The Jigsaw Man (63 page)

Leveson said, ‘Let me make it abundantly clear, this was the start of your career of sexually abusing girls, wasn’t it?’

West replied, ‘No, sir.’

Leveson asked, ‘Girls that you picked up in some way or another?’

West replied, ‘No, sir, it didn’t happen like that.’

In his summing up, defending counsel Richard Ferguson QC laid the blame for the Cromwell Street killings firmly at the feet of Frederick West, insisting that there was no direct evidence to link Rosemary. ‘He was a man devoid of compassion, consumed with sexual lust, a sadistic killer and someone who you may think was the very epitome of evil.’ He said that Mr West had killed before he met his wife and did not need her ‘knowledge, consent or participation to continue killing’. Although Rosemary had been shown to be a ‘cruel sexual assailant’ and a liar, he said: ‘That does not prove she is guilty of any of these murders …’

‘This is not like the trial of OJ. Simpson. There are no bloody footprints, no gloves, no DNA evidence. You are not being asked by us to acquit in the teeth of evidence - you are being asked by us to acquit because there is no evidence.’

*

Shortly before 1.00 p.m. on 22 November, the jury ended thirteen hours of deliberations by announcing guilty verdicts on all the charges. Mr Justice Mantell turned to Mrs West and said, ‘On each of the ten counts of murder you have been unanimously convicted by the jury. The sentence is one of life imprisonment and if attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released. Take her down.’

Many in the gallery, crammed with relatives of her victims, roared in approval while others gave polite and decorous applause.

In the days that followed a great deal was to be said and written about the possibility of there being more victims and also whether the warning signs should have been recognized sooner. The police and welfare agencies defended decisions taken over the previous thirty years and argued that only with hindsight could they have known that they had serial killers in their midst.

The most common question that I was asked was how could so many people have gone missing over such a long period of time and no-one have discovered a link with the Wests? Although some of the victims were drifters and runaways, most had loving parents and friends, jobs and workmates - surely, someone must have known, or at least suspected.

However, it shouldn’t surprise us that the Wests killed for a quarter of a century before being caught. We live in a culture now where people come and go all the time. Wives walk out on husbands, teenagers run away from home, hitchhikers fail to arrive, the list goes on. Their fate is unknown to their friends and families. Often the police are informed, private detectives are hired and publicity campaigns fill newspapers.

Some of these people simply go their separate ways or seek to make a fresh start unfettered by their past, but others are victims of violent crime. Yet without a body, or bloodstains or the proverbial ‘smoking gun’, the police may have little reason to suspect that someone has actually been murdered. They are simply ‘missing’.

Five of Mr and Mrs West’s known victims had no publicly known connection with the couple, they were brazenly abducted off the street or picked up while hitchhiking. Three were drifters or runaways who stayed briefly at the house. Even the disappearances of Mr West’s own children, Heather and Charmaine, were explained to the satisfaction of those who enquired. One had run away from home and the other had gone off with her natural mother.

With the clarity of hindsight and the carefully structured presentation of the prosecution case, it all seems so obvious. Yes, there were warning signs which might have been heeded, but even today when police are far more sophisticated in dealing with crime, prosecutions still fail or flounder. One reason is that the crime and the criminal are sometimes beyond the comprehension of those investigating.

In the West case, how could it be otherwise? The police’s long experience had prepared them for investigating killings spawned by basic lust, or revenge, or angry impulse. Now they were dealing with a man and a woman whose depravity was so shocking it was difficult to grasp the magnitude let alone the implications.

Frederick and Rosemary didn’t have ‘MONSTER’ written across their foreheads; they were a likeable, affable couple who seemed close to their children. It’s easy now, knowing their crimes, to look at photographs and immediately ‘recognize’ them as being evil.

I’m not surprised they killed and got away with it for so long. I say this because I know - not just suspect - that there are a dozen more people just like them still out there; serial killers who may never be discovered and whose secrets will stay buried beneath the garden, or the cellar, or beside some remote forest track.

I also know that the file on Frederick and Rosemary West can never be closed because there are more victims to be found. Of course, it’s impossible to say exactly how many, although it could easily be as many more again. After all, this couple are known to have killed for twenty-five years, growing in confidence and refinement as they went along. Between April 1973 to April 1975 six girls were tortured and murdered. Then there was a gap of three years before Shirley Robinson disappeared and another year to Alison Chambers in 1979 and eight years to Heather West in 1987.

Given all that is known about the Wests and people like them there cannot have been a ‘silence’ during these periods or, indeed, since 1987. Consider, Mr West’s first known victim was Anna McFall, the family’s nanny, who disappeared in 1967 when he was twenty-six years old. As I’ve explained, his dangerous psychopathy would have manifested itself when he was young, perhaps in his late teens. There could well have been earlier killings which had as much to do with simple expedience as his desire to dominate women completely.

This realization saddens me because I know that hundreds of families with missing daughters will fear the worst. Others, who live in houses where Frederick West is known to have worked or lived, will suddenly be thinking, ‘He built our patio … I wonder … ?’

So what can or should be done about it? I think a strong case can be made for the search to continue and to some extent it has, although I’m aware of the enormous financial and emotional cost. There were only two people who could have told us where further remains are buried and one, Frederick West, can speak no more. His wife has the knowledge but not the motivation. She will feel pity for herself but absolutely no remorse for the victims or their families - it’s not in her nature.

Therefore, the only alternative is to go back to everywhere the couple have ever been - following their histories point by point - and, where necessary, to begin digging again.

As Rosemary West entranced the nation with her witness box performance, fifty miles away in Oxford, the fate of Gordon Wardell was being decided by a jury. He had almost been forgotten in the scramble to publicize the House of Horror.

Charged with murdering his wife as well as trespassing and stealing Ł14,130.92 from the Woolwich Building Society, Wardell had been in custody since October 1994 and continued to maintain his innocence. Prosecutor Richard Wakerley QC told the jury that he did not have to prove why Wardell killed his wife. ‘In the process of marriage there may be many motives. There may have been a heated argument, all sorts of reasons. The prosecution do not, and do not have to, set out to prove a motive. We set out to prove his story is false.’

On 7 December, Wardell entered the witness box and choked back tears as he told of the last time he had seen Carol alive. He maintained his story of being attacked and tied up and said that when he heard of Carol’s death, ‘I felt as if my whole world had come to an end.’

A string of prosecution witnesses gave evidence to show how Mr Wardell could have faked his injuries but the defence produced its own experts who said the injuries he suffered were entirely consistent with being beaten and bound in the way he described. A consultant anaesthetist said it might also have been possible for him to have been injected with a drug to keep him unconscious for perhaps seven hours although this would have required the attackers to have some medical knowledge. Similarly, the only explanation for Mr Wardell not having urinated for sixteen hours was an extremely rare condition known as myoglobinuria which affects victims of earthquakes and car crashes.

At the end of a six-week trial involving 128 witnesses, the jury deliberated for nine and a half hours before finding Wardell guilty of killing his wife. Mr Justice Cresswell praised detectives for their efforts and told Wardell, ‘You are an extremely dangerous, evil and devious man. You killed your wife in a brutal manner then cynically attempted to escape detection, going to elaborate lengths to make it appear that your crime was the work of a gang of raiders. This murder was an outrage to your wife, her family and to everyone who knew her.’

As one case ended another took its place. The negative publicity surrounding the Rachel Nickell case had died down quickly and the media had moved on to newer pastures. My anger hadn’t diminished, however, and I had become more aware of the role I played in police investigations. I could be asked to help and my advice could be accepted and acted upon, but ultimately I was on my own.

At the same time, ever since I could remember I had deliberately stressed that my psychological skills and experience, although mine, were resources that the police could call upon. But the Green Chain rapes had shocked me and made me realize that I should be more direct and assertive, less willing to simply give my expertise and then walk away. Since then I’d become more insistent on things being done and on having details checked and rechecked.

In the process, I realized that sometimes the line between being a consultant psychologist and a consultant detective had become blurred. For example, many of the questions I asked in the Wardell case such as whether his wife’s sandals could be fitted back on her feet, had little psychological value but important investigatory implications. By asking such questions I didn’t mean to suggest that the detectives had been neglectful or unaware. I simply knew that an uncritical analysis of the information could cause enormous problems. If one detail is overlooked or misinterpreted then it can change the entire direction of the inquiry.

If the Wardell case had centred on the inconsistencies in the story of one man and how these fitted together, the murder of fifteen-year-old Naomi Smith was characterized by the sheer number of potential suspects. For me it began when Detective Superintendent Tony Bayliss telephoned me at home on Sunday afternoon, 17 September, 1995. Naomi had been found three days earlier with her throat cut and injuries to her genitalia. Her body was discovered beneath a children’s slide little more than 100 yards from her home at Ansley Common, a former mining village on the outskirts of Nuneaton.

An incident room had been set up at Bedworth Police Station and Bayliss gave me travel directions. Following these to the letter, I found myself turning left into a pedestrian precinct at Bedworth, driving round bollards and bemused late Monday afternoon shoppers. As I found the station, I noticed a woman arriving at the same time carrying a briefcase. We were standing in the foyer, carefully avoiding eye contact, both of us fearing the other was probably a journalist. Ultimately we finished up in the same room; she was a scientist who had come to discuss DNA samples.

Bayliss began the briefing and certain details were added later by Gino Varriale and Detective Sergeant Jez Grew. On Thursday at approximately 9.45 p.m. Naomi Smith had left her parents’ neat red-brick semi-detached house on the Bretts Hall Estate to post a letter for her mother Catherine. The postbox was by a bus stop on a busy main road less than 200 yards from her home.

Her journey would have taken less than two minutes past the houses of neighbours watching TV and beneath the street lights on Ansley Common Road.

‘A twelve-year-old girl who lives across the road saw Naomi post the letter,’ said Bayliss. ‘She said Naomi began walking home, stopped, turned and walked back past the. postbox. She paused at the entrance to an unlit alleyway - the locals call it a jitty - which runs behind houses and leads to the recreation ground where her body was found. According to the witness, Naomi stopped for a second or two and then walked down the jitty into the darkness. The girl’s a solid witness.’

Gino said, ‘We also have a motorist who says he saw Naomi standing by the postbox at about 9.35 p.m. He was waiting for traffic at an intersection and as he pulled away he noticed a teenage girl standing half on the road and half on the path, looking in his direction.’

‘As if she might be waiting for someone,’ explained Bayliss.

‘Did she have plans to go out that night?’ Bayliss replied, ‘Not according to her parents.’ ‘What about engineering a reason to get out of the house?’

‘No. Her mum asked her to post the letter.’ In daylight the jitty could be viewed as another route home for Naomi from the postbox, but most of her friends insisted that she wouldn’t use it at night. It led to the recreation ground, known locally as ‘The Rec’, which consisted mainly of open space, with swings, a slide and other brightly coloured playground fixtures fitted tightly into the corner nearest to the entrance.

Naomi’s spread-eagled body had been found at 11.30 p.m., lying on a square of Astroturf in a children’s sitting area that was covered by a sloping wooden roof and a playground slide. She was discovered by her father Brian Smith and her best friend Emma Jones who had gone looking for her.

Bayliss began flicking through crime-scene photographs to illustrate various points.

‘We can’t be sure of exactly how she was found. She was moved by her father into the recovery position and covered with a blanket. The ambulance team also touched her. From what we can ascertain, she was lying on her back with her legs open and knees drawn up.’

Naomi had been wearing jeans and a dark blue polo-neck jumper with an old white Aran-style sweater. Over this she had her favourite bomber-style jacket with the words ‘Chicago Fire Department’ emblazoned in flames of yellow on the front and their logo on the back, over the legend, ‘BACKDRAFT’.