Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  While the newspapers and television reported daily on the mystery of Lucy’s disappearance, Fred and Rose continued to live a remarkably ordered life and seemed untroubled by the fuss they had caused. Rose was nursing their first son, Stephen, who had been born the previous August, bringing the number of their genetic children to three (Fred’s illegitimate son, Steven, and Anna Marie were also still at home, making five children in all). Fred was busy negotiating a £5,000 mortgage to buy 25 Cromwell Street from Frank Zygmunt, becoming the first member of his family in several generations to own his own home. The mortgage was guaranteed by Fred’s Jamaican-born friend Ronalzo Harrison, who had no doubts about trusting the Wests.

  They continued to take in lodgers to help meet the financial burden of the repayments. These were now almost exclusively young women, attracted by the low rents on offer. One tenant was a teenager named Juanita Mott, who would soon play a larger part in their lives.

  There were now the remains of two bodies in the cellar of Cromwell Street, and a third in the inspection pit by the kitchen, all victims of Fred and Rose’s lust. But still they were not satisfied.

  Thérèse Siegenthaler was born in Trub, Switzerland, and had been brought up in the German-speaking Bern area. In 1974, Thérèse was a 21-year-old sociology student at the Woolwich College of Further Education in South-East London, living in a flat five miles away in Caterham Road, Lewisham. She had a weekend job in the Bally shoe shop at the Swiss Centre in London’s West End. Thérèse was a strongly-built brunette of medium height, who wore glasses and little make-up. She was a highly principled and intelligent woman, with firm political beliefs and considerable self-confidence. She was fluent in English, but spoke with a distinct Germanic accent.

  In April 1974 Thérèse attended a party in Deptford, South London, and the next day left to hitch-hike to Holyhead in North Wales. She intended to catch the ferry to Ireland and there meet a Catholic priest with whom she shared an interest in South African politics. As she prepared for her journey, a friend warned Thérèse about the perils of hitch-hiking. She laughingly replied, ‘I can look after myself. I’m a judo expert.’

  But Thérèse met her match on that journey between London and Holyhead. She was picked up, probably by Fred and Rose together, and taken to Cromwell Street. Fred misunderstood her accent and decided she was Dutch, so he nicknamed her ‘Tulip’.

  They gagged her with a brown scarf tied behind her head and fastened with a bow, bound her arms and legs with rope and raped her. When they had killed her, Fred set to work slicing at the hip joints, leaving distinct cuts on her left upper femur. He also cut off her head, again ‘to make sure she was dead’. Other parts of her body, including a collarbone, fourteen wrist and ankle bones, and twenty-four finger and toe bones, were also removed. Thérèse’s remains were jumbled into a sump-like hole in the cellar; Fred later disguised the grave by building a false chimney breast over it.

  Her disappearance was reported to London’s Metropolitan Police, and it was obvious to Scotland Yard that she had not intended to run away. Thérèse’s bank account, containing 3,600 Swiss francs, was untouched. She had also written to her father, Fritz, in Switzerland, saying she would spend Easter in Ireland but would return to London after a week. Thérèse had even booked West End theatre tickets and an airline ticket to Zurich to see her family later in the year. Her family and the police made vigorous efforts to trace her, but they were not to know that she had gone missing, not in London or Ireland, but in an obscure back street of Gloucester, a city she did not even have to pass through on her projected journey.

  Four months later Rose was admitted to the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital with an unusual wound – reminiscent of the injury Fred had suffered while dismembering Lucy Partington. Rose arrived at the hospital at 10:55 P.M. on 13 August with a deep laceration across the ring and middle fingers of her right hand. On admission, the cause of the cut was given as ‘playing about with knives’, but by the time Rose had been transferred to a ward, this had changed to ‘cutting wood’. Her wound was treated and she was kept in hospital for two nights.

  If Rose had been helping Fred to dismember a body, or had been involved in torture, it is hard to see who the victim might be, as months had elapsed since their last known murder. It is possible that the injury was caused during a game, or a row, with Fred; Rose intimated to her mother, Daisy, that she had been cut in this way on at least one occasion. But maybe there was another victim at this time, the details of whom have never been discovered.

  Incredibly, Fred and Rose still did not stop killing. Three months after Rose’s hospitalisation yet another young girl found her way into their cellar.

  Born Shirley Lloyd in Birmingham in 1959, Shirley Hubbard was a strikingly attractive teenager who had been taken into care at the age of two, following her parents’ separation. When she was six she was fostered by council workman Jim Hubbard and his wife, and went to live with them in their large, double-fronted villa in Ombersley Road, Droitwich. It was from this family that Shirley adopted the surname Hubbard, although her name was never legally changed.

  Shirley was a rebellious girl, who knew she was attractive to men and often flirted with them. She attended Droitwich High School, and first ran away from home in October 1974 – on that occasion she was found camping in a field with a soldier. A short time after this Shirley met a boy named Daniel Davis at a funfair. Daniel was a salesman at John Collier, the tailors. He made a date to take Shirley to the cinema. (Coincidentally, his older brother Alan, who worked on the fair, had formerly dated Carol Ann Cooper, but the two girls did not know each other.) They ate ice cream while the film played, and kissed and cuddled. Afterwards they had hot dogs. Other dates followed: Daniel went shopping with Shirley and she had tea with his parents. On 14 November 1974, when Shirley was aged fifteen and a half years old, she spent the day working at the make-up counter at Debenhams in Worcester, where she had been employed for a month on work experience. Shirley left the store in high spirits because she had a date. She met up with Daniel, they bought a bag of chips and went and sat by the River Severn in Worcester, watching the boats go by. At 9:30 P.M. Daniel saw his girlfriend on to the Droitwich bus, arranging to meet her the next day at the bus stop.

  But when the next day came, Shirley was not on the bus she said she would catch, or the next one, or even the one after that. Daniel decided she had probably made other arrangements and walked away, slightly upset. He never saw her again.

  It is not known how Shirley came into the clutches of Fred and Rose. She was not acquainted with the Wests, and had no connection with Cromwell Street. She was probably picked up at a bus stop, offered a lift in the same way as Lucy Partington, and must then have been taken to Cromwell Street where she became a toy for Fred and Rose’s sexual games. In their search for excitement, Fred and Rose subjected this slight fifteen-year-old to an even more extreme form of bondage.

  They wrapped tape around her head eleven or twelve times to create a shiny brown mask which stopped just beneath her eyes, with a strap of tape under her chin. A transparent plastic tube with an internal diameter of one eighth of an inch was inserted through the mask. It extended for three inches up through one of her nostrils into the nasal cavity, while twelve inches extended outside the mask. This device was an extreme variation on the bondage pornography that Fred and Rose collected. In this unusual fetish, women are strapped into rubber or plastic suits with tiny holes, or constricted, often zipped, openings. Invariably they are also tied up. Sometimes the mouth and nostrils are covered over and tubes inserted through the masks to allow breathing. The idea is to confine the victim and sexually excite the participants by making the victim helpless to resist the sex act that follows. In Shirley’s case, the device had a secondary purpose of keeping her absolutely silent, and yet still alive. Without the tube, Shirley would simply have been suffocated by the mask.

  After her inevitable death, Shirley’s naked body was dismembered and her remains concealed in t
he cellar, her decapitated head, which had been cut off from front to back, still encased in its mask with the tube lolling out. She was buried – minus a section of her trunk, including the third thoracic vertebrae, seven wrist bones and thirteen finger and toe bones – in what became known to police as the ‘Marilyn Monroe’ area of the cellar, so named because of the wallpaper which featured pictures of the film star. The cellar had now become a charnel-house, with four dismembered corpses buried within feet of each other.

  Shirley’s disappearance was reported, and enquiries were made, but the police could not pick up the trail. There were several ‘sightings’ of Shirley in later years, but it is now apparent they were tragically inaccurate.

  To kill and cut up a human being is, as has been stated, no easy task, and one wonders why nobody noticed four young women being murdered in the house within a space of twelve months. Professor Bernard Knight estimates that a non-medical man like Fred might be able to remove a head and legs fairly easily within half an hour, and would become more adept at the work with practice. But the problems of disposing of the bodies would be formidable. Even if the victims had been left for several hours, or days, after death (which is very unlikely), the amount of blood caused by dismemberment would have been considerable, and not all of it can have soaked into the ground. The professor confirms that, when cut up, corpses ooze blood even after the heart has stopped pumping. This blood would have been on Fred’s hands and all over his clothes, and there would have been stains in the cellar. The smell of rotting human flesh is also distinctive.

  At the same time there were also the victims’ clothes and personal effects to dispose of. The remains of Lynda Gough, Carol Ann Cooper, Lucy Partington, Thérèse Siegenthaler and Shirley Hubbard were all found virtually naked, and there were neither purses nor handbags in their graves – in fact hardly any personal possessions at all.

  Several people, including children and lodgers, continued to live at 25 Cromwell Street while this mayhem was going on. It is true that Cromwell Street was badly lit at night, and that Number 25 was in a particularly dark part of the street, but it seems odd that nobody noticed young girls being forcibly bundled into the house, no doubt kicking and struggling to get away. Nobody saw women’s clothes being burned on the bonfire, as they probably were, or strange items of jewellery appearing in the house. The only complaint by lodgers was of a slight fusty smell, and of bangings and crashings in the cellar late at night. In retrospect, it is all too clear what those noises were.

  12

  BETRAYAL OF TRUST

  Juanita Mott, who had been staying at Cromwell Street as a lodger, was another teenager from a broken home. The daughter of a US Army serviceman, Juanita’s parents had split up when she was a child. She went to live with her mother, Mary, who had remarried. Juanita left school at fifteen, and in her search for an affordable bedsitter to rent, found her way to Cromwell Street, where the Wests were offering very cheap accommodation at the time – as low as £7 per week. They advertised in the Gloucester Citizen evening newspaper, but most of their lodgers heard about Cromwell Street by word-of-mouth, and several young women were already living in the top two floors of the house. Juanita was a regular visitor over the next couple of years, eventually retaining her own door key.

  By the spring of 1975 Juanita was eighteen years old: a pretty, brown-haired girl of average height who bore a striking resemblance to Carol Ann Cooper. She had worked briefly in a bottling factory, but was now unemployed and lodging with a friend of the family, Jennifer Baldwin, at her bungalow in the small Gloucestershire town of Newent. Jennifer was due to get married on Saturday 12 April 1975, and Juanita had offered to look after her children during the ceremony.

  Juanita often hitch-hiked into Gloucester at weekends, and it seems that this is what she intended to do when she left the bungalow on the evening before the wedding. To catch a lift into the city, she normally stood beside the B4215. This quiet country road also happens to be the most direct route between Gloucester and Much Marcle.

  Fred and Rose would have known Juanita’s habits and the place where she picked up lifts. They were probably waiting, and offered her a ride in much the same way as they had picked up Caroline Owens outside the Gupshill Manor pub two and a half years before.

  At Cromwell Street Juanita was gagged with a ligature made from two long, white nylon socks (similar to those often worn by Rose), a brassière and two pairs of tights one within the other. She was then trussed up with lengths of plastic-covered rope, of the type used for washing line. The rope was used in a complicated way, with loops tied around her arms and thighs, both wrists, both ankles and her skull, horizontally and vertically, backwards and forwards across her body until she could only wriggle like a trapped animal. Then the Wests produced a seven-foot length of rope with a slip-knot end forming a noose. This was probably used to suspend Juanita’s body from the beams in the cellar.

  Restriction of breathing – one part of the extreme bondage Fred and Rose found exciting – probably led to Juanita’s death. It is also possible, however, that she was killed by a blow to the back of the head with an implement like a ball-headed hammer. There was an unusual fracture at the base of her skull suggesting this, but it would be an awkward wound to inflict while she was alive and was more probably done while Fred was dismembering her body. Again, he decapitated his victim, removed her legs at the hip and kept aside three of her neck vertebrae, her eleventh thoracic vertebrae, the first rib, both her kneecaps, pieces of her hands, toes, and other parts of her feet: more than eighty bones in total. Juanita’s butchered remains were then buried three to four feet beneath the cellar floor, between the staircase and the second alcove. The lengths of washing line, and pieces of clothing including a pair of women’s briefs, were also thrown into the pit.

  There had been no indication that Juanita would run away. She often went into Gloucester for the evening, and had not taken any of her personal possessions with her. Most significantly, she had promised to look after Jennifer Baldwin’s children, and it was unlikely that she would deliberately let her down, especially on her wedding day. Yet, despite these suspicious circumstances, Juanita’s family failed to report her to the police as a missing person. If they had done so, Juanita’s known links with Cromwell Street might have been investigated.

  The police did visit 25 Cromwell Street, and quite frequently, but not to investigate murder. They came to interview Fred about the petty theft and receiving of stolen goods in which he was always involved. They also came to check reports that the Wests’ lodgers were in possession of cannabis, and minor ‘drug busts’ were commonplace at the house. There were at least three unannounced visits from drug squad officers in the early 1970s, one resulting in the arrest of a lodger. Gloucester drug squad detectives Price and Castle became familiar faces at the house, and former lodger Benjamin Stanniland admits that the male lodgers were ‘known to police’. This is partly why Fred and Rose began a policy of renting only to young women. Yet the police searches never revealed anything more incriminating than the occasional illegal cigarette (belonging to the lodgers, not Fred and Rose, who had no interest in drugs). The Wests’ composure during these visits was remarkable, considering what was concealed beneath their feet.

  Fred continued to make regular appearances in the local courts. On 25 March 1975 he was found guilty of theft and fined £50 by Gloucester magistrates; in November he was convicted of receiving stolen goods and fined £75.

  There was little to indicate to his neighbours or to the police that Fred was anything other than a normal, if light-fingered, jobbing builder. He chatted amiably with those he came into contact with and impressed all who met him with his energy and hard work. Fred had recently demolished the garage behind the house and was building a large flat-roofed extension, complete with plumbing for a bathroom, toilet and kitchen. Neighbours noticed that the whole family helped him: digging foundations, mixing cement and carrying building blocks. Fred worked late into the night, lo
ng after the children had gone to bed. ‘Dad was always building,’ says his daughter Anna Marie.

  But nothing at 25 Cromwell Street was quite as it seemed, and, unknown to his neighbours and children, part of the reason for building the extension was to cover up the grave of Lynda Gough, the Co-op seamstress whose remains were buried in the inspection pit where the garage had been.

  These home improvements cost money, and in the spring of 1976 Fred travelled away from Gloucester to earn some extra cash. He spent seven months in Cumbria, where British Gas were laying a pipeline across the Pennines. Fred was attracted by the high wages of £200 per week, and was taken on first as a general labourer and then as a welder’s mate. He was known as ‘The Wog’ by workmates because they thought he had negroid features.

  He lodged at the Belted Will Inn in the village of Hallbankgate on the Tindale Fells, near Carlisle, and at an address in Brampton. Deprived of his regular trips to ‘bunny-land’ with Rose, Fred had to look elsewhere for sex. One evening he tuned into a radio phone-in programme on which callers offered household items for sale. A lady who had been trying to sell a gas fire on the programme later received a telephone call from Fred. ‘I’m not interested in the fire,’ he said. ‘I’m far more interested in you.’ He pestered the woman with telephone calls, often obscene, for several days.