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In the precinct, Dahmer seemed almost relieved that his murder spree was over. He made a detailed confession and admitted that he had now reached the stage where he was cooking and eating his victims’ bodies.

Dahmer’s cannibalism and his necrophilia were the cornerstones of his insanity plea. But the District Attorney pointed out to the jury that if Dahmer were found insane and sent to a mental hospital, his case would be reviewed in two years and, if he was then found to be sane, he could be out on the streets again. In June 1992 the jury found Jeffrey Dahmer guilty of the 15 murders he was charged with and he was given 15 life sentences, or 957 years in prison. The state of Wisconsin had no death penalty, but he still faced execution. He still had to be tried for the murders that took place in his parents’ home in Ohio, which did have the death penalty. However, after serving two years in the state penitentiary, he was murdered by another inmate.

Chapter 17

The House of Horrors

Name: Fred West

Accomplice: Rosemary West

Nationality: English

Number of victims: Fred was charged with 12 murders, Rosemary with 10

Favoured method of killing: rape, strangulation, dismemberment, buried the bodies in the garden

Reign of terror: 1967–94

Motive: sexual perversion

On 24 February 1994, the police turned up at 25 Cromwell Street, an ordinary three-storey house in central Gloucester in the south-west of England, with a warrant to dig up the back garden. The door was answered by Stephen West, the 20-year-old son of the householders Fred and Rosemary West. The police told him that they were looking for the body of his sister Heather, who had disappeared in May 1987 at the age of 16. Stephen’s parents had told him that she had left home to go and work in a holiday camp in Devon and he believed that she was now living in the Midlands.

‘I wanted to know the reasons why they thought Heather was buried there but they wouldn’t tell me,’ said Stephen, disingenuously. Among the surviving West children there was a running joke that Heather was buried under the patio.

‘I told one of the detectives that they were going to end up making fools of themselves,’ said Stephen. ‘He just replied “That’s up to us”.’

As the police went about their business, Stephen and his mother Rosemary tried to contact his father Fred, who was working on a building site about 20 minutes’ drive from Gloucester. Eventually they got through to him on the mobile phone in his van.

‘You’d better get back home,’ Rosemary told Fred. ‘They’re going to dig up the garden, looking for Heather.’

That was at 1.50 p.m. 56-year old Fred did not turn up at home until 5.40 p.m. It has never been explained what he was doing during the intervening four hours. Fred said that he had been painting and that he had taken ill as a result of the fumes while he was driving home. He had had to pull over and passed out at the roadside. Others suspect that he was disposing of evidence.

When Rosemary, 44, was interviewed, she told the police that Heather had been both lazy and disagreeable, and they were well rid of her. Fred said that she was a lesbian who had got involved in drugs and, like his wife, seemed unconcerned with her disappearance.

‘Lots of girls disappear, take a different name and go into prostitution,’ he said, seemingly more concerned about the mess the police were making raising the paving stones of his patio.

That night the middle-aged Fred and Rosemary West stayed up all night, talking. Geoffrey Wansel, author of Evil Love based on 150 hours of taped interviews with Fred West, says that they cooked up a deal. Rosemary was to keep silent, while Fred said that ‘he would ‘sort it out’ with the police the following day, and that she had nothing to worry about as he would take all the blame’.

The next morning, Fred stepped into a police car outside and told Detective Constable Hazel Savage, who had instigated the search: ‘I killed her.’

At Gloucester police station, Fred told detectives how he had murdered his daughter,