Fiendish Killers

by Anne Williams

  It was not long before Hindley fell in love with sullen, brooding Brady. Brady himself was not much taken with Hindley, however, and it was months before he began to take an interest in her. However, after a year they became lovers, and Brady began to realise that he had found a partner to share his darkest fantasies. For a working-class man, Brady had unusually intellectual tastes: his favourite books were Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. He also enjoyed reading more popular works about sadomasochism. He apparently saw himself as a kind of superman, not bounded by common morality. Myra was extremely impressed by Brady, and tried to transform herself into the Aryan image that he admired, dyeing her dark hair blonde. She cut all ties with friends and began to spend all her time with her new boyfriend. She was completely under his spell, and when he suggested they begin a life of crime together, she was only too willing to join in.

  Rape, torture and murder

  In 1964, Brady decided that they should perform a bank robbery. Myra joined a gun club and obtained two weapons for him but then Brady changed his mind. It was not robbery he wanted to commit but murder. Accordingly, they chose their first victim, a sixteen-year-old girl called Pauline Reade who was a neighbour of Myra’s. The couple waylaid the teenager on the way to a dance on July 12, 1963 and lured her on to Saddleworth Moor. Brady raped her and cut her throat. They then buried her there on the moor. Having got away with this crime, on November 11 they abducted a twelve-year-old boy, John Kilbride, from a market in Ashton-under-Lyme. He met the same fate. A little more than six months later, in June 1964, another twelve-year-old, Keith Bennett, was abducted from near his home in Manchester. He too was raped, murdered and buried on the moors. The couple struck again six months later, abducting a girl, ten-year-old Lesley Ann Downey. With Hindley’s help Brady took pornographic photos of Downey, which he planned to sell, and made a tape of their torture of the terrified little girl. Finally, Brady raped her and either he or Hindley – depending on whose account you believe – strangled her, before they buried her, too, on the moor. Once again, the law did not catch up with them, and they began to believe that they could continue to commit the murders unpunished. Brady even began to brag to friends and family about the couple’s exploits. In particular, he told the story of what they had done to David Smith, Hindley’s brother-in-law.

  At first, Smith did not believe Brady, so Brady became annoyed and asked Hindley to bring him over to their house on October 6, 1965. There, Smith met their latest victim, seventeen-year-old Edward Evans. Smith was horrified and went to the police the next morning, but it was too late: when police raided the house they found Evans’ body there. They realised they were on the trail of a serial killer and began to look for the other victims. After a search of the moors, they discovered the bodies of Downey and Kilbride. They also found a box containing the photos and the tape documenting Downey’s murder. At the trial both Brady and Hindley tried to pin the blame on David Smith, but the evidence of the tape led to them both being convicted of murder. Brady and Hindley each received a life sentence. Hindley claimed that she was innocent but eventually came to accept partial responsibility. Brady accepted his guilt and later confessed to five other murders, which remain unproven. In prison, he attempted to starve himself to death. In 2002, he wrote a book on serial killers which caused a great deal of controversy in the UK on its publication. That same year, Myra Hindley died in prison.

  Fred and Rosemary West

  Perhaps the most memorable series of murders ever to take place in Britain were those committed by Fred and Rosemary West. These crimes shocked not only the people of Britain but the world. Nine bodies were found buried under their house, one of them belonging to their own daughter, Heather. Nearby, the bodies of Fred West’s first wife and child were also found. But what was most bizarre about the whole affair was that for years and years, the Wests had lived as a married couple with a large family in what appeared to be normal circumstances, so that even their neighbours did not know what was going on in the house of horrors in their street. Today, the house has been knocked down, to try to forget what was one of the most horrifying cases ever to take place in British crime history.

  Sexual abuse

  How did such a pair come to wreak such violence on a string of innocent victims? It began with Fred West, who was one of six children born to Walter and Daisy West in 1941, in the village of Much Marcle on the edge of the Forest of Dean. This was a very poor area, a backwater where illiteracy and incest were still common. Fred was very close to his mother, and it is thought that they had a sexual relationship. He also claimed that his father sexually abused his sisters. At school, young Fred was not successful, and even when he left aged fifteen, he was still virtually unable to read and write. However, this did not seem to him a great problem since, like his father and grandfather before him, he worked as a farmhand.

  Like many other serial killers, he sustained a head injury at a young age, which seems likely to have contributed to his violent behaviour. When he was seventeen, he had a serious motorbike accident. After this, his behaviour deteriorated until he was arrested for having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. However, when his case came to trial his lawyer produced evidence to show that Fred suffered from epileptic fits and he was let off. In 1962, he met Catherine ‘Rena’ Costello, a young woman with a record of delinquency and prostitution. They moved to Scotland, where she came from, and got married, despite the fact that she was already pregnant by an Asian bus driver. The child, Charmaine, was born in 1963, and the following year they had their own child, Anna Marie.

  First victim

  At this point, the family moved back to the large town near where Fred grew up, Gloucester, in the south-west of England. However, family life was unstable, and it was not long before the pair split up. Fred began a relationship with a friend of Rena’s, Anne McFall, and by 1969, she was pregnant with Fred’s child. McFall wanted Fred to divorce Rena and marry her, but he refused and then grew angry. The couple argued and Fred killed her, dismembering her body and that of her unborn child, and burying them near the trailer park where they had been living. Curiously, he cut off the tops of McFall’s fingers and toes before burying her. This was to become a Fred West trademark. Then Rena moved back in with Fred. During this period, he is thought to have murdered fifteen-year-old Mary Bastholm, whom he abducted from a bus stop in Gloucester.

  It was not long before Fred and Rena split up again, and this time Fred met a young woman who was as vicious as he was. Rose Letts was born in November 1953 in Devon. Her mother, Daisy Letts, suffered from severe depression. Her father Bill was a schizophrenic who had sexually abused her.

  A rather unintelligent child, Rose became fat and sexually precocious as a teenager. When she met Fred he was twelve years older than her, but she fell in love with him. Soon after they got together, he was sent to prison for non-payment of fines, and Rose, not yet sixteen, was left pregnant with his child. On his return from jail, Rose went to live with him. She looked after his daughters Charmaine and Anna Marie, and in 1970 gave birth to the couple’s own child, Heather. The following year, while Fred was once again in prison, Charmaine went missing. Rose told people that Charmaine’s mother Rena had come to take her back, but in fact Rose herself had murdered her. When Fred came out of prison, he hushed up the murder and buried the body of the child under the house. Not long after, Rena came to find Charmaine. Fred killed her too, and buried her out in the countryside.

  Bloody carnage

  In 1972, Fred and Rose married and had a second child, Mae, moving to a house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester. There, they began to use the cellar of the house for perverse sexual games, raping their eight-year-old daughter Anna Marie there. Later that year, they employed a seventeen-year-old girl named Caroline Owens as a nanny. Owens rejected their sexual advances but they raped her. She escaped and told the police, but when the case came to trial in January 1973 the magistrate believed Fred’s word
over Owens’ and let the Wests off with a fine. This was to prove a terrible mistake.

  The Wests’ next nanny, Lynda Gough, was not only raped but ended up dismembered and buried under the cellar. The following year, Rose gave birth to another child, Stephen, and the bloody carnage continued with the murder of fifteen-year-old Carol Ann Cooper. In late December, they abducted university student Lucy Partington, tortured her for a week and then murdered, dismembered and buried her, in one of their most horrifying murders. After that, their perversions became more and more extreme. Over the next eighteen months they killed three more young women: Therese Siegenthaler, Shirley Hubbard and Juanita Mott. Hubbard and Mott had been trussed in elaborate bondage costumes, Hubbard’s head wrapped in tape with only a plastic tube inserted in her nose allowing her to breathe.

  By now, the Wests’ life had descended into one of horror, but the family were still living in their home, and no one in the neighbourhood noticed what was going on. By 1977, Rose was working as a prostitute, and she became pregnant by one of her black clients. At around the same time, their latest lodger Shirley Robinson, an eighteen-year-old ex-prostitute, became pregnant with Fred’s child. Rose was angry about this development and decided the girl had to go. In December 1977, she was murdered, and as the cellar was now full, Robinson was buried in the back garden, along with her unborn baby. Two years later, the Wests killed once again. This time, the victim was teenager Alison Chambers, and she too was buried in the back garden. And then, as far as is known, the Wests stopped killing for pleasure. It may be that they carried on killing and that their victims were never found; it may be that they found other sources of sexual excitement; nobody knows exactly what happened.

  Bodies found

  In the following decade, Rose had three more children, two by another black client, one more with Fred. She continued to work as a prostitute, specialising in bondage. Fred found a new interest in making videotapes of Rose having sex, and continued to abuse his daughters, until Heather told a friend about her home life. Her friend’s parents told the Wests about Heather’s allegation and Fred responded by killing his daughter, the last of his known victims. And that was that – until in 1992 a young girl whom the Wests had raped went to the police. When police arrived at the Wests’ house in Cromwell Street with a search warrant, they found pornography and evidence of child abuse, and arrested Rose for assisting in the rape of a minor. Fred was arrested for rape and sodomy of a minor. Anna Marie made a statement supporting the allegation, as did the Wests’ oldest son Stephen; but following threats from their parents, they withdrew them and the case collapsed.

  After this, the younger children were taken in to care by the authorities. While there, care assistants heard the children joke about their older sister Heather being buried under the patio. The assistants mentioned this to policewoman Hazel Savage, who sent police to dig up Fred’s garden. A day’s digging revealed human bones – and not just Heather’s. Eventually, a total of nine bodies were found in the garden, and the other bodies the couple had buried nearby were also found. On December 13, 1994, Fred and Rosemary West were charged with murder.

  In a sensational development, a week later, Fred hanged himself in prison with strips of bed sheet. Rosemary was charged with murder and tried to put the blame on Fred, but was sentenced to life imprisonment. Today, she is serving out her sentence. She is unlikely to be released before she dies.

  Angels of Death

  Beverley Allitt

  Beverley Gail Allitt was born, one of four children, on October 4, 1968. Overweight and aggressively temperamental as a child, she suffered from an impressive array of ailments ranging from blurred vision and back trouble to ulcers and urinary infections. She also took to wearing bandages and casts over unseen wounds and even persuaded a doctor to remove a perfectly healthy appendix. Doctors suspected these were all just childish attempts at attention-seeking. They were right, but little did they know just how shockingly these seemingly innocent theatrics would later manifest themselves.

  With such a personal attachment to infirmity it was perhaps unsurprising that Beverley chose a career in medicine and despite repeatedly failing her nursing exams she finally managed to find employment on Children’s Ward Four of the understaffed Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire.

  It was here that Beverley Allitt was to realise her childhood potential and attack thirteen children, four fatally, over a fifty-eight-day period.

  It seemed every child entrusted into her care fell foul of a mysterious predisposition to heart failure. Children such as Liam Taylor, Timothy Hardwick and Paul Crampton, all of whom were admitted with comparatively mild, non-heart-related complaints, who had, after being alone with Allitt, deteriorated to such an extent that they went into cardiac arrest.

  Yet surprisingly the finger of suspicion failed to point to Allitt. Her eagerness to attend to the children successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of those concerned. This was no more evident than in the case of premature-born twins, Katie and Becky Phillips. April Fool’s Day of 1991 was to take on a sickening twist when little Becky was re-admitted to Ward Four with gastroenteritis and into Allitt’s care. Two days later, she returned home where she died in her parents’ bed. Concerned for their remaining child, the Phillipses admitted Katie to Grantham. Katie suffered two apnoeic episodes while alone with Allitt who raised the alarm each time. In a shocking misinterpretation of events, the Phillipses asked the nurse to be Katie’s godmother.

  It was only after the tragic death of Claire Peck that an inquiry was eventually held regarding the suspiciously high number of cardiac arrests on the Children’s Ward. Case notes tell us that, admitted with asthma, the fifteen-month-old arrested twice in Allitt’s company. The inquest found a high level of potassium and traces of lignocaine in her system leading them to suspect foul play. After tests on more of the victims found inordinately high amounts of insulin, they sought a common link. There was only one in all twenty-five suspicious episodes – Beverley Allitt.

  In a search for motive, investigators came upon her childhood bouts of attention-seeking and believed this to be a condition called Munchausen Syndrome. With her actions failing to inspire the desired attention, it was believed her condition had developed into Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, whereby injury is inflicted on others to receive attention. Prosecutors at her trial used this approach to obtain their conviction. On May 23, 1993, Beverley Allitt received the attention she deserved; thirteen life sentences for murder and attempted murder, the harshest ever for a woman.

  GENENE ANN JONES

  Dr Kathleen Holland was excited when she opened her new paediatric clinic in Kerrville, Texas, in 1982. She was desperately in need of reliable nurses and, although Genene Ann Jones did not come with very good references, she decided to take her on anyway. Jones had recently worked at the Bexar County Medical Center, but little did Dr Holland know that there was an ongoing investigation into the ‘suspicious’ deaths of forty-seven children during Jones’s four years of employment there.

  Parents were pleased to have a new clinic so close to home, but within the first two months of opening, seven children had suffered seizures while under the care of nurse Jones. Dr Holland, saw nothing suspicious in the number of seizures, simply had them transferred by ambulance to the nearby Sid Peterson Hospital. However, the rest of her staff were not so sure.

  Some of the nurses approached Dr Holland with their suspicions, but the doctor simply explained that she was at a loss to understand why so many children had been afflicted. She reassured her staff with the fact that none of the children had died, but she spoke too soon. Fifteen-month-old Chelsea McClellan suffered a seizure a few days later and died while being transferred to hospital. Dr Holland was devastated that a child should die under her care and decided to start making investigations to satisfy herself that this couldn’t happen again.

  During her investigations she learned that a bottle of succinylcholine, a powerful muscle relaxant, had go
ne missing. Jones’s went to Dr Holland’s office and told her that she had found the missing drug, but when the doctor studied the bottle she noticed that the cap was missing and the rubber top had been punctured by a syringe needle. Added to this, when Holland had the liquid in the bottle tested, she discovered that it had been replaced with saline. She dismissed Jones’s from her employ and then found out about the investigations being carried out in her former place of employment. The drug she had been using was extremely dangerous, which left patients lying inert, aware of what was going on around them, but unable to do anything to get anyone’s attention.

  Jones was an ex-beautician who had entered nursing in 1977, working her way round several hospitals in San Antonio. On November 21, 1981, Jones was indicted on charges for injuring four-week-old Rolando Santos by deliberately injecting him with heparin, which is an anticoagulant. Physicians managed to save his life, but their resultant investigation pointed towards nurse Jones and she was dismissed from her job. However, she was allowed to continue with her profession elsewhere, allegedly seeking to become a ‘miracle worker’ by supposedly saving children in near death situations.

  On May 26, 1983, Genene Ann Jones was indicted on two counts of murder and charged with injecting lethal doses of a muscle relaxant to deliberately cause the death of Chelsea McClellan. She was also charged with causing injury in the cases of six other children while under the employ of Dr Holland.