Geoffrey - An Evil Love

AN EVIL LOVE

by

Geoffrey Wansell

LONDON NEW YORK SYDNEY TORONTO

This edition published 1996 by BCA by arrangement with HEADLINE BOOK

PUBLISHING

Copyright 1996 Geoffrey Wansell

The right of Geoffrey Wansell to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1996

by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING

10987654321

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor by otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Typeset by Letterpart Limited, Reigate, Surrey Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent

For every victim of child abuse

The life of Frederick West

Mans evil love Makes the crooked path seem straight.

Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, canto 10

Writing the Biography of Frederick West A personal preface

This book is a terrible journey through the darkness of one mans mind, and writing it has been an agonising experience. Nothing could have prepared me for what I have read and listened to in the past year.

Frederick West took a monstrous pleasure in defacing the beauty of the world. And in doing so, he stole something from each and every one of us - our innocence. To that extent we are all his victims.

There will be those who say that no book should ever have been written about the life of such a man, that he should simply be consigned to oblivion. It is a view I understand. Indeed there have been times during the past year, sitting in the silence of my room hour after hour, listening to his voice, reading his lies, and threading my way through the maze of excuses he offered for his actions -actions for which there could be no possible excuse - when I too wished I could be rid of him.

But I do not believe we can afford to forget, or ignore, Frederick West.

For just as great beauty illuminates the whole of our lives, so great evil reminds us that beauty is to be cherished. To try to push West away, to deny that he existed, is to close our minds not only to the possibility of evil, but also to the redeeming power of good.

Certainly there were days when I sat in front of my word processor with tears running down my cheeks, days when I was unable to type the next word, to utter the next unpalatable truth. Yet, no matter the agony I felt, it was nothing to the agony of those who have lost their daughters, sisters or friends. It was as nothing to the agony of the children, including his own, who suffered at his hands. As the book progressed I became more and more determined to offer those children and young people some explanation of the man who blighted so many lives.

And, as I began to unravel the elements of Wests life during the long nights of winter, I came to realise that this was not only a book about a murderer, but that it was also a book about childhood. For it was in childhood that Wests own life was shaped, and it was Wests abuse of children and young people - his desire to soil their innocence - that first led him along his terrible path.

That understanding, more than any other, sustained me. For it became ever clearer to me that to study the roots of evil is to make a start in preventing its spread. Now in the warmth of summer, having finished the book, I am convinced that if there is a light to be found in the black tunnel of Wests life, it is the light which shines to tell us all that we must do everything in our power to protect our children.

I began this journey as a result of a remarkable decision, and a decision not originally taken by me. After Frederick West killed himself on 1 January 1995, the Official Solicitor to the Supreme Court was approached to administer Wests estate. He concluded that among his duties he had to protect the financial interests of the five minor children, who were all then still in the care of the local authority, and to ensure that the best value is obtained for them.

One way for him to do so, he concluded, was to allow an author access to Wests many hours of interviews, all of which were Wests intellectual property, to write a balanced portrait of his life.

I agreed with him. But I only did so after a great deal of heart-searching, because I believed it offered an opportunity to consider evil at first hand, a chance to begin to explain what may have driven this apparently commonplace little man to acts of such extreme depravity. That is how my journey began and how this book came to be written. After Wests death, I accepted the Official Solicitors offer of access to those interviews; as well as to Wests ninety-eight page memoir I Was Loved by an Angel, written in his prison cell; and to many other papers and statements about his life: more than 15,000 typed pages in all. And, in the early autumn of 1995, I set out to write his biography.

Never before has a biographer been given the chance to listen in quite this way to the innermost thoughts of a serial killer, a man now certainly guaranteed his place in the pantheon of British murderers alongside Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen, John Christie, the Moors Murderers, Denis Nilsen and the Yorkshire Ripper - even though he was never convicted of a single murder. Writing the book has not only been a challenge, it has also changed my view of life.

When I began I thought, as so many people think, that it is indefensible to describe anyone as evil. There must be good in everyone, it is just a question of finding it. But the further I went along the path of trying to understand Frederick West the more convinced I became that, although there were certainly elements of humanity within him, he nevertheless demanded to be called evil.

For Wests actions do not lie within the limits of normal human behavior. They lie far beyond them. And he knew it.

Frederick West was not a madman, not a schizophrenic nor a paranoid, not some solitary loner waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting victim, a man who hid his features beneath a black hood. He was an amiable, deferential family man, the father of at least six children, a baptised and confirmed member of the Church of England, a house owner with a mortgage who took his children for walks in the park on Sundays.

But he was also a man absolutely without conscience. He needed no excuse or explanation to kill. He had no need of alibis like medical experiments or being lonely, about cleansing the world of wrongdoers, or sweeping away evil. He did not hear voices urging him to act. Nor did he think he was the incarnation of some weird and imagined deity. Frederick West killed for pleasure, to amuse himself and his wife Rosemary. He killed because he enjoyed it.

That is what made the journey to try to offer some explanation of his crimes so difficult. To justify my contention that West demanded to be described as evil meant that I had to convey the full extent of his excesses, to confront the worst that he was capable of. To have pulled back would have been to leave the portrait incomplete, unfinished, the description unjustified.

As a result, I found myself reading and re-reading the Book of Common Prayer in the small Anglican church at the foot of my garden, looking at the words that must have been said over the infant Frederick West wrapped in swaddling clothes at his baptism: Dost thou, in the name of this Child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all the covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou will not follow or be led by them?

The more I read those words, and the more I contrasted them with his, the clearer it became to me that Frederick West had wilfully and determinedly set out to disregard every tenet of human behavior, every commandment of the faith into which he had been confirmed, and taken a positive delight in doing so. He had then taken an almost equal delight in concealing his actions behind the subtlest disguise of all, the familiar. By the time my journey to complete this book had come to its end, Frederick West had become - for me - the face of the devil.