by Bill Wallace
On 28 November 1994, he was on a work detail with two other men, both highly dangerous. Jesse Anderson was a white man who had murdered his wife and blamed it on a black man. Christopher Scarver was a black schizophrenic murderer who suffered from delusions that he was God.
That morning, the three men were left alone to get on with their work. When the guard returned, he found Anderson dead, in a pool of blood. Beside him lay Jeffrey Dahmer, his skull smashed in with a broom handle. He died later in the ambulance taking him to hospital. He was thirty-four years old.
Rosemary West
Since the death of Moors Murderer, Myra Hindley, in 2002, the dubious honour of being the most hated woman in Britain has probably passed to Rosemary West who, with her notorious husband Fred, was convicted of murdering ten young women and girls, one of them her own daughter Heather, in pursuit of deviant sex.
Rosemary Letts was born in November 1953 in Devon to Bill and Daisy Letts. Daisy suffered from depression while Bill was a schizophrenic who demanded unwavering obedience from his wife and children, a control freak who took pleasure in beating them with a piece of wood or a leather belt for the slightest infraction. If Daisy tried to intervene, the beating would be transferred to her. If the kids stayed in bed too long, he would chuck a bucket of freezing cold water over them; any task they were given to do was inspected meticulously afterwards and if they had failed to meet his unreasonably high standards, they would have to do it all over again; they were not allowed to speak and play was forbidden. Money was tight too when Rose was growing up. Her father’s temper and his psychotic episodes led to difficulties in holding onto jobs and he drifted perpetually from one menial job to another.
In 1953, Daisy’s health inevitably collapsed under the strains of her depression, caring for her three daughters and one son, and the issues with her brutally violent husband. She went into hospital where she was treated with electroshock therapy, a controversial treatment that involves delivering electric currents into the brain in order to induce seizures in anaesthetised patients. At the time she was pregnant with Rosemary and it is unknown whether her unborn baby suffered some kind of trauma as a result. There was little doubt that she was different to Daisy and Bill’s other children. As a baby, she developed the habit of rocking violently in her pram and as she got older would rock her head sometimes for hours. The family began to believe she was ‘a bit slow’ and dubbed her ‘Dozy Rosie’. However, she became the favourite of her father’s children, always doing his bidding and helping him. She was the only member of the family not to be regularly beaten.
At school, her size – she was grossly overweight – made her the butt of cruel jokes and she developed into an aggressive loner who lashed out at anyone who tried to tease her. Her reputation at school was not helped by the fact that academically she was a dead loss.
In the area of sex, however, her education was, if anything, ahead of others of her age. She had no qualms about provocatively walking around naked at home after having a bath and is said to have sexually molested her younger brother at a young age. She also began having sex with the older men of the village, her father having forbidden her from having a boyfriend. On one occasion, she claims to have been raped by an older man.
In 1969, Daisy Letts finally walked out on Bill, taking only Rose with her. They moved in with her daughter Glenys and her husband and, free of her father’s rigid constraints, Rose started going out at night. Surprisingly, however, she moved back in with her father a few months later.
Around this time, she met Fred West.
She was waiting for a bus at Cheltenham bus station when a scruffy, dirty man with frizzy hair and simian features approached her. At first she was repulsed but Fred was a charmer and before long she had agreed to have a drink with him. At first, she resisted his advances, but one day she succumbed in the caravan where he lived with his two children, Anne-Marie and Charmaine. Soon she was pregnant. Her father was furious and reported West to Social Services. When nothing changed he turned up outside West’s caravan, threatening him. There was a fight and when Fred won, Rose was impressed. She began to realise that Fred West could provide her with the means of escaping from the domineering and violent man who had controlled her life. The trouble was, she just moved on to a man who was exactly the same way.
Fred was a petty crook and sexual predator who had banged his head a couple of times when he was younger and had been left with a volatile temper and violent mood swings as a result. He also had one leg shorter than the other, a consequence of a motorbike accident. At the age of twenty, he got a thirteen-year-old girl pregnant but did not seem to accept that there was anything wrong with that. ‘Doesn’t everyone do it?’ he asked.
He was not interested in ‘normal’ sex. His turn-ons involved bondage, sodomy and oral sex. When his partner of the time was unwilling to participate, he went elsewhere for it.
When Fred was sent to prison for theft and for non-payment of outstanding fines, Rose moved into the caravan to care for the two children, one of whom was not actually his, but whose mother had once lived with him. In 1970, with Fred still in jail, Heather was born. Rose, still only sixteen, was now caring for three young children, and resented the fact that two of them were not her own.
In summer 1971, there were only two after Charmaine disappeared, most probably murdered by Rose in a fit of temper. Her temper has been spoken of by various people who know her; Anne-Marie said that she became ‘a kind of maniac’ when angry. She explained Charmaine’s disappearance by telling Anne-Marie that the girl’s mother, from whom Fred had been estranged for a couple of years, had come to collect her.
When Fred came out of prison, he and Rose moved into a house at 25 Midland Road in Gloucester. Charmaine moved in with them – they put her body, minus fingers and toes, Fred’s trademark – under the kitchen floor. It would remain there until it was dug up by police in 1994.
In the Midland Road house, Rose West launched a prostitution business, entertaining many of the West Indians who had settled in Gloucester. Fred had his fun, too, watching her have sex with strangers through a peephole in the wall, mixing business and pleasure, so to speak.
When Charmaine’s mother Rena suddenly turned up, looking for her daughter, Fred decided that she would have to die. One night, he plied her with alcohol and strangled her. She was cut up and her body, minus fingers and toes, was buried in the countryside.
Meanwhile, Rose was accompanying Fred on expeditions to find girls to rape. When the girls saw another woman in the car, they relaxed. Fred would then threaten them with worse if they told anyone about what he had done.
Fred and Rose married in 1972 and five months later, another daughter, Mae was born. However, the Midland Road house was by this time becoming too small for their growing family and Rose’s burgeoning prostitution business. They moved into what would become one of the most notorious addresses in British criminal history – 25 Cromwell Road, Gloucester. It was a much larger house, on three levels with a basement that offered huge potential for Fred West. Often in those days, basements were converted into rooms for entertainment. Fred was no different. He converted it into a room for entertainment. Unfortunately, Fred West’s idea of entertainment involved torture and depraved sex.
The first visitor to the basement was Fred’s own daughter, eight-year-old Anne-Marie. They explained that they were going to demonstrate to her how she could please her husband when she was older. They stripped her, tied her hands behind her back and Rose held her down while her father raped her. It would not be the last time, but she was threatened with a beating if she told anyone.
They took on a nanny, seventeen-year-old Caroline Owens who lived with them and during her time there rejected advances by both Fred and bisexual Rose. When she told them she was leaving, they stripped her, raped her and threatened to kill her if she whispered a word of it to anyone. It was her mother who found out what had happened, noticing bruising on her daughter’s body. She squeezed the truth
out of her and went to the police. When the case came to court, Fred’s defence was that she had agreed to have sex with him. The magistrate believed him and he got away with a fine.
The next nanny, Lynda Gough did not survive for long. She was dismembered and put under the floor of the garage. No one looked for her.
The year that Fred and Rose’s son Stephen was born, 1973, they killed fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, Carol Ann Cooper, but only after torturing and raping her for a week in the basement. Twenty-one-year-old student Lucy Partington also spent a week in the hellish basement after climbing into Fred’s car in December, the same year. She ended up under the house. Fred went to a hospital in the early hours of 3 January 1974 with a serious laceration that required stitches. When Lucy Partington was dug up in 1994, police found a knife matching his cut beside her body. It is surmised that he sustained the injury while dismembering her body.
Fred started work on adding some more space to the house, enlarging the basement and joining the garage onto the house. It was all done, unsurprisingly, given what was buried there, under cover of darkness. The basement had to be expanded to accommodate three more bodies – fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard, nineteen-year-old Juanita Mott and twenty-one-year-old Swiss hitch-hiker, Therese Siegenthaler. Horrifically, some of these girls would have seen other victims still alive when they were brought back to 25 Cromwell Road. When Shirley Hubbard’s remains were found, her head was entirely wrapped in tape with only a three-inch rubber tube inserted in her mouth to enable her to breathe. Anne-Marie was still being abused, but now she was not only being raped by her father; he was bringing home other men to rape her too.
Rose’s temper was still there, and her jealousy knew no bounds where Fred was concerned. When a lodger, a prostitute by the name of Shirley Robinson, got pregnant by Fred, Rose insisted she had to go. She was killed in July 1977. That December, Rose gave birth to a baby, Tara, who was not Fred’s, but the daughter of one of her West Indian clients. Louise came along in November 1978; this baby was Fred’s.
As soon as Anne-Marie grew old enough to look after herself, she immediately moved out. But it was no problem to Fred. He turned his incestuous urges onto his daughters Heather and Mae. Meanwhile, Barry was born in 1980, and Rosemary Junior – again not Fred’s – in 1982.
The killing continued. A seventeen-year-old Swansea girl, Alison Chambers, was abducted in summer 1979. Space being short under the house, she was buried in the back garden. When their daughter Heather made the fatal mistake of hinting to a friend about what was going on, Fred heard about it and she was killed and buried. He later claimed he had not intended to kill her, that she had been sneering at him and he wanted to wipe the smirk off her face. Rosemary told an inquiring neighbour the following day that she and Heather had had a ‘hell of a row’ leading some to believe that Rosemary may have initiated her death.
It ended with a knock at the door on 24 February 1994. Sullen, vastly overweight Rosemary West opened it to a couple of policemen who had come with a warrant to dig up the back garden as part of the search for Heather West. A girl they had abducted but not killed had told a girlfriend what had happened to her and the friend had gone to the police. The West children were taken into care as a massive investigation began. When one of the children joked that Heather was under the patio, the police decided to have a look.
In December 1994, Fred was charged with eleven murders and Rose with ten. By this time her ardour had cooled and she visibly pulled away from him when he tried to comfort her in court.
Fred hanged himself using strips of bed sheet on New Year’s Day 1995 and Rose was left to face the music, being found guilty of ten murders and sentenced to life imprisonment.
After she had rejected him in court, he wrote to her, ‘We will always be in love…You will always be Mrs West, all over the world. That is important to me and you.’ He never got a reply.
Ian Huntley
It is a beautiful but relatively ordinary photograph. Two little girls posing in Manchester United football shirts, smiling at the camera just before sitting down to enjoy food cooked on a barbecue by one of their dads, on a warm August Sunday in 2002. When they finished eating, they asked if they could go to a nearby sports centre to buy some sweets. Their parents said okay and they set out. Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, both aged ten, were never seen alive again.
The party in the Wells’s garden continued until someone wondered where the girls were. It was getting late and their parents began to worry. They went out and looked around the neighbourhood, thinking that perhaps they had met some friends and had forgotten the time, as kids often do. But there was still no sign of them. Eventually, they called the police and reported the girls missing.
By the time a police search was launched towards midnight, the girls’ parents were understandably frantic. They had been ringing the mobile phone that Jessica carried everywhere with her, but there was no reply. The search that night revealed nothing and as more resources were poured into the small Cambridgeshire town of Soham, bolstered by hundreds of volunteers, the days turned into weeks. That photograph was distributed widely and appeals for information were made by both girls’ parents. David Beckham, who the girls worshipped and whose name had been on the back of their football shirts that afternoon, made a televised appeal, but still they did not turn up. It was as if they had vanished from the face of the planet.
Police had pieced together the journey the girls had taken that Sunday by finding witnesses who had seen them. Twenty-nine-year-old Ian Huntley, who worked as caretaker of Soham Village College, told police officers that he had seen Holly and Jessica stroll past the house he shared with his girlfriend, twenty-nine-year-old Maxine Carr, the girls’ teacher at the local primary school. He would have been one of the last people to see them before they vanished and as such, he immediately became a suspect. In order to eliminate him from their enquiries, investigators searched both his house and the college where he worked. Nothing was found, however, to connect him with the girls or their disappearance. Nonetheless, there were still those who found his behaviour a little odd, sensing that he was somehow a little too emotionally involved. He asked too many questions and at one point gave an interview to a television news reporter.
Uneasy about him, investigators decided to search his house and workplace again and at last came up with something. In a building at Soham Village College the burned remnants of the football shirts Jessica and Holly had been wearing were discovered, as well as their shoes. On the bin bag in which they were found were Ian Huntley’s fingerprints. Huntley and Maxine Carr were arrested immediately on suspicion of murder.
Finally, on 17 August, thirteen days after the barbecue, a game warden found the little girls’ partially burned bodies in a trench six feet deep close to the RAF Lakenheath airbase in Suffolk. They had probably died of asphyxiation.
The people of Britain were stunned. Having followed every minute detail of the investigation, people were horrified when their faint hopes that Holly and Jessica would be found alive were shattered. The nation went into mourning.
Meanwhile, evidence implicating Ian Huntley was piling up. Huntley knew the area where the girls were found. He had often gone plane-spotting there. When forensic scientists searched his car, they found fibres that matched what the girls had been wearing that day. Strands of Huntley’s hair as well as fibres from his clothes, carpets and car were found on the football shirts. Finally, the last signal from Jessica’s mobile phone was traced to an area adjacent to Huntley’s home.
On 20 August, Ian Huntley was charged with the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman. Maxine Carr, meanwhile, was arrested for assisting an offender. Having provided him with an alibi, telling police that he had been alone with her when the girls disappeared, she was also charged with conspiring to pervert the course of justice. She had actually been visiting her mother in Grimsby when she said she had been with him.
Huntley and Carr maintained that they were innocent dur
ing those first days but they were remanded in custody until their trial, which began on 3 November 2003 at the Old Bailey in London.
The prosecution case rested on a huge amount of evidence that had been collected against Huntley. Adding to the evidence was the fact that he had scrubbed clean his red Ford Fiesta the day after the girls disappeared. Even more suspicious was the fact that he had replaced the lining of the car’s boot with a piece of carpet. A throw that had covered the back seat had been disposed of. Furthermore, he replaced all four of the vehicle’s tyres, even though their treads were still legal. He was reported to have offered the man who changed the tyres £10 to write down a fake registration number. His cover-up was to no avail, however. There were copious amounts of material on and underneath the Fiesta that could only have come from the area where Holly and Jessica’s bodies were dumped.
Three weeks after the start of the trial, Huntley suddenly confessed. A statement by him was read out to the court in which he described how on that Sunday the girls had stopped at his house to talk to their teacher Maxine Carr. While they were there, Holly had a nosebleed. He led the girls to the bathroom, he said, to tend to the nosebleed and claimed that while reaching for some toilet paper, knocked Holly backwards into the bathtub which was half-filled with water. At this point, he said, Jessica began to scream and when he placed a hand over her mouth to stop her, he accidentally pressed too hard and suffocated her. Looking round at Holly in the bath, he realised that she was also dead. He panicked and decided to get rid of their bodies. He wrapped them up, put them in the boot of his car and drove to Lakenheath, cutting off their clothes, pouring petrol over them and setting fire to them before driving back to Soham.
