An Evil Love Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Geoffrey Wansell is an award-winning author, journalist and an expert in true crime. He was the authorised biographer of Frederick West, appointed by the Government. His most recent book, Pure Evil, is about those British murderers given whole life sentences in this country. Together with his daughter Molly, Geoffrey also has a weekly true crime podcast, Blood Ties, which has been running for the past four-and-a-half years.

  The presenter of twenty-eight episodes of his own one-hour television series for CBS Reality – Murder By The Sea – he has also made more than 120 hours of television documentaries for Sky – Britain’s Most Evil Killers and World’s Most Evil Killers.

  He has been the principal crime and thriller reviewer for the Daily Mail for the past decade, and before that was one of the paper’s leading feature writers.

  Together with David Suchet, he wrote the best-selling book Poirot and Me in 2013, which has been published around the world. They met on the set of the 20th Century Fox film, When the Whales Came in 1988, which was based on a Michael Morpurgo story, on which he served as executive producer.

  First published in the UK by John Blake Publishing

  an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  4th Floor,Victoria House

  Bloomsbury Square

  London WC1B 4DA

  England

  Owned by Bonnier Books

  Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden

  Owned by Bonnier Books

  Sveavägen 56, Stockholm, Sweden

  www.facebook.com/johnblakebooks

  twitter.com/jblakebooks

  First published in hardback in 1996

  This paperback edition published in 2022

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78946-617-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78946-618-8

  Audiobook ISBN: 978-1-78946-621-8

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design by www.envydesign.co.uk

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  © Text copyright Geoffrey Wansell

  The right of Geoffrey Wansell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright-holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  John Blake Publishing is an imprint of Bonnier Books UK

  www.bonnierbooks.co.uk

  For every victim of child abuse

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Prologue ARROW OF DESIRE

  Chapter One DARK IMAGININGS

  Chapter Two UNNATURAL DEEDS

  Chapter Three FOUL WHISPERINGS

  Chapter Four A SCOTTISH MARRIAGE

  Chapter Five ‘LOVED BY AN ANGEL’

  Chapter Six THE ABORTIONIST

  Chapter Seven THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  Chapter Eight THE UGLY DUCKLING

  Chapter Nine BLOODY PARTNERSHIP

  Chapter Ten THE CELLAR

  Chapter Eleven SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN

  Chapter Twelve THE MASTER BUILDER

  Chapter Thirteen SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

  Chapter Fourteen IMMACULATE CONCEIT

  Chapter Fifteen ROSEMARY’S BABIES

  Chapter Sixteen THE NEXT MRS WEST

  Chapter Seventeen THE HOUSE OF DREAMS

  Chapter Eighteen ROSE’S CHOCOLATES

  Chapter Nineteen HEATHER

  Chapter Twenty A FATHER’S RIGHT

  Chapter Twenty-one THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

  Chapter Twenty-two THE PERFECT MOTHER

  Chapter Twenty-three LIKE PULLING TEETH

  Chapter Twenty-four AN EVIL LOVE

  Chapter Twenty-five THE LAST GAMBLE

  Epilogue GONE TO THE DEVIL

  ‘Man’s evil love

  Makes the crooked path seem straight.’

  DANTE, THE DIVINE COMEDY,

  ‘Purgatory’, canto 10

  INTRODUCTION

  W

  hen I started to write the life of Frederick West, almost three decades ago, I never imagined that it would change my life forever – but it did, completely.

  Until that moment I had never written about a serial killer. But now I had the chance to look into the face of evil, the life of a man who I believe was the most relentless killer this country has ever produced, who may well have killed sixty young women.

  The experience changed me forever – though it took me a little time to realise it. By the time I started to write about him the gregarious, talkative little jobbing Gloucester-based builder had been dead for ten months, after hanging himself in his cell at HMP Winson Green in Birmingham on 1 January 1995. But his influence on my life was dramatic.

  Quite suddenly I found myself plunged into the darkest side of man’s inhumanity to man in the most vivid way imaginable. I was given extraordinary access to the full details of West’s crimes, life and writings – an opportunity very few writers have ever been granted and one which I did not feel I could refuse. I listened to his lilting voice for hour after hour in his police interviews and conversations with his solicitor, all the time trying to comprehend what made West the monster that he most certainly was.

  But that gave me the chance to write what I believe is the most detailed examination of a British serial killer that has ever been published, based largely on his own words.West’s is a story of incest and child abuse, a horrifying account of murder, lust and depravity that sullied this country forever.

  The reason I was given that opportunity to write his story was the result of a decision by the then Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court, who was West’s executor. He decided to exploit West’s estate for the benefit of five of his children, who were by now in local authority care. They had been removed from West’s home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester in the wake of child abuse allegations made against him in 1993.

  The decision to allow me access to West’s papers, his police interviews, his prison diaries, his interviews with his original solicitor, his private videotapes and the police interviews of his wife Rosemary was deeply controversial. It provoked angry scenes in the House of Commons, when the then prime minister, John Major, was forced to defend the decision against criticism from all sides that no killer should benefit financially from his crimes.

  But the decision stood and I was granted access to every part of the material, as well as given the right to attend the trial of West’s wife Rosemary at Winchester Crown Court in October and November 1995. At the end of the trial she was convicted for her part in ten murders and received a life sentence which will ensure that she will never be released.

  As I began I took one further important decision. I wanted to paint his crimes in all their ugly, depraved detail to leave no doubt that he was a man with no respect for human life – the very epitome of evil, ‘a sadistic killer who had opted out of the human race’, in the words of the late Richard Ferguson QC, who defended Rosemary West. I did not want to leave any doubt about.

  This book was first written during the winter and spring of 1996 and published in hardback that autumn. The Independent commented that it ‘relentlessly pursues the truth through the maze of West’s many deceptions’, while the Sunday Telegra
ph added: ‘It is unlikely that much will ever be added to Mr Wansell’s portrait’. One other reviewer called it ‘the definitive account of West’s life and crimes’.

  In fact I added more in the paperback version after I attended the trial of West’s younger brother John on rape and indecent assault charges in November 1996. Like his brother, John West escaped justice by committing suicide – on the night before the jury were to retire to decide on his fate.

  Ironically, both brothers killed themselves using an identical method of hanging and neither left a suicide note. Though Frederick West did leave a whole string of letters to his wife Rose in his prison cell before he killed himself.

  This book introduced me to the world of true crime writing and television, which has played an ever increasing part in my life ever since. I have made countless television documentaries about West, but many more about all manner of other evil killers in Britain and around the world – more than 250 hours in total. I was also consultant producer on a recent Netflix documentary about Denis Nilsen.

  True crime came to fascinate me and I also wrote a biography of another British serial killer, Levi Bellfield, convicted of the murder of Surrey schoolgirl Milly Dowler, and a book on murderers who have been sentenced to ‘whole life terms’ of imprisonment for their crimes, called Pure Evil.

  But this book is where it all began, and the images that it left in my mind of the depravity of West’s crimes is a legacy that has never left me. If you write and read about the horrors that we as a society are capable of, the memories never leave you. The images of what wicked men, and even women, are capable of remain with you, lodged in a compartment in your mind that it is best kept securely locked.

  Almost thirty years have passed since West’s heinous crimes first surfaced from the garden of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, but they have reverberated throughout the country ever since.That was clear only last year, when police excavated the cellar of a shop in Gloucester in the hope they might locate the remains of fifteen-year-old waitress Mary Bastholm, who disappeared from a bus stop nearby in January 1968 and has long been believed to be another of his victims.

  There can be no question that West was a truly evil man. Reading the book again now, after all these years, just reminds me of that. It is sometimes a painful story to read, so harrowing that it still brings tears to my eyes, but it is also a restorative one, for it reminds us that to confront evil is to encourage every one of us to recall that great beauty is to be cherished as its counterpoint.

  The story never dies, nor should it be allowed to. No one should ever forget that the cheerful, gregarious jobbing builder hid his evil deeds in plain sight. He was a monster who was also a cheerful, welcoming next-door neighbour, and it is all the more chilling for that.

  Geoffrey Wansell

  London, April 2022

  Prologue

  ARROW OF DESIRE

  ‘That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’

  SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET

  H

  alfway between a smirk and a leer, never quite a grin, it was a naughty boy’s smile, a smile that hints he’s got away with something, but no one is ever quite sure what. It was the smile that Frederick Walter Stephen West hid behind throughout the fifty-three years of his life, his mask against an inquisitive world. Looking back, it was a smile to send a shiver down the spine.

  Frederick West was a small, spare man. Five-feet six in height, barely ten stone in weight, he would have looked quite at home at a fairground, tearing the tickets for the dodgems, winking at the girls as he helped them into their car, then standing on the back as they made their first tentative movements across the rink. West would always have jumped off – just as they started to scream.

  His eyes were as sharp as a poacher’s. Startlingly blue, darting out from beneath a shock of dark curly hair, they were the eyes of a man who always knew what he wanted, eyes that never missed a movement, particularly from a warm-blooded furry animal. The Herefordshire countryside that bred him infused every fibre of his body, just as it haunted his voice.

  When West moved, it was always quickly. The noose would be around the rabbit’s neck before the animal had a chance to move, the pheasant caught by the wire before it could blink. Success was always greeted with an ugly, gurgling snigger, once heard, never forgotten; a dark sound to accompany the sparkle in his eyes.

  Never afraid of being dirty, his short strong fingers were forever soiled in offal or manure, clay or mortar, which he would wash off in the cattle trough at the side of the field or the tank waiting to be plumbed into the house on the building site. If there were no hot water, he never craved it. A cold stream from a hosepipe in the garden would do just as well at the end of the day. He would often sit down for supper wearing only underpants and a vest.

  Frederick West may not have been able to read or write, but that rarely inhibited him. He could talk, and talk he did, incessantly; bragging about his prowess with women, boasting about the size of his motorbike or who he knew ‘in the right places’, nudging and winking his way through the world, forever ready ‘to sort things out’, never afraid to ‘shoot round’ and ‘help someone out’, anything to keep himself busy.

  For West was not a lazy man, any more than he was a stupid one. His intelligence was born in the fields and woods on the very edge of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire, honed in the thickets of the countryside, nurtured in a world in which it was sometimes safer to kill a man than to kill a hare, a delicate skill that he brought to the city of Gloucester, and to the prey there was to be had there.

  His hands were large, with the thickened thumbs of a man used to manual labour. He prided himself on being one of the best trench diggers ever to work on a motorway, just as he did on his record as a press operator in the light fabrication shop at Gloucester’s Wagon Works.They were the hands of a man who was not afraid of the feel of steel or blood.

  Blood did not terrify Frederick Walter Stephen West. He was not afraid of it any more than he was afraid of the sound of a cracking bone. He had grown up with the sharp tooth-edge of violence, the rabbit hit with a pickaxe handle as it runs out from the corn, the pig hanging in the kitchen for its blood to drain away, the chicken caught by a fox leaving its trace of blood in the snow.

  When he talked about blood, West would sometimes laugh to himself. But it was not a generous laugh, born of affection and kindness. It was a lascivious, wolfish laugh, the acknowledgement of an illicit pleasure, a laugh that made others uneasy, though they could never quite put their finger on why. It was the laugh of a man who was not afraid to inflict pain.

  To a gamekeeper, the laugh made Frederick West seem innocent; that and his endless stream of chatter. The naughty wink, the suggestive story, the knowing leer, all rendered him approachable, unthreatening, an obsequious Jack the Lad at the end of the public bar with a pint of cider and a bag of crisps. What could be a more effective disguise? West never presented himself red in tooth and claw; he was too careful for that. Instead, he took refuge in the ordinary, the banal. Who could take offence at that? Even a policewoman might be won over.

  Women were Frederick West’s only hobby. He did not keep pigeons, do the football pools, or dream of Disneyland. Instead, he craved the company of women, vulnerable women, creatures who could be seduced by his relentless, eager talk. His was an unexpected charm, a persistence that never faltered. Women were sexual objects to be conquered, and then displayed as trophies, the only truly worthy prey.

  It was no accident that one of Frederick West’s nicknames was Freddy the Fox – ‘’cause nobody can work me out’ – for beneath the endless chatter, weaving its spells and fantasies, behind the smirking laugh, tailored to cajole, there lay a ruthless wickedness a wild creature might scent in the air, a ferocious, slippery violence capable of freezing a rabbit on the edge of a cornfield.

  Though he would always call it love, lust was the light that illuminated the life of Frederick West. Learned as a child, burnished as an adolesc
ent, and given full rein in adulthood, there was no limit to his priapic desire.To him, it was as natural as the stoat’s pursuit of a leveret in the moonlight. There was no shame to be drawn from victory when it came, only pleasure.

  It was an evil love, as the world would come to know.

  Chapter One

  DARK IMAGININGS

  ‘Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.’

  SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET

  I

  t was twenty minutes before two o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 24 February 1994 when the unmarked police car turned into a narrow street in the centre of the English county town of Gloucester. A light drizzle was falling from the pewter sky, and the plain, flat-fronted houses seemed to huddle together for protection against the wind sweeping up the Severn Estuary from the sea.The lunchtime shoppers, picking their way home past the dustbins and detritus littering the street’s pavement, bent into the squall. Then, as the police car drew quietly to a stop outside a flat, sand-coloured semi-detached, the wind abated and the street seemed to hold its breath.

  For a moment none of the police officers moved.They simply sat and stared at the square three-storey house beside them, as if they could not quite believe why they had come to this ordinary-looking abode, in this nondescript street, in this honest English town. But this was no ordinary house. Unlike every other in the street, its entrance was barred by a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates.

  With their intricate pattern of whorls and curlicues, the gates looked incongruous amid the rotting sofas and derelict prams cluttering the pavements in this street of bed-sits. They were matched by the sign on the wall beside the ground-floor window, the sign giving the number of the house. It, too, was wrought-iron, every bit as sinuously proud as the gates themselves. It read simply: 25 Cromwell Street. As the five officers pushed open the gates and walked up to the house’s green front door, the sign seemed to challenge them.