THE HOUSE OF DREAMS
‘Just as dumb creatures are snared by food, human beings would not be caught unless they had a little nibble of hope.’
PETRONIUS, THE SATYRICON
Frederick West’s morbid fascination with gynaecology was not restricted to an interest in abortions. He was also intrigued by the possibilities of genetic engineering, so much so that in the wake of the birth of Tara, his wife’s first mixed race child, he became increasingly fascinated with the possibility of repeating it, artificially. No sooner had Rosemary West given birth to his own fifth child and fourth daughter Louise, in November 1978 than West embarked on a series of bizarre medical experiments designed to ensure that his wife would give birth to another mixed race child – whether the father in question knew about it or not.
West’s plan was straightforward enough. If Rosemary West had sex with a Jamaican client using a condom, West would take the used condom away as soon as her client had left, and meticulously protect its contents. He would then mix them with the contents of another black client’s condom, which he had stored earlier. And a short time afterwards West would insert this newly mixed semen into his wife by means of a small syringe, in the hope that she might conceive. To store the semen from the first condom, West would sometimes ‘persuade’ a young woman to keep the first condom inside her vagina for a time to maintain the semen at body temperature. But if his wife’s client did not use a condom, West was not to be deterred. He would insist that she allow the man’s semen to dribble out into a small pot that he kept especially for the purpose, and again mix it with an earlier client’s, and, as before, insert the mixture with his small syringe.
The objective of West’s experiments was to ensure that his wife became pregnant with a mixed race child but was prevented from knowing, for certain, the identity of the father. It was a means of control over the woman who obsessed him. It allowed him to manipulate her sexuality, indulge his own fascination with what he saw as the greater potency of her black lovers, while at the same time alleviating his natural jealousy, for he was always the one in control of the experiment. He was the ‘mad scientist’ setting the parameters for his own bizarre world. Most important of all, it meant that Rosemary West would never be able to form any kind of permanent relationship with one of her black lovers, and thereby threaten their own love for one another.
West never sought to cloak his murders in the respectability of medical ‘experiment’. Not for him the alibis of Joseph Mengele, or the creation of a master race. His attempts at artificial insemination were simply another part of his fascination with sex.When he was eventually caught, West made no attempt to explain his killings of young women as merely an investigation of their genitalia or reproductive organs: far from it. For him, their deaths were simply ‘kinky sex that went wrong’, to use his own macabre phrase, not part of some greater scheme to redefine the human species. West offered no justification for so many of the deaths beyond his own sadistic lust and sexual gratification.
When Frederick West was first asked about his medical experiments, when he was arrested by the Gloucestershire police in 1992 on charges associated with child abuse, he admitted freely that he carried them out, but denied that he had ever stored the semen in another young woman. But there is evidence that West did, in fact, do so, using at least one young woman to store the contents of the condoms. Instead, West gleefully admitted to the police that all he and his wife used to do was: ‘Just shove it in the bag and take it with us.’ He went on to explain that ‘We go up the hills . . . and use it the same night . . . within an hour and a half ’, because, he concluded, ‘What you must remember is whenever a coloured bloke makes love to her, then I make love to her within half an hour of that . . . because that is our thing, like.’ West saw nothing strange or unnatural in this behaviour.
His fascination with the female reproductive organs knew no bounds.West also explained to the police in 1992 that he had been experimenting with ways to make a film inside a woman’s vagina, and had even found and kept a medical device for the purpose. ‘It was left at home by a midwife one time,’ he maintained, and he and his wife had adapted it to their own purpose.‘We put it in her, look in with a torch and things like that, and try to film inside as well,’ he told the police proudly. ‘It shows the womb, like, inside.’ At the time, West admitted only that he performed this on his wife, but there must be the suspicion that it may have been yet another of the humiliations that he meted out to his victims.
One young woman who may have been forced to undergo these and other medical experiments was Frederick West’s eldest child, Anna-Marie. Now fourteen, she had been abused by West and his wife for six years, regularly supplying him with sexual favours, and suffering physical abuse from his wife with equal regularity. She, in turn, became, by her own admission,‘aggressive, if not delinquent’. Indeed, it is difficult to see how she could have responded to the abuse in any other way, so distorted was the world she inhabited. One of Anna-Marie West’s first boyfriends was told by West himself that he was ‘not shagging her enough’, even though he knew his daughter was legally under age. The boy also suspected that West spied on them while they were in Cromwell Street. On another occasion the fourteen-year-old girl was told by West: ‘You don’t want no fucking schoolboy.You want someone who’ll sort you out. He won’t know what to fucking do with it.’
The girl was also still being introduced to her mother’s clients, with whom she was expected to have sexual intercourse. ‘Sometimes I had to go first, sometimes second,’ she would recall many years later. If she refused, the punishment could be brutal. Shortly after her fourteenth birthday in July 1978, she was treated in the casualty department of Gloucester Royal Hospital for ‘puncture wounds’ to both feet, wounds uncannily similar to those suffered by her sister Charmaine seven years earlier. The summer before, Anna-Marie West had been detained overnight at the same hospital for what was described as ‘an accident at an ice-rink’, but which also might well have been inflicted with a kitchen knife. In the school year that ended in the summer of 1979, she was absent on sixty-eight occasions.
Not long afterwards, at the age of fifteen, Anna-Marie West became pregnant by her father. But she did not give birth to the incestuous child that Frederick West may have longed for. The pregnancy was diagnosed as ectopic, and she was again admitted to the Gloucester Royal Hospital, although no one explained what was wrong with her. West himself accompanied her, explaining only: ‘The doctors think there might be something wrong inside. They are going to put you to sleep and have a little look.’ She remembered afterwards that West did not stay long, but that when he came back briefly – ‘He hated hospitals’ – it was simply to tell her that she was now all right. He visited her just once more in the week she was there.
Within a matter of months Frederick West’s eldest child was to run away from Cromwell Street. Disturbed and distraught, she would tell her friends that she thought her mother was ‘a slag’ because she worked as a prostitute, and how often her father grabbed at her breasts when she passed him. Finally, Anna-Marie West, who was to change her name to Anne Marie shortly afterwards, could stand no more. For the first time she realised that ‘other people didn’t live in the way we did at Cromwell Street’. As she would explain fifteen years later, until then: ‘I associated everything with sex . . . To get love you had to provide sex; if someone gave you something or offered to help you in any way, you repaid them with sex. If you wanted something from someone, you offered them sex. To avoid beatings and provoking Rose, and to please her, you had sex with her or with the men she had chosen . . . The only love and affection I ever knew from my father came after he had had sex with me.’
Within the walls of Frederick West’s house that was perfectly normal behaviour, entirely acceptable within the ‘alternative universe’ that he had so deliberately set out to create for himself and his family. Life there went on much as before, although now there were five of Rosemary West’s children, Heather, aged nearly nine, Mae, six, Stephen, five,Tara, a little under a year, and the new baby, Louise, as well as Anna-Marie. The upstairs rooms were still filled with lodgers, and the house still had its criminal associations. One local burglar used it as his permanent address for a period of ‘home leave’ from prison, and there were persistent rumours that West still allowed other criminals to hide in the cellar, or to leave their stolen goods there. Certainly, the neighbours would often see Frederick West and his wife leave the house in the late evening in his green Bedford van, with a sliding door at the side, not to return until the early hours of the morning. More often than not they would then carry planks of wood and other building materials into their house, which they had presumably ‘found’ on their expedition.
But it was not only stolen sand and cement that Frederick West would go looking for in his van. There were still the attractions of young women, and he had carefully nurtured his latest local source. Jordan’s Brook Community Home in Hucclecote, Gloucester, which had housed Miss A, the girl he and his wife had attacked in the summer of 1977, still catered for some particularly disturbed young people among its twenty-four residents, and West made sure that many of them got to know the reputation of 25 Cromwell Street for providing accommodation for the night ‘with no questions asked’. In 1979 Frederick West was working on a house near Jordan’s Brook, and he would regularly offer the inmates cigarettes or a lift in his van if they needed it. Inevitably, he would also joke relentlessly about sex, inviting any girl who might ‘need a bed’ to come to visit him. By then, some of the Jordan’s Brook girls had even given Frederick and Rosemary West a nickname. They called them Mr and Mrs Shackles.
One of the girls at Jordan’s Brook at the time was a sixteen-year-old named Alison Chambers, who had arrived there in December 1978 from a children’s home near Pontypridd after running away and threatening to ‘go on the game’ as a prostitute in London. Born in Hanover in Germany, where her father had been serving in the RAF, she had become a rebellious teenager after the breakup of her parents’ marriage. Her mother Joan had married again when her daughter was thirteen, and moved to Swansea, but Alison Chambers had not been altogether happy with her and, as a result, in 1977, at the age of fourteen, she had been taken into care in Wales. Soon after Christmas 1978 she had moved to Jordan’s Brook in Gloucester.
A little over five-feet, two-inches in height, Alison Chambers was a neat, cheerful girl, with blonde hair and bright blue eyes. She had quickly settled into life in Gloucester, although one member of the staff was to remember later that she was ‘obviously insecure’ and prone to exaggeration, particularly when it came to stories about her boyfriends.‘It was as if she wanted constant attention,’ she would recall. Like so many of the other young women who were to find their way to Cromwell Street, Alison Chambers was in pursuit of her own version of love.
Not long after her arrival at Jordan’s Brook, Alison Chambers was sent out on aYouth Training Scheme to prepare her for the end of her period in care on her seventeenth birthday that September, and to introduce her to working life. In the early part of 1979 she had worked as a waitress in the Road Chef café, but by April she was ‘very, very happy’ to be employed at a firm of solicitors in Westgate Street, Gloucester, where she acted as a junior receptionist and general assistant. By that summer Alison Chambers had also started to make her way to 25 Cromwell Street. One of the lodgers at the time remembered her coming regularly in the early evening, always smartly dressed and carrying a handbag, a girl who looked ‘as though she’d come from work’, made to feel welcome in a house where she was always known as Al or Ali.
The world of Cromwell Street must have seemed enormously attractive to the impressionable young woman. It was not only a place to stay for an hour, or the night if necessary; it was also a haven from Jordan’s Brook, the institution that Alison Chambers had grown to ‘loathe’, as she told a friend. Rosemary West’s five children no doubt made Cromwell Street feel more hospitable than the children’s homes she had been used to, and Frederick West’s elaborate and exaggerated stories would certainly have impressed her. Once again he was the older man who seemed to take an interest, a man with a family who could be relied on, the father she wished she had. And yet again West delighted in playing up to her fantasies. He even bought her a necklace with her name engraved on it.
But it was not just the Wests themselves who made Cromwell Street attractive to Alison Chambers and to some of the other girls from Jordan’s Brook. There was also the fact that the household made no secret of its interest in sex in all its forms. That brought the house a glamour, and a fascination, which no ordinary house could match. It was this that led the girls to congregate outside it on the pavement on some evenings, talking among themselves.The stories of the red light that went on in the ground-floor lounge when Rosemary West was ‘entertaining one of her clients’, or the stories of the ‘wailing’ that would emanate from her ground-floor front bedroom, must have made the place seem even more exciting. Several of the girls who found their way there were almost certainly encouraged to earn extra money by acting as part-time prostitutes for the Wests, who offered them to their friends and visitors. Others, including Alison Chambers, participated in both the Wests’ sexual life.
Cromwell Street was a house of dreams, a place where Alison Chambers could forget that she was, in fact, a resident of a children’s home, a place where she could confess her deepest secrets. Her best friend at the time remembered years later that they had both discussed with Rosemary West running away from the home; Rosemary had produced a black-and-white photograph of a farm which she said she and her husband owned. Rosemary West told Alison Chambers that she could have her own room there, where she could write the poetry Alison had told her she wanted to, and where Alison could ride the horses in their stables. ‘Alison was captivated,’ her best friend would recall sixteen years later. She photocopied the picture of the ‘farm’ and drew ivy on it: she even told the other inmates of Jordan’s Brook, though some of them thought it was only her ‘story-telling’.
The attraction of the new life that Cromwell Street seemed to offer proved too great for Alison Chambers to resist, as did the sexual possibilities that the Wests offered. By the end of July in 1979 she had almost certainly become the lover of both Frederick and Rosemary West. And on 4 August, after discovering that she would have to stay at Jordan’s Brook beyond her seventeenth birthday in September, she packed most of her belongings and absconded from the home. She confided to her best friend that she was going to live at Cromwell Street, but asked her not to tell the staff at Jordan’s Brook. Instead, Alison told her to tell them that she had ‘run away to Wales’. The two girls then arranged to meet the following afternoon so that Alison could collect the few clothes she had left behind. But when her friend kept their appointment the next day, the sixteen-year-old girl with a faint Welsh accent did not turn up. The following day the police were notified.
Alison Chambers was to be heard from again, however. In September 1979 she wrote to her mother and stepfather ‘to let you know exactly what I am at present doing with myself and my life’. She went on: ‘I can understand that this is little consolation to you, after my taking off from Jordan’s Brook House, but I feel I owe you at least that.’The German-born girl, who was just about to celebrate her seventeenth birthday, then told her parents: ‘I am at present living with a very homely family and I look after their five children and do some of their housework.’ This letter was sufficient to satisfy the West Glamorgan County Council that she was not a missing person, and that she should be released from care. It was also enough to persuade the police that she was no longer a missing person.
‘All I’m doing,’Alison Chambers explained,‘is trying and I might say succeeding in living a normal everyday life with worries that are shared and with happiness that is true.Also I’m living in a happy and relaxed atmosphere and not a strained and cold atmosphere. I cannot say I feel sorry for running away because that would be untrue, but I am sincerely sorry for any anxiety I’ve caused the family.’ And she ended her letter.‘I just wanted to let you know I’m safe, and shall continue to write to let you know how I’m coping. One thing I don’t want anyone to do is to worry about me because I don’t deserve it, so please don’t. I love and miss you all. Please believe that. Until I write again, take care of yourselves. All my fondest, Alison.’
This heartfelt, honest plea for freedom was the last anyone heard of Alison Chambers until her left thigh bone was unearthed from beneath the patio in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street fifteen years later. Alison Chambers did not sense the danger that lurked there, did not sense that the Wests’ nickname of ‘The Shackles’ might have had an ugly rather than simply an erotic, clandestine, sexual connotation, and did not sense that her trust might cost her her life. Tragically, she may well not have been the only victim the Wests took from the impressionable young women boarded just across Gloucester in Jordan’s Brook Community Home.
No fewer than twenty-two young women were to go missing, their ‘whereabouts unknown’, after they left the children’s home between 1970 and 1994. The whereabouts of another forty-two young people who left its care, including Alison Chambers, were ‘not recorded’. Some of them may well have made their way across Gloucester, using alleyways and side-roads, just as Alison Chambers and her best friend had done in the summer of 1979, to ring the doorbell beside the iron gates at the front of 25 Cromwell Street. Some, too, were probably offered a lift there by the dirty, dishevelled little man the girls all knew as ‘flirty Fred’.
A number of those missing young women must have fallen into the hands of Frederick West, whether in Cromwell Street or at the farm that his wife told Alison Chambers about. West’s prodigious sexual appetite and his addiction to violence and murder, now fuelled by the killing of at least eleven young women, could not have stopped. The only realistic conclusion is that West did lure many more young women to Cromwell Street, or elsewhere, for his sexual gratification, and their humiliating death.The possibility that he then disposed of their bodies in the style that he had perfected in another site, or sites, is too great to be ignored.Though he would insist throughout his final police interviews that ‘there are no more. I can’t make up people I killed’, the statement was another lie, as he hinted in the last remaining months of his life.
Frederick West probably persuaded Alison Chambers to write the letter to her mother and stepfather. It bears all the hallmarks of his natural skill at covering his tracks and confusing the outside world. He would have known that it would have deflected even the most inquisitive official from his door. The letter was too perfect a cover to have been an accident. And it worked triumphantly. The letter was sufficient to persuade West Glamorgan County Council, which was responsible for Alison Chambers, to release her from its care, as she seemed to be making her own way in the world. The tragic result was that Alison Chambers met her end in Cromwell Street. Indeed, her thigh was the first human bone discovered there, though at the time no one knew to whom it belonged.
When FrederickWest first confessed to her murder,he gave a most unexpected explanation for it. Anxious to divert attention from his connections with the girls from Jordan’s Brook, West insisted that Alison Chambers had turned up at Cromwell Street to blackmail him with a copy of the portrait photograph he had had taken sixteen months earlier with Shirley Robinson. In his first version of the reasons for her death,West maintained that the sixteen-year-old from Swansea, who had not even arrived in Gloucester when Shirley Robinson disappeared, was, in fact, ‘Shirley’s mate’. Clearly confusing her at first with another young woman, whom West said was ‘big-boned’ and twenty-two years of age,West went on to insist that the girl he only ever knew as ‘Shirley’s mate’ had turned up at Cromwell Street ‘several years’ after Shirley Robinson’s death and said to him:‘As far as I can gather you killed Shirley.’
But West rapidly changed his story, suggesting instead that she had arrived ‘between twelve months and two years’ after Shirley Robinson. ‘She came to the door and asked if Shirley was there, and I said, “Shirley don’t live here now”, and she said,“Yes, yes, she does . . . I’ve got a photograph here of you with Shirley”.’West said he then told her to ‘go to a café or something and have a cup of tea and come back later’, because ‘Rose was cooking the dinner’.
Then West began to heap lie upon lie, confusing the dates and events, in his customary elaborate attempt to conceal the truth. He suggested that ‘Shirley’s mate’ was the girl Shirley Robinson had told him she was ‘having the baby for’, and that he had sent her down to his own café in Southgate Street (though it had closed two years earlier). ‘I said: “I’ll come down and pick you up.” . . . So anyway I . . . sent Rose out to sleep for the night . . . went down with the van, drove past the café, she came out and . . . went back home with her to try and sort it out.’ Back in Cromwell Street, West explained:
She said that Shirley said in her letter that if she didn’t turn up in so long or something then to come and get me and I’d know where she was. I said,‘What do you mean by that?’ and she said . . .‘That you could have knocked her off, killed her.’ She was telling me about Shirley, and if she didn’t find her she’d go round and get the police, and all this lot, so we had an argument, a row, and I punched her on the jaw first, and knocked her on the floor and strangled her.
He went on to tell the police that he had buried the girl’s body under a ‘big paddling-pool’ in his garden, which was made out of blue engineering bricks. ‘All I done was lifted him up and packed her underneath him, and dropped him back on top of her.’ Finally, Frederick West confessed that he had cut the girl’s body up into four pieces, a head, torso and two legs, with his sheath knife.
Barely a day after this confession West changed his story again. This time he told the police: ‘I don’t actually believe this girl was old enough to actually be associated with Shirley. She didn’t seem to me to be.The only thing I can’t understand is where she got the photograph from and the so-called letter. I never actually seen the letter but I’ve got the photograph off her.’ This time, he explained that the girl had turned up looking for ‘Cromwell Road and not Cromwell Street’ and that he had been driving her around looking for ‘Cromwell Road’ when ‘she produced this photograph, because I think what she was doing was building up courage’ to ask him. In this second version West suggested the girl was ‘too young-looking’ to be Shirley Robinson’s ‘lesbian friend’, and that he had simply ‘dropped her off ’. But:‘Then she turns up again, later, and she starts the same crack again, and she starts putting threats. She wanted money to go off somewhere.’ And West still maintained that he never knew her name.
It was another tissue of lies. But one with a deliberate and well-thought-out purpose. Like every other confession Frederick West gave during his interviews with the police, it was designed to divert any possible suspicion away from Rosemary West. ‘Rose would definitely not have seen her,’ West insisted as he described the girl as ‘about five feet two’, with ‘blonde crinkly hair . . . just to her ears’, and ‘blue eyes’, estimating her age as ‘fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, if that’. In this second version the girl had turned up ‘a month or two’ later, but West had prevented her from even entering Cromwell Street, and had instead set off to drive her back to Bristol when she had started demanding money. ‘Then she starts giving me all that, evil of the day, all she could think of. What she was going to do to me and what she was going to tell the police that I’d done.’ He pulled into a lay-by, ‘had a right shouting match’ with her, then decided to drive her back towards Cromwell Street.When they were nearby, in a garage off Saint Michael’s Square, behind his house, ‘she set going again, so I grabbed her by the neck with me hands and choked her’.
It was now after midnight, West maintained. ‘So I . . . put her along under the window by the back door’, took a piece of ‘thirty amp cable’ and twisted it around her neck because ‘I wasn’t sure she was actually dead’. West then realised, or so he claimed to the police, that he could not make the hole under the paddling-pool in the garden any bigger ‘without using a sledge-hammer’ – ‘plus the fact that Rose is in bed’ – and so had been forced to cut her up into the four pieces he had originally described.
When the police finally identified Alison Chambers as ‘the girl under the pond’ Frederick West changed his story for a third time. This time he claimed that she had been living at number 11 Cromwell Street, and that he had ‘done her room up for her and she stayed there for a while . . . ’cause she had nowhere to stay’. When the house had first been converted to multiple occupancy, West went on to explain:‘There was a load of girls ran away from Jordan’s Brook and was there . . . I mean, it used to be a regular place for them to go.’ Once again West took scrupulous care not to suggest that she, or any other Jordan’s Brook girl, had been anywhere near his own house in Cromwell Street.
‘She was looking scruffy,’ he told the police. ‘She wasn’t scruffy in the first place. No, she was quite well dressed, but she’d worn the same clothes over and over . . . and she had an iron mark on her jumper.’ West insisted that the girl ‘was turning up too often, watching me’, and ‘I think what she was really after was a handful of money off me ’cause she thought we got money, or I got money’.
West admitted that some of the girls who arrived at Cromwell Street ‘were obviously trying to make money other ways’, and added, ‘a lot of them were on the game’. As a result, he said, there were ‘girls that accepted what we did and, you know, and forgot about it, went home and on their way . . . See, I had affairs with so many different girls, I mean, you’re not talking one or two, and . . . everyone didn’t end up in disaster, by no means.’ When the police suggested that the girl he was calling ‘Shirley’s mate’ was, in fact, Alison Chambers, West simply replied: ‘Don’t mean a thing. I never asked her her name.’ But he went on to insist:‘This girl never stayed with us.’ Throughout each of his three different confessions, West also neglected to reveal to the police that the sixteen-year-old Alison Chambers was naked when she was buried, and that she had clearly been subjected to some form of sexual abuse.
Like its two predecessors, this third confession, too, was a pack of lies. But that is not altogether a surprise. Frederick West was by this time desperately trying to conceal the extent of his killings, and was confused about which young woman he had buried and where. Without the ability to write any sort of list, he would have been struggling to keep track of the lives of a number of young women, not all of whom he would confess to killing.West certainly confused Alison Chambers with another young woman, whose identity we do not know but who became one of his victims – the big-boned, twenty-two-year-old whom he first described as the body in his garden. She would not be the first young woman whose life would become a mystery once she entered Cromwell Street.
The Wests attracted young people, many of whom concealed their identities and their reasons for being there. Many of them were to fall under the Wests’ spell, and went on to disappear without trace not long afterwards. Several of the lodgers remember a pregnant young woman with khaki shorts, hiking-boots and a German accent as having been there at this time, but Frederick West would never confirm it. Once within the doors of Cromwell Street a number of young women seemed simply to have vanished without trace, although no one can say with absolute certainty how many.
When the body of Alison Chambers was recovered from beneath the rear bathroom window of 25 Cromwell Street, her skull was found to be bound tightly with a one-and-three-quarter-inch-wide plastic belt, passing from under the chin to the top of her head. The buckle was still on the top of her head, with fragments of her hair trapped in it. The only possible explanation for a belt that would have clamped the girl’s jaw tightly shut was that it had been used to stop her screaming. When West was confronted with its existence, he insisted: ‘She wasn’t actually bondaged . . . it was just whatever was on her was put on her . . . so I could keep her together and lift her.’ He went on:‘I can’t even remember putting a belt on her head.’ But that, too, was clearly a lie.
There can be only one conclusion. Once again Frederick West’s victim had been subjected to relentless and horrifying abuse. Just as the other victims had been in the past, she would have been systematically violated both by West and his wife Rosemary. This time the Wests may have pushed the boundaries of their humiliation still further: Frederick West may have filmed her death. West was well aware of the commercial potential of ‘snuff movies’, which depict the sexual torture and death of a young woman. Only a few years after Alison Chambers’s disappearance, West even bragged to a young woman whom he met in Cromwell Street that he was ‘interested in them’. There must be at least the possibility that one of his victims provided him with the chance to exploit what he would have seen as an opportunity for a profit from this form of pornography.
No matter what West told the police it was a lie to say that neither Frederick nor Rosemary West knew Alison Chambers. She had worked for them for a time as a ‘nanny’, just as some of her predecessors had done. And like them she had suffered a terrible fate. When her body was recovered, her remains were dreadfully jumbled, but, once again a significant number of her bones were missing. In particular, both Alison Chambers’s kneecaps were absent from the familiar two-feet cube shaft she was found in; just as both kneecaps were absent from the graves of Shirley Robinson and Juanita Mott.They must have been removed to incapacitate her.
Like her predecessors, Alison Chambers had been mercilessly mutilated. Her upper breastbone had been specifically removed, as had sixty-three of her seventy-six finger and toe bones, and no fewer than twenty-seven of her thirty wrist and ankle bones.Though the police meticulously recovered even the girl’s fingernails and toenails from her tiny grave, a total of ninety-six of her bones were missing. The only conclusion is that at least some of them were removed while she was alive, but, gagged with a purple belt, she would have been unable even to protest.
Finally, in the last months of his life, in conversation with Howard Ogden, his first solicitor, West admitted that Alison Chambers, whom he still described as ‘Shirley’s mate’, had, in fact, lived with him and his wife for ‘a month or more after she’d left Barnwood in Gloucester’, and that she had befriended one of the lodgers. By this time he was placing the blame for all the killings at his wife’s door, explaining only that: ‘When I caught them young girls there, they’d have to fucking go.’ Unbelievable though it may sound,West also suggested:‘If the girl did stay at all at our place, I mean, I’m not saying she didn’t because if anybody was in trouble . . . I helped them out the best I could with . . . no bad intentions whatsoever. I mean, I like people to look upon me as somebody they can trust.’
One other unlikely event may have contributed to the death of Alison Chambers. At some point in the summer of 1979 West paid for his wife to abort her third pregnancy in three years.Though the reason is not entirely clear, West told Howard Ogden many years later that: ‘She reckoned it was mine. So I went and paid for her to have an abortion.’ That explanation could well be true, for West was apparently determined that his wife should conceive another mixed race child as a result of his experiments with the semen of her black male clients. Nevertheless, it was also to be the only abortion that Rosemary West would ever allow to be performed on her. It could well have infuriated her so intensely that she took part of her revenge on Alison Chambers.
What is not in question is that within a few weeks of Alison Chambers’s disappearance Rosemary West was pregnant again – with her sixth child – though she was still not quite twenty-six years of age. Frederick West would later question whether this latest child was his, suggesting to Howard Ogden that his wife had conceived after making love to her father, Bill Letts. But that was a gross, and mischievous, lie. Letts himself had died the previous May, at the age of fifty-eight. Indeed, this too may have unsettled Rosemary West, who had sustained her sexual relationship with her father throughout her life, and that, too, may have contributed to her anger towards Alison Chambers.
‘Rose used to go on holiday a lot with her dad,’ West would explain subsequently, ‘long weekends and all that.’ His death came as a shock to both the Wests. ‘He had this sinus trouble, where he had to have his nose drilled out every so often,’ Frederick West explained, ‘because the bones used to grow over in his nose. He had it all his life. And he went into hospital and had it done. They put him under anaesthetic and he went straight out.’ Rosemary West attended her father’s funeral in the council cemetery in Cheltenham alone, and perhaps in memory of the man who had first introduced her to deviant sexuality, she paid him a distinctive tribute by wearing deliberately provocative clothes, including a pair of black stiletto heels.
Only a matter of weeks later Rosemary West was to tell Alison Chambers about the farm that she and her husband shared, and only a matter of weeks after that the sixteen-year-old absconded from Jordan’s Brook. After her disappearance, Rosemary West would lead some of the other girls from the children’s home to think that Alison had actually gone to live on their farm. But in the months and years that followed, no one ever went to find the farm, or to look for the girl with the soft Welsh accent.At the trial for her murder, Rosemary West even denied that she knew her.
The police did visit 25 Cromwell Street some months after Alison Chambers’s disappearance, but it was in pursuit of missing goods rather than missing girls.The worst of the drugs raids of the mid-1970s had come to an end, but Frederick West’s appetite for petty theft and receiving had not dimmed, and that had attracted the attention of the police. Only a year earlier an old friend from Leyhill had been arrested again for storing stolen property in the cellar of Cromwell Street. And in the summer of 1980, only a few weeks after the birth of his second son and seventh child (whom West chose to christen Barry – in a grim memorial to Shirley Robinson), he was arrested for receiving some of the proceeds of a burglary at a local health centre in December 1979, including five tape recorders and a number of tape cassettes. They were found in the top cupboard of one of the first-floor bedroom wardrobes.
One of the tapes so shocked the police that when West eventually came to trial on 2 October 1980, the contents were not read out in open court. Instead, the jury were simply handed a transcript.When questioned about it,West confessed it was a recording of his making love to his wife in the back of his van the previous December on ‘a disused airfield near Stoke Orchard’. But he went on to explain that he had been going to phone a detective constable he knew, Malcolm Mustoe, about the goods ‘and return them’.West also told the court that he had given information ‘about a well-known Gloucester criminal who had been his lodger to DC Mustoe before’.West was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for the offence, but the sentence was suspended for two years, and he left the court after having to pay just a fine of £50. The evidence leaves little doubt that Frederick West was operating as a low-grade police informer at the time. It would have suited his purposes admirably. There could hardly have been a shrewder ruse to distract their attention from any connection that he might seem to have with a missing girl or girls. Once again it was Frederick West’s means of ‘grooming’ authority, of ensuring that he would always remain underestimated, the small-time thief and informer who was no danger to anyone.
West walked a tightrope on the very edge of the law, but he walked it so skilfully, and with such a measured tread, that he never seemed in danger of falling. Both the police and the underworld seemed to trust him. One of the criminals to whom he gave room at the time remembered many years later, for example, that West would regularly go out at night in his green Bedford van, taking a fork, spade and pickaxe. He even recalled that on one occasion both the Wests went out one evening taking with them a petrol-driven garden cultivator, called a ‘Merry Tiller’. West could hardly have needed it for his small allotment, especially as he would later insist that the ‘council took it off me ’cause I never looked after it’. But no questions were ever asked, no reports made. Frederick West made everything seem perfectly normal.
On another occasion, in the years immediately after the disappearance of Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers, a resident in another house in Cromwell Street, then still only a small boy, remembered seeing West emerge from his house one evening covered in blood from his shoulders to his knees ‘in patches’. He ran to tell his mother, but she was watching Minder on television and did not pay much attention. The boy also remembered many years afterwards Heather West, then aged nine, telling him that there was blood all over the kitchen at Cromwell Street. But again no one seemed to take the slightest notice.
In the summer of 1980, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Anna-Marie West disappeared from Cromwell Street altogether, severing every tie with her mother and father for almost three years. In her account of her life, written fifteen years later, she maintained that she wanted to start a new life, and that on the morning of her disappearance her father had thrown away all her belongings and stripped her room. She reported him as asking his wife: ‘I don’t think she’ll be a problem, do you?’ Rosemary West did not answer.
In the last months of his life Frederick West gave a rather different version of his eldest daughter’s departure. In conversation with Howard Ogden, West maintained that he had always told Anna-Marie ‘to accept Rose’, but that her ‘love turned to hate’. He then suggested that ‘Anna-Marie was frightened to tell me what was going on’, and went on:‘At sixteen,Anna-Marie said,“Get that fucking bitch out of here, and I’ll look after the children.” Straight to her face. Rose was sat there.’West insisted that he ‘couldn’t do it’, and that as a result his daughter had left, but not before she had hit him ‘straight in the face’.
The strain of sustaining the carefully insulated world of Cromwell Street was beginning to take its toll on the Wests.And their children were growing up.