Fred And Rose West

Fred and Rose West abducted, raped, tortured and killed an unknown number of women over a 20 year period. They buried their victims under their Gloucester home. Fred West committed suicide while awaiting trial. Rose West was convicted of 10 murders and is serving life.

Frederick Walter Stephen West (Sept 29th 1941- Jan 1st 1995), best known as Fred West, was a British serial killer. Between 1967 and 1987, he and his wife Rosemary are believed to have tortured, raped and murdered at least 12 young women, many at the couple's home in Gloucester.

These women were usually lodgers and nannies who lived relatively transient lives and would not easily be missed, however their daughter Heather was among those murdered.

Born to a poor family a poor family of farm workers. He left school at the age of 15 and began work as a casual labourer. As a teenager he injured his head seriously in a motorcycle accident and also in a fall from a building's fire escape.

A prolific petty criminal as a teenager. He moved from his parents' home to live with an aunt a hundred yards away until he moved to Gloucester, where he took a job in a slaughterhouse. He was fined for theft in April and October of 1961.

West later worked as an ice cream van driver. On November 4th 1965, he accidentally ran over and killed a four-year-old boy with his ice-cream van.

At age 20, Fred West was a convicted child molester and petty thief. In November 1962, West married his former girlfriend, Rena Costello, who was pregnant by an Asian bus driver.

Her daughter Charmaine was born in 1963, and a year later Rena bore Fred a daughter called Anne-Marie.

While still married to Rena Costello, West met his next wife Rosemary "Rose" Letts on Nov ,29, 1968, Rose's 15th birthday. In 1970, 17-year-old Rose gave birth to their daughter Heather.

Fred West was imprisoned around this time and spent Christmas 1970 behind bars. After Heather’s birth, it appears that Rose killed Fred and Rena Costello’s daughter Charmaine, and Rena Costello was later killed by West.

In January 1972, the couple married and in June that year, Rose gave birth to their daughter Mae.

During Rose and Fred's time together, a number of young women were killed, dismembered, and buried on their property.

Their only known victim after 1979 was their daughter Heather, who was killed in June 1987 at the age of 16.

In May 1992, 51-year-old West raped his 13-year-old daughter at Cromwell Street and filmed it, and then raped her twice afterwards.

She discussed the incident with her brothers and sisters, who told friends at school.

In August the police decided to investigate, eventually leading to Fred West being charged with 12 counts of murder, with Rose as an accomplice. She was also charged with child cruelty, and the remaining children were placed in foster care.

They started searching the house and excavating the garden of 26 Cromwell Street on Feb 25, 1994.

After Fred's arrest, the police uncovered human bones. West confessed, retracted and then re-confessed to the murder of his daughter, denying that Rose was involved.

Rose was not arrested untilApril 1994, initially on sex offences but later charged with murder. Further bodies were found and, on March 4, 1994, West admitted nine more murders, including his first wife and Ann McFall.

Nine sets of bones were found in the cellar of the house, in vertical shafts dug for the purpose.

The Wests began their killing spree at another house, 25 Midland Road.

Under the floorboards police found the body of Charmaine, Fred's eight-year-old daughter by his first wife, Rena Costello. At least two other women were killed in the flat.

On Jan 1. 1995, Fred West committed suicide whilst on remand in his cell at Winson Green by hanging himself.

The evidence against Rose was circumstantial; unlike her husband, she did not confess.
She was found guilty of all 10 murders and sentenced to Life imprisonment.

The trial judge recommended that she should never be released, and 18 months later Home secretary Jack Straw agreed with this recommendation.

In 1996 the Wests' house at 25 Cromwell Street, along with adjoining 23 Cromwell Street, was demolished and the site made into a pathway. Every brick was crushed and every timber was burnt to discourage souvenir hunters.

Fred West had confessed to murdering up to 30 people, only 12 known victims were the ones they know that were killed by the pair but experts believe there were more.

Harold Shipman

Dr Harold Shipman was convicted of killing 15 of his patients in Greater Manchester. An official report later concluded he had killed more than 215 people. He was found hanged in his prison cell in 2004.

When the police began investigating Dr Harold Shipman in September 1998 they struggled to understand him.

How could a GP who was trusted and respected by more than 3,000 patients also be a killer who struck time after time with no obvious motive?

Harold Frederick Shipman was born into a working class family in Nottingham on 14 January, 1946.He was a confident and clever child who was accepted into the local grammar school and was ambitious and academically successful.

When he was 17 his life changed dramatically. His mother, Vera, died of lung cancer at the age of 43. For the first time Shipman saw the influence of doctors administering drugs like morphine to alleviate pain in the last days of a life.

In 1965, he went on to study medicine at Leeds University.
His 17-year-old window-dresser girlfriend, Primrose, became pregnant. The two had first met after Primrose's father rented Fred a room. They married in November 1966 and moved into a flat. Together they had four children .

In 1970, Shipman graduated from university and started working at the Pontefract General Infirmary. By 1974 he had become a GP working in a practice in Todmorden, but he soon began to have blackouts. His colleagues made the discovery that Fred Shipman was addicted to the morphine like drug pethidine.

Shipman was convicted of making out drug prescriptions to himself and given a heavy fine. He was also fired from his job at the Todmorden practice and went to a psychiatric and drug treatment centre in York.

Sometime later in 1977, Shipman re-emerged as a GP in Hyde. His new colleagues respected his work, although some felt he could be arrogant and patronising towards his patients.

In 1993, he set up on his own, having fallen out with his partners. His wife, Primrose, worked as a part-time receptionist .

On 7 September 1998, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Kathleen Grundy. As police investigated they uncovered evidence of a further murders.

Shipman highly confident denied all charges.

Detective Chief Inspector Mike Williams said: "He was an arrogant type of individual to deal with. And I don't say that lightly."

"I've listened to the interviews, and he certainly wanted to control and dominate the interview and the officers, at times belittling them. He was treating this as some sort of game, a competition, pitting his, what he considered to be his superior intellect, to those of the officers who were interviewing him."

Shipman was given 15 life sentences for murder, but police believe he may actually have killed up to 215 patients.

The South Manchester coroner, John Pollard, who knew and worked with Shipman, has his own theory about the doctor's motives.

"The only valid possible explanation for it is that he simply enjoyed viewing the process of dying and enjoyed the feeling of control over life and death, literally over life and death."

.

Harold Shipman, found hanged in his cell at Wakefield high security jail in West Yorkshire 2004.

Canadian Bacon

Robert Pickton the 57-year-old pig farmer was found guilty by a Vancouver court of murdering six women he is charged with the killing of a further 20.

He was found guilty of killing Mona Wilson, Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Brenda Wolfe, Andrea Joesbury and Georgina Papin.

The women are just some of dozens who disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s from Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, a district famed as "Canada's poorest postcode".
For years, police refused to open murder cases, labelling the women simply as missing.

Many were drug addicts, working in the sex trade to fund their habits - part of a transient and disenfranchised community. The low social status of these women, many of whom were of aboriginal origin, contributed to the police's lack of concern.

He was known as an ordinary farmer, "just a pig man".

In February 2002, the police stumbled across some of the women's possessions while searching his property for firearms.
But when they began examining outhouses and sifting deep through the soil on the 10-acre farm, they found blood-stained clothes and pieces of human bone and teeth, amassing enough evidence to charge him with 26 murders. Some of the bodies had been fed to the pigs.

The 10-month trial heard from almost 130 witnesses, including Lynn Ellingson, who said she once walked in on the pig farmer, who was covered with blood, as Ms Papin's body hung from a chain in the farm's slaughterhouse.

In a videotape played to the jury, Pickton is heard telling an undercover police officer that he had planned to kill one more woman before stopping at 50, taking a break and then killing another 25 women.
"I was going to do one more; make it an even 50," Pickton told the officer, who had been planted in his cell to gain his trust.

Pickton was already regarded as a dodgy character, and had quite a reputation, women were afraid of him and prostitute's and warned each other about him referring to him as a "bad date."

1983: First woman disappears from Downtown Eastside
1995: Spike in number of women vanishing 27 in total.
1999: Vancouver police offer $100,000 reward for information
Feb 2002: Police search Pickton's farm, find remains, first murder charge
May 2005: Pickton now faces 27 murder charges
Aug 2006: Judge splits charges into two cases
Jan 2007: trial begins
Dec 2007: Pickton found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder.

Pickton was a serious suspect by 1997, she said. In that year alone, 13 women disappeared.

Described at the trial as not showing any emotion, he occasionally smiled. Normally, unless he nods or smiles at a defence witness he knows, his face doesn't change. He listens intensely. His hair is very greasy. He is a creepy-looking guy. He talks using little aphorisms, little clichés.

Under Canadian law a murder conviction leads to an automatic life sentence. Pickton must wait 10 years for possible parole.

Health officials issued a tainted meat warning to neighbours who bought pork from Pickton's farm, concerned it might have contained human remains.

Deadly Pizza

Chester Turner a pizza delivery man has been sentenced to death for the murders of 10 women and an unborn baby in Los Angeles during the 1980s and 90s.

Turner preyed upon prostitutes and other women with drug problems mostly in the South Los Angeles.
Turner, 40, declined to say anything at the court hearing, he was convicted of 10 counts of first-degree murder, plus one count of second-degree murder for the death of one victim's unborn baby.

Paula Vance, 24, found in the business, Olympia Tool, in Azusa. Brenda Bries, 39 was found slumped over a portable toilet.

The Vance murder was witnessed from a bystander at a neighboring trailer park.

Diane Johnson, 21, found partially nude and strangled in March 1987 in a roadway construction area west of the Harbor Freeway.

Annette Ernest, 26, found lying on a shoulder of a road in October 1987, partially nude and strangled.

Anita Fishman, 31, strangled and left partially nude outside a garage in an alley off Figueroa Street in January 1989.

Regina Washington, 27, also found partially nude and strangled with an electrical cord behind a vacant house inside a garage off Figueroa Street in September 1989. Washington was six months pregnant. The death of the fetus was attributed to the strangulation of the mother, and it was ruled a homicide.

Andrea Tripplett, 29, strangled, found partially nude behind a vacant building on Figueroa Street inApril 1993.

Desarae Jones, 29, found strangled next to a vacant residence in May 1993.

Natalie Price, 31, found partially nude and strangled next to a vacant residence in Febuary 1995.

Mildred Beasley, 45, found partially nude and strangled; she was left amongst the bushes alongside the 110 Fwy in November 1996.

Turner was already serving an eight-year prison sentence for a 2002 rape when his DNA linked him to the killings, which were carried out between 1987 and 1998.

The Gay Slayer

Colin Ireland born 1954, a former soldier who had been convicted for burglary and robbery in his twenties, decided to become a serial killer as a New Year resolution at the beginning of 1993, when he was 39.

Ireland claimed to be straight and had been married , he lived in Southend and hung about in The Coleherne, a pub popular with gay men, he feigned being gay to lure pub patrons into his clutches.

The clientele wear colour-coded handkerchiefs depending upon their masochistic preference, submissive or dominant, to make cruising easy and to avoid misunderstanding.

Peter Walker a choreographer, approached Ireland in the pub and then they left for Walker's flat in Battersea. After he was willingly bound and gagged by Ireland, he was subjected to a beating which Ireland gave with his fists and a dog lead.

Ireland then killed him by suffocating him with a plastic bag. After cleaning the flat to get rid of clues he went through Walker's personal items and found him to be HIV positive. Enraged he stuffed a condom into Walker's mouth.

The next day Ireland phoned the Samaritans to tell them where he had locked up Walker's dogs before he killed their owner.

Two months later, Ireland returned to the same pub and picked up Christopher Dunn, a Librarian. Again the murder took place in the victim's flat, in Wealdstone. Dunn was wearing a body harness and had been willingly handcuffed and had his feet tied together. Ireland then beat, tortured and suffocated his victim. Before killing Dunn he got his pin number for his bank card as he was unemployed.

Six days later, Ireland once again picked up a man at the pub. It was Perry Bradley III, who was 35 and the son of a serving US congressman. They went to Bradley's flat in Kensington, and Ireland persuaded him to be tied up . Once his victim was helpless, Ireland again used torture to get his bank card number. He delayed the killing until Bradley had actually fallen asleep, still trussed up, and then strangled him with a noose. Again he cleaned the flat and left the next morning.

There was enough distance between the murders for police to think they were just sex games that went wrong.
Ireland, angered that he had received no publicity even after three murders, killed again within three days.

At the pub he met and courted 33-year-old Andrew Collier, a housing warden, and the pair went to Collier's home in Dalston. Once he had tied up his victim on the bed, Ireland again demanded his victim's bank details. This time, however, his victim refused to comply. Ireland strangled him with a noose.
Ireland left the next morning with £70, having also killed Collier's cat in an angry reaction to finding out his victim was HIV positive while rummaging through his personal effects in an attempt to find the bank card number. Another alleged reason for killing the cat was because when Ireland killed Peter Walker and protected the dogs, by locking them in a room, the media called him an animal lover so, in order for Ireland to prove the media wrong he killed Andrew Collier’s cat and draped it over his dead body.

Ireland finally left a clue for the police: He put a condom in Collier's mouth, just as he had done to Walker, creating a visible link between the two murders.

The fifth victim of Ireland's series (he had read that serial killers needed at least five victims to qualify as such) was Emanuel Spiteri, aged 41, a chef whom Ireland had met in the same pub.

They went to Spiteri's flat in Catford, and again Spiteri was persuaded to be cuffed and bound on his bed. Once more, Ireland demanded his bank number but didn't get it. He used a noose again to kill his victim.
After carrying out his post-murder cleaning and clearing the scene, Ireland set fire to the flat and left. He rang the police later to tell them to look for a body at the scene of a fire and added that he would probably not kill again. However, he had forgotten to wipe off one set of fingerprints he had left on the window.

At last the police connected all five killings, and word spread fast among the whole of London, not just within the gay community, that a serial killer who specifically targeted gay men was operating and could strike again at any time.
Investigations revealed that Spiteri had left the pub and travelled home with his killer by train, and a security video successfully captured the two of them on the railway platform at Charing Cross station. Ireland recognised himself and decided to tell police he was the man with Spiteri but not the killer he claimed to have left Spiteri in the flat with another man. However, police had also found the fingerprints in Collier's flat which matched those of Ireland.

He was charged with the murders of Collier and Spiteri, and confessed to the other three while awaiting trial in prison.

He told police that he had no vendetta against gay men, but picked on them because they were the easiest targets. He had robbed those he killed to finance his killings because he was unemployed at the time, and he needed funds to travel to and from London when hunting for victims.

When his case came to the Old Bailey on December 20, 1993, Ireland admitted all charges and was given life sentences for each. The judge, Mr Justice Sachs, said he was "exceptionally frightening and dangerous", adding: "To take one human life is an outrage; to take five is carnage."