Masters - She must have known: the trial of Rosemary West

Contents

MOLIERE

SARTRE

SAINT-EXUPERY

RABELAIS

CAMUS

WYNYARD HALL AND THE LONDONDERRY

FAMILY

DREAMS ABOUT H.M. THE QUEEN

THE DUKES

NOW BARABBUS WAS A ROTTER

THE EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF MARIE CORELLI

THE MISTRESSES OF CHARLES II

GEORGIANA, DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE

GREAT HOSTESSES

KILLING FOR COMPANY THE CASE OF

DENNIS NILSEN

THE SWINGING SIXTIES

THE PASSION OF JOHN ASPINALL

MAHARANA THE UDAIPUR DYNASTY

GARY

THE LIFE OF E. F. BENSON

VOLTAIRES TREATISE ON TOLERANCE

(edited and translated)

THE SHRINE OF JEFFREY DAHMER

MASTERS ON MURDER

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

Brian Masters has written over twenty books on subjects as diverse as French literature, the dukedoms in Great Britain, E.F. Benson and Marie Corelli. His groundbreaking study of mass murderer Dennis Nilsen, Killing for Company, won the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction in 1985. He is also highly regarded for his journalism.

When Frederick West was arrested on 25 February 1994, it was for the murder of his daughter Heather. Nobody then had the smallest suspicion that the remains of other young women would be found beneath the house where he had lived for twenty-two years and in which his wife had raised a family of eight children. As the allegations and charges multiplied, they appeared to point to a familiar pattern of lust murder, wherein a man with inadequate sexual powers but inordinate sexual appetite translates his frustrations into the most squalid sadistic brutality, forcing himself upon girls who cannot find him wanting and will not offer resistance because they are either trussed, immobilized and silenced or they are dead. Later, Rosemary West was also charged with all but two of the murders for which her husband was awaiting trial, and I assumed the evidence would relate to her compliance or acquiescence in his activities, presumably under duress. But on 1 January 1995, Frederick West committed suicide in his cell at HM Prison Winson Green, Birmingham, thus cheating the judicial process and preventing justice ever being achieved on behalf of the girls whose families had been hurled, for a second time, into their appalling grief.

For several weeks, it seemed as if the charges against Rosemary West would be dropped, there being insufficient evidence to warrant a trial. It was generally thought that, as an alleged accomplice, she could not be held to account for crimes the main perpetrator of which was himself dead and untriable. But it was not to be. Not only was she indicted on ten of the twelve charges Frederick West would have faced, but the Crown was proposing that she was, in some instances, far more than an accomplice in joint venture; she had murdered alone, in the absence of her husband.

This book attempts to examine and evaluate the evidence which brought Mrs West to trial. It does so without the assistance of Rosemary West herself, who has declined to co-operate, and is therefore solely the responsibility of the author and represents his view and nobody elses.

I have assumed some knowledge of the case on the part of the reader, and therefore the first chapter plunges without preamble into one of the charges of murder. Anyone entirely new to it will discover the other charges, the background and the history, as they emerge gradually from a consideration of the legal and psychological implications which are thrown up by Chapter One, and they are in any event visited more than once as different aspects call for separate analysis.

Brian Masters

Castries, 1996

The trial of Rosemary West was the culmination of one of the centurys most notorious murder investigations. The bodies found at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, outraged a nation and led to the arrest of Frederick West for the killings of twelve young women. When he then hung himself on New Years Day 1995, he seemed to have cheated justice.

The subsequent trial of his wife for the same crimes was a media sensation. From his courtroom vantage point, Brian Masters examines the evidence put to the jury and the facts behind the case. In this psychologically acute and legally penetrating account, he looks at how and why an evil psychopath was able to ensnare so many in a web of unseeing complicity.

THERE WAS ONE moment in the trial above all others which was almost intolerably heart-rending. A full-face enlarged photograph of Charmaine West was beamed on to a screen on the wall between the witness-box and the press benches. Of those who died, this was the only likeness we, in the body of the court, saw (the jury, of course, saw photographs of them all). She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed, happy little girl of eight years, with an endearing broad smile which revealed that her two upper front teeth had not yet descended, leaving an amusing wide gap, of which she appeared to be delightfully unconscious. It was a picture full of life and vigour, light-heartedness and hope.

David Whittaker, the odontologist from University College, Cardiff, then superimposed over this photograph another, transparent image of the skull which was found twenty-three years later and which prosecution and defence accepted was that of Charmaine. It fitted exactly, the line of the jaw following precisely the fleshy photograph which we could still see behind. And there were the two front teeth, high in the bone, waiting to descend and fill the gap.

The demonstration was of crucial importance, for it helped indicate when Charmaine might have died. And if we knew when she died, we might have a better idea who could have killed her.

Charmaines mother was Catherine Costello (Rena), Frederick Wests first wife. Her father was an unknown Asian bus-driver. Rena had been pregnant with her when she met Fred, who did not seem to mind, although one of his other children later said that both he and Rena had wanted to abort the baby, but Charmaine was born anyway in March 1963. Fred had appeared in time for the christening, however, at St Marys Roman Catholic Church on 6 September, and that is when the name Charmaine first appears Charmaine Carol Mary West. Thereafter she was often known as Char.

Her beginnings were not auspicious. She was not wanted and she was in the way. Rena had always been anxious to escape the restrictions and glumness of Glasgow, but she had expected something rather more exciting than what she got. She had worked as a street prostitute in Glasgow at the age of sixteen, and at eighteen was a bus conductress, which is how she had met Charmaines father, but shortly afterwards went south into England and found a job as a waitress at a caf in Ledbury. There she met a man from the neighbouring village of Much Marcle, Frederick West, twenty-one years old, short but handsome in a rather louche kind of way, with dark curly hair, full lips, a yellow-tooth smile, and a touch of the gypsy in him. He was blunt and candid, a farmyard animal really, smelling of the fields in which he had been reared and, like a farmyard animal, frank about the mechanics of sexual reproduction. He liked to touch and to fornicate whenever the opportunity presented, and if it did not, he would manufacture it. Though barely literate, he was a ceaseless chatterer, dreamer, boaster. He promised Rena the earth. What she did not know was that Frederick West had already disgraced himself in the village where he lived by forcing sex upon a thirteen-year-old girl, for which he had been arrested for rape at the age of eighteen. He had also been accused of incest with his sister. He was plausible, charming, but dangerous.