THE LAST GAMBLE
‘For behind the wooden wainscots of all the old houses in Gloucester, there were little mouse staircases and secret trapdoors; and the mice run from house to house through those long narrow passages; they can run all over the town without going into the streets.’
BEATRIX POTTER, THE TAILOR OF GLOUCESTER
In the last years of his life Frederick West kept his keys on a ring with a small tag. The tag bore a simple message:‘Heaven doesn’t want me and Hell is afraid I’ll take over.’ And it was not a joke. It was the vainglorious remark of a man who took a terrible pride in his own evil. It is the clearest indication there could be that West killed for pleasure, and that he did so in full command of his senses.
Behind that obsequious little grin lay an intensely vain man who was convinced that he could do whatever he wanted, regardless of the cost in pain and suffering, regardless of the law, regardless of morality.West saw nothing wrong in soiling the world around him with his own lust, or in defacing the lives of vulnerable and naive young women whom fate threw into his path. He viewed such things as his right.
The stain of West’s murderous vanity consumed his own family. It was there that the killing began. Lest anyone forget, his children’s nanny and her unborn child, his first wife and her first child, the young woman who mistakenly thought she might become his third wife and her unborn child, and his eldest child by his second wife, all died at his hands. ‘The ferocity of the assaults will tend to be greater for pre-existing relationships,’ according to the criminal psychologist David Canter.This was certainly so in West’s case.
West killed not only for pleasure. He also killed for convenience. If a young woman who fell into his hands threatened to cause him or his wife a problem, he killed her without hesitation – ‘to sort it out’. Like the jobbing builder that he was, he then treated his victims as if they were no more than a piece of sewage pipe, there to be used and buried. The girl had served her purpose. She deserved nothing more.Then, after his pure and protracted sadism, he killed as he lived – in haste. On such occasions the body was just another ‘job’ to be finished off as quickly as possible, before he nipped home, or back upstairs, for a mug of tea.
But whatever form his murderous activities took, he concealed them in the subtlest way – by donning the mask of the simple-minded ordinary man, anxious to help, never to be feared. He stealthily persuaded the professional social workers, doctors, teachers and policemen who knew him that he could be ignored. ‘Fred had the entire community eating out of his hand,’ in the words of consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Eileen Vizard, FRCPsych. ‘He had groomed every professional he had ever encountered into trusting him. There is a great deal of skill involved in that.’
For also present was an element of perverse sincerity, which cast a spell over almost everyone he met. It was a spell so strong that even his children have remained subject to it. When his first-born child, Anne Marie, was called to identify his body in the mortuary after his suicide on 1 January 1995, she trembled, and wrote later: ‘He wasn’t the dad I knew, the one who I remembered from my early childhood who used to ruffle my hair and tell me that he loved me.’ Another daughter, Mae, wrote: ‘I tried to hate him, but I don’t think I can . . . I just forgave him. Despite everything I still loved him.’ His eldest son Stephen added: ‘When I looked at him lying there on a table at the Coroner’s Court, I said a prayer in my mind. I just said how much I cared for him and how much I wanted to stick by him.’
Frederick West’s youngest children saw their father in this same light in 1996. Talking about him for the first time, Louise West remembered:‘He kissed me good night as any other father.’ For her, ‘he was just my dad and I loved him’. Aged eighteen in November 1996, she then explained:‘His bad side was a bit extreme, as in what I know now from the press, not as how I knew him then. On his good side, he was good and nice because he was my dad. If he gave you anything you treasured it.’
The memory of her father that Louise West treasures most was ‘the funny side’. He ‘was rude and morbid, but always had a sense of humour’, she recalled in the 1990s, with jokes that he ‘used to kick in when you were beginning to think he was getting serious’. She did not recall ever feeling ‘sad or depressed around him’, remembering instead that he used to sing ‘I Want to be Bobby’s Girl’, and used to ‘take the piss out of people’. Most of all she recalled her father as a man who was ‘always doing something’. ‘When he was at work we were at school, and when we were at home he was always at work.’
In fact, Louise West remembered her childhood as ‘very up and down. Dad wasn’t around all the time. He had to go out late and earn money. He was the breadwinner, and therefore demanded respect. He was rather old-fashioned.’ But, speaking in the aftermath of his death, she also acknowledged that ‘things could change drastically at times, up and down, depending on the money situation’. The Wests ‘signed her birthday cards together – although they were written by Mum’. Her parents argued, but even though ‘they had fights, they got on. They argued like parents and they kissed like parents.They loved each other’.
West’s daughter Rosemary, like Louise, speaking for the first time about her family when she was fourteen, also remembered ‘some happy times and some bad’, although she added,‘but doesn’t every family have bad times?’
None of the Wests’ youngest children see their parents solely in a bad light. Even though West was not her natural father, Rosemary spoke of him in the 1990s as if he were, and said, ‘I felt my father loved me. He cuddled me, cared for me and looked after me.’Then in 1996, four years after being separated from him, she added:‘I can remember his face and smile.When he gave me money for all of us to get some sweets down the shop.’
Coping with the knowledge of their father’s crimes has not been easy for any of the Wests’ five youngest children. Rosemary West, for example, accepted that she ‘didn’t really know my dad’ when she thought about it shortly after his death.‘I thought I did, but no. I don’t really know what to think. He was my dad, and what I knew of him was good. Then I hear what he had done, and I’m not so sure.’ Nevertheless, the capacity for mercy and forgiveness among the Wests’ youngest children is striking. ‘I think my mum and dad did love each other,’ Rosemary concluded.‘I suppose they had bad times as well.’
One of the team of residential social workers who looked after the Wests’ youngest children for two years after the Care Orders in 1992, and throughout the revelations of Cromwell Street, wrote afterwards: ‘The children’s fortitude and desire to be ordinary in the face of all that was happening in their lives was an inspiration to those who worked with them.’ And this was in spite of the fact that ‘we heard things and had to tell them things that no kids should ever have to hear, let alone experience’.
Another of the social workers who dealt with the Wests after the 1992 case, and during their arrest in 1994, even pays tribute to the Wests as parents, saying: ‘Despite the atrocities, Mr and Mrs West must have got certain aspects of child care and family life correct, as their younger children are charming, and remarkably normal on the surface, in spite of their experiences.’
The Wests’ youngest child, Lucyanna, thirteen in July 1996, is clear proof of that. At that time she remembered her childhood as a ‘mixture of happy and unhappy times’, although she was less sure whether Frederick West loved her. ‘I wasn’t his best daughter, like Rose or Tara. He didn’t really show if he loved me, or I can’t remember.’ She, too, remembered her parents’ arguments.‘I suppose they must have loved each other at least a little bit, but I’m not sure how much,’ she added, but concluded firmly: ‘I think it is obvious he wasn’t a good man.’
West’s youngest children no longer live in Gloucester, or Gloucestershire, and have been given fresh identities to allow them to restart their lives away from the pressures surrounding their father’s death and their mother’s imprisonment. It is just as well, for even in death Frederick West was still bathed in the macabre.
In March 1995, shortly after his wife had been formally committed for trial on ten counts of murder – having been charged with the murder of her stepdaughter Charmaine in addition to the nine original charges – Frederick West’s body was released for burial. And then two final twists took place in the story of his life.
At ten o’clock in the morning of Wednesday 29 March 1995, West was cremated at Cranley Crematorium in Coventry while a fist-fight raged between reporters and photographers from two rival newspapers. Only Stephen, Mae and Tara West were present to represent the family, although Anne Marie arrived some time after the service.Then, on Friday 3 November, on the very day that four extracts from their father’s interviews with the police were played to the jury at their mother’s trial, Stephen West decided to carry out his father’s wishes and scatter his ashes on the graves of Walter and Daisy West in the churchyard at Much Marcle. In the early hours of the following morning, in an effort to avoid the attentions of the press, he set off with Anne Marie for the Herefordshire village where his father’s life had begun.
There, in the still darkness of a winter’s night, the final drama of West’s life was played out between two of his children. On the way to Much Marcle, Anne Marie told her stepbrother to stop the car, she then grabbed the urn containing her father’s ashes from the back seat and ran off into the darkness. (She later claimed that she wanted to pour her father’s ashes into the same urn that contained the ashes of her mother Rena and stepsister Charmaine.) Stephen West gave chase, and tried unsuccessfully to locate her in the darkness. Finally, he called the police, and a police helicopter found his stepsister in the countryside. His father’s ashes were returned to him, and once again he set off with his stepsister for Much Marcle churchyard. On the way, she seized the urn for a second time and once more disappeared into the darkness. But this time she did not return. Stephen West wrote later:‘She said she’s got this little room in the house with a low-wattage bulb and she’s got the ashes in a corner with other memorabilia.’
Secrets at the dead of night, mysteries to fog the imagination – even in death they were still the stuff of Frederick West’s life. He had taken with him to his grave the secrets of the deaths of so many young women. One of the most disquieting was the fifteen-year-old waitress Mary Bastholm, who went missing at the beginning of 1968. Throughout his initial police interviews West insisted, ‘I have never known the girl, never spoke to the girl in me life’, even though there is considerable evidence that not only was she an acquaintance of Ann McFall, who used to spend time with her at the Pop-In café in Gloucester before her own disappearance in 1967, but she was repeatedly seen with West himself.‘I’m telling you straight, there ain’t no messing, I never knew Mary,’ he continued to protest. It was a tooth that he did not intend to have pulled by the team of investigating officers until he was good and ready. Indeed there are accusations even in recent times, that he indulged his depraved obsessions with child abuse while he was working as an ice-cream seller in Glasgow, the abundance of children as his customers affording him many opportunities, and the accidental death of the three-year-old child he ran over, being a convenient way of ending a troublesome witness to his activities.
In the last months of his life the knowledge that there were other crimes that he might or might not admit to having committed bolstered his sense of power and self-importance, sustaining him through the painful process of writing his memoir of Ann McFall. There was always a strain of pride in his voice when he told the police: ‘I’m not in a counting match . . . To try and get as many as I can.’ It was one of the last controls West had. In fact, as his son Stephen puts it, West knew and the police knew ‘there are more bodies, a lot more’, but ‘no one knows exactly how many’. One reason for his silence was, of course, his relationship with his wife. But that had become less straightforward since the 1992 abuse case.
The case itself was an ‘unpleasant, but rather typical child-abuse case’, in the words of one of the social workers directly involved. They had certainly ‘encountered far worse cases’. At the outset the Wests’ reactions ‘were not unusual from other cases in that they completely denied the allegations’. They took care to cast themselves as they always had, as ordinary, straightforward, working people, and the united and unthreatening front they had presented so successfully for more than twenty years still carried conviction.
Neither Frederick nor Rosemary West struck the social workers as ‘at all challenging’, and neither ‘sought to seriously challenge the care proceedings’. Their attitude depended on the circumstances. They were ‘always respectful, even timid in the face of the court’ – though the social workers now recognise that they had no compunction about breaching the ‘no contact’ order and seeing their children. The Wests, say the social workers, were ‘very skilled at controlling, even manipulating the situation’ by portraying themselves as ‘vulnerable, timid individuals who were being bullied by the Social Services’. One social worker remembered afterwards this even went ‘to the extent that you could feel sorry for them (if the abuse was put to one side)’.
Frederick West took care to treat every figure in authority (or who appeared to be in authority) with an exaggerated subservience. ‘Anyone wearing a suit was greeted with overwhelming respect’, in the words of one social worker, although there were rare occasions when his dark side surfaced. On the day in December 1992 when the final Care Orders were granted in respect of their five youngest children, he walked up to one of the two female social workers and stood very close to her, looking her straight in the eye. He congratulated her on gaining the Order – and the children – but he did it in such a way that ‘it was difficult to determine if he was being sarcastic or threatening’.
On another occasion during the proceedings he said of one of the female social workers:‘I have never seen such an evil person; she is divorced with no children and possibly a man-hater.’ Looking back, the social workers accept that he was ‘astute at identifying those professionals whom he could manipulate and those he could not’. Indeed, they recall one meeting where he confronted both a male and female worker, and although the man asked all the questions, ‘Mr West never took his eyes off and directed all his answers to the female’. If he chose to do so, he could make any social worker feel uncomfortable – ‘which was not the case with Mrs West’.
It was Frederick West who acted as the spokesperson for the couple, but although he always appeared to be in control of the relationship, the social workers suspected that, beneath the surface, ‘Mrs West was perhaps a much more dominant, stronger character than she appeared to be’. But they recognise that it was West who drove the relationship, he who had ensured that their abuse would never surface, he who had orchestrated their lives.They now insist: ‘Anyone with the cunning and adroit character of Fred West could operate in the modern era undetected.’
Throughout the 1992 case the Wests were at pains to present a united front. The social workers dealing with their case cannot remember a single occasion when they did not appear together, ‘being as one in all respects’, and embracing in the dock when the case against them collapsed in June 1993. But in the aftermath of the case strains began to appear in the Wests’ relationship.
Frederick West had always treated each of his children as though they were his possessions, and decided that if he could not see them without being supervised by someone from the local authority, he did not want to see them at all. Rosemary West, by contrast, was anxious to keep in contact with her children, no matter what conditions might be imposed by the Social Services Department responsible for them. But, as always, she bowed to her husband’s wishes and agreed not to see them at all. It was the first true breach in the intricate tapestry of shared lust and desire that had bound husband and wife together for two decades.
Their daughter Mae insisted at the time that her mother, in the wake of the case, even contemplated leaving her father. ‘She went upstairs and packed one day after he came home, but he crept upstairs to listen outside the door – as he always did – and persuaded her not to.’ West had not lost his ultimate control over his wife. Indeed, he would not finally do so until she was removed from his care entirely by his imprisonment after their last night together in February 1994.
From that moment onwards Frederick West, the man who liked to be called ‘Fox’ – ‘’cause no one can ever work me out’ – accepted his fate, and accepted it completely.Throughout the hours of police interrogations, he never once incriminated the woman whom he insisted ‘would not harm anybody . . . I mean, Rose didn’t have a violent nature at all’. Even when he privately retracted his initial confessions, telling Howard Ogden that she had been responsible, he then changed his mind again, wrapping himself once more in his own inner narrative of their love-story.‘I was so locked up in Rose, for what reason I still don’t know,’ he told the police, continuing: ‘we were mentally locked into each other in a big way . . . And we still are at this moment.’
Frederick West’s calculation had been that his suicide would ensure his wife’s release. Rosemary West seized upon the idea and did everything in her power to convince the world that this was true. His suicide was his last bit of ‘sorting out’, his last gift. And when she reached her trial for murder at Winchester Crown Court on Tuesday 3 October 1995, part of her was still convinced that his plan to save her would work.
Sixteen days after her trial began, when she gave evidence in her own defence from the witness box, in which she denied meeting many of the innocent young women who met their deaths at her hands, she was still clinging to that conviction. She had not budged four days later, when the jury heard her husband’s tape-recorded confessions to the police, all of which specifically excluded her. In her mind, she believed the confessions meant that there had to be ‘a shadow of doubt in the jury’s mind’, a doubt that would ensure her acquittal. In fact, it was her, and her husband’s, last miscalculation.
Ironically, Rosemary West was betrayed by another woman.The doubt on which she and her husband depended was cast from the jury’s mind, in part at least, by the last woman to play a significant role in Frederick West’s life – Janet Leach, the ‘appropriate adult’ during eighty of his police interviews. It was her evidence, suggesting that there had been a pact between the Wests, a plan that he should take the blame, which finally convinced the jury that Rosemary had been involved in the killings.West’s fascination with women, his inability to resist the possibility of a seduction, even when he was in prison and charged with murder, tipped the scales. In that sense Rosemary West was convicted by reason of Frederick West’s own lust. Janet Leach’s role in West’s interviews, and her subsequent experiences, were dramatised in a harrowing two-part TV production, entitled Appropriate Adult, in 2011.
At Winchester Crown Court on the afternoon of Tuesday 21 November 1995, the jury of seven men and four women (one juror having been stood down during the trial) reached unanimous verdicts that Rosemary West had killed her firstborn child Heather, her husband’s stepdaughter Charmaine, and Shirley Robinson. Shortly before lunch on the following day they announced precisely the same verdicts on her guilt in the cases of the seven other young women whose dismembered and mutilated bodies had been recovered from her small semi-detached Edwardian villa in Cromwell Street. Common sense, in the jury’s opinion, dictated that ‘she must have known’. The trial judge, the Honourable Mr Justice Mantell, sentencing her to ten life sentences, concluded with the words: ‘If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.’
Four months later, on Tuesday 19 March 1996, the Court of Appeal in London agreed with the jury’s decision, and refused Rosemary West’s application to appeal against her verdict.The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, Mr Justice Mitchell and Mr Justice Newman concluded their formal judgement, delivered less than a fortnight later, with the words:‘The applicant and Fred were in the habit of sexually and sadistically abusing young girls in the cellar of their house for their joint pleasure.’They ended:‘The jury had the advantage of hearing and seeing the applicant give evidence and be cross-examined. Clearly they rejected her evidence. We fully understand their doing so. The concept of all these murders and burials taking place at the applicant’s home and concurrently grave sexual abuse of other young girls being committed by both husband and wife together, without the latter being party to the killings is, in our view, clearly one the jury were entitled to reject. The evidence in its totality was overwhelming.’