THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
‘Human blood is heavy; the man that has shed it cannot run away.’
AFRICAN PROVERB
Secrets will out. But they escape in the most unlikely ways. So it was in the case of West’s latest assault on one of his daughters. The story of her rape and buggery at the hands of her father was not told at first by her, or even by a member of her family. It was told by a school friend to a passing policeman. The ugly world of Frederick West began gradually to come to light as the result of a chance remark to that most old-fashioned figure of authority in British society, a policeman on the beat.
Shortly after six o’clock on the evening of Sunday 2 August 1992, one of the girls from Beaufort Comprehensive School was joking with a uniformed police constable in Cromwell Street. One of a group of three twelve-year-olds talking to the officer suddenly asked him:‘What would you do if your friend was being assaulted?’ The banter continued for a moment, and then the constable asked who was being assaulted. The girl told him that she was worried that her friend might have been ‘mucked about with’ by her father, who had taken a video while he was doing so. The officer did no more than make a note of the girl’s story at the time, but the following morning he began to make enquiries.
Three days later, on Wednesday 5 August, the police formally alerted the Social Services Department in Gloucester, and then applied for a warrant to search 25 Cromwell Street for pornographic videotapes. Just before nine o’clock the following morning, a team of two detectives and four policewomen rang the bell and asked to speak to Frederick West. But West was not there. It was Rosemary West who opened the front door and asked what the officers wanted. As the women police officers filed past her into the ground-floor living room, where the children were still in their pyjamas watching television, one of the officers explained that they had come to search the premises for pornographic material following a serious allegation of child abuse.
Rosemary West immediately flew into a rage. While the first police officer was still trying to explain what was happening, she started shouting abuse at the officers at the door, and then turned and ran into the downstairs living room, where she screamed at her five children:‘You don’t have to say anything.’ Rosemary West then started to lash out at a woman police constable in the living room, hitting her repeatedly, first with her fists and then her feet. Finally, one of the male constables grabbed her by the arm, twisting it behind her back, and arrested her for obstruction. Rosemary West’s reply was succinct:‘Fuck off, you bastard.’
Immediately after her arrest she was taken to Gloucester Police Station, while the first search of her house was started by the three male detectives and the three remaining policewomen tried to comfort the West children. The police explained to Tara, Louise, Barry, Rosemary and Lucyanna why they had come, and gave them breakfast.Then they arranged for them to be taken to a local authority home nearby to be introduced to the team of social workers who would be looking after them. By a strange irony the home they were taken to would have been known only too well to their father. It was part of the complex of buildings known as Jordan’s Brook Community Home.
It was not until shortly after two o’clock that afternoon that the police finally located Frederick West.At two-fifteen he was arrested for rape in the small village of Bisley, a mile east of Stroud, and seven miles south of Gloucester. When he was cautioned, West replied fiercely: ‘What – fucking hell, I know what this is – it’s down to jealousy.’ But he was then taken to Gloucester Police Station, where he was placed in the cells.
West was to be held on remand in prison and at a bail hostel for ten months before he would be allowed to return permanently to his own home, and by that time his five youngest children had all been taken into local authority care. The first chinks of light had begun to shine into the dark world of Cromwell Street. It was exactly a quarter of a century since West had murdered Ann McFall, and he had killed at least another eleven women in the intervening years. But he was still confident that he could escape from any charge. He had done so before. Why should he not do so again? When he was arrested for the assault on his daughter, he simply denied that it had ever taken place, calling the accusation ‘Absolute rubbish’ and ‘Lies, all lies’.
He painted a picture of himself to the police as a straightforward, down-to-earth, working man who loved his wife and family but who had been subjected to foul and unfounded allegations. ‘I left home this morning with a bloody family and a home,’ he protested, ‘and tonight I’m in prison and I ain’t done nothing . . . I mean, we got what we want. We don’t mess with our kids. We’ve got everything.’ He went on to suggest that his daughter Mae had made up the charges to gain attention.‘I got no problems with my children at all.They think the world of their father as far as I know, all of them, I mean.’
But in spite of his confidence and bravado, the alternative universe that West had fought so hard to create, the incestuous world that he had sought to protect, was starting to disintegrate. And part of the reason for that lay in his own confidence. To the astonishment of the officers interviewing him, he began to reveal some extraordinarily bizarre details. He suddenly displayed an eerie knowledge of the times of his wife’s and daughters’ periods. ‘Like my wife’s on now,’ he explained matter-of-factly to the two officers, adding, ‘I think Louise is due because Louise is normally with her mother.’ He also told them that his wife kept a note of all his family’s menstrual cycles in a black notebook beside the telephone in the upstairs part of the house.
Slowly but surely he began to unfold his private life. After telling the two officers, ‘Me and my wife leads an active sex life . . . We make love every night, I mean perhaps twice, it just depends on what happens’, he went on, ‘I mean, you’ll find harnesses, you’ll find bloody God knows what in my home that we make up and things we do. You’ll find tapes where we’ve been out in the van, out in the lanes, making love, and we’re not frightened to show it. We enjoy our sex life, but not with our children.’ They also, he explained, had ‘mates that come in and share our life with us . . . come in and sit with us, and perhaps make love with us, like’.
Then, at nine-thirty that evening, just as his second formal police interview drew to a close, he announced suddenly, and without being prompted:‘As far as I know,Tara, Louise, Rosemary and Babs should still be virgins. Nobody should ever have gone near them.’ When he was told that one was suggesting that he had taken her virginity, he replied truculently:‘Well, prove it then, if she says that.’ It was the first time he had ever allowed himself to lose his temper with a policeman.
On Friday 7 August 1992, the day after Frederick West’s arrest, Emergency Protection Orders were made for his five youngest children at the Tewkesbury Family Proceedings Court. The children were to be placed in local authority care, and there was to be no contact between the Wests and their children. Indeed the children’s whereabouts were not even to be disclosed to them. It was the first time in twenty-two years that there had been any official intervention in the life of Frederick West and his family.The five children under eighteen, now placed in care, were never to be looked after by Frederick and Rosemary West again.
That same morning Anne Marie West broke her silence for the first time and made a long statement to the police describing the abuse she too had suffered at her father’s hands throughout her childhood. Rosemary West was allowed to return to Cromwell Street that day on bail. From the time she found out about Anne Marie’s statement, which mentioned Rosemary West’s connivance in the abuse, Rosemary West never spoke to her stepdaughter again. The splits within the West family were widening.As Mae West, who returned home to stay with her mother at the time, was to record two years later:‘Anna was effectively kicked out of the family. Mum put the phone down on her whenever she rang up.’
Meanwhile, at Gloucester Police Station, Frederick West was being confronted with the details of his daughter’s first twenty-five-page statement. ‘Rubbish. Absolute lies,’ he maintained fiercely. ‘I never touched her.’West then went on to suggest that she had taken the detail of the statement from a book. ‘It’s all made up . . . She’s copied it from somewhere . . .There ain’t one blade of truth in it as far as I’m concerned.’ He challenged the police to go to Cromwell Street. ‘Knock on any door and they’ll tell you those children are looked after.’
During his three police interviews on the day after his arrest, West wriggled and squirmed. He denied everything, condemning the children for ‘ganging up on him’ as it became ever more apparent that they were supporting the allegations. West tried to cast doubt on her story, portraying himself as the injured party. He suggested that two of his daughters may have wanted to ‘go into care’ and had dreamed up the story as a means of getting there. He suggested that his daughter was making the allegations because she was jealous that he was paying more attention to one of her younger sisters than to her. He suggested he had found her in bed with a boyfriend. He suggested she was angry with him for ‘grounding her’ after a gang of girls at school had threatened her with a knife because she had stolen one of their boyfriends. Each and every one of his explanations was noted, but he was still remanded in custody. He was finally charged on three counts of rape and one of buggery against his daughter.
Rosemary West, too, was interviewed by the police, and she insisted throughout that she had never sexually abused her children. Then she exercised her right to remain silent during the interrogations. Unlike her husband, she did not attempt to talk her way out of the charges. She left that to him – ‘to sort it out’. Soon after eight o’clock on the morning of Tuesday 11 August she was arrested again and taken back to Gloucester Police Station, where she was interviewed a further ten times. Although she no longer exercised her right to silence, she strenuously denied every allegation made against her, and in the process contradicted each of her children’s statements to the police.
When it was put to Rosemary West that her children had at various times been beaten in front of other men, had their bottoms painted with rude words, had photographs taken while they were naked, had been made to watch pornographic videos, had been put in boiling water, had had their trousers pulled down and been whipped, their mother called the allegations ‘rubbish, absolute rubbish’, exactly as her husband had done.When the police officers asked her to explain the vast collection of rubber masks and suits, vibrators and dildos, and other sexual paraphernalia that they had recovered from Cromwell Street, she refused to discuss the matter. When they asked her about a video that had been found showing her being tied up in the back of a van and sexually assaulted, she declined to comment.When the officers asked her whether she had assisted her husband in the rape of his daughter, she denied it.
Rosemary West also told the police that she had no idea of the whereabouts of her eldest child, Heather. The girl had ‘hung round the house for about six months and then left’, she said. When she was asked where she was now, she replied, ‘I don’t know’, and when she was asked whether she had ever had any contact with her daughter, she said bluntly, ‘Not since she’s left home, none’. The only explanation she could offer for her eldest daughter’s disappearance was:‘I went out shopping one day, as per usual on a Friday, and come back home and she’d gone.’ She was ‘not sure’ whether Heather had ever been reported as a missing person. ‘As far as I’m concerned she hasn’t just disappeared, she made a conscious decision to leave,’ she said tartly in justification of her apparent uninterest.
Rosemary West then offered an explanation that had clearly been prepared in consultation with her husband. Their daughter was a lesbian and wanted her own life. Besides, even if they had wanted her to stay they were frightened that it might affect the other, younger children. ‘Why I didn’t pursue Heather to sort of stay home,’ Rosemary West told the police, ‘was Heather had told me, and certain things pointed to the fact, that Heather was a lesbian . . . and wanted a life of her own . . . And that was why she wanted to leave. She said it wasn’t good for the rest of the children.’
But when she was asked, immediately afterwards, whether she, too, was a lesbian, she denied it point-blank. Instead, she simply elaborated on her earlier lies, telling the police: ‘I know in my own mind that she’s getting on with her own life . . . One of her friends told me.’ She even maintained that she had heard from her daughter on the telephone ‘a while ago’, adding that ‘She just rings to say she’s all right’, but that her husband might not be aware of it because ‘she doesn’t want to speak to him’.
In fact, the police did not pursue the issue of Heather West’s sudden disappearance during the rest of Rosemary West’s interviews concerning the alleged rape and buggery of her daughter. They told her simply that they were concerned that they could find no record of the girl having claimed any kind of Social Security benefit or having paid any income tax, or even any record of her having registered with a doctor in the five years since she had left Cromwell Street.
The fetid sexual world of Cromwell Street steadily began to emerge into view. A few days before Frederick West’s confessions about his active sex life and the involvement of ‘friends’, Detective Constable Hazel Savage had taken a statement from Anne Marie, in which she had confirmed that she, too, had been abused by her father, with her stepmother’s help, at the age of eight. But she had gone on to explain that she had also been the victim of a series of experiments involving the storage of semen in used condoms, which was then to be used by her father and stepmother for experiments in artificial insemination.
Just nine days later, Anne Marie retracted her statement completely, describing it as ‘a figment of my imagination’. She would explain later that she was afraid that her parents would ‘get at’ her and her two young children. Three years later Anne Marie would confess: ‘I left so much out. I felt uncomfortable about a lot of it because it sounded so unbelievable, and besides there were some things I couldn’t imagine ever talking to anybody about . . . I recounted only what I thought might help the girl.’ Detective Constable Savage did not believe Anne Marie’s retraction. She was convinced the young woman’s description of her abuse was true, just as she was convinced that Anne Marie’s own search for her missing sister Heather concealed a mystery that demanded to be solved. Over the next twelve months this forty-nine-year-old officer with twenty-four years’ experience was to devote herself to the task.
On Tuesday 11 August 1992 Rosemary West was formally charged with ‘causing or encouraging the commission of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of sixteen’ and with ‘cruelty to a child’. She first appeared before Gloucester magistrates the next morning after spending the night in the cells at Gloucester Police Station. She was granted bail on condition that she did not communicate with her younger children, her stepdaughter or her husband, and in the early afternoon of Wednesday 12 August in chastened mood Rosemary West returned alone to the now empty Cromwell Street.Allowed to communicate with only her two older children, Mae and Stephen, she started drinking, and that night took forty-eight Anadin tablets. She was found by the two children slumped on the sofa of her ground-floor living room in Cromwell Street. And at 1.50 a.m. in the morning of Thursday 13 August she was admitted to Gloucester Royal Hospital, where her stomach was pumped. As her daughter Mae would recall: ‘She looked old and frail, and nothing like Mum. It was as if all the energy had drained from her body.’
Neither Mae nor Stephen West told their father about his wife’s suicide attempt, but ‘he found out later’. The news clearly upset him, as did the order preventing her from having any contact with him until her next court appearance seven weeks later. No matter how their sexual promiscuity made it appear, Frederick and Rosemary West’s relationship was a symbiosis. Neither was used to existing alone: they were linked by their dark imaginings.
West was by this time on remand in Gloucester Prison as a Rule 43 prisoner, a category reserved for sexual offenders who are segregated from the rest of the prison population. And like his wife, he, too, was suffering.When his two older children visited him,‘He started talking really strangely’, Stephen West would recall later.‘He was crying and said that he’d done stupid things at night . . . the worst crime that we could ever imagine. He became all pathetic, and for the first time in our lives said “I love you”. It was the first time I had seen him cry. He seemed scared to death.’
But West did not let his fear get the better of him during the police interviews that followed. No matter how frightened he may have been, he took elaborate pains to sustain his image as the hard-working man who was being unfairly accused. Even more significant, he also insisted that his wife was not responsible for anything that had happened in his house. ‘I’m the boss and she follows,’ he told Detective Constable Savage firmly on 18 August. ‘We’ve always lived that way.’ West went on to maintain that the sexual tone at Cromwell Street had always been set by him. ‘I control Rose’s sex life,’ he insisted repeatedly.And when he was told that his wife had been charged with sex offences, West was clearly shocked, repeating the phrase ‘This is crazy’, and blaming his eldest daughter Anne Marie for ‘trying to get her mum done as well’.
West also kept up this pretence of normality as the details of what the police had discovered in his house were put to him. It was no easy task, but made easier than it might have been by the fact that, although the two police searches of Cromwell Street on 6 August and 11 August had been extremely thorough, they had both failed signally to find a copy of the videotape that the police believed that her father had made of his daughter’s abuse. One videotape was found smashed completely in a dustbin, and another thrown away in a waste-paper bin in the living room.
But the police did make finds. They unearthed ninety-nine commercial and home-made videotapes, a vast collection of rubber underwear, a rice flail and a bullwhip, a suitcase containing a variety of straps and other whips, and a giant dildo kept in a metal box that had once housed a whisky bottle. They found photographs of the erect penises of a number of naked men, photographs of two of Frederick West’s daughters naked or with very few clothes on, a photograph of Rosemary West sitting obscenely astride the gear stick of a car, as well as other photographs of her in a variety of sexual poses. The officers themselves described this haul as ‘so disgusting and so vile and so difficult’ to cope with that many people might find it impossible to talk about.
Frederick West made every effort to convince the police that there was nothing abnormal in his collection of pornography, or in his sexual relations with his wife. His sex life was ‘perfectly normal’. But over a series of twelve interviews with the police between 18 August and 26 August 1992 it became ever more apparent that the sexual world he occupied was, in the words of one expert who interviewed him later,‘unique in our experience’. Another described Frederick West’s amateur videos of his wife as ‘of a most disgusting sexual character’, showing as they did his wife in ‘revolting sexual and lewd behaviour’.
West himself did not accept either description. His sex life was his own affair. When he was asked about the parentage of three of his younger children, he made no secret of the fact that his wife had a number of black lovers, or of the fact that he and his wife had been involved with ‘a lot’ of men. ‘I mean, who’s counting . . . There’s probably dozens of them.’ The men were ‘selected by me and Rose, or by me at least’.
West then went on matter-of-factly:‘That’s part of my enjoyment in my sex life, watching her with other men,’ while ‘the main kick is that she has sex with black men.’ West saw nothing strange in taking a photograph of his naked wife exposing her vagina to the camera, having himself written the words ‘black hole’ across her stomach in lipstick, and keeping the photograph in an album. ‘She was expecting a black child, that’s why,’ he said calmly.
In the midst of this defence of his sex life, Frederick West also offered his first version of the disappearance of his daughter Heather. He told the police that someone called ‘Shirley’ had come to pick her up. ‘She went through the door laughing her head off, and she said:“Tell Mae and Stephen I’ll get in touch with them or something”.’ But when he was asked if she had indeed got in touch with them, he replied,‘I don’t think so’, but then added quickly that he had seen her himself ‘about twelve months ago’ in Gloucester, when she had been ‘dealing in drugs’ with Shirley, whose surname he ‘had the vague idea was Robinson’.
Not displaying the slightest sign of fear or guilt, he persistently challenged the police to take their case against him to court, claiming that the whole accusation was a fabrication that had ‘damn near been rehearsed’. He insisted: ‘I’ll tell you what, this has got to go into court, and they have all got to stand up there and be counted on why these lies have come out like this, or who is instigating them.’ He went on: ‘I never thought my children would tell lies about me.’ Finally, he blamed the whole case on their ‘jealousy’ of the better conditions of his ‘flat upstairs’ in Cromwell Street.
Frederick West would hardly have felt so confident had he not been well aware that he had already disposed of all incriminating videotapes. It is no surprise that when Rosemary West visited her husband at Gloucester Prison in the afternoon of Monday 10 August – the only occasion on which they were allowed to do so after his arrest on 6 August – one topic of whispered conversation between them concerned the whereabouts of the videotapes that West told his wife the police were looking for.Amid a discussion of whether Stephen West would be capable of a plumbing repair that seemed to be necessary on the top floor of Cromwell Street, there seemed to be the suggestion that some videotapes might need to be removed.Whatever they talked about, the tapes disappeared and their whereabouts have remained a mystery.
After a further court appearance in early October, when West was once again remanded in custody, he was sent from Gloucester Prison to a bail hostel, Carpenter House, in Edgbaston, Birmingham, where Rosemary West was at last allowed to visit him. Both were eager for these meetings. Rosemary travelled to Birmingham at least fourteen times in the following five months, and Frederick West himself was given a special dispensation to return to Cromwell Street for Christmas. The reason for his privileges has an all too familiar ring.West had persuaded the staff at Carpenter House, as he had persuaded so many other figures in authority in the past, that he was not in the least dangerous or threatening. They found him ‘quiet and unassuming’, well behaved and always anxious to please.
Life at Carpenter House was well ordered but hardly prison-like. The inmates were allowed to come and go as they pleased, provided that they were back in the hostel by eleven o’clock in the evening.West could receive visitors, and spend his time as he chose. In fact, he conducted himself while he was there as if he were still working. He went out after breakfast, usually carrying a black plastic bag. He would sometimes return briefly at lunchtime, and then go out again until late in the evening. In one sense he was still working. But not as a labourer: as a petty thief.
When Frederick West returned to the bail hostel every evening his plastic bag would often contain notes and coins. ‘That was money I picked up on the streets during the day,’ he would explain a year later, money he said that he collected ‘near bus stops and telephones boxes, like’. He maintained that he could ‘pick up £10 on a good day’ and never failed to collect ‘£30 a week’ throughout the period he was there. But the black plastic bag did not only contain money; it also contained credit cards which he said he ‘found in wallets lying all over the place’. But not all his crimes were petty.
West was also seen talking to a number of young women during his time at the Birmingham bail hostel, one of whom he helped when her car broke down not far from Carpenter House. Though he would later tell the police that he ‘stopped killing altogether after Heather’, many of the people involved in his case remain convinced that he committed at least one murder during his time there, in spite of the fact that the police were now clearly taking a far greater interest in him. If he did so, it would have been entirely in character. He would have disposed of the body in exactly the same way that he had disposed of all his victims’ bodies: dismembered and shoved into a narrow two-feet-square shaft dug in an unlikely place. He had access to woodland and open ground, and could have stolen the necessary tools from sheds on people’s allotments. Frederick West still believed he was invincible – that nothing and no one would ever stop him. Indeed, he may not have acted alone.
Whether or not he had, as he claimed,‘stopped all that girlfriend business’ and ‘never had no girlfriends up in Birmingham at all’, there was still Rosemary West. She ‘came up by train, two or three times a week’, he told the police a year later. ‘I had no worries.’ He and his wife took to camping near Edgbaston reservoir, using a small blue igloo tent their son Stephen had given them, as well as a ‘green sleeping-bag for a bit of a mattress’. ‘It was for me and Rose to go and make love in the woods. It was the only place we had.’
After one visit she wrote to him: ‘To my darling. Well, you really tired me out on Saturday, but it was a wonderful day . . . Remember I will love you always and everything will be alright. Goodnight sweetheart. Lots of love, Rose.’ A large heart was drawn on the letter with an arrow through it. In the middle were the words: ‘Fred and Rose.’
But Frederick West was also seen carrying the tent, together with the sleeping-bag, during his daily tours around the centre of Birmingham when his wife was not present, no doubt in the hope of persuading some other young woman to share it with him. It was just one of the pointers that convinced many observers of the case that he killed again during his period in the city.
But in the eyes of the bail hostel staff West was such a model inhabitant that in March 1993 he was allowed to move to the even less disciplined regime of a ‘cluster house’ (a more relaxed version of a bail hostel) in Handsworth. Here there was a minimum of supervision of the inmates.The house was subjected only to random checks. Here, too, his wife continued to visit him regularly, and here he was to stay for three months until his trial in June 1993. Once again he roamed the streets of Birmingham, but this time he did rather more: he took to slipping back to Gloucester and Cromwell Street without permission to see his wife. ‘Dad would suddenly turn up out of the blue,’ his daughter Mae would remember later, ‘even though he wasn’t supposed to.’
Throughout his time in Birmingham, West took pains to present himself to the psychologists and social workers who came to interview him as a plain man ‘wronged’ by false accusations. He insisted he would contest the care proceedings against him ‘to show the children that he cared about them’, and he even prepared an explanation for his own and his wife’s sexual exploits. He maintained to anyone who questioned him that he suffered from an ‘inability to get an erection’. He first experimented with this explanation during his last police interview in Gloucester, explaining to detectives: ‘I very rarely get an erection . . . because I got injured some years ago on a motorbike. I mean, it’ll come up and suddenly it’ll go boom . . . And that was how all this started with these men and that because Rose likes sex . . . I mean if I can get an erection once a month I’m bloody lucky, you know.’
Ever plausible, never argumentative,West would go on to explain that his children were simply the result of good fortune. ‘It sort of caught at the right time and everything connected up right.’ He suggested repeatedly that after he had come out of Leyhill Prison in the summer of 1971 he had ‘got lucky’ and managed to father Mae and Stephen but ‘then it just died.There was nothing. I mean I never got an erection then for something like about four years, five years.’ And this was the reason why he had encouraged his wife to take other lovers. ‘As far as I’m concerned if I can’t do it then I should help her to get someone else to do it.’
West refined this subtle but outrageous lie throughout his time on remand. Indeed, he planned that it should be the principal plank of his defence when his rape and buggery trial finally came to court, and he polished it meticulously. He told one psychologist that he had been injured ‘in the genitals by an iron bar’ while at work in 1973, and that since then he had experienced ‘problems’ in getting any form of erection. It was this that had driven him to find a family friend to help his wife become pregnant, and this that established that he had not engaged in any extra-marital affairs since the start of his relationship with Rose.
‘I wish to clarify,’ West insisted, ‘in respect of our sex life, which I admit is not conventional, we have never involved the children . . . that is why we have separate living accommodation.’ The pornographic videos, he explained, were only there in the hope of encouraging him to get an erection. Time after time, the professionals who interviewed or tested Frederick West described him as ‘friendly and cooperative throughout’.
Sixteen months later, after his arrest in 1994, West would admit to the police that this picture of impotence was a complete fabrication: ‘Because, I mean, I’ve never been injured, not sexually anyway.’ He went on to explain that he had never suffered any injury whatever to his genitals, that he had never been struck by an iron bar or anything else, and that he had never had any sexual problems whatever (though that too, ironically, was probably a lie, in view of the speed of his own ejaculation in some instances).
West would also tell the police that at least one professional who interviewed him ‘was a prat anyway’, and that he could not understand some of the tests he had been given. ‘They were all wrote on paper and you just had to tick and mark them . . . half of them I couldn’t even read.’ It was a mark of the contempt in which he secretly held many of those in authority, a contempt, however, which he took immense pains to conceal beneath his familiar mask of humility.
Throughout the autumn of 1992 Frederick and Rosemary West made a determined effort to persuade the local authority that they should be allowed to have their children back in their care. The children were theirs, and they loved them. The Wests continually presented themselves to the psychologists and the social workers as a ‘caring couple’ who did not argue and ‘discussed everything’ and made all their decisions jointly. They also sought to cast doubt on the evidence of Anne Marie – who had withdrawn her statement accusing them of child abuse by this time – suggesting that she was ‘living in her own fantasies’ and that she had ‘always rejected Rose as a mother’. West insisted that if his eldest child ‘got a chance to back her into a corner and have a go at her she would’.
West told the police that ‘Anna thought she was miles above Rose because Rose had half-caste children’, and maintained that his daughter had been ‘coerced into making these allegations’ out of jealousy and her being ‘vindictive towards us’. He went on to maintain that she ‘had got in with the wrong crowd’ and described her as ‘an old baby who has always had a real mouth on her’. Returning time after time to his original explanation that she was ‘jealous’ of their flat upstairs, he insisted repeatedly that ‘nothing whatever had happened’.
But these lies were to no avail. On 19 November 1992 Frederick and Rosemary West were committed for trial on the charges against them, and five days later, on 24 November, full Care Orders were made in respect of Tara, Louise, Barry, Rosemary and Lucyanna West at Bristol County Court. The Wests were denied contact with their five youngest children, unless the children themselves officially requested it. One factor that weighed against the Wests was the fact that their younger children seemed to have responded favourably to being away from Cromwell Street. Another was the photographs of the naked children found at the house, as well as the Wests’ enormous collection of obscene videotapes.
Though no videotapes showing sexual abuse of the children were found, the obscenity of the tapes that were discovered threw an ugly light on life behind the iron gates that West had so meticulously crafted at the Muir Hill Wagon Works. It took one police officer almost a fortnight to watch the pornographic tapes that West himself admitted that he kept in Cromwell Street, ranging as they did from commercial pornography to home videos made by West himself.
Among the commercial tapes were many examples of young women being ‘instructed’ in sexual matters by ‘a master’, as well as tapes of ‘schoolgirls’ having sex with several ‘teachers’ at the same time, often featuring anal intercourse, as well as others suggesting incest with ‘an uncle’, and many focusing on bondage and the participation of a voyeur.Among the home-made ones, all of which featured Rosemary West rather than her husband, either alone or with another partner (either male or female), many centred on her desire to urinate on herself in front of the camera. They also showed her inserting various large objects, including an orange, a pint beer glass and a beer can, into her vagina. ‘I’d sooner watch ones of Rose,’West told the police after his arrest.
Significantly, the collection of home-made video-recordings also revealed that the Wests had updated their ‘Rose’s chocolates’ system in the beginning of 1992. One videotape in particular, made between February and March 1992, featured timed and dated occasions in which Rosemary West first dressed to go out in front of the camera, and then returned later that evening, or the following morning, and undressed in front of the camera again to display the semen stains on her underwear. West himself was clearly the cameraman on each of these occasions, although only rarely did he allow more than an arm to appear in any shot, and he never spoke. West’s desire to keep a record of Rosemary West’s other sexual partners was thus clearly shown to be important to him. As for Rosemary West herself, she was still keen on marking her partners’ sexual performances, on one occasion even going to the trouble of holding a small note up to the video camera along with her underwear indicating her score out of ten.
After the Care Orders had been placed on her five youngest children, RosemaryWest returned the video camera to the Midlands Electricity Board, where it had been bought on hire-purchase, confessing to one friend ‘it cost me my children’. From that time onwards she would never again allow herself to be videotaped in a sexual position. And much to Frederick West’s annoyance, she would allow the police to destroy all the videotapes that had been recovered from Cromwell Street.When he found out,West insisted that they should ‘start the collection again’. Gloucestershire County Council kept four of the videotapes, as proof of the Wests’ unusual sexual activities. In 1994 they handed them to the police.
There is little doubt that Rosemary West felt the loss of her children far more sharply than did her husband. One social worker who dealt with Frederick West at the time recalled later:‘Fred didn’t seem too bothered. Perhaps because it meant that he could do what he wanted to when he was at home without worrying about the children, but Rose clearly minded a great deal. She missed them; without them there wasn’t very much to do.’
Indeed, in the wake of the court’s decision to grant the five Care Orders in respect of his youngest children, Frederick West became – for the first time in his relationship with the Social Services Department – non-cooperative, even a little truculent. Now, instead of addressing everyone he met as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, and deliberately going out of his way to appear helpful, he started to put on what his son Stephen later called ‘his hard face’.
West knew that his wife was deeply upset that she was not being allowed access to the children unless the children requested it, and he resented the fact that now neither of them was to be allowed to see their children at any time without a social worker present during a ‘supervised’ visit. ‘For the first time, Fred shut down completely,’ one social worker remembered afterwards. ‘He wanted to see his children alone, and that was all he wanted. He refused to compromise.’The reason was not only that he wanted to influence them, but also that he knew that that was what his wife wanted more than anything else.
The Wests did manage to see their five minor children after the Care Orders were placed on them. Rosemary West, in particular, saw them in the park at the end of Cromwell Street, and there were also occasions on which some of them found their way back to the house for short, unofficial visits. The seductive power of both Frederick West and his wife had not entirely disappeared, in spite of the intervention of the local authority. Indeed, in the months and years to come it would never disappear. Cromwell Street had been the family home, and, no matter the pain and suffering that may have been inflicted there, it still retained a powerful attraction to each and every member of the West family.
Throughout his period on remand in Carpenter House, and then in the ‘cluster house’ in Handsworth, Frederick West continued to protest his innocence. His daughter Mae, who had returned to Cromwell Street to live with her mother, remembered that her father had never lost confidence that he would be released. And once again, but for the last time, his confidence was to be justified.
On Monday 7 June 1993 the Wests appeared in the dock of Gloucester Crown Court before Judge Gabriel Hutton, the city’s senior judge. Frederick West faced three counts of rape and one of buggery against his daughter, while his wife faced a count of encouraging the commission of unlawful sexual intercourse and another of cruelty to a child. But before the jury could be sworn in, counsel for the prosecution told the judge that two important witnesses were not prepared to testify.
The children had been told by prosecuting counsel that they might still have to give evidence directly in the court itself, even though video-links had been set up to allow them to give most of their evidence outside. And even though the children had been prepared for doing so by their social workers, the prospect of actually giving evidence against their parents in open court proved too much. On the day itself the children refused to appear or to give evidence. In the circumstances, the prosecuting barrister informed the judge,‘We take the view that we cannot proceed, and accordingly we offer no evidence against the defendants.’ The judge had no alternative. He returned formal verdicts of not guilty on all the charges.
In the dock, Frederick and Rosemary West threw their arms around each other in celebration. Twenty years after Carol Raine, they had again walked free from Gloucester Crown Court after facing serious charges. Thirty years after his original incest case, West had again seen evidence against him evaporate into thin air in minutes. West could not conceal the grin on his face. When he got back to Cromwell Street, he told Mae and Stephen that he had changed, and everything ‘would be different’.
In a sense things already were. The younger children had gone, and Rosemary West had bought two dogs from a rescue centre for company. One was a small wire-haired terrier, the other a white mongrel. She had named them Benji and Oscar. She had also started to over-eat dramatically, cramming herself with chocolate eclairs and crisps while watching television. Without her children, Rosemary West’s life had lost part of its meaning.
For his part, Frederick West did his best to convince Mae and Stephen that he had seen Heather West in Birmingham. He told them she had visited him, and ‘would be home within a week’, going on to insist that he had even seen her in a community centre in Gloucester since then. ‘Mum just told him to shut up,’ Mae West recalled later. The Wests’ two elder children were beginning to wonder what exactly their father had been talking about when he had confessed during his time on remand in Gloucester Prison that he had done ‘stupid things at night, when we were in bed’. They had begun to wonder whether their elder sister Heather was alive or dead.
Not long afterwards, Mae and Stephen West set a trap for their parents.They arranged for them to watch a repeat of the television thriller Prime Suspect 2, which focused on the burial of a body under the patio of a house in a story that had its background in pornography. ‘They just looked straight through it,’ Stephen West would write two years later. ‘They didn’t pass any comment. They were staring at it, studying it . . .They went off afterwards and talked to each other.’ Both of the elder West children were satisfied that ‘there was nothing untoward going on. We thought that if there had been, they would have turned it straight off. Now we think maybe that would have been too obvious.’ Not long afterwards, they repeated the experiment, this time by persuading their mother and father to watch the episodes of the television serial Brookside which dealt with a sexually abusive father who was buried under the patio. But once again there was no reaction. Once again it seemed as though the Wests could not know anything about the disappearance of their daughter.
After West was released from custody in June 1993 he returned to Cromwell Street and went back to work. Life in the house might be a little different now, with the younger children removed to care and the two elder ones visiting regularly, but that did not mean he could not enjoy himself. Working again for Carson’s Contractors, and now driving a white Bedford Midi van, he went back to offering lifts to young female hitchhikers on travels around Gloucester. Frederick West picked up a ‘new age traveller’ who told him that she ‘liked a bit of violence with her sex’, as he admitted to the police a few months later. He also again offered rooms in Cromwell Street to young girls who might need a ‘place to stay for a while’.
What he did not know was that the social workers looking after his children had begun to hear about the ‘family joke’ that their elder daughter Heather was ‘buried under the patio’. The remark had been made shortly after the five were first removed from Cromwell Street, but as the minor children had begun to settle into their new lives away from their parents so the repetitions became more frequent.
From the spring of 1993 the residential social workers responsible for the children began to pick up more and more stories about the laying of the patio ‘at the same time that Heather left home’, and her being ‘buried at nine down and three across’. At first the social workers were unsure whether or not to treat the remarks seriously, but as the summer progressed they became convinced that the police should be informed.
In August 1993 Detective Constable Hazel Savage was detailed to find Heather Ann West, and in the months that followed, in the midst of her other duties, she made every effort to establish whether any trace could be found of the girl who would have been just about to celebrate her twenty-third birthday. DC Savage had already established that there had been no claims for unemployment benefit or sick pay, no registration with a doctor or a dentist, no hospital admissions, not even an application for a passport.
In the first weeks of 1994 she decided to take formal statements from the social workers about the ‘family joke’ they kept hearing. The statements were to form the basis of an application for another warrant to search 25 Cromwell Street. Only this time the police were not going to be looking for pornographic videotapes or evidence of West’s abuse of his daughter. This time the warrant would be to allow them to prove whether or not the family joke was true.