Fred had been brought back to Cromwell Street and was asked to point out the graves in the garden. He was mortified by the damage done to his patio and complained bitterly, telling the bemused detectives that he expected everything to be put back the way they had found it when they finished. Then he indicated that the third, unknown victim was buried near the bathroom wall. Under the watch of Professor Knight, the search team excavated the grave Fred had identified, and at 5:20 P.M. on Monday, as the daylight was fading, they uncovered a set of bones in the pool of liquid mud at the bottom of the pit. The bones were jumbled, and it seemed that the body had been dismembered, like Heather’s. Numerous foot and hand bones, and some other body parts, were missing. The remains of the head were separate, and a belt was fastened around the skull from under the chin to the top of the head.
Fred had also given instructions about where in the back garden the search team would find his former lodger, Shirley Robinson, yet there was nothing to be found where Fred had said they should dig. It was only after the search area had been widened that, at 9 P.M. that evening, the team uncovered a third set of bones, buried just behind the back door of the house, partly under the wall of the church next door. The grave was left for Professor Knight to excavate fully in the morning.
All this activity drew attention to the case, and national newspaper journalists began to drift into Gloucester. They spoke with Fred’s neighbours, and were told that he worked very hard and was always willing to help out with any odd job. It was clear that Cromwell Street was an unprepossessing address: it was shabby, and many of the houses had been split into low-rent flats used by a transient population of college students, the unemployed and psychiatric patients who had been released from the decommissioned Coney Hill mental hospital. There was also a criminal element – one former resident was serving a prison sentence for attempted murder, and another young man was a well-known drug dealer.
Some of the neighbours claimed they had always suspected something was wrong at Number 25. They spoke of banging noises and screaming late at night. A terrible smell was said to have come from the house, and one neighbour remembered a plague of flies emanating from the cellar.
Members of Fred’s family were traced, and gave their reaction to the discovery of Heather’s body. ‘I can’t believe the news. Fred was always such a gentle guy,’ said his youngest brother, Doug. The developments had such a dramatic effect on John West that he feared he was experiencing a heart attack. The next day Fred made the daily newspapers in a story headlined: GARDEN OF EVIL.
Professor Knight returned to the house in the morning, and carefully excavated the remains of the body Fred had named as Shirley Robinson. This was the only grave where the distinct remnants of any human organs were preserved: there were scraps of brain tissue inside her skull. It appeared from cut marks on her bones that the young woman had been hacked to pieces: her head had been cut from her spine, and again, many foot and hand bones were missing. Beside her remains, Professor Knight found the skeleton of a foetus, almost at full term.
John Bennett decided he had to widen the investigation. ‘With three bodies in the garden, we were searching the house properly,’ he said. Rose was moved out to a police safe-house in the market town of Dursley, thirteen miles south-west of Gloucester, and police moved into 25 Cromwell Street. Every single item of furniture was removed and put into storage: fitted cabinets, baths, sinks and major appliances were all taken out; carpets and linoleum were rolled up. When this was done, the police began to inspect the floorboards and the concrete floor of the cellar.
On Thursday morning Fred again appeared at Gloucester Magistrates Court. This time he was charged not only with Heather’s murder, but with that of Shirley Robinson* and the unknown young woman found near the bathroom wall. The hours of questioning had clearly taken their toll, and Fred was pale and tired. When he heard that he was being charged with the murder of Shirley Robinson, his arms shot up into the air, his legs buckled and he slumped down on to a chair.
Fred was made aware that his painstaking home improvements were being ripped apart. At the same time, the police began to ask him in detail about what had happened to his first wife, Rena, and also Charmaine, whom they assumed to be Fred and Rena’s daughter. They had discovered that Rena and the child had not been seen for twenty years. It was put to Fred that he had killed them, too.
The interviews went on for up to sixteen hours each day. They were conducted by two shifts of detectives, each made up of one man and one woman. Hazel Savage was part of one of these teams. There was a major breakthrough shortly after Hazel had impressed upon Fred that police now intended to search the entire house. A handwritten note was passed to John Bennett. It read: ‘I Frederick West authorise my solicitor Howard Ogden to advise Supt. Bennett that I wish to admit to a further (approx) 9 killings, expressly, Charmaine, Rena … and others to be identified.’
Fred was asked whether there were any more bodies in the house. Fred already knew that the police were searching the cellar, so there seemed little point in lying; also, he was anxious to take the blame and protect Rose. On Friday evening Fred decided to tell the police about the other girls buried in his home. He said they were mostly hitch-hikers and runaways. He did not know all their names. Most were under the cellar floor; another was under the bathroom floor. He could not remember exactly how many there were.
Fred had prepared a plan of the cellar, and, in a genial mood, sat down with detectives to show them where to look. It was an extraordinary moment. When Hazel Savage asked ‘How many bodies are there in Cromwell Street, Fred?’, he was unable to answer, and after a moment of thought, agreed with his solicitor Howard Ogden that they were only ‘talking an approximation’. Apart from ‘Shirley’s mate’, he said there was ‘the girl from Newent’ and a girl named Lynda.
HAZEL SAVAGE: Lynda who?
FRED WEST: Um, Gough, is it?
It was obvious that either Fred’s memory for these tragic events was not good, or that he was trying not to say anything that would incriminate Rose: in his own words, he was ‘not one hundred per cent sure on some of these’. He talked about the killings in a shockingly matter-of-fact way, without any passion or distress. The only time he became agitated was when he learned that the police were planning to demolish parts of the house. ‘What, they’re gonna actually knock the building down?’ he cried in dismay.
The detectives were dumbfounded by this torrent of information, but they believed him – even though they were beginning to recognise that Fred lived in a fantasy world at times. ‘We got an impression when he was telling the truth,’ says John Bennett.
Fred repeatedly told detectives that Rose had never been present when he had strangled his victims. It seems that he was trying to cover up for her. Fred said he had picked up the girls at various places, and had relationships with them, but had strangled them when they had threatened to tell Rose or had demanded money. He said he had taken the girls back to Cromwell Street to abuse, kill, cut them up and bury their remains.
He spoke about the sexual aspect of the crimes, but did not agree that he had raped anybody – Fred thought that all the victims had wanted to have sex with him. In fact, Fred considered himself to be a perfectly normal, rather nice man.
When he was in the interview room with other men, Fred spoke at great length about sex and his sexual fetishes, but he became reticent when Hazel Savage or another woman came in. He also refused to explain why there were bones missing from the victims and why a belt was tied around the skull of the unknown girl.
Asked about the condition in which the remains had been found, Fred said that he had cut up the bodies to make them easier to bury, and that he had decapitated them to ‘make sure they were dead’. The fact that there were no clothes found in the graves suggested that the girls had been naked when they were killed, pointing to a sexual motive.
John Bennett decided that he was dealing with a psychopath – a man who could butcher young women, bury them under
his garden and house and yet carry on as if nothing were wrong – but felt there would be no harm in obtaining an expert opinion on Fred’s mind. The police called in the criminal psychologist Paul Britton to compile a professional ‘profile’ of Fred’s mentality. This was done by studying Fred’s interviews and noting not only what he said, but the way in which he said it.
The inquiry team were struck by Fred’s remarkably relaxed attitude towards his crimes. When Fred spoke about what he had done, it was without passion or anguish. From what the detectives were now learning about Fred’s psychology from Paul Britton, it was felt that Fred’s blasé manner might indicate that he had been killing for such a long time that he was now quite used to murder. Fred was fifty-two years old. It was not lost on the detectives that, if he had been killing since he was a young man, then he had almost certainly murdered many more than those dozen or so girls he had already talked about.
Identifying the remains was proving difficult. Heather was not such a problem, but there was hardly any information about the other two victims. Fred had identified the third set of remains as those of a lesbian named Shirley Robinson. Yet there was no police report of such a person having gone missing, and Rose claimed to have only the vaguest memory of her, despite the fact that they must have been pregnant and living in the house at the same time. The other young woman was an even greater mystery.
The scale of the inquiry was growing by the hour, and a large incident room was set up on the ground floor of the Bearland headquarters to handle the incoming information. John Bennett decided to use the relatively new computer system HOLMES (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) to bank the mass of data, and computer-imaging software (named ‘Watson’) to help his detectives save time in analysing the data for evidence. ‘Watson’ produced easily-understood charts and diagrams.
An early priority was to compile an accurate list of all the Wests’ children. Until police knew how large the family was, they could not work out who was missing. Interviews with Anna Marie and others suggested that Fred had fathered children all over the country – Fred himself claimed as many as forty-two – and that they came and went from Cromwell Street with bewildering frequency. Another piece of computer software, known as the ‘Analyst’s Notebook’, was used to create the complex West family tree.
Work in the incident room was controlled by the ‘action allocators’ who handed out the assignments to the inquiry teams. These detectives were sent away to interview potential witnesses. Information they brought back to the incident room was then given to the ‘home teams’ who programmed the data into the HOLMES computer. Statement readers went through transcripts of interviews that had been completed, marking passages that needed further investigation. Together with the four officers who were interviewing Fred full-time, the search team at Cromwell Street, the uniformed officers who were guarding the site and John Bennett and his senior staff, it was already a major inquiry involving over thirty men and women.
At his laboratory in Cardiff Royal Infirmary, Professor Knight was carrying out examinations of the remains that had already been found. He measured the dimensions of the bones and conducted chemical tests to establish the sex, approximate age and height of the victims. He was also able to describe how they had been dismembered and work out approximately how long they had been underground. Proving cause of death would be more difficult, because all the flesh had long since rotted into a kind of black mulch, and there were no wounds to study – just old bones.
A new electronic device was hired to probe 25 Cromwell Street for the bodies Fred had pointed out. The ground-probing radar machine (GPR), also known as Surface Penetrating Radar, had been developed by a company named ERA Technology to locate land mines on the Falkland Islands. The company had been trying to convince the Home Office of its other possible applications in criminal investigations, and tests had been carried out using the buried carcasses of pigs. Costing £50,000, and looking rather like a sophisticated lawnmower, the GPR was not able to find actual bones, but emitted an electronic pulse that could detect cavities in the ground, including air pockets, where flesh and other material had rotted away. The GPR was attached to a computer monitor which displayed a colour image of whatever it found.
The machine was brought into the house late on the afternoon of Friday 4 March. It was first tried in the ground floor bathroom, where Fred had said a body was buried in an old inspection pit under the floor. Just after 4 P.M. a positive red image appeared on the computer screen, and John Bennett was called to the house. The machine was then moved into the cellar, where it was used late into the night. Fred was brought back to the house that same evening, and was aghast to discover it had been stripped by police of every stick of furniture. Fred was led down into the cellar. Using an aerosol can of paint, he then sprayed 3′ × 3′ square markers on the concrete floor where he recalled burying bodies. Afterwards he was taken back to Bearland.
By Saturday morning, the GPR had located what appeared to be five more sets of remains – Fred had evidently lost count when marking them the previous evening, as he had indicated six.
Pneumatic drills were brought in to start breaking up the cellar’s concrete floor. Just before lunch on Saturday, the police found human remains buried in front of a false chimney breast. In the pit with the bones was a knotted loop of cloth: this was found to be a scarf square, folded, or rolled, and tied so as to form a loop approximately 13½ inches in circumference. It had been tied in a bow, and fragments of hair were trapped inside the knotted part of the cloth. Again the head appeared to have been decapitated and body parts were missing. The soil around the bones had been stained by the decomposition of human flesh.
Another set of bones was found a little before 3 P.M., also in the cellar. This grave was directly opposite the previous one, against the other wall adjacent to a fireplace decorated with Marilyn Monroe wallpaper. The victim had been decapitated, her legs had been severed, and bones, especially from the hands and feet, were missing. The surrounding clay had been stained dark brown. A mask of adhesive tape was wrapped around the skull eleven or twelve times, and a narrow plastic tube was protruding from the nose. A second length of tube, bent in a U-shape, was also in the grave.
Later that evening John Bennett addressed a press conference in Gloucester, admitting, in his cautious way, that his team had found ‘suspected evidence’ of at least two more bodies. But he warned that the GPR machine could not distinguish between hollows caused by bones and those of general debris. The full story of what the police had been told by Fred, and what they had found, appeared on the front page of the next morning’s Sunday Mirror newspaper, under the headline HOUSE OF HORRORS, the name that became synonymous with the case.
On Sunday morning the sixth set of bones was discovered, buried in what detectives described as the ‘nursery alcove’ of the cellar on the same side as the fourth victim. The bones were between two and a half and three and a half feet beneath the floor, and had been dismembered and jumbled on top of each other just like the others. This time the decapitated skull had a length of cloth wrapped around it, and a large, well-worn knife with a wooden handle was found with the bones, some of which again were missing. The knife was still sharp. There was also a piece of rope and an oval of adhesive tape approximately sixteen inches in circumference; two hair-grips and hair fragments were caught in the adhesive. From what Fred had said about the girl buried there, it appeared that these were probably the remains of Lucy Partington, who went missing in late 1973. John Bennett, in particular, remembered the case, as he had been one of the young police divers who had dragged local rivers and ponds in the search for her body twenty years before.
Just before lunch on Sunday, the team discovered another grave on the opposite side of the cellar in an alcove by the wall, where a staircase had once been. The grave was about three and a half feet deep, and again the soil had been stained. With the decapitated, dismembered remains was a plastic-covered rope, like a clothes line, still wrapped
around the upper arm bone, the right leg at knee level and the thighbone. Another length near the elbow went under the spine, with two small wrist- or ankle-sized knotted loops. A band of fabric, made of two nylon socks, a brassière and two pairs of tights one within the other, was wrapped around the jaw of the skull.
The next evening – while Bernard Knight excavated the remains in the basement – the police broke up the concrete in the downstairs bathroom, uncovering more remains in what had been the inspection pit. The grave also contained a loop of adhesive tape that had almost certainly been used as a gag. The victim had been dismembered and decapitated; many bones were missing and the skull was embedded in the wall of the excavation near the gag. There were also two pieces of tape, a length of string and pieces of knotted fabric, but nothing that could have clothed the girl. Like all the others, she must have been naked when she died.
On Tuesday, at 7:10 P.M., the ninth set of remains was found, buried three feet beneath the cellar floor, away from the wall and adjacent to a wash-basin. The skull was face down, with an elasticated cloth band covering the jaw. Other pieces of fabric and a length of clothes line were nearby. The victim had clearly been cut up and decapitated. The earth and clay beneath the cellar were sodden from the high water table and mixed with sewage from a nearby drain. (There had been an ancient moat beneath Cromwell Street and the footings under the houses were generally damp.) This complicated Professor Knight’s work, because he felt the bones could have moved around over the years in the semi-liquid medium in which they were buried.
By Day Fourteen of the investigation, the bones of nine young women had been discovered at 25 Cromwell Street. Some had clearly been buried for many years, and apart from three, the police had absolutely no idea of the victims’ identities.
*There were never any charges brought for the killing of either Shirley Robinson’s unborn child or Anna McFall’s, as there is no such crime under British law.
Fred & Rose Page 25
