AN EVIL LOVE
‘The world is still deceived by ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt But, being season’d with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil?’
SHAKESPEARE, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
In the alternative universe created by Frederick and Rosemary West at 25 Cromwell Street one emotion was paramount above all others – love. No matter how terrible the pain or unremitting the suffering they inflicted on others, they remained tenaciously in love. Their distorted version of love lay at the heart of their being. They had used it as their justification for murder and for the abuse of their children. Both had started their lives searching for love, longing for it to be reciprocated, and both had finally found it with each other. Each satisfied the other’s need. Frederick West quite simply ‘adored his wife’, in the words of one friend, and ‘would do anything in the world for her’, while Rosemary West would stop at nothing to please her husband.
The clearest proof of the Wests’ devotion to one another lies among the videotapes seized by the police during their child-abuse investigation in 1992. One of the tapes was made by Frederick West of his wife during February and March of that year. The first part was no more than West’s updated version of ‘Rose’s chocolates’ whereby, instead of putting her used knickers in a jar, he asked his wife to hold them up for the camera. On each occasion her husband would zoom in on the stains made by another man’s semen.
There was no aspect of sexual depravity that Rosemary West would not explore for her husband, and few that he had not asked her to. Each had demanded that the other prove their love by means that were almost beyond contemplation.They had proved it in the terrible humiliation and torture of innocent young women, in the killing of their eldest child and their eight-year-old stepdaughter, and in the abuse of their remaining children. Neither had baulked at these murderous actions, seeing them rather as proof of their evil love. Their relationship, born in sexual desire and fostered in perversion, had reached its zenith.
Neither Frederick nor Rosemary West cared to distinguish between the spiritual expression of love and its ugliest manifestation in sexual perversion. For them both, the two were inextricably mixed. Neither saw any contradiction between the depraved exhibition of sexual promiscuity for their home video camera and their private protestation of a far more romantic love.Their love for one another was their justification for their every action, and their killings. And the two loves existed side by side, just as they did on the videotape made by Frederick West in the spring of 1992.
For immediately after his new version of ‘Rose’s chocolates’, and a sequence showing Rosemary West urinating on a tea towel in her kitchen in Cromwell Street, with which she proceeded to wipe her naked body, Frederick West’s videotape jumped to a carefully selected section of the 1943 film version of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. The sequence West had so painstakingly added to the videotape was the one in which Orson Welles, as Edward Rochester, finally declares his love for his daughter’s governess, played by Joan Fontaine. The juxtaposition of these two starkly different video images, which had obviously been made quite deliberately, is so swift and so striking that there could hardly be stronger proof of the extent or nature of their depraved mutual love.
Because of this love, on the night of 24 February 1994 Frederick West told Rosemary to ‘blame him’ for everything. He believed that if he took the blame, his wife would be left alone, untouched, and still the mistress of Cromwell Street. But, misled by his earlier contacts with the Gloucester police, he had underestimated the tenacity of Detective Constable Savage and the other officers now involved. By the end of March 1994 the police were convinced that he could not have acted alone. Indeed, they were in no doubt that not only must Rosemary West have been fully aware of his every action, but that she must also have been a participant.
On Wednesday 20 April 1994, eight weeks after the police first arrived at Cromwell Street with a warrant to search for Heather, Rosemary West was arrested and taken to Cheltenham Police Station. At first she was questioned only about allegations of child abuse and of acting as a prostitute at Cromwell Street, and throughout four official interviews that day she answered the police’s questions evasively rather than aggressively.
The next morning, Thursday 21 April, she declined to answer any further questions. For thirteen minutes she refused even to agree that her name was Rosemary West, admitting only: ‘I’ve just got nothing to say.’ It was a decision that she would stick to rigidly throughout the rest of her time in custody. Indeed, it was to be seventeen months later, when she walked into the witness-box at her trial on ten counts of murder, before she would agree to answer any further questions about the case.
On the same day, seven miles away at Gloucester Police Station, Frederick West was explaining that his wife had started to have sex with other men only ‘as a turn-on for me and herself ’, but that he made sure always to make love to her either before she went out with another man or when she came back. As for the deaths, ‘it had been a long secret, longer than I believed’, West confessed. As far as he knew his scheme was working. There was at least the chance that she would return to Cromwell Street and be reunited with her children.
At three-forty on the afternoon of Saturday 23 April 1994, Frederick West’s plan began to break down when his wife was ‘arrested on suspicion of the murder of a girl called Lynda Gough’. Throughout three police interviews that afternoon, she continued to exercise her right to remain silent. She answered each and every question, including those that suggested she might have tortured or been involved in sexual acts with the nineteen-year-old girl before she was killed, with ‘No comment’. At six-fifteen the following afternoon she was charged formally with Lynda Gough’s murder. Her reply was straightforward: ‘I’m innocent.’
Time after time in the weeks to come, officers from the Gloucester Constabulary offered Rosemary West the opportunity to repudiate her husband, and to admit that she had been ‘forced’ to act against Lynda Gough and the other young women whose bodies had been discovered in her house in Cromwell Street. But just as she had done in February, she declined each offer, saying only ‘No comment’. She was still honouring her part in the pact she had made with her husband,‘keeping her promise’ to him.
Steadily, as the last days of April ebbed into May, Rosemary West was charged with a total of nine murders, culminating with that of her own firstborn child Heather West. To each charge, bar one – to which she made no reply whatever – she answered: ‘I’m innocent.’ But the charges began to make a subtle difference to her attitude to the case, and to her husband. She started to cast herself not only in the role of a doomed lover, Jane Eyre unable to marry her own Rochester, but also in the quite separate role of a naive victim, a woman who had suffered at the hands of an evil and manipulative madman.
She had realised that their original pact, in which her husband had told her to let him ‘sort it out’, allowed her to portray herself as completely innocent of any knowledge of the girls whose murders she was now being charged with – without breaking her promise. She could indeed deny all knowledge of the victims and remain loyal. But she also added her own subtle variation. She decided to make a public show of rejecting her husband.
On Monday 25 April the police began preparations to excavate the basement of 25 Midland Road. They actually started digging at eleven o’clock the next morning. As they did so, Frederick West was explaining proudly to Detective Constable Savage his plans for having his children ‘baptised together’, and how his wife had written to him when she was a young woman of fifteen, telling him to meet her in Pittville Park in Cheltenham on a Sunday afternoon to make love, and finishing her letter:‘Keep saying your prayers and remember I’ll always love you. Lots of love, Rose.’
West could not conceal the smile on his face.When Hazel Savage suggested to him that he seemed to be enjoying the questioning, he replied:‘Yeah, why not?’
‘I don’t know,’ the detective answered. ‘I don’t understand it really.’
‘You will in the end,’West replied.
‘Will I? When will I understand it?’
‘I don’t know. At the end, whenever that is,’West told her.
Then he added, with another grin: ‘You’re the love of my life, Hazel. I can’t even remember Gloucester Police Station without Hazel.’
At that moment, as far as Frederick West knew, everything was still proceeding according to his private plan. The banter with Hazel Savage was no more than to keep himself amused.
Shortly before lunch on Wednesday 27 April Hazel Savage broke the news to West that his wife had been charged formally with the murders of Lynda Gough and Carol Ann Cooper. In an instant, and without warning, his demeanour changed completely. Now he was afraid for his wife.
The next day Frederick West asked for time to consult his lawyers, and at 9.38 a.m. on Friday 29 April, he retracted every one of his confessions. He first asked Howard Ogden to write out another note, a counterpart to his 4 March confession of nine murders. Then, in a two-minute interview, West put the note into his own words, telling the police:‘Well, I have not, and still not, told you the whole truth about these matters.The reason for this is that from the very first day of this enquiry my main concern has been to protect other person or persons, and there is nothing else I wish to say at this time.’
As soon as West had finished, Hazel Savage asked him if he was feeling all right. ‘Yeah, perfect,’ he replied. ‘That’s what the doctor just said.’ In the weeks to come he was to refuse repeatedly to identify which ‘person or persons’ he was protecting, even though the police persistently attempted to persuade him to do so. It was, in fact, Frederick West’s last attempt to throw his pursuers off the scent, his last effort at subterfuge. For though it may have appeared so at first sight, West was not now simply acknowledging that his plan to save his wife had failed, and that he was now content to shift the blame to her. It was, as always with him, considerably more complicated than that.
At one level Frederick West wanted to confuse the issue, and in the process give himself a chance to think. At another he wanted to fight the battle alongside his wife. If Rosemary West was to be charged alongside him with at least ten counts of murder, then he would provide her with another alibi altogether and blame someone else entirely. West’s mind was fertile enough to think of other potential assailants whom he could hint might be guilty of the crimes.
At yet another level West was also thinking that the charges against his wife might enable him to escape. He did not intend to break their pact, but if that was how a jury decided then he would not object. For West was only too aware that he would be far less capable of tolerating a long period of imprisonment than she would. ‘Rose is a creature of habit,’ he once told the police admiringly.West suspected that the habit and routine of prison life would be far easier for her to accept than for him.
In the ensuing five days Frederick West gave just one brief interview to the police, one in which he hardly made any comment. But then events intervened to force him to react. At 7.10 p.m. on Wednesday 4 May, an officer excavating beneath the kitchen floor of the ground floor of 25 Midland Road found what appeared to be human remains. It was the most terrible discovery of the entire police investigation, for the eight-year-old’s body had been brutally destroyed.The single piece of evidence that West had prayed would never come to light was lifted from the concrete floor of the tiny villa on the edge of Gloucester to haunt him.
In an interview just after two o’clock on the following afternoon, Frederick West was told that they had found what seemed to be the remains of Charmaine. The child’s body was not wrapped in blankets, as West had once insisted that it was; nor was it clothed, as he had also maintained; nor was it in one piece in the tiny hole in the ground into which it had been stuffed. For the first time in his police interviews, Frederick West began to cry. Almost the only words he could bring himself to say were: ‘I mean, I’m the only dad she’s had.’
It was to be another five days before West was interviewed again. And when the interviews resumed, on 10 May, he refused to explain anything whatever about the death of his stepdaughter Charmaine. He was charged with her murder on the following day but refused to say anything in reply, just as then he refused to return to Fingerpost Field to assist the police search for the body of Ann McFall. Her body, too, was one that he now prayed would never be found.
The remorse that West may have felt for the killing of Ann McFall – the only murder that he was never to confess to – may have been the reason for his initial decision to tell the police where he had buried her body. But the fact that they had failed to find it convinced him that they might never do so. In fact, it was to be almost another month before McFall’s body was unearthed in Fingerpost Field near Dymock. By that time the Gloucester police were on the very brink of giving up the search entirely after excavating a hole almost the size of an Olympic swimming-pool, twenty metres by thirty to a depth of two metres.
In the meantime Frederick West had gone into denial. He, too, had begun to refuse to comment as a team of officers questioned him repeatedly about the missing bones, the masks, gags and bindings, and the cuts in the bones found on the victims. Now he remained silent and uncommunicative as two officers asked him whether he had attacked the young women found beneath his house and garden at Cromwell Street before or after their deaths.
When West was asked if there was anything specific he wanted to say, he replied:‘Yeah, I had nothing to do with these girls’ deaths at all. I have lied through the statements and at this moment I am not prepared to change that . . . I am not prepared to say who I am protecting in this case.’ A little later he added: ‘I am not so worried for myself, probably, but I have eight children out there.’ Then, when he was asked if his reply meant that he thought the ‘person or persons’ he was referring to might harm his children he replied:‘I suppose.’
Finally, at 12.40 p.m. on Friday 13 May,West ended his hundred-and-thirty-second interview at Gloucester Police Station with the words: ‘Nobody spares a thought for what I’ve lost in this. I’ve lost more than anybody else. Couldn’t we end this?’
Frederick West was sent to Her Majesty’s Prison at Winson Green in Birmingham as a remand prisoner while the police continued to question and then charge his wife with the murder of the nine victims found in Cromwell Street. On Thursday 2 June he returned to Gloucester briefly to appear before the magistrates’ court, and was once again remanded in custody.The following day Rosemary West, too, was remanded in custody there, and her interrogation at Cheltenham Police Station brought to an end. She was sent to the nearby Pucklechurch Remand Centre. The Wests had neither seen nor spoken to each other since their last night together in Cromwell Street.
The starker, less familiar conditions of Winson Green prison in Birmingham had a dramatic effect on Frederick West. Though he would try to insist that he was ‘a hero in here, a saint, everyone’s after me signature’, he became increasingly frightened and withdrawn as the weeks passed. Almost his only consolation was a continuing series of interviews with Howard Ogden, who travelled up to see him regularly from his small office in Cheltenham from the middle of May until the end of July. His only other regular visitor was his eldest son Stephen.
Ogden tape-recorded his conversations with Frederick West. Although they were designed as the first steps in the preparation of West’s defence, Ogden also did so with a view to offering them for sale, an action that would eventually bring him into conflict with the Law Society, and see him lose the right to practise as a solicitor for a period of one year. Passing preliminary judgement on his actions, Mr Justice Lightman told the High Court: ‘I can think of nothing more calculated to bring the legal profession into disrepute and destroy public confidence.’ Ogden was then ordered to hand over the tapes.
West’s conversations with Ogden were a bizarre mixture of lies, fantasy and half-truth, which reflected West’s fear and mental deterioration in prison. In more than twenty hours of interviews, West sought to deny any wrongdoing whatever on his part, casting himself for the first time as the innocent bystander, caught up in his wife’s wickedness. In that respect the interviews are ludicrous. But they offer an insight into the Wests’ alternative universe. And they were the only occasion on which Frederick West broke the pact he had made with his wife on that February night in Cromwell Street three months before. In his desperation he sought a scapegoat, and that scapegoat was his wife.
In every one of his fifteen conversations with Ogden at Winson Green, West returned to his familiar lengthy, rambling style of storytelling, heaping detail on detail, reminiscence on reminiscence, repeating some things endlessly, then suddenly revealing something unexpected. But the pressure of his time on remand, and the realisation that he would now almost certainly spend the rest of his natural life in prison, had unhinged him. His mind was wandering, confusing fact and fantasy, trying to reconcile the reality of his killings with the need to deny them.West began to dissemble.
In West’s first interview with Ogden, on Wednesday 18 May, five days after his last police interview, he did not start by incriminating Rosemary West. At that moment his mind was still strong enough to sustain their pact. Ceaselessly rolling hand-made cigarettes in his short fingers, West set about describing his first meeting with his wife, and how she had ‘taken over from Rena’, who ‘kept disappearing for a week or fortnight at a time – after she’d had Charmaine’.
In what may have borne some resemblance to the truth, West told Ogden that Rena had been ‘supplying girls for these parties’ given by Rolf, at which girls were used for immoral purposes.West claimed that he had known Rolf first, and had then introduced him to Rena, who began to use him as her pimp before they went back to Scotland together.‘Rena always looked after me,’West explained. ‘She was never unkind to me in any way.’ And he went on to deny that he had killed her. But then he specifically accused Rena West of killing his ‘angel’, Ann McFall, and went on to claim – quite suddenly – that Rolf had ‘recruited Rose’ to ‘get’ his first wife.
‘I am not lying to you in any way,’ West assured his solicitor. ‘Anything I say to you can be backed up. What I tell you is the gospel truth.’
By the time Ogden returned to Winson Green a week later, West had prepared his new sanitised version of events. He began by trying to spread the guilt for the killing of the young women in Cromwell Street as far as he could, and maintaining that the accounts of his own sexual appetite were ‘fantasy’. Claiming that Rosemary West, not he, was guilty of the killings, he also implied that his younger brother John had been involved, ‘’cause John was shagging Rose for fucking years . . . I knew that’. West blamed his wife’s sadistic sexual nature for the murders, and insisted that he had ‘deliberately mixed things up’ for the police.
Throughout, Frederick West set out to cast himself as the innocent. He denied that he had any kind of sex life with his wife. ‘I hated it. I hated the smell of her at times as well.’ He denied that he liked bondage: ‘I put it on Rose once, and even then I didn’t like the idea of it, and I didn’t ever have anything to do with it.’ He denied any attack on his other daughter: ‘All I did was kick her in the fucking arse at the gate, a few nights before, for being with a drug addict.’ He denied any attacks on either Anne Marie or Mae. He denied that Heather West was his daughter. He denied that he had attacked Carol Raine: ‘That was Rose attacked her, not me.’ He denied that the cellar at Cromwell Street had been kept locked:‘The basement was always wide open. Anybody who wanted to go down there could.’ He denied that ‘it was kitted out for sex games’. He denied that he was interested in pornographic films. He denied that he ever knew that his wife advertised in contact magazines, and he denied that he had ever encouraged her to have sex with any other man.
‘Rose fucking ruled me, I didn’t rule Rose. Everybody knows that,’West told Ogden.‘Every penny I earned she had. She searched my clothes to make sure I didn’t have any money.’West accused her of having ‘new clothes all the time’, when ‘most of my clothes was off building sites’. West claimed that his wife ‘laid roofs’ and ‘could mix plaster all right. She dug holes and everything’. She was also ‘a brilliant cook’, but ‘had special food of her own, kept the best of everything for herself ’. Most of all, he insisted,‘Rose must be cool, calm and collected’.
To demonstrate exactly how cool, calm and collected his wife could be, Frederick West proceeded to try to convince his solicitor that he knew nothing about the killings in Cromwell Street until the evening of 24 February 1994. ‘When Rose told me where the bodies were and everything, I died at that moment. Every feeling dropped out of me body.’ West claimed: ‘I didn’t suspect Rose of anything,’ and went on, ‘I was quite prepared to take it. It was my fault that these girls got too vulnerable. I should have checked on my own home more.’
Careful to sustain the fiction that he ‘fell asleep’ in a lay-by for ‘two to three hours’ on his way back to Cromwell Street that afternoon, West remembered:‘Rose was in some kind of state. She was crying and shaking and God knows what, and that ain’t Rose, believe me. She’s a hard case, no messing with her.’West went on to tell Ogden that he ‘couldn’t quite catch on why’ she was so upset, but that he had gone to the police station to tell ‘Hazel Savage about Heather – what I knew’. When he returned home again West maintained that he caught up with his wife in the bar room on the first floor and told her: ‘There’s piss-all out there. What are you worrying about?’ In this version of events, Rosemary West told him:‘Oh, yes there is.’ And he replied:‘What the hell do you mean? She said,“Heather’s out there”.’
Then West offered what may have been part of the truth. ‘I shall have to take it,’ Frederick West said he told his wife. ‘You say nothing.’ But ‘I wanted to get out of the house there and then. It seemed as though my whole life stopped there, finished . . . I drank my tea, took a couple of Paracetamol and I said:“Right, what happened, then?” She wouldn’t tell me no more, nothing. I said:“Is that it?” She said:“Oh no.There’s Shirley and Shirley’s mate”.’
West said that he had then asked his wife:‘“How many is there?” She says: “I don’t know, seven, or eight, or nine, something like that”.’ According to West, his wife then pointed out to him where each of the bodies was buried, and ‘she named them all’. She also told him that ‘Charmaine’s in the cellar at the back of Midland Road’, and ‘Rena’s out at her beauty-spot’.
West told his solicitor that Rosemary West’s explanations for the deaths were ‘sex acts that went wrong, bondage that went wrong’. That night he lay on the bed, ‘I was in a trance, in limbo, like’, but he was sure that the police would ‘just dig the bodies up and leave Rose, Mae and Stephen’ living there in peace. It was one of the few honest remarks in Frederick West’s entire fabrication, along with his remark a few days later: ‘What I did all the time, and I’m still trying to do it now, is cover up for Rose.’
‘Everything was so blatantly cruel,’ West confessed on 31 May. ‘The main problem I’ve had is that I swore on the kids’ lives that I wouldn’t shop Rose for what she did. That’s the only way I could get her to tell me what she done to Heather, ’cause she wouldn’t tell me what she’d done to her.’ He was afraid that his wife had ‘tortured her’, and hoped ‘that she hadn’t been sent to the niggers in Bristol’, concluding: ‘At this time I knew nothing about any other girls. Nothing. Only Heather.’
Cromwell Street, he said, ‘was more secure on secrets than GCHQ is . . . She never told me nothing. That was her policy in life. She told nobody nothing.’ And his wife had threatened him by saying: ‘If you drop me in it, you won’t last long, and they’ll make sure you die a horrible death.’ West claimed to Ogden that when he suggested to his wife that she could not have acted alone, and there must be ‘somebody else mixed up in it’, she had told him: ‘You don’t need to know that.’
Throughout this litany of fantasy and falsehood, which rambled on throughout June, Frederick West denied playing any part in the killings. The day after the discovery of Ann McFall’s remains in Fingerpost Field shortly after six o’clock on the evening of Tuesday 7 June, he told Ogden that his first wife Rena had killed her ‘and Rena must have told Rose that she was in the pond’. Rosemary West had ‘no feelings at all’, he maintained.
On rare occasions reality would intrude into the fantasy. When Ogden asked West why he thought his wife ‘stopped after Heather’, West paused before replying: ‘Did she stop?’ He then went on: ‘There’s a farm somewhere that Rose had a lot to do with.’ A few minutes later he told Ogden: ‘I don’t even know if they got them all.’
‘I knew that you wouldn’t get anything out of Rose,’West said. ‘If she went down that police station, they’d never have found any of ’em, if I hadn’t got it off her, ’cause she’d never have said a word. She can just shut herself off, and you can carry on for evermore.’ He insisted to Ogden: ‘Rose is the only person who knows the names of the people, what went on, what it was, what she was getting these girls for, and everything.’ But West also told his solicitor that he still thought ‘the world of Rose’, even though ‘these things have happened’.
Then, on Thursday 30 June, in the midst of his interviews with Ogden, Frederick West was briefly reunited with his wife, in the dock at Gloucester Magistrates’ Court. It was their first appearance together. He was charged with eleven counts of murder, she with nine, as well as other sexual offences.
In the dock West made every effort to touch Rosemary West, to establish some form of contact with her. At one point he even stretched over to stroke the nape of her neck, and whispered in her ear, but she stared straight ahead, no longer the woman who had hugged him so enthusiastically just one year earlier as the child-abuse case had collapsed. Now she seemed to shrink back from him, playing her role as his innocent partner, trapped by his evil ways, to its own perfection. West looked crestfallen. It was not what he had expected. The possibility that he might now be isolated from the woman he loved, who might even go free, began to consume him.
The police seized the opportunity of West’s return to Gloucester to arrest him for the murder of Ann McFall. Over the next three days he was questioned repeatedly about the disappearance of the Scottish girl who had become his nanny, and then become pregnant by him. And throughout he maintained his innocence. ‘I don’t know what happened to Ann,’ he told the police. ‘All I know, I thought the world of her, look . . . No way would I have anybody touch her.’ Nevertheless, shortly after seven o’clock on the evening of Sunday 3 July,West was charged with her murder.
It was in the wake of that final charge that West began work on his memoir of the Scottish girl. It was almost certainly the only way he could find to convince himself that he had not killed her, an attempt to deny what may have been – for him – the one significant killing in his career, the one death which, in retrospect, he may have regretted. Shortly after he returned to Winson Green Prison, he began to write, and to tell his solicitor again, that his first wife Rena was responsible, although he also told Ogden: ‘I don’t think Rena would have done it absolutely deliberate. I think she was so drugged out of her brains and everything else, drink and everything else, that she stabbed Ann.’They were West’s own lies, devised for himself, his flimsy protection against the evil of his own actions.
By the middle of July West had decided that he had to ‘tell the truth’. ‘If I’m to have any chance in this case at all,’ he confided to Ogden in an interview, ‘I gotta go back to the police and tell the truth. I know exactly what the truth is . . .What was killing it before was that I wasn’t prepared to admit knowing about Ann.’ West’s private despair at his wife’s coldness then came tumbling out, as he blamed her and her father for the deaths in Cromwell Street.‘Why should I take the rap?’ he demanded suddenly. ‘Rose broke every promise she made to me.’
Frederick West then proceeded to admit, for the first time, the depraved sexual element in the killings, adding, ‘I don’t know if the girls were cut up at Cromwell Street, or somewhere else’.West suspected, he told his solicitor, that it was ‘somewhere else’, and he denied flatly that he had ever buried anyone at his house. ‘I didn’t know anything about any of the girls in Cromwell Street.’ Minutes afterwards he contradicted himself completely, explaining: ‘All the girls I got on great with. But there was never any sexual relationship with them . . . I used to talk fucking dirty to them and they’d talk dirty back.’
But he insisted that he had never even met Lucy Partington or ‘the Dutch girl’, suggesting that ‘Rose’s father’ must have picked them up on his way home.
In the past Frederick West had never told the police that his wife played any part in the killing of his daughter Heather, beyond once dropping the remark: ‘I ain’t in this on me own, you know.’ Throughout his police interviews, until he retracted every confession, he had stuck firmly to the story: ‘Heather was sheer accident – her, you know, just happened at that moment . . . Heather just stood there with her hands in her pockets flipping her trousers like that and laughing at me . . . that was the end of everything.’
Now West transformed totally this version of events. In his interviews with Howard Ogden at Winson Green, he specifically blamed Rosemary West for Heather’s murder, claiming that his wife had confessed to him on their last night together in Cromwell Street that she alone had been responsible. ‘I didn’t ask any details,’ he said, because ‘I didn’t want to know what had happened. I thought the world of her. The main problem I’ve had,’ West went on, anxious as always to cast himself in the most favourable light,‘is that I swore on the kids’ lives that I wouldn’t shop Rose for what she did.’ He continued:
Rose always had this thing against Heather, that Heather smelled. She always used to say: ‘You can smell that little bitch, that dirty bitch.’ . . . Rose hated Heather, right from an early age . . . She didn’t kill her on the spur of the moment, that’s obvious, because she moved her out of the house. She did exactly the same with Stephen, after she attacked him, moved him out without me knowing.
But on the night before the police started to excavate their garden, Rosemary West had told him: ‘“That thing’s out in the garden.” . . . I said: “What do you mean?” She said: “Heather, I killed her”.’ And then:
Well, I must have sat there for ten minutes, absolutely shocked, gone. I couldn’t even think. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. Me mind had gone . . . I thought Rose was just going to say: ‘I strangled her and buried her in the garden, fully clothed, dressed, everything.’ Then she says: ‘Oh, she’s cut up. Her head’s cut off.’ I give a few deep breaths and said: ‘What do you mean?’ She said: ‘I had to cut her up to get her back home in a dustbin . . . I brought her home in a pushchair.’ That was the trolley she used for shopping.
This time West explained that Heather had left Cromwell Street with a girl ‘with a red miniskirt on’. But:‘What I didn’t know was that Rose had offered Heather £600 to go away’, but that Heather had rung him a week later ‘because the money hadn’t arrived’. In this version West claimed that it was only then that ‘Heather was killed somewhere else’. In this version he insisted that it was his wife – and not he – who had been in contact with Heather after she left Cromwell Street, and that she had told him to tell the children, and anyone else who asked, that he had seen the sixteen-year-old regularly over the years. ‘I just followed through what Rose told me,’ he claimed.
Like so many of Frederick West’s other versions of events this, too, was a tissue of lies. But it did contain some grains of truth. In particular, West maintained to Ogden that his daughter was a lesbian. ‘Heather hated men. There was no doubt about that. She made it quite clear to me, she hated men near her. I had nothing against Heather being a lesbian, if that’s what she chose to be,’ he went on.‘She was floating between one and the other all the time, and I always said if you get a good man it’ll settle you down . . . ’cause all Heather said when I picked her up from school was what knickers the teachers had on.’ Significantly, West also told Ogden that he ‘always suspected’ that Heather West was not his child, ‘and that Rose was already pregnant when she came to me at Lake House.That’s why she was in such a hurry and that.’
These last assertions are significant. For there is no doubt that Frederick West excused himself from guilt about killing the sixteen-year-old both by telling himself that she was not his child in the first place, and at the same time consoling himself with the thought that it was ‘a father’s right’ to sexually initiate his daughter. Taken together with his claim that his wife was responsible for Heather West’s killing, they lead to the inescapable conclusion that he and his wife together attacked and murdered their firstborn child on that wet June morning seven years before.
As July wore on, West became more and more voluble about his wife’s sadistic sexuality and her rapacious appetite. ‘It would be easier if people asked me who Rose didn’t have sex with, not who she did. I mean, there were so many’, explaining:‘This making love to her after every nigger. Load of fucking rubbish. I had less sex with Rose than anybody, because she was at it all day with different blokes, at it all night with different blokes. When I did join the queue . . . Rose provoked me all the time. If I’d attacked anybody it would have been Rose . . . It never stopped. It didn’t stop at all.’
By the third week of July West’s desperation was becoming ever more evident.‘I don’t put in to see nobody,’ he told Ogden.‘I don’t want to see nobody. I’ve got nothing to say to nobody.’ He did not know anything about the killings. He had made it all up to protect his wife, and now she had abandoned him.
All that was preoccupying West now was his new vision of his wife.‘All I am worried about is Rose getting out, because if Rose is out, Rose is gone, and they ain’t gonna find her.What she thought is that they’d have left her at the house, and she’d have just vanished.’ West was also convinced, he claimed, that she would kill again.‘She can’t stop.’
Now West knew nothing about the dismemberment of the bodies, nothing about the abuse of his children, nothing about incest.‘You didn’t put a bull to a calf that was his child and all that,’ he told Ogden. ‘To touch your own kids, your own daughters, it was disgusting.’West denied attacking Anne Marie, and maintained that the attack on his other daughter had been carried out by his wife with a vibrator. ‘Rose tried to break her in. Got too close to me coming home. Walked out and left her there in disgust.’ It was another tissue of lies, but in revealing the depths of his wife’s depravity West was also revealing his own.
‘Rose knows the answer to it all,’ he told Ogden on 22 July.‘Even the police don’t think I done it on me own.’ Flatly denying that he knew anything at all about ritual killing – ‘never had anything to do with it’ – West went on to explain: ‘There’s no video of Rose touching a girl, for a simple bloody reason – ’cause Rose didn’t want to show the bloody cruelty of what she was doing to these girls.’ His wife kept a green hardback diary behind the meter box in which she kept a sheet of paper which marked where the girls were buried. ‘Rose wanted it wrote down, she enjoyed this. Rose wrote everything down, always.’ There was also, West insisted, an audiotape attached to the back of the diary ‘for her ears only’.
On Wednesday 27 July, the day before he was due to make his next court appearance with his wife, West gave Ogden his last interview, the fifteenth in the series that had begun ten weeks before.They discussed, as they had on many occasions, some of the witness statements made to the police during the case, and West told Ogden that he could not ‘see anything in rape’. Nevertheless, he went on to confess: ‘If a girl says no, the only thing I had out of it was more of a challenge to get her.’ Then, quite suddenly, he paused in the middle of the interview and said:‘Fuck me, I should go to hell for what I’ve done.’
A few days after his court appearance on Thursday 28 July, Frederick West dispensed with the services of Howard Ogden as his solicitor and replaced him with the Bristol firm of Bobbetts Mackan.West had discovered that Ogden was offering the contents of their taped conversations for publication, and he was concerned that his confidences had been broken.
More important still, he had no wish for his rejection of his wife to reach her ears. No matter what he might have said in private, in a confidential conversation with his solicitor, including that he ‘would give evidence against her’, West did not wish to say so publicly. Part of him still hoped for a reconciliation; in part of Frederick West’s mind, at least, his wife was still Jane Eyre.
Typically though, Rosemary West was not the only woman in Frederick West’s thoughts. Janet Leach, the thirty-eight-year-old independent observer who had been present for eighty of his interviews with the police, had been almost the only woman – apart from Detective Constable Savage – with whom West had been in regular contact during his months in Gloucester Police Station. Though she had eventually been replaced as the ‘appropriate adult’, she had sat alone with West in his cell many times during the times of his police interrogations. West had confessed to her that he was ‘protecting’ his wife, and ‘that he would do anything’ for her. ‘They’d made a pact that he would take the blame for everything,’ Leach recalled seventeen months afterwards. ‘And Rose would never say anything.’
Janet Leach may have come closer to glimpsing the real nature of Frederick West than many other people. He had confessed to her that he ‘wasn’t very good at sex but that she was very demanding and he would do anything for her’; and Leach saw at first hand how upset West had become when his wife had been arrested and charged in April. ‘He just said that the police were getting too close and they would find out that Rose was involved.’ West admitted to her that the dead girls in the cellar of Cromwell Street were ‘some of Rose’s mistakes. It was all sexual. It wasn’t meant to happen.’ He had gone on to claim that his younger brother John had been involved ‘a lot’ in the abductions and murders – indeed that he and Rena West had killed Ann McFall, that there were ‘another twenty’ victims, including Mary Bastholm, whose remains were ‘on the farm’.
After she had ceased to be the ‘appropriate adult’ during his interviews, on 7 May, Janet Leach had kept in touch with West by letter. ‘Fred asked me to keep in touch – about the other bodies,’ she would explain later. After his transfer to Winson Green Prison, Leach went to visit every week. And as the months wore on he took to telephoning her three nights a week and ‘sometimes every night’. Leach believed that West would confide in her. ‘He said he would disclose to me where the other bodies were buried.’ But he never did so.
In the absence of his wife, Frederick West had set about grooming Janet Leach exactly as he had groomed so many other women throughout his life. He carefully seduced her into his own world with his subtle mixture of confidences and flattery, making the mother of five feel that she alone understood him, and that she alone was capable of helping him. The strain of her involvement with him was to bring about a stroke a month after she stopped seeing him at Gloucester Police Station, but she had recovered sufficiently to start visiting him in Birmingham in July. ‘I think he thought I reminded him of someone,’ she was to remember. That is exactly what West told her, as he had told more than one other woman in the past – that she reminded him of Ann McFall.
West was steadily becoming more and more distressed. And on Monday 1 August, he was visited by Dr James McMasters, the Winson Green Prison medical officer and psychiatrist. ‘He said he felt his solicitor had manipulated him,’ Dr McMasters was to recall more than a year later. ‘He felt uncertain as to how he was going to cope with the court case,’ and ‘protested his innocence,’ claiming that ‘he had been telling lies to the police and not giving them full information about who he suspected was involved.’As the interview wore on, Dr McMasters watched West become ‘calm and quite rational’.West had resumed his favourite trick of presenting a sane face to the world. Dr McMasters, who was to visit Frederick West thirty-nine times during the next five months, was to reach the conclusion that ‘he was not mentally ill, and was not at risk of harming himself ’.
That opinion was not shared by West’s eldest son Stephen, who insisted later that he had ‘told anybody that would listen that Dad was going to kill himself ’. West may have been more honest with his son than with anyone. In the first weeks after his arrest, he had confessed to Stephen that he had killed all the victims, but warned him: ‘When they start telling you that snuff movies are involved, don’t believe them. It was not quite like that.’ But West admitted to necrophilia, telling him:‘I only made love to them when I thought they were dead.’West never explained why he did it, claiming only: ‘I’ve done it all.’ As Stephen West was to write after his father’s death: ‘I believe that what he told me then was the truth.’
One other fact that was increasingly preying on Frederick West’s mind was the deaths of many other young women. In mid-July, West had intimated to a prison officer and a probation officer that he had killed more than the dozen victims, more than the dozen for whose murder he was awaiting trial. He had hinted that there might be eight ‘extra’ girls, and had rambled on about his wife wrapping their bodies in white plastic mackintoshes. West suggested that although some were in Gloucester and Cheltenham, others were further afield, in places where he and his wife had been on holiday, including Snowdonia.
West told his son, too, that he had killed ‘many’ more young women, suggesting that he did indeed have a ‘farm’ twenty-five minutes’ drive from Cromwell Street. He also hinted to others that he had killed while on trips away from Gloucester on his own. But he steadfastly refused to tell the police. West still liked to surround himself with secrets. ‘There’s only one person who’s going to tell them about it, and that’s me,’ he told Stephen.
In Winson Green Prison Stephen West watched his father gradually deteriorate.‘The second time I went to see Dad in prison,’ the twenty-one-year-old was to write later,‘he told me bluntly:“If they take their eyes off me, I’ll be gone.” I told him he shouldn’t do anything like that, but every time I went to see him he used to cry for the first twenty minutes.’ In his son’s mind, Frederick West had recognised that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, and could not face it, any more than he could face being separated from his wife and his house. ‘I don’t think he could accept that life as it was in Cromwell Street was over,’ his son was to explain. ‘He said he loved Rose and missed her.’
For four months Frederick West kept the worst of his growing depression at bay by devoting his time and energy to the task of completing his memoir of Ann McFall. I Was Loved by an Angel, this began, though he had given it no title. In the weeks after his fifty-third birthday in September he laboured to write out a fair copy in longhand, after painstakingly making a rough copy first. Over and over again West wrote: ‘Our love, it was so true and faithful and would last for ever . . .The girls were my treasures, and now I had Anna. What a gold-mine. All I had to do was to get a house and love them. It was so easy . . . Anna and I had no secrets from each other.’
In the last months of his life Frederick West was gripped by the passionate desire to prove to himself and to the world that he could not have killed the one woman who had truly loved him, even though he had told his son that he had killed her ‘because he loved her and couldn’t have her’.
Now casting himself as a doomed lover in a romantic tragedy, West wrote that shortly after Ann McFall had discovered that she was pregnant with his child they had returned together to ‘the same spot where Anna became pregnant’. ‘Just then a shooting star went across the sky,’ West wrote. ‘I said to Anna: “Make a wish.” Anna looked at me.Anna said:“I have no need to make a wish upon a star . . . I have you”.’ Struggling to convey his sense of loss, he went on: ‘Anna’s hair and eyes shone in the moonlight. She was so beautiful and so in love with me and our baby, and I was so in love with them: both of them.’
West was re-inventing his alternative universe, redrawing his internal mental map, in an effort to give himself some peace.And as Anna McFall’s story began to draw to its close, so, too, did his life. On the final page of his memoir, West did not describe the young Scottish woman’s death, however. Instead, he chose to conceal the truth once more, taking refuge again in romanticisation. He brought his 30,000-word manuscript towards its close with the words:‘Anna gave her life for me without thought for her own life. Her love was so strong for her baby and me. I have no idea how Anna died, but all I do know is Anna died loving me. And Anna knew that I loved her more than words can say.’
This, too, was another jumbled version of the truth. For Frederick West left another document with his memoir which hinted at yet another explanation of Ann McFall’s death. ‘The end of this story,’ he wrote on a single sheet of lined paper from a prison exercise book, ‘is in my heart. All I can say is, I never harmed Anna, and Anna gave her life for me to stop a man from making love to her . . . The man who killed Anna will live in hell on earth for a long time.’
In fact, it was Frederick West himself who wanted to escape that hell on earth. By the end of November the balance of his mind was wavering fatally. His description of the death of Ann McFall seemed to allow West to contemplate his own death, and he did so in a lengthy inner conversation with himself, some of which he jotted down.
In one fragment he explained to Janet Leach the reasons for his impending suicide. ‘I have gone to Anna, Heather, Charmaine, Rena, Shirley and my two unborn children who never had a chance to see life or I to see them or hold them . . . I know how the families of the girls feel. I lost 5 in this tragedy.’ He ended the note: ‘I wish to thank Janet for all she did for me . . . Janet looked so much like Anna it was hard not to love her, but it was not right.’
But even though Janet Leach had become an important part of West’s re-drawn world in Winson Green, she could never replace Rosemary West. On his wife’s forty-first birthday in November 1994, West wrote to her, proclaimed his undying love for her. ‘We will always be in love,’ he told her.‘The most wonderful thing in my life is that I met you. How our love was special to us. So love, keep your promises to me.You know what they are.’
Then, after telling his wife that he wanted to be buried beside her, and asking ‘Lay Heather by us, we loved Heather’, West concluded: ‘Well Rose, you will be Mrs West all over the world. That’s wonderful for me and you. I have not got you a present, but all I have is my life. I will give it to you my darling.When you are ready, come to me. I will be waiting for you.’ At the foot of the letter West had drawn a gravestone with the inscription:‘Fred West and Rose West. Rest in peace where no shadow falls. In perfect peace, he waits for Rose, his wife.’ But the letter was never posted.
A fortnight later, on Monday 12 December, the day before his sixth court appearance alongside his wife, he wrote to her again:‘To Rose, as in life and as in death, our love will never die. Rose and I will love for ever in heaven. I will wait for you darling so please come to me.’ West ended his letter with the words: ‘You know I love you only and you love me only. Well the world knows you are my wife and I am your husband, and always will be. You will become a widow. I love you darling, Fred West.’ But that letter, too, went unposted. West was preserving in his mind a romantic image of his wife, an image that could never match the reality.
That became only too clear to West the following morning, Tuesday 13 December, when he saw Rosemary West for the last time. She stood alongside him in the dock at Gloucester Magistrates’ Court, separated from him by two women prison officers. Stone-faced and looking straight at the bench, she ignored him, just as she had done on the five previous occasions. Rosemary West had even asked the officers to tell him that she did not wish to speak to him.
Frederick West kept stealing glances at her, as the details of the twelve charges of murder against him were read out to the court. She did not turn to smile, or even to acknowledge him. She had taken to the role that he himself had given her so completely that she now believed it. She was still the woman to whom he was ‘inextricably knotted’ by a string somewhere beneath his left rib, but now there was apparently no room for him.
Trapped in Cell 8 on D3 landing at Winson Green,West’s whole purpose, his entire way of being, had been destroyed.There was no opportunity to ‘shoot round’ anywhere, no chance for ‘a bit of fun’, no opportunity to visit ‘bunny land’, no prospect of the poacher’s life. Suicide offered an escape from an intolerable captivity, but it also offered what West saw as three other, more subtle attractions. It meant that he would take with him to his grave the details of his other victims and the sites of their graves; it would mean that no one would ever forget him. And, finally, it would offer his wife – so he believed – the chance to get off.
It was this thought, above all others, that convinced West to kill himself. He told his son Stephen so in the last month of his life. ‘He was worried that he would never be with Mum again, and he said that he would give up his life for Mum so that she could live a normal life and be out.’ It was the last gift that he could give the woman who had set out in their life together as the ‘nanny’ for his two children in a grubby caravan in Bishop’s Cleeve. ‘I’ll give my life up,’West told his son,‘so she can have that.’
In the last days of December West confirmed it. He wrote a final note to his wife. ‘To Rose. I loved you for ever. I made mistakes. I am so upset about you being in prison. Please keep your promise to me. I have kept mine.’ The letter ended: ‘I can’t tell what I know.You are all free to go on with whatever you want to, but think of all I did for you all, and never complain. I love all of my children.They were all mine.’ He signed it:‘All my love and kisses to you darling, Fred.’
Frederick West then set about planning his death with all the care he had taken in planning the deaths of so many innocent young women. And there would have been the same sly, ugly grin on his face as he did so. For suicide represented West’s final victory over the world, proof that he was no ‘ordinary domestic murderer’, that he was far more than the smelly, flirty little man that the police had seen him as for so long. In his mind his death would ensure that he would for ever remain shrouded in mystery, a man who took his secrets to the grave, a man who may have killed many, many more women than even the darkest imagination could conceive. His suicide was designed to set him apart, to underline his celebrity. Death was not defeat for West, but the only sure guarantee of his perpetual notoriety. He did not intend to have that denied him.
On the morning of Sunday 1 January 1995 West woke in his small cream-painted cell in Winson Green, and, after washing in the corner sink, dressed in the prison issue clothing of brown jeans and a blue-and-white shirt.The clothes did not fit particularly well. He had lost weight in the seven months he had been in prison, and his hearing had deteriorated so much that he had been fitted with a hearing aid. After breakfast he was allowed out into the prison’s exercise yard, where he took care, as he always did, to be polite to anyone he encountered. The shouts when he passed of ‘Build us a patio, Fred’ and ‘Are the kids getting under your feet?’ had diminished as the months had slipped by, but he still took care never to cause trouble, never to confront anyone.
Back in his cell, West wrote a brief note: ‘To Rose West, Happy New Year darling. All my love Fred West. All my love for ever and ever.’ In just four weeks’ time they would have been married for twenty-three years. Then, shortly after eleven-thirty, he collected his ‘special’ meal of soup and pork chops and went back to his cell. West knew that he would be left alone for at least an hour to eat, but he did not do so. Instead he retrieved a seven-foot-long rope he had made himself, by sewing a prison blanket, then attached it to the severed handles of a prison laundry bag with needle and cotton, plaiting the strips into a cotton strand, a ligature that a poacher would have been proud of.
Balancing on the linen laundry bag, Frederick West then threaded the plaited cotton handles through the bars of the ventilation shaft directly above the door of his cell, tying it as tightly as he always did. Making a noose from the thicker rope, he slipped it over his head and around his neck, then kicked the bag silently away from beneath him. But West did not die at once, as he probably knew that he would not. Instead, he strangled himself ‘for a minute or two’, hanging just a few feet above the floor of his cramped cell. He had chosen to die, and he had chosen how he would die – in a bizarre if unconscious salute to the young women whom he had caused to suffer a similar fate.
Just before 1.05 p.m. a prison officer returned to Frederick West’s cell but could not open the door.The dead weight of his body was holding it shut. When two officers finally managed to push the door open, and cut West down, there was no chance of reviving him. By the time the prison doctor on duty arrived at one-forty, there was nothing to do but pronounce him dead.
One of the letters left in his cell was to his daughter Anne Marie. It ended: ‘When you read this remember me and bear me in your mind, and let the world say what they will. But speak of me as you found me.’ West, once again, outwitted the law. On the wall of his cell he scratched his own proud epitaph. It read: ‘Freddy, the mass murderer from Gloucester’.
West offered no atonement for his wickedness, no apology for the dreadful suffering and humiliation that he had brought on so many young women and their families. The man who had snuffed out the lives of the innocent killed himself not out of despair, or even out of desperation, but out of vanity, a desire to remain mysterious and always to be remembered.
In this, at least, he achieved success, for just as he had predicted to himself that it would, the news of his death made headlines. In the months and years to come, no one was likely to forget that Frederick West had killed himself on New Year’s Day.