Happy Like Murderers

by Gordon Burn

  By the early seventies there were always a lot of people milling around and going up and down Cromwell Street late at night. The Ebony Club had opened in the old school buildings at Tommy Rich’s and that drew a lot of complaints from the older neighbours on account of the loud reggae music and the persistent heavy bass. Maxi’s was another club around the corner at the park end of the street where people from number 25 would come and go. It drew a rough crowd: one night a boy got up on his seat and fired bullets from a 12-bore shotgun into the ceiling above the bar. Tracy’s on the bus station was safer and more mainstream, with bouncers and visiting DJs and a liberal, but if necessary enforceable, dress code. Caroline Raine still hitched in from Cinderford to go to Tracy’s some nights. The brother of a fifteen-year-old from a local children’s home who would become involved with Fred and Rose worked on the door. Liz Parry, one of the long-term tenants at Cromwell Street, was a barmaid at Tracy’s; and Rose was even sometimes seen in the club in the early years of her marriage to Fred.

  *

  Rose West’s diary entry for Thursday, 24 February 1977:

  Went to Tracy’s with Anna[-Marie, then aged thirteen]

  Meet two fellas

  Not much good Not feeling to good …

  12 o’clock Got home. Hopeless!

  Fella not a lot of good

  12.30 o’clock with Fred. That’s better. Got a little cuddle.

  Tracy’s was under the multi-storey car park that had been built when the bus station moved to the site of the old cattle market, close to the centre of Gloucester. And Fred was frequently seen with his work van hanging around in the bus station late at night chatting to these little teenyboppers as he liked to call them. These little teenybopper birds out of it on drugs or drink; without money; perhaps in need of friendship and somewhere to stay. Girls having what he was always telling Rose she should be having. Girls having their young life.

  Nobody will ever know whether Carol Cooper, known to her friends as ‘Caz’, was part of the traffic passing though 25 Cromwell Street in the final months of 1973. But she was the kind of age and living the kind of life being lived by many of the girls who were regular or casual visitors to the house at that time. Carol Cooper was friendly with one or two bikers, members of the Scorpions who had dossed at Cromwell Street in the year or so that Fred West had been letting out rooms there. She was last seen getting on a bus in Worcester just after nine o’clock one night in November 1973. She was fifteen, and 10 November was the Saturday of the first weekend she had officially been allowed to sleep away from the Pines Children’s Home where she had been living since she was thirteen. It was the first official time and she was going to spend the Saturday night as she had spent Friday night, at her grandmother’s in Warndon. But there had been several unofficial occasions when, instead of going back to the Pines, Carol had spent the night sleeping rough or in some abandoned railway carriages with some of the bikers she had got to know. She wore a jean jacket and the gang’s ‘patches’ and had used Indian ink and a needle to tattoo ‘Caz’ on her left forearm and a pattern of dots across the knuckles of her left hand. Physically she was tall and strong and she was regarded as being ‘outward’ as a person. Her parents had separated when she was four, and her mother had died when Carol was eight. She had made an attempt at living with her father and his new wife but that hadn’t worked out. She was effectively without a family and rebelling. She had been caught shoplifting. She was devil-may-care and a rebel. She was a regular absconder from her local-authority home. On Bonfire Night in 1973, a few nights before she went missing, a firework had gone off in Carol’s hand. That was a Monday. Her left hand was still bandaged on the Saturday when she met her boyfriend of the time, Andrew Jones, and a large group of friends to go to the Odeon in Worcester. When they came out of the pictures they went to a local fish-and-chip shop and sat on the steps of another cinema, the Scala, to eat them. It wasn’t late when Carol and Andrew went their separate ways: it was quarter past nine. But it was later than Carol had intended because she had had a small spat with Andrew and she hadn’t wanted to get on the bus without making up with him and that had taken time. But he gave her money for her fare and she got on the bus and nobody who knew her ever saw her again.

  It isn’t known how Carol came to get off the bus without returning to her grandmother, but it is known she ended up in Cromwell Street. Carol was certainly there because on 8 March 1994, just after seven in the evening, her remains were found under the cellar floor at 25 Cromwell Street, the ninth set of remains to be found at the address. They were in the rear part of the cellar, a short distance from the wall and adjacent to a washbasin which was installed some years after her death when that part of the cellar was made into a bedroom for Stephen. As in the case of Lynda Gough, many bones were missing, particularly from the feet and hands. Several fingers and toes and wrist bones had been taken away. The skull had been struck from the spine, and the bones had been chopped so that the remains could be forced into a small hole no bigger than three feet deep and two feet square. Again there was a ring mask or gag, this one made of elasticated surgical tape wound around itself several times to cover the jaws and lower face as well as the back of the head. There was also some hair remaining, some loops of fabric and a length of woven cord, doubtless all that remained of at least part of the binding that held her. The black discoloration of the soil around the area where the remains were found was a result of decomposed body tissue and demonstrated that the dismembered body rotted where it lay underground in Cromwell Street. There was nothing to suggest that Carol had been wearing clothes when she died.

  Six weeks after Carol Cooper was murdered, Lucy Partington, a twenty-one-year-old third-year undergraduate at the University of Exeter, studying medieval history and English, became the second woman to be buried under the cellar in Cromwell Street. Her parents were divorced: her father Roger was a research scientist with ICI on Teesside; her mother Margaret worked in an architect’s office in Cheltenham. She was a member of the university’s medieval music group and had visited Much Marcle Church and the nearby Kempley Parish Church among other places to make notes on the medieval art works and paintings. Lucy Partington, wore the same wire-framed glasses as Lynda Gough and wore her long hair in the same casual way. She had converted to Roman Catholicism only a few weeks before she disappeared after taking instruction from a priest in Exeter.

  She had spent Christmas with her mother in Gretton, the small village where she had grown up, just outside Cheltenham. Christmas Day in 1973 had fallen on a Tuesday. On the Friday, Lucy was due to go and stay with her father in the north of England. On Thursday night she paid a visit to a close friend called Helen Render who was seriously disabled and largely confined to a wheelchair. She arrived at Helen’s house around eight and spent a couple of hours there, mainly composing an application letter to do an MA in medieval art at the Courtauld Institute in London. She left Helen Render’s house just before a quarter past ten in something of a rush to catch the last bus, known as the grey bus and cheaper than the standard service, her letter to the Courtauld in her hand. The old Kersey bus was half the price of the normal bus and most people used to catch the Kersey. It was sleeting but the bus stop was only a three-minute walk away on the main A435 trunk road between Cheltenham and Evesham. A man out walking his dog saw Lucy hurrying between Culross Close and the bus stop. He would identify her from the description: ‘Dressed in rust-coloured raincoat, pink jeans, red mittens, carrying faded brown canvas satchel. Gold-rimmed specs. Was last seen in Albemarle Gate, Pittville, Cheltenham.’ It was a description that would go on the ‘Missing’ posters that would start to appear in shop windows and on lamp-posts in the coming weeks. The grey bus was ten minutes late that night and the streets were underlit and in some cases not lit at all because of the fuel crisis and the three-day week, and Lucy was never seen again.

  Everybody who knew her agreed that Lucy Partington was too sensible to accept a lift at night from a man, or even a ma
n and a woman, who she didn’t know. (Graham Letts’s mother-in-law, Ellen White, claims to know that Fred and Rose had Stephen, who was only a four-month-old baby, in the van with them on the night they picked Lucy Partington up, which could certainly have been a factor, but Mrs White is unwilling to say how she knows.) She would not have got into the van voluntarily unless it was somebody she recognized or knew.

  There is every possibility that Fred West had had a passing acquaintance with Lucy Partington at the very least since she was a child. As a bread-roundsman in Bishop’s Cleeve and the surrounding villages in the late-fifties he had got to know, for instance, many of the families who lived in a hamlet called Stoke Orchard (population 312). One of these families was the Whites and in particular Mrs White whose daughter Barbara was going to marry Rose’s brother, Graham. Fred would tell Barbara that he remembered her as a pretty child, and Ellen White, Barbara’s mother, would remember Fred as somebody who would give you his last penny in those days and anybody in the village would tell you the same. The Whites lived where they still live, at 5 Cleeve View, a short terrace of forties brick council houses facing the main road in Stoke Orchard. Rose’s sister Glenys and her husband Jim Tyler lived next door to Mrs White at 4 Cleeve View for several years. (It was through his sister that Graham met, and eventually married, Barbara White.) Mrs Nock at 1 Cleeve View, another of Fred West’s bread-round customers, would look after Charmaine and Anna-Marie for him a decade later. Stoke Orchard was close to the M5 extension, and he would leave the children with Mrs Nock on his way to work on the motorway in 1968 and 1969, and collect them on his way back home to the trailer at night.

  Jim Tyler was a farmer’s son from Gotherington, the next village north of Bishop’s Cleeve: Tobyfield Road, where the Letts family lived, very soon becomes Gotherington Lane; and the lane, going east out of Gotherington village, becomes the road to Gretton, the village where Lucy Partington grew up and where her mother was still living in 1973. It was Gretton that Lucy was trying to get back to on the night she disappeared. Lucy Partington was a year older than Rose Letts. She was six years older than Barbara White. Although he wouldn’t see her for ten years, Fred West remembered Barbara as a child. So it is possible – more than possible – that he remembered Lucy Partington as a seven-or eight-year-old girl. The bread that he delivered was baked in Gotherington, the next village along the road from where Lucy was growing up. He delivered to Gretton and all the other villages around and about. He was well liked and attractive and friendly: Mrs White thought so. He was also devious and vigilant and patient. A shrewd, proud lout.

  Lucy Partington went to Pates Grammar School for Girls in Cheltenham from 1963 to 1970. Pates is situated immediately behind the Pump Room made famous in the days of George III, on the A435, the main Cheltenham–Evesham road. At the end of the day she would come out of school and walk through the Pump Room straight to her bus stop on the other side of the Evesham road by the railings of Pittville Park. It was the grey bus to Bishop’s Cleeve and Gretton. The same bus that Rose would take when she was working in the cake shop in Cheltenham in 1968 and 1969. The bus on which Fred West would approach her when she wasn’t yet sixteen and ask her to go out with him for the first time. He was living on the Lakehouse site in Bishop’s Cleeve from 1967 to the end of 1969 – years in which every day after school Lucy Partington would be waiting at her bus stop opposite the Pump Room. 9 Clarence Road, the first address that Fred and Rose shared and where he moved in 1969, was very close by. Did he remember her as a seven and eight year old from when he was delivering bread round Gretton? He was devious and vigilant and patient. Did she remember him? Did he stop and offer her a lift in the old white camper van with a blue stripe on its side which had become so familiar to the girls of Cleeve School? This man parked close to the school with the two scruffy but pretty little daughters sitting up in the front beside him. Even after they had moved to Gloucester he would drive the children over to Cheltenham on some Sundays to play in Pittville Park. Did she ever get in?

  By coincidence, the bus stop closest to Lucy Partington’s friend Helen Render’s house, the stop where Lucy was waiting on the night she disappeared, was the stop she had used all through her time at school. The bus stop just at the top of that brow there. That’s the top of the Evesham road almost up towards the race-course roundabout. Lucy had written a poem about it and the many wet and cold afternoons she had stood by it waiting for a bus, the park at her back and the Pump Room directly opposite, her school beyond that, giving the poem the title ‘Bus Stop’. This is not the stop that Fred West invested with so much significance the night he made Stephen get out of the van and stand on the spot where his mother and father first met. As if there were some magic or mystery or something around it. These pavements. This bus stop. That bus stop was back in the centre of town.

  But the bus stop where Lucy Partington waited every day and wrote about and which she was hurrying towards when she was last seen is the stop that Rose West claimed she had been standing at and been chased from and pursued into Pittville Park and raped there when she was fifteen. ‘I was waiting for a bus when a man approached me,’ she said. ‘He was chatting me up, I resisted his advances, I wasn’t interested in men at that time, but he was very forcible, very strong, because he was grabbing me, then it got out of hand. I got frightened and I ran away from him. I ran towards the park in Cheltenham. There was nobody around, this man’s gaining on me, pursuing me towards the park … There was a little gate to the entrance of the park. He smashed the padlock off it as if it was nothing, and dragged me down by the lake under some trees and raped me.’ Afterwards she went back to the bus stop, she said, and got on a bus when one came and went home.

  If this was something that happened it was something that Rose West kept to herself for twenty-five years. It is strongly reminiscent of the chase-and-rape scenarios that are a staple of many full-length, hard-core pornographic features of the kind the Wests watched together and Fred West kept and lent out from Cromwell Street. What is interesting is the location of the bus stop – which Rose claimed she was too frightened ever to stand at again – and the part of Pittville Park closest to the bus stop on the Evesham road. Places played an important part in their private mythology: the five-bar gate near the Odessa in Tewkesbury; the disused airfield near Stoke Orchard where they liked to go at nights for rough sex and taping sessions in the van; the hunting stile close to where Rena was buried in Letterbox Field; the house that they built with their bare hands together at 25 Cromwell Street. Although they were interviewed separately and were unable to confer with each other – all communication between them ended after their arrest in February 1994; Rose withheld her co-operation almost entirely from the police, answering ‘no comment’ to all their questions to her for weeks – they both made references to the bus stop that Rose had been raped from and Lucy Partington had travelled home from school from and was hurrying towards on the night she disappeared, and to the part of the park adjacent to where the bus stop still stands. The old Kersey bus was half the price of the normal bus and most people used to catch the Kersey.

  Fred West told the police that he had had sex with Rose at the place close to the lake in Pittville Park where she claimed to have been raped. He had been spotted there with Rose by Andrew, her brother, and it was this that had got him barred from seeing her: ‘Because her brother walked that road at all hours of the day and night, going to see his girlfriend in Cheltenham.’ Grotesquely, but instructively because of what it reveals about the transferences and distortions that fed his fantasy life, he also claimed to have had sex with Lucy Partington in that same part of the park. They had agreed to meet in the park, he claimed, because of the danger of being spotted by Andrew Letts or some other member of Rose’s family: ‘The last thing I wanted them to do was to go and tell Rose I was meeting another girl in Cheltenham.’ He said that he ‘used to park in Pittville Park and wait for her’, keeping the van out of sight. ‘I met Lucy … in the park one day. On t
he boating lake there when I was with the kids and I got going with her after. It was all secret hush hush … I took the children home and I arranged to meet her back at night, and I came and met her on that hill and we had a bit of a sex romp and that, and that was it. Most of the time I met her was in the dark … [The murder – he claimed to have strangled her when “she come the loving racket” and was threatening to tell Rose about their affair] must have been about when I was taking her back to the bus stop. She used to get the bus at the top of … er, where the peacocks are. Pittville Pump Rooms or summat there by the side of it … I used to bring her back to there and drop her to get the bus.’

  All through his life Fred West would invest his deepest and most complicated emotions – all his most difficult and disturbing thoughts – not in people, but in things. Places and things. And it is possible to detect signs in the parallel but separate accounts that Rose and Fred West gave of events related to the abduction and murder of Lucy Partington that that bus stop on the Evesham road and the part of the park that fell within its force field was such a place. He spun a fantasy around it involving sex and murder. Her fantasy focused on coercion and rape. It is a location that appears to have assumed an importance for them retrospectively because of what happened there on the night of 27 December 1973, the details of which only one living person knows.