Authors: Paul Britton
He worked quickly because every moment away from the house increased the risk of being seen by someone and endangered his story of being tied up at home. He also had the added danger of his neighbours waking early and glancing out their windows to see him arrive home. This, again, is where his logistics background came into play and he made probability judgements of what was the greater or lesser risk. He knew what things he could leave to chance and those he dare not.
Back at the house I suspect that the lounge had already been rearranged, awaiting his arrival. Wardell took off his clothes, which may have already been wetted to conceal the presence of a covering garment. Then he faked his injuries using his fists and tools from the garage, before tying himself around the metal sack holder.
The advisory team gathered at Nuneaton Police Station to discuss the timetable for Mr Wardell’s arrest and interviews. No-one expected any easy admissions and the interview strategy had to explore his account of events in such fine detail as to pin down any provable lies. If the evidence was woven around him in precisely the right way he might slip up and incriminate himself.
Bayliss said that with no compelling reason to arrest the suspect immediately, the police had a rare opportunity to prepare themselves for the interviews, even to the point of choosing the best people and rehearsing them.
‘Will you do it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, if you want,’ I said, although I warned him it could be bloody. The interviewing officers had to be prepared for Wardell to suddenly adopt ‘no comment’ tactics, if his solicitor advised it. If this happened the team had to be able to carry on asking questions and putting issues to him without getting angry or frustrated.
Six possible interviewers were chosen, one of them a woman, and we gathered on a weekday morning in a room at Nuneaton station that became very hot and uncomfortable as the day wore on. Initially, I asked each of them how they would go about conducting an interview with Gordon Wardell. Their general outlines were quite good but then I stopped them, suddenly. ‘Ask me the question.’
There was silence.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve heard your outlines, but none of the specific questions. Ask me your precise questions.’
Quickly, it became clear that they didn’t have the fine details of their plan - the building blocks of their interviews. I explained to the officers that they needed to have their questions prepared and have others ready for every possible answer that he might give. Equally, they had to be equipped to deal with how Wardell said things.
A week later I returned to the station and was placed under ‘arrest’ before being escorted to an interview suite - the same room that Gordon Wardell would soon see. For the next few hours I had to step into his shoes and see how the interview teams fared.
Sitting at a table I waited… and waited for the first pair to arrive.
Finally Tony Bayliss put his head around the door. ‘Paul, I don’t know how to say this.’
‘What?’
‘They won’t come.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They think it’s unfair. They’re worried that this is some sort of exam, you know; that they’re being assessed and that if they don’t cope it’s going to hurt their careers.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said quizzically.
‘Ah, I’m really quite embarrassed. I don’t know what the bloody hell they’re playing at. I’ll talk to them again.’
It wasn’t my place to comment, but I was surprised; these were experienced detectives. Yet I sometimes forget how much pressure interview teams are under. They were preparing to interview a very dangerous and devious man who would only be charged with murder if they could succeed in winning a chess game on an invisible board. The focus of the entire, high-profile and expensive investigation came down to their skill in that small room.
After what I imagined were robust discussions, the first pair arrived and the role play began. Various pairs were tried through the morning and two officers proved to be particularly good. I threw in lots of curve balls in a bid to disrupt them and at one point exploded in anger, almost sending one of them toppling out of his chair.
‘What Wardell sees helps him,’ I explained. ‘If you aren’t holding it together he’ll know. He can read the way you sit, speak and look at each other. This man is not going to admit anything. He’s extremely dangerous and devious. You have to set his story in stone and make a case from the provable lies.’
The most important example of this involved fixing Wardell’s account of Carol’s last meal. Traces of Sunday lunch had been found in her stomach and the postmortem concluded that she had probably died within three hours of eating it. No trace had been found of the ham and salad that Wardell claimed his wife had eaten at 7.00 p.m.
The interviewers had to cement his account of the meals and guard against the possibility of him retracting or altering his recollections. They weren’t dealing with a stupid man and he was likely to pick up on direct questions about Sunday lunch. So instead they had to embed the questions in a mountain of other inquiries about what happened that day.
‘Tell him you want to understand his daily routines because the robbers had to have known his and his wife’s movements on the day. Ask him about waking up, who got out of bed first, did he shower, what did they have for breakfast, who cleared the table, who scraped the plates, who washed up? And then go through the entire morning in the same detail so that when you ask about lunch it’s entirely consistent with what’s gone before. Without realizing its significance, he’s going to give you that crucial record of events.’
The second important strand was to allow Wardell a rationale for blaming someone else, for instance to let him say that Carol had died accidentally and afterwards he had covered up for her parents’ sake. Or perhaps he’d been a victim of blackmail or coercion by raiders who had promised that his wife would be OK if he cooperated and it devastated him when the truth emerged.
The interviewers had to also emphasize the lack of gross violence - Carol wasn’t defiled or degraded - and allow Wardell to be respected for the cleverness of his plan and the calm way he responded. This would appeal to his illusions of grandeur and self-importance.
To my knowledge, training in this depth had never been done before during an operation, but I knew that success could only be measured by what happened when the real suspect heard the questions.
At 7.30 a.m. on Thursday 20 October, Gordon Wardell was arrested at his home. For three days he was interrogated before appearing at Nuneaton Magistrates Court on Monday morning charged with murdering his wife and robbing the Woolwich Building Society.
That afternoon, Tony Bayliss called and invited me for a drink in the police social club. The interviews had gone well, he said. Wardell had given more and more detail that helped prove he was lying. Later, as I shared a beer with the detectives, I could understand their sense of satisfaction. Not only had they discovered the truth beneath layers of falsehood and deceit, they felt they had the evidence to prove it.
But from my point of view, the case couldn’t stop there. Wardell was an extremely dangerous man with a history of sexual deviancy and violence in his youth. Similarly, I could see many of the same elements of preparation and planning present in Carol’s murder as in the earlier offence. What had happened in the intervening years? Had his dealings with prostitutes given Wardell a vent for his deviant fantasies, or were there other incidents of sexual violence in his past that had gone unreported or undetected?
There was only one way to be sure. The police had to go back and look at Wardell’s life, point by point, tracing his movements and whereabouts to see if there were any links to unsolved murders and sex crimes. We still have much more to learn about Gordon Wardell.
On New Year’s Day Ian turned on the television and I immediately recognized the face of Frederick West. The file photograph made him look younger than his fifty-two years. He was smiling, tilting his head slightly and showing off his rock and roll sideburns.
The news reader announced: ‘The Gloucester builder Frederick West was found hanged in his maximum security prison cell this afternoon, a month before he was due to be committed for trial accused of murdering twelve young women. ‘Staff at Winson Green prison in Birmingham tried to revive him but he was pronounced dead at 1.22 p.m.’
The Control Room at Arnold Lodge phoned me. ‘Have you heard the news? A journalist has been calling trying to get hold of you.’
‘I’ll ring him back, but tell anyone else I’m not available,’ I said, unwilling to get involved.
My mind was with the families of the victims and the Wests’ own children - the forgotten victims of Cromwell Street. How would they accept the news? I also recalled my conversation with John Bennett months earlier when he’d asked me whether Fred and Rosemary were likely to harm themselves.
Sadly, my fears about Mr West’s sense of isolation and abandonment had proved correct. Once the interviews were over and he realized that his beloved wife and soulmate had repudiated him, he opted for suicide. Letters that he wrote in prison to his children revealed his state of mind. He was angry at Rosemary for not standing by him and accused her of turning people against him.
Committing suicide was never going to be a problem. Life was unimportant to him. He’d murdered enough people to know that you die easily or you die hard; and he’d seen how quickly the transition could be made from being in pain and torment to being dead. However, despite his criticisms of Rosemary, nothing could diminish his love for her and I think Frederick recognized his own weaknesses and felt that at some point in the future he might stumble and unwittingly point the finger of blame at his soulmate. Once dead he could never accuse or implicate Rosemary in what had happened.
Rosemary, who was also being held on remand, said very little about the suicide. Her lawyer, however, went onto the offensive claiming that the charges against his client should be dropped because of lack of evidence and the saturation media coverage which, he said, made it impossible for Mrs West to get a fair trial.
‘Why have a go at a rather naive and manipulated, short-sighted young woman who happened to be involved with an older man who had a dark side to him which he was able to keep screened from all who met him?’ He described the Wests as having had an ‘alternative lifestyle’ and said that the ‘horrendous and exceptional and unbelievable things that he [Frederick] is supposed to have done were a mystery and completely unknown to Mrs West’.
Ten months later on 6 October, 1995, a jury was sworn in at Winchester Crown Court and asked to decide whether this had indeed been the case. Rosemary West stood charged with ten counts of murder including the deaths of her daughter Heather and stepdaughter Charmaine.
Amongst the evidence presented in the eight week trial were several letters written by Rosemary to Frederick while he was in prison in 1971. In the first letter, dated 4 May, she wrote, ‘Darling, about Charm. I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it? I would keep her for her sake if it wasn’t for the rest of the children. You can see Charm coming out in Anna [another stepdaughter] now.’
Another letter dated 22 May, began with the words, ‘from now until forever’.
‘To my dearest lover, darling I am sorry I upset you in my previous letters. I didn’t mean it, no joking. I know you love me, darling. But it seems queer that anyone should think so much of me …
‘We have got a lot of things to do in the next couple of years. We will do it just loving each other. Better not write too much in case I put my big foot in it, ha, ha!’
Shirley Ann Giles, a next-door neighbour at the time, gave evidence that her daughter had once come home distressed after having seen Charmaine standing on a chair or a stool with her hands tied behind her back while Rosemary held a wooden spoon as though she was going to hit her. Later evidence from Mrs Giles was used by the prosecution to argue that Charmaine had most likely been killed by Rosemary while Frederick was serving his ten-month prison sentence.
Another neighbour Mrs Elizabeth Agius described how Mr West had boasted about his journeys from Gloucester to London searching for teenage virgins. In the presence of Rosemary he had said they preferred runaways and said it was easier to pick them up when Rosemary was in the car as the young girls thought it was safe.
In some of the most harrowing testimony, Rosemary’s stepdaughter Anne Marie Davis described how she had been raped by her father and sexually assaulted by her stepmother from the age of eight. She learned to hide the injuries she received from frequent beatings and was absent from school more than sixty times in her penultimate years. From the age of thirteen she was made to sleep with Rosemary’s male clients while her father watched and occasionally rewarded her with a box of chocolates.
When Rosemary West entered the witness box on 31 October, she described her troubled childhood during which she claimed to have been raped twice before she was fifteen, first when she was picked up by a stranger in a car and later when she was dragged from a bus stop. Interestingly, both offences were unreported and mirrored the abductions of several Cromwell Street victims years later. Either these attacks were a dreadful coincidence, or I suspect Rosemary simply used her later activities as a blueprint to help invent rape stories in an attempt to win sympathy from the jury.
Sobbing occasionally, she portrayed herself as the affection-craving victim of her violent and bullying husband and said that they had come to lead separate lives.
She denied being Fred’s ‘willing assistant’ and maintained that she knew nothing of the murders.
Under cross-examination from Brian Leveson QC, Rosemary said that she had only a vague recollection of the assault on Caroline Owens in 1972. Finally she admitted, ‘Yes, there was an incident… it was a mistake in my life and obviously now I tremendously regret it… I was charged with indecent assault, not attempted murder. I am on trial here for murder not for abuse.’