GONE TO THE DEVIL
‘When all the blandishments of life are gone
The coward sneaks away to death, the brave live on.’
MARTIAL, EPIGRAMS
The life of Frederick Walter Stephen West came officially to its end on Friday 12 July 1996 in the unlikely Gothic splendor of the Birmingham Victoria Law Courts, once the site of the city’s assizes. A jury of six men and three women, sitting before the Coroner Dr Richard Whittington, formally decided – by a majority of eight to one – that West had indeed killed himself just before one o’clock on New Year’s Day 1995, in his cell at Winson Green Prison.
Over two days, the jury had heard the ‘infinite pains’ West had gone to in his determination to take his life. As mentioned earlier, he had volunteered to mend his fellow prisoners’ shirts, thereby giving him access to a needle and thread. He had secretly sewn a thick eighty-eight-inch long rope from the hem of a green prison blanket and then attached that rope to plaited loops made from the handles of the laundry bags the shirts for repair had come in, using his poacher’s knots.
The stealth West had brought to his life, he brought to his death. As already described, slipping the noose around his neck – moments after a prison officer had glanced into his cell – he had not risked standing on a chair. The noise of his kicking it away might have attracted attention – so that an officer would have come to save his life. Instead, he had climbed on to the laundry bag full of shirts, tied the thin white strips attached to his thicker, sewn rope to a ventilation grille above his cell door, and silently pushed the bag away from beneath his feet, leaving his body suspended two feet above the floor of his cell.
In the words of the pathologist Dr Peter Acland, Frederick West was ‘dead almost instantaneously,’ certainly ‘within one or two minutes’, the supply of blood and oxygen to his brain fatally cut off causing cerebral anoxyia. He would have known exactly how long it would take to die. He had seen so many innocent young people die in this same way. And, as his son Stephen put it after the verdict, he knew ‘how to cheat the law’.
Like a thief in the night, Frederick West stole away from life.
There was no suicide note, just a cardboard box on the small table in his cell containing a few papers. There was his memoir, jumbled with notes to himself, and letters – to Janet Leach, to his children and his grandchildren, and most important of all, to his wife Rosemary West.
‘Our love will never die,’ West had written, ‘Rose and I will love for ever in heaven. I will wait for you darling. So please come to me.’
On another note, meant for her forty-first birthday, West had written,‘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 to come to me I will be waiting for you.’ It was perhaps, a sign that the last element of the pact they had reached ten months before was suicide.
As mentioned earlier, at the foot of the letter to his wife he had drawn a simple gravestone. It bore the inscription: ‘In loving memory Fred West, Rose West’. Underneath was printed in capital letters: ‘Rest in peace where no shadow falls. In perfect peace he waits for Rose his wife.’