Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [95]
The matter came to court in January 1973, but West was able to convince the magistrate that Caroline had consented to sex. Despite West’s long criminal record, the magistrate did not believe that the Wests were capable of violence and they got off with a small fine. By this time Fred was 31. Rose was 19 and pregnant for the third time.
The Wests still needed a nanny and seamstress Lynda Gough moved into 25 Cromwell Street to take care of the children. Soon after, they murdered her. Then Fred buried her dismembered body under the floor of the garage. Again he removed her fingers and toes, although this time her kneecaps were missing too. When Lynda’s family asked what had happened to her, they were told she had moved on. The police were not called and there were no repercussions. Soon after, in August 1973, the West’s first son, Stephen, was born.
Having got away with so much, the Wests began killing just for the fun of it. In November 1973, they abducted 15-year-old schoolgirl Carol Ann Cooper and took her back to Cromwell Street where they amused themselves with her sexually. After about a week, they got tired of her and killed her, either suffocating or strangling her. Then her body was dismembered and buried under the house.
The following month, 21-year-old university student Lucy Partington went home to Gotherington near Cheltenham for the Christmas holidays. She was the cousin of novelist Martin Amis. On 27 December, she went to visit a disabled friend. She left to catch a bus home shortly after 10 p.m. and was waiting at a bus stop on the outskirts of Cheltenham when the Wests offered her a lift. It is almost certain that she would not have got into the car if Rose had not been there. The Wests took her back to Cromwell Street where they raped and tortured her for about a week, then murdered her, dismembered her body and buried it under the house.
Fred cut himself while dismembering Lucy’s corpse and went to the hospital to have the wound stitched on 3 January 1974. By then Lucy – like Carol Ann Cooper – had been reported missing, but there was nothing to connect either of the girls to the Wests. Their bodies were concealed in Fred’s home improvement scheme. This involved enlarging the cellar and turning the garage into an extension to the main house. The only thing remotely suspicious about this was that Fred’s home improvements were done at strange hours of the night. However, West did attract police attention. To pay for his home improvements – and the concrete he covered the corpses with – he committed a series of thefts and fenced stolen goods.
Three more young women – 15-year-old schoolgirl Shirley Hubbard, 19-year-old Juanita Mott from Newent in Gloucestershire and 21-year-old Swiss hitch-hiker Therese Siegenthaler – ended up under the cellar floor at 25 Gloucester Street. They had been tortured and dismembered. The Wests had subjected them to extreme bondage, using plastic covered washing lines and ropes to suspend them from one of the beams in the cellar, and gagging them with tights, nylon socks and a brassiere. In 1976, the Wests enticed a young woman from a home for wayward girls back to Cromwell Street where she was taken to a room where two naked girls were being held prisoner. She was forced to watch while the two girls were tortured. Then she was raped by Fred and sexually assaulted by Rose. Later dLLaturing the court case, she gave evidence as ‘Miss A’.
It is likely that one of the girls was Anne-Marie, Fred’s daughter who was the regular target of the couple’s sexual sadism. But Fred not only raped and tortured his own daughter, he brought home other men to have sex with her.
By 1977, Fred had extensively remodelled the house. Upstairs he had constructed extra bedrooms so they could take in lodgers. One of them was 18-year-old Shirley Robinson. A former prostitute with bisexual inclinations, she had sex with both Rose and Fred.
Rose fell pregnant by one of her West Indian