by Ray Black
MORE KILLING
Charlie and Caril, having fled town, took refuge with an old family friend of Charlie’s, seventy-two-year-old August Meyer. August was a kindly old bachelor who had known Charlie since he was a little boy and had never shown him anything but kindness. On their way up to his remote farm the couple’s car got stuck in some mud and they ended up walking the rest of the way. From here the story is a little confused, because both Charlie and Caril gave a different version of the events, but August Meyer was shot in the head. They carried his body to the outhouse and hid it under a blanket. Then they returned to Meyer’s house, stole his money, his guns, ate his food and then fell asleep as if nothing had happened.
The next day the couple returned to their car and with the help of some neighbours managed to free it from the mud. However, further down the track they got stuck again and decided to abandon the car and go on foot. Hiding their guns they managed to cadge a lift from seventeen-year-old Robert Jensen and sixteen-year-old Carol King. The second they were inside the car Charlie held the gun at Robert’s neck and forced him to drive back to Meyer’s farm where there was an abandoned storm cellar. Once there Charlie killed the young couple by shooting them in the head. Carol was left half-naked with her jeans and pants around her ankles, and their were repeated stab wounds in her abdomen and pubic area, but no sign of sexual abuse. Caril, allegedly, was sitting in the car while all this happened, but of this there is no proof. Having emptied their pockets of any money Charlie returned to the car and they escaped.
By now there was a massive police hunt underway. Stupidly enough the couple now returned to Lincoln where they were well known, and it was here that they chose the house of a wealthy steel executive, C. Laur Ward. Charlie forced Mrs. Ward and her housekeeper upstairs where they were both tied to a bed and stabbed to death. When Mr. Ward returned home after work, he was confronted by Charlie and he was shot as he entered his home.
Next Charlie and Caril stole the Ward’s car and drove to Wyoming. They drove all night and crossed over into Wyoming the following morning, January 29, 1958. On their way they kept a look-out for a car to steal and came across a Buick that was parked up on the highway. When they stopped they found a man sleeping, Merle Collison, a travelling shoe salesman. Charlie woke up the salesman to tell him that they were going to swap cars, and then shot the poor man in the head. With Collison dead in the front passenger seat, and Caril in the back of the car, Charlie started the Buick but was unable to release the handbrake.
A couple of minutes later a young geologist, Joe Sprinkle, stopped to see if they needed help. Charlie immediately pointed his gun at the young man and threatened to kill him if he didn’t help him release the brake. Suddenly Joe saw the slumped body of Merle Collison in the passenger seat and realized that if he were to stay alive he would have to get the gun from Charlie. They wrestled and while they were struggling a deputy Sheriff by the name of William Romer, came by and saw the fight.
When she saw the man Caril jumped out of the back seat and rushed up to him and started crying. She asked him to take her to the police because she yelled, ‘He’s killed a man’. The man replied that he was the police, but before he could take any action Charlie had run off to their original car and was driving back towards the town of Douglas. The Sheriff immediately ordered a roadblock and went off in pursuit. A chase ensued but Charlie was eventually apprehended and he and Caril chose Nebraska as the place to stand trial. Caril maintained that she was a hostage throughout the whole ordeal and she only stayed with him for fear that he would kill her family if she didn’t.
Charlie and Caril were both charged with first degree murder and murder while committing a robbery. Charlie’s trial started on May 5, 1958 and he did nothing to help himself, in fact he was quite unrepentant and tended to brag about his crimes. Initially he told the authorities that Caril had played no part in the crimes, but when he learned that she was trying to say that she was an unwilling hostage, he turned and tried to implicate her in the murders. The jury had no doubt about his guilt and sentenced him to death by electric chair. He was finally executed on June 25, 1959.
Caril’s defence built upon her being a hostage and that she was forced by Starkweather to go along with him on his murdering spree. However, the jury were not convinced and she was also found guilty on November 28, 1958.
Due to the fact that she was only fourteen years old, she was given a life sentence instead of the death penalty. She was sent to the Nebraska Center for Women to serve her sentence and was paroled in 1977.
Fred And Rosemary West
Fred and Rosemary West had a love affair with violent pornography and every video they owned reflected in some way their very own depraved and perverted behaviour.
This case study covers every sordid angle of a team working in unison to satisfy their sadistic fantasies – prostitution, drugs, kinky sex, incest, paedophilia, suicide and murder. The house where all this happened, 25 Cromwell Street, became known as the House of Horrors and as you read on you will see just why it received this name.
FRED WEST
Fred West was born in 1941 in the small village of Much Marcle. He was the eldest of six children to Walter and Daisy West and he began life as a beautiful baby with blond curly hair and piercing blue eyes. Fred was definitely his mother’s favourite but he also had a good relationship with his father. His homelife was happy and suffered none of the normal abuse that we find in many of the killers that have been mentioned in this book.
As Fred reached puberty he started to lose some of his baby good looks, and he became rather unkempt and scruffy. At school he was not a very promising student and was constantly being punished for insubordination. His mother, not happy with the constant caning her favourite son received, would go to the school and yell at his teacher. This only made matters worse for Fred and this earned him the nickname ‘Mother’s Boy’.
Virtually illiterate, Fred left school at the age of fifteen, and took a job as a farm hand. By sixteen Fred had started to tidy himself up so that he was able to attract the opposite sex. He appeared that he took any girl that caught his fancy and he was known to be a very aggressive lover.
When Fred was seventeen he was involved in a very serious motorcycle accident which left him in a coma for more than a week. The accident resulted in him having a metal plate in his head, and one leg that was permanently shorter than the other. This incident seemed to have a lasting effect on Fred and he was prone to violent outbursts of temper and had less control over his emotions. This may well have been the reason why his sexual fantasies became so perverse and resulted in him being a serial killer.
When Fred had recovered from his accident he met the pretty sixteen-year-old, Catherine Bernadette Costello, nicknamed Rena. She had been in and out of trouble with the police since early childhood and by the time they met she was already an accomplished thief. They became lovers but the affair ended when she returned home to Scotland a few months later.
In the year 1961, Fred was accused of getting a thirteen-year-old girl pregnant. She was a friend of the family, but Fred was adamant that he didn’t see anything wrong with molesting minors, and his parents ordered that he move out and find somewhere else to live. Fred, still obsessed with sex and with young women in particular, stuck his hand up the skirt of a young woman standing on a fire escape outside the local youth club. She was so angry that she turned round and knocked the young Fred off the fire escape. Once again he was knocked into unconsciousness and this along with the damage from the motorcycle accident seems to have had a lasting impact on Fred West. He had no doubt suffered brain damage.
In 1962, Fred’s parents relented and said that he could return home, which coincided with the return of Rena to Much Marcle. Immediately the affair started up again and in certain respects they seemed to be a good match. Rena was certainly somewhat of a delinquent and on her return was pregnant by another man. Fred and Rena married secretly in November 1962 and moved up to Scotland. Fred’
s parents presumed that the baby Rena was carrying was Fred’s, but when Charmaine was born in March 1963, it was very obviously of mixed-race. They wrote to Fred’s parents and told them their baby had died during childbirth and that they had decided to adopt a baby.
Despite the fact that Rena had been a prostitute she objected to Fred’s obsessional sexual appetite, which included bondage, oral sex and other perversions. This drove Fred to satisfy his urges elsewhere and his job as the driver of an ice cream truck gave him unlimited access to young women. For some reason the image he portrayed to the outside world made him attractive to the young girls who surrounded his ice cream truck to hear his interesting stories. Even though Fred was unfaithful, he always remained totally possessive of both Rena and Charmaine.
Fred and Rena’s second child, Anna Marie, was born in 1964. Their marriage certainly had many ups and downs and during this period they met Anna McFall, whose boyfriend had been killed in an accident. Fred was involved in an accident with the ice cream truck that had killed a young boy, and even though Fred was not at fault, they decided to move back to Gloucester, along with Anna McFall.
Fred took a job in a slaughter house and this only seems to have heightened his sexual perversions. He seemed to love to mutilate and dismember corpses and the sight of blood excited him even more. By now Fred and Rena’s marriage was really on the rocks and Rena wanted to move back to Scotland with the children. Fred wouldn’t allow the children to leave and so Rena returned to Glasgow on her own. However, Rena was so miserable without her daughters that she returned to Gloucester in July 1966 to find Fred and Anna now living in a trailer. Rena, desperate to get her children back, went to the police and told them that her husband was a sexual pervert and was unfit to raise their children.
In 1967, Anna McFall became pregnant with Fred’s child. Anna was desperate to get Fred to divorce Rena so that they could marry, and Fred’s response to this request was to kill her and her unborn baby. He buried the body near the caravan park, but not before dismembering the body. He had cut off her fingers and toes which were found to be missing at the gravesite, and this was to become his ‘signature’ for further crimes.
For a while Fred seemed nervous and unsettled, but Rena moved back into the trailer and Fred returned to his normal self. Rena went out to earn some money as a prostitute, and while she was away from home he started to fondle the young Charmaine.
Coincidentally around this time there were several sexual assaults committed in the Gloucester area, and one was pretty fifteen-year-old Mary Bastholm in January 1968.
In February of that year Fred’s mother died following an operation, and it was about this time that he committed a series of petty thefts. He had many different jobs and it was while he was working as a driver for a baker, that he met Rosemary Letts. She was to become his lifetime soulmate and next wife.
ROSEMARY LETTS
Rosemary Letts was born in November 1953 in Devon. Her background was far more unstable than Fred’s because her father was a schizophrenic and her mother suffered from severe depression. When her mother, Daisy, was pregnant with Rose, she underwent several electrotherapy treatments for depression, and it is not known what effect this had on the unborn baby. After she was born, Rose developed a habit of rocking herself, and as she became a little older this developed into only head rocking. As a toddler she used to swing her head from side to side for hours on end until she appeared to have hypnotized herself into a form of semiconsciousness.
At school she was below average, and was often the butt of cruel jokes due to the fact that she was overweight. She would lash out at anyone that teased her and consequently became rather a bad-tempered loner. As a teenager she started showing signs of being sexually permissive and loved to climb into bed with her younger brother and start to fondle him. Her temper and chubbiness kept boys of her own age from being interested, and so Rose turned her attentions to the older men in the village.
In January 1968, Rose and other girls in the area started to worry about their safety, as a young girl named Mary Bastholm had disappeared from a bus stop in Gloucester. But as time went by she became less and less cautious and ended up by being raped by an older man.
In 1969, Daisy Letts became intolerant of her husband’s cruelty and she took Rose, who was by this time fifteen, to stay with her other daughter Glenys and her husband. Rose spent most nights out with men and her brother-in-law, Jim Tyler, who even claimed that Rose once tried to seduce him. A couple of months later, much to everyone’s surprise, Rose moved back in with her father. Rose’s main aim in life seems to have been to find herself an older lover, and then she met Fred West.
THE PARTNERSHIP
Rosemary’s father was not pleased when his daughter started having a relationship with Fred West. He considered that he was an undesirable boyfriend and took several measures to try and stop the affair. Meanwhile Fred was sent to prison for various thefts and failure to pay fines for previous offences. Rose went back to live with her father for a while, that is until he discovered that she was pregnant with Fred’s child. She moved back to take care of Charmaine and Anna and also to cope with Fred, who was always in and out of trouble with the police.
Heather was born in 1970. Rose became short-tempered and was not happy about having to look after three children with very little money. She was not happy about having to look after Rena’s children and she started to treat them badly. One day in 1971, Charmaine went missing. Rose told Anna Marie that Rena had come to fetch her, but it is believed that Rose lost her temper and went further than she normally did. Anna Marie described Rose as ‘a woman entirely without self-control – when she lost her temper, she became a kind of maniac’.
Fred was in jail when Charmaine was murdered so the only part he probably played in this was to bury her body under the kitchen floor of their home in Midland Road, where it lay undisturbed for over twenty years. Fred now had a hold over Rose and between them they kept the deadly secret.
Both Fred and Rose had no interest in normal sex they were only interested if it involved perverse acts like bondage, lesbianism or sadism, and for this purpose they used to invite members of the West Indian community to fulfil their fantasies. Fred would watch, take erotic pictures and even place adverts in magazines for willing participants. However, when Rose killed Charmaine she posed a new problem for Fred, his first wife Rena. It was only a matter of time before she came looking for her daughter. In August 1971 Rena did in fact come looking for Charmaine, but she went to Fred’s father, Walter, to see if he knew what had happened. Fred realised that the only way out of this predicament was to kill Rena and after he had strangled the life out of her, he dismembered her body and mutilated it in the same way he had done with Anna McFall. He then put all her remains in a bag and buried them in the same place as that of Anna.
Rose and Fred had befriended a neighbour, Elizabeth Agius, who babysat for them on several occasions. She asked them one evening if they had had a nice evening and where they had been, to which they replied they had been cruising around in the car looking for young virgins. Elizabeth laughed because she thought they were joking, but it turned out that she was openly propositioned by Fred and eventually drugged and raped.
Fred and Rose’s second daughter was born in June 1972. They were now legally married and they decided they needed a larger house in which to raise their growing family. They also needed the room so that Rose could continue with her expanding prostitution business. Number 25 Cromwell Street seemed the ideal location. It was a nice large house with a good-sized cellar, and the West’s took in lodgers to help them pay the rent. Fred told Rose that he had plans for the cellar and that he would either make it a place for her to entertain her clients, or alternatively he would soundproof it and use it as his ‘torture chamber’. Unfortunately, his first client was to be his own daughter Anna Marie. Together Fred and Rose undressed Anna and tied her hands behind her back. Then Fred raped her, while Rose held her down. Apparently the pa
in from the rape was so bad that she was unable to go to school for several days. She was threatened that she would be beaten if she told anyone about their little secret. This was to happen on more than one occasion.
In December 1972, Fred and Rose picked up a seventeen-year-old girl called Caroline Owens, who they hired as their nanny. They promised her parents that they would take good care of her, but Caroline promptly left when Rose made sexual advances towards her. Foolishly, three weeks later, Caroline accepted a lift from the Wests. As soon as she was in the car Rose started to molest her while Fred drove the car and started asking kinky questions about Caroline’s body. Back at Cromwell Street the couple stripped, tortured and raped her. Although she had also been threatened with violence if she didn’t keep her mouth shut, she did later go to the police and tell her story.
Even though Fred had a record, the couple were only fined a meagre £50 as the police didn’t believe this nice couple could possibly be capable of such heinous acts.
Fred and Rosemary had for some while been friends with a girl named Lynda Gough. After several months Lynda moved into Cromwell Street to help take care of the children. Her mother was suspicious when she left a note to say she was leaving and traced her back to the Wests’ house in Cromwell Street. When she knocked on the door it was answered by Rose who was wearing Lynda’s slippers, and she told the anxious woman that her daughter had gone to Weston-Super-Mare. In truth her dismembered body was buried in the basement.
In August 1973 their first son, Stephen, was born. The next person to be abducted by the Wests was Carol Ann Cooper, in November of the same year. Her body was buried along with the growing number of others that were beneath 25 Cromwell Street. As normal her body had been dismembered and she had had her head and legs removed.
