Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [99]
In October 1996, Gloucester City Council demolished 25 Cromwell Street. There were calls to create a memorial garden on the site, but there were fears that it would be turned into a ghoulish shrine, so it was left as a landscaped footpath leading to the city centre.
Four years after Rose West was sentenced her son Stephen revealed to the police that he was convinced that his father had killed 15-year-old Mary Bastholm. He said that, while visiting his father in prison shortly before he died, West had boasted that Bastholm’s body would never be found. He also talked of a number of other victims and crowed: ‘They are not going to find them all, you know, never.’
When Stephen asked specifically asked him about Mary Bastholm, West replied: ‘I will never tell anyone where she is.’
However, to the police, West had continued strenuously denying that he had killed Bastholm, although she had been seen in his car. Mary Bastholm’s brother Peter said he was relieved by the news, though his parents had both died without learning the fate of their only daughter.
Later in 1998, Fred West’s cousin William Hill was jailed for four years after being convicted of one count of rape and three charges of indecent assaults. Like West, Hill preyed on young women and one of his convictions was for a series of indecent assault on a 15-year-old girl over an extended period in the early 1980s. He tried to kill himself in jail but failed. Fred West’s brother John succeeded in hanging himself in jail while awaiting the verdict after being tried for raping Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie tried to kill herself by throwing herself from a bridge near Gloucester, but was rescued. She had previously tried to kill herself during the trial by taking an overdose, but was rushed to hospital and had her stomach pumped. Stephen West tried to hang himself at his home in Bussage, near Stroud, after his girlfriend left him. He survived when the rope snapped.
In December 1998, Gordon Burn, the author of Happy Like Murderers, another book about the Wests, claimed that the bones removed from the victims’ bodies – usually fingers, toes, but in some cases kneecaps and entire shoulder blades – had been buried near Pittville Park in Cheltenham, close to the bus stop where Fred first met Rose in 1970. Burn said that the location held an ‘almost spiritual’ significance for the Wests.
He was interviewed by Chief Constable of Gloucestershire, Tony Butler, and Detective Chief Inspector Terry Moore who had taken over the case after Detective Superintendent John Bennett had retired.
‘Out of all the books it’s probably the best written and the most interesting,’ said Moore. ‘He has got some things right and some things wrong.”
As to the bones, Moore said: ‘There are various theories but nothing has come to light. The secret has gone to the grave with Fred and Rose is not saying anything.’
In 2000, Rosemary West secured legal aid to launch a new appeal. Her lawyer, Leo Goatley, said that West may ‘unearth new photographic evidence, which would prove that her husband, Fred West, was the sole killer’. The hope was that she would ‘be cleared by anatomical photographs of women which were taken by Fred West and seized by police during an earlier investigation in 1992’. The photographs, he asserted, were time stamped and would help his client prove she was not present at the time. The originals, he said, had been destroyed, but Goatley was confident that ‘copies would have been made or details of the photographs chronicled by police’. He also said that excessive publicity and chequebook journalism prevented her getting a fair trial, and an application was made to the Criminal Cases Review Commission on 20 October 2000.
But the application was doomed to failure when a TV documentary