Authors: Paul Britton
‘This is where Heather was found,’ said Moore, motioning to a spot at his feet. ‘Another body was found here and the third victim over there.’
Inside the single-storey extension that Mr West had built in the early seventies, it was like a demolition site. The police had removed floor-coverings, skirting boards, furniture, fixtures and fittings. When a house becomes a scene of crime and the scientists go to work, it ceases to be a home any more. So many details that make it cosy and intimate are lost. Even the things that do remain - the shaving gear in the bathroom, a photo album, a closet full of clothes - leave one with a very melancholy feeling.
Passing through a bedroom at the back of the house, we entered a kitchen area, a broad room with a concrete floor.
‘What do you think?’ asked Moore.
‘I think Fred is a lousy builder. It’s a bodge from one corner to the other. How on earth did he make a living?’
Moore smiled.
Worktops and the sink remained and I could imagine where the family had sat down to dinner as saucepans bubbled on the stove and food filled their plates - just as in any ordinary house. But I also knew that this is where Mr West had described putting down sheets and dismembering the bodies.
Off the kitchen, at the very back of the house, was a small bathroom. This is where the body of Lynda Gough had been found buried under the bath. She went missing in April 1973, two weeks short of her twentieth birthday, while working as a seamstress at the Cooperative Store in Barton Street, Gloucester.
Stepping over rubble and broken plaster, I walked into a more general living area which had been cleared of furniture. There was a large, neatly cut hole in the floorboards and the lower wall; with a hinged trapdoor resting open. Gingerly climbing down slippery steps and ducking my head, I emerged into a half-cellar, not wholly sunk beneath ground level.
About seven feet high, twelve feet wide and twenty feet long, it looked as though someone had put together a low cost version of Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of Horrors without the wax models. Silver-grey fingerprint dust covered almost every surface and children’s wallpaper curled and hung in torn shreds.
The cellar had apparently first been used as a storage area and then been converted to a bedroom for the children. There were no windows and the room was now lit by strong inspection lamps hanging from hooks or clipped to pillars. Duck boards crossed the floor which was little more than a series of deep holes and mounds of hard, wet, black mud - so dark it seemed to soak up the light. Each of the five holes had contained the remains of a separate young woman.
Beneath the wallpaper were the innocent scribblings of children, cartoon characters and games of noughts and crosses. Yet there were also more sinister drawings that hadn’t been explained. Skulls had been painted or stencilled at various points and, as I studied them, they seemed to provide quite neat sighting lines across the locations of each burial pit. Perhaps it was important for Mr and Mrs West to keep track of their ‘treasures’ and these were the markers to remind them.
Then I noticed a hook in the ceiling which served no obvious purpose but it could easily have carried the weight of a person - someone suspended and restrained. The cellar itself was an ideal venue for imprisoning someone; no-one could see or hear and the degree of control attainable would be almost total.
Climbing out of the cellar, I turned through a doorway into the older part of the house. A narrow flight of stairs rose to the first floor. Halfway up, I turned and saw something that I knew was enormously significant. On the rear of the door was a colour poster - larger than life-size - of a woman wearing a see-through negligee and posing provocatively with her arm draped up the doorframe. Like Rosemary West, she had long dark hair and a full figure.
Her facial expression and pose were saying, ‘There are great delights here,’ beckoning onlookers into her world. This was the dividing line. Every time the Wests passed through this door, they knew what lay on the other side. It represented complete fulfilment and their other life.
‘This is Rosemary’s reception room,’ said Moore as we reached the first floor.
The photographs didn’t do it justice. Like something from an ageing bordello, the armchairs and settee were done out in velvets and a large mural of the sea and palm trees covered one wall. Opposite was the carved-wood bar replete with spirits, ashtrays, ice-buckets and cocktail shakers. A sign suspended above it said, ‘BLACK MAGIC.
Moore said, ‘Quite something, isn’t it.’
I wandered around the room, looking at several display cabinets with glass shelves and wooden drawers.
‘Is it OK to touch?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. We’ve been through it.’
The cabinets displayed various paraphernalia, ordinary cheap ornaments that you might have collected on holidays or bought at a church market. Several glass containers sat on a shelf containing ordinary bric-a-brac - loose change, cigarette lighters, hair clips and a number of wrist watches.
‘Do you know where these came from?’ I asked.
Moore replied, ‘Why? Is it important?’
‘Not any more, not in this case.’
I knew that Mr and Mrs West had savoured what they did to their victims. They would have taken keepsakes; souvenirs they could reflect on later. It wasn’t significant any more in this particular case, but if the killers or victims had been unknown, such bric-a-brac would have become gold.
Opening a drawer, I came across a bundle of family papers - a typical collection of old bills, brochures, school reports and photographs. Every family has them and they can sometimes help reveal the fine details of who people are and how they live.
An ordinary family photograph album shows the heart of the family and how it develops. You will see the people who are significant; their relationships, changing friends and growing children. You will see the clothes they wear, the way the rooms were decorated and the numbers on the birthday cake. Who is standing close to whom? Who seems to be more distant? How is the picture composed? Who is the photographer focusing on? How is the subject responding? What is their relationship? All of it tells you a little more.
In the Wests’ album, it was what I didn’t see that meant something. Many customary photographs were missing. There were long gaps and nothing to show a family bound together by love and harmony. The reason was because Frederick and Rosemary West lived for something entirely different. They chronicled their pastimes in homemade pornographic videos rather than family albums.
On the same floor, directly opposite, was a small, plain, drab bathroom. This is where Mr West claimed he had dismembered Heather’s body, but it was immediately obvious that the room was too small to enable him to do the things he had said he’d done.
A final flight of stairs led me to a landing shielded by a curtain suspended from a rod. Walking into the larger of two bedrooms, I was surprised by the size of an elaborately carved four-poster bed with erotic motifs on the pillars and cross-beams.
‘This is where Rose brought the men,’ said Moore.
I didn’t reply and instead wandered through the room, glancing through the dirty window down to the street.
Across the landing, the smaller bedroom had an ordinary double bed and the slightly ruffled appearance of having been searched. There was a cavity in the wall behind the bedhead and several wires spilled out and snaked downwards, leading nowhere. These were for the listening devices and video camera which monitored events in the next room.
Whatever had happened here was far more intricate than ordinary prostitution. People had been invited into the house, given drinks and polite conversation and then taken upstairs for sex. It wasn’t a business arrangement for Mrs West - it was at the centre of her reason for living.
There is a term known as ‘peak experience’ which describes periods in a person’s life when everything comes together and they are living and operating at their maximum potential. Everything is honed; their senses tell them more, life is richer and problems are tackled enthusiastically and effectively. It’s what a coach has achieved when an athlete peaks at precisely the right time for the big event.
For Fred and Rosemary West, I would expect ‘peak experience’ to be when they were engaging in their sexual and sadistic pastimes. Everything else faded away when compared to the enormous buzz that it gave them. The whole house was a playground for their fantasies made real.
Walking into the sunlight was like emerging from a black, black sewer.
Terry Moore and I strolled in silence along Cromwell Street, until I stopped and looked back. It was a street indistinguishable from any other street and if you were to rise above it, you would see street after street all the same. The only thing that separated it from all the others is what the police had discovered inside Number 25.
Afternoon shoppers chatted in the shade of awnings and glanced at window displays. Children chased each other, laughing as they were caught and dashing away again. Gradually, I felt as if I’d been distanced from these happy carefree lives. When you experience death and bereavement vicariously every day of your working life, you can never escape from it. Each time I immerse myself, it erodes my capacity to enjoy. Colours are still bright, the sun is still warm and people still smile, but somehow I step into a domain which prevents me from fully appreciating these things.
As if replaying a tape in my head, I began going over the details and painting in the subtle colours and nuances of Mr and Mrs West. How was it that this outwardly friendly and affable couple had become predatory and sadistic sexual psychopaths? What was it within their lives that gave them the need and the energy to abduct, torture, rape and kill a string of young women?
In many ways Rosemary and Frederick West are no different from the rest of us. The very same developmental processes which moulded you and me made them what they became; it was only the content of those processes which varied. I know this because I’ve assessed and treated people who have the same motivations and pathology. Perhaps not people whose body count is as high, but sexual psychopaths just the same.
For Frederick it began early - in childhood when the vast majority of us are given the moral guidance and strictures that bind us to society and teach us what is right and wrong. In his case it didn’t happen. I can’t know why - it wasn’t my task to find out - but it doesn’t necessarily mean that his parents were negligent. Lots of children have raw deals or grow up in difficult circumstances, and they don’t turn out to be sadistic murderers. They catch up because there are wider influences such as school, or important friendships which socialize them and make them frightened of doing things they know are wrong.
When Mr West was growing up and discovering his sexuality, his attention became focused only on his own needs and wishes. He didn’t really learn to see other people as separate, unique individuals who had the same rights, needs and wishes as he did. He could use the right words, but had no internal grip on the concept.
It’s like a person who is born totally colour blind. They can get through the world, they see edges quite well and know what a traffic light is; you can even sit and talk to them about the grass being green and roses being red and they can say it back to you but they have no concept of what green and red really are.
Feelings for Frederick, as far as they existed, were ‘my feelings’. He could never really grasp the notion that other people had feelings and theirs were just as important as his. This problem didn’t permeate through every facet of his life - otherwise he wouldn’t have survived at all; he couldn’t have held down a job, or paid for things at the till. He would simply have walked out or taken them off the shelf. Some kinds of psychopath do that.
Frederick’s problem manifested itself in his relationships with women. He had none of the honesty, integrity or regard that we expect when we meet, woo and have intimate contact with a partner. For him, women were sexual objects to be exploited in whichever way he chose.
He grew through his late childhood and adolescence with a very strong sexual appetite. He needed partners frequently and would expect women to be available to him almost constantly. However, his desire was much higher than his ordinary social capacity was likely to help him to fulfil. He didn’t have the skills to have his way with the sophisticated women he was attracted to. Nor was he able to get women to do consensually all of the things he would have liked. Some would have gone as far as having sex but then drawn back when he wanted to experiment and go further.
In particular, he had a growing need for dominance and coercion - not out of bitterness or resentment towards women, as is so often the case with sexual aggressors, but as a means of personal enrichment and pure pleasure. Careful research suggests that this attitude may well have had its roots in his first sexual experiences.
Most men and women fantasize about sex and masturbate. The content of the fantasies will often be influenced and sometimes shaped by their early sexual experiences - in the family, or with friends at school or from seeing pornographic material.
Many more people than we realize are introduced to sexual activity in a family setting - be it with parents, a sibling, an uncle, or a cousin. Sadly, they are often seduced or coerced into some form of sexual degradation. I have seen case after case where a patient has revealed to me that his first sexual experience occurred in childhood when a man, either in his family or close to it, began touching him sexually and in due course sodomized him. Others have described how their sisters or cousins were routinely used for sex by men in the family and how they also were drawn into using them sexually. This can go on for years and years, so that it distorts the way they view sex and relationships.
Much the same holds true within a school or peer-group setting, although the constraints are more widely evident. Young couples experimenting with sex know that the risks from overstepping the boundaries are greater because a partner is more likely to complain if things are done which make them unhappy.