IMMACULATE CONCEIT
‘Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to tell a lie well.’
SAMUEL BUTLER, NOTEBOOKS
Frederick West was a compulsive and felicitous liar. Lying came to him as easily as breathing, and required no more thought. It was as much a part of his personality as his relentless sexual appetite. But, like much else in his life, West brought a meticulous care to his lying. Throughout his life he had steadily refined a technique that made everything he said seem straightforward, but which also effectively concealed far more than it revealed. West would layer half-truth on half-truth – to disguise the lies beneath – apparently open and yet in fact obscuring almost everything of the truth. It was a technique that he must have used on the young women who became his victims, the apparently open-faced, talkative little man, who took pains to lace every sentence with an exaggeration or an irrelevant detail.
Ask Frederick West if he knew someone, and he would never answer directly, always asking instead where they lived, before digressing into an endless description of the best route to take to their house. Ask him if he had committed a crime, and he would embark immediately on a description of the events that might have led up to it, only then to digress again until it was almost impossible to recall the detail of the original question. West went to considerable trouble to seldom answer any but the most direct questions, and even then to do everything in his power to confuse and fog the questioner.
In his final year West explained his technique to Detective Constable Hazel Savage in an interview room at Gloucester Police Station. It was the first and only time that he ever did this, and it revealed the subtlety of his approach. ‘What happens is,’ West confessed,‘I’m talking away to them . . . and suddenly it comes into my mind, shit, I’m telling them the truth, you know what’s been going on . . . So then I shove something in there . . . to get away from it.’ This use of irrelevant detail, West admitted, was ‘because I want to get away from it, to give me a chance to think’. It was the only occasion on which West admitted that he knew when he was lying and when he was not, and how he managed to cope with the situation.The only difficulty he encountered was ‘that you get to a stage where you . . . just don’t know what you are actually saying . . . You’ve got everything mixed up. So you’ve got to try and get out of it, to give your mind a chance.’
West maintained throughout the 145 police interviews conducted at the end of his life that he would never explain anything to anyone unless somebody asked him the correct, direct question, and even then he would still lie rather than tell the truth. ‘When you’ve got so much on your mind, it, well, suddenly runs into each other in your mind and . . . the only thing you can think of is to dive out of it, to give you a chance . . . because the last thing I want is for you to be able to come back and say, “you lied to me about that”.’ It was not the reaction of a simple or blunt man.
West took enormous pleasure in practising this technique.Anyone he met was to be deceived, to be lulled into the sense that they understood him, while he kept the reality studiously hidden for himself alone. Though he could barely read, and certainly could hardly write, his native wit and self-confidence carried him through triumphantly for years. He particularly enjoyed practising his technique for deception on the police. West revelled in the police drugs raids that regularly swept through Cromwell Street. He would seize the opportunity they brought him to lie with a persuasive fluency that no one would detect – except perhaps his wife Rosemary. As she was to put it: ‘The police coming round was just a joke to him. He thought it was funny.’ It gave him an opportunity to deceive, and there was nothing that West relished more.
Frederick West nevertheless recognised that he could have been an even more persuasive liar if only he had been able to write notes of what he had said, to give himself an aide-mémoire. As he confessed to his first solicitor, Howard Ogden, in the last weeks of his life: ‘Where I’m buggered up, see, is I think of things, but I can’t write it down. I can’t write. I’ve got to fucking remember it, and it’s not that easy.’ Easy or not, West managed it with a fluency that confused police officers, social workers, doctors, psychologists, probation officers, prison officers and his victims for almost half a century. And very few people whom he came across guessed that they were being duped.
‘Dad always told me he would just let out the bits of information that suited him,’ West’s son Stephen explained after his father’s death. ‘It meant that he could always make people like the police run about after him, for example. If they thought he was going to tell them something new, they would take an interest.’ When he talked about it, Frederick West giggling gleefully, hugging himself with pride, then quickly returned to his pretence of humility and subservience.
And if the police could be taken in, what chance would a vulnerable young girl stand against him? West used exactly the same techniques on them as he did on those in authority. He lied and lied again, exaggerated and boasted, twisted and turned their emotions, all in an effort to confuse, an effort to entice them to forget their fears – and trust him. In the twelve months between the middle of April 1973 and the middle of April 1974, West had used the technique to such effect that the bodies of four young women were now buried beneath his house in Cromwell Street. Lynda Gough, Carol Ann Cooper, Lucy Partington and Thérèse Siegenthaler stood silent witnesses to his appetite for lies, deception, sexual excess and murder.
But to the young men and women coming and going in his rooms at Cromwell Street, Frederick West was still simply an affable landlord, albeit one with an ‘open marriage’, as he liked to describe it to everyone he met. West told one of his female lodgers at the time that ‘Rose liked women and he liked to watch’, while at the same time he encouraged a young Jamaican to have sex with his wife, calling the young man ‘the best friend I ever had’.
In the early summer of 1974 Frederick West left Permali’s factory in Bristol Road, Gloucester, for a new job nearby, in the light fabrication shop at Muir Hill Wagon Works, which was then owned by Wingets of Rochester, Kent, which made the shells of railway wagons. He was to remain an employee there for ten years, with only one brief break. Endlessly talkative, and yet relentlessly hard-working, West was for ever chattering to anyone who would listen. One fellow worker remembered him as ‘a bragger and a liar’, but also ‘a friendly sort who got on with most people’. And, just as he had at Permali’s,West made no secret at his new job that his wife was a prostitute ‘who liked women and blacks in particular’, telling anyone who might be interested that he had made eight-millimetre pornographic films of her making love, which he ‘showed to friends’ in his cellar on Sunday afternoons. West even boasted that he kept the master copy ‘hidden under the floorboards’.
When West invited his fellow workers to Cromwell Street, some were astonished to find that he had decorated the first-floor bathroom of the house with Polaroid pictures of his wife’s ‘private parts’; one called him a ‘pervert’ as a result. Undeterred, West recruited some of them to help him work on his house in Cromwell Street. In the summer of 1974 they assisted him as he laid the first concrete floor in the cellar. West told them that he was still considering ‘lowering the floor’, but that before he made up his mind to do so he wanted to keep to a minimum the ‘smell of sewage’ which he said had begun to permeate the room from a ‘broken pipe’ beneath. It was more likely that the smell came from the decomposing bodies of four young women, but no one who worked in the basement with West noticed anything particularly unusual.
Upstairs, the Muir Hill men were often introduced to some of the young female lodgers. West would brag that he would sometimes turn his lodgers ‘into prostitutes’. One was a Swedish or Dutch girl who seemed to be pregnant, but there was also a girl called Marilyn from the Forest of Dean, together with a Gloucester girl, also called Marilyn, as well as the daughter of an American serviceman from the US Air Force base at Lakenheath in Suffolk, called Donna.They were just some of the many young women who seemed to flood in and out of the house at all hours of the day and night. Twenty years later the police would make strenuous efforts to locate them all, to satisfy themselves that they had not suffered the same fate as the four women buried beneath the house, but they would not succeed in every case. The women were a part of the mystery that would surround Frederick West for ever.
Nothing about the West family was commonplace. Many years later one visitor remembered that when one of the female lodgers, who was pregnant, had told her landlord and landlady in broken English, ‘I am with child; it is Fred’s’, Rosemary West had replied immediately, ‘No it isn’t; it’s yours’, and started laughing along with her husband. Another recalled West telling off his eldest child, Anna-Marie, then aged only ten, for ‘screwing in the park’.
In the summer of 1974 the Wests’ other children were still tiny. Heather was three-and-a-half, Mae two and Stephen only just one, and, hardly surprisingly, Rosemary West’s temper was short. The violence that had been part of her life since her childhood was ever present. On the night of 13 August 1974, for example, West remembered:‘I came in from work late, and she said,“The children have broken the telly. I want a new one”.’ Frederick West did not take his wife’s complaint too seriously. But Rosemary West quickly grew angry when he refused to respond. Giggling, West picked up the broken television and ran towards the living-room door, only to see his wife run after him brandishing a kitchen knife.
‘I slammed the fucking door straight in her face, and the knife come “bang” straight into the door,’ West remembered. ‘Next minute there’s one almighty scream. So I put the television down and opened the door. One of Rose’s fingers is hanging down and the other one is hanging off.’ Even though two of her fingers had been all but severed, his wife was not crying.‘So I grabbed a towel, covered her hand, took her out the front. This is twelve o’clock at night.’ Frederick West remembered that his brother John had been ‘standing by the front gate’ when they got outside. ‘We took her down the hospital.’ At Gloucester Royal Hospital that night Rosemary West insisted that it was simply ‘an accident’. She had been ‘playing with knives’ while ‘cutting wood’.The stony look on her face would not have changed as the hospital admitted her for the night with ‘a deep laceration across the ring and little finger on her right hand’.
Rosemary West was detained in hospital for two days, but the accident did nothing to dissuade her from using knives. Time after time when she lost her temper she would turn on her children with a knife in her hand, jabbing the point at them. Her second daughter Mae remembers one occasion on which her mother was cutting meat in the kitchen:
She was shouting, as usual. For some reason she picked on me and came at me with a knife. I was sitting there on the top step in the lounge and she came towards me. She flashed at me with the knife. I was crying and said, ‘No, Mum, no Mum, no Mum’. She kept slashing the knife at me and there were little nicks all over my rib-cage . . . You never knew what Mum was going to do next.
At this time it was always Rosemary West who disciplined the West children. Her son Stephen recalls:‘The slightest thing would set Mum off . . . Mum had no self-control. She would just flip and have no idea what she was doing . . . Mum would hit out with anything she could lay her hands on. If she’d had a sledge-hammer she would have belted you with it. A rolling-pin was one of her favourites. She would just lash out and you would be sent flying.’ Frederick West, on the other hand, ‘was the same as my mum, but he didn’t flip as often. Mum was like that every other day.’ By comparison with his mother, Stephen West insists, his father was ‘more abusive than violent – but he snapped very quickly. Dad would flip four times a year. But when he did go he was like a madman.’
The lack of self-control that brought abuse to the Wests’ children was reflected precisely in the abuse of the young women who became the Wests’ victims at Cromwell Street.Within the confines of their own home, the Wests sustained their unquenchable, secret desire for sexual abuse and violence, as four young women had already discovered to their cost, each one suffering more and more extreme humiliation at the hands of the Wests. The gags used to prevent their screaming had become more subtle and precise, the ties that secured them to the beams more elaborate and sure, their imprisonment longer, their deaths ever more horrifying. And the Wests’ appetite for all of this showed no sign of diminishing.
In November 1974, almost exactly one year to the day after the disappearance of Carol Ann Cooper, and almost exactly a further year after the abduction of Carol Raine, another young girl was to fall into the hands of Frederick and Rosemary West. Her treatment was to prove beyond any doubt the extent of the depravity that they were now eager to explore.
Shirley Hubbard was a pretty, spirited, vulnerable girl of fifteen and a half when she found herself at Cromwell Street. And, like so many of the other girls who did so, she was a child of a broken, unhappy home. Born in Birmingham on 26 June 1959, the daughter of Glenys Lloyd and John Owen, her parents had separated when she was two, and, as a result, their daughter Shirley had been taken into care. She was subsequently adopted by James and Linda Hubbard, who lived in Droitwich,Worcestershire, and at the age of twelve, adopted their name.
By the age of fifteen Shirley Hubbard was five-feet, six-inches tall, slim but well proportioned, with shoulder-length fair brown hair, hazel eyes, and ‘a nice smile’ which meant that ‘she could usually get her own way’, in the words of a friend. If she failed to do so, ‘she would usually show off ’. She had also tattooed herself on the left forearm with SHIRL in one-inch-high block capitals. Shirley Hubbard was also something of a flirt. ‘She always reacted positively to the presence of a man,’ according to one acquaintance, and from the age of fourteen would regularly slip out of her downstairs bedroom window at night to meet one boyfriend or another. Shirley also liked to hang around the fair when it appeared in Worcester, and ‘liked older men, who were strangers in the area’, according to her friends. In the autumn of 1974 there were rumours, for example, that she was seeing an older, married man working on some houses being built at Briar Hill in Droitwich, who ‘would take her out in his car’. On 14 November 1974, she ran away from her foster home for a second time. Once more, she cleared her room of most of her possessions and clothing, probably stuffing them into a duffel bag, but on this second occasion she was never to return. On that Thursday, Shirley Hubbard set out from her home in Droitwich for her temporary job on the make-up counter at the Debenhams store in Worcester, where she was doing a week’s work experience. It was half-day closing, and at one o’clock that afternoon she met up with her new boyfriend, Dan Davies, who worked at the John Collier tailor’s shop in the town. His brother Alan, who worked on the travelling fair, had been one of Carol Ann Cooper’s boyfriends for a while the year before, but Caz Cooper and Shirley Hubbard had never met, at least to the best of Dan’s knowledge. That afternoon Dan Davies and Shirley Hubbard sat on the banks of the River Severn eating a bag of chips and watching the world go by.They then went to his house, where they talked to his brother and sisters.
Shortly before 8.30 in the evening, just as Carol Ann Cooper’s boyfriend had done exactly a year before, Shirley’s boyfriend set off to put her on a bus home, this time from Worcester towards Droitwich in the north, rather than from Worcester towards Warndon in the east. And, just as Caz Cooper’s boyfriend had done a year earlier, Dan Davies arranged to meet his girlfriend at seven o’clock the following evening before he put her on to a waiting bus not long after nine o’clock. And, exactly like Caz Cooper one year before her, Shirley Hubbard was never seen again after she boarded the bus in Worcester on a November evening.
The similarities between the cases of the two girls are striking. It is possible that Frederick West had continued to haunt the centre of Worcester in the wake of his success with Carol Ann Cooper, and had spotted the happy-go-lucky Shirley Hubbard in the town. But it is far more likely that he had been introduced to her by one of Caz Cooper’s friends, and that she had fallen under the spell of his extravagant stories, the mature father-figure she had spent much of her life searching for. West may very well have been the ‘older, married man’ she had been having a relationship with in Droitwich, for there is no doubt that West had done odd part-time building jobs in the town. Indeed, just as he may have done with Caz Cooper, West may even have suggested that she get an early bus from Worcester that evening to allow him time to take her to Cromwell Street, with the promise that he ‘would run her home’ afterwards. It is only too likely that Shirley Hubbard may even have decided to accept the offer of a room at Cromwell Street from Frederick West, and packed her belongings in Droitwich as a result.
Frederick West would no doubt have been offering Shirley Hubbard a place where she could ‘be herself ’, away from ‘the pressures’ of her foster-home, and he would probably have offered to ‘run up’ and collect ‘the rest of her things’ with her whenever she wanted. It would have been his way to welcome her into a secret that only they shared, a secret that would cost the fifteen-year-old her life.The older man whom Shirley Hubbard found herself with this time, the man in whom she placed her trust, and who seemed only too prepared to look after her, was not the father she so clearly longed for. Frederick West did not like a young woman to leave him, not once she had found her way into his care, and certainly not once she had discovered his secret appetite for abuse. Though Shirley Hubbard’s disappearance was reported to the police on 15 November 1974, her whereabouts were to remain a mystery until her skeleton was recovered from beneath the cellar floor of 25 Cromwell Street almost two decades later.
When Frederick West first confessed to killing the five young women whose bodies were discovered beneath the cellar floor – a confession he later retracted – he bracketed Carol Ann Cooper and Shirley Hubbard together, calling them ‘Worcester Girl One’ and ‘Worcester Girl Two’, and insisted that he did not remember even their names. He also told the police that their bodies were fully clothed, that they had not been mutilated, and that, once again, the only reason that he had killed them was that they threatened to tell his wife of their relationship with him. ‘It was made quite clear,’ West maintained,‘that I was married to Rose . . . and every one of them did 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.’ It was also a bare-faced lie.
It was not the only lie that West was to tell in the case of the two Worcester girls. Time after time he would amend and modify his version of their deaths. Indeed, throughout the first stages of his police interviews he would even suggest that he picked them both up together ‘in Tewkesbury one day’, but that he had then picked up the ‘one without the firework burn’ – that is Shirley Hubbard – ‘a few weeks later’. He went on to say:
I picked her up just outsideWorcester, and I was just generally talking to her as I was going along, and the next minute . . . she’s got me fly undone and messing about . . . I just pulled in and . . . we made love. I think we made love twice . . . one after the other and then she, that’s right, then she said ‘That’ll be ten quid’ or something, and I said, ‘Well, I don’t carry money . . . and anyway I wouldn’t pay a prostitute . . . If you’d said that in the first place,’ I said, ‘I’d have told you to get lost.’ . . . Then she started shouting and she said, ‘You’re the sort of person who goes with slags’ or something to that effect . . . And I just lost my head with her. Because as soon as she said that I thought of Rose, and Rose is no slag as far as I am concerned. So I went for her.
At this stage Frederick West was also insisting that:‘there is nobody else involved. I did it all on my own . . . Let’s get that straight now.’
West was never to give any direct details of how Shirley Hubbard came to meet her death. Nevertheless, at about this time Frederick West did confess to one of his workmates at the Muir Hill Wagon Works that he had worked as a pimp or ‘stick man’ in Scotland, and that while he was there he had learned how to make girls do what he wanted them to. He told his fellow worker that he would ‘lock them in a room for a couple of days without food and water, to make them behave’. West had gone on to explain that he had recently picked up a fifteen-year-old girl outside the city and taken her back to Cromwell Street, where he had had sex with her. Rosemary West had then joined in, and afterwards West had suggested that she should consider a career as a prostitute – presumably working for him and his wife.
The girl had refused, and so they had tied her to the bed and ‘sexually tortured her’. Rosemary West had used ‘instruments to penetrate the girl’, West confided, but he had nevertheless left the girl tied up in his wife’s hands and had gone to work. But when he had come home again ‘she was in a bad way’. Not for the first time, his fellow worker did not take him seriously, clearly thinking that it was simply another of West’s wild sexual exaggerations. But it seems only too probable that the fifteen-year-old girl Frederick West was describing was Shirley Hubbard.
The degradation that the previous four young women were subjected to in the cellar of Cromwell Street was repeated on Shirley Hubbard. But, again, the Wests further refined their technique, this time gagging their victim in a quite horrific way.The Birmingham-born girl was taped up in such a way that she would have been completely unable to see either what her tormentors were doing or even who they were. Shirley Hubbard’s head was covered from chin to scalp in two-inch-wide parcel tape, wound overlapping around her skull eleven or twelve times, with a final loop under the chin. Only the very top of her head was left uncovered. The mask – for there can be no other word for it – would have made it impossible for the fifteen-year-old to either see or speak, or indeed to hear at all clearly. It would also have made it impossible for her to breathe.
But Frederick West did not want their victim to die of suffocation: at least not until she had been kept alive long enough to gratify their own sexual desires, and the desires of anyone else whom they chose to invite into the cellar of Cromwell Street. To ensure that Shirley Hubbard could breathe, therefore,West inserted into the mask two U-shaped pieces of thin clear plastic tubing each approximately eighteen inches long and an eighth of an inch in diameter. The idea was straightforward: the tubes were designed to fit into the girl’s nostrils so that she could still breathe, even though her head was completely encased in a shiny mask.
During his police interviews, Frederick West became confused over which girl had actually been forced to wear this dreadful mask, suggesting at one moment that it might have been ‘the Dutch girl’, his name for Thérèse Siegenthaler, only to change his mind and realise that he had made a mistake.West finally accepted that Shirley Hubbard, whom he described only as ‘Worcester Girl Two’, had, in fact, been the young woman subjected to this hideous mask of parcel tape. Indeed, West did not deny that he had ‘trussed the girl up’ and ‘attempted to hang her upside-down on a hook in the cellar ceiling’ for ‘kinky sex’.Yet again, he claimed,‘enjoyment turned to disaster’, as the girl managed ‘to slip off ’, ‘fall on to the cellar floor’ and ‘die as a result of her injuries’.
Part of West’s confession to the police, a confession that, like all his others, he was to retract, is almost certainly true. In his later conversations with his first solicitor,West confirmed that ‘Worcester Girl Two’, Shirley Hubbard, had been at ‘Cromwell Street for two or three days, possibly a week’ before her death, although he tried to shift the blame for her murder entirely on to his wife.‘Rose kept her out of the way,’ West insisted. ‘These girls were always in the bloody bedroom with Rose, that’s what I couldn’t understand. It seemed a peculiar place to keep girls.’
West maintained that he had told his wife, ‘That’s a schoolgirl, she can’t stay here’, and told his solicitor that he then ‘took her to Worcester, and dropped her.That was the first time, and the last, that I’d ever seen her.’ But West went on to admit that he and Shirley Hubbard had had a drink together in a pub called the Swan With Two Necks, claiming that ‘From there, she left on her own’. West specifically denied that he had been working on the houses at Briar Hill in Droitwich, although he then became confused about where he was actually working at the time, suggesting that he was still ‘at Permali’s’. Even more significantly, Frederick West did not explain how Shirley Hubbard came to find her way back to Cromwell Street and into the cellar of his house.
Regardless of Frederick West’s facile denial that he ‘never tried it on with nobody’, Shirley Hubbard, like the four young women who found their way into the cellar before her, was brought to Cromwell Street and ruthlessly and brutally used by Frederick and Rosemary West as an object for their sexual gratification. The novelty of their horrifying new mask would have temporarily increased the intensity of their sexual excitement, just as it would have allowed them the opportunity to invite other people to abuse the girl without fear of their victim’s recognising them. But it also brought a disadvantage.The mask would have prevented West from seeing the terror in his victim’s eyes. To use Professor Canter’s terminology again, Shirley Hubbard was not solely an ‘object’ for Frederick West’s use; she was also a ‘vehicle for his emotions’. The experience of not seeing the impact on her of his depraved actions would have diluted the pleasure he received by applying the mask in the first place.
Frederick West could have indulged his appetite for medical examination on the naked and helpless girl, as he did with Thérèse Siegenthaler. He may have experimented again with fire or flames, which may account for the top of his victim’s head being left free from the tape that covered the rest of her skull, just as he may have mutilated other parts of her body with cigarettes or oxy-acetylene. He may have whipped her with the cat-o’-nine-tails, or West may have given vent to another of his sexual obsessions, the possibility of mating a girl with a large dog. In the years to come West would return repeatedly to his interest in this perversion. He accumulated an extensive collection of pornographic videotapes featuring women being abused by animals, including both an Alsatian dog and a boar pig, and suggested repeatedly that he wanted his wife Rosemary to make love ‘to a bull’.
Faced with this onslaught of depravity, one can only pray that Shirley Hubbard would have subsided into unconsciousness. For once again Frederick West removed a number of bones from his victim’s body before disposing of it: forty of Shirley Hubbard’s bones were missing when her remains were unearthed from their narrow shaft of a grave beneath his cellar floor two decades later, including seven of her sixteen wrist bones, which may indicate that she had been suspended by her ankles.
Even two decades later West showed not the slightest remorse or contrition. He simply told the police in his first interviews that he had used his sheath knife to dismember the girl. ‘It was sheer force of habit,’ he explained. ‘I mean, it’s handy to have a knife with you anyway, for numerous reasons . . . When you’re building, cutting plastic, cutting anything. It wasn’t carried as a weapon. It was carried as a tool.’ It was also a tool that West used to decapitate Shirley Hubbard between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae.This time his victim’s remains suggested that her neck had been cut from front to back, rather than from back to front, which indicates that it was carried out while she was suspended above the narrow hole that he had dug for her remains. But Shirley Hubbard’s head was not allowed simply to drop into the hole beneath her.When it was recovered, it was erect, as if it had been placed specifically in that manner. And the mask of sticky tape was still around her skull.
Shirley Hubbard’s dismembered body was eventually buried in the front of the three cellar rooms at Cromwell Street, the one nearest the street. And Frederick West later told the police that he had dug the hole at an earlier point ‘’cause I was preparing the drains for a bathroom’. West then created a false chimney-breast nearby, and some time afterwards, in an act that can be seen only as the expression of his dark, bizarre sense of humour, he decorated the walls with wallpaper bearing the image of Marilyn Monroe.
Beyond the cellar, life at Cromwell Street continued on its familiar, routine path. West was now working relentlessly, at the Wagon Works in Bristol Road during the day, and as a jobbing builder – both on his own house and other houses – after his shift was over at Muir Hill. His appetite for work was undiminished, not least because it allowed him to conceal his actions. If anyone ever enquired where he was, West would say cheerfully ‘working twelve hours a day’. It was the perfect cover.The ploy failed on just one occasion revealing his appetite for petty theft. On 25 March 1975 Frederick West appeared at Gloucester Magistrates’ Court on a theft charge, for which he was fined £50 and ordered to pay £10 in compensation. He took particular care to thank everyone obsequiously for their ‘kindness’. But in spite of his abject apologies to the magistrates, his contempt for the law had not diminished in the least. West took an intense and secret delight in allowing the cellar to become a storage site for stolen goods.
No one can be sure whether Frederick and Rosemary West sustained their passion for anniversaries by finding themselves another victim shortly after Christmas in 1974, as they had done with Lucy Partington the year before, for if they did so their victim’s body was not interred beneath their cellar floor. But Frederick West certainly marked another macabre anniversary in April 1975. Almost exactly a year to the day after Thérèse Siegenthaler had disappeared while hitchhiking to Ireland by way of Gloucester, another young girl, Juanita Mott, went missing while hitchhiking on another road nearby. This time the girl had a clear connection to the Wests. Like Carol Raine before her, she had not only visited Cromwell Street, but she also knew the Wests well. Unlike Carol Raine, she would not survive to tell the tale.
Like Shirley Hubbard and several of Frederick West’s other victims, Juanita Mott was the product of a broken home. She was born on 1 March 1957, the daughter of Ernest Mott, a United States serviceman who had returned to the United States, and Mary, who remained in England and lived in the Coney Hill area of Gloucester. Attractive and outgoing, she was five-feet, four-inches tall, with dark shoulder-length hair, with a fringe she would sometimes dye blonde.‘Leggy and gangly’, as another friend put it, her skin somehow always ‘looked tanned’.
Juanita Mott had also had her share of trouble with the police. After staying with her mother and grandmother in Gloucester, she had started living in bed-sitting-rooms in the city, and early in 1974 found herself at number 4 Cromwell Street, where one friend remembered her as ‘not very bright, naive and a bit dopey’.
In the middle of 1974 Juanita Mott confided to a friend that she had met a man called Freddie, who looked like a gypsy and wore an ear-ring in his ear. Indeed,West may well have offered the young woman a room at 25 Cromwell Street, for when, for a second time, she found herself in trouble with the police in 1974 for a deception involving Giro cheques, and while she was in Pucklechurch Remand Centre, she wrote to West at Cromwell Street.
There seems little doubt that Juanita Mott accepted Frederick West’s offer of a room at Cromwell Street. Not only was she probably infatuated with him, but she would also have felt at home. She, like so many of the other lodgers, shared difficulties with the police and the Social Services department, and used the address as a place at which to hide for a time, a place where no one would ask too many questions. As West himself admitted: ‘That’s why half of them was there. I mean, a lot of the girls that was there didn’t use their own names.’ Juanita Mott did not stay at 25 Cromwell Street for very long.There is no clear explanation for her decision to move out, although it is possible that West may have told her, as he told other young women who came to lodge at Cromwell Street:‘If they couldn’t pay the rent they would have to have sex with me – or Rose.’
By March 1975 she had gone to stay with a family friend, Jennifer Frazer-Holland, in Newent – one of Frederick West’s old stamping-grounds on the road from Much Marcle to Gloucester. Juanita Mott had stayed with her in the past, and Jennifer Frazer-Holland knew her well. She recalled years later that Juanita did not have a ‘particular boyfriend’ at the time, but that she would sometimes ‘stay out all night’. Nevertheless, Juanita had promised that she would be at her friend’s Newent bungalow on Saturday 12 April 1975 to babysit Jennifer’s young children, while she got married. The evening before Juanita set out to hitchhike from Newent into Gloucester. She did not return to babysit the following day, which was ‘totally out of character’. Though she was reported missing to the police, Juanita Mott was never seen again.
Whether by accident or design, Juanita Mott encountered Frederick West on the road from Newent to Gloucester on that Friday in April 1975. It may have been a chance encounter, but it is far more likely that he had arranged to meet her, or that he knew that she usually travelled into town on that day of the week. West may even have asked someone else to find out whether she was likely to be hitchhiking on that day. And, as he had with Carol Raine before her, West may have taken his wife with him that day, to make it more likely that she would accept a lift. If Juanita Mott had refused the offer of a lift, if Thérèse Siegenthaler had done so, or Lucy Partington, they might have escaped the terrible fate that awaited them at Cromwell Street. If there were ever an argument against any young woman, no matter how strong or sensible, hitchhiking in any circumstances whatever, it is the life of Frederick West. Evil can come in the least frightening packages.
In fact, West was pursuing Juanita Mott as a ‘present’ for his wife, a morsel to tempt her. For there is no doubt that, like Carol Raine, Rosemary West had set her heart on sexually possessing the attractive girl, who had celebrated her eighteenth birthday only a month or so before. Like Carol Raine, Juanita Mott may have rejected Rosemary West’s advances, or refused to participate in the bizarre sexual experiments that had become her passion, or declined the Wests’ offer for her to become a prostitute. Whatever the precise reason, her refusal ensured that Frederick West would make her his target on his wife’s behalf, his morbid sweetmeat to succour her depraved sexual desire.
Twenty years later Frederick West maintained only that Juanita Mott ‘used to come to visit’ Cromwell Street, but that ‘she never lived there’. He described her to the police as a ‘black-haired girl, fairly big built’, who had an ‘American father’, although he also suggested that she ‘might have had a baby, ’cause she had stretch marks’. West insisted that she used to ‘come and visit friends at Cromwell Street’, and that she had then become friendly with him over a period of ‘probably a couple of months’. Juanita Mott, he said, used to come ‘down the basement helping me and that . . . when there was nobody there, like’.
As with his other victims, West also boasted about the fact that he and Juanita Mott had become lovers. Indeed, he claimed that shortly after their affair started they were ‘making love two or three times a day’ in the basement. In his first explanation of her death to the police, he even suggested that he had killed her after they had finished making love on a mattress on the cellar floor. They had been in the basement laying carpet tiles, West suggested, and she ‘could have tied something round her head to keep her hair away from the glue’ they were using. ‘We were both undressed. I never made love with clothes on . . . and she was undressed.’ He explained
As the erection went, so I slid out of her, and then I still lay on top of her talking . . . I said something to the effect,‘Oh, this is getting serious’, or something – and she said, ‘Oh, yer, I think it’s about time that I told Rose and we sorted it out’. I mean, I never had no inclination of that whatever. I got quite a shock when she said she was going to tell Rose and . . . start going together, making it serious . . . I thought, No way can I allow that to happen. I just lost me head. I just strangled her with me hand.
In a later version of these same events, West amplified the story slightly, and suggested that Juanita Mott had told him she was pregnant, and, like Lucy Partington before her, ‘was going to tell Rose if I didn’t go away with her’.
In an even later version, one in which he blamed his wife entirely for the eighteen-year-old girl’s death, Frederick West again painted himself as little more than the innocent helper, a man anxious to ‘help out’ these girls. He told his original solicitor that he had taken ‘the Mott girl back to Stroud Road several times, and to Newent . . . Juanita used to come and talk to me quite regular’. He insisted that he had not picked her up thumbing a lift to Gloucester from Newent on Friday 11 April: quite the reverse.‘I took the Mott girl out to Newent. She had been staying on and off for a considerable time, I think . . . She wanted to go to America to see her father, and I was helping her to make some money to go . . . giving her money when I could get a few bob on the side, without Rose knowing.’ It was yet another attempt to cast himself in a good light, the one good Samaritan whom the vulnerable young girls who found their way to Cromwell Street could rely upon.
He did not deny that some of the young women who found their way there suffered a terrible fate. ‘We used to get loads of girls – but what I didn’t realise was that Rose was enticing them there,’West maintained.‘I believe the girls ended up at these parties in Bristol. They were drugged. They were sexually abused. But I don’t believe they were killed there. They were taken back to wherever Rose had ’em – and then they were tortured and killed by somebody else.’
The person who was actually supplying young women for prostitution and ‘parties’ in Bristol, or anywhere else for that matter, was Frederick Walter Stephen West. Indeed, significantly, West told the police when he first admitted the killing of Juanita Mott, that: ‘she enjoyed getting hurt when she was making love’. That single remark, more than any other, holds the key to her fate. For Juanita Mott became the sixth young woman in the space of just two years to be sexually abused, tortured, decapitated and finally dismembered in the cellar beneath the pavement of number 25 Cromwell Street.
The Wests’ appetite for sexual sadism had grown into a consuming passion.The mask that had covered Shirley Hubbard’s face entirely had clearly not satisfied them, no doubt because it denied the opportunity for them to see the horror in the eyes of their helpless victim, and so this time they gagged their victim with her own clothes. When Juanita Mott’s remains were recovered from their narrow grave beneath the cellar floor, two pairs of tights, one within the other, a brassière and two long white nylon socks were found wrapped around her skull, ‘under the chin and over the top of the head’ in the words of the forensic pathologist who discovered them. Significantly, Rosemary West often wore long white nylon socks.
Frederick West had also perfected a sexual harness to keep his victim utterly immobile while he and his wife abused her. A length of plastic-covered rope, like a clothes-line, more than ten feet in length, was found knotted around Juanita Mott’s body, with two small loops of ankle and wrist size specifically tied within it. Another seven-feet length of rope may have been used to tether the girl to a place in the cellar. For it seems almost certain that on this occasion, the Wests did not suspend their victim from the beams in the cellar, but instead incapacitated her on the floor – on the mattress that West himself said that they had used to make love on. For when Juanita Mott’s remains were recovered, nineteen years after her disappearance, both her kneecaps were missing. And, as Rosemary West’s children would bear witness in the years to come, their mother would often hit them on the knees when she wanted to incapacitate them. Juanita Mott’s kneecaps were probably removed while she was alive to ensure that she remained the Wests’ prisoner.
Like every one of Frederick and Rosemary West’s victims, Juanita Mott would have been subjected to relentless and horrifying sexual abuse. In the years to come they would specifically keep for their own amusement a videotape of a young woman, drugged and bound, whose captors inserted a clear plastic tube into her vagina, through which they encouraged two live mice to enter her one after the other. Every videotape they kept reflected in some way their own depraved behaviour. In the circumstances it is literally impossible to imagine the shock or the terror that this would have induced in any young woman, nor the excruciating pain that could have been caused by the animal itself, if it were allowed to remain there for any time. Such inhumanity is the final sign that Frederick West’s violent criminality was, as Professor Canter put it,‘nearest to exhibiting pure evil’.
During his last police interviews, Frederick West was reminded that the eighteen-year-old’s body had also been viciously mutilated before it was buried.When the officer began to describe the bones that were missing from the body, West suddenly started to panic. ‘I feel terrible,’ he said suddenly, one of only a handful of times on which he actually displayed emotion during his long series of police interrogations. It was one of the rare occasions on which his voice trembled.
In fact, no fewer than eighty-eight of Juanita Mott’s bones were missing when her remains were recovered from her tiny grave beneath the stairs that led down into the cellar of Cromwell Street. The upper part of her breastbone and her right first rib were missing, along with both her kneecaps, all but one of her sixteen wrist bones, six of her fourteen ankle bones, and fifty-eight of her seventy-six finger and toe bones. Each and every one of them must have been removed. It would seem as though her hands were cut off entirely, for there can be no other reasonable explanation for their absence, not least because her fingernails were recovered from the familiar small narrow shaft two feet square into which Frederick West had stuffed what elements there remained of her body.
Juanita Mott also suffered a depressed fracture to the base of her skull ‘as if a ball-ended hammer had been hit against the skin’, in the words of the forensic pathologist who unearthed her remains. No one can be certain whether the blow was inflicted before or after her death, but there must be at least a possibility that she was struck with a hammer while she was still alive, yet another brutal humiliation for this helpless victim whose only mistake had been to accept a lift from Frederick West.
Once she was dead, West disposed of her body in his usual way. It was decapitated between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, both her legs were ripped from their sockets, disarticulated at the hips, and she was shoved into a hole in the floor of the cellar and covered with clay soil. Her bindings, the bundle of material that formed a gag, a seven-feet length of rope and a pair of knickers, which presumably belonged to her, were stuffed into the small hole along with her. All passion spent, it was as if she had never existed.