The Trial

This piece originally appeared in 1996 in Granta 53: News: Scoops, Lies and Videotape. Gordon Burn’s book about Fred and Rosemary West, Happy Like Murderers, was published two years later. Read an interview with Gordon Burn here.

There are constants in the media landscape, the images that, even half-seen, alert us to another excitingly dire occurrence.

Police divers emerging from a local lake or culvert.

The ragged wave of police, friends, neighbours and tourist volunteers lapping slowly across woodland or wasteland, scouring the thickets popular with local courting couples, poking into long grass with sticks.

The distraught father or mother at the centre of the formal disposition of the police press conference, and the home video or snapshot of the missing person enlarged from a copy negative and pushed until it lacks precision and definition.

The feeding-time noises of electric shutters as they are directed at arm’s length into the inky glass of the accelerating prison van, in the remote chance that something behind the glass – something syndicable – might stick to the film.

Women with children placing flowers and teddy bears and fluffy bunnies on the impromptu pavement shrine marking the site of the latest atrocity.

‘News, darker and darker news, may be the only narrative people need, and the shapers of this narrative are authors in their own right,’ Don Delillo has written. ‘To a certain extent their world has become our world, a place of extreme anger and danger.’

Community is partly built on members sharing stories, and the stories we tell ourselves increasingly seem to have death as their theme. There are now so many of these stories that only the most sensational or brutal or those which contain unusual elements stand any chance at all of making it on to the news agenda.

The murder of a sixteen-year-old by her parents was a story that would have made any news editor reach for the phone. Heather West had last been seen in June 1987. Her remains were discovered on 26 February 1994 in the garden of a house at 25 Cromwell Street in the cathedral city of Gloucester where she had lived with her seven brothers and sisters, her mother, Rosemary, and her father, Frederick. Two days later the remains of two other young women, Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers, were excavated from below the patio area. Four days after that the police search moved into the interior of the house where, during the course of forty-eight hours, the remains of five more women, Therese Sieganthaler, Shirley Hubbard, Lucy Partington, Juanita Mott and Carol Ann Cooper, were discovered buried in a roughly circular pattern in the cellar. The remains of a ninth woman, Lynda Gough, were discovered under a bathroom floor.

Familiarity with the Wests (‘dumpy mum Rose’, ‘Gloucester builder Fred’) seemed to increase as the body count rose. Most of the women had disappeared in the 1970s. They had been dead for more than twenty years. The time lag accelerated the process of objectifying them as ‘victims’, of divesting them of their identity. ‘Fred and Rose’, meanwhile, were soon bloated into myth. There were Fred-and-Rose jokes, as there had been Haigh (‘the acid-bath murderer’) and Reginald Christie (‘Reggie-No-Dick’) jokes forty years earlier: the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck told them in magazine profiles; Billy Connolly told them in a video which was eventually taken off the market. Schoolchildren photocopied and circulated a spoof flier decorated with skulls and spades: ‘Fred West Home Improvements. Don’t have grave doubts. Most of Fred’s family have been in patios, bathrooms, fireplaces etc for years.’

West hanged himself in his cell in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham on New Year’s Day 1995. By then the bodies of his first wife, Rena Costello, and her friend Anne McFall had been recovered from fields near the village of Much Marcle on the Herefordshire-Gloucestershire border. The remains of Charmaine, Rena Costello’s daughter, who had last been seen in 1971, aged eight, had been found under the bathroom of a house at 25 Midland Road in Gloucester where Frederick and Rosemary West lived when they were first married.

In February 1995, a year after she was arrested, Rosemary West faced committal proceedings alone in a small country court in Dursley, a few miles south of Gloucester. A committal is a preliminary hearing of the evidence by a magistrate, who then decides whether the case should be heard in front of a judge in a higher court. Rosemary West was charged with the murder of her daughter Heather and of the eight other young women and girls whose remains were found in and around the house where she and her husband had lived for twenty-three years; she was also accused of murdering her stepdaughter Charmaine.

Twelve seats in the courtroom’s public gallery were allocated to the media. The overspill, about 150 journalists, listened via an audio link in another part of the building. No witnesses were called; their statements were read aloud in a deep, above-stairs accent by the pink, Micawberish junior prosecution counsel, Mr Chubb, who frequently attempted the underclass vernacular. Several newspapers by then had bought up witnesses, so some of the journalists at Dursley might have been expected to be prepared for what was coming, but nobody remained unshocked by the accounts of child rape, sadomasochism, sexual abuse and torture that Mr Chubb gave in his brown, classic-radio-serial voice. Frederick West had been twenty-seven when he met Rosemary Letts, as she then was, in 1968. She was fifteen and had been physically abused by her father in childhood: she was sexually obsessed with both men and women. He was a psychopath with sadistic-paedophiliac tendencies, and an obsessive voyeur. They worked in tandem, cruising the streets for female hitch-hikers, runaways and girls from broken homes. They trussed them and gagged them with masking tape and kept them hanging from beams in the basement until the pair’s lust had burnt itself out. Then the victims’ bodies were decapitated and dismembered and dumped in pits in the ground. The West children were forced to have sex with their parents and their mother’s ‘visitors’ from the age of eight. Their father videod what went on in Rosemary West’s ‘special room’ through a hole in the door.

Mr Chubb read this catalogue of fantastical and barbaric obscenities at slightly faster than dictational speed; in the audio annexes our hands moved urgently in unison, ashamed and hot-eyed and driven, hungry to get it all down.

By law, nothing could be printed until the trial itself had begun and the evidence heard before a judge and jury. But every night the journalists working for daily papers transmitted an account of the day’s proceedings back to the London office. And every night the reaction from the London office was the same: disbelief, revulsion, excitement and a fear that, even when the law permitted publication of the evidence from the higher court, it could not be published on grounds of taste.

Sensational murder cases are usually regarded by newspaper editors as a way of putting on readers. Not as reliable a way, perhaps, as in the days when the death penalty still existed in Britain (the last meal, the last wish, the possibility of a last-minute reprieve; the pre-dawn vigil, the posting of the typed notice on the prison gate). Scotland Yard’s murder squads would go out around the country, and a sort of travelling circus of crime reporters would go with them. On really big stories a paper such as the Daily Express would send four cars – three of them to block the road while the lead car got away with the quarry. Crime reporters saw themselves as a kind of journalistic elite. Their lifestyle was lavish, their expenses legendary. The death penalty was abolished in Britian in 1965, and the years since then have seen a gradual shift in serious resources from reporting crime to reporting the royals.

Rosemary West’s trial opened in the first week of October at the Crown Court in Winchester and lasted until late November. Many of the photographers who staked out the area around the court in the early days of the trial had been pulled off the Diana beat. Their presence was in many ways symbolic: with the picture opportunity limited every day to five or six seconds of a speeding police vehicle, they had nothing to shoot but each other. At Dursley on one occasion they had handed out eggs and encouraged local schoolchildren to throw them at West’s transporter. But Winchester is a prosperous, reserved, conservative town with historic links to Keats and Jane Austen. Lacking a spectacle and unable to invent one, the media had to become its own. The television footage of Rosemary West’s high-speed precision-timed comings and goings became a ritual. There was nothing much to see and it was always much the same, but the heavy media presence was in itself justification for having the story high in the running order.

Independent Television News chartered a helicopter on the first day, and there was something immediately familiar about the sequence that ran in ITN’s bulletins that evening: the white vehicle with the police outriders; the path cleared through the commuter traffic; the implacable helicopter dipping and tracking. It was the visual vocabulary of O.J. and the Bronco, borrowed, presumably, partly in the hope of inheriting some of the same audience. The timing was impeccable: Simpson was acquitted on Rosemary West’s first day in the dock.

The French artist Christian Boltanski once spent a year clipping images of criminals and their victims from Détective, a weekly tabloid that focuses on grisly tragedies. What attracted him to these images was the fact that, once a photograph was separated from its caption, it was impossible to distinguish victim from criminal. ‘He has the face of a Nobel Peace Prize winner,’ Boltanski has said of the Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie. ‘It would be easier if a terrible person had a terrible face.’

Searching for the terribleness of her ‘inner being’, reporters and court artists scrutinized Mrs West compulsively, hoping to catch the intimate and unintended. She showed signs of agitation sometimes: her tongue would flick out, a finger would wipe behind her enormous glasses. She appeared to cry in earnest, although reflexively, whenever her daughter Heather’s name was mentioned. Her clothes attracted constant attention. ‘I’ve done a piece to camera for the six [o’clock news] but I’m going to redo it for the nine,’ a television reporter told me one day. ‘The green thing, I’ve seen it up close and it’s not a waistcoat, it’s a tailored dress.’

With her notepad and balled tissues and beakers of water, Rosemary West came to occupy the dock like a long-distance railway traveller laying claim to a whole compartment. Then, called to the witness stand for her evidence, she proved lumpen, intractable, as uncommunicative as the walls and bricked-up windows of the house at 25 Cromwell Street. (She did reveal herself as a tabloid reader. Asked for her reaction to various atrocities, she several times replied: ‘Shock-horror.’)

It seemed appropriate at the end of the trial that, rather than using a picture of ‘the most depraved woman on Earth’ as an identifying logo of their ‘Fred and Rose’ features, television and newspapers went unanimously for a picture of the wrought-iron nameplate – all Fred’s own work – that hung outside 25 Cromwell street until the police removed it to keep it out of the hands of souvenir hunters. (More than thirteen hundred household items were destroyed ‘under controlled conditions’ for the same reason.)

As an example of suburban kitsch, the plaque was a suitable symbol for the ersatz gentility that Rosemary West displayed in court every day: the bows of exaggerated deference towards the judge; the protestations about being ‘too proud a woman’ to wear another woman’s clothes when it was put to her under cross-examination that she had dressed in the garments taken from the victims; the wearing of a poppy in the week before Armistice Day.

In the third week of the trial the court travelled in convoy from Winchester to Gloucester to make a site visit to Cromwell Street. I made the trip in the same car as a woman reporter on one of the broadsheet papers who apologized for her appearance and said that she had been unable to sleep because of nightmares. She had seen what in the darkness looked like the ghost of a woman, standing with arms outstretched at the foot of the bed. She had sat up until dawn drinking tea.

But when the Royal College of Nursing offered a free counselling service for journalists attending the West trial in Winchester, nobody applied.

Rosemary West’s first day of evidence made all the front pages. The playing of the police’s tape-recorded interviews with Frederick West – ‘a confession from beyond the grave’ – was another page-one splash. Journalists covering the trial were gratified by the amount of coverage the story was getting. Long ‘backgrounders’ on the Wests were being written in the expectation of a guilty verdict; some tabloids were planning pull-out supplements. But then word started to spread about an interview that the Princess of Wales had given to a reporter from the BBC: it was rumoured to be explosive; pages of space were being cleared.

At 11.44 a.m. on Monday 20 November, ten hours before the interview was due to be broadcast, the judge sent the West jury out. If they arrived at a verdict quickly, news of it would be swamped by the Diana coverage in the papers the following day. When they hadn’t agreed by 4.30 p.m., the judge sent them to a hotel, and the journalists tried to disguise their relief. The Diana story was still dominating the headlines forty-eight hours later when Rosemary West was found guilty on all ten counts of murder and jailed for the rest of her life.

The parallels between a major trial and a theatrical production are frequently drawn. They apply to the supporting cast no less than to the featured players; at the end of eight weeks, the reporters who had covered the case felt as though they were a repertory company breaking up and going their separate ways.

Fittingly, the first reunion dinner took place less than a fortnight later at the Garrick Club in London, which was founded in 1831 as a place in which ‘actors and men of education and refinement might meet on equal terms’. The club motto is ‘all the world’s a stage’.

The cover of the special menu announced the occasion as the ‘Westologist’s Dinner’. It comprised Garrick Smokies, mignons of veal with Parma ham and nut butter, chocolate soufflé with white chocolate sauce. Coffee was followed by Churchill’s Vintage Character Port. A printed slip – ‘It is expected that no mention of Mr or Mrs West will be made after the first ten minutes’ – was briefly acknowledged and then, in the draughty, unclubby silence, quickly ignored.