THE PERFECT MOTHER
‘The unrighteous are never really fortunate.’
EURIPIDES, HELEN
The final act in the tragedy that was Frederick West’s life came to its climax on a damp day seven years after the murder of his daughter Heather. And, like the last act of any great drama, it came about as a result of its protagonist’s own blind arrogance. For more than a quarter of a century West had literally got away with murder, and it had bred within him a confidence that knew no bounds, an utter certainty that he would always ‘sort it out’.
Like a tragic hero,West had believed that he could do no wrong. He had failed to see that his abuse of his daughters, something that he regarded as ‘a father’s right’, might finally bring the forces of law to his door. He saw his abuse as ‘only natural’, nothing even to comment on. Had he thought otherwise, there is every possibility that his other crimes would have gone unrecognised and undetected. For it was this appetite for the abuse of children, rather than his bestial murder of so many other innocent girls, that led to his downfall.
On the afternoon of Wednesday 23 February 1994, magistrates granted officers from the Gloucester Constabulary a search warrant under Section 8 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984 to allow them to search 25 Cromwell Street for evidence ‘as to the whereabouts of Heather Ann West’. The magistrates granted the warrant principally on the basis of the statements from the social workers looking after the five younger West children and the ‘family joke’ about their missing sister. In the finest tradition of a Jacobean tragedy,West’s downfall was occasioned by his own words.
No one can say for certain where the joke about Heather West being ‘under the patio’ started, but it bears all the hallmarks of a remark that Frederick West himself would have made. Behind the gates of Cromwell Street, within his own family, he would have felt so confident, and so comfortable, that he may well have implied that he had the power of life and death, just as he had the power of ‘breaking in’ his daughters. It was the sort of grim joke that he would have delighted in telling his sons, for example, anxious to draw them into his own incestuous, ‘masculine’ view of the world. Frederick West would have smirked when he said, in the privacy of Cromwell Street,‘You’d better be good or you’ll end up under the patio.’ But he did not dream that his own words might be repeated.
When the Gloucester police arrived at Cromwell Street shortly after one-thirty in the afternoon of Thursday 24 February 1994, while Rosemary West was watching Neighbours on the television in her ground-floor living room, they were not aware that they were in pursuit of a serial killer. They were not even certain that they were in pursuit of a murderer.The police simply wanted to establish the whereabouts of Heather West, and by implication whether there was any truth in the sick joke they had heard was circulating.
At that moment hardly one single officer saw Frederick West as more than an ever amenable petty thief and occasional informant, with a ‘bit of a reputation’ for pornography and a wife who had worked as a part-time prostitute offering her services to men of all kinds. No officer could possibly have believed that he was to be revealed as one of the most extraordinary serial murderers in British history. How could he be?
West could barely read or write. He did not seem to have the intelligence to master anything complicated. There was nothing in the least threatening about him. He did not even seem mysterious. He seemed just a small, smutty little man with a gap-toothed grin.
As the five officers pushed past his daughter Mae into the living room of Cromwell Street on that wet February afternoon in 1994, they certainly did not suspect that they were on the brink of unearthing a series of horrifying murders. There were even some in the Gloucester force who doubted whether their enquiries would bear any fruit at all, who even suspected that they were out on a wild-goose chase. There were certainly a handful who saw this investigation as the product of the obsession of a single female detective constable, who had first come into contact with Frederick West and his family almost thirty years before.Yet had it not been for this ‘obsession’, Frederick West’s crimes might never have come to light. But now a new element of personal tension was introduced.
Rosemary West loathed the police. She blamed them for the loss of her five children; and she particularly loathed the bespectacled Detective Constable Hazel Savage, whom she referred to within the family as a ‘bitch and an arsehole’ who was ‘waging a personal vendetta’ against her husband and herself. And the moment she saw Savage walk into her living room on that February afternoon in 1994, she once again lost her temper completely. She grabbed the search warrant, looked at it, called it ‘stupid’ and then started to scream at the five officers.
At that moment her son Stephen arrived, and she told him to call her husband on his mobile phone. But Stephen West could not get his father to answer. He rang Frederick West’s employer instead, and Rosemary West then told him:‘I don’t care where he is, I want him home now.’That was shortly before one-fifty in the afternoon. By three o’clock West had left the house he was working on in Frampton Mansell, less than twelve miles away. But he did not reach Cromwell Street until twenty minutes to six that evening. Where he went in the intervening two hours remains a mystery, one of the many that still cloak his life, but there can be little doubt that he went to cover his tracks at another burial site or sites within an easy drive of Gloucester. One thing he did not do was run.
It was not until seven-fifty that evening that West gave his first formal interview to the police.At that stage he was so confident that the police investigation would come to nothing that he declined the offer of a solicitor. He had not been arrested, and was free to leave the interview room at any time. When he was asked if he could help ‘trace’ his daughter Heather, he replied simply: ‘I’ve no idea where she is.’ There was a pause. ‘I think I’ve seen her quite a few times, actually,’ West went on, although then he could not remember either the date or the year of her birth.
That night he stuck to the story that he had told his friends and neighbours in Cromwell Street for years, that Heather had been collected from his house by a woman in a red Mini – except it was not a car, but a skirt. It ‘was just about to the bottom of her knickers . . . you know, if she bent, it lifted like that – you could see everything’, he told the police with just the trace of a smirk. He informed Detective Constable Savage that she was ‘into drugs . . . because she gave bloody drugs’ to his son Barry when he was seven. ‘He went up on the flipping church roof and thought he could fly.’ He had seen his daughter the previous year in Birmingham, he added,‘in a Mercedes – I mean, she’s into a load of crap.’
‘I don’t want any of my children to leave home,’ he explained, adding some time afterwards that he had even been considering buying 23 Cromwell Street for Mae and Stephen West, now that his own mortgage was almost paid off.That, at least, was true.West had not wanted his daughter to leave him, or his control.
When Hazel Savage told him,‘I cannot rest until I know Heather is safe and well . . . That’s all I want,’ he replied at once, ‘If I knew that I’d be the first one to tell you.’
But when it was suggested to him that it was a ‘family joke’ that Heather’s body was under the patio, Frederick West laughed out loud.‘Oh, for God’s sake. I mean you believe it . . . I think we better pack it up Hazel.We’re talking rubbish, aren’t we? . . . I mean, you’re digging me place up. Carry on doing it.’
In his second interview that night, West repeated that Heather was ‘bringing drugs from somewhere and taking them up to schools, recruiting schoolkids’. That was the reason he did not report her missing, he explained; he did not want to see her arrested. Digression followed digression as West suggested he had seen his daughter while on remand in Birmingham, that she had threatened his brother John with a piece of wood ‘two by four’ because he ‘put his hand on her head’, which he described ‘as the reason I thought she was a lesbian’, and his telephone conversations with her.
West clearly hoped that he might be able to persuade the police not to start excavating the garden of Cromwell Street, even going so far as to complain that they ‘had no right’ to rip it up. But as one officer explained to him, they were interested only in locating his daughter, and whether there was any truth in the family joke. ‘Once that’s sorted and checked, at least Hazel and the police will be able to say then,“Forget any of the rumours, we’ve checked that she’s not there”.’
Shortly before nine-thirty that evening, Frederick West left Gloucester Police Station for what was to be his last night of freedom. When he arrived home, he demanded a cup of tea, and then set about undoing his illegal rigging of the electricity meter in the kitchen at the back of the house without alerting the police constable sitting in the garden. Once he had done so, he ‘took the dogs out for a walk’ with his wife to the park at the end of Cromwell Street for three-quarters of an hour. As far as either Mae or Stephen West knew, it was the first time the Wests had ever taken their dogs out for a walk in the evening together.When they returned,West watched the late television news dressed only in his underpants, and shortly afterwards disappeared upstairs to bed with his wife.
No one except Rosemary West knows what she and her husband discussed that night. West said afterwards that he ‘lay awake most of the night’, thinking about what to do, while his wife said, ‘We didn’t just talk’. They almost certainly made love, as they had made love almost every night throughout their life together. West was to tell the police just a few days later: ‘It was nothing for me and Rose to have it twice a night and then in the morning,’ adding,‘Me and Rose probably only missed two days a month when we didn’t have sex.’ It was West’s way of reaffirming and demonstrating his love for the woman with whom he had shared almost all his dark secrets.
Frederick West would also have told her that he would ‘sort it out’ with the police the following day, and that she ‘had nothing to worry about’, as he ‘would take all the blame’.The pact in some form must certainly have been made in the early hours of the morning of Friday 25 February 1994.Though he would renege on it during his bleakest hours in prison, it was to bind him to her for the rest of his life.
West’s greatest hope was that he would be able to protect his proudest possession – Cromwell Street itself – from being destroyed by the police. In the first instance he may even have believed that if he confessed to the killing of his daughter, the police would not even bother to excavate more than one single site in the garden, leaving the rest untouched. For he still cherished the hope that his younger children would be returned to their mother, and that family life would resume there.
West may also have believed that if he confessed to one killing, he was likely to serve only a comparatively short prison sentence and would then be free to return to Cromwell Street himself. For West sensed that the police were not certain whether they would find anything underneath the pink and cream patio slabs in his sixty-feet-long garden. During the early hours of Friday 25 February 1994, he decided to try to make sure they did no more than find the body of his daughter Heather. He did so by laying a false trail with what appeared to be a terrible confession, but was, in fact, one that concealed far more than it revealed.
When Detective Constable Savage returned to Cromwell Street the following morning and asked for the address of Rosemary West’s mother, much to his wife’s distress, West was already fully prepared. He had decided exactly what was necessary to preserve the world he had so carefully created in his home. He would make a sacrifice. He had existed in prison before, he could do so again. So he had packed what he called ‘me prison lighter’, together with his cigarette papers and tobacco to make a supply of roll-your-own cigarettes.
Shortly after eleven o’clock on the morning of Friday 25 February, and after spending less than a minute in private conversation with his wife, West walked out of his house and climbed into the unmarked police car. It was then, speaking to Hazel Savage, that he confessed to killing his daughter. It was the first of a series of calculated gambles to divert attention from the terrible truth of what actually lay beneath the patio, and the cellar, of his house.
‘The thing I’d like to stress,’West told Hazel Savage just after five o’clock that afternoon, in his third official interview, ‘Rose knew nothing at all.’Time after time in the weeks ahead, he would repeat the same words.West told the police that his exact words to his wife when he left Cromwell Street that morning were: ‘I’ll go and talk to Hazel and persuade her not to go up and see your mum.’ And he went on to insist:‘Rose shouldn’t be under stress, because she hasn’t done anything.’
‘Through the past eight years, there’s quite a few times that I’ve actually decided I was going to come down to see you personally,’ he told Detective Constable Savage. ‘I mean, when I was in Birmingham my sole intention was to get back home, put my home all back together and then sort it out once and for all.’ West specifically denied that he had told his family anything about his confession, or the murder of his daughter, just as he denied that he had told them anything about his dismemberment of the body.
West expanded upon his original story about Heather leaving with ‘the girl in the red Mini’. Now he maintained that he had sent his wife out shopping, and then tried to convince his daughter to ‘get a flat up the road’.‘She said,“If you don’t fucking let me go I’ll give all the kids acid and they’ll all jump off the church roof and be dead on the floor”.’
He went on to say:
She stood there, and she had a smile and a sort of smirk on her face, like you try me and I’ll do it. I lunged at her like that and grabbed her round the throat like that and I held for a minute. How long I held her for I don’t know. I can’t remember . . . I can just remember lunging for her throat and the next minute she’s gone blue. I looked at her and I mean I was shaking from head to foot. I mean, what the heck had gone wrong?
He insisted that he had not intended to kill his daughter. ‘I mean, I just went to grab her, to shake her, and say take that stupid smirk off your face.’ But then he had discovered that ‘there was no way I could get any life back into her’.
West claimed that it was only then, when he knew that his daughter Heather was dead, that he decided to try to get her body into a dustbin, but could not manage to. Without hesitating, he said, then ‘I cut her head off ’. He then picked up a knife and ‘cut her legs off with that . . . put her in the bin and put the lid on and rolled it down the bottom of the garden behind the Wendy house and covered it up and left it there.’ Immediately afterwards, West told the police, he ‘got all her stuff, which was by the door . . . all ready to go . . . and took it over and put it by the wall . . . in St Michael’s Square’.
‘Then Rose come back, must have been an hour or more later, and she said, “Oh, didn’t you persuade Heather to stay?” or something, and I said,“No”.’ Frederick West stressed time after time: ‘Rose knew nothing at all . . . She hasn’t done anything.’ Indeed, he embellished his story further by explaining that he had forgotten to remove his daughter’s training shoes, which he had left in the hallway of Cromwell Street by mistake, and had been forced to lie to his wife, telling her: ‘Oh, she’s put her shoes on instead.’ That night, West claimed, he had sent his wife out ‘with the coloured bloke for the night’, and it was then that he had dug a hole in the patio and buried his daughter.
Frederick West concluded his initial formal confession with the words:‘I want to get it sorted out. I mean, all right, me marriage has gone, me home’s gone, but at least me home’s done up that they’ll get something to sell or keep.’ The fate of number 25 Cromwell Street clearly concerned him far more than the fate of the sixteen-year-old girl whose body he had just confessed to dismembering into ‘two legs, a head and a body’.
Shortly after seven o’clock that evening, while his wife was being detained in custody at Cheltenham Police Station, West accompanied Hazel Savage to Cromwell Street and showed her where Heather’s body was buried. In his mind he was no doubt intent on minimising the damage the police might do to his beloved property.To his amazement, however, the police were clearly intent on excavating the whole of his garden. He had miscalculated badly.
By the beginning of the following afternoon, Saturday 26 February, the police had found no trace of the body of Heather West. Rain had been falling relentlessly in Gloucester for almost two days, and the fifteen officers in the search team at Cromwell Street were struggling against a sea of mud and sludge. They had brought in tarpaulins to cover the site, and a pump to help clear the excess water, but water seemed to be seeping up through the ground itself as well as falling from the sky. Progress was agonisingly slow. And, even though they were looking in the precise spot that Frederick West had told them the night before that his daughter’s body was buried in, they could find no trace of her.
When he discovered this,West’s attitude changed completely. He started to smirk. ‘How many months will they carry on digging for?’ he asked, then amending his question slightly. ‘All right, how many weeks?’ Shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, Frederick West retracted his earlier confession completely. He insisted that Heather was not in the garden of Cromwell Street at all, because she was ‘possibly at this moment in Bahrain’, where she ‘works for a drugs cartel’ as a ‘drug runner’. In an extraordinary outburst he told the police:
Now, whether you believe it or not, that’s entirely up to you. As far as I’m concerned I would like to see them all still stay out there digging in that garden because they tore my house apart eighteen months ago, and they weren’t satisfied with that, they had to come back and rip my home apart. Then you came in yesterday and upset Rose over her mother and all that . . . That’s the reason I made up that story . . . There ain’t nothing in my garden.You can dig it for evermore. I’ve never harmed anybody in my life.You look on my records through life. I have never even punched anybody, ’cause I don’t believe in it, hurting people.
West then condemned DC Savage for waging a ‘personal vendetta’ against him.‘Because you seem to want to get me for some unknown reason, well not me quite so much, but Rose.We’ve always had the feeling that you wanted to get me and Rose.’ When Hazel Savage strongly denied this,West went on to claim that his daughter called him regularly on her mobile phone, and had even had lunch with him recently in Devizes in Wiltshire. He also insisted that she had ‘bodyguards, a chauffeur and a new birth certificate’. And when he was asked, in the last minutes of the interview, whether his daughter was ‘going to be under the patio’,West said emphatically:‘No.They can dig there for evermore. Nobody or nothing’s under the patio. I mean, I know Heather ain’t in there. Nobody’s in there. So what am I bothered about?’ Finally, he called the whole matter ‘a joke . . . it always have been’. It was now just after 2.45 p.m.
Eighty minutes later, at 4.05 p.m. on Saturday 26 February, the search team found Alison Chambers’s thigh a little over two feet beneath the ground outside the rear extension bathroom West had constructed over the old garage at the back of Cromwell Street. The soil around it was waterlogged,‘semi-liquid mud’ in the words of the forensic pathologist Professor Bernard Knight, who was called in to help the identification and recovery of the skeleton. The soil had been turned black and sticky as the tissue of the girl’s body had decomposed in the ground, where it had lain for more than fifteen years. One discovery sparked another. Minutes later, the police found Heather West’s skeleton on the left-hand side of the tiny rear garden, opposite the barbecue.
Had the police digging under the narrow patio that stretched from the back of Cromwell Street down towards St Michael’s Square not found human remains that afternoon, Frederick West would certainly have retracted his first confession completely, and may even have walked out of Gloucester Police Station a free man once again. But in the growing dusk of that late February Saturday afternoon, the police realised that they were dealing with something, and someone, who was not at all what some of them had expected. For the very first time they were forced to confront the certainty that Frederick West was a significant criminal – not just a ‘bit of a joke’, not just ‘flirty Fred’, the man who sometimes called himself ‘Fox’ or ‘Chief ’. The man who had buried these bodies would, it began to dawn on them, turn out to be far removed from the ordinary ‘domestic’ crook whom some of them still privately believed him to be. Quite how far, both they and the watching world would discover in the weeks to come.
Predictably, the first person to change his tone in the light of the discoveries at Cromwell Street was West himself. Rumours of the finds in his garden reached him within twenty minutes, and, ever quick on his feet, when he walked back into the first-floor interview room at Gloucester Police Station shortly after four-thirty, the first thing he did was to apologise to Hazel Savage. ‘I’ve got nothing personal against her at all,’ he explained, blaming two tablets he had taken for making everything seem ‘all weird’. West then added quickly: ‘Heather’s where I told you she is, and I mean they should have found her anyway by now, because she’s there.’ Moments later he was asked if there were any other bones in the garden. ‘Well, that’s a peculiar question to ask, ain’t it?’ he replied without hesitation.
Half an hour later Hazel Savage asked West who else was aware that Heather was buried under the patio, and West replied firmly: ‘Nobody. That’s a secret I’ve kept myself for eight years. I never told anybody.’ Explaining this lie, he added with insistence: ‘I love my wife . . . but I mean I don’t want to destroy the love that I had there when I’ve destroyed one love already, you know . . . I mean, Heather’s gone . . . Rose is not going to let me say to her “I’ve strangled Heather” without coming straight to the police.’
He then embarked on a long and elaborate reminiscence about his future father-in-law’s attempts to prevent Rosemary Letts giving birth to their daughter ‘because the parents said she had to have an abortion, right, and there’s no way we wanted an abortion’. So great was his ability to divorce himself from his own actions, so little was his empathy for his own child, that he saw no contradiction between this rambling story and his admission – moments later – that he had placed her body in pieces on blue plastic bags in his garden.The idea, he explained, was ‘to keep fresh soil off the top of the ground’ and disguise the fact that he had dug a fresh hole just two-feet square and four-feet deep in which to shove the jumbled remains of his and Rosemary West’s firstborn child.
It was not until seven-thirty that evening that Hazel Savage told Frederick West that they had found more than one bone under his patio. ‘Fred, the question is, is there anybody else buried in your garden?’ West paused. ‘Only Heather.’ Detective Constable Savage replied softly: ‘You’ve never said to us that you scattered Heather all over the garden, and Heather didn’t have three legs.’ Once again West paused. Only this time he replied to a question from his solicitor’s clerk:‘Have you any knowledge of where this other bone might have come from at all?’West’s voice became a monotone:‘Yes. Shirley.’ Hazel Savage asked: ‘Shirley who?’ He replied: ‘Robinson, the girl who caused the problem.’
This was the moment at which Frederick West finally realised that he would never spend another night in Cromwell Street with the woman he loved. Seconds later, after being arrested for murder, he admitted that he had strangled Shirley Robinson. But then, yet again, he tried everything he could to put the police off the track and to protect his wife. He suggested that Heather and Shirley had been friends, and that Rosemary West had been in hospital when he had killed Shirley Robinson. Within half an hour he had admitted killing the girl, and told the police she was pregnant. After suggesting that Shirley Robinson had been only six months’ pregnant when she died, he maintained: ‘She was going to have the baby for another girl, in Bristol.’ Then he offered a motive for the killing. ‘Shirley was the one who was supplying the dope to Heather to take to the schools, and that was the reason we fell out.’ Like almost every other statement in each of these first three confessions, this, too, was a lie.
At 9.15 p.m. after making a brief court appearance to allow the police to hold him for questioning for a further thirty-six hours, Frederick West went one step further and admitted that there were actually three bodies in the garden of Cromwell Street. He explained that the third one was ‘Shirley’s mate’, who ‘had turned up one night with a photograph of me and Shirley’, and told him, ‘As far as I can gather, you killed Shirley’. West then went on to expand on the lies that he had told earlier in the evening about his killing of Shirley Robinson.‘Shirley’s mate’, he explained, was about ‘twelve months to two years later’, and their bodies were ‘by the bathroom window’ and ‘where the bins were’ in his back garden.
No matter how open and collaborative he may have appeared, West was still concealing far more than he was admitting. Indeed, had he not seen for himself the full extent of the police excavations at Cromwell Street the previous evening, it is possible that he would not even have admitted the existence of the third body. Ever slippery, once again he took a calculated gamble. He hoped that if he admitted to three murders it might persuade the police to leave the rest of Cromwell Street untouched, and convince them that the deaths were not part of a wider, even grimmer picture.
The following morning, Sunday 27 February, West went back to his house again to show Hazel Savage and the other officers precisely where Shirley Robinson and ‘Shirley’s mate’ were buried. But back at Gloucester Police Station he maintained firmly that there was ‘no question of anybody else’, and in particular he denied that he knew anything about the whereabouts of his first wife and his stepdaughter.‘Now Rena and Charmaine, I have no idea where they went.’ As far as he was concerned, he told the police, he was going to leave his house to ‘Stephen, Mae and Rose’. Cromwell Street was still the single monument to his life. ‘The rest gets nothing,’West said bluntly.
By one o’clock on that Sunday afternoon, Frederick West had been interviewed eleven times by detectives in the case, and had made just one brief court appearance. As far as the outside world was concerned, he was simply a father being questioned about the disappearance of his daughter Heather. The police had disclosed officially only that they were questioning a fifty-two-year-old man and a forty-year-old woman. Throughout many of his interviews, West had been accompanied by his solicitor, Howard Ogden, a local practitioner, who had represented him in the 1992 case, and whom West himself had requested should represent him again on the morning that he had first confessed to his daughter’s murder.
The police had also suggested that he should be accompanied at each interview by a member of the local panel of ‘appropriate adults’, independent observers who were usually called on to be present during the interviews of children or the mentally unstable to ensure that the interests of those being interviewed were protected. Though there was no suggestion that West was unstable, the officer in charge of the Cromwell Street investigation, Detective Superintendent John Bennett, a bluff, square-jawed Gloucestershire man born in the nearby town of Stroud not long after West himself, had suggested after West’s first confession that an ‘appropriate adult’ should sit in. The first choice would have been a member of the Social Services Department or the probation service, but all those available had already dealt with West over the care proceedings for his minor children, and were therefore disqualified. In the end the police had called on one of the panel of volunteers from a charity to fulfil the task.The name of the volunteer was Janet Leach.
So it was that shortly after lunch on Sunday 27 February, Frederick West, flanked by Howard Ogden and Janet Leach, explained in lurid, graphic detail exactly how he had killed and dismembered his daughter Heather seven years earlier.‘Janet turned green,’ West claimed triumphantly to Ogden later. Her reaction was hardly surprising. But, equally, his version of events was hardly the entire truth. It, too, was another of his elaborate lies. He had deliberately made it shocking to conceal the even more revolting truth that lay behind it.
Clearly anxious to avoid any suggestion that sexual abuse might have played any part in Heather’s killing, West declared: ‘She’s still dressed. I hadn’t touched her clothes, because there was no sexual motive in it at all. I mean, I wouldn’t do nothing like that.’ Equally determined to convince the police that there was ‘no question of anybody else involved’,West then claimed:‘The thing came into my mind that Rose could walk in on me at any minute, so I thought I’ve got to do something.’
It was only after he had failed to revive his daughter in the bath, West maintained, that he ‘pulled her culottes off, because I mean it was all wringing wet’, and only then that he had tied ‘tights or something like that’ around her neck. ‘I know I put something round Heather’s neck . . . I can see that knot . . . in the front of her neck.’ Then West explained rapidly that he had found a knife. ‘That’s what I picked up the knife for, to cut whatever she had round her neck . . . ’cause I had no intention at the time of cutting Heather at all. I was just going to put Heather in the dustbin. And that was the whole idea.’
Throughout this confession he insisted that his wife ‘knew nothing about it whatever’. She had been out shopping in Gloucester at the time of her daughter’s death. He explained that he had to hide the body behind the Wendy house at the bottom of his garden in a dustbin because he was ‘afraid Rose would come back at any moment’. He maintained that he had gone to considerable trouble to wash everything: ‘There was no blood anywhere, no marks.’ He claimed that he had taken his daughter’s belongings, ‘shoved them into black bags’, and taken them to St Michael’s Square, behind his house, ‘for the dustman’. He even maintained that he had washed the urine stain out of the sitting-room carpet with ‘a cloth in the sink’, before Rosemary West returned. And that evening, he added, he had sent his wife out to ‘stay with her boyfriend’, because ‘I knew she wouldn’t be back until at least half-past seven in the morning’.
Just as he intended that it should, Frederick West’s confession concealed far more than it revealed. For he went to elaborate pains to deny specifically four of the elements that habitually played their part in his crimes.West denied, without it even being suggested to him, that there was a sexual motive to his daughter’s death. And he also denied that anyone else – particularly his wife – was involved, that bondage might have played a part in the killing, and that he had planned to mutilate the body. The truth, of course, is that all four played their part in the death of Heather West, just as they had done in the death of each one of his other victims.
The inescapable conclusion is that Heather West met her death precisely as so many of the other young women who found themselves in Cromwell Street with Frederick West met theirs. With Rosemary West’s connivance, she was bound, abused, killed and finally mutilated. She had become as much a vehicle for her father’s appetites as all the other young women whose lives he had snuffed out in the previous twenty years.
West tried to maintain that he was so overcome with grief at his daughter’s death that he had hardly been able to think.‘I mean,’ he added,‘with Shirley and that it didn’t matter. I wasn’t that bothered whether they were dead or alive, you know. I mean, it was just to get rid of them.’ He refused to admit, though it was certainly the fact, that exactly the same held true for his daughter.
Two hours after Frederick West completed this third formal confession of the murder of Heather West Gloucester Constabulary announced for the first time that they had charged a fifty-two-year-old man with her murder. Their official press release did not name West, but the following morning both the Daily Telegraph and the Western Daily Press proclaimed that he was the man due to appear in court that morning charged with her murder. As for Rosemary West, the police announced only that the ‘forty-year-old Gloucester woman who was arrested on Friday in connection with Heather’s disappearance’ was ‘still being questioned by officers in the city’. In fact, she was being questioned in Cheltenham, seven miles away.
West was still determined to keep any hint of suspicion away from his wife. On the Saturday evening, after his admission of the killing of Shirley Robinson, West had asked: ‘Has Rose been told yet?’ adding,‘How did she take it?’Then, to sustain the pretence of her innocence, he went on disingenuously: ‘I expect she hates me now.’ West asked specifically that his wife be told of his confession. The reason was clear. He wanted her to know that he was keeping to their pact, accepting the blame for everything, ‘sorting it out’ as he had promised he would.
Rosemary West kept her side of the pact too. After her initial police interview at Cromwell Street on the Thursday evening of 25 February, when she had refused to go to the police station – ‘You’ll have to arrest me,’ she told the officers – she had stonewalled repeatedly when questioned about the disappearance of her eldest child.Then, after her husband’s first confession on Friday morning, she had been arrested ‘on suspicion of the murder of your daughter Heather’, and later that day interviewed twice more herself.
Truculent, uncooperative and in stark contrast to her husband, she had answered the police reluctantly, her voice sharp with venom. All that she had talked about with her husband, she told them belligerently, on their last night together in Cromwell Street, was ‘whether the patio would be put back’ and that Heather ‘must be around somewhere’. Rosemary West insisted that her husband had told her that he had seen Heather in Birmingham and that ‘she looked rough’.
When Detective Sergeant Terry Onions told her that her husband had confessed to Heather’s murder, her voice hardly changed.‘So you know where she is,’ she said stiffly.‘So she’s dead. Is that right?’ There were no tears, no screams or wails, not even a break in her voice. It was not the reaction of a mother who suddenly realised that she had lost her firstborn child. And when the detective sergeant went on to suggest ‘That automatically implicates you’, Rosemary West’s tone turned harsh. She stared angrily across the interview room. ‘Why does it automatically implicate me?’ she snapped. ‘It’s a lie.’
Later that evening she stuck firmly to the story that she knew nothing about the death, or disappearance, of her eldest child. ‘Fred just said she’d left’, and he ‘wouldn’t tell her where she lived’. Unhelpful as ever, she maintained:‘I don’t know anything about it. I was not aware of it.’The more the police suggested that there was no need for her to pretend any longer, that she could now admit the truth and make a clean breast of anything she knew, the less communicative she became. The only thing that she was prepared to admit was that her husband had been the dominant partner in their relationship ‘in lots of ways’.
By the end of her second formal interview, Rosemary West had not budged an inch. ‘Of course his moods go up and down,’ she told the police, ‘and, no, I didn’t notice anything particular at the time. Like I say, he was at work a lot, and if I wasn’t busy with the children, then I was out.’The pact was holding.
On the afternoon of Saturday 26 February, after the discovery of human remains at Cromwell Street, Rosemary West was again questioned by the police, and again she denied any knowledge of her daughter’s death. ‘I don’t know nothing about it,’ she told them, adding with barely a change in her tone: ‘Why have we got to go through this again?’ Asked about Rena and Charmaine, she replied flatly: ‘Fred was sorting it out. It was their past, their children . . . I was only sixteen myself.’ And when Detective Sergeant Onions told her that there might be the remains of another person in the garden, she merely sighed and replied:‘Oh, this is all getting too much.’
Nevertheless, Rosemary West’s resentment of her eldest daughter was clear. She described Heather as ‘a stubborn girl’, who ‘didn’t want to do her own washing’ and ‘didn’t want to move up off the seat’, a girl who ‘liked to be different to everybody else’. But when the detective sergeant brought the interview to a close by repeating that there was no need for her to ‘protect Fred any longer’ and asked her if there was anything she wanted to add, Rosemary West simply answered:‘No.’
The following morning, Sunday 27 February, Rosemary West was arrested on ‘suspicion of the murder of Shirley Robinson and another as yet unknown female’, but she refused to be interviewed immediately afterwards.When she did agree to the interview, in the early afternoon, she maintained: ‘The only Shirley I knew used to come to the house when we had tenants.’ She did not remember Shirley Robinson’s pregnancy, she denied that the tenants ever paid their rent to her ‘because they had drugs and that up there, so I didn’t go near them’, and she denied that she was covering up for her husband.
As the police interrogation went on, Rosemary West began to wilt. Her head dropped, and she turned away from the table to look at the floor, refusing to make eye contact with anyone. When Hazel Savage travelled from Gloucester to see her and tell her that her husband had specifically asked for her to be told about his confession, saying ‘I know Rose will hate me’, Rosemary West hardly acknowledged it. Her head remained bowed, looking down at the linoleum floor of the interview room in Cheltenham Police Station.A few moments later she denied again that she was covering up for her husband, and ended the interview by saying flatly:‘I told you what I know, and that’s it.’
Rosemary West did not break the pact she had made with her husband. They were still bound together inexorably. She did not suddenly tell the police every detail of the crimes that she said her husband had committed ‘without her knowledge’. She ‘kept her promise’ to Frederick West: the promise of silence.
Throughout her two nights in custody she refused to eat anything, and she was examined by a doctor before being allowed to return home. Shortly after eight o’clock that evening she was released from custody on police bail and went back to Cromwell Street.When she got there she told Stephen and Mae:‘I’m spending one night here and then we’re off, and we’re never coming back to Cromwell Street again.’
In the months to come Rosemary West never once changed her story. At her trial for murder, she insisted that she knew nothing whatever about the fate of her firstborn child. She told the court that her daughter had always intended to leave home ‘as soon as was possible’, and on this particular morning, though she had tried ‘to persuade her to stay’, Heather ‘wouldn’t listen to me’. After she had collected some money for her from the post office, her husband had told her: ‘Don’t bother with that, you’ll only upset her again. You go and do your shopping and I’ll talk to her.’
By the time she got back ‘two or three hours later, something like that’, her daughter had gone. She said she had wanted to say goodbye, but ‘He just said he couldn’t stop her’. Her husband had convinced her that ‘She’d left with some woman in a Mini, who was going to give her a lift to this holiday camp’. And she had indeed gone ‘round to a boyfriend’s’ that night.
Her husband was always saying, she told the court, that ‘he had seen her here and seen her there’. Indeed, she went on, ‘As far as I was concerned he loved Heather and made a fuss of her and called her his big girl. I couldn’t ever believe he would hurt any of the children’, although ‘I wanted to know why he hadn’t persuaded her to contact me’. The jury at her trial did not believe her. They believed that she knew very well that her daughter had been killed, and, in one of the first two verdicts they were to reach, found her guilty of her murder.
Only Rosemary West could tell the world, if she wished to do so, whether or not she was present when Heather West met her death. Throughout her police interviews she refused to offer any comment on her involvement in the killing. She declined to say whether Heather was going to make an official complaint about her sexual abuse at her father’s hands, or whether West had been trying to ‘break Heather in’, as he had ‘broken in’ Anne Marie, perhaps with a view to turning her into a prostitute.
She also declined to comment on the suggestions that her daughter had called her a ‘nigger-lover’, that she ‘liked inflicting pain during sex’, and that she had once even denied to a neighbour that she had ever had a child called Heather. She refused to say whether or not her daughter had been tortured, or whether she had worked alongside her husband immediately after the girl’s disappearance to complete the patio in their garden, thereby covering Heather’s narrow shaft of a grave.
In spite of all these denials the jury had no doubts.They accepted that she had shown little or no interest in Heather’s whereabouts after her ‘disappearance’ in 1987, that she had changed her story about the girl between two sets of interviews with the police, one in 1992, the other in 1994 – first saying that she spoke only to her, then only to her father – and, most damning of all, that, in his own confessions, Frederick West was protecting her. Specifically, they rejected her categorical statement that:‘Fred is responsible for these murders, not me.’
The jury’s verdict of guilty made clear their belief that Rosemary West certainly knew of her firstborn child’s death. And given her sadistic sexual tastes, and the vicious punishments that she regularly meted out to her children, it is impossible not to believe that she would have participated in the murder in the most bestial way. She may well have wanted to seduce and then sexually torment her eldest daughter as much as her husband did. But she may have depended on Frederick West’s disregard for human life to have gathered the courage to kill her.