Serial Killer of the Month: Frederick West
Archived
Frederick West was born in 1941 in the rural village of Much Marcle, which is 12 miles northwest of Gloucester. Like many villages in England, it is a place of endemic incest. It was also here that West was first exposed to the cult rituals and pagan beliefs which characterized his behavior over the decades of his murderous life.
In 1962 West married Katherine Costello, who was pregnant with another man’s child. They lived in Glasgow, where the young West brutalized her throughout her pregnancy. They named the little girl Charmaine. Soon they moved to Hereford, where they lived in a trailer. Katherine was soon pregnant again, and this second daughter, Anne-Marie, was the last for Katherine. She left Frederick early in 1967 when he got their 18-year-old nanny, Anne McFall, pregnant. With Katherine out of the way, West murdered McFall, sliced her open and dismembered her, then he buried her in a hidden corner of a farmer’s field, where she and her infant would lay undisturbed for 27 years.
After a period of unsuccessful prostitution, Katherine came back to live with Frederick. But he murdered her too, leaving her mutilated corpse to rot in a grave by the dead nanny.
In 1972, Fred married Rosemary Letts and they began a career of murder and ritual sexual torture that would make Ian Brady and Myra Hindley look like a pair of Hitlerian funsters stealing a six-pack from the local five and dime. With Rosemary in his life, West’s blood hunger grew more furious. For the next twenty years they would torture and slaughter young girls, even destroying in the most horrible imaginable ways their own daughters when no other girls were available.
Although sex and convenience seemed to be the motive for the killings, their crimes showed many ritualistic occult characteristics. It is the occult fascination that probably prompted the Wests to move into 25 Cromwell street, a house next to a church, a house surrounded by sacred ground.
All the West’s victims were subjected to some form of sexual humiliation and torture before being killed and dismembered. The head of one of the victims was discovered wrapped in layers of adhesive tape with a thin breathing tube inserted. This controlled a series of forced suffocations during the long sexual assault. In this West resembled the remarkably evil French murderer Gilles De Rais. Though the remains found were all skeletal, a soft tissue mutilation is generally suspected but not proven; but it is good as proven that West mutilated and eviscerated the girls while they were alive.
During the ritual dismemberment, West paid special attention to the extremities. He would invariably remove fingers, hands and feet, and chisel out the kneecaps. One very unfortunate girl even had her shoulder blade pried out and cut from her body. It is probably that such mutilations were not done on dead or unconscious bodies, but on alert victims as part of a ceremonial torture. In most cases particular bones were not found with the rest of the body. It is believed that these particular bones were ground up for occult potions. After death the heads were cut off, as were the legs. West found sexual satisfaction in his brutal torture, but he didn’t keep the heads around, because he had no attraction to his victims (even his daughters). He often engaged in necrophilia with the headless, legless remains, and would as often get messy playing in the exposed viscera of the eviscerated torsos. West’s interest in viscera was such that he considered buying an endoscope to puncture victim’s abdomens so he could watch the living organs as they died.
When he infected his 15-year-old daughter with gonorrhea, the hospital staff discovered that she was ectopically pregnant, and the fetus was removed. That West intended to impregnate his daughters, in addition to simply raping and sodomizing them is corroborated by Rosemary. She told of bringing home used condoms from her nights of prostitution which Frederick would carefully use to fill syringes full of semen. This he would inject into his daughter’s vaginas. As his very underage daughters couldn’t be allowed to go to full term, Frederick would perform abortions on them. This was how he obtained fetuses, which were in his understanding the most powerful ingredient available for black magic. Fetuses have historically been thought to grant powers as diverse as invisibility, power and good luck, to those with the stomach to eat them. There are recent reports that suggest such practices still occur in remote parts of China today.
The one surviving daughter, Mae, says, “He used to play around with syringes and would attempt to artificially inseminate mum.” And West’s son said, “Dad always wanted to breed mum with a bull… He thought he could muck around genetically with people.” It is thought that the West wanted to create a devil, a monster for a child.
In any case, West and his wife killed six of their own children and many, many other girls in what can’t easily be imagined: very horrendous and inhuman ways. Frederick and Rosemary West were sentenced to a British prison for life. At midnight on New Year’s Eve/Day in 1995 Frederick West hanged himself. According to tradition, people who are hanged on the stroke of New Year’s remain on Earth as evil spirits or devils to harm and scare those of us who still live. With this in mind, it wouldn’t be unfair to speculate that Frederick West is still among us, if only as a cold wind on a dark night. —St. Feltcher
Read more Serial Killer of the Month (if you can stomach such things):
Serial Killer of the Month: Frank Sweeney
Serial Killer of the Month: William George Heirens
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