HEATHER
‘A simple child
That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death?’
WORDSWORTH, WE ARE SEVEN
By the late spring of 1987 Heather West was sixteen-and-a-half years old and on the brink of adulthood.With dark hair, dark eyes and a square, almost mannish jaw, she looked Spanish. There was certainly a sensuous, Mediterranean quality to her character, a fiery pride not easily dimmed. On top of that, ‘she seemed more sexually aware than other girls of our age’, in the words of a friend at Hucclecote Comprehensive School in Gloucester.
That was hardly a surprise. Heather West and her younger sister Mae had been fighting a running battle to repel their father’s sexual advances for four years, a battle that had intensified as the months had passed, fanning still further Frederick West’s determination to possess and subdue his wife’s eldest child. By the spring of 1987 West not only wanted to penetrate his daughter Heather, but he wanted also to destroy her spirit and bend her to his own will. And the more she repelled his advances, the more she dressed, or undressed, under the bedclothes, or got her sister to stand guard while she was in the bathroom having a shower, the more irritated her father became.
West’s anger showed itself in the way he talked about his daughter. When she was moody or morose, he would say it was because she was a lesbian, or a ‘lemon’, to use his favourite term. If she stood at the bottom of the garden on her own while the rest of the family were celebrating a birthday, it was because she was ‘on’ rather than because she was unhappy. If she refused to eat, it was because she needed a ‘good sorting out’ by a man, rather than that she was sickened by his relentless sexual advances. Frederick West tormented his daughter for refusing to have sex with him. But Heather West shared her father’s strength of character. She, too, was determined – not to give way.
‘I hate my dad,’ she confessed to more than one friend. The five-feet, four-inch-tall girl hardly knew what a father’s love might mean, so relentless had been West’s incestuous attentions. She had retaliated by becoming argumentative at school and morose and silent at home, and then developing an intense crush on one of her male teachers, which had eventually led to her father being summoned to see the headmaster. Frederick West politely told him that they had nothing to worry about. He would ‘sort it out’. As one teacher recalled later, ‘Mr West was very cooperative’. No one at Hucclecote School suspected child abuse.
The battle against her father’s abuse had made Heather West a sometimes difficult, rebellious teenager. Although one teacher remembered her as ‘very pleasant and willing to participate’, another described her as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde – one minute nice as pie, the next very aggressive’, especially out of school in the company of older pupils. She had a reputation for bringing pornographic magazines to school, which had got her into trouble on a number of occasions, but she had taken eight CSE examinations, and kept up her attendance record throughout her final year.As her last term drew to a close in 1987, she was planning to put her long-fostered plan into action and leave Cromwell Street for ever. There were all sorts of possibilities, she told her girlfriends: joining the Army, working in a holiday camp, living in the Forest of Dean.
‘But Heather was very wary of men and boys,’ her younger sister Mae would recall. Her sister ‘could be really hard towards us . . . She was very similar to Mum.You couldn’t have cuddled her, she wasn’t that sort of person.’ Indeed, it is entirely possible that Frederick West was not alone in wanting to have sex with his daughter. Rosemary West, too, may have become increasingly attracted to the sixteen-year-old, egged on to be so by her husband. His daughters were his to do with as he chose, West had told his wife repeatedly during the fifteen years of their marriage, and the fact that he chose to allow his wife exactly the same rights was entirely his decision. The important thing was that his children should all be drawn completely into his incestuous circle.
His daughter refused point-blank. ‘Heather and I had decided we would never give in and let him have sex with us,’ Mae was to declare. She did not want to give in and join Frederick West’s cycle of abuse. And she did everything in her power to fight her father off. She did not always succeed. Friends of the family recalled later hearing screams of ‘Stop it, Daddy’ and ‘No, no, please, no’ from the cellar of Cromwell Street while she was growing up. Rosemary West said that they were merely ‘Heather having a nightmare’. But Heather confessed to one of her school friends that her father had forced her to have sex with him.
The spirited, dark-haired teenager had challenged her father and mother about the parentage of her three mixed race sisters. Her father had been saying publicly that they were was ‘a throw-back’ to his ‘gypsy past’, but she claimed – quite correctly – that they were clearly the children of one of her mother’s regular West Indian visitors. Heather West had even taken it on herself to confront one of the West Indian’s daughters. As her stepsister Anne Marie was to recall eight years later: ‘Rose and Fred were furious that Heather had been discussing their business outside the family, and she suffered a tremendous beating.’
At the family party to celebrate the third birthday of Frederick West’s first grandchild,Anne Marie’s daughter Michelle, on 17 June 1987, Heather West stood alone at the bottom of her stepsister’s garden, just as she had done two years before. She even refused to pose for a family photograph with her younger brothers and sisters. The tensions at Cromwell Street were taking an ever-increasing toll.‘She wasn’t talking to anyone and mostly kept her back turned to everyone else,’ Anne Marie wrote later. But she also noticed that ‘each time I tried to approach Heather and talk to her, my stepmother or my father would be there in an instant. It was as if they did not want me to be alone with Heather.’
Less than two days after this party Heather West disappeared. She was never seen again by her brothers or sisters. No birthday card or a Christmas present was ever received by her baby niece, her sister Mae, who had shared so many secrets with her over the past four years, or by anyone else.The troubled, spirited teenager vanished as completely as if she had been an assistant in an illusionist’s act. One moment she was standing in the hallway of Cromwell Street, the next she was gone.
The children were baffled. So far as they knew, on the day after the party she had landed a job as a Yellow Coat at a holiday camp near Torquay.Then, at the last moment, the job had apparently fallen through. Her younger sister watched as she went ‘to bed sobbing’ and ‘cried all through the night’ in their shared bedroom in the cellar of Cromwell Street. ‘I had never seen her like that before,’ Mae West remembered eight years later.
The following morning, Friday 19 June 1987, Mae, along with the rest of the West children, went off to school, leaving Heather at home with her father, who was working on an outside building job and could not work that day ‘because it was raining so hard’. By the time the children got back from school that afternoon Heather West had gone. ‘And nearly all her stuff had gone too,’ Mae West recalled. The explanation they were offered was plausible enough. ‘Dad said the job was back on, and she had left with a girl in a Mini.’ Stephen West was a little puzzled that his sister had not taken one of her most precious possessions, a book that she had been awarded as a school prize, but, like his sister, he thought little more about it.
In the weeks and months to come Frederick West kept up a pretence for his children that he and Heather were in contact – of a sort. He had ‘seen her’, or ‘heard from her’, although they ‘hadn’t had a chance to talk’. There were strange telephone calls that seemed to be from Heather, but her sister and brother were never offered the opportunity to speak to her. It was all, of course, a charade put on to sustain the impression that Heather West was alive and well.The truth was the reverse. She was dead, and buried at the edge of the patio that Frederick West had so meticulously laid outside his house and on top of the bodies of Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers a few years before – with his wife’s help.
The timing of Heather West’s disappearance was no accident. Like her half-sister Charmaine’s before her, her murder had been deliberately postponed by her father until the end of the school year, although this time there would be no need to inform her teachers that she had ‘moved to London’. There would be no need to tell them anything. Her schooldays were over, and to anyone who enquired where she was, both the Wests lied with their customary facility.
One friend and neighbour,Anne Knight, who looked after two of the nearby houses and had an office in Cromwell Street, was told by Rosemary West a couple of days after her daughter’s disappearance: ‘There was a hell of a barney here a couple of nights ago.We found out that she was going with a lesbian from Wales, and she has gone to Wales with her.’When another neighbour, Margaretta Dix, asked why she had not seen Heather for a couple of days, Rosemary West told her that her eldest daughter had decided to leave home, and, as there was nothing they could do about it, they had given her some money and she had gone off with a woman in a car.‘I’m not bothered if she’s dead or alive,’ Rosemary West told her neighbour bluntly. ‘She’s made her bed and she must lie on it.’
Shortly afterwards another friend of the family, Ronald Harrison, who had known the Wests since 1969 and whose own daughter was a friend of Heather’s at Hucclecote School, asked where she had gone. Frederick West replied that Heather had been assaulting the younger children while she was babysitting, giving the younger children ‘scratches’ on their faces. As a result his wife had ‘given her a good hiding’ and a few days later Heather had ‘run off ’. But he told Harrison that Heather was alive and well and living in Brockworth in Gloucester, although he did not know exactly where. Both he and his wife also added the bare-faced lie, in response to any enquiry, that she ‘always telephoned’ to let them know she was ‘all right’.
Yet another story emerged a few months later, when Rosemary West told the mother of one of Stephen’s friends, Linda Tonks, that Heather had disappeared when ‘she and Fred’ had gone shopping one day and had taken ‘all her belongings with her’. Frederick West confirmed this, explaining that their eldest daughter ‘was a lesbian’ while his wife nodded in agreement. Then Rosemary West told the window-cleaner Erwin Marschall, who knew Cromwell Street well, used to stay with Anne Marie, and had heard the screams one night several years before when staying in the house, that Heather was ‘uncontrollable’ and had ‘run away from home’ after ‘taking all her belongings’ – adding the further lie that she had called the police. She had, of course, done no such thing.
When Heather West’s body was eventually recovered from beneath the patio at Cromwell Street it revealed a treatment identical in almost every respect to that suffered by the other victims. When the girl was unearthed, it was discovered that she had been decapitated, her body had been dismembered and disarticulated, a number of bones were missing, and those that remained were buried in a narrow two-feet-square shaft similar to that which had housed every other victim. Frederick West had abused his daughter precisely as he had his other victims, and for precisely the same reason – sexual gratification.
Two lengths of orange cord – twenty-two inches and fifteen inches long – were found with the body, the sort of cord that West admitted he carried on his van ‘to tie ladders on to the roof ’, the sort of cord that could well have been used to tie her hands together, or to the beams of the cellar, or to bind her in some other way.When her remains were found the cord was entangled in what remained of her hair. But when Frederick West was confronted with the fact, he maintained only that it ‘was what I tied the dustbin lid down with’.
When West was eventually confronted with a drawing of his daughter showing in detail which bones were missing from her body after it was recovered, he could barely bring himself to look at it. And when he was asked if there was any possibility that she may have been alive when the bones were removed, he broke one of his own rules and refused to offer an explanation. Instead, he said flatly: ‘I’ve no comment on that.’
In fact, thirty-eight of Heather West’s bones were missing from her remains, including her right kneecap, fifteen of her wrist and ankle bones from a total of thirty, and twenty-two finger and toe bones from a total of seventy-six.The mutilation did not end there. Not only had Heather West’s legs been disarticulated from her pelvis with the aid of a sharp knife, leaving the familiar fine cuts on her bones, but her left thigh had also been smashed in two near her pelvis by a sharp-edged object, which Professor Bernard Knight, the forensic scientist who recovered her remains, believed had been done with a cleaver.
Frederick West eventually confessed in gruesome detail to the ‘accidental’ killing and dismemberment of his daughter, just as he had confessed to decapitating her. But he drew back from mentioning these other wounds to her body. To have done so would have been to reveal that there was far more to her death than a simple disagreement about her leaving home. He had seized the opportunity of his being at home with his daughter on that rainy morning in June 1987 to finally destroy her spirit by raping and humiliating her, and he had depended on some form of bondage to help him do so.When she refused to give in he had lost his temper, tying up and killing her as he had killed eight other young women in the past two decades.
Frederick West’s rage made him ‘like a madman’, in the words of his son Stephen. But it was not a fury brought on by her desire to clean chalets at a holiday camp. It was inspired by her persistent rebellion against his authority and fuelled by his sexual lust. Had she been more submissive, Heather West might have survived. But that was not in her character, any more than it was in his.
With Heather’s killing,West’s depravity reached its lowest depth. He killed her, as he had killed Ann McFall, because he knew she was about to slip out of his control, and he could not tolerate the thought. And to rage was added fear: fear that once on her own she might complain that he had sexually abused her as a child, and, worse still, that she might voice her suspicions about the fate of some of the young women she had seen in Cromwell Street.
So he ‘sorted her out’ once and for all. He possessed her, then destroyed her, signing her death, as he signed the corpses of the earlier deaths, with his own unmistakable signature and in the place that was the focus of his fantasies and dreams, the basement of 25 Cromwell Street. In that sense, if in no other, this murder and its predecessors were ritual killings.
When the Wests’ children came home from school on Friday 19 June 1987, Mae West remembered seven years later: ‘Mum was quiet. She and Dad said they wanted a word downstairs, and said, “Oh, your sister has gone”.’ Only twenty months younger than Heather, and with the same dark looks, Mae had shared a bedroom with her for the past four years. ‘Dad was really calm,’ she recalled, ‘when she told Stephen and me. I remember Mum standing and him leaning against the bedpost downstairs in the basement. Mum was quite upset. I thought it was because Heather had not said goodbye to her.’
In the weeks that followed, Frederick and Rosemary West together extended the patio at the back of their house. They laid a crossword pattern of vanilla and strawberry slabs that stretched to the very end of their small rear garden, and which their children would always refer to as ‘two up and one across’. In doing so they put a concrete slab over the hole that West had so meticulously dug and covered in for their daughter Heather’s body. They then constructed a barbecue opposite the site of her grave and put a pine table on the slab itself. All this came as something of a surprise to the Wests’ children, who had been digging a hole themselves nearby to make a paddling-pool for the younger children, a hole that was suddenly filled in and covered over with concrete slabs.
Stephen West was equally surprised that neither he nor his sister Mae were ever invited to talk to Heather on the occasions when she was ‘supposed to have rung up’. ‘We didn’t ask to speak to Heather, we knew that wouldn’t be allowed anyway,’ Stephen West wrote later.‘Knowing what I know now, I think they got somebody to ring up, so that if we had any suspicions it would calm us down.’ In the years that followed, the Wests’ older children filled in a Salvation Army form for a missing person, wrote to two television programmes about their sister, and even threatened to report her missing to the police. As soon as they did so, Frederick West ‘sat us down and told us that Heather was involved in credit card fraud and that if we went to the police we’d be dropping her in it’, her younger sister remembered.
In the years after Heather West’s disappearance, the Wests drew their familiar dark cloak around Cromwell Street once again, just as they had done in the past, and with very much the same success. In October 1987, for example, when Walter West came to visit them with his son Douglas and his wife, the Wests told him their eldest daughter ‘had a job at a holiday camp with a friend’. Meanwhile, Frederick West went back to his old habits of picking up young women and offering them a lift, while Rosemary West returned to her life as a prostitute and went on to form a series of lesbian relationships.
But the veil that the Wests had always managed to draw over their activities could not last much longer. Their remaining eight children were growing older, less prepared to accept their parents’ demands of silence, some of them less prepared to accept the abuse that they had suffered so persistently for so many years.
Something had changed for ever on that June morning in 1987. The evil love that he demanded of his children, like the love that he shared with his wife, was to prove West’s undoing. Heather West brought the police to his door as surely as if she had walked into Gloucester Police Station and made a statement. Only it was to take almost seven years for her to do so.