Fred and Rose were always looking for new sexual partners, and they corresponded with many couples who answered their personal advertisements in ‘contact’ sex magazines. Many of these ostensibly conventional couples had mailed nude photographs of themselves before visiting Cromwell Street. The Wests took part in many ‘wife-swaps’ and kept every letter and photograph they were ever sent, storing them in boxes in the attic.
They also continued to look for women who would live in the house and work with Rose as prostitutes. One of the women they tried to involve in this lifestyle was Kathryn Mary Halliday, a thirty-year-old brunette.
Kathryn was lodging with another woman in a bed-and-breakfast flat at 11 Cromwell Street, having recently left an unhappy marriage. One of Fred’s ‘cobbles’ was to carry out maintenance work on flats in the street owned by West Indian friends. In the late autumn of 1988 he was called to repair a leak in the bathroom above the room which Kathryn rented at Number 11. He chatted as he worked, and when he discovered Kathryn was bisexual, cheerfully invited her back to Number 25, saying, ‘If you’re interested in that sort of thing you should come round to my missus. She’ll sort you out.’
Kathryn was lonely, and accepted the invitation. At Number 25 she was shown into the first-floor lounge, where Fred poured her a large drink. Kathryn noticed that Fred had an odd twitch in one of his pale blue eyes. He asked if she wanted to watch a film from his collection, and Kathryn requested a ‘normal blue movie’. The most conventional film Fred could find was a highly explicit pornographic video which still involved some bondage scenes. The door opened and Mrs West came into the room. Rose wore her customary large spectacles with dark rims, a blouse and a mini-skirt which rode up around her plump thighs as she wiggled down on the sofa next to their guest. Kathryn saw that she was not wearing any underwear. Within minutes Rose had taken off all her clothes and had started to remove Kathryn’s. Then she led her out of the lounge and upstairs to a bedroom on the second floor.
She fondled Kathryn, and was soon initiating aggressive sex in a persistent, almost violent way. ‘It wasn’t really human contact that Rose wanted. She liked pain. I wouldn’t call it making love.’ Fred was filming with his video camera. After a while he became aroused, and had intercourse with Kathryn from behind while Rose fondled her. Later he did the same to Rose, but gave neither much pleasure, ejaculating within seconds on both occasions. ‘You needn’t have bothered,’ Rose told him, and Fred meekly went to get the women another drink.
Kathryn became a frequent visitor to the house, although she was not welcome on Thursdays as Rose had a regular male customer on that day. Most other mornings Rose called for Kathryn on her way back from taking the children to St Paul’s Primary School in New Street, on the opposite side of The Park.
The Wests had found out what Kathryn liked to drink and what brand of cigarettes she smoked, and stocked the bar with these items. Kathryn took full advantage of their hospitality. ‘I’m afraid I used them for it. I was on the dole. I didn’t have any money. Why not?’
Invariably she and Rose ended up in bed, and they were often still there when Fred came home in the early evening. Kathryn helped settle the children down for the night in the cellar, and then the adults would retire upstairs to watch pornographic films. Some of these were extremely unsettling, showing women being abused in what Kathryn recognised as Fred and Rose’s bedroom. One woman was tied hand and foot to the bed while a very large phallus was forced into her. The woman was clearly in pain. Kathryn asked Fred if he had any normal sex films. He replied, ‘What do you mean “normal”?’
The films rarely failed to excite Rose, who was seemingly insatiable. Sex could last for hours without her tiring or becoming uncomfortable. ‘She wanted orgasms all the time, like a machine.’ There was no affection shown. Rose did not kiss or hold her lover tenderly, and neither did she confide in Kathryn, limiting her conversation to banalities such as her latest shopping trip. It was only bestial sex that interested Rose, and Kathryn decided that her lover was ‘thick – a bit short of a load’.
Rose talked openly about prostitution, giving the impression that she enjoyed her work and was emotionally attached to some of her clients. There were photographs in the house of these men, and some were recognisable to Kathryn as respected and prominent members of the local community.
As for Fred, he would normally be content to be a voyeur, and in all the dozens of times that Kathryn had sex at 25 Cromwell Street, he was only actively involved on four or five occasions and hardly ever penetrated his wife. Kathryn decided he was a pathetic figure, and completely dominated by Rose: ‘a wally, always clowning around’. His conversation consisted of leering sexual observations, but he himself was neither virile nor physically appealing. Fred’s naked body was plump and hairy, ‘like a monkey’, and several of his lovers have remarked on his small penis.
As the relationship progressed, the sex became more violent. Kathryn was spanked, slapped, and eventually beaten by Fred with a belt. Fred and Rose enjoyed tying Kathryn up. She was bound with nylon cord by the hands and feet so tightly and skilfully that she complained, asking for the ties to be loosened. Rose seemed to relish Kathryn’s discomfort, and asked how she would feel ‘if we left you all day and just came back up and tormented you every so often?’ When Kathryn was finally untied, there were livid red welts on her wrists.
One night, when all three were naked, Kathryn was led across the hall to a room she had not been in before. A cupboard door was open, and she was shown a collection of black bondage suits and face-masks arrayed on hangers like corpses. The masks were particularly frightening. ‘You couldn’t breathe very well if you put them on. There were no nose holes in some of them, just black masks with zips.’ Kathryn estimated that the suits were too small to fit Rose, and yet they were creased and soiled and had obviously been used often. More suits were stored in a suitcase at the bottom of the wardrobe, together with catalogues of bondage clothing and equipment. The bed itself was nothing less than an instrument of torture, with a wooden beam over the headboard fitted with what appeared to be butcher’s meat hooks. Fred showed Kathryn chains and two whips: a bull whip and a cat-o’-nine-tails. She realised it was a test, to see how she reacted, but Kathryn had seen women wearing the suits in Fred and Rose’s home videos and was justifiably frightened. She talked her way out of the situation and all three went back to the other bedroom, where Kathryn was tied up by her hands and feet. Fred was excited, and, unusually, joined in the sex.
In the days after Kathryn had been shown the secret room, their sex sessions became progressively more extreme. Rose tried to force increasingly large phalluses into Kathryn. ‘They were trying to take me beyond my limits.’ Rose had always been dominant, but now she ordered and pushed her lover about, spanking and blindfolding her, until one evening when Kathryn was tied up and Rose held a pillow over her head. Unable to move or see, Kathryn must have been in a similar situation to that of Lucy Partington, Lynda Gough and several of the Wests’ other victims shortly before they died. It was a nightmarish experience. Kathryn explained what went through her mind:
‘When you are tied up with a pillow over your head you don’t know what is happening. All you think about is yourself and trying to get free. You don’t think of what they are doing to you. Your mind and everything goes and you don’t know where you are. It’s a horrible, horrible feeling.’
Rose put her mouth next to Kathryn’s ear and whispered, ‘What does it feel like not being able to see?’
Then more pressure was exerted, so the pillow folded over Kathryn’s eyes and ears, muffling her hearing. ‘The next thing is she’s having a go at me … he is … somebody is holding the pillow. She was talking to me and the next thing somebody, or something, is inside me.’
One of the sex toys Rose used was a monstrous flesh-coloured phallus studded with latex nodules. Rose called it her ‘Exocet’, after the missile used during the Falklands War. Rose delighted in using the phallus on herself. I
t made her scream. She also had a box of black phalluses of various sizes which she liked to use on Kathryn.
Fred and Rose then had sex with Kathryn, who tried to get the pillow away from her face. Rose bent down and mocked, ‘Can’t you breathe? Aren’t you woman enough to take it?’ Rose said that, if she could not take it, she would be punished, and Kathryn felt something sharp and cold pressing against her stomach. When she was finally released she saw a half-inch cut near her navel. ‘She [Rose] would cause as much physical pain as she possibly could. She had no limit to what she would do,’ says Kathryn. ‘Even then I knew they were dicing with death. They played with me and the idea that I was frightened. They got their thing from seeing other people frightened.’
The Wests wanted Kathryn to move into 25 Cromwell Street, but she decided it was wiser to end the relationship there, and stopped coming to the house. Fred and Rose tolerated this, but ignored her pointedly when they saw her in the street.
Kathryn believes she was only allowed to escape with her life because Fred and Rose knew she had family who would be suspicious if she disappeared.
By the autumn of 1988, Fred had not spoken to his daughter, Mae, for almost two months. He was furious that she continued to reject his sexual advances. Fred bitterly accused Mae of being a lesbian, just as he had accused Heather before her. Partly because of these taunts, Mae started to see a young man named Rob Williams, whom she met in Gloucester’s Pint Pot pub on 14 October 1988, Rob’s eighteenth birthday. Mae was sixteen. Within four months Rob had moved into 25 Cromwell Street, where, to his surprise, he was encouraged to share Mae’s bedroom.
Fred and Rose warmly welcomed Mae’s boyfriend into the house, pleased that their daughter was having a sex life, and Fred stopped making advances to her. He became fond of Rob, who delighted the Wests by making a wooden plaque for the upstairs lounge bar. It was inscribed with the words Black Magic and decorated with palm trees, another gesture towards Rose’s West Indian customers.
It was clear to Rob that Mae’s parents were obsessed with sex. Fred and Rose talked constantly about their sex life, no matter who was present, and happily allowed Rob to borrow their pornographic films, even those which featured Rose. In the mornings Fred would often ask Rob what he had done in bed with Mae during the night, and Fred was known to put his hand under Rose’s skirts and then hold his fingers up, saying, ‘Smell her!’
Rob noticed that the curtains were always closed, and that the house was lit, day and night, by electric light. In fact, the house was full of all types of electrical equipment: fires, televisions and stereo music systems, washing machines and tumble dryers, most of which had been bought new on hire purchase from the Midlands Electricity Board (MEB) showroom in the city centre. Fred was not concerned about the amount of power the family were using because he had bypassed the meter and connected the house directly to the main supply, a piece of electrical do-it-yourself that could easily have killed him. A month before the MEB man called to read the meter, Fred switched from his illicit supply to the conventional system, so that it appeared he was using some electricity. In a similar way, Fred had also tapped into the main gas supply.
Mae was allowed to continue living at home because of her sexual relationship with Rob. But Steve was told that he had to leave, because he was approaching sixteen and was therefore ‘coming of age’. Steve had been his father’s favourite, but Fred now turned on the boy. One day Steve tried to mend one of the children’s bicycles and Fred hit him, shouting that it was his house and he would ‘do what had to be done’. He then beat Steve, sending him scuttling for cover. Rose put Steve’s belongings outside the front door, and told him that he could come back on Sundays for one hour to visit his brothers and sisters.
The same urge to be rid of their children by the time they were sixteen had contributed towards Heather’s murder. Now Fred and Rose were showing signs that they were haunted by this crime. Every photograph of Heather was removed from the house, and Rose was never heard to mention her name, becoming very quiet if anyone else did. The other children rarely spoke of their sister, telling each other they would not know what to say to her if they saw her now. Only Fred behaved differently, bringing Heather back to life with sporadic reports that he had seen her in the street and that she had waved cheerfully. Rose watched her husband silently when he made these statements.
AS the years went by, Fred and Rose became more concerned with maintaining the façade of a respectable life, particularly after two unannounced visits by social workers acting on information that children were being left on their own in the house (neither visit uncovered any evidence of this). They even decided to celebrate Christmas in the traditional way, with decorations and gifts – quite different to earlier years. School drawings of baby Jesus in the manger were brought home and displayed on the walls; the downstairs lounge was decorated with gold tinsel, and a poster of Snoopy dressed as Santa Claus.
On Christmas morning Rose put on her faded pink towelling dressing gown and came downstairs to watch the children excitedly unwrap their gifts. There was an electric car for Barry, slippers for Rosemary and crayons for Tara. Afterwards Rose cooked a turkey dinner, complete with mushrooms, potatoes, peas and gravy. A bottle of sherry was put on the checked tablecloth, and Fred stopped work long enough to join the family at the table.
Other parents at St Paul’s Primary School were impressed that either Mr or Mrs West was there every day to collect their children from school. Fred was often the only man standing outside the school at going-home time, invariably wearing his dark-blue donkey jacket and chatting to one of the young mothers. If it was raining he would have his white Ford Transit van ready, and was quick to offer them a lift. Fred talked about all the comforts he had provided for his family, and charmed many of the mothers.
Once a year the school held a dressing-up day, when the pupils paid fifty pence to charity for the privilege of dressing in whatever clothes they liked. There was a competition for the most inventive costume and Rose enthusiastically took part, helping to turn nine-year-old Barry into a pirate, complete with eye patch, hooked hand and parrot; six-year-old Lucyanna into a rabbit; ten-year-old Louise into a sad clown and Rosemary Junior, seven, into a cat with whiskers and pointy black ears.
The children posed obediently for a photograph before leaving for school. But despite the jolly eye patch and red bandana, the pirate looked forlorn; the big, cut-out smile of Louise’s clown face left her own blank expression clearly visible; and the unhappiness of the children was plain to see behind the masks.
16
DETECTIVE SAVAGE
Walter West’s last years were mostly spent in bed in his room at Moorcourt Cottage, Much Marcle. He could look out over the farm land of Herefordshire, seeing as far as May Hill, while surrounded by the bric-à-brac of his life. Walter had been a formidable man in his prime, but he had not really been well since the tractor accident which left him with only one good lung. The rugged farm labourer who had done so much to shape Fred’s mind was now a feeble invalid, too unsteady to collect his own pension or visit the Wallwyn Arms for a pint of beer.
In the spring of 1992 the old man’s health worsened, and he was taken into hospital. Doug and his brother John, who was working as a dustman, told Fred that he should see his father before it was too late, but Fred did not come. Walter died on 28 March, aged seventy-seven. The funeral was held at St Bartholomew’s, where the Wests had been christened, married and buried for generations. Walter was laid to rest next to Daisy on the shale side of the graveyard, a patch of stony ground near the fence that he had reserved after Daisy’s funeral in 1968.
There was bad feeling between the brothers that Fred had not visited his father in hospital, and also squabbles over who would keep Walter’s few valuables. Partly because of these problems, the family did not immediately pay for a headstone, as they had for Daisy. The grave would only be identified by a metal marker.
Walter’s death was a milestone in Fred’s life. It was
thirty years since he had left home; he had murdered at least twelve young women in that time and still his freedom was not threatened. Yet, strangely, it was at this point – while he engaged in a petty disagreement with his family over Walter’s belongings, and years after the majority of his and Rose’s crimes had been committed – that their secret life began to unravel.
It started simply enough. One of the many young girls who had found themselves in the clutches of Fred and Rose decided to tell a friend about what was going on at Cromwell Street. The girl was thirteen years old.* She told her best friend at school that she had been abused by the Wests, claiming that Fred had raped her while Rose encouraged him. She was terribly upset by what had happened and shared this secret with her friend because she had nowhere else to turn. Her confidante, another thirteen-year-old girl, went home and thought about what she had been told. She did not want to go to the police, but there seemed to be no alternative.
There was a beat police constable in the area where the girl lived, and she told this officer what she believed the Wests had done to her friend. A police investigation was launched, in tandem with Gloucestershire social services. Unfortunately for the Wests, one of the most tenacious female police officers in Gloucester was assigned to the case.
Hazel Norma Savage is a talented and industrious police officer who has enjoyed a distinguished career. She first entered the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1968. It was rare in the 1960s to find a woman officer in plain clothes, and for Hazel to become a Detective Constable was a considerable achievement. Because of her energy, and obvious ability, it was thought that she might be promoted further, but she stayed as a Detective Constable and still held that rank twenty-four years later, when the West case began in 1992. By then, Hazel was a veteran of several major inquiries, particularly those involving women and children. She had become a trusted old hand, well-liked within the constabulary for her robust sense of humour and her professionalism.
Fred & Rose Page 21
