Kiran Dass speaks to Sally J. Morgan, whose brush with serial killers inspired her first novel.
In the 1970s, Gloucester couple Fred and Rosemary West committed a series of brutal attacks where they tortured young women to death in the cellar of their home. An art student in Sheffield in the late 60s and early 70s, Wellington-based writer and arts professor Sally J. Morgan briefly encountered the deadly duo in 1973 while hitch-hiking.
A pregnant Rosemary tried to coerce Morgan into the couple's small grey car, insisting, "Don't be frightened of us. Look, I'm pregnant, how's a pregnant woman going to hurt you?" Sharp instinct saw Morgan firmly decline the offer and it wasn't until decades later she realised how close she'd come to a gruesome end. It is this encounter that forms the basis of her debut novel, Toto Among the Murderers.
"I had never put this hitching incident together with the Wests. Their deeds only came to light in the 90s, which was 20 years after I had refused a lift with them. News reports contained photos, which showed them looking stolid and middle-aged. Rosemary in particular had changed a lot physically. It was only when I saw a documentary containing pictures of their younger selves and a description of their car that the realisation hit me," she says. "I went into shock, waves of nausea came over me. To be honest, this still happens if I think about it too closely."
Sick of the portrayal of young women being merely hunted and vulnerable, Morgan says she was interested in exploring the ways that women fight back and survive. A novel about resistance, Toto Among the Murderers is mostly set in grimy Chapeltown, the roughest part of Leeds, if not Yorkshire, in 1973 - an area then populated by junkies, sex workers and bohemian drifters on the margins. Art school graduate Toto is a flame-haired wild child who tests life's edges by following the direction of her outstretched thumb. For her, fear is "the armature that underpins her life" as she drinks a skinful, gets stoned and runs with the wrong crowd. As reports of young women going missing and being attacked in the area increasingly emerge in the news, Toto edges closer to harm's way.