She was almost certainly tied up, probably with binds made from her own clothes. In the form of bondage that excited Fred and Rose, the victim had to be completely helpless, then tormented to see how much pain they could endure. Lynda either died during this sexual torture, or was murdered because Fred and Rose could not afford to let her go after what they had done to her – they certainly did not want to give her the chance to talk to the police, as they had with Caroline Owens.
When Lynda was finally dead, the Wests turned to the job of covering up their crime. Rose sorted through Lynda’s possessions. She threw away some of her clothes and may have tried to burn others. Those clothes that she liked, Rose kept for herself. Fred disposed of the corpse.
There was an old inspection pit in the garage behind the house, a rectangular concrete hole for working under cars – a ready-made grave. Fred claimed in police interviews that he only dismembered his victims because it meant he could bury their remains more easily. This time the grave was quite big enough to lay Lynda’s body out full-length. However, cutting women up must have excited Fred, because he went ahead and dismembered her body anyway, even though there was no practical reason for doing so.
From examining the marks on Lynda’s femur bones, it seems that he used a sharp knife for the work, and, feeling secure in his own home, where he would not be disturbed and where there was no need to rush, Fred went further than ever in the dismemberment. He disarticulated her legs at the hip, dissected her hands and feet, cut off her fingers at the joints, and removed many of her toes, her kneecaps, a breastbone, seven ribs and twenty-five wrist and ankle bones. Fred later said he wanted to ‘make sure she was dead’, so he almost certainly cut off her head as well (although because some of the cervical vertebrae were never recovered, it is not possible to know for sure whether this happened).
Five cervical vertebrae bones, fingers, toes, kneecaps and parts of the wrist were kept aside, probably as mementos. Fred placed the rest of Lynda’s remains into the inspection pit. He dropped her decapitated head in with a band of tape still wrapped around it. He also put into the hole the other bits and pieces of torture: loops of string and fragments of her clothes, some burned and some knotted, and then filled the inspection pit with earth and debris.
Two weeks went by, and Lynda’s parents had heard nothing. On the third Saturday after she had left home, her mother went looking for her. Mrs Gough asked around the town, talking to Lynda’s friends, and her supervisor at work, until her enquiries led her to a tall narrow house in Cromwell Street. A young couple came to the door. June Gough recognised Rose West as the woman who had taken her daughter out for a drink a few weeks earlier. She asked if they had seen Lynda. At first Fred and Rose were reluctant to admit knowing anything about her whereabouts. Then, as they were chatting on the doorstep, Mrs Gough noticed that Rose was wearing Lynda’s slippers. When she pointed this out, Rose admitted that Lynda had stayed with them briefly, but had now gone.
June Gough looked behind Fred and Rose to the back garden. Hanging on the washing line were several items of clothing belonging to Lynda. Rose said that she had left them behind. They then said that she had been looking after Anna Marie, but that she had hit the child so hard that they had told her to leave. (The truth, of course, was that Rose was the one who continued to abuse her stepdaughter. A few months after this, in July 1973, Anna Marie fainted at a swimming baths. During a medical check-up afterwards, scratches and bruises were noticed around both her breasts. Anna Marie explained the marks by saying: ‘Mummy does this.’) Fred and Rose maintained that Lynda had been talking about going to Weston-super-Mare, the seaside resort near Bristol.
June Gough walked away from Cromwell Street not knowing what had happened. Some time later she and her husband went to Weston-super-Mare to look for their daughter. They asked at the job centre to see if she was registered, but were told that that was confidential information. It would be twenty-one years before she discovered the truth. During that time she contacted various organisations, including the Salvation Army, in the hope that she would find her, but Lynda was never officially registered with the police as a missing person, and, again, there was no organised search for her.
In those years Mrs Gough often walked past 25 Cromwell Street on her way to the shops. One day she noticed that the front entrance to the cellar had been bricked up, and found herself shuddering, not really knowing why, but experiencing an intuitive feeling of dread. She never went past the house again.
Within Number 25, Lynda’s disappearance was explained to the lodgers by Fred and Rose. One morning Rose came and sat on David Evans’ bed. She said that Lynda had hit the West children and that, because of this, she would not be coming back to the house again.
Four months after Fred and Rose had walked free from court for abducting and assaulting Caroline Owens, a crime punished only by a small fine, they had murdered a young girl and escaped with no penalty at all.
11
THE CHARNEL-HOUSE
Carol Ann Cooper was not a very happy fifteen-year-old. Her parents separated when she was three. She lived with her mother at first, but when Mrs Cooper died, Carol went to live with her father, Colin, in Worcester. He had been in the Royal Air Force, had remarried and was working as an insurance salesman, but soon found that he was unable to look after Carol and placed her into care. By 1973, she was living at the Pines Children’s Home in Bilton Road, Worcester, and had the distinct feeling that nobody loved her. A pretty, intelligent teenager with bright blue eyes, she was known as ‘Caz’ and had used a needle and ink to tattoo that nickname on her forearm.
On Saturday 10 November 1973, Carol, her boyfriend Andrew Jones and a large group of friends visited the Odeon cinema in the Warndon area of Worcester. After the film, they all had fish and chips and then went to a pub, where Carol drank bitter orange. At around 9 P.M. Andrew took Carol to the bus stop: she was spending the weekend with her grandmother and he was going to see her off. ‘Carol and me had been getting a bit niggly with each other,’ he said later. ‘She put her arms around me and asked me to kiss her, but I wouldn’t. I was still feeling a bit niggly. She was standing opposite me. I think she was crying and I went over to her and made it up.’ Andrew then gave his girlfriend eighteen and a half pence to pay for her bus fare and to buy some cigarettes; Carol climbed aboard a number 15 bus and the teenagers waved goodbye to each other, looking forward to their next date. It was 9:15 P.M.; Andrew never saw Caz again.
It is not known for sure how she vanished; Carol did not live to tell the story. But it seems likely that a young couple offered her a lift that winter night. What happened next can be deduced from the condition of Carol’s remains, found at 25 Cromwell Street more than twenty years later.
If there were strange noises that night from the cellar of the house, then the lodgers who lived upstairs thought little of it. The landlord, Fred, was an industrious man who often worked at odd hours. He had recently been enlarging the cellar, and had dug down past the foundations to the main drain. Now a man could stand upright in the cellar without banging his head. He had carried out all the work himself, using just a pick and shovel to move literally tons of earth. He was also in the process of pulling down the garage behind the house to build an extension using, among other oddments he picked up, a railway sleeper as part of the foundations. To save time and work, he also built directly on to the wall of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Fred never seemed to stop, and loud noises were common at all hours of the night.
When the cellar door was closed, a band of surgical tape was wrapped around Carol’s head, gagging the terrified girl. Her limbs were bound with cord and pieces of braided cloth were fastened under her arms. Heavy wooden beams supported the ceiling, and in one of these were a number of neatly drilled holes. Fred later claimed that he fixed hooks into the holes and thereby suspended the bodies of his live victims. Carol may well have been strung up on a hook so that she was suspended above the floor. How long she dangled there, and
what manner of torture she suffered, can only be imagined. She was undoubtedly used as a sexual toy by Fred and Rose, and subjected to extreme sado-masochistic perversions. She eventually died, probably by suffocation or strangulation, either as a result of what had been done to her, or because Fred and Rose could not risk setting her free.
There are two theories as to where Fred dismembered the bodies of his victims. Fred’s son Steve claims his father told him this was done at a derelict farmhouse outside Cheltenham, explaining that he could make as much noise and mess as he liked there. Steve further claims that Fred said he transported the corpses between Cromwell Street and the farmhouse in large fibreglass water tanks stolen from the Wingate factory where he worked. There has also been an unproved allegation that he committed sex acts on the bodies at the farmhouse.
But the police, and their forensic advisers, believe the victims were killed and dismembered at Cromwell Street, over the holes that had been dug for their burial. This is what Fred himself said in contradictory conversations while in custody.
The ‘farmhouse theory’, if it can be called that, is an interesting one, however. Like much of what Fred said, it is probably part fact and part fiction, and therefore contains an intriguing element of truth. The victims found at Cromwell Street, including Carol Cooper, were almost certainly murdered and dismembered at the house, but it seems likely that a farmhouse did figure in Fred’s crimes in some way, and may indeed have been the scene of other murders that have never been discovered.
He removed her legs at the hip, leaving deep gouge marks in her left upper thighbone, and cut off her head between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. An unusual gouge mark in the skull suggests that Carol was stabbed in the head – this could have happened either before she died or while Fred was dismembering her. He had already dug a pit on the right-hand side of the cellar, three feet deep with a step halfway down. He placed her jumbled remains, and the means of her torture, into this hole. The gag that had prevented her screams was still wrapped around her head; pieces of rope and knotted binds were also buried. As with the earlier victims, Fred did not bury all of Carol’s remains: parts of her hands and feet, one of the cervical vertebrae and a breastbone were kept back.
Carol’s sudden disappearance was suspicious. She had run away several times before, as her stepmother told the police, but it was odd that she had not taken any of her belongings with her this time. Carol was properly registered as a missing person, and West Mercia police made extensive enquiries in the Worcester area, but they found no trace. There was no reason to think she had met her end almost thirty miles away in Gloucester.
Lucy Partington was from an upper-middle-class background, very different to Carol Ann Cooper’s. Her father, Roger, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Margaret, worked as an architect. One of Lucy’s uncles was the novelist Kingsley Amis, later Sir Kingsley, and she had played as a child with his son, Martin, who also became a famous writer. By the Christmas of 1973 Lucy was aged twenty-one, and in her final year at Exeter University where she was studying medieval English. She was a serious, pious young woman who had recently converted to the Roman Catholic faith. She did not have a boyfriend. The only factor that Lucy had in common with Carol Ann Cooper was that both sets of parents had separated.
That Christmas Lucy returned home to spend the holiday at her mother’s house in the picturesque Cotswold village of Gretton, near Cheltenham. She went to a party at a neighbour’s house, watched a rugby match with her family, and attended midnight mass, but mostly Lucy spent her evenings at home, curled up in front of the log fire, reading Wuthering Heights and savouring the peace and quiet. On the morning of 27 December 1973, Margaret Partington briefly looked in on her daughter before leaving for work. Lucy was asleep, enjoying a lay-in. Her mother never saw her again.
Later that day Lucy rose and dressed in pink flared denim jeans, a pink shirt, sweater, brown shoes, knee-length socks and a rust-coloured raincoat, and went into the centre of Cheltenham with her brother, David. They split up, and at about eight o’clock that evening, Lucy went to visit her friend, Helen Render, at her home in the suburb of Pittville, not far from the Cheltenham racecourse.
Helen had been disabled from birth, and was confined to a wheelchair. She and Lucy, whom she knew affectionately as ‘Luce the Moose’, had been close friends since meeting at Pates’ Grammar School’s history group four years earlier. Lucy had been very active at Pates’, appearing in the school’s 1968 production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.
Lucy thought of Helen’s house as her second home, and had been going out of her way to see Helen during the holidays because her friend had not been feeling well. On the evening of 27 December, the girls talked about their shared interest in medieval art, and Lucy composed a letter of application for a postgraduate course at London’s Courtauld Institute, admitting that she did not expect to be accepted. Helen’s mother gave her a stamp, and Lucy left the house at 10:15 P.M. to walk to the bus stop on the Evesham Road, planning to post her application on the way. It was understood that if she missed the bus home to Gretton she could come back to the house and Lucy’s father would give her a lift home.
The bus stop was only a three-minute walk from the Render house, but it was a lonely spot next to Marle Hill Park and Lucy was often the only person waiting there. Sometimes the bus drivers did not see her in the dark and drove straight past. Lucy could have gone back to the house and asked Helen’s father for a lift, but it was late and she did not want to bother him.
As fate would have it, she was waiting on the A435 trunk road, the route Fred and Rose used when they travelled between Gloucester and Bishop’s Cleeve. They often visited the village, especially during Christmas week, and were probably driving home with their children when they saw Lucy standing at the bus stop. It is unlikely that Lucy would have accepted a lift unless she felt confident they were a normal family group. She was a cautious girl, and would have been particularly wary of lone men because another of her old school friends, Ruth Owen, had been frightened a few years earlier when a dark-haired man fitting the general description of Fred tried to lure her into his car.
Neither was she the sort of girl who would have gone to Cromwell Street willingly, so what happened to her in that car is probably similar to what happened to Caroline Owens: she may have been knocked unconscious and then gagged and held down by Rose as they drove into the city. She was then no doubt quickly bundled inside. It was not a very festive house that Lucy found herself in, nothing like her own cosy home at Gretton. It was a seedy sort of place, decorated in a hodge-podge of half-finished alterations distinctly lacking in Christmas cheer.
Lucy was pushed down into the cellar, where she was bound and gagged with lengths of adhesive surgical tape, three-quarters of an inch wide, together with pieces of cloth. The surgical tape was wrapped around her head until it formed an oval mask over her face. Her limbs were restrained with cord, knotted in place. There is little doubt that Lucy was sexually tortured, as the other girls had been, and again died either as a result of her injuries or because the Wests could not risk letting her go.
Lucy’s ordeal may have carried on for a very long time. Part of the Crown’s case against Rose would later be that she and Fred kept Lucy tied up in the cellar, and used her as a sexual plaything, for anything up to seven days before she was finally murdered. The cellar at the time was a dark, dank hole; the floor was earth and there were puddles of water dotted about. There was no electricity and the only natural light came from a small metal grille.
The evidence for this long period of captivity is that a week after Lucy’s abduction, at twenty-five minutes past midnight on the morning of 3 January 1974, Fred walked into the casualty unit of the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital with a serious laceration to his right hand. It was extremely unusual for Fred to attend a hospital; he feared hospitals, even refusing to visit his own mother when she was dying. ‘It was very rare that you could get him inside [one] because of his
motorcycle accident,’ says his younger brother, Doug. Also, as a builder, Fred was used to cutting himself, so it must have been a major injury for him to voluntarily attend, and one wonders what he had been doing at midnight to cut himself so badly. The most likely explanation is that he had been dismembering Lucy’s body.
Before he set to work, Fred had dug a hole in the part of the cellar later described by police as the ‘nursery alcove’, because of the nursery-style pattern of the wallpaper. Then, when the rest of the household had gone to bed, he began to cut up the corpse, using a knife from the selection he kept on a kitchen shelf.
The knife he used was a cheap stainless steel kitchen model with a riveted wooden handle, manufactured by Richards of Sheffield as part of a set given away to mail order customers. The blade had been worn away by vigorous sharpening until it ended almost in a point, and had come to look like a flexible dagger. Fred used this, and possibly heavier knives, to decapitate Lucy, disarticulate her legs and remove other body parts including her toes (a total of sixty-six foot and hand bones), ribs, vertebrae, the left kneecap and left shoulder blade.
The shoulder blade would have been particularly difficult for a non-surgeon to remove, and it was probably while Fred was struggling with this that he cut himself, gashing his hand so badly that he dropped the knife into the grave. After being treated at hospital he filled in the grave, forgetting to pick up the knife again. There it remained until 1994. (Rose later admitted in court that she had probably been the one who had sharpened the knife.)
Lucy was quickly reported to police as a missing person and an extensive search was launched. It was clear to detectives that this was not the sort of girl to run away, and as the days went by without word from her, it seemed increasingly likely that she had met a violent end. Teams of police officers, divers (again, including John Bennett) and sniffer dogs were all used in the search; there was even a reconstruction of Lucy’s last trip to the bus stop. Her mother, Margaret, said at the time, ‘How anybody could disappear and just vanish completely in three minutes baffles me.’ Television appeals were made, some of which were no doubt seen by Fred, who made a point of watching the news every evening. But nothing was found, and the police had no reason to look in the direction of 25 Cromwell Street, where Lucy had died just one month after Carol Ann Cooper.
Fred & Rose Page 15
