World's Worst Crimes: An A-Z of Evil Deeds (19 page)

A Killer Couple

Fred and Rosemary West are among the most chilling serial killers of all time. During the 1970s, they murdered a string of female victims, including their own daughter. Yet despite frequent brushes with the police, the seemingly good-natured builder and his wife were never connected with the murders at the time they were committed.

In the decade that followed, police gave up the search for the girls who had gone missing in the area, and their files sat on the shelves collecting dust. The Wests would probably have got away with their crimes, had it not been for the fact that, in 1992, a young girl they had raped finally went to the police, and the whole story began – literally – to be unearthed.

Violence And Sexual Abuse

Fred and Rosemary West were both from deprived rural backgrounds, where violence and sexual abuse was not uncommon. Born in the village of Much Marcle in 1941, Fred was one of six children, and later claimed that incest was rife in the family. He was backward at school, and left at the age of fifteen scarcely able to read or write. At the age of seventeen he suffered a serious motorcycle accident that possibly caused damage to his brain: it was after this that his behaviour became increasingly out of control. He was eventually arrested for having sex with an under-age girl, and narrowly avoided prison. His parents, finally tiring of his behaviour, threw him out of the family home.

Rosemary Letts, born in 1953 in Devon, was sexually abused from a young age by her schizophrenic father. Her mother suffered from severe depression. As a teenager, she was overweight and sexually precocious. When she met Fred, who was twelve years older than she, she idolized him, and soon became pregnant by him, even though she was not yet sixteen.

The Murders Begin

Fred had already been married, to prostitute Rena Costello, who had a mixed-race child called Charmaine from a previous relationship. Fred and Rena’s own child, Anna Marie, was born shortly before the pair split up. Fred had then taken up with a friend of Rena’s named Anna McFall, who was pregnant with Fred’s child when, as later emerged, he murdered her, dismembering her body and burying it near the trailer where they lived. He was then free to concentrate on his relationship with his new girlfriend, Rosemary.

During this time, Fred was in and out of prison on minor charges such as non-payment of fines, while Rosemary was left in charge of the children – Charmaine, Anna Marie, and the couple’s new daughter, Heather, born in 1970. Rosemary had a ferocious temper and was insanely cruel, especially to Charmaine. She abused the children while Fred was away, finally murdering Charmaine. Later, Fred buried the child’s body under the house. Then, when Rena came looking for Charmaine, Fred murdered her too, burying her body in the countryside.

In 1972, the couple moved to a house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, where Rosemary worked as a prostitute and continued to bear children, some of which were Fred’s, and some of which were fathered by her clients. The basement of the house was used for deviant sexual activities, including the rape of their daughter, Anna Marie, and a girl they employed to care for the children, Caroline Owens. When Owens went to the police, Fred West was tried for the rape, but – unbelievably – he was let off with a fine. Tragically, the next girl hired to care for the children, Lynda Gough, was not so lucky: she did not escape with her life, and was murdered and buried under the cellar. The couple went on to abduct, torture and murder more young women, in a killing spree that was as brutal as it was depraved: Carol Anne Cooper, Lucy Partington, Alison Chambers, Therese Siegenthaler, Shirley Hubbard, Juanita Mott, and Shirley Robinson all met their deaths in the most horrifying ways. The Wests even killed their own daughter, Heather, after she told friends about her bizarre home life. She was buried, like many of the other victims, in the garden of the house.

The Case Goes Cold

Then, suddenly, the killings stopped. There have been many theories about why this came about: perhaps the Wests found other ways of satisfying their violent sexual impulses; or perhaps there were actually many other victims who were never missed, and whose deaths were never reported.

The Wests were careful to choose their victims from the bottom of the social pile; often girls who had lost touch with their families, or who were working as prostitutes, whose relatives and friends would not come looking for them. Lucy Partington, a middle-class university student and a relative of the writer Martin Amis, was the exception.

It looked as though the Wests had got away with their crimes, and that their victims would be forgotten. But in 1992, the couple’s horrifying deeds came back to haunt them, when a girl they had raped went to the police to report her ordeal. This time, her story was believed.

Buried Under The Patio

On 6 August 1992, police arrived at the house in Cromwell Street. They searched the house for pornography and found more than enough evidence to arrest the couple for rape and sodomy of a minor. One of West’s perversions was to film his wife on video, engaging in sex with different partners, both men and women. The older West children, Stephen and Anna Marie, both made statements supporting the allegation of rape, but the case later collapsed when they withdrew these, under pressure from the family.

Meanwhile, the younger children had been taken away from their parents and placed in social care. Their carers began to notice that they often joked about their sister Heather being buried under the patio. This was reported to the police, who returned to the house in February 1994 and began to dig up the garden. To their horror, they not only found Heather’s remains, but a total of nine other bodies in the garden. Later, other bodies under the cellar were dug up.

Fred West initially confessed to the murder of his daughter Heather, but then retracted the confession. It seemed that he and Rosemary then made a pact, in which he would take the blame for the murder, emphasizing that his wife was not involved in any way. Accordingly, he re-confessed, stressing that Rosemary was not to blame, but by this time there was evidence to show that she too was responsible for the murder not only of Heather, but of many other victims as well.

Hanged In His Cell

Fred West was charged with twelve murders in all, but before he could come to trial, he hanged himself in his prison cell, on New Year’s Day in 1995. Rosemary maintained that she was innocent, but in October that same year, she was convicted of ten of the murders, and received a life sentence.

What would have happened if that young girl had not gone to the police to report her rape in 1992? Is it possible that Fred and Rosemary West would have continued to evade the law until the end of their natural lives, their crimes never discovered? What if the authorities had dismissed the girl’s story, as they had dismissed that of Caroline Owens, the Wests’ nanny, years before?

It seems almost incredible that two people who had committed so many hideous murders could have gone undetected for so long – but that is what happened.

Perhaps it was a change in the social climate that helped to bring them to justice. Perhaps the permissive climate of the 1970s, in which the rules about sexual morality were beginning to be relaxed, impacted in a negative way on the underclass to which both Fred and Rosemary West belonged. This might explain why it was that the bizarre sexual behaviour that took place in their household went largely unnoticed and unremarked on by friends and neighbours, who might, in other times, have found it unacceptable.

However one explains it, the fact remains that it was only through the bravery of one young girl that the appalling brutality of this pair of vicious killers came to light, years after the murders happened, so that they finally received the punishment they deserved.

A loving couple? Fred and Rosemary West – not even their neighbours had any idea of what was going on.

Killing For Company

Dennis ‘Des’ Nilsen is one of the most perplexing of serial killers. He exhibited few of the conventional childhood signs of a future killer; he did not torture animals or play with fire. When he killed it was not in a sexual frenzy, but while his victims slept. He killed them, he famously said, so they would not leave. He was ‘killing for company’. However, the fact remains that this mild-mannered civil servant was responsible for the violent deaths of at least fifteen men.

Motivation

His case is fascinating not simply because it does not fit a pattern but also because, more than most other killers, Nilsen himself has tried to understand his own motivation. He helped the writer Brian Masters to write his biography and has written his own autobiography, as well as penning numerous letters to the press and researchers.

Dennis Andrew Nilsen was born in the Scottish port town of Fraserburgh on 23 November 1945 – yet another serial killer to be born during the post-war baby boom. His parents were Olav, a Norwegian soldier who had left Norway when the Nazis invaded, and Betty, who came from a religious Scottish family. His father was a heavy drinker who effectively deserted Betty from the very start. There was never a family home: Betty and Dennis remained at her parents’ house and the couple were divorced in 1949.

The father figure in Dennis’ life became his grandfather, Andrew Whyte. When Whyte died in 1951, it was a defining trauma in Dennis’ life – all the more so because he was taken to see his grandfather’s body without being told that he had died. This unexpected sight of his grandfather’s corpse is the event that Nilsen himself regards as having sown the seeds of his later sexual pathology.

In 1953, Nilsen’s mother remarried and went on to have four other children. Understandably, she had less time for Dennis and he became a rather solitary child. In 1961, aged sixteen, he opted to join the army, to be a soldier like his absent father. He remained in the army until 1972, working for part of the time as a butcher in the Catering Corps. Dennis had no sexual experience as a teenager but was increasingly aware that he was attracted to men. During his last year in the army he fell in love with a fellow soldier. However, the man in question was not gay and did not return Nilsen’s affections – though he did consent to Nilsen’s request to film him while he pretended to be dead.

The end of their friendship was a great blow to Nilsen, who then left the army and trained to be a policeman – taking a particular interest in visits to the morgue. However police work did not suit him and after a year he left and found employment in a job centre in London’s Soho, interviewing people looking for work.

Gay Scene

Soho was the hub of London’s emerging gay scene at the time and Nilsen began to immerse himself in a new world of bar-hopping and casual pick-ups. However, whatever sexual gratification Nilsen got from this was not enough to counterbalance a terrible sense of loneliness. This abated for nearly two years, between 1975 and 1977, when he shared an apartment in north London with a man named David Gallichan. They were not, apparently, sexual partners, but they shared domestic duties and acquired a dog and a cat. However, temperamental differences drove them apart and in 1977 Nilsen asked Gallichan to leave the flat.

The loneliness returned and became unbearable for Nilsen. In December 1978 Nilsen picked up a young Irishman in a pub; Nilsen never even learnt the young man’s name. Later that night, as he watched his latest pick-up sleeping, and anticipated him leaving in the morning, Nilsen decided he could not bear to be left alone again. He strangled the young man using a necktie, then finished him off by drowning him in a bucket of water. He washed the corpse’s hair and put him back into bed. Suddenly he had what he later called ‘a new kind of flatmate’.

Realizing, after a while, that he had to do something with this corpse, Nilsen went out and bought an electric carving knife, but could not bring himself to cut up the body, so he ended up hiding the corpse under the floorboards where it remained for eight months until he took it out and burnt it on a bonfire in his garden.

Ready To Kill Again

At the time he was sure he would be caught, but he was not, and so by the end of 1979 he was ready to kill again. This time, however, his intended victim, a young Chinese man called Andrew Ho, escaped and went to the police. The police, however, regarded the matter as a tiff between gay lovers and failed to press charges.