LIKE PULLING TEETH
‘The cruellest lies are often told in silence.’
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE
On the morning of Monday 28 February Frederick West, his dark beard showing three days of growth, and still wearing the blue patterned jumper in which he had left Cromwell Street three days before, appeared before Gloucester magistrates charged with the murder of his daughter Heather. His solicitor Howard Ogden told the court that he was being ‘cooperative’ and assisting the police with two additional murder enquiries. Shortly after his appearance, Rosemary West left Cromwell Street for a police safe house in the small town of Dursley, thirteen miles south of Gloucester. West himself returned to the interview room at Gloucester Police Station to talk about Shirley Robinson.
Almost his first words were: ‘I’ve got to be straight and honest with you. I’ve no idea when. I know Rose was carrying one of the half-caste children . . . We wanted a half-caste child . . . and it was planned. So, I mean, I was quite excited about it.’ Minutes later he returned to his explanation for this second killing: that Shirley Robinson had ‘caused a problem’, she had threatened to upset his relationship with his wife. ‘I looked at her and I thought, Gee, I’ve got to stop this bitch telling Rose, because Rose is the only thing that matters in my life, nothing else, not even my children.’ He was certain that ‘she’s going to absolutely ruin my marriage’.
When Detective Constable Savage asked him if Shirley Robinson was the first person that he had killed, West replied quickly:‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.There’s only three.There’s no more.’ He also insisted that he did not ‘mutilate her’ as such, just ‘pushed her in with a spade’. Then, once again, West repeated: ‘Rose had no suspicion I was doing anything apart from building the wash-room’ while he was dismembering Shirley Robinson’s naked and pregnant body, although he admitted:‘The ball joint makes a noise anyway . . . with the muscle and that pulling away.’
Shortly after five-twenty, the remains of ‘Shirley’s mate’ were recovered from a narrow shaft beneath the bathroom window. And four hours later Shirley Robinson’s remains were finally recovered from a similar narrow shaft by the back door, ‘where the bins are’, in West’s own words. The complete remains of Shirley Robinson’s unborn child were recovered at the same time. All the excavation work was now being supervised by one of the Home Office’s most respected forensic pathologists, the stocky, bushy-eyebrowed Professor Knight of Cardiff University, who had once memorably called the human race ‘a malignancy on the face of the earth’.
Throughout his interviews on Monday 28 February, Frederick West wove a crafty fabric of lies and half-truths. The tapestry included his reasons for killing Shirley Robinson (‘She was threatening to tell Rose she was pregnant’), his explanation for the death of ‘Shirley’s mate’, Alison Chambers (‘She starts threatening about Shirley and if I give her money’), and his regret at killing his unborn child (‘I mean the last thing I wanted to do was hurt a child of mine’). Throughout, West was confident, affable and relaxed. At one stage he even laughed when Hazel Savage called his collection of pornographic films ‘all too vulgar’. At another, confiding that one of his greatest fears as a child was to be buried alive, he admitted: ‘That’s why I strangled them, like . . . I wanted to make sure they were dead.’
The following morning,Tuesday 1 March,West insisted ‘There’s three in the garden and that’s it’ and denied that he may have become confused over the identity of ‘Shirley’s mate’. But then a little more of the detail of what had actually been discovered in the grave with the remains of ‘Shirley’s mate’ began to emerge. There had been bindings. Detective Constable Savage did not go into detail, asking only ‘What are they for?’ West sidestepped quickly. He accepted that he may have ‘put straps’ around the girl’s body to ‘help him carry’ her. And when Hazel Savage then suddenly asked him why she had a piece of belt tied around her skull, he still stuck to his story. He said instantly:‘Well, that probably had another piece through it. Holding her head forward.’
That afternoon the extent of just how economical Frederick West had been with the truth emerged even more clearly. He finally accepted that he had made admissions of his own guilt only when he had been trapped in a corner.When Hazel Savage pointed out that he had made his confession about three bodies only after he had seen the extent of the police excavations at Cromwell Street (and they had discovered a third femur), he muttered:‘Well.’
‘What did you say to me when I was fingerprinting you?’ Savage went on. ‘You said, “Did you blame me for trying it on?”’ Frederick West replied sullenly: ‘But when I realised they were going the whole way, then what’s the point?’ Hazel Savage leaned across the desk separating them. ‘Right, so you haven’t been totally cooperative, have you? It’s been a bit like pulling teeth.’West did not flinch.
‘Well, were you expecting it any other way?’ he said coldly, his voice momentarily losing its familiar, affable burr.
In the weeks of interrogation to come, it became abundantly clear that no matter how cooperative West appeared, he would never admit to anything unless he was forced to do so. He responded to the interrogations with all the skill of a spy, committing his lies to memory and repeating them effortlessly, before carefully leading his questioners off into long digressions that confused or diluted their train of thought. West hid the motives for his actions behind a constantly moving series of glass screens that reflected what the detectives wanted to know, but which revealed none of the reality of his own thoughts.
At one level Frederick West was beginning to bask in the glory of his own notoriety. He was well aware that outside interest was mounting rapidly in the possibility that he might be a serial killer. But at another level West was still trying to conceal the truth about what lay beneath the cellar of his house. A certain amount of glamour appealed to him, but the ugly truth of what had gone on in the damp cave beneath his house was another matter. He had reluctantly admitted the killing of Shirley Robinson and her ‘mate’, but he had no intention of going any further. He kept insisting, ‘That’s all there is.’
In the late afternoon of Wednesday 2 March, Detective Superintendent John Bennett confirmed at a media briefing that West had been charged with the murder of two other women ‘following the discovery of human remains in the garden of a house in Cromwell Street’. The team of investigating officers had expanded from fifteen to thirty, Bennett explained, and this was apart from the search teams still working at Cromwell Street. The police had also decided to empty the house entirely of its contents.
That same day Bennett had consulted the forensic psychologist Paul Britton, an academic who had provided the prototype for the television character Cracker (from the drama series centred around the activities of a police psychologist of that name), with a view to building up a psychological profile of West for the investigation. But the detective superintendent did not specifically announce this to the press.
Had Frederick West known, he would have been very flattered. But in his cell beneath Gloucester Police Station he was still intent on trying to maintain his image as an amiable little man who demanded to be underestimated, the disguise that had worked so well for him for more than twenty-five years. After a brief court appearance on the morning of Thursday 3 March, he was interviewed six times during the afternoon and evening, and his cooperative, relaxed air did not waver for a moment.
With police encouragement, he embarked on the story of his life. After giving an elaborate account of his early life, he bragged cheerfully about his sexual conquests, including having ‘hundreds’ of girls while he was in the Merchant Navy, and on several occasions being in bed with three or four girls at the same time and making love ‘at least twice with each a night’. He talked about his first wife Rena and their life together in Glasgow, as well as her daughter Charmaine. He explained that he disliked homosexuals – ‘I mean, I couldn’t kiss a man’ – but felt that lesbians were a different matter – ‘There’s nothing dirty about two women being attracted to each other, is there?’ He told the officers interviewing him that he liked to watch his wife with other men – ‘It’s a turn-on’ – and that ‘It was important to keep our sex life alive and changing’. But he still insisted, ‘I haven’t touched other girls since Shirley, because it was causing slight problems with Rose.’
Finally, on the evening of Thursday 3 March West was asked if he could remember some of the residents of Cromwell Street, whose names the police had discovered. He embarked on the task gleefully, managing to remember many, many young people – except a girl named Lynda Gough:‘Don’t ring a bell,’ he said.‘I mean, there was dozens of girls staying there that shouldn’t have been there. They were using the address.’When he was told that her parents had even come to look for her after she had stayed at Cromwell Street, he replied cheerfully:‘I . . . we had hundreds of parents coming asking . . . Hazel [Savage] was there very often, fetching girls from there.’ When Detective Constable Savage suggested that Lynda Gough could be the third girl in the garden, Frederick West said only: ‘Wouldn’t have thought so.’
By early the following afternoon, however, West’s memory had improved. He had decided overnight that it would be better to acknowledge that he knew the girl. Yes, Lynda Gough had been seeing one of the lodgers, he explained, and had then asked if she could move in. ‘The room by the bathroom was empty, so I said yes,’ he explained politely. He even admitted that he and his wife had gone to pick up Lynda’s belongings from her parents’ house. But he then maintained that she had been involved with a lodger called Terry who had ‘smashed me straight on the top of the head’ with an ashtray when he had asked him about her, injuring him so badly that he had ‘to go to hospital for stitches’.After that Terry and Lynda had left for Weston-super-Mare, ‘as far as I know’.
What Frederick West did not know was that at that very moment the police were using a new ground-probing radar device on the floor of the bathroom at the back of the ground floor of his house at Cromwell Street.Acting on their own instincts, and on the advice of Paul Britton that West was likely to have killed more than the three people buried in his garden, they had decided to embark on a far more detailed study of the house. Within an hour the ground-probing radar had indicated that a body might be buried underneath the bathroom. West’s disingenuous description of Lynda Gough had come too late.The police were now determined to excavate the rest of the house.
At three-seventeen on the afternoon of Friday 4 March, Hazel Savage informed Frederick West formally that the police intended to ‘dig up the whole of the basement’. He did not blink, and returned to his cell, where he talked for a time to Janet Leach. Less than three hours later he asked for a meeting with his solicitor, who in turn handed a message to Detective Superintendent Bennett. Written out by his solicitor, and signed by West, it stated simply: ‘I, Frederick West, authorise my solicitor Howard Ogden to advise Superintendent Bennett that I wish to admit to a further (approx.) nine killings, expressly, Charmaine, Rena and others to be identified.’
When it was read out in a formal interview, which began at six-ten that evening, Detective Constable Savage asked West how many bodies there were in Cromwell Street. He replied calmly: ‘That’s the ones I can remember.’ Frederick West was no longer an ordinary domestic murderer.
‘I got it in me mind in a certain way,’West explained confidently in the first minutes of the interview, ‘and I don’t want to change that if I can help it.’ He told the officers first that Lynda Gough was under the bathroom, ‘quite deep . . . ’cause there was a big cellar underneath originally’.Then West told the police that they needed to move on to the cellar. He explained that they needed to look for a series of graves, adding: ‘Now these, I’m not a hundred per cent sure on some of these.’
Nevertheless, West identified the first body as being buried by the false fireplace he had put in the front cellar room: ‘I think she was Dutch or summat.’ Another girl in the cellar was from Newent, but he could not remember her name. But he could remember that another was called Lucy Partington, although he was not sure exactly which of the graves contained her body.
In a soft, confidential voice,West went on to explain that he had got his first wife Rena ‘absolutely paralytic’, then taken her out to Dymock, ‘where I know, and strangled and buried her there’. The same evening he had strangled his stepdaughter Charmaine, ‘who was asleep in the back of the car’, taken her back to 25 Midland Road, and put her in the back basement extension and buried her in the coal.Were all the bodies dismembered? ‘To my memory, yes,’ came the reply.
When Hazel Savage asked shortly before seven o’clock that evening,‘Is there anybody else involved with you?’, Frederick West replied at once,‘Nobody at all.’
Later that evening West went back to Cromwell Street, and, using an aerosol paint spray can, marked the floor of his own cellar with neat eighteen-inch squares to indicate where he remembered four of the bodies were buried.
By the following morning, Saturday 5 March, West had also prepared a sketch plan of the different rooms in the cellar with the help of the ‘appropriate adult’, Janet Leach, and, when his formal interviews resumed shortly before lunch, he took the detectives through it. At the same time he also gave his first full account of the death of his stepdaughter Charmaine. But again he began to lie.‘She was fully clothed and everything,’West claimed.‘There was no clothes taken off her or nothing.’ He went on to maintain:‘She wasn’t dismembered at all.’ He had killed her ‘about a week’ after he had been released from Leyhill Prison in June 1971.
During the afternoon, as the police started to excavate the cramped cellar of Cromwell Street, West began calmly to give a detailed description of the girls he thought they were about to unearth. Among them were ‘the Dutch girl’ with a ‘nice figure’ whom he had ‘picked up in Tewkesbury’; the ‘Worcester girl’ who had ‘scars on one of her arms or her hands from a firework accident’; and the ‘Newent girl’ who used to ‘come to visit’. West explained that he did not know their names because he ‘gave them all nicknames’ in case he ever ‘shouted out their names while he was making love to Rose’. Shirley Robinson, he told the officers, was known to him only as ‘Bones’.This, too, was a lie.
By nine o’clock on that Saturday evening in March, West had embroidered his story a little more, claiming that there were two ‘Worcester girls’ in the cellar, as well as Lynda Gough in the ‘inspection pit’ beneath his bathroom extension, bringing the total of bodies under the house to six, and the total in Cromwell Street to nine.‘I don’t think any of them were cut up,’ he announced, but adding: ‘I ain’t sure, I wouldn’t be one hundred per cent on that, mind.’ It was another lie.
Next morning the Sunday Mirror front page bore the headline ‘House of Horrors’. The legend that was to become Cromwell Street had begun. At seven-thirty the previous evening Detective Superintendent Bennett had announced to a packed press conference that during the afternoon the police had found what appeared to be the remains of ‘two further human beings’. They were the skeletons of Thérèse Siegenthaler and Shirley Hubbard. In the three days that followed, the police search team uncovered four more sets of remains – those of Lucy Partington and Juanita Mott on Sunday 6 March, Lynda Gough on Monday 7 March, and Carol Ann Cooper on Tuesday 8 March. By then the nine bodies in Cromwell Street had all been recovered.
It was to be eight weeks before Charmaine West’s remains were to be unearthed from beneath the concrete floor over the old coal cellar at Midland Road, a month after her mother, Rena West, was recovered from Letterbox Field in Kempley at 3.45 p.m. on 10 April.West himself was formally charged with her murder four days later. It would then be a further four weeks before Ann McFall’s remains were discovered in Fingerpost Field in Kempley, just a few hundred yards from West’s family home at Much Marcle. And throughout each and every of one of those weeks, Frederick West cheerfully continued to talk to the police. But getting the truth out of him was still like pulling teeth.
By the time the body of Carol Ann Cooper had been unearthed from beneath the cellar floor at Cromwell Street, it had become clear to the police that Frederick West was still concealing far more than he was prepared to admit about the killings. He was attempting to conceal, for example, that bondage might have played some part in the deaths. Indeed, it was not until he knew for certain that the police had discovered bindings with some of the remains that he suddenly admitted, on the afternoon of Tuesday 8 March, that the girls had been tied up.
An exasperated Hazel Savage put it to her fellow officer during an interview:‘He didn’t want to talk about bondage in the beginning. We’ve been here for days. He’s never talked about it . . . He is now saying “I’d better think up this story that she hung herself ”.’ Frederick West’s demeanour did not change; he just smiled his naughty boy’s smile, his confidence unshaken. At the end of that evening he told the police confidently:‘I mean, every girl I picked up I didn’t put in the basement.’
When he was asked where he did put them West laughed out loud, and replied:‘I dropped them off where they wanted to go.’ He was still one step ahead. The other victims were still his to control, his to know where they were, his to tell the police about when – and if – he decided to. They were his trophies, proof of his power over the world.
As the days passed West continued to play cat-and-mouse with the police, telling them repeatedly: ‘There is certainly nobody else to my knowledge that you will find dead, nobody.’ In particular, he insisted that he had not killed Ann McFall:‘She was a saint as far as I was concerned.’ But then West returned to hinting, tantalisingly, ‘Well, if there’s some more I’ll try and think who they are’, before suddenly reverting to his original story: ‘No, you’ve got all that I had anything to do with.’
West’s rambling explanations contradicted themselves time after time. In a description of his first meeting with Carol Ann Cooper, for example, he insisted that he had ‘picked her up in a lorry’, even though he had stopped driving lorries two years before her disappearance in 1973. He then unexpectedly admitted that he would ‘probably have buried her on the way back somewhere . . . I wouldn’t have taken the risk of bringing her back if I’d had something to bury her with’.The possibility that West was actually describing the abduction of quite another young woman – whose body had indeed been buried somewhere on the road – prompted the police to ask if he had been able to bury somebody else somewhere else. ‘No, No,’ West replied hastily, adding with equal suddenness,‘Can I have a smoke?’
‘See, I had affairs with so many different girls. I mean, you’re not talking one or two,’ West told the police repeatedly, ‘and . . . everyone didn’t end up in disaster, by no means.’ And when he was asked why he had not killed in the last years of his life, West replied, as smoothly and persuasively as ever: ‘Why did I stop for eight years and not do any more? There’s a simple answer for that. When I attacked Heather I got such a shock that I didn’t know how the hell to get over it . . . Then I sorted it out, what the problem was, and it was messing about with other girls, with the fear of Rose catching me.’
His self-confidence never wavered. He toyed with the police throughout his interviews, daring them to prove that he was a liar.‘I tell you what,’ he announced suddenly on Friday 18 March,‘I can’t remember half the places I’ve been laying concrete and patios. It’s an everyday thing for me.’ And he burst out in a fit of laughter. ‘I mean, when they talk about going through places that I’ve been, I mean you’re going to be here for a month . . . Every day’s a different place, and two or three places a day, like.Asda stores, Gateway stores, offices all over England.’ He had been in Reading and Leicester, Nottinghamshire and Newmarket, he told them with a grin on his face. ‘I shall have done me life sentence and back out or buried or something by the time you got round to it.’
They were not the only red herrings West fed to his interrogators. On Sunday 20 March West was taken to 25 Midland Road to show the police the site in which he claimed he had buried Charmaine West. But no sooner had he returned to Gloucester Police Station than he started to insist that his stepdaughter’s body could not be there, as she must have been taken away ‘during the demolition’. ‘They can go and dig the whole of Midland Road up, but they won’t find nothing there, because there’s nothing there.’
The next day, West explained: ‘Charmaine was wrapped up in a lot of blankets, ’cause she wasn’t cut up or nothing, she was just as she was.’ On 12 April West changed his story completely, telling the police instead:‘Charmaine is not dead. Charmaine is well, and that I can assure you of . . . I never touched Charmaine.’And when he was told that Midland Road was about to be excavated, he replied: ‘I can state this on my life that they will not find anything at Midland Road at all. And I would like that to go on the record as said.’
The reason for Frederick West’s decision to lie about his stepdaughter’s death was not only that he was anxious to prevent the discovery of her naked and dismembered body. It was also to distance his wife from any suggestion that she may have played a part in her killing. West knew that she had lived there with Charmaine while he was in Leyhill Prison, and he did not want there to be any suspicion that she might have acted alone.
The pact that he and Rosemary West had made on the Thursday evening of 24 February 1994 depended upon his taking ‘all the blame’ for every action. It was his gift to a woman whom he adored. And as the weeks of his police interviews dragged on, it became ever more apparent how great West’s love was for his wife. Frederick West saw the drama of his life as a love-story as well as a tragedy.
‘I make sure nobody harms Rose,’ he confided to the police on 21 March. ‘I worship that girl, my wife. We’ve got a very special thing in our own minds . . . it’s got stronger.’ Indeed,West’s determination to cast his wife as blameless knew no bounds. The next day he denied that she ever ‘had any sexual relations with any girls, ’cause I would have known that’, and the next added that ‘Rose was not a lesbian. I’ve tried several times to get her into it, but without success’.Three days after that, he tried to convince the police that his wife did not even enjoy her relationships with other men. ‘She was just doing it, because I wanted her to.’ On the same day he claimed she would have ‘turned me in’ if she had known about the killings. ‘I mean, as much as she loved me and that . . . I mean, Rose would not harm anybody . . . Rose didn’t have a violent nature at all.’
West told the police repeatedly that he and his wife were‘mentally locked into each other in a big way, and we still are at this moment’, and that this was the sole reason for his killing. ‘I always told the girls that no way would I ever leave my wife.That was always made quite clear to every girl I had an affair with, that there was no way that I would ever swap Rose for any other woman in the world.’ For once West was telling at least part of the truth: for though his explanations were designed to protect his wife, they were also based firmly in his love for her. Using his curious and revealing phrase, he insisted: ‘I mean we’re not evilly locked together at all.’ And he went on: ‘I mean, Rose might look a bit hard faced and that, but Rose is soft as a kitten and I mean I know that because I’ve lived with her so long, and controlled her life for so long . . . I’ve been tempted over the years to tell Rose, I must admit, but I never ever did. I backed off it.’
When Detective Constable Savage confronted West, telling him that she could not understand how his wife,‘the lady of the house’, could have nine bodies buried in her home and not have ‘a clue’ they were there,West did not budge.‘Well, that’s the truth,’ he told her. And when she suggested that she found that hard to believe in the light of their joint attack on Carol Raine in 1972,West insisted: ‘I set Rose up to do that, that was my fault,’ adding defensively, ‘Rose was pregnant practically all the time . . . She had more to do than to bother with that sort of thing.’
The tension between Hazel Savage and Rosemary West, which had rumbled on in the background throughoutWest’s interrogations, finally surfaced on 28 March. Savage told Frederick West bluntly that she found it unbelievable – and so did the experts the police had consulted – that he had stopped killing for two periods of six years: between 1967 and 1973, and then between 1987 and 1994. She added that the only reason she suspected he was claiming this was his fear of implicating his wife in any killing.
Breaking the confidential tone he had used throughout almost every one of his interviews, West screamed at his interrogator: ‘Rubbish. Because Rose had nothing to do with it at all . . . Rose knew nothing of what I was doing at all, ever.’
Four full weeks after the recovery of the first body from Cromwell Street, and after more than a hundred police interviews, Frederick West was still insisting:‘All Rose wants to be is a mother, and that’s all she’s ever been . . . an absolutely perfect mother.’