did pause for some time when she was asked if the Swiss girl had been scalped before she was buried. It was one of the very few moments of emotion that Rosemary West ever allowed herself to display during her interrogation, perhaps because the memory of this particular atrocity was too vivid to be forgotten.
Rosemary West rapidly recovered her composure, however, and went on to refuse to comment on whether the girl had been made to kneel over a hole that Frederick West had dug in the floor before she had been beheaded. She also refused to discuss what might have become of a contraceptive coil that Thérèse Siegenthaler may have had fitted, and which would have required a medical operation to remove. The device was never recovered from the young Swiss woman’s grave, suggesting that Frederick West, the man who had boasted so persistently of his skill at abortions, may have removed it – either before or after her death.
Lucy Partington and Thérèse Siegenthaler had a great deal in common. They were both students, and almost exactly the same age.They both wore their shoulder-length brown hair parted in the middle, just as they both wore glasses. They were both about the same height and shared the same slim build. More significant still, they both had no link whatever with number 25 Cromwell Street – except for their striking resemblance to the woman who was mistress of that house, the twenty-year-old Rosemary Pauline West.
Was Frederick West deliberately seeking young women who were exactly like his wife? Was he doing so in order to subject them to a sexual humiliation that he would have liked to subject her to, but did not dare? Did she sense that, and help to do so to protect herself from him? Or was she aiding and abetting him to target young women exactly like herself as a way of making her seem even more attractive to her husband – knowing that the victims would never agree to participate in his evil love-affair as she had done? Did West kill these poor girls because his wife demanded it, or because they did not measure up to her?
Though Frederick West offered explanations for many other things in his life, these were questions that he never answered.