An Evil Love Read online

  The officers had come in search of the man who had fashioned those confident wrought-iron gates and flowing iron sign, a son of Gloucester who was about to join another of the city’s famous sons, Richard Crookback, Richard the Third, King of England, among the folklore of his country’s villainy.They had come to find Frederick Walter Stephen West.

  It was not West, however, but his daughter Mae, who answered the ring on the doorbell that Thursday lunchtime.Without waiting for an invitation, the four male officers and a single policewoman walked straight past her, across the narrow hallway, and into the ground-floor sitting room. Frederick West’s wife Rosemary, full-figured, dark-haired, and with a pair of large pearl-rimmed glasses planted firmly on her short nose, was sitting on the sofa watching Neighbours on television. As the officers came in, she stood up, the belligerence in her face only too clear.

  The senior officer, Detective Chief Inspector Terry Moore, handed Mrs West a warrant allowing them to search the garden for the body of her first-born child, Heather, who would have been twenty-three, and explained to her that a team of policemen would shortly start to dig up the paved patio behind the house to look for her body. Rosemary West looked back and snapped:‘This is stupid.’ Then she walked across to the telephone, as if the whole event were taking place in slow motion, being filmed by Quentin Tarantino.

  The ringing startled Frederick West. For a moment he could not quite work out what it was. But then he opened the door of his small white van and picked up the mobile phone lying on the seat. It was 1.50 p.m., and he was drinking a mug of tea. ‘You’d better get back home,’ he heard a voice say.‘Rose says the police are there. They say they’re going to dig up the garden, looking for Heather.’ The dark, curly-haired man, with such clear blue eyes that they seemed almost out of place against the background of his gypsy’s face, merely grinned: ‘Well, they’d better bloody well put it back when they’ve finished.’

  At that moment West was barely a dozen miles from his house in Cromwell Street, working alone on the loft of a house in the village of Frampton Mansell. At the most, it would have taken him twenty minutes to drive home, but he made no move whatever to go. West simply clicked off his mobile phone and went back to his tea. The fact that the police were in his house, threatening to dig up his garden, seemed to worry him not at all.There was plenty of time. He had dealt with the police for years. There was nothing to worry about.

  Seventy minutes later, shortly before three o’clock on that grey February afternoon, West pulled out on to the main Cirencester to Stroud road, which winds through the valleys of the Cotswolds back towards Gloucester. Just as he did so, the mobile phone rang again: ‘Dad, it’s Steve. Are you coming home or not?’ West paused for a moment, then told his eldest son calmly:‘I’ll be home shortly – to sort it out.Tell your mam not to worry.’

  He was not home shortly. In fact, he disappeared for two-and-a-half hours. Where did he go? In that space of time, while police officers sweated and strained to lift the slabs in his garden at Cromwell Street, he could have driven to Bristol Airport, twenty-five miles to the south-west, or to London’s Heathrow, a hundred miles to the east. He could have boarded a ship at Bristol docks, or driven to Scotland, as he had done almost thirty years before, to start a new life. Or he could have gone somewhere to dispose of evidence that would have linked him to the deaths of many, many more innocent young women. He never explained, and now one will never know. His son’s attempts to speak to him again on his mobile phone never succeeded. Only one thing is certain: it was dark before Frederick West’s small white van turned into Cromwell Street just before twenty minutes to six that evening. There was a distinct spring in his step as he walked towards the house that had been his home for twenty-one years, pushed open the wrought-iron gates, strolled up the path, and into his living room. As the five officers turned to look at him, Frederick West just grinned.

  Within an hour, West was on his way to the city’s central police station, a little over half a mile away. ‘Just remember you’ve got to bloody well put it back as you found it,’ he told the two officers travelling beside him in the back of the car. ‘Bloody proud of that garden, I am.’

  At ten minutes to eight that evening, Frederick West gave his first official interview to the police. Detective Constable Hazel Savage and Detective Constable Robert Vestey sat opposite him in a first-floor interview room at Gloucester Police Station and reminded him that he had come there ‘voluntarily’. When asked if he wanted the services of a duty solicitor, Fred West replied calmly, ‘I won’t bother at the moment’, and lit a cigarette.

  For the next forty-three minutes Frederick West denied any knowledge whatever of his daughter Heather. He could not remember her date of birth or her age, he had ‘no idea’ where she was. All he did know was that she had left home years before to go away with her ‘lesbian friend’, a girl who had come to Cromwell Street to collect her. But he remembered the girl very clearly.‘She had a red miniskirt on just about to the bottom of her knickers,’ he went on. ‘You know, if she bent, it lifted like that – you could see everything.’West winked and took another drag on his cigarette.

  ‘Heather obviously didn’t want nothing to do with us, or she’d have been back home,’ he told the officers. ‘I mean, Stephen left home, Mae left home, but they’ve all come back.’ But he did not worry about her. He had seen her in Birmingham eighteen months before. He had heard from her on the telephone, when she told him she was ‘mixed up with drugs’, and she had been talking to a newspaper reporter. ‘Lots of girls who disappear,’ West suggested cheerfully,‘take different names and go into prostitution.’ He did not report her as a missing person because as far as he was concerned ‘she wasn’t missing’.

  ‘Is she under the patio at your home?’ he was asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied firmly.

  There was a long pause until the grey-haired woman detective asked West softly why, if that was the case, there seemed to be ‘a family joke’ among his children that Heather ‘was underneath the patio’. Frederick West’s laughter echoed around the stark interview room.‘Oh, for God’s sake. I mean, you believe it.’ Then he stood up and said: ‘I think we better pack it up, Hazel. We’re talking rubbish, aren’t we? . . . I mean, you’re digging me place up. Carry on doing it.’

  ‘Where is she, Fred?’

  ‘You find her and I’ll be happy.That’s all I can say.’

  Just five minutes after Frederick West sat down for his interview at Gloucester Police Station, his wife Rosemary began her first official conversation with the police – in the bar room that West had created for them on the first floor of Cromwell Street. Unlike her husband, she had refused to go to the police station, opting instead to answer their questions upstairs. Her conversation was recorded on a portable tape machine, and she sat throughout looking stonily at a huge photograph of a sandy beach on the wall opposite her. When Detective Sergeant Terry Onions and Woman Police Constable Debbie Willats reminded her that she wasn’t under arrest, she barked back: ‘If I’m not under arrest, why are you here?’

  Like her husband, Rose West could not remember when Heather had left home. She could not even remember what season of the year it was, though ‘it could have been the summer’, because the girl was forever ‘running away on school trips’, and ‘having arguments with her teachers’. The belligerence of Rose’s manner was softened only by the Devon burr that had lingered in her voice since childhood. Heather had been a ‘stubborn girl’ who didn’t want to do her own washing, or ‘move up off the seat’.

  ‘We didn’t hit it off that well,’ Rose West told the tall, clean-cut detective interviewing her. ‘She didn’t seem to want to know me that much. She was all her father, not me.’

  Then, after about twenty minutes, Rose West echoed her husband’s explanation of her daughter’s disappearance. ‘She was a lesbian as far as I know,’ she said, like a bolt out of the blue. When her daughter had been at infants’ school, her mother said she had known ‘exactly what kind of knickers the women teachers had on’. When the two detectives asked whether she was worried about the daughter she had not seen since 1987, Rose West replied bluntly: ‘She obviously doesn’t want to know me any more, does she?’The whey-faced, dumpy woman, with the manner of an overwrought parking-meter attendant, growled: ‘Ask Fred. He knows all about her . . . I know he had several phone calls off her, but she didn’t want to speak to me.’

  Detective Sergeant Onions reminded her gently that she was describing her first-born child, whom she had not seen since the age of sixteen. Rose West exploded:‘Thousands of kids go missing. It’s only a mystery because you wanted it a mystery . . . If you had any brains at all you could find her. It can’t be that bloody difficult.’

  ‘Is there a body?’

  ‘There ain’t.’

  Shortly before a quarter to nine on that Thursday evening, Detective Sergeant Onions drew the interview to a close: ‘You know in your own mind what’s happened to her.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Rosemary West snarled back.

  The two detectives left number 25 Cromwell Street shortly after their interview with Rosemary West. One uniformed officer remained to keep watch on the garden, sitting on a chair and trying to read a book, while another was stationed outside the front door. As the two climbed into their car the rain was falling steadily. Darkness shrouded the house like a cloak.

  At Gloucester Police Station, Frederick West was interviewed for a second time. Once again he refused the offer of a solicitor, and once again he launched into a rambling series of reminiscences about his last contacts with his daughter, Heather, and why he had never reported her as missing. ‘She was bringing drugs from somewhere and taking them up to schools, recruiting schoolkids,’ he told one officer c
onfidentially, and he did not want to get her into trouble. For more than forty minutes West provided the police with elaborate descriptions of all the places that he had seen or heard from his daughter, and the reasons why she could not be under the patio in his back garden, until, shortly before nine-thirty, he walked out of the interview room and made his way back across the city to his home.

  Not long before ten o’clock that evening, Frederick West walked back into the ground-floor sitting room of his house at Cromwell Street, and there was still a smile on his face. The first thing he did was to re-connect the electricity supply to the meter in the hall: he had been fiddling the electricity meters for years, routing the supply to a faulty meter, and then re-routing it again just before it was due to be read. His son could hardly believe it: ‘God knows why, it was all Dad was concerned about.’

  West took a shower, then sat in his underpants watching the television news, as he usually did, drinking a cup of tea.Then, shortly afterwards, he and his wife took their two newly acquired dogs, Benji and Oscar, for a walk in the park at the bottom of Cromwell Street. Neither Stephen nor Mae West could ever remember them doing so before.

  As they walked down Cromwell Street together, Frederick and Rosemary West were whispering, and they kept up their private conversation for the rest of the night. There were no phone calls, and no visitors, and the only person Frederick West spoke to was the woman who had been his wife for twenty-two years. He told her what he had told her a thousand times during those years: ‘I’ll sort it out.’ As West put it months later: ‘We sat up all night, never went to bed, never even went to sleep all night.’

  By the time dawn broke over Cromwell Street, Frederick West had made a decision. He telephoned his boss and told him that he would not be at work that day, then asked his son Stephen to help him clear out his van.While they were doing it, he told him:‘Look, son, look after your mum. I’m going away for a bit.’

  West then packed a few belongings, including what he called his ‘prison lighter’ (a tin of tobacco and cigarette papers), and put them beside the front door.When Detective Constable Hazel Savage returned to Cromwell Street shortly after eleven o’clock on the morning of Friday 25 February 1994, West was ready. As soon as she asked for the address of Rosemary West’s elderly mother, West took her to one side and asked to go back to the police station with her. After a thirty-second private conversation with his wife, West picked up the small bag of belongings he had prepared, walked out of the door of Cromwell Street and climbed into the waiting police car.

  Without prompting, and as soon as the driver had started the engine, West turned to Detective Constable Hazel Savage and said in his gentle Herefordshire accent:‘I killed her.’

  At eleven-thirty that morning, barely thirteen hours after he had left it, Frederick West walked back into Gloucester Police Station unaided and un-handcuffed. But no sooner had he been asked to empty his pockets than he became unsteady on his feet and had to be helped to sit down on a wooden chair.‘I feel sick and I’ve got a pain in my head,’ he told the officers, who remembered later that his hands ‘became very shaky’ and that he ‘had to be helped to sip from a cup of cool water’.

  Shortly before twelve-thirty he was examined by a police doctor, and then allowed into the station’s exercise yard for a cigarette with a uniformed constable. For the next eighty minutes, he walked around the yard holding his head and looking into space.When the young constable asked him if he was all right,West simply told him: ‘My head hurts and I keep seeing stars.’

  The other thing West told the young police officer was that he had killed his daughter Heather.

  Once again it was raining, but digging continued in the garden of Cromwell Street throughout the day. And just before five o’clock that Friday afternoon, Frederick West confessed formally, during a thirty-eight-minute taped interview, how he had killed his daughter Heather. His voice a monotone, he told the police that he had cut up his daughter’s body into three sections – ‘legs, a head and a body’ – and had buried them in ‘a hole in the ground’ about ‘four, five feet’ deep with a spade. Then he had put all his daughter’s belongings out for the dustmen in St Michael’s Square behind his house.

  ‘The thing I’d like to stress, I mean, Rose knew nothing at all . . . She hasn’t done anything.’

  Shortly after the interview, West and Hazel Savage returned to Cromwell Street. He pointed out the exact spot, halfway down the garden under a line of small fir trees, where he had buried Heather.And later that evening he explained that although he tried to ‘revive’ his daughter for two or three hours he never considered calling an ambulance or a doctor. All he could think to do was to dismember her body and hide it,‘in case Rose came back from the shops or the children came back from school’.

  On the surface it looked as though the police case against Frederick Walter Stephen West was closed. He had confessed. All that was left was to find the body.

  Meanwhile, seven miles away at Cheltenham Police Station, police officers were once again questioning Rosemary West. Shortly after her husband’s first confession they had arrested her on suspicion of the murder of her daughter Heather, and now they wanted to know the details of what she knew. But once again Rosemary West was a distinctly hostile witness. She was prepared to tell them only what her daughter looked like.

  ‘Bit shorter than me, about five-foot four,’ she told them, ‘with really dark hair.’ Heather ‘liked to be different to everybody else’ and was always ‘trying to be opposite to everybody else’. Rosemary West could not remember the precise date on which her daughter had left home, although she thought it was in June, and she also could not remember if she had left with anyone. ‘Past experience told me at the time,’ she said bluntly,‘that once a child does cut you off there’s not a lot you’re going to do about getting them back or being able to talk to them.’

  Detective Sergeant Onions then told her that her husband had confessed to Heather’s murder.

  ‘So she’s dead. Is that right?’ Rosemary West said flatly.

  ‘I’m telling you . . . Fred has confessed to murdering Heather.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That automatically implicates you.’

  ‘Why does it automatically implicate me?’ Rosemary West snapped back.

  ‘Our suspicions are that you are implicated.’

  ‘It’s a lie.’

  By lunchtime on Saturday 26 February it looked as though Rosemary West might be right.The police had not found anything. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that the body of Heather West was buried beneath the patio of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Frederick West was interviewed for the sixth time, shortly after one-thirty that afternoon, and when Hazel Savage admitted that her colleagues digging in his garden had found nothing his demeanour changed in an instant.

  The grin that had been missing since the previous morning began slowly to spread across his face, and the glint in his blue eyes suddenly seemed to return.

  ‘Did I ask them to go and dig my garden up?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Let them keep on digging.’ And he broke off the interview after just eight minutes.

  Less than half an hour later West asked to resume the interview, and this time he repudiated totally everything he had said in the past twenty-four hours. His daughter was not dead.

  ‘Heather’s alive and well, right. She’s possibly at this moment in Bahrain, working for a drug cartel,’ he announced. She had a Mercedes, a chauffeur and a new birth certificate. They had even had lunch together recently in Devizes in Wiltshire.‘I have no idea what her name is ’cause I would not let her tell me. She contacts me whenever she’s in this country.’

  There was a half-smile on his face as he went on:‘Now whether you believe it or not, that’s entirely up to you . . .There ain’t nothing in my garden. You can dig it for evermore. I’ve never harmed anybody in my life . . . I do not believe in it, hurting people.’

  When he was asked what benefit there had been for him in the admission of his daughter’s murder, his smile widened still further. ‘The police are out there digging . . . I feel a lot better for it.’