Serial killers Fred and Rosemary West: How many more victims could there be?

Fred and Rose West: it is thought there could be many more missing young women who were raped and murdered by either or both of them. Photo / Supplied

Mary Bastholm was 15 when she disappeared. A part-time waitress at The Pop-In Café in Gloucester, with dark hair and a shy smile, she was last seen at a bus stop on January 6, 1968, off to visit her boyfriend and carrying a plastic bag, which contained a Monopoly set.

Mary was sexually inexperienced, naive, vulnerable – exactly the type of young woman that Frederick Walter Stephen West, Britain's most notorious serial killer, liked.

Did he drive by and pull over? He certainly knew her from the café. Did he charm her into his car and then prey on her? Quite possibly. Mary was his type.

Since that day, 53 years ago, there has been no sign of her – at the time, the local police threw manpower at the search, including divers in the docks – and, until this week, no one thought there ever would be.

Mary Bastholm aged 15 in 1968.

Yet, two days ago, a police tent was erected outside the café, now named The Clean Plate, sealing it off, and – thanks to a tip from an ITV production team working on a new documentary, fronted by Sir Trevor McDonald, about West and his equally repugnant wife Rose, who is still serving life imprisonment in HM Prison New Hall, West Yorkshire – hopes have risen once more that Mary's remains will be found.

If her body is located, then it will at least bring some sort of closure to her surviving family and friends. There can, at least, be a funeral.

But, if not, a scenario we really can't rule out, then Mary will remain on West's list of possible victims still unfound.

It's difficult to say how long that list is. Officially, Mary is the only real prospect. West escaped trial for 12 counts of murder by taking his own life on New Year's Day 1995, as Gloucestershire Constabulary and social services combed their list of missing persons for any potential missing young women who might have been raped and murdered by him or Rose.

Yet, after my own long experience with the case – which began after West's death, when I was asked by the courts to be his official biographer – I can honestly say that I think there could be many more, perhaps 20 or even 30. One of them might even be found underneath the café instead of Mary. West had access to the area and had done occasional building jobs there.

Rosemary West is serving life imprisonment in HM Prison New Hall, West Yorkshire. Photo / Supplied

To be clear, West was a truly depraved and evil man. He thought nothing of rape and torture. His signature as a killer was dismembering bodies and keeping "souvenirs" of body parts, and he was charged with 12 murders carried out between 1967 and 1987.

His behaviour, which was first revealed at Rose's trial in 1994, was so terrible, it shocked the country – and it did not begin with the disappearance of Mary Bastholm.

West was born in 1941 in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, in rough, rural poverty. His mother Daisy took his virginity when he was 12. His father Walter sexually abused Fred's three younger sisters.

At 20, West was brought to trial for raping his sister Kitty, then 13, and making her pregnant, but the case collapsed. There was repeated violence and complaints of sexual assault. Yet West had a sort of natural instinctive charm or cunning, which seems to have hidden the reality of the man from those outside his immediate family.

He was married twice, first to Rena and then to Rose, who, prior to meeting West, was involved in an incestuous relationship with her own father, Bill Letts. This father-daughter relationship resumed in the late 1970s once Rose began working as a prostitute from the family home.

West had numerous affairs. Rose had at least eight children. Their life would have been chaotic and depraved enough had both not also become murderers.

Fred and Rose West's children, from left, Mae, Heather and Stephen. Heather was murdered by her father in 1986. Photo / Supplied

West's first victim was likely to have been Ann McFall in July 1967, although he never accepted responsibility. She was 18 and living ostensibly with West as nanny to Charmaine, his first wife's daughter by a bus driver, and Anna Marie, her daughter with West. McFall was heavily pregnant with his child when she disappeared.

In 1971, Rose then murdered Charmaine, the same year Rena was last seen alive.

The following year, the couple were almost stopped. A young woman called Caroline Owens, who had been working as a babysitter for them, went to the police and told how they had raped and assaulted her, threatening her with murder. Owens was too traumatised to give evidence, and the Wests were only found guilty of lesser assault charges and fined £50 each. Owens attempted to take her own life on hearing the news.

From 1973 to 1975, the Wests murdered at least six young women at their house in Cromwell Street, including 19-year-old Lynda Gough, Carol Ann Cooper, 15, and Juanita Mott, 18. In 1978, Shirley Robinson – heavily pregnant with Fred's child – was killed. Sixteen-year-old Alison Chambers died there in 1979.

Despite everything that was happening, West was on the police radar only for minor offences – being a fence, petty theft. If anything, he seems to have had quite a good relationship with his local force.

It was the murder of their daughter, Heather, in 1986 that led ultimately to the Wests' arrests. She had disappeared – to the concern of her closest siblings, Stephen and Mae. Then, in 1993, another daughter – 13-year-old Louise – told a friend her father had raped her.

This had set in motion an investigation and a putative trial which, yet again, collapsed when the victim refused to give evidence. But one officer, Detective Constable Hazel Savage, did not lose interest in the case. She was particularly alerted by a remark some of the children made: that if they didn't behave, they would end up under the patio like Heather. It was, she was told, a family joke.

Savage's dogged concern finally led to a police warrant to search the garden on February 24, 1994. Here, they found the remains of three women – Heather, Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers.

It was shortly after that West confessed to the murder of Heather, and to nine others including Charmaine, Rena and Lynda Gough. Six more bodies were found buried in the cellar and under the bathroom floor. Fred revealed the location of Ann McFall's resting place, but denied murder. Most of the bodies showed signs of mutilation and torture, and had bones missing, which have never been located.

On June 30, 1994, at Gloucester Crown Court, Fred was charged with 11 murders and Rose with nine. Immediately afterwards, he was re-arrested and charged with murdering Ann McFall. He took his own life six months later, leaving Rose to face a trial that lasted seven weeks.

The details that emerged were horrendous and many were too awful to be reported in full at the time. I can remember a reporter contacted his desk to dictate his copy by phone. At the other end, the young typist broke down in tears.

The story has never ended. Even once Rose was sentenced to serve the rest of her life in prison, there has always been a continuing sense of injustice – that not all the victims were found and given the respectful burials they deserved.

So credit to the ITV production company for finding enough new evidence to make it worth Gloucester police investigating. Certainly, West often hinted that there were other victims. He told his lawyer that he had murdered Mary, claiming to have buried her on farmland. There were supposed other victims in Birmingham, Scotland and Herefordshire.

So will Rose help the search? I find that unlikely. Although she claimed to be innocent, I have never doubted that she was a willing accomplice to Fred. She now lives in a world of half denial and half pride. Even now, a part of her will be refusing to acknowledge a connection, the other enjoying the revival of the notoriety, the confirmation of her place as Queen Bee in prison.

Mary's disappearance may have been too early for Rose to have been involved – but Fred might have told her if he had a part in it.

Could she, if she wished, reveal the locations of other victims? I don't doubt that. When Fred was first phoned by Rose to say the police were about to dig up the back garden, he disappeared for more than two and a half hours. I believe he went to make sure his other burial sites were properly concealed, to cover his tracks.

But as well as the missing victims, we would do well to remember the family and friends of the known dead, for whom this has been an unwelcome reminder of the awful past. And then there are Fred and Rose's surviving children, whose lives were destroyed from the start: Anna Marie, Stephen, Mae, Barry and those younger ones who were sent far away into foster care.

Whatever is found in the cellar of the former Pop-In Café, how can any of them ever get closure?

- As told to Victoria Lambert

Geoffrey Wansell is author of An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West