THE NEXT MRS WEST
‘Love that is fed by jealousy dies hard.’
OVID, LOVE’S CURE
On a visit to the Green Lantern café in the spring of 1977, Frederick West met the girl who was to make almost as great an impact on his life as Ann McFall had done ten years before. Though he was not to realise it at first, Shirley Robinson forced West to question his love for his second wife, and threatened his marriage to Rosemary West. In the process she became the only woman ever truly to test the strength of the Wests’ love for one another, and she was to pay a terrible price for doing so.
Shirley Robinson was also the only other woman, apart from Ann McFall, that Frederick West was to force himself to write about during the last days of his life. He described their meeting, and their love-affair, in the memoir that he called I Was Loved by an Angel. Laboriously writing in biro on sheets of lined A4 prison paper, West remembered that he met her a short time after he had ‘asked the police to have a look’ at a hand-gun that his father-in-law Bill Letts had at the café.
‘A week or two later I stopped at the café,’ Frederick West wrote, ‘and there was a girl sat in there. I said “good morning” to her and went out to the kitchen. Bill said to me: “I got a girl to work with me.” I said: “Is that the girl in the café?” He said: “Yes.” I said: “Where’s she from?” He said: “I picked her up in Bristol . . . She is looking for a job.”’ West went back into the café, introduced himself, and asked the girl her name.‘She said:“Shirley Robinson.” That was the first time I seen Shirley. I got to know her well.’
That was undoubtedly the case. West’s relationship with Shirley Robinson was to last longer and remain closer than his relationship with any other of his English-born victims. She was to live with him and with his wife for more than fifteen months, and, like Ann McFall before her, she was to come within a matter of weeks of bearing his child. And, once again like Ann McFall before her, she was the child of a broken and unhappy home.
When Shirley Robinson first encountered Frederick West she was seventeen years of age, a brash, precocious girl with a broad Wolverhampton accent, about five-feet, two-inches tall, with light brown shoulder-length hair and a wide-eyed, mischievous smile. Born in October 1959 in Rutland, where her father was working at an RAF base, she had spent an unhappy childhood being pushed from pillar to post. Her younger brother Kevin was born in December 1961 and less than a year after that, Shirley’s parents separated. After living with each of her parents for short periods, things did not work out, and in 1974, at the age of fourteen, she was taken into care in Wolverhampton.
By this time Shirley Robinson had become withdrawn and rather sullen, a girl who did not easily make friends with other girls. As a result she was sent to the secure extra-care unit at the Crescent School in Downend, Bristol, where eventually she was to settle down. One reason for the change may have been that she had become a lesbian. In 1975 she embarked on a lesbian relationship in Bristol, and took a job in the evenings in a gay pub in the city. She went on from there to work at a local boot factory, but that did not last long, and early in 1977 she worked briefly as a housemaid in a hotel in Chipping Sodbury. By the beginning of April she was at the Green Lantern café in Gloucester and, almost certainly, starting to visit 25 Cromwell Street.
‘She told me she was a lesbian,’ West was to explain in his memoir. Indeed, in this version of events it was almost the first thing that Shirley Robinson said to him when they met at the Green Lantern. ‘Shirley was a happy-go-lucky girl,’ West wrote. ‘I called in the café every morning and night’, but one morning ‘Shirley was looking ill. So I asked her what was up with her. She said Rose’s dad was giving her a hard time, and could I get her a bed. I asked Shirley what he was up to. She said he had taken the lock off the bathroom door and her bedroom door and he just kept walking in and . . . “touching me up . . . I only go with girls”.’ West did not hesitate. He offered her a room in his house. ‘So Shirley moved to Cromwell Street.’
The attraction for Frederick West was only too clear. Here was another young woman whom he could watch make love to his wife, and who might then be prepared to take part in one of his ‘films’. The fact that she was a self-confessed and active lesbian certainly increased his fascination for her. In the last week of June 1977 he helped her move out of the flat above the Green Lantern and into the small room beside the bathroom on the first-floor of Cromwell Street. As he did so, Shirley Robinson would no doubt have told him every detail of her unhappy childhood, and the abuse that she had suffered at the hands of adults. Her confidences can only have broadened the grin on Frederick West’s face.
West was well aware that the seventeen-year-old’s attractions for his pregnant wife would be even stronger. The girl was a potential lover for his wife, someone to be seduced without having to venture out into the local pubs or clubs, a morsel that he could bring home for her delectation. His plan worked. Shirley Robinson definitely ‘got on well with Rose’. Frederick West noted as much in his memoir, adding, ‘They were going out at night’. There is no doubt that at some point in the summer of 1977, and at about the same time as Miss A was suffering so dreadfully at her hands, Rosemary West and Shirley Robinson began an affair. West was not only aware of it; he encouraged it. Lesbianism fascinated him, though he could not abide its male counterpart. Frederick West believed all homosexual men were ‘dirty bastards’, while lesbians were ‘clean and straight’.
The Green Lantern café was not proving a success. Its debts were mounting rapidly. Bill Letts had recruited the help of his wife and family to help him to run it, but the café could not support them all financially.And Frederick West knew it.The one thing he never lost sight of was money, particularly his own, and he had no intention of supporting the Letts family. ‘So I went and said to Rose’s dad, “We will have to close it down”,’ West wrote in his memoir. ‘Bill went back to live with his wife, Rose’s mum.’
West recruited Shirley Robinson to work for him instead of the café. The collapse of the Green Lantern had forced him to go back to the Muir Hill Wagon Works, but he was also still working as a part-time builder, and he needed help. West was converting and refurbishing flats for Frank Zygmunt’s widow and son. Zygmunt himself had died shortly after West had moved into Cromwell Street, leaving his property to his family. And, by chance, some of the first flats that West had worked on were at 24 and 25 Midland Road, where he and Rosemary had lived at the start of their relationship. One of his first jobs had been to refill the cellars of both 24 and 25 Midland Road with aggregate – thereby burying his stepdaughter Charmaine still further.
This building job at Midland Road was one reason why Frederick West had originally told the police that they ‘wouldn’t find nothing at Midland Road’, because the demolition men ‘must have taken Charmaine’s body to the tip’. Indeed, West maintained strenuously in his police interviews in 1994, before Midland Road was excavated, that: ‘You pull it down, there’ll be nothing there.’ West clearly hoped that he had covered his tracks effectively during his building work there, and was particularly keen that the police should not try to recover the child’s body. If they did, it would give the lie to his persistent claim to them that ‘she was in one piece, no doubt of that’.To recover her remains would reveal that the child’s body was most certainly not in one piece.
Frederick West took Shirley Robinson with him to work at Midland Road. ‘She worked like a man,’ he wrote. ‘Shirley spent all her time on the job, seventeen hours a day. I worked on my job by day,’ and then ‘went to work with Shirley till we went home at eleven or twelve at night’. And it was while they were at Midland Road that Frederick West, too, embarked on an affair with the tiny seventeen-year-old girl, whom he had nicknamed ‘Bones’ because of her thinness. Three or four months after they started working there together,West would record in his memoir, ‘Shirley was undressing to change out of her working clothes. She said:“You want to have sex with me?” I said:“You’re a lesbian.” She said: “Lesbians have sex with men.” I had never made love to a lesbian. I wondered what it would be like. So I said, “Yes.” So we had sex.’
Their relationship did not end there. According to Frederick West: ‘Shirley said: “I want a baby.” I said: “What for? You’re a lesbian.” She said:“I have a girlfriend in Bristol and we would like a baby.” I said:“No baby.A baby has to have a mother and a father, not two girls. What about when the child goes to school?” So Shirley said:“You can have sex with me when you want to.” I said:“We will see.” So Shirley got dressed and we went home.’ But not until,West maintained, he had instructed her:‘You are not to tell Rose.’
Even if his account of the beginning of their affair is to be believed, the reason for Shirley Robinson’s sexual approach to Frederick West almost certainly had nothing to do with a desire for a child, at least at the outset. She was to confide to a friend some months later that it had simply been her way of paying the rent for her small room in Cromwell Street, as she had discovered that it was a system that West had used in the past. It is also certain that Shirley Robinson’s individual sexual relationships with Rosemary West and Frederick West then expanded into a ménage à trois, with the Wests sharing the girl as a lover, often at the same time and always in the same bed.
Shirley Robinson continued to work with Frederick West, just as she continued to have sex with him. One of the jobs they did together was at 7 Cromwell Street, where they worked throughout one weekend towards the end of the summer of 1977. ‘We started on Saturday to strip the walls . . . The householder and his mates were helping,’ West would recall. Then: ‘It was opening time at the pub, so my helpers went to the pub. Shirley and I did not go. Shirley was on the stepladder working on the ceiling. She said to me:“How long will they be at the pub?”’ West told her: ‘They won’t be back till the pub closes.’
‘Shirley said: “I will take my overalls off . . . catch them.” So I look up. She kicked them off at me to catch them, so I did. I looked up and said: “You got no pants on.” She said: “No, it’s too hot to wear them.” So Shirley said: “Catch me.” So she jumped down to me to catch her. I did. We fell on the floor. Shirley held me tight and said: “Please make love to me. I am in love with you.” . . . So I made love to Shirley.Then we got on with the work.’
Shortly afterwards the seventeen-year-old girl with the strong Black Country accent discovered that she was pregnant.
By this time Rosemary West was eight months’ pregnant with the child she had conceived with a Jamaican. The fact that she was bearing another man’s child, the first time she had ever done so, may have made West feel an unexpected jealousy – even though he may have been enthusiastic about the idea at the outset. In the circumstances Frederick West may just have seized the opportunity to make his wife jealous in return, and himself urged Shirley Robinson to have his child, rather than succumbing to her suggestion.The prospect of having two women fight over him was certainly still one of Frederick West’s passions, just as his appetite for making his wife angry had not deserted him.
Ten days after Shirley Robinson’s eighteenth birthday in October 1977, she was confirmed as six weeks’ pregnant at the Health Centre at the Park in Gloucester, where she had registered as a patient in June, after moving into Cromwell Street. Less than two months later, and just after her own twenty-fourth birthday, Rosemary West gave birth to her third daughter and fourth child, whom the Wests christened Tara. Frederick West told one friend afterwards that they had decided to christen his latest daughter Tara because it was the name of the ‘hotel that Rose often used’; Tara was later to be referred to in the family as Mo.
The night of the birth of Rosemary West’s new child certainly remained imprinted on her husband’s mind, and may give a clue to his attitude towards her pregnancy. In his memoir West recalled that he had been working on their house with Shirley Robinson that evening:
When Rose came in with a black man and said to me,‘Get my case. I am going to hospital. I am in labour,’ I said, ‘I am going with you.That’s my baby’. Rose said to the black man, ‘My husband will take me’ . . . so he went. I said to Rose, ‘Why did you want him to go with you?’ Rose said,‘I was in bed with him when I went into labour. I said he could come and see me have the baby.’ Rose said, ‘I thought you were at work.’ I said, ‘If you stayed at home a night or two you would see me.’ Rose said,‘I need a man to keep me happy.’ I said, ‘Thank you, Rose.’ I could not believe how hard Rose could be to me.
Nevertheless, Frederick West accompanied his wife to the hospital that night and remained with her throughout the child’s birth. ‘I stayed with Rose all day because Rose was upset,’ he wrote,‘because the baby was not black, she was brown. Rose asked the midwife if the baby would go black. She said, “Yes.” So Rose got happier about it.’ She even took the trouble to keep a menu card from her stay in hospital that day, noting on the back: ‘Best meal I’ve had for a long time. Little more salt needed, otherwise excellent. Mrs R. P. West.’ Her husband registered the baby’s birth himself, declaring that he was indeed the natural father. There was no suggestion whatever that the little girl should not be brought up as a member of the West family. Shirley Robinson, meanwhile, signed a greetings card of congratulations, alongside two of the Wests’ other children, Stephen and Mae.
At her trial Rosemary West maintained that she did not know that Shirley Robinson was pregnant by her husband. But before his death Frederick West insisted equally forcefully that she knew very well.‘One night Rose said,“Shirley is pregnant by you”,’ he wrote. ‘I said,“Shirley did not tell me. I only made love to Shirley twice.” Rose said, “Shirley told me that”.’ Although West would go on to insist that Shirley Robinson had ‘set him up’ to get her pregnant, it seems certain that West hoped for this extraordinary confrontation between these two women in his life, perhaps not least to teach his wife something of a lesson.
Certainly, West knew the enmity that the two pregnancies would arouse. ‘I went to see Shirley,’ he wrote, ‘and said to her, “Why did you tell Rose and not me?” Shirley said, “I know Rose is having a black baby and I am having yours. Ha. Ha.” I said, “How did you know that Rose was having a black baby?” She said, “Rose told me. Rose said you did not want no more children. So she had to go and get one”.’West replied by warning Shirley Robinson: ‘Don’t trust Rose. She can be violent.’ Shirley said, ‘I know that Anna told me.’
There can be no doubt that Rosemary West planned revenge. Clearly aware of Shirley Robinson’s pregnancy by her husband, she entered into direct competition with her rival. And barely three months after giving birth to her mixed race child Tara, she herself became pregnant by Frederick West.
Again there were two pregnant women living within the crowded confines of Cromwell Street, which also boasted two female lodgers on its top floor and Shirley Robinson one floor beneath them, whose small room was opposite another occupied by the Wests’ eldest daughter Anna-Marie. The two young women would often go to collect Shirley Robinson’s unemployment benefit together on Thursday mornings. Anna-Marie West is also in no doubt that her stepmother knew that Shirley Robinson was pregnant by her father. It may well be that Shirley told her so herself.
Heather, Mae and Stephen, the Wests’ three younger children, had been sleeping in the cellar, but once their father had completed the twenty-five-feet-long extension to the back of the house they moved to bunk beds behind some curtains on the ground floor. Frederick West, meanwhile, had seized the opportunity to make entry to the cellar a little more difficult. He locked the entrance in the hall, and made the main access down some steps in the new rear living room, which he covered with a trapdoor. The ground-floor front room remained ‘Rose’s Special Room’, where she entertained her clients, and which the Wests took care to keep locked; they slept together in the rear bedroom on the ground floor.
In the first stages of her pregnancy Shirley Robinson had maintained her sexual relationship with both West and his wife. ‘Shirley said, “I am still a lesbian and love girls”,’ West wrote, and went on: ‘Shirley said. “You will love me now I am having your baby, and you know it’s yours, and it will look just like you.” Shirley and Rose got to be good friends and were going out at night together. Shirley would leave me at work about eight o’clock and go home and out.’The eighteen-year-old girl helped West work on an extension to Cromwell Street, which his wife had demanded he create in the last stages of her pregnancy with Tara.
In the spring of 1978, however, when Rosemary West’s second pregnancy within a year had been confirmed, her attitude to Shirley Robinson changed dramatically. From being her sexual partner, she became her enemy.The woman whom she had been happy enough to welcome into her house, and into her bed, was now a threat, and one that she wanted her husband to deal with. But for a moment at least, Frederick West did nothing. He did not ‘sort it out for her’, as he had done on so many occasions in the past. He simply ignored the situation. Even more significantly,West signally refused to subject Shirley Robinson to the treatment that he had meted out to some of the other young women like her who had made their way to Cromwell Street.
West may well have felt angrier than he had been prepared to admit over the birth of Tara. He may also have been intent on teaching his wife a lesson that no matter how dominant she may have felt in the house, he was still firmly its master. Perhaps, too, he was more attracted to the young woman in the small first-floor bedroom than he had admitted to his wife. Certainly, Anna-Marie West would remember her father ‘taunting’ his wife that Shirley was going to be his ‘next wife’. And there is no doubt that in the spring of 1978 Rosemary West sensed her husband might be grooming the young woman to take her place. There is also no doubt that that was exactly what Shirley Robinson had in mind. The eighteen-year-old had even told one of her fellow lodgers that Frederick West was going to leave his wife for her, and that Rosemary West was ‘jealous’.
‘The next thing was Rose was telling everyone she hated Shirley,’ Frederick West was to recall at the end of his life. ‘So I said to Rose, “What’s going on?” She said, “It’s got nothing to do with you” . . . Rose said “Work the cow’s fingers to the bone and do not pay her, give all the money to me and I will pay her”.’ As Shirley Robinson’s pregnancy progressed, so her relationship with Rosemary West deteriorated still further. ‘It became very tense in the house,’ Anna-Marie would recall – until, in March 1978, when she was six months’ pregnant, Shirley Robinson moved out of her tiny cramped room in Cromwell Street to live with a woman.
Rosemary West may well have given the girl an ultimatum that she had to leave their house, for Shirley Robinson admitted to one of the lodgers that she was ‘more frightened of Rose than Fred’. But Shirley Robinson had retaliated by telling her landlady that she was certain she was going to give birth to her husband’s son, and that she and West had even chosen a name together – Barry, after the Welsh rugby union player Barry John. Frederick West was now in a quandary, trapped between two women, both pregnant by him, one apparently determined to remain, the other to become, Mrs West. For once,West dithered.
After Shirley Robinson moved out, he ‘went to see her two or three times’, he wrote. ‘I missed her. We got on so well together, and Shirley was having my baby. Shirley knew I was missing her. So as long as I went to see her, the longer she would stay away. So I stopped going to see her. Within a week Shirley was waiting for me outside of my work . . . She said,“Your baby is missing you and I am.” I said, “Come home with me.” We went to see Rose. Rose said,“Shirley can have her old room back”.’
In the wake of Shirley Robinson’s return, Frederick West admitted that: ‘Rose and Shirley did not have much to do with each other. Shirley made friends with the girls in the top room.’ At the outset West seemed pleased that the girl had returned. Early in May 1978, barely a month before she was due to give birth, he even went to have a full-scale studio portrait of himself, dressed in his best suit, standing beside the small girl in her best dress. It could almost have been a wedding photograph. West later explained it by saying that she had wanted it ‘so she could send them to her father and friends’, but West himself kept two of them, no doubt to Rosemary West’s intense annoyance.
As the birth of Shirley Robinson’s child in June 1978 drew closer, Frederick West’s attitude steadily began to change. Though the eighteen-year-old would make every effort to tell him how much she loved him, and would follow him around whenever she could, she was now more than eight months’ pregnant, tired and irritable, and no longer able to work with him every evening. No doubt under intense pressure from his wife, West began to change his mind. Shirley Robinson had become a liability.West told one of his lodgers, Liz Parry, who was paying £7 a week to live in the top-floor front bedroom, that Shirley was getting ‘too possessive’, while Rosemary West confided to her that ‘no matter what Fred did’ she would never leave him.
Over the months she had lived at Cromwell Street, Liz Parry had become friendly with Shirley Robinson, and now the pregnant girl, too, confided in her. ‘Shirley was frightened of the Wests,’ she would recall seventeen years afterwards. ‘She wanted to stay in my room to keep away from them.’ For about a week Shirley Robinson slept in her bed, while she slept on the couch. As Liz Parry would remember:‘Shirley was becoming quite emotional about Fred.’
At some point in the second half of May 1978 Frederick West finally reached a decision about Shirley Robinson. Shortly before his own death seventeen years later, he ended his brief memoir of her with the words: ‘Shirley said to me, “Is Rose going to leave you?” I said, “I have no idea what Rose is doing. I wish I did.” Shirley said, “I will always be yours. I love you, Fred”.’ They were the last words West would write about the young woman who was eight-and–a-half months’ pregnant when her life was brought brutally to a close one May morning at 25 Cromwell Street.
When West confessed to the murder of Shirley Robinson, he deliberately avoided going into any detail of precisely what happened. In his first interviews he was intent on maintaining that he alone had been involved, and no one else. West told the police simply that he had ‘strangled her in the hall, in the living room’, when ‘Rose was in hospital having a baby’. He also maintained that ‘I don’t think Rose even knew Shirley . . . As far as I know Rose never ever met Shirley.’ As time passed, however, Frederick West gradually expanded on this first account. He explained that the eighteen-year-old was ‘six months’ pregnant’, but insisted that she ‘was going to have the baby for another girl in Bristol’, telling the police she was ‘pure lesbian’ and adding that ‘I don’t know if she actually raped Anna, but she had sex with Anna-Marie’.
West also maintained that the reason he had killed Shirley Robinson was because she had threatened to ‘tell Rose’ she was pregnant with his child. He said the girl had been waiting for him on his allotment at Saintsbridge, and had wanted to have sex with him. ‘I said, “I ain’t got time to mess with you. I got to get home.” . . . So we got in the van . . .We went home . . . and she was nagging on about me having sex with her . . . I remember I kept saying to her all the time, “keep to the agreement, the baby is yours” and that was the end of it.’ When they got back to Cromwell Street, West explained, she had gone upstairs, but when he had joined her she had continued to nag him.‘I turned round and hit her actually, smacked her across the floor, knocked her across the room. She went flying down on the floor.’
Shirley Robinson had not been killed by the blow.West went on:
She wasn’t dead . . . So I got her outside and locked the back doors and stayed outside with her. And I sat on a block there used to be . . . Then I just sat there looking at her, and . . . it was going through me mind at the time, she’s going to absolutely ruin me marriage . . . She’s going to destroy the lot . . .There was loads of spare cable chucked on the floor there, all cut up. So I just went over and picked a piece of that up, and come back and just put it round her neck. I mean, I just didn’t think to kill her, I wasn’t thinking nothing.
All this took place ‘in the late evening’, West maintained, and that after he had killed the girl he had hidden her body under ‘this big heap of cut-off cables . . . And left her there . . . Locked the patio doors . . . and I picked up a bag and I went to the hospital’. When he got back, Shirley Robinson was ‘stiff, cold’, so West had lifted a slab outside his back door and beside the wall of the neighbouring church.‘But then I couldn’t get the hole anywhere near big enough, because it was going to take too long. So I went in the back door and got the knife . . . and just cut Shirley up there, took her arms and legs off, and then I packed her up . . . just pushed her in with a spade.’ He admitted that he had ripped ‘a summer dress thing’ from her body ‘to stop the blood getting on the patio, because I had nothing else’.
‘It had been carefully planned with Shirley not to say anything,’ West claimed to the police. ‘I mean, I didn’t want to get involved with Shirley or involved with any woman apart from Rose.’ He had even ‘chucked her out once’ but ‘she would not bloody stop calling me, and coming and looking for me all the time’. Finally, West insisted she had given him no alternative other than to kill her. ‘I was aware that Shirley was carrying a child of mine . . . and I mean the last thing I wanted to do was hurt a child of mine.’ But Rosemary West, he insisted fiercely,‘is the only thing that matters in my life, nothing else, not even my children’. Like almost every other word of Frederick West’s first confessions, this was a bare-faced lie.
In a second version West came just a little closer to the truth. For a start, he accepted that his wife had not been in hospital at the time of Shirley Robinson’s death, and that the girl had wanted him to pose for a photograph with her as ‘the father of the baby’. This time he maintained that Shirley Robinson had met him at his allotment after he had left the Wagon Works for the day at four-thirty. ‘Shirley wanted me to go and live with her . . . so we went up on to Painswick Hill . . . to talk it over right . . . She came up with “you love me” and all that . . . but I mean I wasn’t interested, no way, and she knew that . . . or it was made clear to her.’ In this second version West said that he then took the girl back to Cromwell Street, only to find that his wife had gone out for a walk in the park with Tara, Heather, Mae and Stephen.West insisted that it was then that he had killed her, because ‘What Shirley had done is gone upstairs and told Liz.’
West then claimed that he had put the girl’s unconscious body in the wash-room he had recently created at the back of the house, strangled her with cable ‘to make sure she was dead’, cut her up with a bread knife, dug the small hole ‘and carried the pieces out and dropped them in the hole . . . I took the big piece out first, and then the head, and then the legs. I didn’t have much room to put it in, so it had to be packed.’ He had dismembered the girl’s body on her own summer dress, and washed her blood from his chest and arms in the sink. ‘If Rose had come out, she had no suspicion that I was doing anything, apart from building that washroom . . . Rose didn’t know nothing.’
The reality, of course, was quite different. Although Frederick West would maintain steadfastly throughout the majority of his police interviews that his wife knew nothing about the death of Shirley Robinson, or indeed about her pregnancy, there is no doubt that Rosemary West knew her intimately. She had made the critical decisions about her future – until her pregnancy. It seems certain, for example, that Shirley Robinson was allowed to remain at Cromwell Street in the spring of 1977 only because Rosemary West wanted to seduce her and then pass her on to her husband, just as she had done with Miss A at exactly the same time. Indeed, at one stage in their bisexual relationship Rosemary West may even have told the girl that she would help her ‘look after’ Frederick West’s baby for her. But when Shirley Robinson made it clear that she intended to become the next Mrs West, Rosemary West’s attitude towards her changed completely. Her lust for her turned to loathing. In the circumstances there can be no doubt that she knew of the girl’s death. She helped her husband kill her.
Girls were brought back to Cromwell Street by Frederick West for his wife’s sexual delectation. He brought them to her in the lair he had created in his cellar, like the poacher he was by nature, and he delighted in the sexual enjoyment that his wife so obviously derived from their abuse, just as he relished the opportunity to despoil and sexually humiliate them himself. At the outset West had allowed Shirley Robinson to escape that fate, perhaps because his wife found her particularly attractive, or because he too was fascinated by her. Whatever the reason, West had dithered, and Shirley Robinson had seized what she saw as an opportunity – marriage to an older man, the father that she had always longed for.
As a result Shirley Robinson became the greatest threat Rosemary West had faced in the eight years she had known her husband. Rena West, by comparison, had been absent for long periods of time, returning only rarely to see West, and to help him to introduce the young Rosemary Letts into their sexual world. Nevertheless, Rena West had been killed at her successor’s insistence, and Shirley Robinson now suffered exactly the same fate. Rosemary West wanted the bright young girl killed. After all, she did not want to give her husband an opportunity to change his allegiance, and see him kill her, as he had his first wife.
At the end of his life Frederick West gave a very different version of the death of Shirley Robinson from the one that initially he gave to the police. In it he explained clearly that he had only been trying to make his wife jealous. In fact,West confessed that if Rosemary West had not been pregnant with a black child,‘Shirley probably wouldn’t even have got the one she got. It was a way of getting even with Rose, I suppose, not intentionally, but that was the way it went.’
West told his first solicitor, Howard Ogden:‘Shirley and me had a good relationship. She loved the idea of having a baby . . . but Shirley conned me, and I realised that after, but I never quarrelled with her over it.’ He even confessed that she was ‘much like Ann McFall – happy-go-lucky, carefree – I belong to Fred and I don’t care who knows it’, and confirmed that he had indeed made love to her one day while they were stripping wallpaper at 7 Cromwell Street. But he added:
What I didn’t realise was that Shirley had grown fond of me . . . The next thing I finds out, she’s only gone and told Rose . . . From that time on Rose fucking hated her, and you could see it.
Let’s be fucking honest. Shirley was madly in love with me, and I knew that. But I was trying to cool it down with her. Because it could never be nothing. From the time she said about pregnancy I said if it ever happens it is your child . . . I’m not leaving Rose. I wouldn’t leave my kids for another woman. That’s the thing I’ve fought all my life – to give my kids a mother.
But Frederick West also knew that ‘Rose fucking hated Shirley. She was always going to belt her face in if her ever got hold of her. Made that quite clear to everybody.’
Shirley Robinson wanted West ‘to go to Germany with her – to meet her father, who was going to send the money for the trip’, but West thought: ‘I ain’t fucking getting mixed up with that, and that was what we had the few words about.’ Shortly afterwards, he recalled, the girl had turned up outside the Wagon Works factory, saying: ‘“There’s me carrying your baby and you’re not bothered about me at all.” . . . Straight in front of everybody.’ Clearly desperate by this time, she also told West outside the Muir Hill works:‘Once I have the baby, you don’t want me with you.’ In the last months of his life, however,West maintained firmly that that had been ‘the last time I ever seen Shirley’.
In this final version of Shirley Robinson’s death, West blamed his wife for killing her. ‘Rose was after Shirley . . . give her a good hiding. I didn’t think she’d kill her. I thought she’d just give her a fucking pasting, and get rid of that baby or summat.’ But West insisted that Rosemary West never gave him the details of exactly how the eighteen-year-old finally met her death. In this account he explains that:
Rose never had the time to kill Shirley at home . . . I am a hundred per cent sure that Shirley was not attacked at home. So where she was I don’t know. Where she was killed. And how she got back there . . . Rose wouldn’t tell me . . . All she said was, “I sorted that bitch out. She had the full length of my arm up her cunt, and that sorted her out . . . I had the fucking head off that bitch. I hated the look on her fucking face. It gave me great pleasure cutting her head off.”
Whatever the brutal revenge Rosemary West wreaked on Shirley Robinson her remains were found buried in an identical manner to every other victim in Cromwell Street, as well as to both Rena West and Ann McFall in their adjoining fields near Much Marcle. Like every other young woman who suffered at the hands of Frederick West, Shirley Robinson was to be abused, tortured and mutilated before she died. Even more horrifically, the eight-and-a-half-month-old baby in her womb was to be abused with her.
Like Juanita Mott before her, the girl’s kneecaps were missing from her skeleton when it was recovered from the back garden alongside the church wall. And, just as in Juanita Mott’s case, there must be a strong possibility that they may have been removed while she was still alive – to incapacitate her completely. It also seems certain that she, too, would have suffered extensive sexual abuse and humiliation at the hands of the Wests.
Shirley Robinson may even have suffered some form of vile and macabre abortion at the hands of the Wests. For Frederick West suggested in a private conversation towards the end of his life that Shirley Robinson may have gone into labour during the last moments of her life. If that is the case, Rosemary West may indeed have‘sorted out’ both Shirley Robinson and her unborn child, as her husband claimed. Certainly, when her remains were recovered the baby was not in the position the Home Office forensic pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight, felt it should have been in. The unborn child’s head was not in Shirley Robinson’s pelvis, and it had not been left intact in the abdomen. Frederick West himself insisted: ‘I never touched the baby at all’, but accepted that his wife had told him that she ‘had her fucking arm up her.That’s why that baby was up where it shouldn’t be. Rose . . . rammed it up her.’
The reality of her ordeal may have been worse even than this. When her remains were recovered, her right thigh bone had been severed with what the pathologist described as a ‘heavy but very sharp weapon’. Shirley Robinson’s right leg may have been broken while she was still alive. Indeed, a good many of her fingers and toes, as well as both her hands and feet, may have been removed at the same time. Yet again, a victim’s bones were removed as souvenirs: twenty-eight of Shirley Robinson’s thirty wrist and ankle bones, and forty-two of her seventy-six finger and toe bones were missing when her body was unearthed from the familiar small, square shaft that Frederick West had dug for it.
Significantly, three of Shirley Robinson’s vertebrae also were missing. She may even have been decapitated – while she was alive – for her skull was certainly removed between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae, and found face down in her tiny grave, just as her legs had been disarticulated from her body at the hips. There were also no fewer than twenty-one fine cut-marks on her bones.There seems no doubt that Rosemary West had indeed lost her temper with Shirley Robinson, and taken considerable pleasure in both her humiliation and her murder.
The only familiar items missing from Shirley Robinson’s grave were any form of mask or binding. But there would have been little need to tie or bind a woman in the last month of her pregnancy, especially if her kneecaps had already been removed. Or it may simply indicate that the Wests used a different form of gag, which they took pains to remove, or that they drugged the girl senseless before keeping her in the cellar that Frederick West had taken such pains to make more difficult to enter while building his new extension.
When Liz Parry returned to her room at Cromwell Street on the day of Shirley Robinson’s disappearance, she did not go downstairs and knock on the door to the Wests’ section of the house. She merely thought the girl had probably made it up with her landlords, and went to bed. The following morning Frederick West made a point of coming upstairs to see her to tell her that ‘Shirley had left to visit relatives in Germany’. Liz Parry later recalled that ‘the Wests seemed very happy’.With Rosemary West nodding her agreement beside him, West went on to tell her gleefully: ‘Another reason Shirley had to leave. She was planning to rip my knickers off me.’
Shirley Robinson was never seen alive again, though the Wests would tell Liz Parry that they were ‘keeping in touch’ with the girl, who had given birth to a little boy, whom she had named Barry. The Wests also implied that Shirley was ‘going to return to Cromwell Street’, and that when she did so Rosemary West was going to look after the baby for her. Anna-Marie West, too, was told by her father and stepmother that Shirley Robinson had gone to Germany. But a few days later another lodger, Claire Jones, saw Rosemary West bundling Shirley Robinson’s few belongings into plastic bags. Her landlady pushed the door closed when she saw her. When Rosemary West came to give evidence at her trial in her own defence, she maintained that she remembered Shirley Robinson ‘but not well’, that they had never had any lesbian relationship, that she would never remove ‘anybody else’s things’, and that she ‘never had a clue’ that Shirley Robinson was pregnant with Fred’s baby.
Like Lynda Gough before her, Shirley Robinson was to return to haunt the Wests. Though they may have thought that they had put any inquisitive officials off the scent – by withdrawing her claim for supplementary benefit, and claiming her unemployment benefit fraudulently for a time – they were visited eventually by Peter Gregson, an official from the Department of Health and Social Security, on 8 August 1978. Gregson remembered seventeen years later that the lady who answered the door informed him that the young woman he was enquiring for had ‘gone to Germany’. The lady, of course, was Rosemary West.
It was the last time anyone came in search of Shirley Robinson. For the seventh time in his six years at Cromwell Street, Frederick West, with his wife’s help, had managed to make a young woman disappear into thin air without anyone really noticing.