The Ryan Green True Crime Collection: Volume 1 (Harold Shipman; Colombian Killers; Fred and Rose West; The Kurim Case)

Citation preview

THE RYAN GREEN TRUE CRIME COLLECTION VOLUME 1

BY RYAN GREEN

© Copyright Ryan Green 2018. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the author. Reviewers may quote brief passages in reviews. Disclaimer This book is about real people committing real crimes. The story has been constructed by facts but some of the scenes, dialogue and characters have been fictionalised. Polite Note to the Reader This book is written in British English except where fidelity to other languages or accents are appropriate. Some words and phrases may differ from US English.

SHORTCUT TO BOOK HAROLD SHIPMAN COLOMBIAN KILLERS FRED & ROSE WEST THE KUŘIM CASE

TABLE OF CONTENTS HAROLD SHIPMAN Introduction Chapter 1 – Hiding beneath the surface Shipman's childhood Primrose Medical school Early career The pethidine chronicles Continuing career The first suspicions are raised Chapter 2 – Evil Unmasked The Shipman Trial Chapter 3 – The Shipman Inquiry Shipman's victims year by year New revelations from Pontefract General Infirmary Chapter 4 – Shipman's Motives and Motivation Clues from his childhood Clues from his character Psychological issues Personal Gain Further clues from the Grundy affair The death of Harold Shipman Conclusion COLOMBIAN KILLERS Introduction The Making of Murderers Luis Alfredo Garavito

Early Life and Motivational Evolution Narcissism Sadism Loneliness The Hunt: Discovery and Chase The Arrest: Unmasking the Man Due Process: The Road to Conviction True Crime: Victimology and Methodology Pedro Alonzo Lopez The Making of a Monster The State vs Lopez: The Discovery and Chase The Unveiling of a Madman The Law of the Land: Conviction and Beyond The Psychology of a Psychopath Victimology and Modus Operandi How do we know? Daniel Camargo Barbosa The Creation of Camargo Camargo’s Early Childhood Adulthood and Beyond Inside the Mind of a Murderer The Evolution of a Murderer Phase One Phase Two Phase Three The Pursuit of a Psychopath: Chase and Capture Imprisonment and Death Conclusion FRED & ROSE WEST Introduction Chapter 1 – Beginnings

Anna McFall (8 April 1959 – June 1967) Rosemary Letts Charmaine West (22 February 1963 – June 1971) Catherine Bernadette West (14 April 1944 – August 1971) Chapter 2 – The House of Horrors Caroline Roberts – The one who got to live Anna Marie West – Daughter and victim Lynda Gough (1 May 1953 – April 1973) Carole Ann Cooper (10 April 1958 – November 1973) Lucy Katherine Partington (4 March 1952 – December 1973/January 1974) Therese Siegenthaler (27 November 1952 – April 1974) Shirley Hubbard (26 June 1959 – November 1974) Juanita Marion Mott (1 March 1957 – April 1975) Shirley Ann Robinson (8 October 1959 – April 1978) Alison Jane Chambers (8 September 1962 – August 1979) Heather Ann West (17 October 1970 – June 1987) Chapter 3 – Investigation and Trial The deception comes to an end Unearthing the dead The Appropriate Adult The Ghost of Anne A shattered bond The Trial of Rosemary West Chapter 4 – Why? Could just one of them have been responsible for everything? Childhood Sicknesses of the mind The “Family of Love” A deadly confluence How did they go so long without attracting discovery?

Conclusion THE KUŘIM CASE Introduction Chapter 1 – Abuse Uncovered Scars, seen and unseen Ana Upbringings and Pasts Klára's early motherhood and marriage The Arrival of Ana An Eerie Child A Grieving Mother's Hope Ana Sends a Letter A Questionable Adoption Setting Upon the Path to Recovery Family Matters Chapter 2 – Now you see her... ...Now You Don't Connecting the Dots Followers of the Grail A Clear Connection The Full Extent of the Abuse Guessing at the Motives Chapter 3 – The Journey of a Thousand Miles At the heart of winter Homecoming New allegations Klára speaks Chapter 4 – The trial Tying all the knots Events according to Klára Mauerová’s testimony Turek testifies

The Barbora question Psychiatrists’ findings Chapter 5 – The trial, continued The vanishing act explained Kateřina breaks her silence Emotions boil over A third opinion Closing statements Final words Verdicts and sentences Unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions Conclusion – The aftermath MORE BOOKS BY RYAN GREEN ABOUT RYAN GREEN FREE TRUE CRIME AUDIOBOOK

Get a free copy of Robert Maudsley: Hannibal the Cannibal when you sign up to join my Reader’s Group.

Click Here To Get Your Free Book

HAROLD SHIPMAN THE TRUE STORY OF BRITAIN'S MOST NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER

INTRODUCTION The man on the cover of this book looks like he could be anyone's grandfather. It's easy to imagine him doting on his little grandkids, reading them stories from his lap and letting them play with his big, bushy beard. If you were told he was a doctor, I bet you'd imagine he was a good, kind and gentle one, with an easy, affable manner and deep care for his patients. Harold Frederick Shipman certainly projected all those qualities, but only so that he could hide the evil that lurked deep inside. Shipman abused his trust and used his position to kill – no less than 218 of his patients found their end at his hand, making him the United Kingdom's most prolific serial killer by a long shot. This book tells Shipman's story, from his childhood under a domineering mother to his pathetic death in a prison cell. It will put you in the perspective of those who lived and worked in proximity to him, showing you the considerate but sometimes haughty doctor he presented himself as before taking you through the process of wrenching off that mask and uncovering the full extent of the evil festering within. We will make a study of the man's possible motives and close with a look at the systemic failures that allowed him to kill and steps taken to make sure nothing like his murderous spree ever happens again. Turn the page and begin to look into the life and mind of the ultimate human paradox: the healer who kills – ‘Doctor Death’.

CHAPTER 1 – HIDING BENEATH THE SURFACE Knowing what we do today about everything that happened and what Shipman did, it’s sometimes possible to forget the fact that those who lived and worked with him would have had a very different perception of him while they were living through it. Hindsight colours how we view the past and it is a lot easier for us to see warning signs and obvious red flags that we really might not have been able to connect if we were in the same situation as Harold Shipman’s contemporaries. There is no doubt that those red flags were there and that if someone had had the notion to diligently investigate and follow where they led, Shipman’s killing spree would have been ended far sooner and a lot of grief and loss would have been avoided. We will examine some of them as we explore the story of Shipman’s life before his crimes came to light in this chapter, but even as we do so, spare some effort to trying to put yourself in the place of Shipman’s contemporaries and close relations. Try to forget the killer you know for a few moments and imagine how you would have reacted to the information available to you, and also remember that you might not have had any knowledge of even some of those surface facts that might have tipped the balance of suspicion for you. Devils like Shipman deserve no sympathy, and this is by no means a plea to show him any. However, a really important part of figuring out how things like this can happen and of making sure they don’t happen again that is often overlooked is gaining an understanding of the processes that were at play the minds of those who were living through the tragedy and yet were unable to see it. You can never predict it – any one of us can find ourselves in a similar situation someday, and we all need to be able to identify those thought processes that may blind us to what is happening.

SHIPMAN'S CHILDHOOD

TV shows and books in the True Crime genre sometimes have a tendency to be overzealous in analysing the childhoods of killers and violent criminals to find connections between their upbringing and their actions to the point where they draw links far too tenuous to be taken seriously. The case of Harold Shipman is not one of those cases. This is one of those stories about which we can almost be completely certain that the way he was raised and the experiences he had in his younger years definitely informed and affected what happened later on. Harold Frederick Shipman was born on the 14th of January 1946 to Vera and Harold Sr. He was their second child – “Freddy”, as he was affectionately known, had a sister seven years older named Pauline and was joined by a younger brother named Clive four years after he was born. Despite his being in a normally less than privileged position among his siblings, Vera had a very special liking for Freddy. It was obvious even to neighbours that he was her favourite, and that she saw him as being the brightest and most promising of her offspring. Vera had something of a superiority complex when it came to all of her children. She controlled who they could play with and when, but with her Freddy, she took it to another level – where his brother and sister could dress casually he would have to wear a tie, and his associations were even more tightly controlled. That sense of superiority inevitably rubbed off on her son, and he grew up somewhat of a loner with few friends, though he was an enthusiastic athlete and played soccer in school. The sequence of events that undoubtedly had the biggest impact on Harold Shipman's life was the illness and death of his mother. Sometime in his adolescence, Vera developed terminal lung cancer, and the young Harold took it upon himself to be at her side and take care of her as much as he could. For him, this meant rushing straight home from school to be by her side and keep her company. Vera no doubt loved these sessions and grew to anticipate her Freddy coming home as the highlight of her day. Without a doubt, it’s while spending time with his mother that Shipman developed the winning bedside manner that endeared his patients to him in his medical career.

Another thing he witnessed that would have altogether darker imprints on the future is that Shipman was also present when the family doctor was attending to Vera. This meant he was present when Vera's cancer was severely advanced and she was in constant pain. The doctor would administer morphine to Vera, and Shipman witnessed how her pain would instantly disappear almost as soon as the drug was administered. The fascination with opiates similar to morphine would never wane and would manifest itself first as an object of personal addiction, and later as his chosen modus operandi for ending his victims' lives. In a more general sense, it is almost certain that this proximity to someone so close to him in the last stages of her life, coupled with the almost angelic aspect he witnessed a medical professional in of taking away his mother’s pain spurred him on to choose to become a doctor in the first place. Vera passed away on June 21st 1963 and Harold would later bend all of his efforts towards entering the medical profession.

PRIMROSE A young man with a life as sheltered and with as little interaction with his peers as Harold Shipman had could reasonably have been expected to have very little luck with romance. Shipman, however, was more fortunate – he caught the eye of a young lady by the name of Primrose. Primrose had grown up in very similar conditions to Shipman – she too had a controlling mother who limited her interactions with other children, no doubt one of the factors that drew the two together. In 1966, Shipman and Primrose got married – he at the age of 19, she at 17 and five months pregnant with their first child. Shipman beat the odds again with this whirlwind romance – the pair of them proved to be exceptionally well-matched for each other and remained together for the rest of his life. Primrose would stand by him through everything that happened and would vociferously come to his defence through a minor crisis early on in his career, as well as later on when his killing spree was uncovered.

MEDICAL SCHOOL 1965 was also the year Shipman got accepted into medical school. This was not on his first try – while Shipman had been a brilliant student during his earliest school days, he became mediocre at best as his education advanced and he had failed the entrance test the first time around. What he lacked in sheer brilliance, however, he made up for in a plodding determination that could not be dissuaded from a path once he had set his mind to it. There is no doubt that Shipman was absolutely resolute in his desire to become a doctor. Who knows what the source of that determination was – perhaps at this stage all he had was just the desire to help people in the same way as he had seen his mother being helped. Or, perhaps, he already had the seeds of what would later happen germinating in his mind, and reaping a harvest of death was his intention all along. Whatever the case was, Shipman re-sat the entrance test and was successfully accepted into the University of Leeds medical program in September of 1965. Shipman's time in medical school was little different from his later youth. He tackled his studies with the same lack of outright brilliance but tempered by the sheer will to press on and do what he needed to do to get through. He was also just as reserved as he had been, with his peers noticing the same tendency towards haughtiness and aloofness instilled by his mother. The soccer field continued to be the one place where that fell away and he became an enthusiastic and very capable team player. In June of 1970, at the age of 24, he graduated from medical school and was ready to begin his career.

EARLY CAREER Soon after leaving medical school, Shipman began his tenure as a house officer – a kind of post-medical school, pre-doctor position, what we more commonly call Residency – at the Pontefract General Infirmary in West Riding in the county of Yorkshire. His time there went without any outward incidents, and after 12 months Shipman was fully registered as a doctor with the General Medical Council,

the board that certifies medical professionals in the UK. He thereafter spent another three years as a senior house officer at the same facility, also attaining a diploma in child health in 1972 and another diploma in obstetrics and gynaecology in 1974. In early 1974 Shipman answered an ad in a medical publication and secured a position at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in West Yorkshire. He had been taken on to replace a former partner at the practice who had retired on grounds of ill health. After a brief probationary period as an assistant general practitioner, he became a junior partner. Shipman was seen as an asset for the practice especially for his being relatively fresh out of medical school – he was much more up to date on the latest information and procedures compared to his veteran colleagues. If only all careers had that attitude. Shipman made good on this expectation, in particular, pushing for an update of the practice’s record-keeping systems. Shipman also underwent a massive shift in his social character and the perception with which he was held, at least by his colleagues. Gone was the reclusive loner, and in his place was an outgoing, wellrespected professional and member of the community. While he was respectful and genial with other doctors, the nurses and staff knew the old, bad side of Shipman. He was abrasive and confrontational, especially when someone was suggesting that things be done a different way from his own – he would demean and put down anyone who did that, often outright calling them stupid. It’s obvious that Shipman hadn’t really changed deep inside. His sense of superiority was still there – he just didn’t lord it over those who he saw as his equals, while those who were “beneath” him bore the brunt of it.

THE PETHIDINE CHRONICLES Shipman attacked his duties with enthusiasm, spearheading and doing much of the work needed to complete the records system upgrade. Another duty he took upon himself was the disposal of expired drugs and occasionally restocking the practice’s supply. This being a very necessary task in the medical profession, and Shipman

also having no prior record of mischief involving drugs, no one really saw any cause for concern. The first suspicions of something untoward going on were raised by the Home Office Drugs Inspectorate, an arm of the government of the United Kingdom, and the West Yorkshire Police Drugs Squad in February of 1975. Shipman had been acquiring unusually large amounts of the drug pethidine, a synthetic opiate similar in action to the drug that was used to relieve his mother’s pain, morphine. For much of the 20th century, pethidine was the most prescribed drug for the treatment of acute pain. Opiates are well-known for their highly addictive nature and the worry that Shipman was diverting excess quantities of the drug, whether for illicit sale or to feed a personal habit was very real. The investigation into this didn't go very far – the investigating officers went no further than enquiring with the pharmacists supplying the drugs to Shipman. The pharmacists knew Shipman's good side – to them, he was an absolute paragon of what a medical professional should be – "efficient and confident", in the exact words they used. They reassured the officers that Shipman was of absolutely upstanding character, and the investigation concluded that there was nothing to be worried about, though a watch would continue to be maintained in case anything else came to light. This episode reveals a new, dark possibility around Shipman’s change of outward bearing towards his colleagues. It could be that it was all a very deliberate façade, one specifically calculated to throw off any suspicions falling upon his behaviour. If this was indeed the case, then he was eminently successful on this one occasion and would benefit from it in hiding his much darker activities as well. Drug abuse is a very difficult thing to hide, however, and cracks would soon begin to show in Shipman’s own behaviour. Sometime in May of 1975, Primrose called in one of her husband's partner doctors after he had suffered a "blackout" in the bathroom, fallen and hit his head on the sink. Such episodes happened on several other occasions, and Shipman was referred to another doctor who diagnosed him with "idiopathic" epilepsy, meaning epilepsy for which the cause could not be identified. At Shipman's own initiative, he also decided to stop driving so as to prevent the risk of an accident if

he suffered a "seizure" and relied on Primrose to drive him to the practice and to house calls. Meanwhile, suspicion over the amounts of pethidine that were being acquired by Shipman was rising again. One supplier, in particular, was noticed to be supplying abnormally large quantities of the drug on orders and prescriptions submitted by him. The Home Office and police finally decided to interview Shipman himself and did so in June of 1975. Shipman was ready with his explanations for his acquiring of the drugs and assured the officers that nothing unseemly was happening to them. The officials also checked with the practice for any possible evidence, but they hit a brick wall there: Shipman's documentation of controlled drugs was found to be lacking in several aspects, particularly the register of the number of times he administered pethidine to patients, even though this was required by the law. Some ampoules of intravenous pethidine acquired by Shipman were unable to be accounted for, but without the register, it was impossible to confirm this. All that resulted from this inquiry was a visit to the practice by a drugs inspector from the Home Office who delivered advice on maintaining a complete register of controlled drugs and also on the correct procedure for disposing of them. It was probably this measure, as well as the alarm of receiving such an ominous official visit that led the practice to the discovery in September of 1975 that Shipman was indeed abusing pethidine and using his powers and responsibility to procure it. Shipman was called into a meeting by the other partners of the firm and confronted with the evidence. His initial reaction was to confirm the truth of this, and then try to use some of his charm and the camaraderie he had built up with his colleagues to persuade them to actually help him hide his addiction and continue to feed it with more illegal procurements of the drug. The gall of this move is absolutely jaw-dropping, and it isn’t surprising at all that the partners rejected this proposal. And so denied, Shipman revealed his true nature and launched on a tirade, tending his resignation and then withdrawing it and telling the partners that they would have to force him out before storming out.

Not long after, Primrose would show for the first time how fiercely she would defend her husband and stormed into the practice herself, repeating Shipman’s assertion that he would not go willingly. After taking legal advice, the practice managed to do just what Shipman had said they would have to and ejected him from the practice. They also notified the authorities of what had transpired, and on the 28th of November 1975, the police interviewed Shipman, now with the certain knowledge of his drug abuse. Shipman had been checked into The Retreat, a drug rehabilitation centre, immediately after his expulsion from the practice and it is here that the police interviewed him. He denied any wrongdoing at first but decided instead to come clean, telling the police what he professed to be the full extent of his wrongdoing. He told them that he had started taking pethidine around May of the year before to combat depression brought on by his being unable to get along with his partners in the practice. This, of course, came as a huge surprise to Shipman's erstwhile partners – when they read about the whole affair in the papers afterward because they weren't even aware Shipman had been subjected to a criminal investigation and trial while it was happening – who had known nothing but fruitful, cordial cooperation with him throughout their time working together. The detective who interviewed Shipman, Detective Sergeant George McKeating noticed that all of Shipman’s veins had collapsed – an effect that could only be the result of no less than five years’ continuous use of intravenous drugs. It’s most likely that Shipman had been abusing pethidine long before he joined the practice, possibly since the very beginning of his days as a house officer. This line of inquiry was not diligently pursued. Shipman wrote a statement for the police detailing his addiction and the ways in which he had acquired the drugs. He also stated his intention never to return to practice as a general practitioner or to work in any position in which he would have access to pethidine. Shipman cleaned up and was discharged from The Retreat on the 30th of December with a recommendation that he continue receiving psychiatric supervision for a few years. His "seizures" completely stopped not long after and by March of 1976, he began to drive

himself around. It is obvious with hindsight that his abuse of pethidine was their cause. On February the 13th of 1976, Shipman was brought to the Halifax Magistrates' Court and presented with three charges of obtaining ten ampoules of 100 milligram pethidine by deception, three charges of illegal possession of pethidine and one charge of forging a prescription (his principal way of obtaining the drug) and plead guilty to all of them. He was convicted but didn't receive any prison time or heavy censure, instead, being slapped with a £75 fine for each one, for a total of £600. Even while criminal proceedings were being brought against him, Shipman was moving on with his career. On February the 2nd 1976, he started work at the Newton Aycliffe Health Centre, administered by the Durham Area Medical Authority, as a clinical medical officer. He was upfront with his employers about the legal trouble he was going through. They consulted with the psychiatrists he had been receiving treatment from and on their advice offered him the job on the condition that he continue receiving treatment. The position didn’t violate the terms of trust he had set for himself as he didn’t have any access to controlled drugs. The details of Shipman’s convictions were reported to the General Medical Council and were brought before its Penal Cases Committee, the branch responsible for assessing criminal cases being faced by GMC members and deciding whether they should be brought before the Disciplinary Committee. The PCC took advice from the doctors Bryce and Milne, the psychiatrists who had been treating Shipman, and they also took into account a letter of support from his employer at the Durham Area Medical Authority stating that he was settling in well in his new job and was showing no signs of being in danger of relapsing. With this in mind, the PCC decided it wasn’t necessary to take any disciplinary action on Shipman. They did send a strongly worded letter that expressed in no uncertain terms that if Shipman was convicted of any similar drug-related offences he would face the full brunt of a disciplinary enquiry. This decision meant that in the GMC's eyes, Shipman was free to continue practising as a doctor, but there was still an avenue that

could bar him from doing so. Under the Misuse of Drugs Act, the office of the Home Secretary had the power to bar Shipman from his profession and from any position whatsoever in which he would have access to controlled drugs. The choice to do so was not made, and the GMC's own decision not to expel Shipman was probably a factor in this. Another factor in that decision was the view given by the police that Shipman's patients had not suffered from his actions. This decision, in particular, might have been painfully ironic because it, later on, came out that Shipman could already have begun killing his patients. It is certain that he did kill afterwards, and his choice of lethal instrument was the very controlled substances he would have been banned from ever obtaining. Had that happened it is certain that hundreds of lives would have been spared.

CONTINUING CAREER Shipman held his position with the Durham Area Medical Authority for a while and also took up a temporary position with the National Coal Board. With no barriers to his re-entering full practice as a doctor, though, it was only a matter of time before he returned. In 1977, he answered an ad for a GP position at the Donneybrook practice in Hyde, a town now a part of the Greater Manchester metropolitan area. Shipman told the partners at the practice all about his trouble with pethidine and the resultant convictions and referred them to one of the psychiatrists who treated him. After consulting with the psychiatrist, as well as the GMC and the Home office, the partners offered Shipman a position at the practice based on the assurances they had received that Shipman was not undergoing any current trouble with drug abuse or his mental health and that he was under no restrictions that would prevent him from handling and administering controlled drugs. On the first of October 1977, Shipman began working at the Donneybrook practice. Donneybrook was the longest stage of Shipman’s career, and he presented himself in much the same way as he had in his previous GP position in Todmorden. He was an innovator who championed

the introduction of new ways of doing things and was heavily involved in other organizations outside of the practice. Some positions he held include area surgeon for the local St John Ambulance, a membership with the Local Practitioners committee and a secretary position with the Tameside Local Medical Committee. He was also way ahead of his time when it came to preventative medicine – he was recommending regular health check-ups regardless of how the patient was feeling long before it became a regular thing. The dedication Shipman showed to his patients was exemplary – morning appointments were commonly slated to last seven minutes each but he would spend more time than necessary with each patient, the excess spent just chatting with them about events and their lives. His allotted morning surgery time would often overrun by thirty minutes, sometimes more. While his partners were taking lunch, Shipman would be beginning his home visitation rounds. Many of these were unannounced, non-appointment visits to check in on the patients and he continued doing this long after it stopped being a common thing for doctors to do as the population grew and more demands were placed on their time. His interpersonal relationships were a little different, though. He was still the absolute epitome of what a doctor should be to his patients and was as a result extremely well loved by them, but with his colleagues, he was a little less magnanimous. His individualism and insistence on things being done his way would assert themselves more and more as time went on, to the point where relations with other partners would begin to deteriorate. In 1991, Shipman told his partners of his intention to leave the practice. He gave two reasons for this: one was that he disliked the computer system that had been introduced in the practice in 1989. The other was his disagreement with the way the other partners were proposing they institute the system of fundholding. Fundholding was a controversial initiative by the UK National Health Service for allowing general practices to set their own budgets with government allocated money.

The former reason makes little sense in the light of Shipman's established reputation as an innovator, and it seems especially spurious once we take later events into consideration – once Shipman had established his own practice he enthusiastically embraced computerized record keeping, even becoming head of the local user group for a software system specially developed for doctors known as Micro-Doc. In a similar vein, Shipman also took to Fundholding with gusto after forming his own practice, joining the Tameside Consortium (South), and a fundholding group for local doctors. Shipman’s conversations over the issue with his partners definitely made it seem like he was against the concept of fundholding but when he was questioned about it during his trial he gave as a reason that he believed his partners were not as committed to fundholding as he was. In hindsight, these reasons seem to have been misdirection on Shipman’s part. When his partners at the Donneybrook practice were questioned, they seemed to find it likely that his real reason was a desire to branch off into single practice because of his individualistic approach to medicine, as well as his sometimes acrimonious relations with his partners. This is notable as an inversion of his previous justifications for his pethidine use – back then he fabricated hostility with his partners that they themselves denied while this time he diverted attention away from the friction between him and his partners while they confirmed it. The darkest and more likely possibility is that Shipman was finding it difficult to continue his patient-killing activities and hide them at the same time while in a shared practice. Going off on his own would give him the freedom to continue unhindered and without such a high risk of detection. On the January 1st 1992, Shipman began practising privately while still within Donneybrook House and preparing his private surgery. In August of the same year, he moved into his new premises at 21 Market Street in Hyde, taking with him some staff from Donneybrook and his patient list. The parting was quite acrimonious and had to involve a lot of legal wrangling over the financial arrangements caused by Shipman's leaving. The biggest source of discord was Shipman's taking of his patient list – while Donneybrook was a

shared practice each doctor had their own list of patients and only treated each other's patients when the doctor in question was out or otherwise occupied. Shipman, in part due to his extreme popularity with patients, had the largest patient list among his partners, a source of revenue the drying up of which would see the practice take a particularly hard financial knock. Once he went into single practice, Shipman’s reputation soared. He was especially popular among elderly patients, in part for his willingness to make home visits to them. Much of his fame spread by word of mouth, and a lot of patients clamoured to be on his list because of recommendations given by family and friends that were already receiving care from him and were massively impressed by his charm and the seemingly deep care he exhibited toward his patients. He wound up actually having so many patients he couldn't fit new ones onto his list. The joy of being accepted to be one of Shipman's patients was, in the words of one such fortunate, on par with having "won the lottery". By the time he was arrested, Shipman was in the process of trying to bring in a partner to try to relieve his workload. Another area in which he excelled was in instituting rigorous audit practices, to the point where he was held in such high esteem by the Health Authority’s Audit Group as to be the go-to name that was brought up when inquiries into audit practices that needed the input of a general practitioner were being made. He was also active in local medical politics and became a treasurer of the local branch of the Small Practices Association. All of these factors contributed to Shipman being widely regarded as the “best doctor in Hyde”, as testified by the widower of one of his colleagues in the area. Shipman’s murderous activities were beginning to rise to a pitch that could no longer be hidden or ignored, though, and very soon suspicions were going to be raised that would lead to the unravelling of the web that had kept them out of view. His community and the world would soon receive the appalling true picture of just the kind of doctor Harold Shipman was.

THE FIRST SUSPICIONS ARE RAISED

As part of his strategy for hiding his crimes, Shipman would instruct the families of his patients that cremation was the best option for laying their family member to rest. Anyone familiar with forensics knows how false the adage “dead men tell no tales” is – a dead body, even at highly advanced stages of decomposition, can tell plenty about how its owner died. Ashes, on the other hand, cannot. In particular, the extreme heat of cremation destroys large, complex organic molecules – molecules like opiates, for example. Not knowing the true diabolical reasons for Shipman’s insistence, a very large number of them took the genial, seemingly trustworthy doctor’s advice. The finality of cremation in terms of finding out anything meaningful about a deceased person’s demise from their remains was wellrecognised, and a series of measures was built around the process of certifying a body for cremation that aimed to make sure that there was no suspicion of foul play or anything untoward in their death. The first was a form – Form B – to be filled out by a doctor who had taken care of the deceased before their death and had identified the body – in every case Shipman himself. The doctor was supposed to give certain details about the patient's medical history, the cause of death, who had been with the deceased at the time of death, and also certify that they had identified the body. This was meant to establish whether the cause of death was consistent with their medical history and make sure there was nothing suspicious about the death itself. Shipman liked to play fast and loose with the facts, though, and since he was the doctor who also certified death and determined its cause, this measure didn't particularly trouble him at all. We'll take a deeper look at the extent of Shipman's fabrications and the shortcomings that allowed him to get away with them in later chapters. Form C was the next form to be filled, and it was to be filled by a doctor from another practice. The said second doctor was supposed to carefully examine the body, question the doctor who had filled Form B to gather the deceased’s medical history, and then certify that the deceased did not perish under any suspicious or violent circumstances. A fee of £45.50 was paid to the Form C doctor – a practice some have wryly called “cash-for-ash”. There were

shortcomings with this practice as well that caused the failure to identify Shipman’s unlawful activities. A third form, Form F, was then filled by a medical referee at the crematorium who checked over the two previous forms and gave the go-ahead to cremate the body of the deceased. At any point in this process, someone could raise the alarm if they noticed anything suspicious and demand a post-mortem examination, and even after that, so could the crematorium staff. And yet in all the years of Shipman murdering his patients, no one did. It was the Form C measure that first raised suspicion, though. By necessity, Shipman had to make Form C requests to practices operating in the same vicinity of Hyde, and one of the practices he patronized for this service was the Brooke practice, right across the street from Shipman’s own surgery. On March 24th 1998, just over four and a half years after establishing his premises on Market Street, Dr. Linda Reynolds, one of the partners of the Brooke practice raised concerns with the coroner for the Greater Manchester South District, Mr. John Pollard, about the number of Form Cs they were filling out for Shipman. The Brooke practice was a multi-doctor practice and had a patient list about three times the size of Shipman's, and in the three months before Dr Reynolds' report, they had experienced fourteen patient deaths. Shipman had in the same period submitted sixteen Form C requests to the Brooke practice. Bear in mind that this figure was just patients of Shipman's that were cremated, and also only those for whom he submitted Form C requests to the Brooke practice. It did not include those that were buried, those who had died in hospital or had their deaths certified by the coroner (Shipman would have had no hand in processing those), or Form Cs that he would have submitted to other practices. Dr Reynolds did not at the time have specifics for these other figures but even a conservative estimate would have yielded a stupendous number. The other suspicious factor reported to Dr Reynolds by Mrs Deborah Bambroffe, a partner and undertaker at Frank Massey and Sons, Funeral Directors, who often attended to the bodies of Shipman's deceased patients was the eerie similarity in the circumstances surrounding a very large number of Shipman's

patients’ deaths. A very large number of them were female, lived and were found alone, were often in good health, and Shipman himself was often present or “discovered” their deaths. They were also often fully clothed and seated peacefully when found, whereas it could be expected that a sudden, unexpected death would find the patient partially clothed or in bed and in their night clothes in more cases than were found, and would probably have fallen or had evidence of a brief struggle as they realized something wasn’t right. The coroner made a report to the Greater Manchester Police, particularly Chief Superintendent David Sykes and Detective Inspector David Smith. Detective Inspector Smith then undertook the investigation. From the details of the investigation that came out in Shipman's trial, it is obvious that DI Smith never took the charges seriously and did not fully understand the implications of what Dr Reynolds was saying. He failed to ask several deeper, vital questions that would have clarified things during his interview of her and, perhaps most egregiously, when he was told that there were two bodies whose deaths were certified by Shipman that were in the morgue pending cremation, he did not request autopsies and toxicology analyses be performed on them. Following the interview with Dr Reynolds, DI Smith requested copies of the death certificates of deaths certified by Shipman within the six months preceding. Shipman had certified 31 deaths, but due to a clerical error at the registry office, Smith only received 20 copies. Because he didn't really understand the significance of the numbers given him by Dr Reynolds he failed to realize that the number of certificates he received was far too low. As a result, he continued with the investigation with a gross underestimation of the true magnitude of what he was investigating. DI Smith then made requests for the medical records of the twenty individuals to be examined. However, without the consent of the deceased's next-of-kin, he couldn't view the documents himself and had to have them assessed by Dr Alan Banks, a medical adviser to the health authority. Dr Banks was acquainted with Shipman, knew his reputation in the community and held him with the same respect many of his colleagues did. Without a serious outlook on the allegations himself, DI Smith was unable to communicate the gravity

of the situation or the extent of the disparities in Shipman's death figures. It's possible that if Dr Banks had had the full number of deaths certified by Shipman he would have found that quite alarming, but as it was, these factors led him not to take the allegations with much seriousness at all. Of the twenty certified deaths, Dr Banks was tasked with finding seventeen sets of medical records and was only able to get his hands on those of fourteen patients. Of those, thirteen were female – a stupendously unlikely statistic – and none of them had any serious conditions leading up to their deaths. Twelve of the patients also died in their own homes, with only two happening at nursing homes. Yet Dr Banks did not find any of this odd or alarming, or if he did let his personal view of Shipman dispel his suspicions. He would dismiss "common features" on the basis that they were not uniform across all the deaths, an illogical decision to make. Overall, he appears to have undertaken his study of the records with the prejudgment that the allegations were absurd and unlikely, and that led to his reporting back to DI Smith that there was nothing to worry about and that only two of the fourteen records could, perhaps, maybe have warranted a deeper look into the causes of death. Dr Banks’ testimony probably put the final nail in the coffin of the investigation as far as DI Smith was convinced in his own mind, but he made one more inquiry all the same. On April 1st 1998 he made a visit to the Dukenfield crematorium, the regional crematorium where all of Shipman’s patients were cremated. He didn’t really do much there – he failed to ask about the system of certification for cremations, as a result completely missing the Form B’s Shipman had filled, as well as failing to ask to view the crematory’s register, which would have revealed to him the 11 deaths he had missed and perhaps caused him to see things in their truer, more sinister light. Never really having treated his investigation with the full gravity it deserved, on April 15th 1998 Detective Inspector Smith met with Chief Superintendent Sykes to deliver his finding that there was no evidence to point to Shipman having killed any of his patients. CS Sykes then gave him the permission to close the investigation as he saw fit. DI Smith did so without much ceremony, never even writing a report of the investigation. At no point were criminal records outside

of the Greater Manchester Police’s criminal records system, which would have revealed Shipman’s previous convictions for drug offences, neither was he interviewed himself.

CHAPTER 2 – EVIL UNMASKED Through the actions of another person who held him in such high esteem that they thought the whole fiasco was not just absurd, but also an almost insulting affront to his character, Shipman became aware that he had been under investigation. Without a doubt, this scared the white willies out of him, and for a short while, he put a stop to his behind-the-scenes ‘god play’ with the lives of his patients. We’ll take a deeper look at what could possibly have motivated Shipman to do what he did in a later chapter, but whatever it is, it seems to have twisted his mind to the point where it either clouded his good sense and reason, or it had become so big of a compulsion that he was no longer in control of it (if he ever had been). A smarter, more cautious person would have ended their activities as soon as they heard that they had been under police investigation, no matter how shallow that investigation had been. After a hiatus Shipman, however, resumed his killing. He could very well have continued doing so without detection indefinitely until someone raised an alarm that could not be ignored as had happened during his earlier debacles over misappropriation and abuse of pethidine. What wound up being his downfall was his very odd introduction into one particular murder of a factor that had never been a part of his routine before. On June 24th 1998 Kathleen Grundy, a patient of Shipman’s died unexpectedly at the age of 81. She had been mentally and physically active, well capable of living on her own and taking care of herself – a perfect picture of health and vitality during the later years of life. And yet Shipman certified her death as having been due to “old age” – a tactic that, as we will see, had very successfully hidden his activities over the years and probably would have done the same in this case. Mrs Grundy had a daughter, Angela Woodruff, who was a practising attorney. Mrs Woodruff had always taken care of her mother's legal affairs, including her will, which had her as the sole beneficiary of Mrs Grundy's estate. You can imagine her absolute surprise, then,

when she received news that a new will had apparently been drawn up without her knowledge and delivered to another law firm.

THE “NEW WILL” (IMAGE SOURCE: THE SHIPMAN INQUIRY, FIRST REPORT)

THE COVER LETTER (IMAGE SOURCE: THE SHIPMAN INQUIRY, FIRST REPORT)

THE LETTER FROM “J.” OR “S. SMITH” (IMAGE SOURCE: THE SHIPMAN INQUIRY, FIRST REPORT)

The new will, drawn up on the 9th of June named Shipman as the sole benefactor of Mrs Grundy's estate and was accompanied by a cover letter purportedly signed by her. It noted that her family were "not in need" and she wanted to reward Shipman, "for all the care he has given to me and the people of Hyde". It was also apparently witnessed by two of Shipman's other patients. On the June 30th 1998, six days after Mrs Grundy's death, the law firm the new will was lodged with received a letter from a person signing themselves as "J. Smith" or "S. Smith" informing them of her death. Mrs Woodruff was immediately, rightfully suspicious about the whole affair and took it upon herself to investigate the provenance of the will. It really did not take much for the validity of her suspicions to be confirmed – all it took was a visit to the two named witnesses on the new will. What she heard from them was so unsatisfying as to almost confirm her suspicions. On July 24th 1998, she made a report to the police in her home county of Warwickshire who passed it on to the Greater Manchester Police, who in turn immediately realized that the doctor on the will was the very same one they had investigated on suspicion of killing his patients just four months earlier. A warrant to search Shipman’s premises and home were executed on August 1st 1998, leading to the seizure of a typewriter and medical records. On the same day, Mrs Grundy's body was exhumed and a post-mortem exam took place. The initial exam was unable to establish the cause of death – meaning Shipman's attribution of it to old age was spurious. Toxicological tests were ordered and showed that an opiate was present in the body, though the exact type and levels were uncertain. More tests were needed to ascertain these. On August the 1oth, the Greater Manchester police were informed by the Home Office Drugs Inspectorate about Shipman’s past conviction over drugs offences. This was the first time the Manchester police came to know that he even had a previous criminal record. Shipman was questioned over this on the 14th. At some point, a re-examination of the 19 deaths certified by Shipman was ordered, as well as interviews of their families over whether they had any concerns about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and a further nine deaths which were missed thanks to the clerical error at the registry office were later included.

The will documents were inspected by a forensic documents examiner on August the 26th. What the examination revealed was that Mrs Grundy's signature on it were forgeries and that it was probably typed using the typewriter police had seized from Shipman’s office. On the 28th, investigators were told that the opiate found in Mrs Grundy's body was morphine and that the levels found, had previously been known to cause death by overdose. On September 7th 1998, Shipman was finally arrested on suspicion of causing the death of Mrs Grundy, as well as for the forgery of the will. Over the course of the next few months the bodies of several patients Shipman had certified the deaths of in the preceding two years who had been buried rather than cremated were exhumed, while the circumstances of several others which were cremated were thoroughly examined. He would be charged with the murder of fourteen more victims by the end of February 1999 – six of whose bodies had been cremated. None of the deceased had been prescribed morphine or any of its derivatives but all of the buried had traces of it in their bodies. Shipman was interviewed with each batch of charges that came in. The first interview had to be discontinued after he became distressed and incoherent. Subsequent ones yielded from him nothing but a “no comment”. The police communicated to the General Medical Council the charges being brought against Shipman, but according to their own rules, they were powerless to do anything until Shipman had actually been convicted of a crime. The West Pennine Health Authority passed the charges on to a body that did have the power to end Shipman’s career, which was the National Health Service Tribunal. There were several long delays in the process – though the Health Authority had communicated with the Tribunal on August the 18th, it was only able to hold a hearing on September the 29th, deciding to suspend Shipman from practice. This decision was not communicated to the Health Authority until October 15th, and they were only able to seize his practice after a fourteen day appeal period had passed.

THE SHIPMAN TRIAL The trial of Harold Shipman opened on the 5th of October 1999, and he was charged with the fifteen counts of murder and one of forgery. He pled not guilty to every single one of them. Shipman’s defence counsel attempted to get the court to try him separately for the cases that had physical evidence, the cases that did not and the Grundy case, which was unique due to the fraud aspect, but the request was denied on account that this would take an inordinate amount of time and come at a prohibitive financial cost. Shipman’s incarceration or freedom would stand on just this one shot. THE PROSECUTION'S ARGUMENTS

The prosecution opened the case by alleging that Shipman killed his patients out of enjoyment and the thrill of exercising power over life and death. While this is a common motivation for serial killers and one which deserves a great deal of consideration, no psychiatric evaluation had ever been made of Shipman to support this notion, and since he was maintaining his innocence, no confession to back this could have come from him. Making this assertion in a court of law could really have come back to bite the prosecution’s case in the rear end if the rest of the case they built had not been so compelling. The toxicology reports from the post-mortem examinations performed on the exhumed bodies were the crux of the prosecution's case. Only one of the deceased had been prescribed morphine and there was no easy way to account for its presence in all of their systems except by the common thread of their having Shipman as their doctor and the proximity of their deaths with a visit from him. Shipman was occasionally seen leaving the patients’ homes by neighbours. In the case of Jean Lilley who was aged 59, her neighbour Elizabeth Hunter saw him leave her house and went in to visit straight after. She found Mrs. Turner blue in the lips and not breathing and unsuccessfully attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her. In one case, he probably actually killed the patient while someone else was in an adjacent room. Marie West, aged 81 was entertaining

a friend, Marian Hadfield for tea one afternoon. Mrs Hadfield had gone upstairs to the bathroom when Shipman arrived. She came back downstairs to hear Mrs West having a conversation with him and did not want to interfere, so she waited in the kitchen. The conversation seemed to come to a stop and the silence lasted a while before Shipman entered the kitchen. He registered surprise when he saw Mrs Hadfield but quickly recovered his composure and told her that Mrs West had suddenly suffered a stroke while they were talking and he had briefly gone out to his car and returned to look for her son. Shipman most likely killed using diamorphine, a chemically derived, more potent form of morphine – perhaps better known by its street name, heroin. Diamorphine is more commonly prescribed than morphine in the United Kingdom on account of its being more potent and faster acting. It very rapidly changes into morphine once it hits the brain so apart from a rush of euphoria caused by by-products of that process their action is indistinguishable. Morphine, like all opiates, acts by binding to certain sites in the brain and blocking the perception of pain so its primary use is in treating extreme pain from physical trauma, chronic conditions and terminal illness. It also has the effect of opening up arteries and easing blood flow, so it’s also commonly administered to people suffering a heart attack (known medically as a myocardial infarction). When administered into a vein, 40 milligrams of morphine and 20 of diamorphine are lethal in a healthy adult who does not regularly use them and hasn’t built up a tolerance. In as little as one minute after injection the person’s breathing stops and within five minutes they die from the lack of oxygen delivery to the brain. If nothing else it is a peaceful death, and Shipman’s victims were often found in attitudes that resembled a deep sleep. Shipman would acquire diamorphine using a method he had grown familiar with a long time ago – faking prescriptions and not maintaining a meticulous register of drugs administered. He would prescribe large quantities of diamorphine for terminally ill patients, sometimes after learning of their deaths, and then fail to bring the surplus in for destruction after they passed away. On one occasion he obtained 12,000mg of the drug in the name of a recently

deceased patient, enough to kill at least 360 people. In a few cases, he actually prescribed diamorphine for patients that he had killed. All of the women whose cases were brought to the court had been fit and healthy in their old age, with no known serious long-term medical issues. The causes of death Shipman would put down were almost never consistent with any previous problems known by the relatives of the deceased. The most common one was a heart attack, such as in the case of Winfred Mellor, who was aged 71 when he killed her. Despite her advanced age Mrs Mellor had been very active and in fact, had taken a two-hour hill walk just a couple of weeks before her death. Another cause he stated was a stroke, as he did with Marie West. The situation of the deceased's bodies was not consistent with these causes of death at all. A person suffering a heart attack experiences a great deal of pain and can be expected to struggle, possibly attempting to get up, get help and ending up on the floor. A stroke is also not a particularly easy way to go – the sufferer notices that something is wrong. Another two causes he listed on some deaths were pneumonia, as in the case of Joan Melia, aged 73, and Betty Adams, 77; and cancer as he did with Maureen Ward, 57. Neither of these two causes ever comes without a period of very obvious illness. Pneumonia also leaves easily identified traces in the lungs of the deceased but none were found during the post-mortem examinations. In one case he named diabetes as the cause, and in several, such as that of Kathleen Grundy he listed “old age”. Old age has a very specific definition as a cause of death – it is the simultaneous failure of multiple organs over a long period of time due to their natural degeneration as a person gets on in years. The only reason the term is allowed to be so vague is that the exact organ which has finally given out would be impossible to point out. Death of old age is a progressive process that can occur over a period of years during which the person is typically bedridden and needs round the clock care. None of the patients whose deaths he ascribed to it had been experiencing a noticeable decline. The picture painted by the prosecution of Shipman was one of a cold, manipulative and calculating charmer who projected a front of

kind gentility to get close to his patients, but once he was “through” with them, having gotten whatever he wanted from their deaths allowed the mask to drop and let his true, callous self come through. According to Detective Sergeant Philip Reade who came in on a routine visit after the death of Ivy Lomas, aged 63, Shipman laughed and called Mrs Lomas a "nuisance". She had been something of a hypochondriac and he joked that he should have had a seat permanently reserved for her in his waiting room. He had left Mrs Lomas dead in a hospital bed and gone on to attend to three other patients before she was discovered. Another way in which his contempt for those who were left behind showed itself was the charade he would put on when the body of the deceased was discovered. The process of ascertaining that a person has died is very rigorous, composed of several steps and takes some time. The first step is to feel for a pulse – first at the wrist and then at the carotid artery on the neck. The doctor is supposed to spend about thirty seconds at each point, loosening any clothing at the neck if necessary. The doctor should then observe the chest wall for another thirty seconds for any sign that the patient (they remain a “patient” until death is actually declared and only become the deceased after that) is breathing, again loosening or removing clothing if necessary. They should also listen for breathing with a stethoscope for a further thirty seconds. The next step would be to shine a bright light into the patient’s eyes to check for any reaction in their pupils. The pupils become permanently dilated after death. The doctor would then use an ophthalmoscope to examine the blood vessels in the patient’s eyes – once circulation stops the blood in them breaks up into short, alternating lengths, a phenomenon known as “cattle trucking”. The final step is to forcibly flex the end of the patient’s finger in order to elicit pain. If the patient were only in a very deep state of unconsciousness this would still cause them to flinch through the action of a reflex. Only then could the patient be declared dead. Depending on the circumstances of the death some of these steps could be omitted, but it should be expected that at least most of them be performed. Shipman never did a single one of them, sometimes even declaring death without even coming close to or touching the

body. What he typically did can only be described as theatrics and “movie medicine”, playing on the expectations and preconceptions the family of the deceased would probably have gained from popular entertainment. When informing Mariah Hadfield of Marie West's death, all he did was open her eye and state to Mrs Hadfield, "see – there's no life there". He would also briefly touch the patient's wrist and declare he could find no pulse. On the occasion of Betty Adams’ death, this lack of thoroughness almost came back to bite him. Bill Catlow, her long-time dancing partner let himself into her house to find Shipman in her living room. Shipman told him Mrs Adams was very ill and that he had called an ambulance. After his usual cursory examination, he declared her dead, but Mr Catlow felt her wrist himself and told Shipman he could feel a pulse. Shipman dismissed this and told him it was his own pulse he was feeling and then went on to call to cancel the ambulance. This was only Mr Catlow's testimony of things as he remembered them but it's quite likely Shipman had declared a patient dead while she was still alive. The supposed call he made to the ambulance service was itself a part of his charade – he would claim to have called an ambulance, or would sometimes apparently make the call in the presence of friends or family of his victims. In some cases, like that of Mrs Adams, he would claim to have already made the call and would call again to cancel the ambulance after declaring the patient dead, other times he would make the supposed call, perform his "checks" while still on the call and then tell the ambulance service not to bother dispatching as the patient was already dead. When call records were examined for the trial it was revealed that no calls had ever been made – it was all an elaborate act on Shipman’s part. He could never have been as fast and loose with his examinations if he had actually been on the phone with an ambulance service – they would have called him out on it. Shipman exhibited a lack of tact and sensitivity with the family and friends of the deceased not at all in keeping with what one would expect from a caring medical practitioner in the presence of the so recently bereaved. He was brusque with them in several cases, once stating that he “had the living to take care of”. He would also make

family members of the deceased feel guilty for not being aware of the deceased’s pre-existing medical conditions, such as in the case of Pamela Hillier, aged 68, whose daughter he shamed for not having spent more time with her “sick” mother. The medical conditions that "explained" the deaths of his victims were, of course, mostly fabrications. In the cases of a few patients, such as Mrs Hillier and Maureen Ward, there really were conditions that could have contributed to their deaths, but their severity was nowhere near enough to be satisfactory. Mrs Hillier, whom he put down as having a stroke, had a history of high blood pressure but, according to the testimony of a medical expert, it was such a minuscule problem that she was not at any higher risk of stroke than the general population. Mrs Ward had had some spats with breast and skin cancer but was in the clear, and had been for a while. For several others, Shipman was found to have inserted backdated entries into his medical records computer system that backed up his stated cause of death. He would date the entries sometimes as far as two years back, but the system kept track of the date that an entry was actually made, and so Shipman was caught out in this particular fabrication. One such case was that of Mrs Grundy – on the day of her death he made an entry stating that she had come to him on the June 27th 1997 feeling tired and depressed, and he made a note with that entry stating “old?”, apparently to corroborate his diagnosis of old age as her cause of death. Mrs Grundy's death is the one that set everything crashing down for Shipman, and it had an important place in the prosecution's case. Of particular interest were the supposed new will and the irregularities found in it. The forensic document investigator's testimony was submitted along with those of the two patients of Shipman’s who had allegedly witnessed the will and of the law firm that received the will. The two witnesses were Paul Spencer and Claire Hutchinson. Both had been in Shipman's waiting room when he asked them to witness a document in the presence of both Shipman and Mrs Grundy. He did not tell them what the document, which already had Mrs Grundy's signature on it was – Mr Spencer was under the impression that it was a medical form of some kind, but Mrs Hutchinson claimed she saw the words "last will and testament" on

it. When shown the will, Mr Spencer said the signature on it was not his and Mrs Hutchinson said she could not be sure, though her address on it was incorrect. Shipman had sometime before that told Mrs. Grundy of a supposed research program into old age that he recommended she take part in. There were supposedly some documents she had to sign – he probably got her signature for the purpose of copying it that way. This is probably also the ruse he used to get Mr Spencer's and Mrs Hutchinson's signatures. The new will was delivered to the law firm Hamilton Ward just two scant hours before Mrs Grundy's death. The solicitor who received the will, Brian Burgess expressed his surprise at receiving the will to the court – no one at the firm had ever dealt with or even heard of Kathleen Grundy. Mrs Grundy's signature on the will was definitely a forgery – and a bad one at that. The document was almost certainly typed on the typewriter found in Shipman's surgery and a fingerprint was recovered from it that turned out to belong to Shipman. Mrs Grundy's fingerprints were nowhere on the document. The closest anyone ever got to hearing a confession or admission of guilt was a district nurse Shipman talked to round about the time that Mrs Grundy's body was being exhumed. He joked that he should have had Mrs Grundy cremated, stating himself the reasoning we deduced about his reasons for doing so earlier: "you can't exhume ashes". THE DEFENCE’S ARGUMENTS

The word “defence” as applied in the criminal justice system can sometimes be misleading, conjuring an image of solicitors with loose morals and shark-like instincts who will twist the truth for the ends of a client they know is guilty. This dark image is not entirely deserved – the role that criminal defence plays in the justice system is absolutely vital and necessary for it to run both fairly and efficiently. The job of the defence is to present their client's side of events on a level that is equal to that of the representatives of their accusers and to possibly be the one person who is on their side in a room full of people who are impartial at best but are most likely hostile.

The defence can only work with what their client tells them – if they admit guilt, the defence then work within that paradigm and try to get the least severe punitive measures on their client as possible. If they profess innocence, they must work with that, in turn, no matter how overwhelming the prosecution's arguments and evidence seem to be. Since Shipman was maintaining his innocence, his counsel had to do their best to tear down the narrative built by the prosecution and build up the one most favourable to their client, using the information he supplied to them himself. As you can guess after reading the prosecution's case, boy did they have their work cut out for them. The prosecution’s case rested most heavily on the toxicology reports, and the defence consequently began by assaulting this aspect first. Forensic toxicology was at that time still very much a new-born science, and its methods were still being refined and perfected. There was not much in the way of precedents and hard data to build a whole lot of justifiable assumptions onto. Ms Julie Evans the forensic toxicologist who performed the tests on the exhumed bodies herself said that she was “breaking new ground” in “novel scientific territory” when she began working on the case. Not much detail was known about how chemical substances are altered and transformed after death, nor were the full effects decomposition has on the process understood. Whether or not all bodies experienced the same rates of alteration was a particular sticking point: the levels of morphine found in the bodies were consistent with those that had been known in the past to be present in the bodies of people who had died of overdose, but if the exhumed bodies had retained more morphine that would have thrown the entire analysis off. This really could have been a strong possibility – the bodies these old, morphine-naïve ladies were being compared to were those of long-time addicts with very high tolerances for the drug which might have broken it down faster and more completely after death. The circumstances surrounding the death, ambient temperatures it had experienced from death to burial and beyond, the presence of other substances in the body – the effects of all of these were simply not fully known.

Shipman’s appearance at patients’ homes on the days of their deaths was explained as simple statistics coupled with sheer coincidence: we saw in the previous chapter how Shipman had long had a reputation for being an especially caring and proactive doctor, visiting his patients far more often than his colleagues. According to the defence, the assertion that he did this to get close enough to his patients to kill them was cynical and unwarranted. It was a freak phenomenon of random chance that he should have visited so many patients on the day of their death, but the scenario was not entirely implausible. The irregularities with Shipman’s prescription of diamorphine, his failure to destroy excess stocks and his possession of large quantities of it could simply be explained by the fact that he was a doctor and access to drugs comes part and parcel with that job, but he was not only that: he was a human being with a regular human mind sometimes prone to error and forgetfulness. In testimony to the court, he called his over-prescription of the drug a “bad habit” and that when he had delivered enough to a patient who needed it he would squirt the excess down the drain. The drugs that were not destroyed were not spared for the purpose of stockpiling – it was simple forgetfulness and procrastination on his part. A lot of the causes of death he attributed his patients’ demise to were because of a variation of the same factor: Shipman was not omniscient, he made the best guesses he could in the circumstances and he may have been wrong a few times. For a couple of the deaths, the defence presented alternate scenarios that would explain the presence of morphine in the patients’ systems. Bianka Pomfret, who passed at age 49 had had a history of psychiatric problems – she had manic depression. It was submitted as plausible that Ms Pomfret had committed suicide by overdose. For Mrs Grundy, they took to Shipman's own testimony and several more notes he kept in his daybook. According to him, Mrs Grundy had exhibited abnormally contracted pupils during one visit to his office, and Shipman had made a note questioning whether she was a drug user. On the day of her death, Shipman said, he had left her alive and well after his visit to her home and that she must have

accidentally overdosed while trying to get high after he left. No drugs or drug paraphernalia of any kind were found in Mrs Grundy's home. The fact that Shipman had made backdated entries into his medical records computer was not disputed, but what they did throw doubt upon was the supposition that this had been done for nefarious purposes. It had simply been done to interject data that made sense in light of the patients’ deaths that Shipman did not see as relevant at the time. The defence presented Shipman's account maintaining that the second will was genuine. Shipman maintained that he had been approached by Mrs Grundy to have him witness a document. He said that he suspected she wanted to leave a modest sum of a few hundred pounds for his practice’s patients’ fund, which was used to buy equipment. He claimed to have actually joked with her about it being a large sum, saying he wouldn’t sign off on her leaving him her entire estate. He also claimed and was backed up by his receptionist, that he had lent Mrs Grundy the typewriter in question. The fingerprint that was found on the will was of him pushing it towards Mrs Grundy. The final ditch attempt by the defence was to attack the assertion the prosecution made way back at the beginning that Shipman had killed for his own personal pleasure, pointing out the flaws of making that conclusion. Establishing a motive is a particularly important consideration when a jury is deciding whether to convict and no one had really been able to seriously do that. The prosecution’s presentation of this aspect in such a throwaway manner really begins to look more and more like a bad idea. Sometimes, though, the rest of the case is just too strong, the evidence just too overwhelming. Shipman’s case was just such a case – his defence had done the best they could with the raw material provided to them by Shipman himself but it was not enough to convince the jury. Shipman was found guilty on all counts and, on January 31st 2000 was sentenced to fifteen life sentences for the murders and, as a tiny bit of gilding on the lily, four years for the forgery of Mrs Kathleen Grundy's purported will. The sentences were commuted to a single "whole life" sentence, the equivalent of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

On February 11th 2000, Shipman was officially struck off the General Medical Council’s register.

CHAPTER 3 – THE SHIPMAN INQUIRY Shipman was behind bars and, with the exception of just one, could and would take lives no more. It was immediately obvious, however, that what had been revealed during the trial was just the tip of the iceberg. The murders examined had gone back just over a year from the time of his arrest, and if that rate was extrapolated backwards the total number could have been astronomical indeed. On February 1st 2000, the very day after Shipman’s conviction, the Secretary of State for Health announced the commissioning of an inquiry to be chaired by Lord Laming of Tewin – the Laming Inquiry. The inquiry began the work of gathering information, but once it was discovered that it was a private inquiry and neither the evidence gathered or conclusions reached would be made available to the public or even the families of Shipman’s victims, an outcry was raised. The families of Shipman’s known and suspected victims had organized into the Tameside Families Support Group and they made petitions to the Secretary of State. Many of them had grieved their family thinking they had died naturally, but the revelations of the trial had reopened old wounds and thrown on them the salt of uncertainty. They had a right to know if the deaths they were grieving anew had been deliberate or if they had been natural as claimed. The public also had a right to know the full extent of his crimes – the entire nation and the world were reeling from the very idea of a murderous doctor and there was a need to understand how it had all been allowed to happen. Tragedies like this could be one-off but there is nothing new under the sun –unchecked, something similar could happen again. The public needed to know that whatever oversights had occurred were plugged so that they could rest easy in the knowledge that they or their loved ones wouldn’t fall victim to their own doctor. The Secretary of State initially maintained his position but after the Support Group and nine media organizations initiated legal proceedings decided to reconsider. On the 21st of September 2000, he announced that a public inquiry would be held. The Shipman

Inquiry was officially set up on January 31st 2001, a year to the day after Shipman’s conviction, and was headed by Dame Janet Smith. The terms of the inquiry were fourfold: to determine the full extent of Shipman’s unlawful activities, to figure out what actions and shortcomings by the authorities, individuals and procedures that should have stopped Shipman’s activities allowed him to go on, to assess the performance of the procedures for monitoring medical professionals and the use of controlled drugs and, finally, to recommend what steps should be taken to better safeguard patients in the future. The inquiry had a monumental task ahead of it: a total of 888 cases were investigated – 887 deaths and one incident involving a stillliving person. Of these, 394 cases were immediately closed as they had no connection with Shipman, while 493 were thoroughly examined and received written verdicts, as did the one involving a living person. 2,311 police statements were examined from all of Shipman's contact with the law over the years and a further 1,378 were taken from anyone who could have helped give a more complete picture of the circumstances of the deaths. Statements were also taken from those who had worked with Shipman throughout his career. It would have been taken far too much time to hear testimony for all 493 deaths, so in the end, a representative number of 179 testimonies relating to 65 of the deaths were heard. A whole slew of documents were also considered, including coroner's reports, cremation forms, practice records and medical records. Due to the procedure of destroying medical records, few paper records remained from Shipman's time at the Donneybrook practice, though the introduction of the computer system in 1989 meant that those from then on did survive. Shipman had also taken advantage of a statute that allowed general practitioners to take possession of copies of their deceased patients' records after three years – these were found randomly stored at his house during the police raid instigated by the investigation into Mrs Grundy's death. The inquiry also gained access to other documents that could shed light on the deaths, even including phone records and personal diary entries. In total, over 37,000 pages of documents were scanned into

the image database that was used to distribute them to the investigation team. Several media organizations attempted to gain the rights to broadcast the public proceedings of the inquiry. There was still a huge amount of public interest in the Shipman affair, and it was put forward that it was an extension of the public's right to know the full extent of what had happened for them to be able to watch proceedings unfold. CNN was one of the organizations that made the request and actually asserted that it was a legal right by invoking Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines the right to freedom of information. The Tameside Families Support Group and several other organizations representing those who would be testifying during the inquiry opposed this, particularly the broadcasting of the first phase, in which the families and close acquaintances of Shipman’s victims would be testifying. The process of recalling such painful memories would put them in a good deal of distress, and they could also conceivably be reluctant to give evidence if they would be subjected to public exposure. Dame Smith agreed with this and, with the view that sensitivity for those close to the deceased trumped the right to publicity barred Phase One from being broadcast. However, she did agree to the broadcast of Phase Two, in which expert witnesses would be giving their testimony. The entire inquiry was all the same still thoroughly documented and disseminated. There were cameras and screens within the Council Chamber at the Manchester Town Hall, where the hearings were held, as well as facilities for representatives of the media to use. The proceedings were immediately transcribed and transmitted to computers in the town hall and inquiry offices and within hours of a day’s hearings would be posted up on the inquiry website, as were the scanned images of pertinent documents. The website itself was fully public and had received 15,000 unique visitors by April 2002. It was also decided that the citizens of Hyde, who had a direct stake in the matter should have a right to watch proceedings as they unfolded, so a feed was piped live over CCTV to the Hyde Public Library where community members could view the footage and images of relevant documents as they came up.

Harold Shipman himself refused to participate in the inquiry. There could have been a measure that might have compelled him to cooperate – issuing him a summons, with the threat of additional prison time if he refused. But Shipman was already serving a whole life sentence and that threat would have held no fear for him. There was nothing anyone could do to get him to testify. There had been a clamour to have Shipman tried for any further murders that were uncovered, but it was decided soon after the conclusion of his trial that this would serve no purpose. First of all, the publicity that the trial had attracted would make any further trial impossible to conduct fairly, and second was the issue of the whole life sentence once again – what would be the point of trying him if he could not have any extra prison time imposed on him? Primrose Shipman appeared to have had some involvement in two of the deaths. She, on the other hand, was a free woman who could have her freedom taken away from her and so was issued with a summons. There was, however, the condition that whatever evidence she presented could not be used against herself or her husband. She cooperated fully with the inquiry, going so far as to volunteer some documents that wound up revealing more damning information about her husband.

SHIPMAN'S VICTIMS YEAR BY YEAR The inquiry thoroughly investigated each of the 493 deaths that had some connection to Shipman. In the end, 215 of these were confirmed by the testimony given and evidence examined to almost certainly have been murdered by Shipman. The earliest confirmed killing happened during Shipman’s time at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre in Todmorden. Eva Lyons was 70 years of age and had been suffering from terminal cancer. On March 17th 1975, Shipman visited her late at night at her home. Mrs Lyons' husband was with them in the room when he gave her an injection in the back of the hand and Shipman sat in conversation with him until she died a few minutes later. Mrs Lyons' husband suspected that Shipman had "helped her on her way" and confided this suspicion to their daughter. It's likely that Shipman had administered an opiate

drug to her and remained with her afterwards so that he could be present to make sure she died. Mrs Lyons was the only person Shipman is confirmed to have killed at Todmorden out of 21 deaths examined from that period. There were a further six that raised some suspicion but could not be confidently confirmed. Five of the suspicious deaths were of patients who were terminally ill, and three of those were very gravely ill and could have been expected to pass away naturally at any moment. The circumstances around them do not shed enough light to make a conclusive decision. One death was of a reasonably healthy woman, though – Edith Roberts, aged 67 was found dead in her bed four days after Mrs Lyons' death. Mrs Roberts had had a history of diabetes and chest pain. She was found lying peacefully in bed with a book beside her. Shipman certified her death as having been due to a heart attack – inconsistent with her attitude upon death as we have already seen. Her door was locked, however – from the inside, meaning she would have been able to see Shipman out and lock up before going to bed. It may be that Shipman departed from his usual routine and administered the drug that killed her via the intramuscular route, which takes longer to take effect hence giving her time to see him out. Without more evidence, her death could not be confirmed outright as a murder. The publicity around Shipman's trial brought out a testimony that may have pointed out Shipman's first attempt to kill. This was the one case involving a living person – Mrs (later Professor) Elaine Oswald. On August 21st 1974, Mrs Oswald made an appointment with Shipman complaining about pain in her left side. Shipman diagnosed her with a kidney stone, prescribed her with Diconal (a mild opiate) and sent her home with the promise of a visit to take some blood samples. This was likely just a ploy to get alone with her – the appropriate test for a kidney stone is a urine sample. Shipman arrived in the late morning after Mrs Oswald had taken the Diconal and was feeling drowsy. Whether he actually took a blood sample or not is unknown, but while he was there Mrs Oswald went into respiratory arrest. Shipman performed CPR on her and called an ambulance. It was suspected that she had overdosed on the Diconal

but it seems clear in hindsight that Shipman had injected her with an opiate, possibly pethidine. His attempt to revive her does make it seem that his intention wasn't to kill her, however. Mrs Oswald was 25, way outside his usual victim's age range, which brings up a possible motive: perhaps Shipman wanted to involve Mrs Oswald in his pethidine use, maybe with a view of coercing her into entering a sexual relationship with him. He may have miscalculated the amount of pethidine he gave her or failed to take the Diconal she had taken into account and was legitimately startled when she stopped breathing. This salacious allegation is no fabrication of the author of this book to add spice to the narrative – it was seriously considered and proposed by Dame Smith herself in the inquiry reports. The gulf until the next killing is quite wide, caused in no small part by Shipman’s pethidine woes and the break in his career they caused. He did not have access to controlled drugs or any meaningful opportunity to kill during his years at the Newton Aycliffe Health Centre. The possibility arose again once he began working at the Donneybrook practice. Shipman still did, however, have the spectre of his drug convictions looming behind him. He had, after all, made a promise not to carry controlled drugs again and he was probably under heavy scrutiny from his new partners. As a result, he would have avoided signing off on drug orders and making prescriptions, at least not early on before he gained his partners' trust. In the first ten months of his time at Donneybrook, there are no confirmed killings, though there was one death that raised some suspicion. His first confirmed murder at Donneybrook – that of Sarah Marsland, 86 on August 7th 1978 – was the first to conform to what could perversely be called Shipman’s “style” – an unannounced visit to an elderly but still active female patient’s home, Shipman himself present during the death (found in this case, interestingly, by another one of his future victims – Mrs. Marsland’s daughter Irene Chapman) and certifying the death as having been due to a heart attack. He claimed to have tried to resuscitate her, and yet she was on her bed – correct procedure for attempting resuscitation is to move the patient onto a hard surface such as the floor.

There are three more confirmed killings from 1978 and a further four suspicious deaths. It’s likely that Shipman acquired the drugs he used for these first murders from two patients who had died of cancer in late July of that year. The early part of 1979 had three suspicious deaths, and the next confirmed killing was that of Alice Gorton, aged 76. Shipman went to Mrs Gorton's home around lunchtime on August 9th, supposedly to deliver some topical medication for chronic psoriasis she suffered from. There was an interesting break to Shipman's routine in this case – after presumably administering the opiate to Mrs Gorton, Shipman went to the house of her daughter Mrs O'Neill who lived nearby, visited every day and had in fact been with Mrs Gorton earlier in the day. He told Mrs. O'Neill that her mother was very ill and she should follow him immediately. When she arrived, she found Shipman in the living room. He went on to tell her that there would be no need for a post-mortem – a needlessly obfuscatory way of informing her of her mother's death that was a habit of Shipman's. He was obviously under the impression that he had done his dirty deed to completion, so you can imagine his surprise when they heard a loud groan coming from the bedroom – Mrs Gorton was still alive. She had quite probably not been breathing for a while, however – which is what would have convinced Shipman she was dead – and had likely suffered irreversible brain damage. Shipman was saved the prospect of her waking up to tell her version of the story when she died 24 hours later. This incident probably startled Shipman, but obviously not enough – his next victim was Jack Shelmerdine, a 77-year-old sufferer of chronic bronchitis with a failing heart. Shipman was called out to Mr Shelmerdine's home on November 28th 1979 to attend to an episode of breathlessness. He gave him an injection of intramuscular diamorphine, after which he lapsed into unconsciousness and died 30 hours later. Mr Shelmerdine's son lodged a complaint with the Regional Health Authority about the lack of geriatric care his father had received in his final hours. Shipman was required to make a statement over the matter and admitted to giving Mr Shelmerdine 10mg of diamorphine,

though it was likely that he administered more with the intention of ending his life. The fact that he had miscalculated his dosages on two consecutive occasions, coupled with the complaint which, although it was not directly against him, could have led to a post-mortem exam probably tipped the balance of fear in Shipman. The whole of 1980 went by with no confirmed killings and only one suspicious death. On April 18th 1981 Shipman killed Mrs May Slater, aged 84. For this killing he employed a strategy for gaining time alone with a patient in a nursing home while simultaneously shielding himself from the family of the deceased that he would use intermittently over the coming years: he distracted Doreen Laithwaite the warden of Mrs Slater's nursing home by making her meet with the family while he performed the deed (he normally would have had to be accompanied by her during his visit) and then had Mrs Laithwaite inform them of Mrs Slater's death. There was one more confirmed killing in 1981 that followed his usual method, but there were also four suspicious deaths, including two that heavily deviated from Shipman's normal method. Ann Coulthard and Elsie Scott were both quite old – Mrs Coulthard was 75, Miss Scott 86. Mrs Coulthard had previously suffered two strokes, while Miss Scott's state of health couldn't be determined at the time of the inquiry, though she was in a nursing home. Shipman may have used Largactil, a non-opiate (and hence not controlled) analgesic instead of his usual diamorphine. Shipman gave Mrs Coulthard an injection of a substance that was probably Largactil on the 7th of September which caused her to become very sleepy and she was heavily sedated for the whole of the next night and day. He told her family the next day that she would probably die before the day was out and indeed she did about an hour after he gave her another injection that evening. It is known that he gave Miss Scott an injection of Largactil on October 6th – a dose of about 100mg. The recommended dose for elderly patients is 25mg. Miss Scott was heavily sedated until she died 18 hours later. A state of heavy sedation is heavily discouraged in older patients – it massively increases the chance of developing bronchopneumonia, an inflammation of the lining of the lungs which was confirmed as the

cause of Miss Scott’s death. It seems likely that Shipman intended for both ladies to die, though the uncertainty of this method and the large time-gap between administration of the drug and death are not in keeping with his usual method. It seems possible that the change in the drug of choice was because of a shortage of easy-to-obtain supplies of opiates, and there were only four suspicious deaths through the whole of 1982. The next confirmed killing was of Percy Ward, a 90-year-old sufferer of duodenal cancer on January 4th 1983. The killing of Moira Fox on June 28th of that year was his first killing of a healthy, independent victim since August 1981. Mrs Fox was also the first confirmed case of what would become another recurring theme in his killings: visiting the patient on the pretext of taking a blood sample. This would have served two purposes: first of all he would have used the act of supposedly drawing blood to distract the patient to what he was actually doing – patients typically aren't all that aware of what their doctor is up to when having blood taken, and Shipman could actually have asked the patient to look away during the procedure. The second purpose would be to explain away the needle mark in the patient's skin if it was ever inspected. This habit probably did lessen the risk of his being found out somewhat but he didn't use it all the time and got away with his crimes just fine on those occasions. The first victim of 1984 was Dorothy Tucker, only 51 but severely overweight to the point of needing a wheelchair to move around and also suffering from varicose ulcers on her legs. In a call to her cousin Mrs Mary Bennett on January 7th, she explained that she had not been feeling well and called in Dr Shipman, who had given her an injection. She expressed a desire to sleep and after that conversation was not heard from alive again. With Mrs Bennett, Shipman introduced yet another element to his repertoire, leaving the furnace set on high so that the room the deceased was found in was unusually hot. A hot room causes rigor mortis to set in faster but reduces the rate at which the body's temperature drops – both factors used to estimate time of death. This could have served to throw off any estimate enough to land it safely outside the time of his visit. Another possible reason that may

have come into play, later on, is one we've contemplated with respect to forensic toxicology. It could be that Shipman intended to speed up the breakdown of opiates in the deceased's body so that if a toxicology analysis were made it would detect lower levels and reduce suspicion of overdose. On February 8th Shipman would kill Gladys Roberts, a 78-year-old widow who lived alone. He had been called in to look at a leg ulcer Mrs Roberts suffered from and killed her while they were alone. This would be the first time Shipman would claim to have made an emergency phone call – Mrs Roberts' daughter Enid called her house to check on her after she failed to make a call she had promised to. Shipman answered the phone and told Enid that he had been on the phone with the hospital when Mrs Roberts died, according to him of a pulmonary embolism (an air bubble from the lungs entering the bloodstream). Because it happened so long ago it's impossible to know for certain whether or not Shipman actually did call the hospital, but judging from later incidents we can almost be sure he didn't. There would be four more confirmed murders and four suspicious deaths in 1984. New Year's Day 1985 saw two suspicious deaths, but his first confirmed victim of the year died the next day and would be the youngest known at that stage of the inquiry – Peter Lewis, aged 41 was in the last stages of terminal cancer. Shipman probably sped up his demise and also used the opportunity to avail himself of Mr Lewis' remaining stocks of opiates. The rest of the year saw ten more killings, including one day on which two occurred – those of Thomas Moult and Mildred Robinson on the 26th of June. There was also one further suspicious death that year. Judging by the relative scarcity of Shipman’s contact with terminal cancer patients in 1985 it seems likely that this was the first year that he began obtaining opiates by issuing false prescriptions in the names of patients who neither needed nor ever received them. He had been working at the practice for close to eight years by that point and had by that time gained enough trust and confidence to pull this off without detection.

Shipman killed eight in 1986, including two women who lived on the same street and had the same two housekeepers. Miss Mona White was killed on September 15th and Mrs Mary Tomlin on October 7th. In both cases, the two housekeepers, Elizabeth Shawcross and Dorothy Foley witnessed Shipman's proximity to the deaths but if they found this unusual they did not voice their opinions. 1986 also witnessed two suspicious deaths. The first case in which GP records survived was also the first case of 1987. On March 30th Shipman killed Frank Halliday, 76, who was generally poorly. The records state that Mr Halliday had been complaining of chest pains for two days before that, but that is highly unlikely as if it were true his sister, who was at the time on holiday in Scotland would have been told and likely returned immediately. This was also the first of several recorded cases where Shipman wrote down that he administered opiates to the patient to ease chest pain – always either 10mg of morphine (as in this case) or the equivalent 5mg of diamorphine – probably to cover for the presence of the lethal dose he had given them. The usual procedure in legitimate examples of this practice is to slowly inject the drug into the patient’s vein and observe their reaction – morphine acts almost immediately so its effect is pretty much in real-time. The doctor administering it should then write down exactly how much of the drug was administered and over what length of time – something Shipman never did in these cases. There were seven more killings and one suspicious death that year. Shipman’s oldest victim was killed within a cluster of four murders in a single week and two in one day. On February 15th 1988, Shipman took the life of Ann Cooper, aged 93, who was still active and selfdependent despite her age. There had been two murders in that year before this mini-spree, but afterwards followed a gap of seven months. It’s likely that this sudden uptick in deaths had not gone unnoticed, probably drawing the comment of one of Shipman’s partners, so he chose to lay low for a while. All the same, five more murders followed after the break as he regained his confidence. Twelve patients saw their end at Shipman's hands in 1989. The first patient he killed at his practice's premises was 81-year-old, Mary Hamer. Mrs Hamer was in good health and visited Shipman's

practice on March 8th of that year for an issue the nature of which never became known to the inquiry. Shipman saw two or three patients after killing her, and before informing the practice’s receptionist that she had died. He told her family that she had come in complaining of chest pains and put her death down to a heart attack. The last killing of the year was that of Joseph Wilcockson on November 6th, who was found dead but still warm by the district nurse who had come to dress a varicose ulcer he suffered from. The district’s nurse involvement set tongues wagging at the practice and this probably gave Shipman another scare. Shipman wouldn’t kill for another ten months and would only kill two people in 1990 and none at all in 1991. It’s likely that he had started to see the difficulty of maintaining a high kill rate while working in a shared practice and tried not to raise any more suspicion while he was preparing to move out on his own. All told, Shipman killed 171 while a partner at the Abraham Ormerod Medical Centre and a further 30 deaths occurred under suspicious circumstances but could not be confirmed. When we look at Shipman's killing patterns, it is immediately obvious that he left the Donneybrook practice with the intention of gaining the freedom to take his killing up to the next level. There was only one suspicious death in the part of 1992 during which he was practising independently within Donneybrook house. Within six weeks of establishing his own practice he would kill: on October 7th, 72-yearold Monica Sparks would hold the dubious honour of being his first victim at the Market Street surgery. In the early part of 1993, Shipman would establish a grisly rhythm: killing a patient and then filling out a prescription for 30mg diamorphine in their name on the day of their death or shortly afterwards to replace the ampoule he had used in killing them. One intended victim during this period may have had a very narrow escape: on August 31st, the step-daughters of Mrs Mary Smith walked in on Shipman leaning over her while she was unconscious. She slept very deeply until the next morning. It seems likely that they may have interrupted him while he was administering diamorphine to her and caused him to stop before he had delivered a fatal dose.

The scare that came from this close call probably caused Shipman to take a break until December 1993. Fearing having a pattern identified, he never prescribed 30mg diamorphine again, instead switching exclusively to appropriating the leftover stocks of his deceased terminal cancer patients. The amounts he got in this way are stupendous – the first time he did this he may have obtained 3,000mg, enough to kill up to a hundred and fifty people. The three patients he killed that December brought the year’s death toll to 16, already a record year. It wasn’t even close to the highest count he would reach. Shipman killed three times in early 1994 before having another serious scare on February the 18th. Mrs Renate Overton was suffering an asthma attack when Shipman was called to her home to see her. Mrs Overton's daughter was with her at the time and went upstairs when the attack had been dealt with. Shipman called the daughter down saying her mother had collapsed and gone into cardiac arrest. The daughter called an ambulance while Shipman attempted to resuscitate her. He must either have been more successful than he intended or the ambulance may have arrived too soon for his liking, but the ambulance crew managed to revive her, although she had suffered massive brain damage. Mrs Overton remained in a coma until she died 14 months later on April 21st 1995. Mrs Overton's death prompted some questions from the coroner for Greater South Manchester. Shipman's retelling of the event left out any mention of diamorphine, but if medical records had been checked his administering it to her would have been uncovered. Due to a law that was then in effect that stated that a person could not be tried of murder due to actions undertaken more than a year and a day past, Shipman would not have faced murder charges for her death but could still have been charged with attempted murder. Unfortunately, the coroner did not order an inquest into the matter. His failure to kill Mrs Overton led to another gulf of three months. Mary Smith, who he had previously failed to kill, would unfortunately turn out to only have received a stay of execution. She had developed lung cancer over the intervening period. Shipman acquired 1000mg of diamorphine in her name before killing her with part of that stock on May 17th.

The number of confirmed killings in 1994 was 11, with two suspicious deaths that year as well. Including Mrs Overton's, 1995 saw 30 killings confirmed and one suspicious death. The first killing for which Shipman was tried and convicted, that of Maria West (whose friend was waiting in the kitchen while Shipman killed her), happened on March 6th that year. There were another 30 killings in 1996, one of which, that of Irene Turner would form part of the murder trial. In one, that of 72-year-old Edith Brady in his surgery he would perform a new piece of charade when ascertaining death. When he called in his practice manager to witness the death, he touched the back of Mrs Brady's neck, claiming to be checking for brainstem activity and stating that there was "nothing there". John Grenville, the medical expert consulting for the inquiry would call this "pure charlatanism". 1997 was Shipman’s most prolific year, seeing 37 confirmed murders, of which seven were part of the trial that brought him down. 1998, the final year in which he was free to perform his dark deeds saw 18 murders, of which six received convictions. The perception and reality of Shipman’s nature finally begin to come together at this point.

NEW REVELATIONS FROM PONTEFRACT GENERAL INFIRMARY When the inquiry started on its investigations, the possibility that Shipman could have started killing while he was a house officer at Pontefract General Infirmary was considered but was quite quickly discounted. This proved to have been a hasty move, however: as events unfolded more people would come out of the woodwork to reveal more details of the picture. One such person was Sandra Whitehead, who had been a student nurse at PGI in 1971 when Shipman was serving there. On February 4th 2004, Mrs Whitehead testified that her time at PGI was fraught with bad memories because of the high number of patient deaths she experienced there. When she realized that she had worked with

Shipman at PGI, she instantly made the connection – The high death rate must have been connected with Shipman. Dame Smith decided the inquiry must look deeper into the matter. Death certificates and cremation forms from PGI were thoroughly assessed to ascertain a connection with Shipman before relatives of the deceased were contacted – they had already taken the solace of the first verdict but would have unnecessarily had the uncertainty return anew if they had been questioned despite the death having no connection. Grounds for some suspicion were found in 133 deaths, and of those, the inquiry managed to make contact with the relatives of 117. Statements were then taken from them. Statements were also taken from several more of Shipman’s colleagues from PGI which revealed a great deal of information as well as some additional details about Shipman’s character and reputation while at PGI. The character revelations were largely in keeping with what we already know of Shipman: generally a loner, occasionally insufferable and superior, popular with patients but also, interestingly, formed very strong friendships and made uniformly positive impressions on a couple of his colleagues. There was a plentiful supply of pethidine at the facility as it was the most commonly used opiate analgesic at the time. There were also plenty of other non-controlled drugs Shipman could have used to kill, including Largactil (which, as we have already seen, he would later use in several suspected killings) and potassium chloride, which is used to replace potassium ions lost through excessive urination but in large enough doses can cause cardiac arrest – this lethal quality actually makes it a drug of choice in legal executions. It is also all but untraceable in toxicology. Shipman certified more deaths in the evening – from 6pm to midnight – than should be statistically possible. The period covers a quarter of the day, so you would expect it to contain a quarter of deaths – and yet 54% of Shipman’s certified deaths occurred during this period. It appears to have been a time of opportunity for Shipman as he seems to have had more time alone with patients during that period. Shipman’s colleagues also reported in him an overconfidence verging on recklessness, particularly when he was administering

drugs to patients. He would sometimes administer drugs far too quickly and in amounts far too excessive. It could be that in these cases he was experimenting with the effects of large doses of certain drugs and not actively trying to kill. All told, there were 14 deaths that held mild suspicions of having been intentionally caused by Shipman, four that were found to be seriously suspicious and three that were confirmed as unlawful killings. A further three were found to probably have been caused by extreme recklessness on Shipman’s part. All were very ill in some way or in dire medical emergencies. Six cremation Form B’s for young children were filled out by Shipman. Of these, he reported that he was alone with the child at the time of their death in three cases. This should not be possible: a child in the final stages of illness typically receives a great deal of attention from parents, relatives and nurses and is unlikely to be alone at the moment of death. Still, when most of them were examined most were found to have been natural. Only one raised suspicion: Shipman’s youngest possible victim was Susie Garfitt – just four years old, she had cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic. Susie’s mother Ann was at her daughter’s bedside when Shipman told her that the prognosis was not good and Susie could only be kept alive with continuous medical intervention – and an implication that doing so would be "unkind". Mrs Garfitt told Shipman to "be kind" to Susie, though she was not implying that he should quicken her death. All the same, when she went to get a cup of tea she returned ten minutes later to find Susie dead. Without knowledge of if Shipman had any drugs with him that could have precipitated Susie's death, it's impossible to know for certain, but the proximity of the conversation to her death makes it seem extremely likely. The confirmed killings from PGI brought Shipman’s total up to 218. The actual numbers are probably much higher – assuming half the “suspicious” deaths were murdered by Shipman, this brings a conservative estimate of 238. Shipman’s cellmate reported that he had in private confessed to 508 murders, but this seems way too unlikely and, being the testimony of a convict, is probably not to be trusted.

CHAPTER 4 – SHIPMAN'S MOTIVES AND MOTIVATION Even the lowest estimate of 218 lives taken over a career of thirty years is an appalling figure, and it leaves all empathetic human beings with the question: why? We struggle to comprehend the reasoning when a single person is killed, but 218? As much as we can try to understand it, an instinctive grasp of the state of mind necessary eludes us. For many cases, we at least have the reasoning spelt out to us in the killer's own words. For Shipman, we never will – no matter how overwhelming the evidence, he never uttered a word of confession to anyone credible through to the very end – at least not to anyone who's talking. He never once publicly boasted of the lives he's taken At least this factor allows us to discount one explanation with certainty: he didn't do it for the acclaim. As arrogant and selfimportant as Shipman was, he never intended for his crimes to be found out, let alone become famous because of them. For everything else, we'll have to guess and try our best to reconstruct from the facts what the probable combination of factors that drove him was.

CLUES FROM HIS CHILDHOOD As stated way back in the beginning, Shipman’s childhood definitely had a huge influence on his future. The most obvious factor was his mother Vera’s death and his proximity to it. Watching a loved one slowly succumb to a terminal illness is a difficult thing to experience, and it is impossible to come out of it unchanged in some way. The effect of the experience on Freddy Shipman’s young mind must have been devastating and the change it wrought was a dark one. It's possible that Shipman seeing his mother's doctor nearmiraculously take away her pain gave him the drive to emulate that but ended up going too far – it may have transmuted into the urge to

take away the pain completely by delivering his patients into the complete painlessness of death. This explanation is corroborated by deaths much like that of little Susie Garfitt – terminal patients whose remaining lives would be short and either filled with pain or a featureless cloud of heavy sedation. The fact that all of his victims at PGI and most of his early ones in Todmorden were terminal patients possibly shows that this was his biggest motivation earlier on, but the greater profusion of healthy victims later on show that if it was it fell away as time went on. Whether or not a victim was on their last legs and not going to last much longer does not excuse Shipman’s hastening of their death. There may be some debate to be had over whether it would be acceptable if the patient was going to live the rest of their lives in either a stupor or unbearable pain, or their relatives consented, but the rest of his crimes definitely make Shipman a villain and not a saviour. The alternative explanation for Shipman’s targeting of terminally ill patients may be that their deaths are just easier to explain and he never did have anyone’s best interests at heart. As time went on and he continued to stretch the boundaries without being caught, he may simply have gained more confidence and widened his victim pool. The whole affair may simply have awakened unquenchable morbid fascinations in Shipman. He may simply have been infatuated with death, or perhaps with opiates as shown by his addiction to pethidine. The fact that most of Shipman’s victims were elderly women may be significant in that it may point back again to mother issues. He may have held some resentment over his mother’s death that manifested itself into a desire to kill as many older women as he could. The gender aspect may not be as important as that of age, however: women tend to live longer lives than men and become a larger portion of the population as age rises. It could be that women were simply a more plentiful resource.

CLUES FROM HIS CHARACTER

Shipman’s character as reported by those close to him may shed some light on his reasoning. The sense of superiority he acquired from his mother definitely followed him throughout his career, even manifesting itself in a casual disdain during his interviews with the police after he was caught. It may have directly influenced his actions as well. Shipman may have seen himself as capable of making the decision over whether it was time for a patient to “go”. Many of his conversations with victims’ friends and family support this postulate – he would often tell them that the death had happened at “the right time” or “for the best”. Following from this may have been a sense of frugality in Shipman: the United Kingdom has a single-payer tax-funded healthcare system – the National Health Service. All citizens are entitled to receive care through it free of upfront charge. Shipman may have intended to remove the drain on the service by terminally ill patients who were going to die soon as well as older patients who would become more and more demanding on the system without contributing into it as time went on. In a few cases, he probably killed to get rid of patients who were heavily demanding on his time due to hypochondria such as Eileen Cox, who he killed in 1984, or psychological issues, such as Joan Harding, killed in 1994. He occasionally went as far as to actually call certain patients a nuisance, as he did Ivy Lomas. The elaborate theatre he put on for victims’ friends and family in the immediate aftermath of a killing also may have stemmed from his sense of superiority: he might have taken some pleasure in so thoroughly fooling them, and he may have enjoyed being in the limelight for that brief period. He was also a control freak, and that desire for control may have grown into a desire to control the ultimate, of life and death.

PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES Shipman's addiction to pethidine tells us that he may have had an addictive personality, prone to an unhealthy fixation on certain things. Confessions from serial killers often detail how they simply couldn't stop. The feeling they got from ending a life kept them

coming back again and again. If indeed he did have an addiction to dealing death, Shipman may have had some control over it as shown by the breaks he took whenever he experienced a scare. All the same, he would invariably return after the hiatus, which does give the theory some credence. Shipman did once ask a home care nurse whether or not she felt a ‘buzz’ when she found a patient dead – implying that he probably felt it himself. The depression he professed when he was caught out for abusing pethidine may have been genuine. Sufferers often express a distance and perceived dislike from their compatriots regardless of if the relationships are actually on good terms. If Shipman did suffer from a depressive disorder it may have contributed to his drive to kill.

PERSONAL GAIN A motive worth looking at whenever older folk are murdered is that of financial gain. The forged will that got Shipman caught might seem to point to this, but it has its own microcosm of details that throw some doubt on that – we will discuss it on its own. What would be more indicative of gain as a motive is if Shipman used a large number of deaths to accumulate wealth. Shipman was alone in the deceased’s house for the vast majority of his killings, raising the possibility that he could have stolen items in the process. In one case he was found studying a victim’s display cabinet while she lay dead in another room. Perhaps trying to pick out the most valuable item to take? A few families did report jewellery or sums of money missing after a death. Shipman would occasionally ask for a memento of the deceased. What this suggests is that he wanted trophies of his killings, pointing to some deep psychological motive. Police seized a box containing some jewellery from Shipman's home. Some were found to belong to Mrs Shipman and returned to her. Of the rest, only one – a platinum diamond ring – was positively identified by a family. The rest were auctioned off and the proceeds given to the Tameside Families Support Group.

FURTHER CLUES FROM THE GRUNDY AFFAIR Shipman's forging of Kathleen Grundy's will was a new and unique development in Shipman's repertoire and badly executed in a way that may shed more light into his state of mind. The surface explanation is that his greed had exploded to a whole new level and he wanted to increase his financial returns from killing. It seems unlikely, however, that he planned to continue with this new element. It might be possible to get away with one forged will, but multiple ones – not so much. Even if he had gotten away with it, the drama that would surround the affair would have made it extremely difficult to continue killing – he would have been under much heavier scrutiny. It seems likely that Shipman was considering putting a stop to the killing – whether because he had grown tired of it or because the pressure from the investigation of earlier in 1998 had shown him how close he was to being found out. The forgery was so terrible that it was immediately obvious that it was a forgery, and it seems incredible that Shipman would have expected it to work. This raises the possibility that he had become delusional and really did believe it – his descent into incoherence during the first police interview seems to confirm this. It could also be that he had grown subconsciously tired of all the killing and the will was a way of forcing himself into a position where he could no longer do it even if he felt compelled to.

THE DEATH OF HAROLD SHIPMAN The truth is probably a combination of all of the above factors, but as already said, we will never know from the horse’s mouth. On January 13th 2004, the day before his 58th birthday, Harold Shipman was found dead in his cell. He had hung himself using his bedsheets. Since he left no suicide note we can’t know for sure his reasons for killing himself, but we can make a few guesses. If desiring to control life and death was part of Shipman's motivation, it could go towards explaining his suicide. In many cases where it is a motivator, once the killer has been backed into a corner or caught,

the ability to exert that control over others is taken away from them and they often resort to the one life they do have some remaining control over their own. Suicide may have been the final, crowning act of control for Shipman. Another two likely explanations involve his wife Primrose: the first is one he told a prison officer: if he died after 60, Primrose would not be eligible to receive an NHS pension and lump sum. If he died before then, however, she would receive them. Primrose had unflinchingly stood beside Shipman and believed wholeheartedly in his innocence – her handing in of documents that damaged his interest’s points to a genuine belief and not the actions of someone who wanted to defend a person they believed to be guilty. But in the end, that faith may have begun to crack: she reportedly sent him a letter not long before he killed himself asking him to “tell [her] everything no matter what”. Losing his one unfailing supporter may have caused him to crack. Whatever his reasons were, Shipman’s death brought up the question of how we should react to the death of a monster. Some thought it cause for celebration, with tabloids running celebratory headlines to break the news. For the actual families of those who had been killed, however, there was no celebration. He had died without ever confessing or giving an explanation for why their family members had been killed. For those whose family member’s death had merely been branded “suspicious”, they would never even know if they had been killed or not, always in a perpetual state of not knowing.

CONCLUSION A near-continuous campaign of murder like Shipman’s does not happen without massive exploitable gaps and blind spots in important systems and people’s reasoning. Those gaps were almost large enough for activities of Shipman’s magnitude, which means that it’s possible many smaller-scale sprees also fell through. In a way, this particular killing spree may have a positive aspect, in that in being too large to fall through completely it prompted the closing of those gaps so that the smaller cases could no longer slip through. It was the introduction of a completely new and obvious element that got Shipman caught – it seems likely that if it had not been for the forged will he would have gone on killing for who knows how long. The factors are all there in the story as it’s been presented so far, but it is necessary to analyse each of them in turn so that we can get a better understanding of them and prevent something similar from happening in the future. A part of the reason Shipman managed to be so prolific were the cracks in the system of monitoring and certifying deaths through which he slipped. There simply was no concrete system for monitoring each doctor’s patient death rate, and “honour systems” like the ones which were in play are vulnerable to abuse by people like Shipman with no honour at all. If there had been a system that automatically initiated an inquiry into a doctor with too high a death rate, Shipman probably would not have made it beyond his house officer years at PGI without being detected. Those cracks were sealed, new systems of accountability put in place that made sure any anomalies were immediately investigated to make sure there was nothing nefarious causing it. The death and cremation certification procedures were also woefully full of holes that were vulnerable to exploitation. At no point did the family of the deceased get an opportunity to look at any of the documents, allowing Shipman to invent causes of death and lingering illnesses out of whole cloth, as well as claim the presence

of people who were never there. The Form C doctor was supposed to “carefully examine” the body to confirm that it had not suffered a sudden death, but the conditions were never ideal to do that. Many doctors saw Form C as just being a “rubber stamp” on Form B. The triple-check provided by Form F also failed similarly. The importance of cremation to Shipman’s modus operandi prompted enough concern to warrant an over 600-page volume report from the inquiry with suggested corrections in the procedure, which were implemented. The bungles made by Law Enforcement throughout the years of Shipman’s murderous career would make a good bumbling caper comedy if only the rest of situation was not so tragic. The entirety of Detective Inspector Smith’s time on screen would warrant Yakety Sax playing in the background. Shipman’s case certainly caused them to perk up and completely change the way they approach investigations. There’s a saying that if you want backstage access to any show or concert, you don’t ever really need a pass. You only need a few things: a black turtleneck, work gloves, a coil of cable, a ladder and a determined look on your face. With that get-up, you can walk into any restricted area – even get legitimate staff to swipe you through locked doors with no questions asked. If you have the right look and attitude and exude enough confidence, people tend not to question you. The deepest root of Shipman’s success lies in this principle – the way he presented himself is what allowed the rest of the systemic failures to fall in place for him and obscure his true purpose. Most of the oversights on the part of people who should have realized something was off but just weren’t able to connect the pieces are really not their fault. Shipman, like many, many other serial killers, was a consummate manipulator, capable of presenting a front that fooled thousands over the course of his career. The very qualities that endeared him to his patients and allowed him to get close enough to take their lives were the very same ones with which he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. The position of a doctor is naturally one in which we imbue a great deal of trust. By looking like the perfect, noblest example of that

profession, Shipman distracted even those who should have known better. His colleagues were probably well aware of the number disparity between their patient death figures and Shipman’s, and they knew on an intellectual level that there was something wrong with them statistically. And yet their conscious minds just couldn’t allow them to connect those facts with the possibility that Shipman could be using his position to commit murder. Even those who did not like him just had far too much trust and respect in his position to figure it out. Others connected to the medical profession who should have realized something was wrong allowed themselves to be duped. During his first time being investigated over pethidine, Shipman was defended by pharmacy staff who had the figures of the amount he was acquiring right in front of them. In several cases, Shipman murdered multiple charges of some caregivers and still, they didn't think to raise suspicion. Mortuary staff, Form C co-signing doctors, crematorium workers – all failed to notice the patterns. During the first time Shipman was being investigated for possibly killing his patients, Alan Massey of Frank Massey and Son, Funeral Directors went so far as to visit Shipman to tell him about what he saw as a ridiculous investigation. A family member or friend of someone recently deceased is typically in a state of shock and grief upon learning about it. They can’t be held responsible for failing to think clearly in that situation and Shipman would actually take advantage of that. The charade he put on for the deceased’s families worked especially because of their grief and confusion. He would also use it to forestall the body receiving a post-mortem exam and also to press the family to destroy the evidence for him by having the body cremated. Ultimately, no matter what systems are in place, those systems are run by people. If those people remain inattentive enough even the best-planned systems will fail. Shipman’s crimes certainly awakened us all to the possibility of those we trust the most being the ones who are out to hurt us, and it remains to us to recognise the warning signs around us. It’s not just those in the medical profession that are in a position of life and death over us. Whatever you do, always be

ready to investigate anything that looks anomalous and raise alarm when it is due. You never know – lives may depend on it.

COLOMBIAN KILLERS THE TRUE STORIES OF THE THREE MOST PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLERS ON EARTH

INTRODUCTION Even in today’s jaded society, the taking of a human life strikes us as an utterly chilling act. It is the permanence of death, the finality of it that terrifies us. Horrifying as it may seem, the blood-curdling truth is that for some men, one murder is not the end. Instead, it is almost as if that first murder opens the floodgates through which pours the torrent of carnage wrought by men such as Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Jack the Ripper. There is, however, a side of Hell so dark even monsters such as Bundy would shrink from it. Colombian Killers is a look into the minds that lie beneath the madness. The stories of three men who have forever tainted the lush fields of Latin America with a horror that spans three decades of civil war are here brought to light. This book narrates the sadistic acts of Luis Alfredo Garavito, Pedro Alonzo Lopez, and Daniel Camargo Barbosa. For these men, rape, and murder were but the beginning of the horrors they inflicted upon the world. The fear their crimes inspire is not about their nature, the methodology, or even the victims. It is about who the killers themselves are. This book begins with three parts, each dedicated to one of these three monsters of modern-day Colombia. Once you’ve been edified with the general knowledge of the atrocities, we will delve further into the tiny details, the forgotten horrors, the thousands of ways that we as a society failed these men and, in so doing, shaped them into the monsters as they are known today. Luis Garavito, Pedro Lopez, and Daniel Barbosa are among the most prolific serial killers in the world. Between them, they were convicted of 329 murders, but it’s believed that the number they committed is over 750. This book is not for the faint of heart, nor for the feeble of spirit. Be very sure you want to know what you are about to read because if you can be sure of nothing else, be sure of this: You will never forget what you are about to read.

THE MAKING OF MURDERERS To begin with, let’s talk about the term ‘serial killer.’ The very notion of a ‘serial killer’ has alternately appalled and captivated the human race for generations. For as morbidly fascinating as we may find Hannibal Lecter, the thought of such a character prowling the streets is enough to make us walk just a little faster as we head home. So why do the most evil, sub-human villains of human society become such natural celebrities? Why are we, the supposedly normal members of the human race, so in thrall to the horrors that such people threaten to visit upon the careful constructs of our normal, unaffected lives? The way one NYPD Homicide Detective puts it, ‘The why is the wow.’ To elaborate, our macabre fascination comes in part the shock of such acts - the sheer insanity of them, the horror of the possibility of such a thought crossing our own minds, is what truly enthrals us. In our ‘normal’ world, the ‘why’ behind all of these murders demonstrates to us how different, how singular, these distant monsters are, while simultaneously forcing us to admit, in the deepest corners of our minds, by way of something as mundane as a bowl of cereal or a favourite movie, just how much they are not. It is this vacuum between conventional and inexplicable that we seek to fill. And so, it is that desire that brings us to where we are now, attempting to decipher the minds of monsters depraved enough to have earned a title more sinister than mere ‘murderer.’ We speak, of course, of ‘serial killers.’ A serial killer is a soul who has been driven to the most unspeakable of crimes, not just once, and not just in a fit of rage–but gradually, over a period of time, at least two to three times, driven by a need, be it sexual, rage-fuelled, power-based, or constructed around the thrill of some perverse psychological gratification. The men we will be discussing are motivated by perhaps the most chilling trifecta - sex, power and revenge.

LUIS ALFREDO GARAVITO

‘La Bestia’

EARLY LIFE AND MOTIVATIONAL EVOLUTION ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ A clichéd question asked of nearly every child. An easy question with anything but an easy answer. For all the million answers children have given to this question over time, the answer is never ‘remorseless paedophilic mass murderer.’ It’s unlikely that these individuals were born with this intention. To commit such atrocities, an individual must have encountered numerous or significant damaging events in his or her life. Luis Alfredo Garavito Cubilos, known as ‘La Bestia’ (The Beast), Tribilín (Disney’s Goofy), ‘El Cura’ (The Priest), or ‘Bonifacio Morera Lizcano,’ was born in the small village of Génovo in Quindio of Colombia on the 25th of January, 1957, a few months before the deposition of President Gustavo Rojas and at the threshold of a decade-long civil war that would ravage the country. He was the son of Rosa Delia and Manuel Antoni, the first of seven children, to be followed by three brothers and three sisters. He lived a relatively impoverished childhood and was subjected to frequent abuse. Psychologists have been quick to attribute to Luis the three characteristics that define most sexually driven serial killers: acceptance seeking, repressed hostility, and incompatibility amongst peers - or narcissism, sadism, and loneliness. While this trifecta is what many claims drive the average ‘lust killer’ each of these traits also stands individually as a marker of the desperation that can fuel serial murderers, especially when they are embedded in one at such a young age. Defining these traits allows us not only to identify individual aspects of personality development but to do so while directly tying them in with the hedonistic urges (or in this specific case, isolative rejection) as well as physical, emotional and sexual abuse that drove Luis Garavito to become what he became.

NARCISSISM It has been widely theorised that of the factors that affect most organized serial killers such as Luis Garavito, the one that acts as the catalyst for all other factors is malignant narcissism. Garavito was born a healthy first-born son in an impoverished Colombian family in the middle of a civil war that was decades long. He was, as such, the perfect child. His own sense of self would have thus been built up considerably into an almost overwhelming sense of selfworth. Unfortunately for Garavito, such a sense of self-worth is as fragile as it is formidable, making it easily disturbed. For Garavito, the affronts to his fragile self-worth would come in the form of his six younger siblings, making it seem almost as if he was usurped six times over and replaced at least three times. Coupled with this struggle was the physical abuse Garavito suffered at the hands of his father and the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his two neighbours - actions that caused him to develop within himself a frustrated neurosis in terms of parental ideals. He was betrayed in the worst possible ways by those who were meant to protect him. It was from this moment that his fixation with his own age at the time (seen later in terms of victimology) and the fiduciary relationships he had formed during that time period began to solidify as a perverted power struggle. The abuse occurred when Garavito was about 12 0r 13 years old, an age when he was still naïve enough to think he was invincible, as most children that age do. The primary projection of his narcissism, first damaged by the shifting of family dynamics as the other siblings were born and then shattered conclusively with the abuse he was subjected to, likely acted as a key motivator not just of his murders but, more specifically, his replication of the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of ‘trusted’ parent figures.

SADISM

Unlike Pedro Lopez, Luis Garavito’s methodology speaks of a vastly different kind of sadism. Garavito’s style was simple: he would rape first and then disembowel or slit the throats of his victims. Death came after the act of rape, not as a part of it. This indicates that Garavito had a Sadistic Personality Disorder rather than a proclivity for Sexual Sadism. His murders were not sexually motivated but rather undertaken because he enjoyed the sense of God-like power the psychological and physical suffering of other’s brought him. For Garavito, the act of sex was tainted with the abuse he suffered at the hands of his neighbours - parental figures whom he trusted leading to his repetition of the act with his victims. Garavito did not leave his victims alive to suffer through what he had suffered through. In his mind, to do so would have been an act of mercy or, as is more likely, a relinquishing of power. One of the key motivators of sadistic murders is the basic need for control. For Garavito, who as a child continuously felt wrongly usurped, the cruelty of sadism was likely manifested in the way he tortured most victims after the rape, as an ultimate show of dominance before the final act of murder.

LONELINESS As simplistic as it may sound, loneliness is the thing that links sadism and narcissism - these two things representing the two more volatile sides of the deranged mind of Luis Garavito. Garavito’s childhood was, in its own way, solitary to the extreme. He was the firstborn son, only to be continuously challenged for his position in the household, circumstances which made him go from the centre of attention to the least significant, in terms of need. When this loneliness was further triggered by at first neglect, and then abuse, Garavito’s fundamental existence became a matter of question - who was he outside of his identity as the oldest son? What would he amount to? For someone like Luis, who would have at one time been used to constant attention as the first-born child, the isolation he might have felt as he was relegated to the position of ‘just another child,’ compounded with the low self-esteem and lack of ability to initiate

any form of normal intimacy after his rape, created for him a sense of alienation - one that would later catapult him into life as a shadow of a man, a monster who hunted by night and masqueraded by day, seemingly unimpaired by the scars of his past - using the pseudo personas he’d crafted to lure over 147 boys to grisly deaths. Researchers in North America and Europe have carefully examined and studied serial killers and their psychological evolution for many years. The investment has supported law enforcement authorities as well as social workers who aim to prevent crimes as well as protect citizens. Colombia has been far less fortunate. With a population of over 41 million, it’s far from equipped to deal with the devastating consequences a prolific serial killer leaves on a country’s social terrain. They are even less prepared to deal with the horrific fact that, in many ways, it is their own society that failed Luis Garavito, and in so doing allowed him to become the monster he became.

THE HUNT: DISCOVERY AND CHASE As a country that has been immersed in political and social strife for the past 50 years, Colombia struggles to provide even the most basic security to its citizens. It is this chaos of incessant political unrest that created, in the shadows of every impoverished neighbourhood, the perfect victim pool. For as crowded as Colombia’s streets are, one specific group of people will remain forever unseen - its street children. Colombia’s continuous political strife has bred a sub-culture of anonymous children. Garavito carefully selected his prey from the children of low-income households were more vulnerable to the charms of a wandering peddler or a pleasant priest. As the anonymity meant a lower risk of discovery, this was a significant factor in Garavito’s crimes going for so long undetected. April 22nd 1999, was just another day at Los Centauros Park, Villavicencio. Located in Eastern Colombia, the park itself was part of the regular route for an impoverished young boy named Ivan Sabogal, who sold lottery tickets to help fund his schooling. Ivan’s abduction, or rather as it was then noted ‘disappearance,’ was not discovered until later that evening, when his mother realised he had not returned home by the assigned time. Terrified, Ivan’s mother contacted the police and pleaded with them to take on her son’s case, hoping to be able to convince them that there was indeed something sinister about Ivan’s not coming home that day. In a country like Colombia, Ivan’s mother had little to no power to exert, his abduction could easily have been glossed over, and probably would have been had it not been for the Prosecutor Fernando Aya. Aya had already been investigating the disappearances of 13 other young children over the span of six months. He discovered several mass graves just on the outskirts of Villavicencio and identified a pattern in Ivan’s case that was consistent with previous disappearances. Villavicencio was not the only village affected thousands of miles away, in the heart of Colombia's Coffee District, another set of mothers were desperately trying to tell the authorities

about their missing sons, each hoping against hope that their son would be the one who came home. The horrors of Garavito’s had begun long before that investigation. Years before this, dead children were being discovered all across Colombia in mass graves. One such discovery took place in the quaint little town of Nacederos, where the tortured bodies of fourteen children, ranging from 8 to 14 years old, were unearthed, baffling the Colombian police. What was even more shocking was the state of the remains. These were not recently deceased bodies. The bodies being unearthed were already decomposed to the point where there was almost no way of individual identification. All that was recoverable at this point were the bones and teeth. Surprisingly, the dental records did initiate a major breakthrough - none of these children had had work done on their teeth, indicating that they could not afford it, which put them in the same economic sub-group as the missing street children. Mario Artunduaga, Colombia’s most renowned forensic reconstructionist, began working on the bones of the children that were recovered. It was here that the forensic team hit their first major roadblock. The team soon realised that the diagnostics they were used to working with would not apply to these cases because the subjects were children as opposed to grown adults. The malleable nature of their bones and the way in which their craniums were constructed called for a major adaptation in process. Artunduaga realised that he would have to create his own methods, and so he did. Meanwhile, the authorities began to chase down every lead they could. Theories ranged from satanic cults to drug traffickers. Every scrap of evidence was considered and reconsidered. The only thing they could be sure of was that, whatever they were dealing with, they could not afford to miss any clues. Back in Villavicencio, when Aya was still looking for evidence in his initial investigation, he decided to go and stake out the points of disappearance, hoping that this would allow him to reconstruct the crimes and understand how the abductions took place. Once he arrived at the disappearance points, Aya was confounded. Each one was located in a heavily populated area. How could the abductions

have gone unnoticed? Why had the stench of the bodies not been reported? Aya and his team decided to do some groundwork in an attempt to figure out exactly how this happened. Very soon, Aya and his team began to realise how easy it was to miss an abduction in that region. Despite the high population, the area was covered in thick vegetation, and the terrain much too difficult to walk through, making it very difficult for an abduction to have been detected. At another end of the country, Detective Aldemar Duran, who had previously investigated three similar murders, recognised similarities with other cases all around the country. He cross-referenced the murders against homicides and abductions of a similar nature dating from 1991 to 1998. His hunch became the key to unlocking the mysteries of Garavito’s damning pattern. Forensic scientists were now supplied with evidence such as specific nylon threads, alcohol bottles, and a particular methodology that convinced police that the murders were not the work of a team or organization, that they were dealing with one man: a sexual sadist who single-handedly raped and murdered hundreds of Colombia’s children. The Colombian authorities knew that they needed all the help they could get with this case. Colombia had little to no experience managing such cases, so they reached out to their counterparts in the FBI, asking for files on cases similar to the ones they were now investigating. It was now February of 1999, and yet another mass grave had been unearthed, this time in Palmira, just sixty kilometres south of Nacederos. Carlos Herrera joined the task force. Herrera obtained over thirteen pieces of evidence from this crime scene, one of which was a pair of shoes that would later help investigators identify an important physical characteristic of the murderer. The shoes showed extreme wear towards the ends of the soles, indicating that the shoes were too big for their wearer. Furthermore, the heel of one shoe was nearly worn through, which Herrera concluded indicated a limp or a rotating gait from some sort of injury. The shoes also helped investigators predict the man’s height. He would be somewhere between 163 and 167 centimetres tall.

Duran’s team decided that if they were to unmask this murderer, they would have to find a way to enter the world he lived in. A handful of Colombia’s top detectives went undercover in the country’s homeless populace, each in an area the murderer was most likely to target again. The theoretical noose around Garavito’s neck tightened further. Finally, the authorities were one step closer.

THE ARREST: UNMASKING THE MAN The 1999 crime scene was largely what broke this case wide open. Herrera pieced together the remnants from the crime scene evidence to create a criminal profile that the murderer would fit into. These tiny little pieces of information would add up to a very specific personality and physical body type, helping the authorities to create a narrow suspect pool. A pair of charred glasses and a specific brand of alcohol were also recovered from the crime scene. The charring was something that none of the tests could account for, but the lenses did reveal a condition usually specific to two age groups - 40 to 45 or 55 to 60. The glasses were also bent at an awkward angle that indicated the wearer probably had widely separated ears. Aside from age range, height, a preference for a particular brand of alcohol, and two possible distinguishing characteristics, there was still next to no physical evidence that would identify Garavito. As such, the investigators began to focus on behaviour profiling. Various currencies left at the crime scenes hinted that the killer might be moving around Colombia with relative ease, that somehow he was blending in with the crowds of Colombia without raising suspicion. The investigators decided to look into the victim profile, realising that, given the suspect’s probable age, he could have been active much longer than anyone realised and that would mean there might be many more cases than they initially thought. The authorities pulled over ten years of criminal records and allocated roughly 5000 cases to the probable suspect pool. Based on the already known parameters, they removed all with female victims and were left with over 1500 male perpetrators. They then excluded suspects based on height and age and then narrowed the list further by focusing on those who were active in the areas of the already known crime scenes. The final list consisted of 25 names. Duran’s icy determination to capture Garavito had earned him the name ‘The Murderous Shadow.’ He had become so invested in the case that he flew to Bogata to ascertain more information on the

relating case files. It was there that Duran came across another strong lead. In 1996, there were reports of yet another child who went missing Renald Delgado, a twelve-year-old boy from the region of Tunja, bordering the north of Bogata. Delgado’s case closely matched that of the current victim pool; only, unlike the others, Delgado’s case included a suspect. A shopkeeper had reported that the boy had last been seen in the company of a man who was not from the region. That man had been identified and brought in for questioning, only to be released due to a lack of concrete evidence. This man’s name was Luis Alfredo Garavito - a name that appeared on the list of 25 suspects that the investigators had compiled. Duran knew immediately that this was no coincidence. A careful examination of the file revealed other connections. For instance, Garavito’s birthplace was registered as Genova, the place where Duran’s original three cases had occurred. Furthermore, his place of residence as per his written statement was, Trujillo - the location of yet another mass grave. The official investigation, however, had taken a different turn. A suspect had been identified in Pereira, one with a limp and in same age range, and he was seen selling honey from the same bottles as those found at the crime scenes. His name was Pedro Pachuga. On October 1997, two young boys disappeared from a bus station in Pereira, and Pachuga was a top suspect. The boys were later discovered dead. Just days later, another young boy identified Pachuga as an attempted rapist. Sure of their target, the investigators scoured the streets for the man they thought was responsible for the hundreds of bodies strewn across Colombia. Within weeks, the investigators caught and arrested Pedro Pachuga. There was only one catch - Pachuga insisted he was innocent. During his incarceration, Pachuga continued to plead his innocence, which in itself wasn’t unusual, but within weeks the murderer had struck again, this time in Bogata. Four boys murdered with the exact same MO. It became clear that the prosecutors had indeed apprehended the wrong man. The authorities were shaken. The body count was now well past a hundred and rising. They knew that

they needed to take more care in terms of the recovery of evidence, as they could not afford any more mistakes. The Colombian investigation became a meld of every relevant foreign technique they could reasonably replicate, from the British techniques of evidence recovery with colour-coded crime scenes to the Russian and American techniques of forensic facial reconstruction. Soon, four of the victims had been identified by the families - another crucial step in the on-going investigation. Meanwhile, Duran used the case file on Delgado to track down the address left behind by Luis Alfredo, and in so doing found Ester Garavito Cubillos, a sister of Luis Garavito. Ester was found to have a bag of Garavito’s personal items. The bag contained documents, travel mementoes, and a collection of journals that revealed intimate details about Garavito’s childhood and later life. Duran’s team carefully combed through the documents and found a receipt of money wired to a woman in Pereira, where documents revealed he had been implicated as part of the homicide of a minor by a judicial body in the area. The investigators proceeded to track down the location of the woman, and much to their own surprise they found yet another suitcase of documents, these dating from 1994 to 1997, in her care. The bag contained synthetic fibres, razors, and lubricants, all of which were consistent with what had been uncovered in previous crime scenes. The evidence in Palmira pointed to one further thing - the suspect in question had been burned. Based on the evidence and the crime scene at Palmira, the investigators came to the conclusion that the suspect would have been wounded and heavily burned as he left in an attempt to distance himself from his latest victim. A man matching his description allegedly sought help at a pharmacy in Pereira, only to disappear right after. This provided yet another physical clue to the suspect’s profile. He would have had severe burns along the left side of his body. By April 22nd, 1999, the search for Ivan Sabogal had intensified. At 11:15 that evening, the police received a call for help from a junkyard employee reporting a boy who claimed to have escaped an attempted rapist. The police responded immediately and, along with

Ivan’s mother, went to retrieve the boy. She identified the boy instantly. Ivan Sabogal had survived. Ivan provided a description and then explained how a homeless man had passed by as the predator attempted to assault him, and how that momentary distraction had allowed Ivan to run away. The predator had chased after him and the homeless man, but after being spotted by a young woman as they ran, he had backed off. ‘La Bestia’ was still out on the streets of Colombia. The police were prepared to accept the win they had been handed by recovering Ivan Sabogal and were driving him and his mother back to the police station when the unexpected happened. Right there, outside their window, walking along the highway, was a man Ivan identified as his assailant. The man identified himself as Bonifacio Morera Lizcano. That name was not on the list of suspects, but with young Ivan’s positive identification, the police brought him in for questioning. Even Bonifacio's arrest was strange, to say the least. The man did not struggle or protest in any way. He was unnervingly calm as he persistently claimed that he was not the man the police were looking for. Nothing he said or did would ever make anyone think that this was a man who had murdered hundreds of children across the Colombian countryside. Once they reached the police station, Prosecutor Aya visited the suspect in custody and straight away noticed the physical similarities between Bonifacio and Luis Alfredo Garavito. He also noticed something the other officers hadn’t. On each of the documents that the detainee had signed as Bonifacio, his signature varied. Ava took his suspicions and a photograph of Bonifacio to a meeting being held with prosecutors from all over the country regarding the murders. It was here that Aya showed Duran and his team the photograph of the man they had in custody. Duran and his team identified him immediately. The man in the picture was Luis Alfredo Garavito. Finally, all the puzzle pieces all fell into place. The scourge of Colombia was finally behind bars.

DUE PROCESS: THE ROAD TO CONVICTION By the end of this final meeting, authorities were left with little doubt that the man in custody was indeed Luis Alfredo Garavito. He was 42 years old and 167 centimetres tall. He wore glasses and had scars and burns along the left side of his body. He was born in Genova and raised in a dysfunctional family, and had suffered abuse at the hands of parental figures before the age of sixteen everything fit. Unfortunately, ‘everything’ was also completely circumstantial, meaning that without Garavito’s confession, the Colombian authorities could prove nothing in a court of law, or at least not enough to build a solid case. The authorities desperately needed to establish concrete links between the crime scene evidence and Garavito himself. Once again, the investigators started to hunt for evidence to link Garavito to the crimes. Detective Duran, who had now been studying Garavito’s profile for years, suggested that there was a possibility that there were more ‘memento’s’ of the victims that Garavito would have saved over the years. They just needed to figure out where they were. It was with this aim in mind that the investigators hunted down Mrs Umbar Toro, one of Garavito’s best friends, and coaxed her into visiting Garavito in jail. The investigators were hoping that Garavito’s need to forge a connection would make him open up to this old friend. Sure enough, Garavito confessed to Umbar Toro that there was indeed another bag of documents, which he had left with another inmate’s wife. The contents of this final bag were even more incriminating than those of the first two. The bag contained regional newspaper clippings, paper documents, and even pictures of some of the victims. The bag also contained a scrap of paper with weird

markings on it. It was later discovered that the markings were a personal tally of his victims. Despite all of the evidence, Garavito still refused to confess, and the investigators realised that it was unlikely he ever would. Without a confession, the prosecutors would need an airtight case if they wanted to put Garavito behind bars. Nothing could be left to chance. It was clear that now was the time to establish a concrete link between the evidence collected and Garavito himself. First and foremost, the prosecution would need to establish a DNA link between Garavito and the DNA recovered from the crime scenes. Then there was the matter of the glasses that had been recovered. They needed to be able to determine Garavito’s eye condition without tipping him off and thereby giving him the chance to lie about it. To avoid any disruption on Garavito’s part, the entire prison was subjected to an eye exam, and it was during this exam that Garavito’s cell was searched for traces of DNA to run against the crime scene samples obtained off the liquor bottles and the bodies. The prescription for the charred glasses came back as a match, and yet the prosecution still didn’t think they had enough evidence to seal his fate. The Colombian authorities decided to use Link, a Dutch software that cross-references events, coincidences, and probabilities. They input the software with hotel reports, witness testimonies, and evidence. Link’s report placed Garavito at every single crime location at the time of the event, stacking huge weight behind the prosecution’s case that Garavito was the only possible perpetrator. They decided that with this software they had enough to secure a conviction, but as a final attempt to make the case as airtight as possible, they decided it was time to take another shot at Luis Garavito himself. Garavito went through an 8-hour interrogation, with no crack in his demeanour. Garavito remained calm and stable, maintaining the entire time that not only was he innocent, but that all the evidence and witness testimony merely pointed to a flawed investigation. At this point, Lili Naranjo, the head of Garavito’s investigation, decided to end the interrogation, recognising that Garavito was far too

composed to crack under the pressure they were applying. They knew that they needed a different approach if they were going to destabilise him enough to get a confession. They were going to need someone who knew Garavito better than Garavito himself. Prosecutor Naranjo authorised a private meeting between Garavito and Detective Duran, the only man who knew the cases well enough to go toe-to-toe with Garavito. What followed would go down forever in the history books as the end of Luis Garavito. Duran decided to approach the only part of Garavito that wasn’t capable of staying detached - his fantasy realm. In order to do so, he verbally recounted every one of the murders in intricate detail. He carefully crafted the monologue, taking Garavito back to each of the fantasies he ached to relive. But, the fantasies were not as Garavito remembered them. Duran used explicit detail to build such a vivid mental image of the horrors that Garavito had inflicted, that after 18 hours, Luis Alfredo Garavito, the world’s deadliest serial killer, cried out for Detective Duran to stop. Duran held the murderer in his arms as Garavito, now sobbing, confessed to his crimes by pointing to pictures and explaining in detail what he had done to each of the children and how he had done it. Garavito defended himself by claiming that he had been possessed by ‘evil spirits’ before each of the kills, theories he attempted to support by referencing his journals. Each of his journals was colour coded blue or red. The blue ones, which he claimed were his own, consisted of Bible verses and other ‘pure’ thoughts; the red ones contained detailed descriptions of his kills. In December, Garavito was finally tried and convicted on two counts. The first was for a murder in Tunja, the central province of Boyacá, where 14-year-old Silvino Rodriguez’s dismembered and tortured body had been discovered in June 1996. The second count was for the attempted rape of Ivan Sabogal, the 12-year-old boy from western Villavicencio on account of whom he was finally apprehended in April 1999. Garavito had, in fact, confessed to the murders of over 190 young boys, although experts believe the actual total to be closer to 300. A lack of conclusive evidence, however, prevented Garavito’s conviction on the other counts.

The death penalty does not exist in the Colombian legal system, and they had long ago declared that the longest a man could be imprisoned was 60 years. Based on these two counts, Garavito was given this maximum sentence. However, things changed soon after, in 2000, when the Colombian penal code underwent modification, now stating that no individual can be imprisoned for more than 40 years. Garavito has been described as a ‘model prisoner.’ He has been studying through his incarceration and has issued a public apology to the people of Colombia. Currently, Garavito is likely to serve a reduced sentence and could be released in 22 years. However, in the face of extreme public pressure, a judicial review of the case has been launched. Garavito could face additional charges for murders that he has not previously confessed to. Such crimes would not fall within the influence of the previous legal process.

TRUE CRIME: VICTIMOLOGY AND METHODOLOGY The victimology and methodology of a crime are where one will ultimately find answers to the whys that crop up during the investigation of a serial killer. Both aspects are crucial in building an offenders profile - a fact that held true in the case of Luis Alfredo Garavito. Garavito’s victims were always male, always ranging from six to sixteen, and generally slim, with brown hair and brown eyes. They were either street children who would not be missed or boys who were impoverished enough to be taken in by the promise of a few coins or sweets. They basically paralleled Garavito himself. Psychologists theorise that for Garavito, the young boys who were from impoverished backgrounds were stand-ins for the child Garavito who had suffered a rape or multiple rapes at the hands of his neighbours. Even the age of his victims coincides with the age from which he began to be subjected to abuse, which continued until he finally left home. In Garavito’s mind, the children he chose represented his own childhood self. But it wasn’t enough for Garavito to merely abduct a child, or even rape him. There was an entire method to his madness that in the most warped ways made perfect sense. Garavito himself had been raped by neighbours and abused by his father, parental figures, or adults that he trusted. It was this bond of trust that Garavito felt compelled to replicate with his victims. Instead of simply abducting the children, Garavito would build an elaborate ruse, in which he would pose as a monk, a missionary, a humanitarian worker, a handicapped old man, or even at times a harmless street peddler. In each instance, Garavito spent time talking to his victims, carefully using his assumed persona to build trust between himself and the child. This bond that he created was, in a way, a balm to his soul. It was how he explained away his mistake in trusting his neighbours.

Surely, if so many boys did the same, it wasn’t really his ‘fault’ that he had been victimised the way he had. But it wasn’t just the victim profiles that defined Garavito’s crimes. Rather, his crimes followed a strict systematic procedure, one that was indicative of his sadistic and sociopathic nature. Garavito would first rape and then torture his victims. It is worth noting that the torture was a part of his methodology rather than a part of the sexual act itself. It was not important for him to torture the boys. Rather, the torture came as an afterthought, usually followed by slitting their throats and dismembering their corpses - the final act of degradation. An act that points to the reconstruction of his own childhood trauma, only amplified. He consistently used screwdrivers or knives to commit these acts. Recently, Luis Garavito, or La Bestia, as he is better known, has expressed an intention to start a political career once he is released. He has also gone on record to state his intention to work with abused children as part of this political career. The disturbing fact is that, with the Colombian legal system being what it is, it is entirely possible that this erstwhile mass murderer, who once littered the Colombian landscape with his kills, will leave his maximum security holding cell in just a few short years to do just that.

PEDRO ALONZO LOPEZ

‘The Monster of the Andes’

THE MAKING OF A MONSTER It has been said that if evil had a face, it would be that of Pedro Lopez. This leads one to ask, what caused this seemingly normal man to become the monster that history remembers him as? Lopez was a man who had undoubtedly been dealt a cruel hand by fate. Born to a prostitute in Tolima, the seventh of thirteen children, Pedro had grown up hiding behind the ragged curtains of his ramshackle home as he watched his mother be sexually objectified by different men every day. It was a life where nothing was sacred, which is perhaps what lead eight-year-old Pedro to do the unthinkable and sexually molest his own sister, an act that led to him being kicked out his dank, horror-filled childhood home. Alone and terrified, on a cold night in 1957, eight-year-old Pedro Alonzo Lopez found himself expelled from his own home, ordered to never return. It was at that moment that Lopez realised how expendable he was. His victimisation is likely to have intensified during this phase of his life (a matter further explored in Chapter Four). Exiled for sexually assaulting his own sister, Pedro walked the dark streets of Tolmia, trying desperately to come to terms with the edict handed down by his mother. The first time he went home, refusing to stay away, his access was denied. The next time he tried, his mother not only prevented him from re-joining the family but went a step further and dropped him off at the city border with no food, no shelter, no support, and no options. Pedro was at his most vulnerable, but his luck was about to change (for a brief moment). A ray of hope came walking by in the form of an older man who found Pedro wandering around the streets. The man stopped, spoke to him, and finally decided to help him. For Pedro, this man was his shot at doing things over, and more importantly doing things right. This man promised food and shelter and was offering Pedro a chance at absolution. Or so he thought. The older man who took Pedro Alonzo Lopez off the Tolima streets in 1957 with the promise of food and shelter was unfortunately not a Good Samaritan hoping to help a vulnerable child. He was a

predator. That night, eight-year-old Pedro Lopez was not taken home to a plush bed and warm food. He was taken instead to an abandoned building where cold grasping hands tore the clothes off his back and raped him repeatedly, only to finally toss him out onto the filthy Colombian streets once again. This betrayal of faith, so soon after he’d lost his only sense of stability, ruined Pedro's trust in humanity in the most basic ways, but most of all it destroyed his trust in adults. Pedro Lopez soon began to go to unnatural lengths to avoid contact with adults. At the peak of his trauma, young Pedro hid out in dark alleyways or deserted buildings on the mean streets of Tolima, leaving his carefully scouted sanctuaries only to scavenge for food in the nearby bins and trash fills - a pitiful existence that became all Pedro knew for over a year. Pedro’s mother, in her attempt to protect her daughter against further sexual trauma, had sentenced Pedro to a lifetime of trauma, one that he would never truly overcome. The following year, Pedro finally gathered enough courage to travel across the country to a small town named Bogata, coincidentally a town where Luis Garavito had also been active. Once he arrived in Bogata, Pedro went back to scavenging and begging for food. It seemed he had to some degree been able to overcome his aversion towards adults, and it was thus that he met yet another set of adults who would play a life-changing role in his life. An elderly American couple was so heartbroken at the sight of the young child scavenging for food that they offered to take him home. Realising that, realistically, he had next to no other options, Pedro took the leap of faith and went with them. It seems evident that this decision would further influence Pedro into becoming the ‘Monster of the Andes’. This was not directly down to the elderly couple, as they were nothing but kind to Pedro, providing him food and board and enrolling him in a school for orphans. In fact, it was just as his life began to regain a sense of normality that Pedro Alonzo Lopez was reminded that he would never be lucky enough to be saved. At 12 years old, Pedro Lopez was sexually molested yet again, this time by a male teacher at the school he had been enrolled in. This was the last straw. Pedro Lopez was tired of being the victim.

He began to feel the anger grow inside of him, and using all his previous fears to channel courage and aggression, Pedro carefully planned the theft of a large sum of money from the school’s office then fled back to the streets of Colombia that he now considered his only safe haven. It was now 1963, and with the civil war drawing to a close, businesses were opening up once again. Unfortunately for Pedro, he was neither trained nor educated well enough to be able to take advantage of this growing economy. He instead resorted to begging for food once again for almost six years, eventually turning to petty theft for survival. Pedro’s initial foray into theft was probably an early indicator of how he had lost any respect for the concepts of right and wrong. He soon shifted to car theft as a teen and became impressively adept at it. Not only was he well paid for his services, but also, for the first time in his life, he was sought after. For someone like Pedro, who had never fit in anywhere, such valuation was likely highly comforting and addictive. Like everything else in his life, however, this too fell apart. At eighteen, Pedro was arrested for car theft and sentenced to seven years in jail. Two days in, Pedro was gang-raped by four adult inmates. He furiously swore to himself that never again would he allow his abusers to get away unscathed. Pedro spent the next two weeks fashioning a crude knife from prison utensils, then hunted down his four attackers and stabbed them to death. Much like Luis Garavito, Pedro Lopez’s childhood does in many ways explain how he became all that he became. The detached, vicious, and morally corrupt madman who roamed the length of the Andes was manufactured by a Colombian society that continuously failed him. This is not to say that his misfortune exonerates him or justifies anything he did, but it does explain many of his actions and reactions. What it doesn’t explain, however, is Pedro's sadistic enjoyment of not just the act but the web of manipulation that he weaved around his victims, and for that, we must step into the mind of the man himself.

THE STATE VS LOPEZ: THE DISCOVERY AND CHASE Unlike most other serial killers, Pedro’s story actually begins from when he was in jail. An angst-filled teenager with revenge on his mind, Pedro Lopez murdered four men within the first month of his imprisonment. Surprisingly, Pedro was not convicted for the murders. The prison authorities, who had been aware of the four men and their prior assault on the eighteen-year-old, decided to list Pedro’s act as one of self-defence, allowing him to get off with a mere two years added to his previous sentence. Nine years later, in 1978, Pedro Alonzo Lopez was released from prison. Now twenty-seven years old, Pedro Lopez was no longer the young man who had once scavenged for food. His past experiences, in addition to having spent his formative years in prison, made Pedro veer toward an extremely anti-social personality. Pedro later claimed that, because of his mother’s abuse and the way he had come to view adults, he found it difficult to even hold a conversation with an adult female. He needed to find an alternative, and so he did. Pedro Lopez began to travel widely through Peru soon after his release from prison. He later admitted that during this time he stalked and murdered at least a hundred young girls from various native tribes across the region. He began to realise that younger females were more susceptible to his meagre charms and therein found the solution to his difficulty with women. Pedro’s new solution was put to a halt when he was captured in Northern Peru by a native tribe known as the Ayacucho's. At the time, Pedro had been attempting to abduct a nine-year-old tribal girl. Infuriated, the tribe stripped Lopez bare and flayed him for hours before finally deciding to bury him alive. Once again, however, an American missionary intervened. The lady in question convinced the tribe that Lopez ought to be handed over to the appropriate authorities, and that since she was on her way to the town square,

she could easily drop him off at the nearest police station. The tribe reluctantly agreed and tied Pedro up to the back of her truck. The missionary delivered Lopez to the local authorities. However, because of the cultural divide, the Peruvian police were unwilling to ‘waste’ their time by investigating ‘petty’ complaints lodged by natives. Instead, Peruvian authorities released the rapist and serial killer into Ecuador, where the second phase of Lopez’s murder spree commenced. Upon regaining his freedom, Lopez began to do the exact same thing he had done when he was released from prison. He travelled extensively, lured, young women in, and murdered them. The majority of this happened in Colombia. The authorities began to notice an increase in the number of missing people on their reports. Because of their ages, the authorities initially thought that the children were runaways, but soon it became clear there was a pattern evolving. All the victims were young, attractive females. The number of disappearances and the similarities of the cases led authorities to suspect a sex slave or prostitution ring was involved. Not in their wildest dreams did they imagine that the hundreds of missing girls were the work of one single person. Bodies began to appear in other places. Initially, since there were only one or two bodies at a time, the authorities didn’t know whether to associate them with the mass disappearances. Dr Rothman Rios, who was the medical examiner at the time, explained that the bodies themselves did not indicate any significant links. There was little to no evidence to suggest who was behind the murders, and no witnesses. It began to seem like whoever was responsible had managed to commit the perfect crimes. In March 1980, a flash flood near Ambato, Ecuador, unearthed four bodies. All four were female. All four had been sadistically tortured. The idea that these four women were just victims of random murders when the country was besieged by an increase in missing women, was hard to argue. The authorities were forced to reconsider. There was clearly more to these disappearances than slavery or prostitution rings. The discovery of the four bodies from the flood and the constant disappearance of young girls put the entire country on edge. The fact

that the police had no leads made the entire population paranoid. Mothers with young daughters realised that the murderer could literally be anyone, as could the victims. It was this countrywide wariness that would lead to the capture of Pedro Lopez. Just days after the flash flood unearthed the bodies of four victims, Pedro Lopez was to stalk his last victim. It was early morning, and Carlina Ramon Poveda, a vendor at the local market, was setting up her stall with her young daughter in tow. Lopez had entered the market posing as a peddler who was selling chains, padlocks, and other similar wares. He continued selling all day until late in the afternoon when he finally approached Carlina’s food stall and pretended to look into her pots and pans to see what she was cooking. Meanwhile, the stranger began to sneak looks at Carlina’s eleven-year-old daughter, Maria. Maria became flustered by the man’s attention and went to her mother. She told her the man had been looking at her and beckoning to her. Realizing that this abduction was not going to be as easy as he’d previously thought, Pedro Lopez quietly slipped out of the market. However, by then Maria had already alerted her mother, who realised that there was a strong possibility that this was the man the entire country was looking for. Within minutes, Carlina gathered some of her vendor friends and chased down the unknown man, who had just made his way to the main entrance. The authorities were summoned immediately. Pedro Lopez, when they found him, was babbling incoherently, so much so that the authorities initially presumed they had captured a madman - failing to realise that the man they now held in custody and were driving to local police headquarters was the Monster of the Andes.

THE UNVEILING OF A MADMAN Once he had been taken to police headquarters, Lopez adopted a silent pout, which, much to the dismay of the officers in charge, he maintained throughout the entire questioning procedure. It wasn’t that Lopez was scared or frustrated in the way Luis Garavito had been. It was more like he was bored and was enjoying flustering the authorities. Realising that the regular scare tactics would not work on this particular suspect, the authorities decided to use a very different approach. At this point, the police did not suspect Lopez to be guilty of anything more than the murders of the children whose bodies had been uncovered weeks before in the flash flood. An officer on duty suggested that one of them dress up as the local priest and attempt to win over the man’s confidence. Ultimately, “Pastor Cordoba Gudina,” who was the Captain at the time, entered Lopez’s cell and sat with him through the night. Soon enough, the Padre began to win over Lopez’s confidence by regaling him with tales of crimes he professed to have committed as a rapist. Lopez began to contribute to the conversation the young Padre had initiated. Each story was more gruesome than the prior, each revealing such bone-chilling acts of inhuman degradation of the victim that at one point even the seasoned officer could no longer sit there listening to them. The detective, who remained undercover for nearly an entire month, was stunned. Pedro Lopez had by then gleefully informed the undercover Padre that he had been travelling through Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia for the past three years, and by his own count had raped and killed over three hundred young girls - a claim that, if proven to be true, would rank him as one of the most prolific serial killers in the world. By the next morning, authorities had been able to gather enough evidence to finally confront Lopez with his crimes. This time Lopez finally spoke up. Pedro Lopez, as he came to be known, The Monster of the Andes, claimed proudly that he had raped and murdered over one hundred and ten young girls in Ecuador, at least a hundred in Peru, and, as he put it ‘many more than a hundred’ in

Colombia, going on to state that he only really enjoyed the girls in Ecuador, claiming their trusting nature made them more ‘appealing,’ as opposed to the stranger-wary little girls back in Colombia. In his own words, “I like the girls in Ecuador. They are more gentle and trusting, more innocent. They are not as suspicious of strangers as Colombian girls.” It was at this point that the police began to reach out to their neighbouring countries to see if there were any cases to corroborate his claims. It made no sense that a serial killer could have been active in three countries and yet remain entirely undetected by the authorities in all of them. Lopez was relishing this new-found attention. He started to talk about his own childhood and the many ways in which society had failed him. Each reference to his own tragic past he made more apathetically, as he logically reasoned how he had become the monster he was claiming to be. At one point, he specifically pinpointed the moment he decided to become a serial killer. “I lost my innocence at age eight, so I decided to do the same to as many young girls as I could.” Still, the police could not make sense of the sheer number of murders Lopez was confessing to, and when both Colombian and Peruvian Authorities failed to substantiate his claims, Lopez began to realise that the authorities didn’t quite believe him. So, Lopez did the only thing a narcissistic psychopath such as himself could do: he offered to take them to the bodies.

THE LAW OF THE LAND: CONVICTION AND BEYOND One would think that with half a dozen dead bodies and a confirmed confession, Pedro Lopez would be behind bars without question. That was not, however, how Pedro Lopez’s case was to go. Once he’d provided his initial confession, Pedro realises that the local authorities doubted the veracity of his claims. So, he offered to take them out to the gravesites to prove to the truth of his proud claims. Initially hesitant, the local police finally decided to allow Lopez to guide them to the gravesites, which he claimed were scattered all over the country. Over the span of six weeks, Lopez led the police across eleven Ecuadorian provinces, at each revealing yet another gruesome collection of bodies. For his own safety, the police required Lopez to dress as a police officer when he accompanied them out to the gravesites. There was a guard placed on either side of him, both for his protection and to thwart any attempt at escape. The first gravesite was just on the border of Ambato. He described the girl as a newspaper seller who he had abducted, raped, and then murdered just ten months earlier. He told them he’d buried her under a specific bridge in the locality. To their surprise, the police found a complete skeleton, as described, at the base of the bridge. The medical examiner was unable to determine any specifics of the crime from the body, other than a corroded arm and leg, evidence of the torture he’d inflicted on the young child. However, the police soon gained the clarity they sought after one of the victim’s family members was brought to the site. They recognised the clothes hanging off the bones of the skeleton and confirmed what Lopez had told the police. The bones belonged to a young girl named Hortensia Garces Lozada. Lopez’s claims were shockingly accurate, and as the police moved on to the next location, they found more and more bodies. The police shared some blame for these horrendous atrocities. The disappearances had begun long before the identity and capture of

Lopez, but investigations never really amounted to anything. Even in the case of Hortensia, the police had refused to investigate the case, insisting that it merely an incident of a runaway child. The locals claim that such bias was due to the class divide. For the most part, Lopez’s victims had been from impoverished families, which was why they would fall for his lures of money so easily. Hortensia, for instance, had been lured away by a mere ten dollars. Roughly two months after Hortensia, that Lopez chose the wrong victim - nine-year-old Ivanova Jacome. As the daughter of a successful baker, Ivanova's disappearance was responded to in ways that none of the other girls’ had been. Immediately, there was media coverage and flyers were distributed all across Ecuador, with the police working day and night to find her. It was this burst of media attention that had triggered the wave of suspicion back in April. Ivanova's body, displaying evidence of both rape and mutilation, was eventually found on an abandoned farm. Pedro Lopez’s trip down memory lane would go on for over fiftythree gravesites. At each gravesite, Lopez would display the exact same amount of amusement and satisfaction, as if each grave marked a victory in his name. His pride was sickening, and yet the police had little choice but to follow him around and encourage him to take them to the next site. They desperately needed the information that only Lopez himself could give them. So, they continued to supply him with cigarettes and alcohol. Lopez began to develop a friendship with the captain he had initially confessed to. In fact, at one point, Pedro began to refer to the captain as ‘Father,’ an impulse the police later attributed to his lack of a fatherly figure in his own life. Finally, when the police began to realise that Lopez was leading them to already compromised gravesites (possibly from wild animals or floods), they decided to bring him back to the police headquarters, where he was charged with fifty-seven counts of murder - for the fifty-three gravesites and four corpses discovered in the floods. It was Lopez’s own detailed confessions, however, that lead to him being charged with one hundred and ten murders. Victor Lascano, at that time governor of the Ambato jail, told reporters that, in his

personal opinion, the tally of three hundred girls that Lopez claimed to have murdered was likely a low estimate. Pedro Lopez openly confessed to over three hundred murders, calling himself ‘worse than an animal,’ and yet showed no sign of regret in his actions or words. His voice was calm, steady, and unemotional. Lopez had been caught in Ecuador, a country that had become a favourite hunting grounds for serial killers due to the sentencing laws. No matter the nature or number of murders the maximum conviction was sixteen years. By confessing to all of his crimes, Lopez was ensuring he could not be tried again in that same jurisdiction for the crimes he was confessing to - a judicial practice known as ‘double jeopardy.’ Ecuadorian law also prohibits consecutive sentencing, meaning he could only be sentenced to sixteen years total rather than sixteen years per murder. He was convicted nine months after his arrest, by Judge Jose Roberto, in a southern town in Ambato, close to where he was first apprehended. This mockery of a sentence was of no solace to the families who had lost their girls. Pedro Lopez, by his calculations, would be spending only seventeen days in jail per murder he’d confessed to. Outraged, the families demanded a reform of the prison laws, but the Prison Minister, Pablo Faguero, responded with, “Yes, it does sound strange, but that is our law.” Fourteen years after his sentencing, on August 31st 1994, Pedro Alonzo Lopez walked free. His behaviour in jail had been so exemplary that the ‘Monster of the Andes’ had had his sentence reduced by two years. However, the Ecuadorian authorities detained him an hour after his release. Lopez discovered that the superintendent of the province had ordered him back into custody, claiming that he was an illegal immigrant who did not have proper documentation. The only logical step, therefore, was to hand him over to the Colombian authorities. The hope was that once on Colombian soil, Pedro Lopez would be forced to face the harsher laws of his country of origin. The very next day, Lopez was handed over to Colombian authorities at the Rumichaca Bridge, which connects Ecuador and Colombia. After more than two decades, Pedro Alonzo Lopez was home. On arrival, Lopez was picked up by Colombian National Security and

was immediately processed and sent to Tolima for prosecution. In December 1979, he had travelled to El Espinal, a small town in Tolima. Within months, a ten-year-old girl by the name of Flore Sanchez had disappeared. Sanchez’s body had later been found and identified by her mother. The pattern and methodology of this twenty-year-old murder fit Lopez’s previous methodology perfectly. Along with the evidence gathered by the police, Colombian authorities had everything they needed to secure another conviction. Yet, by another stroke of luck, Lopez once again found himself saved. In 1995, he was declared mentally incompetent on grounds of insanity and incarcerated in the psychiatric wing of a prison in Bogata. Three years later, Lopez was declared sane on evaluation by the prison psychiatrist. He was then released on the condition that he attend monthly sessions with a judge and continue to receive psychiatric treatment - both of which requirements Lopez would later forgo. Upon his release, Lopez decided to go back to his roots and visit his mother, Benilda, for the first time in nineteen years. He slipped back into his terrifyingly cruel persona, taunting his impoverished mother by selling her belongings before her very eyes. Pedro kept the meagre earnings from the sale and walked back into the countryside he had once littered with the bodies of little girls never to be seen again.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A PSYCHOPATH ‘The Monster of the Andes’ has provided one interview in his lifetime - to a Mr Ron Laytner of Edit International. This one interview, in combination with his confession and the evidence obtained at the gravesites, has allowed us to piece together what went on in the mind of Pedro Lopez - the man and the murderer. Investigators have been trying to understand the psychology behind one of South America’s most deadly men so that they can ascertain both his victimology and methodology. After all, with Lopez on the loose, it might only be a matter of time before the Monster strikes again.

VICTIMOLOGY AND MODUS OPERANDI For a man whose victim count is in the hundreds, it is remarkable how consistent he has always been with his victim choices. As most profilers will tell you, victim profiling is still a relatively new mode of investigation. However, it offers great value to authorities both by helping to predict prospective targets and identify specific events in the serial killer’s own life that can point to the perpetrator. In the case of Pedro Alonzo Lopez, all of the victims were little girls, aged from eight to twelve. As discussed earlier, this was the same age that Pedro was first molested. It’s also the same age he was forced to leave his house for molesting his sister. When asked in his interview why he only ever chose young victims Pedro stated, “It's like eating chicken. Why eat old chicken when you can have young chicken?” This was intended to elicit shock and repulsion. A mass murderer who shamelessly confesses to his crimes does not have a lot to hide. Remember that Lopez revelled in the horror he inflicted.

Theories suggest that this was a reflection of his fear of adults as well as his revulsion for adult females. FBI profiler Robert Ressler once famously pointed out that, especially in cases like Lopez’s, a serial killer will often have an obsession of sorts with their mother, one that would manifest in a love-hate relationship. In cases of mothers who presented with sexualised lives, this obsession would manifest with an edge to it meaning his selection of young women was indicative of his complex relationship with his mother as well as the abuse he suffered at an early age at the hand of sexual predators. In Lopez’s warped mind, he viewed the innocence of the girls, as well as their age, as a reflection of his own naiveté, which he perhaps was attempting to purge from the girls. Some profilers have theorised that, in his mind, Lopez actually considered himself to be helping the girls, indicated by the way he would refer to them as his ‘dolls.’ They posit that his notion of being their ‘saviour' - despite his torture, rape, and murder routine - could be a reflection of his feelings about poverty and life as a victim of sexual abuse. It could be that he saw death as a gift and that in his eyes he was giving them the release none of his abusers had been ‘kind' enough to provide him. Even Lopez’s method of luring the girls was reflective of his own abusive past. Lopez would bait them by offering sweets or money, material lures similar to those offered to eight-year-old Lopez when roamed the streets of Tolima by himself. The way he had responded to the lures must have been something he regretted and berated himself for as a child and as an adult. Watching little girls the same age make the same mistake he had was likely cathartic for Lopez - it absolved him. What he had done to ‘contribute' to his abuse was a mistake hundreds of children would make. This also explains why he preferred the Ecuadorian girls to the Colombian girls. The girls he hunted in Colombia were much warier - a reminder of what he had not been. Their suspicion spoiled Pedro’s satisfaction in the kills. The abuse Lopez endured was a catalyst for the ‘Monster,’ this viciousness that the acts of rape and torture reflected. Pedro Alonzo Lopez may have killed over three hundred young girls, and he remembered every one of them. At no point did they blur into

each other. These murders were not done in an attempt to purge something from his memory. In fact, it was more as if they were keeping a memory alive - allowing him to live it again and again. Acts born not of a compulsion he was forced to satisfy, but rather the indulgence of a luxury.

HOW DO WE KNOW? Look at how Lopez committed the crimes. His signature move throughout the murders was strangulation. He stated that the moment of the kill was the most precious - the moment he watched her life force slowly drain from her body. Of his victims, three had been strangled so ferociously that their eyes popped out of their sockets. Lopez tried to explain this fetish by likening it to the ‘moment of truth' in bullfights as if he were the spectator watching either the bull or the matador realised he is facing certain death. Strangulation was a very risky method. It left behind evidence, and it was slow. With Lopez’s level of intelligence, something must have compensated for those drawbacks. Identifying that reward is the key to understanding what drove him. Like most sexual sadists, Lopez felt that his ability to control the moment of death gave him power. He had lacked that sense of control his entire life. He began as a street kid with no way to ever amount to anything more than just that. As a man, the Monster of the Andes was not some powerless street rat who could be used and abused at will. He was powerful, a force to be reckoned with. Lopez derived pleasure from controlled acts of violence. That’s what sets him apart from Garavito, for whom killing was just an afterthought. That's also what makes him so dangerous because it suggests that Pedro Lopez, now a free man, is far from done. Some people claim they’ve seen Pedro Lopez somewhere in the mountain ranges he once haunted, while some claim that he was murdered by the kin of the families he ripped apart - but the truth is, no one really knows. It is this uncertainty that causes the people of the Andes to look over their shoulders as they walk their daughters to the fish market, or warn them never to talk to strangers when they send them on an errand. After all, it was the Monster of the Andes

himself who said, with calm prophetic intent, “Someday, when I am released, I will feel that moment again. I will be happy to kill again. It is my mission.”

DANIEL CAMARGO BARBOSA

‘The Sadist of El Charquito’

THE CREATION OF CAMARGO Historically, the term ‘genius’ has usually been used to denote superior intellect. With intellect being the measure of a person’s ability to process and deal with information, the term genius has normally held positive connotations, reserved for intellectuals whose application of that intellect was deserving of recognition. A world in which history defines genius by pure intellect would also be a world in which mass-murdering psychopaths such as Daniel Camargo Barbosa would be referred to as ‘genius.’ Shocked? Born with an IQ of over 160, Daniel Camargo Barbosa’s story is very different from that of Luis Garavito or Pedro Lopez, and there is a specific set of reasons to illustrate why. For years there has been a revolving theory amongst criminal psychologists that suggests that certain serial killers are not born psychopaths. People who are born psychopaths begin to display signs of sociopathic behaviour - such as being aloof, small-scale sadistic tendencies, or even sexualised sadism - early on. A specific trigger launches them down the murderous path they become notorious for. There is, however, another type of serial killer - men and women who are not born with prominent psychopathic tendencies, with no manifestations of sociopathic tendencies in early childhood. They generally display a high level of intelligence, which makes them a malicious and particularly scary breed. Daniel Camargo Barbosa was one of these types. Daniel Barbosa’s body count, even at its maximum estimation, does not hold a candle to Garavito’s. His methodology, so far as gruesomeness is concerned, is nothing compared to the brutality of Pedro Lopez’s. Neither of these factors is what makes Daniel Camargo’s story so chilling. His reputation stems from the destruction he wrought wherever he went. He was a master manipulator, capable of using mere words to convince a young woman to bring him virgin sacrifices and even persuade hardened prison guards to help him escape a prison as impregnable as

Gorgona Island. He was, in many ways, the real-life manifestation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty - a fact as unsettling as it is fascinating.

CAMARGO’S EARLY CHILDHOOD Born on the 22nd of January, 1930, in the quaint little town of Anolaima, Cundinamarca, Daniel Camargo’s early childhood was the very embodiment of a picturesque Colombian upbringing. Camargo was born to Teresa Briceno just as Colombia began to drag itself up from the ditches of the aftermath of its civil war and into a new relative peace, which ushered in its wake Enrique Olaya Herrera’s rise to power. Until this point, Daniel was by all accounts a happy, cheerful child - until tragedy struck. When he was two years old, Daniel and his half-sister Cecilia lost their mother. Their widowed father, like many men of those regions, chose to remarry within the space of a few months - a move that would play a critical role in Camargo’s story. Daniel’s father had always been an emotionally distant man. This distance gave rise to hostility on Daniel’s part when it became evident that his father had little patience or time for young Daniel, therefore leaving him vulnerable to his abusive teenage bride, Dioselina Fernandez. Camargo’s relationship with his stepmother was a significant contributor to his development - both his sadism and his resentment for women. Reports indicate that while his stepmother shared an amicable relationship with his half-sister Cecilia, Dioselina Fernandez displayed psychopathic tendencies such as sadistic physical and psychological abuse towards young Daniel. Camargo spoke at length about his stepmother during interrogation. His statements illustrate her as being extremely abusive, both mentally and physically. In one in particular interview, Camargo described his stepmother forcing him to take off his pants and then mercilessly beating him with a cattle whip. In another, he talked about how she would force him to wear dresses and go out in public so that he could be ‘publically shamed.’ In some reports, neighbours said that it was

Camargo’s behaviour that triggered the need for punishments. Psychologists claim that this tendency to overlook abusive behaviour is a result of the ‘mask of sanity’ worn by the abuser. It’s likely Daniel’s stepmother presented his behaviour to the outside world in such a way as to justify her actions. It is a well-documented fact that a combination of psychological and physical abuse will scar a child’s psyche. Daniel was eventually forced to adopt a defence system to protect himself from the inhumane treatment he had suffered at the hands of his father’s new spouse. Camargo was a child of extraordinary intellect, so it was only natural that he perceived his circumstance as a problem in need of a solution. His solution was to become a master manipulator. He realised early on that telling the truth was not getting him anywhere with his dysfunctional family, so young Daniel resorted to half-truths, manipulation, and outright deceit to ‘save’ himself. Many years later, these same techniques would serve him to simply get what he wanted.

ADULTHOOD AND BEYOND As an adult, Daniel applied his persuasive skills to the world of sales. He became a door-to-door salesman for brands such as General Electric, Olympic and Blot Man. During this time, Daniel met and married his first wife, Alcira Castillo in the year 1957. As a newly married man, Daniel realised that his meagre income as a salesman was not enough to maintain a proper homestead. It was at this point that Daniel first began to consider alternative income sources, both legal and illegal. In 1958, Camargo was charged with the robbery of a tailoring shop. This event was to prove extremely significant to the evolution of Camargo’s felonious persona, not because he was arrested, but because mere hours after his arrest, Daniel Camargo walked out of the jail a free man. The idea of an arrested felon walking out of a police station is reminiscent of something out of a Hollywood movie. In his own words, Camargo describes the event by saying, “The moment I entered the jail, the officers were out. I walked in, grabbed an

abandoned folder off a desk, tucked it under my arm, and simply walked off into the street.” Camargo walked out of the police station and back home, to the arms of his wife and their Eduardo Santos home in Southern Bogota, then went back to work. For a while, everything seemed perfect. But perfection was not something that Camargo’s life would hold on to for very long, and things changed very quickly just four years later. On one particular day in 1962, Camargo had spent all day going door to door with a sales catalogue for mixers and other home appliances when a torrential downpour hit the city streets. Exhausted and now drenched, Camargo decided to call it a day and go home early. Little did he know the absolute betrayal he would find when he got home. While Camargo was out walking the streets of Bogota trying to provide for himself and his wife, his spouse had spent her days having an affair with another man. Camargo did not immediately react to his wife’s betrayal. Instead, he waited outside for hours for the man to leave. Once he had, Camargo silently retrieved his belongings and left to go back to his childhood home. He went back to his job as a door-to-door salesman and continued his life in the absence of his wife. One year later, he met the woman who would help him become the ‘Sadist of Charquito.’ Before we get into the details of Camargo’s relationship with this mysterious woman, it is important to understand that since his wife’s betrayal, Camargo began to develop an unhealthy obsession for purity. This obsession would feed his modus operandi as well as his psychological reasoning for the brutal rapes and murders he is notorious for. In 1963, when Camargo met Esperanza, she was a drugstore attendant at the Granada City Centre. While Esperanza was only a year younger than Camargo, she was submissive by nature. This allowed Camargo to take on the role of a dominant, controlling partner. These traits came into full force when Camargo realised, during an intimate moment, that Esperanza was not a virgin. This conflict between his ideals of purity and his affection for Esperanza acted as Camargo’s trigger.

INSIDE THE MIND OF A MURDERER The young, submissive Esperanza was the perfect foil for Daniel Camargo’s domineering and manipulative self. Having found himself at the mercy of abusive and unfaithful women for years, Daniel found that he had now shifted into a role of a dominance - and what better way to maintain this position of superiority than by ensuring his submissive Esperanza was reminded daily of how shameful her lack of virginity was. At one point, Camargo persuaded Esperanza that since she failed to preserve her own virginity for him, she now owed it to him to bring him virgin sacrifices in her stead. And so began a string of rape cases that would terrorise the city of Granada. Initially, Esperanza provided her own two younger sisters to Camargo as sacrifices. The couple had had them over for dinner, and Esperanza laced their food with sedatives that she obtained from her workplace. Once they were unconscious, she left them alone with Camargo for hours. Far from being enough, these rapes only served to whet Camargo’s newly found appetite for sadism. Knowing that he could use Esperanza’s desperation to make up for her lack of virginity to control her, Camargo enticed her with promises of marriage while simultaneously threatening to leave her. All she had to do to ensure he didn’t was continue to bring him virgins. Esperanza did exactly as Camargo instructed. It wasn’t long before a routine was established. She would dress in the blue uniform common to Granada’s major supermarket chains, enter the stores, and wait with Camargo for the perfect girl. The girls were all young, no older than ten to fourteen years, and were also attractive. Once he’d selected his target, Camargo would approach the girls as they left the shop and accuse them of theft. When the girls began to deny the theft and get panicky, Esperanza would come in and tell them not to worry, and that if they accompanied her to the manager’s office they would be able to persuade the manager not to call the police.

Terrified, the young girls would follow the sadistic couple. Half-way to the ‘manager’s office,’ they would take a detour at a coffee shop, where Camargo would offer the girls a pill to take the edge off. The pills were actually Sodium Seconal - sleeping pills. After they dosed their victims, the couple would carry them off on public transport, under the guise of being a family, to Camargo’s home, where Esperanza would give them a stronger dose of sedatives and then leave them to be violated all night. In a macabre twist, the couple would then drop the children off in front of their homes in the early hours of the morning. They continued their reign of terror for over a year. The media began to refer to the mysterious woman who abducted these women as ‘The Lady in Blue,’ since the presence of a woman in blue was the only connection they could derive from the abductions. But it wasn’t until twelve-year-old Monica was abducted that the rest of the gruesome details came to light. Monica had gone to the downtown stores in Bogata with her aunt to buy a pencil at around 6pm and was about to leave the store when a man approached her and accused her of stealing a purse. Monica denied having stolen anything, but the man continued to insist she had, and it was at this moment that ‘The Lady in Blue’ approached them and suggested that they go resolve this issue at the manager’s office. On the way there, the couple paused briefly at a coffee shop, where Monica was offered a pill to calm her down. Monica’s next recollection was standing in front of her house knowing that she’d been raped. The next day, Monica went to the police and provided them with a statement, which would later lead to the capture of Daniel Camargo and his accomplice. The police began to deploy undercover officers all around Bogata’s downtown shopping areas, as they suspected the couple employed the same routine every time. All they had to do was carefully survey the shops for a man fitting Camargo’s description. Just months later, in 1964, a man fitting the rapist’s description was spotted and approached by undercover officers who asked him to identify himself. Knowing that he was already a fugitive from the law, Camargo immediately attempted to flee the scene. The officer in

pursuit prevented his escape by shooting him twice in the leg from behind. The news of the rapist’s arrest spread quickly. Terrified, Esperanza immediately surrendered to the authorities and even provided a detailed account of the crimes, claiming that Camargo had forced her to take part. Her reports were enough to convict Camargo for up to six years. On the 10th of April 1964, Daniel Camargo Barbosa was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. Camargo was so grateful for the lenient sentence that he supposedly swore to repent and steer away from a life of crime. However, just days before his final sentencing, his case was handed over to a new judge who instead sentenced him to eight years in Bogata’s Modelo Prison. Camargo claims that it was this last minute change in sentencing that provoked him to recant his pledge, leading him instead to count down the days until his release and return to crime.

THE EVOLUTION OF A MURDERER During his time in prison, Camargo was known to read voraciously, a habit he continued after his release. He also kept a journal documenting most of his actions after his release. It’s this journal that helps us understand most of what really happened to Camargo, through his own words. Outside of the journal, Camargo, unlike the two other serial killers discussed in this book, remained tight-lipped about his killing sprees. Camargo’s evolution was gradual, almost as if it came in phases: his initial phase in Brazil was followed by the murders in Barranquilla, Colombia, and then a final phase in Ecuador.

PHASE ONE Right after Camargo’s release, a strange series of events befell Colombia. Young women from thirteen to twenty-two years old began to disappear, eventually turning up brutally raped and strangled in mass graves. The way the victims were selected and the manner in which they were left strangled prompted locals to believe that there was a ‘vampire’ preying on the women of the capital city. The authorities put together a task force dedicated to solving the murders and capturing the killer - whom they dubbed ‘The Sadist El Charquito.’ However, the bodies stopped turning up. It seemed the killer had ceased his sadistic spree. Although Camargo never openly admitted to these murders, the victimology and methodology both indicate that he was likely responsible. Further strengthening that theory, the killings stopped just when Camargo left Bogotá for Brazil.

PHASE TWO Authorities believe that Daniel Camargo fled Bogotá once he got wind of the special police task force. He entered Brazil then travelled along the Amazon River to Manaus, where he attempted to integrate

himself by learning to read and speak Portuguese. He used his experience as a door-to-door salesman to go to work selling trinkets on his way to the major cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Camargo has not admitted to any murders in Brazil, and there is no solid evidence to tie him to any such acts. His diary entries, however, describe the ‘docile’ nature of Brazilian women in comparison to the Colombian women he’d victimized, casting suspicion that he may have raped and murdered at least one Brazilian woman in order to draw such a comparison. In 1973, a Brazilian woman lodged a complaint of fraud against Camargo. While there are no other details available, it is known that the Brazilian authorities immediately captured and deported Camargo to Colombia for his lack of proper documentation. The Brazilian authorities did not wait to receive his Colombian criminal records, releasing him based on his false identity. Camargo, who was still living under his false identity when he arrived on Colombian soil, decided to move to the Caribbean coast and set himself up in Barranquilla, Colombia. Camargo was forced to live on the streets for the first few months, but he soon found a job as a street vendor selling television monitors. He acquired a black suitcase, which he carried the monitors in, and walked the streets of Sandy hawking his product. Camargo was able to earn a comfortable living and was doing quite well for himself when, one day, he saw a nine-year-old girl while walking past a school. Almost instinctively, Camargo slipped back into his old ways and abducted her. After raping the young girl, Camargo strangled her to death so that she wouldn’t be able to ‘tattle’ to the police as Monica had years before. This murder was Camargo’s first confirmed murder. In May of 1974, Camargo was arrested after returning to the scene of a murder where he had accidentally left his suitcase of television screens. While it is now known that Camargo was responsible for over eighty murders in Colombia, he was convicted for just one -the rape and murder of a nine-year-old. In December 1977, he was interned on the island of Gorgona, Colombia, where he was sentenced to thirty years. The sentence was later reduced to twenty-five years—a sentence not consistent with his crimes.

PHASE THREE The final phase of Daniel Camargo’s evolution encompasses his escape from his island prison and his relentless two-year murder spree in Guayaquil. His escape, the way he manipulated his way back to Ecuador as a free man, is a chilling illustration of how deftly Camargo used his intellectual prowess. Daniel Camargo’s escape from Gorgona is like something out of a film. The heavily guarded prison was located on a remote island, making escape nearly impossible. To this day, the particulars of how Camargo managed to escape are unknown. All that is known for certain is that, in November of 1984, Camargo, after a careful study of the ocean currents surrounding Gorgona, escaped the island on a rickety boat. His escape was considered to be so humiliating that the Colombian authorities initially lied and told the press that Camargo had been eaten alive by sharks. The rest of the details of Camargo’s escape remain a mystery. All that is known for sure is that by the first week of December 1984, Camargo had somehow arrived in Quito, Ecuador, and then travelled on to the densely populated city of Guayaquil by bus, disappearing into its crowded streets. Just weeks later, on 18th December 1984, a nine-year-old girl went missing from the city of Quevedo in Los Rios, Ecuador. Within twenty-four hours of that, a ten-year-old girl was abducted. Was this yet another reign of terror by Daniel Camargo?

THE PURSUIT OF A PSYCHOPATH: CHASE AND CAPTURE It was 1984. Quito was a bustling city in the heart of Latin America. Ecuador had just begun to heal from the scars that Pedro Alonzo Lopez left on its social landscape. Suddenly, scores of young, attractive women began to go missing in almost all of its major cities. Soon enough, the country was swept up in the same hysteria that it had just put to rest. For months, the police and the media hunted down every possible lead, and yet nothing made sense. Speculation spread. In hushed whispers, tales of red trucks driven by human-trafficking rings ran rampant. The theory was that these mysterious red trucks were operated by the Ecuadorian Mob and that the Mob used the trucks to abduct attractive young women and sell them into international prostitution networks. Some claimed the Mob were involved with more than just prostitution; they suspected the abductions to be potentially tied to everything from organ traffickers to sex dungeons, even to satanic cults in which millionaires could purchase the victims as human sacrifices. It wasn’t only vague rumours that were circulating, though. Within weeks, alleged victims began to come forward, and the media broadcasted their statements, in which they claimed to have been abducted by a group of blonde men with heavy Italian accents. These ‘victims’ went on to claim on public television broadcasts that they had been abducted and taken to ships with foreign flags, where they were then forced to undergo cruel prostitution routines. These statements were so disturbing that they not only incited terror amidst the general public but led to national-level concerns, which led to the government authorising a Navy search and rescue mission along the Pacific coast. The expedition went on for months, and yet there was no evidence of the ‘ghost ship’ the victims were describing. The local authorities weren’t making much headway with the red truck leads. Desperate,

the Civil Defence of the Province of Guayas issued a statement outlining extreme security measures in the face of this yet unidentified threat. The statement required young girls to dress less provocatively, not speak to strangers, and not stay out late at night. Meanwhile, the people of Ecuador were afraid, and that fear bred animosity. The public began to develop an anti-authoritarian sentiment and take action into their own hands. They decided to search on their own for loved ones, offering rewards within communities, which prompted acts of vigilantism. Nothing seemed to help. Months passed by, and women kept disappearing. In 1985, after almost a year without any significant progress, there was a startling development. In the rugged landscape of Guayaquil, piles of female bodies were discovered hidden in a nearly inaccessible section of bush. The bodies were found in groups, stripped naked. There was nothing on them or around them to help identify the victims, but the forensic researchers believed that they had enough evidence to piece together a connection with the missing women of Ecuador. Within weeks, the forensic team delivered their report. The bodies of all of the women showed signs of asphyxia or strangulation. There were no entry wounds or any other signs of weaponry. There were no bruises other than the strangulation marks inflicted at the time of the murder by the murderer himself. All the bodies indicated that they had been raped at about the same time as they had been murdered. The forensic team were able to identify the bodies and notify the appropriate family members. During the period of notification, many of the victims’ families were reported to have received strange messages and phone calls. Some families even received letters and packages. The person responsible for the murders was taunting them. In one particular example, a letter was delivered to the family of a young delivery girl, on the Pacific coast, where a group of kidnappers demanded a million sucres ($3,000 USD) in exchange for the young girl. Suspicious, the family demanded proof of life. A few days later, a

package arrived for the family. Inside was the underwear of the young delivery girl. At this point, the family contacted the police, but the messages and phone calls ceased immediately. Even so, the fact that the phone calls had been placed confirmed what the authorities suspected ever since they discovered the bodies hidden in the bushes in Guayaquil. At this point, the police had already called in renowned Ecuadorian psychiatrist Dr Oscar Bonilla Leon. Leon reviewed all the available evidence and then used both psychological and sociological profiling to determine that, based on the evidence, it was most likely that the murderer in question would be a man of mature age and average height. Leon went on to dispose of the previous theories of a group or a gang, pointing out that the bodies all showed identical signs of sexual abuse. Strangulation is normally indicative of a single perpetrator. Basic criminology shows that, unlike theft or drug trafficking, sex crimes generally do not involve groups. Given the nature of the crime and the evidence accrued, the most likely scenario was that these disappearances had nothing to do with ghost ships, kidnappings, or human trafficking, but were instead the act of one man. Ecuador, once again, had its very own serial killer. For months, both the Ecuadorian authorities and media used every bit of information they could to keep the people of Ecuador sharp and alert. Finally, this constant vigilance paid off. One day, a police officer was assisting an old, unfailingly polite man who had fallen down in the middle of the road and, in so doing, dropped a bunch of paperwork. The officer noticed among the paperwork the identity card of a young woman. He didn’t think anything of it at the time, but once he was back at the police station, his eyes fell upon the daily newspaper, which published photographs of the most recent victims on its front page. Stunned, the officer felt a chill run down his spine. This was the same girl whose identification card had fallen out of the old man’s documents. By the time the officer realised that the man was most likely the man they were looking for, it was already nightfall, and he knew there was nothing he could do at that moment. Instead, he waited for daybreak and returned to the site of the accident. Sure enough, he found the

documents that had been scattered across the road the previous day. The evidence was clear. They had found their man. Based on the documentation collected and a sketch supplied by the Ecuadorian police, a picture of the most wanted man in Ecuador began to circulate. His name was Carlos Solis Bulgarian. By 1986, there was no police officer in Ecuador who did not know that name. In fact, just weeks later, on February 26th of 1986, two officers patrolling the Avenue of Los Granados de Quito noticed a man limping down the middle of the road, making his way across town with his little black suitcase. The officers later explained that there was something about the way the man’s serenity clashed with the bustling little town that prompted them to step forward and ask to check the contents of his suitcase. Inside the suitcase were a copy of Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky and the clothes of a young girl. Later, these would be identified as the clothes of eight-year-old Elizabeth Telpes, who had been murdered just two hours before the police came across the limping stranger.

IMPRISONMENT AND DEATH Dr Bonilla Leon was the first person to interview the unknown man. After a series of questions, the man claimed to be Carlos Solis Bulgarian, an Ecuadorian who was part of a gang of rapists. Solis went as far as to name his two accomplices, a Jamie Rodriguez and Jorge Chavez. Based on these claims, the suspect was transferred in a police convoy to Guayaquil, where he repeated the same story. The interviewers, however, had already seen the transcripts from the initial interview and noticed that while the suspect stayed true to the theme of his story, there were a number of facts that didn’t line up. For one, the man’s accent was not Ecuadorian; it was Colombian. He was constantly mixing up sites and dates. Leon allowed the suspect to weave his way into an immensely tangled web of lies. Once he had, Leon carefully pointed out the discrepancies. Confronted with such proof of his deceit, the suspect finally showed signs of cracking. The man shifted into the regretful demeanour of a man who had been wronged as much as he had committed wrong, imploring, “Doctor, I just want to know if you would be willing to work with me in the direction of my recovery, to help me return to normal, to return to a useful man.” Well aware of the psychological manipulation that the suspect was attempting to use, Leon agreed and pretended to humour the suspect. It worked. Eventually, the relaxed and admitted, “You’re right, I am not Ecuadorian; I am Colombian. And my name is not Carlos Solis Bulgarian. My real name is Daniel Camargo Barbosa.” By the end of the interview, Camargo had admitted to killing and dumping over seventy-one women from Ecuador. He even helped the Ecuadorian authorities find the bodies, and in so doing revealed proof of some of the most sadistic acts of mutilation ever seen on Ecuadorian soil. Camargo’s victims had all been girls, but unlike the bodies that had appeared in the bush, these bodies were hacked and crushed. The tortured bodies were barely recognizable. When was asked why he chose young girls, Camargo replied, “Because they cried.”

Despite of all the suffering caused by Camargo, he was sentenced to only sixteen years in prison - a sentence that was reduced by two years for ‘good behaviour.’ Interestingly, one of Camargo’s prison mates was Pedro Lopez. The years rolled by, and the people of Ecuador slowly put behind them horrors of the Charquito. Life as they knew it returned to normal. But this calm was not what it seemed. Back in a corner cell at Quito’s Centre for Social Rehabilitation of Men, an inmate, Geovanny Noguera, better known as Luis Masache, was seen to be sharpening his machete. It is said that Masache had come to Guayaquil for the sole purpose of avenging his young niece, who had been one of Camargo’s victims. On the 13th November 1994, Masache waited for Camargo to emerge from his cell and delivered twenty blows with his machete. Camargo was left for dead in a pool of his own blood.

CONCLUSION A near-continuous campaign of abduction, rape, and murder like the three covered in this book does not happen without massive exploitable gaps and blind spots in important government systems and people’s reasoning. In a way, these mass killing sprees may bring about some positive outcomes for the people from the countries they plagued. Communities have become more vigilant, the authorities have greater experience in dealing with such heinous crimes, and the government have had to question how they sentence such crimes. There’s a strong argument to suggest that the biggest influence resides with parents. This book exposes the catastrophic effect of a child’s neglected and abusive upbringing can have. These ‘monsters’ are products of the society and culture we have created. The role society plays in each of their lives is critical in moulding who they eventually became. One wonders: What is more terrifying, the notion that serial killers and child molesters exist and run rampant, that authorities are illequipped to deal with such events and deliver just sentences, or that the killers are produced by the failings of society?

FRED & ROSE WEST BRITAIN’S MOST INFAMOUS KILLER COUPLES

INTRODUCTION On the 24th of February 1994, police knocked on the door of an ageing house in the English town of Gloucester. They’d come to serve a search warrant in the case of a missing girl – the daughter of the house's inhabitants. What they uncovered would shock the world: decades of child abuse, an underground torture chamber, and a burial ground containing the bodies of the spent victims of the torture – including that of the missing daughter. The address was 25 Cromwell Street, and these discoveries would earn it the moniker “The House of Horrors”. At the end of the investigation, the number of the murdered was twelve – all young females, including one daughter and one stepdaughter. The couple responsible were Rosemary and Frederick West, and this book will tell you their story. We’ll start from the very beginning, with the killers’ childhoods and upbringings, exploring in detail the factors that contributed to their later depravities. From there we’ll detail the crimes themselves, following the tragic tales of their victims, including the mechanisms that led them to their grim fates. We’ll examine how the full extent of their crimes was uncovered in the subsequent investigation. Finally, we’ll dig into the malignancies surrounding the killers and that drove them to commit the heinous acts. This book is not one for the faint of heart. It enters into graphic details that may upset those of a delicate constitution. It is a true life report on real events. If you believe as I do that we are better served knowing and understanding the full depths of darkness the human soul is capable of, and if you are able to stomach this knowledge, then read on and discover the story of one of Britain's most infamous killer couples.

CHAPTER 1 – BEGINNINGS The story of the couple so horrifically take so many young lives begins in Herefordshire Parish, of Much Marcle, 18 miles northwest of Gloucester, in the very place most of the murders would later take place. On the 29th of September 1941, Frederick Walter Stephen West was born. He was the second child and first son of Walter Stephen and Daisy Hannah West, descendants of several generations of farm labourers. Much ado has been made about Fred West’s childhood, and understandably so: one of the most common features of sex criminals and child abusers is having experienced abuse themselves. There is a great deal of confusion around the issue when it comes to Fred West, however. Most of it has been created by Fred West himself through the tangle of misleading and contradictory tales he told to the police upon his capture. Many outlets that reported or commentated on the story chose to take the more sensational allegations that came out of the West investigation at face value, while others acknowledged that little could be confirmed, no matter how compelling the story of West’s childhood would be if it had been true to his account. The entire affair is clouded with a fog of uncertainty, but a probable narrative can be pieced together. Of West’s childhood, what can absolutely be ascertained is that he grew up in a large, close-knit family. Despite the austerity of the war and post-war periods, Walter and Daisy West went on to have four more children after Fred. Daisy was particularly close to her eldest son – there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he was her favourite. This manifested in a rigid over-protectiveness, including his being forbidden to date until he was 21. He also had a close relationship with his father, who was far more permissive and provided a strong role model for young Fred. The exact nature and extent of his influence, however, has been up for debate. In the course of the investigation, Fred West claimed that everything he did was inspired by his childhood. According to him, incest was a common, accepted thing in Walter and Daisy's household, and both parents engaged in intercourse with their children. He would claim

that his own first sexual experience was with his mother, at the age of twelve. He also claimed that Walter was fond of bestiality and introduced him to it and that his father once told him that if he wanted to do anything at all, he could do it as long as he did not get caught. But as we’ve said, those accusations are not overly credible. We’ll examine them in further detail in Chapter 4. The man who whose vaguely sinister visage came to loom in the minds of the horrified public, started out as a charming blond-haired and blue-eyed infant. He wasn’t much gifted academically – he performed dismally in most subjects in school and had difficulty reading and writing throughout his life. This led to a great number of reprimands and punishments, which Daisy took personally. She rushed to his defence on multiple occasions, making a row at the school over what she took as personal affronts and as bias against her “golden son.” The effect of this on young Fred was likely less than ideal, placing him on the receiving end of a great deal of ridicule for being a “momma’s boy” and causing distance from and friction with his classmates. All the same, he did show some talent with his hands, doing rather well in art and woodworking. This served him well in his adult life, as he became a competent builder. This same skill was also ideal for the hiding of the bodies of his victims. While he was a rather intransigent and strong-willed young man, it appears that for most of it he wasn’t especially violent or immoral. On the 28th of November 1958, when Fred was at the age of seventeen, something changed that: a motorcycle accident. He came away from the mishap with a broken arm and leg and a fractured skull. He wound up with a plate in his skull, the broken leg set shorter than the other, leaving him with a permanent limp. His family also noticed a marked change in his character following the accident – an increasingly volatile temper, lack of overall emotional control, and a predilection for theft and shoplifting that would continue well into his adulthood. From these symptoms, it’s possible to deduce that Fred suffered brain damage from that accident. One incident in particular, though, stands as compelling evidence of some type of brain trauma affecting his actions. One evening at a local youth centre, Fred was

chatting up a young lady out on the fire escape. At some point, he stuck his hand up the girl’s skirt, a move which distinctly failed to impress. The altercation that ensued resulted in Fred falling off the fire escape. He was knocked out cold, suffering yet another blow to his head. His habit of theft reached a small climax in 1961, when he was caught attempting to lift a watchstrap and cigarette case from a jeweller's. He was fined for the crime. The lack of sexual boundaries exemplified in the fire escape incident also culminated in disaster that year when he impregnated a thirteen-year-old girl. He managed to get off the statutory rape charge without a sentence due to his suffering from epileptic fits, but it resulted in an extremely strained relationship with his family and his expulsion from their home. Despite his off-putting appearance and the desperation apparent in both his overzealous advance on the girl on the fire escape and his preying on a minor, Fred actually never had much trouble wooing women. He was, in fact, quite adept at it. His brother Doug later recounted how Fred was the one who always got the prettiest girls. He never left home for a social activity looking anything less than sharp, and he had an easy charm that served him quite well. Despite his trouble with reading and writing, he was an eloquent and poetic speaker. Following his distancing from his family, Fred West took on several jobs in construction and as a delivery driver. It was while driving that he met the woman who would become his first wife – and later one of his victims. Catherine Bernadette “Rena” Costello, a stripper and prostitute, was waiting at a bus stop when Fred picked her up. He coaxed her story from her: She was pregnant by a Pakistani immigrant bus driver and on the run from her home in Scotland. She, like Fred, had a habit of theft and burglary, and there was an active search by the authorities for her whereabouts. Imagine her consternation, then, when the bus she was riding was flagged down by an officer of the Criminal Investigation Department. Realizing her need for a cover story, Fred came to the rescue. He offered to claim responsibility for the pregnancy so that Rena could proffer the excuse that she had come down to look for him, the father of her unborn child, hence distracting from her identity. The ruse

worked – the officer let them on their way. With that particular crisis averted, Rena still had a dilemma: she had to flee and remain in hiding. The two of them had struck a chord with each other. There seemed to be only one solution – that she and Fred get married, however temporarily, so that the trouble would blow over. Fred agreed, and on the 28th of November 1958 – within a fortnight of their meeting – Rena Costello became Rena West. The marriage took place in secret – the West family only knew about it long after it had happened. This deepened the rift between Fred and his family. The caustic character of the bride he brought home did not help. Rena did not fit in with the family at all, and they all saw her as an unlikeable person who was bad news for Fred. Consequently, and once again in secret, Fred and Rena made the decision to leave for Glasgow. On the 22nd of May 1963, Rena’s daughter was born. The child was given the name Charmaine Carol Mary West, since they had decided to keep up the ruse that Fred was the father. Her true father’s details were not listed on the birth certificate. Charmaine was clearly biracial, a fact they explained away to Fred’s family by saying Rena had miscarried and they had decided to adopt. Rena’s ‘bus driver’ ‘boyfriend’ and the biological father to Charmaine turned out to be her pimp. Fred had no problem with this and actually took on a job with him as Rena’s chauffeur, driving her between shows and clients. During the day, he drove an ice cream truck, and it was while out on this job that he became entangled with yet another lover and future victim. While out his rounds one day, Fred came upon a girl crying on the step to a house. She was dishevelled – her clothing in rags and her long hair matted. He rolled down his window and he called her over to offer her a sundae free of charge. They got to chatting, and Fred invited her into the truck to ride along with him for the rest of the day. Grateful, she opened up to him. Her name was Anna McFall, and she was 16 years old. Her mother was an alcoholic and was engaged in prostitution to fund her addiction, which had taken her over so completely that she no longer cared enough to take care of her own daughter.

Fred was moved by her plight and felt compelled to get her out of it. As it turned out, she could help him. By then, Rena had given birth to Fred’s first legitimate child, Anne Marie West. With both he and Rena busy and away all the time, the children had no one to look after them. Anne, as he always called Anna McFall, could step in and take on their care. He brought her home and Rena helped her to clean up and wash her hair and gave her a change of clothes. This state of affairs continued for some time, until tragedy struck on one of Fred’s ice cream rounds. On the 4th of November 1965, he ran over and killed a four-year-old boy with his truck. The death was ruled an accident, and Fred was cleared of any wrongdoing, but his legal exoneration did not dispel the outrage of the community. Fearing reprisals, Fred fled back to Much Marcle, taking the two children with him.

ANNA MCFALL (8 APRIL 1959 – JUNE 1967) At some point before this, Anne had fallen in love with Fred. Unable to bear being without him, she weaselled his address out of Rena and followed him. This turned out to be a godsend for Fred who, with no one to take care of the children while he was at work, had had to hand the children over to Social Services. Anne resumed her role as caregiver for the children. During this time, Fred likewise fell in love with Anne. He would later call her his first (and only) true love – he came to regard Rena as neither a good wife nor mother to his children. While they had all been living in Glasgow, Rena had continued heavily in her ways and did not give much in the way of care for Fred or the children. In a journal Fred kept after his arrest, he wrote of how Anne would give him a smile and make him a cup of tea when he got back from work and talk to him about the children. He would also say that while Rena belonged to whomever she happened to be with at any one time, Anne had belonged to him alone. Their relationship blossomed, and within a couple of years, Anne was pregnant with his child. And then, in August 1997, when Anne was six months pregnant, she disappeared.

Anne McFall’s death is obscured in a particularly dense pall. It was the very last one to be confirmed as linked to West. While exact circumstances remain unclear, the murder of Anne McFall is the one that is uniformly recognized as the first to be his first. Some of the details can be tentatively guessed at. Rena had visited several times to see the children, once living with them for several months, but may have been unaware of the true nature of Anne and Fred’s relationship. With Anne pregnant, hiding the relationship was no longer an option. It could have been that Fred panicked and resorted to extreme measures. Another popular theory is that Anne had begun pestering him to divorce Rena and marry her and, for whatever reason, Fred was unwilling to do so, to the point that he resorted to killing Anne to escape the pressure. There is another theory, as well. Fred had already exhibited the predilection for extreme sexual acts, which would later become the hallmark of his crimes – something may have gone wrong while he was trying to have some fun, fun that Anne might not have been able to take in her condition. Or, he could simply have killed her in a fit of rage. Without his testimony, what exactly happened may never be known. No seriously difficult questions were asked at the time. When a social worker asked after her, Fred needed to say nothing more to explain Anne’s sudden absence than that she had returned to Scotland. Anne embodied several characteristics that later defined many of his victims: a young, pretty girl living on the shadowy periphery of society, unlikely to be terribly missed. The period between their meeting and Fred murdering her was quite long, but apart from that, the pattern would be the same. Fred would pick up his victims at random while driving around on his job. A chance meeting while on a delivery round was also the way Fred met with his future wife and partner in crime. On the 29th of November 1968, Fred picked up a young girl at a bus stop. Her name was Rose Letts, and that very day was her fifteenth birthday.

ROSEMARY LETTS

Rosemary Pauline Letts was born on the 29th of November 1953, the fifth child of William (Bill) Andrew Letts and Daisy Gwendoline Letts. Both parents suffered from mental afflictions: her father was schizophrenic and her mother clinically depressed. While pregnant with Rose, Daisy received the now discredited and harmful procedure of electroshock therapy. We can’t be absolutely sure that the electroshock therapy had an effect on Rose’s tender developing brain, but from her infancy, it was obvious that she was not a typical child and may have suffered some damage. She would rock violently back and forth, to the point that if she was put in a pram it would slowly be propelled across the room. This physical tic persisted as she grew older in the form of rhythmically swaying her head, to the point of seeming self-hypnosis, earning her the nickname “dozy Rosie.” She was also not terribly bright and did poorly in school. Unlike Fred, there is almost no doubt that Rose, along with her sisters, was sexually abused by her father. Bill Letts was an absolute tyrant who would deliver cruel beatings to his children that would not stop until his wife interjected – at which point he would divert his violent attentions to her. Harsh physical punishments were also not uncommon. For example, he would compel his children to dig up the entire garden for no particular reason, making them do it all over again if it wasn't to his absolute liking. The one thing Rose would prove to be extremely clever at was manipulating her father. She made sure to stay on his good side and always leapt to do as he said and as a result would avoid bearing the brunt his worst beatings. She became his favourite – and possibly the prime target of his sexual predations. Rose turned to a common coping mechanism exhibited by victims of abuse by embracing extreme promiscuity once she reached puberty. By all accounts, it seems that Rose, with time, became an enthusiastic participant in the sexual abuse. She also very early on demonstrated another common affectation of abuse victims: she became an abuser herself, fondling her younger brother in his bed. This was still not enough for her – she wanted more, and with as many other partners as possible. But like other parental abusers, Bill Letts probably saw her as his property and absolutely forbade her to

see anyone else. This was no barrier to Rose. She simply made sure he wouldn’t find out, going out in secret. This drove her mostly into the arms of older men, who were not always tender. It is known that on one occasion Rose was the victim of rape by an older suitor. Sick of her husband’s constant abuse, Daisy Letts left Bill in early 1968, taking Rose with her to live with one of her older daughters. Yet Rose – probably missing her father’s twisted affections – decided she would rather live with Bill and returned to him. It was during this period that she met Fred. Despite their age difference, or because of it, Rose and Fred hit it off. Fred’s sexual appetites were as extreme and voracious as ever, and he was without a doubt thrilled to find someone who could match him in that respect. As soon as he learned of their relationship, Bill vehemently objected, going so far as to visit and make threats against Fred. With a degree of irony that may have been lost on him, he also attempted to have Social Services intervene on his behalf to stop the abuse of his still underage daughter by a man twelve years her senior. Perhaps his concern went beyond his lecherous possessiveness of his daughter and he could sense some dark quality in Fred, the same as that which he had within himself, but magnified to more monstrous proportions. On Rose’s sixteenth birthday, exactly a year after they’d met, she moved in with Fred. She eventually fell pregnant with his child. Together with the children Charmaine and Anna Marie, in the early part of 1970, they moved to a house – number 25 Midland Road, in Gloucester. The Wests' first child together, who they named Heather Ann, was born on the 17th of October 1970.

CHARMAINE WEST (22 FEBRUARY 1963 – JUNE 1971) Through all this time, Fred’s shoplifting and theft habit continued unabated. He was booted from job to job after being caught stealing, and around the end of 1970, it would get him into trouble with the law once again. On the 4th of December of that year, he was convicted

for failing to pay several fines that had been levied on him for thefts and was sent to prison. Rose had never particularly enjoyed being saddled with the care of children that were not hers. Her frustration undoubtedly multiplied when Charmaine and Anne’s father was put away and she was left with the task of looking after them along with her own new baby. She would take this frustration out on the two stepchildren themselves, very often giving them heavy beatings over the slightest offence. The language of violence was one she had learned from her father with a strident, brutal intensity. Anne Marie would later recount how, no matter how badly she was beaten, Charmaine would resolutely refuse to give Rose the satisfaction of making her cry. This would heap further coals on Rose's rage, increasing the fury of the beatings. In June of 1971, shortly before Fred’s release from prison, Charmaine disappeared. It’s likely that during one of the beatings, Rose was driven into a fury so intense that she killed Charmaine. Fred came out of prison on the 24th of June 1971. We’ll never know his first reaction upon learning of his stepdaughter’s death, but what seems likely is that he disposed of her body himself, or at the very least helped Rose do so. Not long after his release, Fred filled in the house's coal cellar and built an extension to the kitchen over it. It was in this buried coal cellar that Charmaine's body was found.

CATHERINE BERNADETTE WEST (14 APRIL 1944 – AUGUST 1971) To explain Charmaine’s disappearance, Rose and Fred told family and neighbours that Rena had come and taken her away. But when Rena herself showed up to see her daughter, making that particular fib stick proved difficult, to say the least. Once again, the circumstances around Rena’s death are unclear, but we can guess. Most probably, Fred took it upon himself to do it. The degree to which Rose was involved cannot be ascertained. She may have actively helped Fred plan it. At the very least, she probably knew about it, making her an accessory to the murder.

Like Anne McFall, Rena was a drifter and given to prolonged disappearances. Her absence wasn’t difficult to explain. Rose and Fred may never even have had to try, as there was never a missing persons report filed or police inquest undertaken, and her absence was taken for granted by any officials who may have visited the family. And just like Anne, Rena was buried in a nondescript field out in the Gloucestershire countryside, her kneecaps and fingers removed. The whole affair of Charmaine’s death served to bring Rose and Fred closer together. They had a shared, deadly secret now – Rose had killed, and Fred had killed in turn to help cover that up. The cover-up had worked, and the pair was free to continue with their life together. And what a life it was. They were definitely no ordinary couple, and as time went on they broadened their sexual escapades. Rose began working out of their house as a prostitute, mostly servicing local Gloucester men of West Indian descent. She also placed advertisements in swinger magazines seeking “well-endowed” men to bed her – often for profit, but sometimes just for fun. Fred enthusiastically encouraged this behaviour and may, in fact, have been the first to suggest it to Rose. Fred would often watch her at work through a peephole for his own pleasure. A neighbour at 25 Midland Road, Elizabeth Agius, sometimes babysat the children for Rose and Fred. She supplied information about the couple’s escapades during that period that would prefigure their later crimes. According to her, after they returned late one night, she asked the couple what they had been doing while they were out. They answered frankly: they had been out cruising for young girls – preferably virgins – to have sex with. She took it as a joke at the time. There is a possibility that the pair were perpetrating sex crimes during this period, but if they did, they never confessed. Elizabeth was herself propositioned by Fred, though she refused, and may have herself been a victim of drugging and rape at the couple’s hands. Rosemary once again became pregnant by Fred near the end of 1971. Having decided they were a match made in whatever twisted underworld couples like that are made, the couple wed on the 29th

of January 1972, and Rosemary Letts became Mrs West. Since Rena had not been confirmed dead or even declared missing, the marriage was technically bigamy on Fred's part, but there were no repercussions from this. On the first of June 1972, Rose and Fred’s second daughter was born. They named her Mae West. Number 25 Midland Road was becoming too small to accommodate their growing family, so a little later that year, they moved to an address that would go down in infamy and as knowing an amount of human suffering more in keeping with the darkest years of the Middle Ages than the 20th century: number 25 Cromwell Street.

CHAPTER 2 – THE HOUSE OF HORRORS If the land could talk, if it could tell us of the things experienced by human beings that have passed over it through the ages, there is none that would not have a story of suffering, pain, and bloodshed. The struggle against the elements, starvation, exposure, wild animals, and also against each other. There has been no limit to the ingenuity and enthusiasm with which people have inflicted misery upon each other. The deeper any one place should delve into its memory, the greater the frequency and intensity of violence it would recall. The battlefields of the Far East upon which Genghis Khan and his Mongolian horde carried out their campaign of global domination saw so much slaughter they became mired with the grease of decaying bodies. In some cities, rape was so widespread that a tenth of the world’s Asiatic population is descended from that one prolific conqueror. All of Europe is dotted with thousands of dungeons, towers, and castle cellars that would speak of eagerly sadistic applications of torture upon human bodies. Numerous town squares would give testimony of “witches” and “heretics” who were burned or hanged while throngs of spectators, children among them, cheered on – a craze that spread from the Old World to the New. Every place where humans have settled would have a vast library of stories of tribal warfare, interpersonal violence, and wanton cruelty. Mercifully, the closer to the present we consider, the fewer the places that bear fresh memories of such torment inflicted by thinking creatures upon each other. Violence and cruelty of all types have decreased dramatically with the ages (it is the greater availability of information that makes tales and legends of it far easier to come by in the modern age), and we can be thankful for that. But some places still give setting to such atrocities, which are more horrifying for their rarity. These places would tell us that while the soul of

mankind as a whole has become less savage, there still exists the seed of the blackest brutality in some of us. Number 25 Cromwell Street is one such place. The house itself was a drab, brown old three-storey building. It was neighboured on the left by a Seventh-Day Adventist church and on the right by another house of similar construction. The Wests probably had dark things planned for the place from the very beginning: their favourite feature was the cellar, which was perfect for their sexual escapades. Their old neighbour, Elizabeth Agius, recalled Fred telling her that he planned to use it either as a room for Rose to practice her trade, or that he would soundproof it and use it as his torture chamber. Once again, Ms Agius assumed he was joking, but having had a deeply unpleasant experience with him she could not quite seem to recall, she was no longer sure. All the same, she could not do anything about it and simply allowed the couple to drift out of her life. It was not long after they moved into the house that it saw its first victim.

CAROLINE ROBERTS – THE ONE WHO GOT TO LIVE While Fred continued taking jobs as a driver and construction worker, Rose was quite busy herself entertaining clients at their home. She couldn't mind the children effectively. They needed a nanny, and in October of 1972, they found one in Caroline Roberts, a seventeen-year-old girl and former beauty queen. Caroline’s family knew of the arrangement and were given the Wests’ assurances that they would take good care of her. If the Wests’ idea of care was to incessantly pester the poor girl with propositions and attempted seductions, then care for her they did. It did not take long for Caroline to grow tired of their advances enough to leave, but Rose and Fred were not done with her yet. On the 6th of December 1972, the couple, by sheer happenstance, found Caroline hitchhiking on the road during one of their prowls for young girls. They seized upon the opportunity to invite her to their

home, whereupon they effectively abducted her, bound her up, and took her down to the cellar. Threatening to keep her down there as a sex slave, have Fred’s “black friends” come in and have their way with her and then kill her and bury her under the paving stones of Gloucester, they got her to comply with their demands. What followed was a night of sexual and physical torture. Rose was no bystander, forcing Caroline to perform cunnilingus on her and inflicting her fair share of the torture. Once they were done with her, they let her go, extracting from her the promise that she would tell no one and that she would return the next day to resume her duties as their nanny. This may speak to a certain naiveté on their part this early into their joint career in crime, but who knows: it may have worked for them successfully before. They can’t have utterly failed to find partners in all their earlier outings, and at least some of them had to have experienced a stretching or outright breakage of their barriers of comfort and consent. If indeed there had been other girls who suffered at the Wests’ hands as Caroline had, then the threats worked, as none of them ever came forward to lay charges. The Wests' tactic may have worked perfectly on this occasion, too, had it not been for Caroline’s mother. She noticed the bruises her daughter had received during their ministrations and patiently coaxed the story out of her. She then immediately called the police to report the Wests. An investigation was launched and the Wests brought to trial, but when Caroline declined to testify against them, the court’s hands were tied. The most they could be pinned for was indecent assault, and all the repercussions they faced were paltry fines of fifty pounds each. The Wests took the experience with Caroline as a learning experience: from this point on, whenever they picked up a victim they would make sure she could never speak a word of it to anyone – on account of being thoroughly deceased and buried out of sight. And for their “regular” dose of sexual sadism, they would keep it all in the family.

ANNA MARIE WEST – DAUGHTER AND VICTIM

Fred West’s daughter Anna Marie was just eight-years-old when they turned their attention on her. The first incident lived on in her memory so vividly that she would recount it in excruciating detail decades later, when her abusive parents were eventually brought to trial. She told of how Rose led her down to the cellar to the waiting Fred and took her clothes off, all the while telling her how lucky she was to have such caring parents who would make sure she would be able to satisfy her husband when she got married. A gag was placed over her mouth to prevent her from screaming, and Rose held her down while Fred undid his trousers and penetrated her. Anna Marie was so severely traumatised physically and emotionally that she could not go to school for several days afterwards. The threat of a severe beating was enough to keep the naive, terrified girl from ever speaking to anyone about what had happened. Anna Marie would continue to be the prime target of Rose and Fred’s abuse until she finally had enough and left years later. Her parents were not the only people who abused her – they allegedly prostituted her out to clients who desired for younger flesh. One of the abusers was Fred’s brother John, who allegedly visited on many occasions to have sex with his young niece.

LYNDA GOUGH (1 MAY 1953 – APRIL 1973) The Wests needed a nanny to replace Caroline Roberts, and for that purpose, they employed another young woman with whom they had developed a relationship. Her name was Lynda Gough. She had dropped out of school to work as a seamstress at a local Gloucester co-op at the age of fifteen. Exactly how she became entangled with the Wests is unclear, but it is suspected that she worked for them as a prostitute out of their residence and was a voluntary sexual partner to them both. On the 19th of April 1973, Lynda left her family home, leaving behind a note telling them she would be moving to Number 25 Cromwell Street. As an adult, she was free to do as she pleased, but when several days passed without hearing from her, Lynda’s mother went to Cromwell Street to investigate. When she got there, it was Rose who answered the door – wearing Lynda’s robe and slippers. Rose

told her that Lynda had indeed been there a few days but had left to find work outside of Gloucester. Lynda’s mother may have believed the story – that her daughter had moved on. As suspicious as Rose wearing her clothes may have seemed, it was a massive leap to assume that the Wests might be holding her captive, or worse. She was concerned, though, and told a friend who was a police officer about her daughter’s disappearance. The police officer later stated during the inquiry into the Wests’ crimes that he had made a missing persons report on Lynda but, after an extensive search, no record of any such report was found. Lynda probably endured a period of torture before being killed and dismembered her fingers, toes and kneecaps removed. She was buried in the ground floor bathroom of the house. Fred, being the builder he was, was always working on some new addition or making some improvement to the house. He would often work long into the night, and must, from the outside, have appeared as just another dedicated do-it-yourself enthusiast. But his constant improvements had another purpose: disposing of the bodies of his and his wife’s victims somewhere no one could accidentally stumble upon them. Every single known murder that occurred at 25 Cromwell Street was concealed somewhere under the soil on the premises. In August of 1973, Rose gave birth to the Wests’ first son, whom they named Steven.

CAROLE ANN COOPER (10 APRIL 1958 – NOVEMBER 1973) On the 10th of November 1973, a fifteen-year-old girl went out to the cinema with her friends. Her name was Carole Cooper, and she was a resident of The Pine Children’s Home in Worcester. She had been given a pass to stay with her grandmother in Warndon for the weekend. The last that was ever seen of her was getting on a bus in Warndon at ten past nine that evening. She was probably picked up by the Wests during a nighttime cruise, taken down to the cellar at Number 25, tortured for several days, and

then killed. As usual, she was dismembered and had fingers, toes, and kneecaps removed and then was buried in the cellar. That cellar really did prove to be a perfect self-contained ecology for their activities: victims could spend their final agonising days in it then be killed, processed and disposed of without the Wests ever having to lug anything suspicious around in the above-ground levels. Carole’s grandmother reported her missing after she failed to turn up that evening. An extensive police search was undertaken, but it never even touched on the Wests as potential suspects. Picking up young girls at random and under the cover of darkness was certainly serving the Wests well. The reason both of them went out on their late-night trawls together rather than Fred going alone was to have Rose provide an illusion of safety. No young woman with the slightest shred of self-preservation would get into a vehicle occupied by a lone male at night. A couple would probably be, by her calculation, safer. The unfortunate girls who suffered at the Wests’ hands probably all entered their car willingly and without any struggle, only to realize far too late the hell they had damned themselves to.

LUCY KATHERINE PARTINGTON (4 MARCH 1952 – DECEMBER 1973/JANUARY 1974) By and large, the Wests’ favourite victims were girls who were drifters, cut off in some way from family and strong-willed, though naive about certain aspects of life. Such girls were likely to disappear to make their own fates at an early age, and so their disappearances would never come as a total shock. Any search or inquest that resulted from their disappearance was likely to be limited and made with an implicit understanding that they were probably alive and well somewhere. The trawling technique was imprecise, and the next time they used it, in December 1973, their victim would be an exception to the rule. Lucy Partington was born to a well-off middle-class family, a cousin of English novelist Martin Amis. She had completed her secondary education and was a student at Exeter University. Over Christmas,

she travelled home to be with her family in Cheltenham. On December the 27th, she went to visit a friend in Pittville, leaving again at ten minutes past ten that evening. She was last seen on Evesham Road waiting to catch a bus home. Lucy was reported missing the next day, and an investigation was launched. Yet again, as thorough as the investigation was, there were absolutely no clues to connect her with the Wests at all, and the investigation never touched them. While the police and her loved ones were frantically trying to find her, Lucy was in the cellar at Number 25, being tortured for its occupants’ sadistic pleasure. This is likely to have gone on for several days, possibly into the New Year, before she was finally put out of her misery. As usual, her body was dismembered, fingers, toes, and kneecaps removed. It seems that Fred suffered an accident while doing this – on the third of January 1974, he went to a hospital to get treated for a serious cut. A knife matching the cut was found with Lucy’s body when it was exhumed from the cellar over two decades later.

THERESE SIEGENTHALER (27 NOVEMBER 1952 – APRIL 1974) The Wests’ next victim was also a high-achieving young woman from a well-off family. She was Therese Siegenthaler, a 21-year-old from Switzerland. She was a free spirit, eschewing the more formal route of secondary education at the age of sixteen to pursue secretarial studies. In the early part of 1973, she left her home country for England to study sociology at the Woolwich College of Further Education in London. Therese had an appetite for adventure and travel, and the week before Easter 1974, she left her student accommodations in Lewisham intending to hitchhike to Ireland. She was due back the week after Easter, but when she failed to turn up, people became concerned. She was reported missing on the 26th of April 1974. Therese had never even reached her destination – she was probably picked up by the Wests in Gloucester or the surrounding area the very evening she left. She may have been offered a night’s

accommodation by the Wests and accepted, never suspecting the plans they had for her. What happened to her had become routine to the Wests – she went through the same ritual of torture, murder, dismemberment, and mutilation as the others had before her.

SHIRLEY HUBBARD (26 JUNE 1959 – NOVEMBER 1974) The next victim was a little closer to the Wests’ preferences in social status, and probably also in age – Shirley Hubbard was a mere fifteen when she was abducted. She was born Shirley Lloyd but changed her last name to Hubbard – though the name change was never officially made. She was attending Droitwich High School and was also going through a work experience placement at a general store in Worcester. On the fourteenth of November 1974, she left her workplace to head home, and this was the last anyone ever saw or heard from her until her remains were recovered from under the cellar floor at Number 25 two decades later. Lucy's body showed evidence of what was done to her before she died that most of the others did not – her head was completely covered in tape, with nothing but a pair of plastic tubes inserted into her nostrils for her to breathe through. This was Rose and Fred practising a type of BDSM known as "close confinement,” in which the (optimally, willing) “submissive” has their head or entire body covered up in latex or some other plasticine material so as to deprive them of the majority of sensation and freedom of movement. BDSM was an integral part of Rose and Fred’s regular sex life, and probably formed the basis of most of the tortures they inflicted on their victims. There is, of course, nothing wrong with BDSM, so long as all parties involved are consenting and have set clear guidelines and boundaries for everyone to follow. One such guideline is a “safe word” or “safe gesture,” which the submissive partner can say at any time, whenever they feel uncomfortable, their boundaries are pushed a little too far, or they reach their physical limit. The dominant partner must immediately stop whatever they are doing and comply with any

of the submissive’s directives to release them from bindings as necessary. Many of the activities involved in BDSM are physically dangerous and can lead to death, especially if they are carried out for a prolonged period – hence part of the necessity for a safe word. Rose and Fred would not have bothered with safe words for their victims – they did not even bother with the cardinal rule of BDSM, which is the consent of all parties involved. It may be that most of the victims were not outright murdered with intent, but that some BDSM activity had gone on for far too long while their bodies slowly gave out. The end result was the same at any rate – several young lives were tragically ended in some of the most excruciating ways imaginable.

JUANITA MARION MOTT (1 MARCH 1957 – APRIL 1975) Following the murder of Shirley Hubbard, every one of the Wests’ known victims were familiar to them, usually as current (at the time of their deaths) or former lodgers at Number 25. This may seem counterintuitive, as it created an undeniable link between the Wests and the girls, but the type of girl that found her way there typically fit the profile of estrangement from family and a slight likelihood of being missed or vigorously looked for afterwards. This saved them the dice roll of picking up young women from the streets and eliminated the possibility of picking up someone who would be looked for so thoroughly as to be traced back to them. Their next victim, Juanita Mott, was the daughter of an American service family. She was a troublesome child. At fifteen, she dropped out of school, ran away from home, and took on a series of temporary jobs. She lived briefly at Number 25 but was living with a friend in Newent when she left on the 11th of April 1975, promising to return there the next day. When she failed to return, her family contacted the Missing Persons Bureau and the media to make pleas to anyone aware of her whereabouts. Making a report to the police was considered unnecessary – they presumed she had disappeared

of her own volition and that law enforcement’s resources were better used elsewhere. The only people who knew her whereabouts were the Wests, and they weren’t about to pipe up. Just as they had Shirley Hubbard, they subjected Juanita to extreme BDSM-style torture. With her, they practised rope bondage, a style sometimes humorously referred to as "two hours of arts and crafts and five minutes of sex.” She was gagged with a length of nylon stocking and then trussed up with washing line, forming elaborate loops around her limbs and crisscrossing horizontally and vertically around her torso and head. A length of rope with a noose was then used to suspend her from the ceiling of the cellar. When she expired, she received the same treatment as those who had succumbed to the Wests’ lusts before her and buried under the cellar. The first long interval during which there are no known victims of the Wests was between the years 1976 and 1977. Rose had continued working as a prostitute or entertaining male “friends” the entire time the family lived on Cromwell Street, as well as “managing” girls who worked out of their house. Most of her clientele was still largely from the West Indian community of Gloucester, but one of her more frequent ones would be her father. Bill Letts indulged in old habits, coming to have sex with his daughter, with Fred’s explicit knowledge and approval. Another source of clientele, according to Fred, were Gloucester police, an accusation that was vehemently denied. The accusation, if false, would not have been unthinkable. Rose had a dedicated room – “Rose’s Room” – in which she did her work. The room was equipped with several cameras that were used to make recordings of Rose’s sessions. The cameras had all been stolen by Fred, who still indulged his other vice of shoplifting despite the danger of potentially leading law enforcement to his larger crimes. Fred enjoyed watching the tapes and also had a peephole into Rose's Room through which he would watch her live at work. Fred's cuckoldry would culminate in Rose giving birth in December 1977 to a child of mixed race, something he was actually enthusiastically happy about. They named the child Tara. Also in 1977, Fred converted the upper floors of the house into bedsits so as to better accommodate lodgers.

SHIRLEY ANN ROBINSON (8 OCTOBER 1959 – APRIL 1978) One of the earliest occupants of the freshly spruced and revamped lodger’s accommodations at 25 Cromwell Street was a young Leicestershire-born girl named Shirley Robinson. Shirley fit the profile for the Wests’ lodgers perfectly: a troubled teen and drifter, she was also willing to work for her landlords as a prostitute and was eager to participate in sexual activities with them. She was also bisexual, meaning she could play with Rose, who was of the same inclination herself. Shortly before Rose gave birth to Tara, Shirley fell pregnant. The last that was ever seen of Shirley was in April of 1978. Given that she had managed to stay alive so long, it’s unclear just why Shirley was killed. It may simply have been another escalation of the Wests’ unsafe BDSM practices. As may have happened with Anne McFall a decade previously, her body might not have been able to cope in its fragile condition. On the other hand, it may have been due to Rose becoming jealous of her. Hypocritical as it may have been given that she had given birth to a child who was not Fred’s, Rose may have felt threatened by this younger woman as a potential rival for her husband’s love. If this was the case, she may have done the deed herself, or she may have given Fred an ultimatum that either she or Shirley needed to go – “go” being defined in the most terminal sense. Whichever the case, it was Fred who disposed of the body, going through his usual ritual of dismembering the body and removing the fingers, toes, and kneecaps. The cellar was now full. It could only take six bodies before he would have to start burying them on top of each other. Instead, Shirley was buried in the back garden, probably under the cover of night. Rose gave birth to another daughter – Louise West – in November of 1978. Rose’s father, abuser, and sexual partner, Bill Letts, died in May of 1979 of a lung infection.

ALISON JANE CHAMBERS (8 SEPTEMBER 1962 – AUGUST 1979) The last victim who was unrelated to the Wests was another troubled teen. Alison Chambers was born in West Germany and grew up in Swansea. Early in the year of 1979, at sixteen, she was moved to Jordansbrook House, a care home for troubled girls. She worked under the Youth Training Scheme for a solicitors’ office in the city. The last time she was seen was in August 1979. Her disappearance was reported to the police as an absconder from care. It was simply assumed that she had run away from the care home, and so a thorough search was not undertaken. The assumption was right: Alison had left to stay at 25 Cromwell Street, enticed by the promise of perceived freedom. The picture of what happened to her was filled in by Sharon Compton, a friend of Alison's who had gone to Cromwell Street with her. Sharon spoke of what drew young girls to Cromwell Street: the atmosphere of family that the Wests projected and the promise of acceptance for once in their lives, rather than constant correction and rejection. But after a couple of weeks, the Wests began to show their true colours, forcing the girls into engaging in sexual activities, including BDSM. Foreseeing the danger she was in from the couple, Sharon left. When Alison realized this, too, it was already too late. She, too, was buried in the back garden. Following the death of Alison, there is a lapse of eight years until the next murder, at least that we know of. This is not to say that the Wests didn’t find other outlets for their sexual gratification. They still had Rose’s prostitution business, which continued turning in revenue as ever. Rose gave birth to three more children, only one of whom was Fred’s. The other two were of mixed race, sired by Rose’s West Indian clients. The Wests also likely engaged in sexual relationships with their lodgers, many of whom worked for Rose in her prostitution business. The other recipients of Rose and Fred’s sexual attentions were their own children. Anna Marie continued as the chief focus of their attention. In 1979, Fred impregnated her, and the pregnancy had to

be terminated as it was ectopic, meaning the embryo had implanted in her fallopian tube and wasn’t viable. By legal definition, Anna Marie’s pregnancy had to have been the result of a rape – she was just fifteen years old – but no further investigation was made into it by the police or social services. The question of the father’s identity was never even posed. The pregnancy proved to be the last straw for Anna Marie. She moved out in December of that year to live with a boyfriend. This was no big loss for her parents – they still had plenty of children onto who to divert their attention. The two elder daughters, Heather and Mae, received the bulk of the attention early on. The younger ones would receive their initiation in due course. Fred would check on how they were growing and admire and fondle their developing bodies, giving them compliments on how they were “developing.” He would also reward them with cream cakes for complying with his sexual advances – as well as shutting up about them. The eldest son, Steven, would also, around the age of thirteen, be introduced to having sex with his mother, being told it was a normal thing for a boy to do. The children were also subjected to physical abuse at the hands of Rose. She had not lost a bit of her temper and followed in her father’s footsteps in delivering savagely cruel beatings to her children. She often tied the object her rage’s hands behind her back with a belt or length of rope and beat her bloody. 31 hospital visits were made by the West children over the years, but no alarm was ever raised. On one occasion, Rose became so angry at one of her sons that she strangled him until he developed bruises around his neck and burst blood vessels in his eyes. He explained these injuries at school as the result of an accident involving a rope around his neck and a fall out of a tree while playing. The beatings were held over the children’s heads to make them comply in never telling about the sexual abuse.

HEATHER ANN WEST (17 OCTOBER 1970 – JUNE 1987)

The Wests' first daughter was less acquiescent and more resistant to the abuse than her older half-sister, Anna Marie, ever had been. Her refusals to have sex with her father earned her the label of lesbian – and she did have a greater attraction towards girls. Nonetheless, the Wests often used expedient of force on her. She was a headstrong and independent-minded child in general and often provoked the rage of her parents. It was likely one such moment that got her killed – she drove one of her parents to such anger that they went too far and killed her. Fred admitted to the murder early on after the crimes were discovered, but retracted later on to pin the blame on Rose. Fred pinned nearly everything on Rose near the end, lending some doubt to this, but Rose had already shown that she could be driven to a blind, killing rage with Charmaine. A neighbour of theirs also reported Rose and Heather having a “hell of a row” around the time of her disappearance. Realistically, either of them could have been the one to kill her. Heather had also told her girlfriend about the abuse the previous year, and the girlfriend had told her parents, who were friends of the Wests. Not believing a word, the parents brought it up with Rose and Fred, who laughed it off. An alternative explanation for her killing was that it was a punishment for this lack of confidentiality, or that they did it to get rid of a “weak link” who could have blown the lid on their disgusting activities. It once again fell to Fred to dispose of the body, and he performed the usual rituals on her. While he was digging her grave, he got some unexpected help: Steven came out and asked him what he was digging for. Fred told Stephen he was planning on making it into a fishpond, at which point Steven offered to dig it for him. You can imagine his confusion when the planned fish pond was within days filled in again. Fred then proceeded to build a patio over the burial site. To explain Heather’s disappearance, the other children were told that she had left to work in Devon, later changing the story, after a long time had passed with no contact from her, to say she had run off with a lesbian lover. Fred eventually allowed the truth to come out,

though, as a “joke” to the children that they would end up “under the patio, like Heather” if they misbehaved. After Heather, the Wests killed no more, though they still continued with the sexual abuse of their children. In the end, it would be this – along with the (actually truth-based) joke about Heather – that would bring down their facade and reveal them as the monsters that they were.

CHAPTER 3 – INVESTIGATION AND TRIAL The Wests managed to keep a lid on what was happening in their house for an impressive amount of time. Apart from the couple of girls they picked up who were from a higher social standing, they had managed to keep most of their victims low profile. Even in those two exceptions, they escaped detection by virtue of their having no discernible connection to them. They had also, through a combination of intimidation, bribery, and appeal to the common bond of family, effectively silenced their children about the abuse. There had been close calls – making the mistake early on of letting Caroline Roberts live, a mistake they never repeated again, and the breaking of confidentiality by Heather, which she may have paid for with her life. But what Heather did was bound to happen sometime. Children make friends, and they develop trust and share things with those friends. The only way to completely eliminate this variable would have been to completely isolate their children, perhaps going so far as to imprison them in the cellar as many abusers have done. But the West family projected an outward picture of a normal, healthy family – even if it was one whose house saw visitors at all hours of day and night making patronage of the body of the mother of the house. The children went to school and played as normal, and they made friends there as other children did. The narrative of normalcy Rose and Fred fed to the children about the abuse may in fact have played a part in their downfall. Telling the children that what was happening was normal and yet instructing them never to discuss it with anyone surely sent mixed signals. They may have begun to view it as one of those “private matters” all families have that should preferably be kept confidential but could be shared with someone they deeply trusted. In 1992, the Wests’ daughter Tara, fourteen at the time, made a friend she trusted, and she told that friend about some of the abuse: the molestation and rape she had suffered at the hands of her father

and the mountain of pornographic videotapes of their mother he would sometimes view with the children. The friend did turn out to be trustworthy, but not in the way Tara had naively expected. The friend understood that what Tara had told her was unnatural and wrong and chose to make one of the most difficult decisions a friend ever has to make: whether it was in the interests of her friend to break the implicit bond of confidentiality to get her out of an abusive situation. She made the choice a true friend would make and told her parents about the abuse. Unlike Heather's girlfriend's parents, those of Tara's friend either did not have a friendship with the Wests to cloud their judgment or if they did they did not allow it to do so. On the fourth of August 1992, the friend's mother went to the police with the allegations, and on the sixth, a warrant was served on the Wests' residence to search for evidence of child abuse. The stacks of pornography were found, along with enough evidence to charge Fred with the rape and sodomy of a minor, and Rose with assisting in the abuse of a minor. The five younger West children were taken into the custody of Social Services and housed temporarily at Cowley Manor in Cheltenham. The detective assigned to the case was named Hazel Savage. She'd had prior experience with Fred West during his earliest troubles with the law. She had joined the police force back in the sixties when Fred was beginning his habit of shoplifting. She'd also investigated some of his first wife Rena's brushes with crime. Immediately, she began noticing some odd things: first of all was the complete absence of Rena and her daughter Charmaine in Fred's life, and their seeming complete disappearance from the face of the Earth after her previous investigation had concluded. An interview with Anna Marie West, which revealed her tragic story of abuse, also served to deepen her suspicions as she heard of Rose's rages at Charmaine. The second, was Heather's absence from family videos after 1987. The crux of the investigation at that point was the alleged abuse, though, and Detective Savage had to focus her attention on that. In June 1993, Rose and Fred came to trial for the charges against them, but then the trial hit a snag that was frustratingly familiar: Tara

refused to testify against her parents – as, oddly, did her friend. With both key witnesses unwilling to give their testimony, the criminal case completely fell apart. Rose and Fred were free to go. Fortunately, though, Social Services had enough evidence to keep Tara and her four younger siblings in their custody and out of the Wests’ clutches. They would suffer abuse no more. With the trial unsatisfactorily concluded, Detective Savage could pursue her inquiries into Rena, Charmaine, and Heather’s whereabouts with her entire attention. Social workers taking care of the younger West children had heard them refer to the family joke about Heather being under the patio. At first, they assumed that it was a joke and never even informed the police about it. It was only with Savage's continued interest in Heather that one of them thought to mention it. Further questioning of the children left the detective convinced that it was no joke and that Heather really was buried under the patio. She began to petition for a warrant to excavate the area under the patio to find the remains. The rest of Gloucester Police had been searching for Heather, but only in relation to the abuse investigation, hoping that she could shed further light that would allow them to press new charges on Rose and Fred and perhaps this time get a conviction. They took the bee in Savage’s bonnet over the patio as quixotic, fully buying the Wests’ explanation that she was alive and well somewhere out there, and they just needed to find her. The biggest objection to undertaking the excavation was the cost: it would be no cheap and easy thing, and an expenditure of cash and manpower had to be well justified before it was authorised. As more and more time passed with no trace of Heather, expending that cost began to seem more and more justifiable. The final detail that had to click for them was the fact that Heather’s national insurance number had not been used at all ever since her disappearance, meaning that she had never undertaken any employment, claimed any benefits, or visited a doctor anywhere in the UK at all. Either she had left the country by clandestine means as soon as she left home, or she was dead. The only possible lead they had was that little family joke.

THE DECEPTION COMES TO AN END On the 24th of February 1994, police knocked on the door to Number 25 Cromwell Street with a warrant to excavate the back garden in search of the remains of Heather Ann West. When Stephen West answered the door, he reacted to the warrant with genuine surprise and amusement – were the police really going to demolish the patio and dig up their garden over a joke? When her son told her about the warrant Rose, immediately telephoned Fred. He replied that he was “on his way.” Fred reportedly left the construction site he was working on as soon as he received the call at 1:40pm, but by the time detectives left the house at half-past five that evening, he still had not arrived. He was not seen or heard from until 7:40pm, when he arrived by his own volition at Gloucester police station. What he did during those six hours is a mystery to all, but there has been some plausible speculation. When it was discovered that fingers, toes, and kneecaps of all of the girls and women Fred had buried had been removed, the question arose of just what had happened to them. If Fred had kept them as souvenirs, he may have used that time to get rid of them. Alternatively, he may have visited other burial sites, perhaps that of his first love Anne McFall, or perhaps some other secret site that was never discovered. The purpose of the visit to the police station was simply to mock the police once again for expending so much time and resources on a joke. His explanation for Heather’s disappearance and lack of contact was that “lots of girls disappear, change their names and go into prostitution,” reiterating that Heather was a lesbian and had perhaps run away with a partner, and also that she had had drug problems. With the police having no warrant for his arrest, he was free to leave and so returned home. Meanwhile, Rose was also being interviewed at the house, and she would give the police the same account of Heather’s absence. When Fred got home that evening, he took the dogs for a walk in Gloucester Park, together with Rose. Whatever they discussed on their constitutional, it’s likely that they both recognised and acknowledged the near certainty that the police would find Heather’s

remains. Fred also probably offered to completely shield Rose from all suspicion and take all of the blame upon himself. When Detective Savage and her colleagues came to Number 25 the next morning, Fred had a brief private conference with Rose before instructing the police to take him to the station. When they got him into the police car, he admitted to killing Heather and burying her in the garden. He also told them that they were digging in the wrong place. He was then arrested and taken to Gloucester Police Station. The Wests’ ploy to deflect suspicion from Rose did not work as well as they had hoped, and she too was arrested about an hour after Fred and taken to the police station in neighbouring Cheltenham.

UNEARTHING THE DEAD Fred secured the services of a solicitor named Howard Ogden. He was interviewed later on the day of his arrest about the death of Heather. In that interview he gave his first account of what happened: he had been angry at Heather over something, he could not remember what, and rather than quail at his rage or attempt to make peace, Heather had laughed at him. Intending to wipe the smirk off her face, Fred had reached over and throttled Heather. He had not intended to kill her – just to shut her up – but had miscalculated his strength and the amount of time she could endure. He provided a glimpse into his BDSM life when he said that he had endured being choked and deprived of oxygen for much longer amounts of time, and he was shocked when she fell limp as he let go of her. Nearly all of Fred’s interviews with the police and his solicitor were recorded on tape, and they make for a fascinating look into his mind. His recall of every place and setting was vivid – including when the things he said contradicted others he had said earlier. His description of how he disposed of Heather’s body was no exception. He told of how he had taken her into the bathroom and garrotted her with a length of nylon rope to make absolutely sure she was dead and wouldn’t wake up when he put the blade through her skin. When asked how he had managed to go through with cutting his daughter up, he stated that he had closed her half-opened eyes. “You wouldn’t

want someone looking at you while you were cutting into them, would you?” he said by way of further elaborations, seemingly oblivious that normal people don't ever want to cut into other people at all. He also described in detail the sounds Heather’s body made as he cut into it – the worst, he said, was going through her neck, which had made a crunching sound as he sawed through it. Later in the day, the police took him back to Number 25, where he pointed out the exact spot Heather was buried. Even with Fred's direction, investigators found that digging at the house was far more difficult than expected. It was turning out to be a typically rainy English spring, and the combination of that with the high water table caused the soil in the garden to be absolutely waterlogged. To make matters worse, there was a burst sewer line adding its putrid effluent to the mire and creating unsanitary working conditions. This led to significant delays in finding the body. When lunchtime on the 26th of February rolled around without any notable findings, Fred may have begun to believe the investigators would never find the body and give up on the search. At 1:30pm that afternoon, Fred was interviewed again. This time, he recanted his confession of killing Heather. Heather was alive and well, he told them, working for a drug cartel in Bahrain, with a new birth certificate and a personal chauffeur driving her around in a luxury Mercedes. A further interview later on yielded the same answer from him. At around 4pm, the investigators finally found something – a human bone, in a location different from the one Fred had pointed them to. They may have initially thought that Fred had lied to them and had been trying to misdirect them when he gave them the location. When the police came to him with the find, he dropped the Bahrain story and again admitted to killing Heather. When asked if there were any other bodies out there, he denied that there were. The bone was taken to the Home Office pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight, who identified it as a human femur – a thigh bone. Professor Knight was then taken to Cromwell Street, where he helped to uncover a more-or-less full set of remains – more, because there were two femurs. Professor Knight, who had a dry sense of

humour, quipped, “Either this lady had three legs or we’re looking at more than one body.” Fred was interviewed later that evening about the third femur and admitted to killing and burying Shirley Robinson. He described the night he buried her in detail – it was a bright, moonlit night, so he had no need for artificial lighting. He also appeared to express remorse over what had happened, stating that he had a problem and that he had wished he could tell Rose so that she could get someone to help him. He accidentally let slip the number of bodies that were buried in the garden when he said that there had been three victims thus far, before hastily correcting himself, admitting only to the two that were known at that time. Fred had still not been charged with a crime and so could only be held for a maximum of 24 hours without a further warrant. He was taken before the Gloucester Magistrates' Court, and the police received a warrant to hold him a further 36 hours. Fred was interviewed again after that and asked a second time if there were more remains to be found in the garden. He finally dropped his insistence that Heather and Shirley were the only ones. He admitted that there was someone else buried there, whom he called "Shirley's mate." This would turn out to be Alison Chambers. Fred's recollection on this detail was incorrect – he had killed Shirley in 1978, while Alison had not moved to Gloucester until early 1979, meaning the two could not have known each other. On the 27th of February, Fred was charged with the murder of his daughter, Heather West. When Rose was let out on bail that same day, it seemed the ploy to divert attention away from her seemed was working. The next day, Fred had the charge read to him at the Gloucester Magistrate’s Court but was not asked to plead. He was then remanded into custody, where he was interviewed about exactly how he had killed Shirley Robinson. He told the police about his affair with her, and that he had decided to end it without Rose’s knowledge by throttling Shirley in her sleep. He also described how he had cut Shirley up, stating that he had passed over his axe and gone for his knife to do the deed. This assertion was not supported by the forensic evidence – Shirley’s bones were found to have marks and shatter patterns

consistent with having been chopped straight through with an axe. He also claimed to suffer from terrible nightmares over the sound her body made as he cut through it that woke him up screaming. It’s likely Fred added these details to give himself a few “humanising” traits. On the second of March, Fred was further charged with the murders of Shirley Robinson and an unknown female – Alison Chambers’ identity was still not known at the time.

THE APPROPRIATE ADULT Due to Fred’s apparent mental deficiencies, as revealed by his nearilliteracy, a social worker name Janet Leach was assigned to him as an “appropriate adult.” The duty of an appropriate adult is to assist vulnerable people – adults like Fred, as well minors – through the process of trial, making sure the accused understands everything that is going on and that they are not exploited by the police. Unlike a solicitor, an appropriate adult is not bound to maintain the client's confidentiality. This meant that anything Fred said in her presence, she could choose to pass on to the police or give as testimony in court. Fred, of course, did not know this, and for some reason he also appeared to have a strong attachment to her, leading to him giving her a great deal of information he would not give the police. Mrs Leach picked up on this and used it to her advantage, convincing Fred to come out with several truths he would otherwise never have volunteered. She still avoided breaking Fred's trust and never came forward with any information he did not want her to share. On the day charges for the other two murders were brought against Fred, a member of the public told the police about the former Cromwell Street tenant Lynda Gough and her sudden disappearance. Fred initially denied any knowledge of her, then changed his story to the one he and Rose had told Lynda’s mother all those years ago – that she had left to work in Weston-SuperMare. Unsatisfied with this answer, the detectives told Fred about the ground scanning equipment they had acquired that could sense disturbed earth through solid matter, and that they would use it through the entire house.

Janet Leach was also unsatisfied with his claim that there were no other bodies buried under the house and used the mysterious leverage she had with Fred: she threatened that she would refuse to work with him any longer if he did not confess to everything. This is what seems to have tipped things over for Fred, and on the evening of the fourth of March he handed a note over to the police admitting not just to the bodies buried under Cromwell Street, but to his very first victims from the 1960s – murders they had not yet thought to connect to him. The note stated, "I, Frederick West, authorise my solicitor, Howard Ogden, to advise Superintendent Bennett that I wish to admit to a further (approx.) nine killings expressly Charmaine, Rena, Lynda Gough and others to be identified." He did not even know the names of all of his victims and referred them by nicknames such as “Scar Hand” for one, on account of the burn scar on her hand, and another as “Tulip” as he believed her to be Dutch (likely the Swiss student Therese Siegenthaler). The next day, Fred, dressed in an overall similar to those worn by the investigation team, was taken to Cromwell Street to point out the locations of the bodies in the cellar. At this point, Fred’s pronouncements began to take a surreal turn. He asserted that he could see the spirits of the women he had killed and that they guided him to the spots under which they were buried, after which they left peacefully. This may have been yet another attempt by Fred to manipulate the investigators, perhaps this time into believing he was insane and unfit for trial. Investigators undertook the task of excavating the cellar and bathroom, which was by no means an easy one. The cellar had to be dug up by sections, and when one section was completed it had to be filled in with concrete to preserve the structural integrity of the house. In order to get a concrete mixing truck close enough to do the job, the low perimeter wall of the Seventh-Day Adventist church had to be demolished. In return for the courtesy, the search agreed not perform any work on Saturdays, out of respect for that being the church’s day of worship. The members of the church also made visits to other residents on the street and held special multi-

denominational prayer services to help the community through this troubling time. While the remains of his victims were turning up over the next few days, Fred was being questioned about the circumstances surrounding their deaths. He still maintained that Rose knew nothing. He admitted to the sexual nature of their demise, stating that he had engaged in adulterous relationships with all of them, but when asked if they had been tortured, he replied with a vehement “NO!” further stating that “nobody went through hell” and that “enjoyment turned to disaster.” When it became obvious that all of the skeletons dug up had fingers, toes, and kneecaps missing, Fred was asked about this. He refused to comment on several rewordings of the question as to what had become of the missing bones. Digging also commenced at 25 Midland Road. The investigators had to break through a cement floor and metal sheeting to get to the coal cellar and then excavate several tons of filled-in rubble. Charmaine’s remains were recovered on the 5th of May 1994. The task of ascertaining the identity of each set of remains had fallen to David Whittaker, a forensic orthodontist. Where dental records were available, he compared them with the teeth of each skeleton, but for several, he had nothing to go on except pictures of the missing girls and women. The task of identifying most of these remains proved difficult and painstaking, but that of confirming Charmaine's was one of those cases every profession encounters once in a while, the kind that is both very easy and extremely satisfying, as it clearly demonstrates the inner workings and value of the profession. Dr Whittaker was provided with a picture of Charmaine and Anna Marie in which Charmaine was sporting a very wide, gap-toothed grin. Dr Whittaker, accounting for growth, could then extrapolate what the teeth on Charmaine's skeleton would look like and then compare his expectations with reality. It was a perfect match. As the remains turned up and were identified, further charges of murder were brought against Fred. Although both Rose and Fred maintained Rose’s innocence, it seemed highly improbable that all this had been going on without her knowledge, if not her active

participation. Rose was also charged with the nine Cromwell Street murders.

THE GHOST OF ANNE During conversations with Janet Leach, Fred began to talk about someone else who had figured greatly in his life – Anne McFall, whom we described as having been his first true love. When Fred showed Janet a picture of Anne, the probable inspiration for his borderline-obsessive trust and fondness for her was revealed – the resemblance between Anne and Janet was so uncanny that the picture could have been mistaken for one of Janet at a younger age. Through Janet, Fred revealed that Anne had been murdered – but not by him. Anne and he had been living together, and she was pregnant with his child as well as tasked with minding Charmaine and Anna Marie. He said that he had come home late one night from a delivery run to an abattoir to find his wife Rena and her pimp at the time – a Jamaican man named Rolf – standing over Anne's body in a suitcase. Rena, according to him, had stabbed Anne to death in a drug and alcohol-fuelled rage and was still incoherent and uncomprehending of just what she had done when he found them. With Rena’s pimp there, his hands were tied. He could not go to the police. Rolf intended to dispose of Anne’s body at the garbage tip, but Fred would have none of that – he said they would bury her at their “special place” in Much Marcle. Two and a half decades later, he followed her “spirit” and lead police to the spot on the edge of Fingerpost Field, where he recalled burying her. He would later admit that he had been lying about the ghost this particular time. When the police expressed doubt over the veracity of this version of events and suggested that it was he who had killed Anne, he reacted badly, stating over and over again that she was not just the first, but also the only woman he had ever truly loved. In private, he admitted to Howard Ogden that he had, in fact, killed Anne. He also said that he had told his father, Walter West, about it and even led him to the field where he had buried her. According to Fred, Walter had told him that he would not turn him in, and that if Fred could live with what he had done, that would be up to him. He

would, however, no longer be welcome in the family home. Fred suspected that Walter had also told his mother Daisy, and the stress of this knowledge had contributed to her succumbing to a gallbladder infection not long after. When asked about how Rena had died, he said that it had been due to an argument that escalated. The evening on which it happened had begun well enough, with some drinking and a tryst at their favourite field – a different one in Much Marcle from the one he had shared with Anne. During the post-coital talk, she had somehow managed to tick him off. In the course of the argument, he became so incensed as to smash her against the gate, instantly killing her. He buried her in that very field. Again he led the police to the burial site with yet more talk of her spirit guiding him to the spot. The excavation of the fields took even more time than that of the two houses had. Fred’s estimates of where the bodies were buried were slightly off, and investigators had to call in heavy equipment and an inflatable environment tent to protect the dig sites from the elements. The excavations both commenced on the 10th of March 1994, but Rena’s remains were not found until the 11th of April, Anne’s on the 7th of June.

A SHATTERED BOND The news that Anne’s remains had been unearthed brought about a change in Fred. Now that his true love had finally found rest, he was released from his bond with Rose. He did not begin by straight out accusing Rose of anything, but he let slip a few clues: Rose had “always been Anne, in a way” to him, and he had defended her because of that. Not long after, in another interview with the police, Fred stated, "I have not, and still not told you the whole truth about these matters. From the very first day of this enquiry, my main concern has been to protect another person (sic) or persons, and there is nothing else I wish to say at this time." Over the next couple of weeks, Fred began to shift more and more of the blame towards Rose. He would begin with an insight into her sexual character: the fact that she had been a willing and

enthusiastic sexual partner to her father. He claimed not to have endorsed the relationship, but that he had caught them together at least half a dozen times. He then went on to allege that the swinging and prostitution had all been Rose’s idea, as had the initiation of all their BDSM activities. He said that she had also been a source of shame for him at work – it was difficult to show his face there knowing that all of his workmates had slept with his wife. He also made a further allegation about the incident with Caroline Roberts: he had been a bystander while Rose taped her up and abused her. This was a very different story from the one that Caroline herself would tell. It had been Fred who knocked her out, and both of them had participated in the abuse. He still, however, avoided saying that Rose had been involved in any of the murders. Once Number 25 had been confirmed as a crime scene, Rose had meanwhile been transferred to alternative accommodations, together with her now adult children, Stephen and Mae. In the hopes that Rose would accidentally let slip that she had been involved in the murders, the house they were transferred to was wired with recording devices. But while Rose and her children did have many conversations, in none of them did she say anything that would incriminate her. On one particular occasion, not long after the investigation began, Rose had a late-night conversation with Mae in which she gave her version of what happened. It was pretty much the same as the original story that Fred had told – that Fred had performed all of the killings himself and she had absolutely no knowledge of them. When she came to talk about the rest of their sexual activities, Rose said that it was Fred who had driven them both into it all. She pointed out their age difference – Rose had been but a girl when she met Fred, and she accused him of brainwashing her. The prostitution and abuse had all been at Fred's insistence. Rose may very well have meant for Mae to believe all this, and she may have had the benefit of plausible deniability had the children only ever seen Fred initiate the abuse. It seemed that no further bodies would be forthcoming, and all of those that had been recovered had had their identities confirmed to

the best knowledge of the forensic investigation team. There was little else left to do but bring the Wests to trial. On the 22nd of September 1994, Frederick and Rosemary West were brought before the Gloucester Magistrate’s Court and had their charges amended to nine joint charges of murder for the ones that occurred at 25 Cromwell Street. This court appearance was the first time Rose and Fred had been seen each other, let alone been in the same room and close enough for physical contact since the investigation had begun and Fred turned himself in. Who knows what was going through Fred's mind when he saw Rose. Perhaps he thought she would still recognize their pact and give him some form of affirmation. Perhaps he found himself yearning for old times and wanted to rekindle some of the affection they had shared. Perhaps seeing the woman he had spent so much of his life and shared so many secrets with trumped whatever feelings he had still harboured for a woman nearly three decades dead. Whatever the reason, when Fred passed by Rose as he entered the courtroom, he leaned over to her and touched her shoulder. She did not turn to acknowledge him or return the gesture in any way. She did not make any moves to communicate with him or even look at him at all throughout the appearance. If Fred still held onto some measure of compassion for Rose that would give him second thoughts about implicating her, the snubbing he received from her that day wiped them away. He completely turned on her and told his solicitor that everything he had said up to that point had been a lie. The first alleged piece of information he would build this new narrative on would be what had transpired on the night the police issued the warrant on her. He claimed to have got home and told Rose that there was nothing to worry about and that there was no chance that Heather was buried in the garden, and she had nonchalantly told him that she actually was. After coming to grips with the fact that she had killed Heather, whom he had “thought the world” of, he had resolved that he would have to take the blame for the death. He added further flourishes that painted Rose badly, such as that she had tried to

dispose of Heather in the dustbin before realizing she wouldn’t fit and cutting her up to bury her. As he worked to form the story he would tell the police, he claimed, he still believed there was only one body, thinking he could at least explain just one as an accident. But then it occurred to him to ask if there were any more. With the same dismissiveness, she replied that there were “seven, eight, or nine, something like that.” There seems to have been a great deal of turmoil in Fred's mind during this period. Not long after the court appearance, he made the bizarre decision to fire Howard Ogden as his solicitor and took on a partner of the firm Bobbets and Mackan. He may have still been harbouring a dim flicker of hope that Rose would come around. After another court appearance that December, in which she ignored him again, he sent her sent her a letter saying, "We will always be in love... You will always be Mrs West, all over the world. That is important to me and to you." Noticing his erratic behaviour, prison officers put Fred on suicide watch. The measure did not work: at noon on New Year’s Day 1995, Fred was found dead in his cell, having hanged himself using a noose made out of his bedsheet.

THE TRIAL OF ROSEMARY WEST Although Fred was gone from this world, his wife still lived, so there was still someone to answer for the decades of sexual abuse and murder. On the 13th of January, after it had been ascertained that Fred had been incarcerated at the time, she had the murder of Charmaine West added to her list of charges. In May of 1995, she officially pleads not guilty to all charges, and on the 3rd of October, her trial officially began. Fred’s death actually helped to open up some avenues to the truth that had been closed while he still lived. He had told Janet Leach a version of events that he claimed to be the real truth – and probably was – but had instructed her not to tell it to the authorities. Janet was not bound by law to comply with this request, but she had kept his secret out of a personal sense of ethics. She had come under a great deal of stress from assimilating the horror of his tale, and the

added burden of this secret did not help. So great was the strain that she suffered a stroke. Upon hearing of Fred’s death, Janet decided that her promise of confidentiality to him had been lifted and that she could come out with the truth as he had told it to her. The story he told her, given the rest of the evidence and testimony of other witnesses, rings the closest to the probable truth: Fred and Rose had been equal partners. Neither had really pushed the other: when one of them made a suggestion, be it initiating prostitution, picking up young girls, or abusing the children, the other would agree to it readily. Mrs Leach presented this testimony when she was called forward as a witness. After the testimony, she collapsed and had to be briefly hospitalised. Another key witness was Anna Marie West, who described in excruciating detail the abuse she had suffered at the hands of her father and step-mother, all the while staring daggers at Rose. She too was overwhelmed by the experience of giving her testimony and took an overdose of pills with the intent of committing suicide. Fortunately, she was discovered in time and her life was saved. Two other former victims of the Wests also testified: Caroline Roberts, who described her captivity and assault at their hands, confirming it was perpetrated by both of them in equal measure, and another woman only identified as “Miss A.,” who described being led down to the cellar by Rose to see two young girls tied up and naked – one of whom may have been Anna Marie. Rose’s defence attempted to convince the jury that sexual assault was not the same as murder, nor did it point to a capacity for it. They pointed to Fred’s early confession tapes – the ones in which he admitted to performing all of the killings himself – as evidence of Rose’s innocence. When it was revealed that Fred had lied about many key issues, however, the veracity of the rest of the tapes’ contents were thrown into doubt. The prosecution was altogether more successful in building up a case to implicate Rose with circumstantial evidence. They were also able to use Rose’s temper against her, quickly learning and putting to use the tactic of making her angry in order to get her to make statements that damaged her own case.

The jury did not take long to reach a verdict: unanimously, they found Rose guilty of all ten murders she had been charged with. The judge presiding over the trial handed her a life sentence for each of them and recommended that she never be released. There is no punishment imaginable (or rather, perhaps, none permissible by the law) that could possibly repay a debt of ten young lives. Some of the Wests’ victims may have been headed for an early grave or an ignominious and miserable life anyway, but every life has the potential for greatness, to make invaluable contributions to society or, at the very least, to be lived in happiness. Because of the depravity of one couple, none of that potential could ever be achieved. At the very least, every single one of the girls the Wests killed had someone, even if it was just one person, who cared for them and was shattered by their disappearance. Eighteen months after Rose’s sentence was read, the Home Secretary would agree with the judge’s recommendation and commute her sentence to a “whole life” sentence. The lives she helped take can never be returned, but we can take some measure of ease knowing that Rosemary West will never see another day of freedom in her life.

CHAPTER 4 – WHY? Take a few moments right now to imagine what it might have been like to be one of the Wests’ victims. Picture yourself, for example, in the place of Therese Siegenthaler, looking forward to a couple weeks’ exploration of a fascinating new country; or perhaps as Lucy Partington, still warm with the memory of spending time with an old friend you never get to see much anymore since you left to pursue your studies, and looking forward to spending the rest of the festive season with your family; or Carole Cooper, still bubbly from spending a fun night at the cinema with your friends. Imagine what it must have been like to accept what seemed like a benevolent lift from a man and his jolly, matronly wife, and then to have them turn on you out of nowhere, take you down to a dank, dim cellar and begin to do things to you – things so vile and agonizing you began to wish for the release of death, welcoming its embrace when it finally came. Imagine you are Shirley Hubbard, Alison Chambers, or Juanita Mott, drawn towards a big, warm family that seems like your first real chance at acceptance for who you are and freedom to determine who you want to be. Imagine your hosts’ demeanour towards you begin to change, as they begin to drop more and more hints to you that you would need to do certain...things with them if you desired to stay much longer. Perhaps you acquiesce, and maybe the first few times are even mutually enjoyable. But as time goes on, things become more and more extreme. Maybe you decide you have had enough – but they ignore your pleas to let you go. Or maybe you grit your teeth and bear it, thinking that surely they will let up before they do any lasting damage to your body. As your consciousness begins to fade, you realize – far too late – that they will not. Imagine yourself as one of their daughters, growing up with the same blind trust and faith in your parents that all children have. Imagine as you grow up receiving weird touches from your father in places that just feel uncomfortable and wrong, accompanied by statements about how you are “developing” that you just don’t understand. Imagine being led down to the cellar by your mother and

father, being told about how “lucky” you are, before being held down by your mother while your father caused you the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life. Imagine this happening multiple times, to the point where it becomes routine. Imagine you are Heather, realizing that your parents’ version of “care” is not caring at all, becoming disillusioned with them. Imagine venting that disillusionment at your father by manipulating him into greater and more entertaining paroxysms of rage, to the point that he reaches out and grabs you around the throat. Imagine your sense of ultimate betrayal as he does to you the one thing you had always believed to be beyond him, and you slowly faded away... Anyone with a shred of empathy finds himself aghast to think a fellow human being capable of committing such atrocities against a single person, let alone twelve. The question that comes to all of our minds is why? Why did Rose and Fred do what they did? What went wrong in their moral development that overrode the most basic, visceral human values we all share? There is no one simple answer to this question – like everything else that can possibly go wrong with the human mind, it is likely a combination of factors. And because of the uniqueness of every human mind, we will never know beyond conjecture which of those factors was active and to what relative degree each affected the Wests. We can, however, attempt to reconstruct a picture as close to accurate as possible by analysing the circumstances that moulded the Wests, the way in which they conducted themselves and the things that they themselves said.

COULD JUST ONE OF THEM HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERYTHING? In discussions of serial killers, Rose and Fred are nearly always mentioned together, but the only murders that truly count as “serial murders” are the ones that occurred at Cromwell Street. The court of public opinion holds them both as being responsible for those, but given the fact that Rose and Fred both made protestations of their own innocence and fingered the other as being responsible for

everything, we should entertain the possibility, at least in small measure, that one of them was telling the truth. Rose’s story, that it was all Fred’s doing, is slightly more credible than the other way around. The key factor, and one that Rose herself emphasized, is the difference in age between them. Fred was well into adulthood when he met Rose, whereas she was still a juvenile. He had the advantage of maturity over her and could conceivably have used that to shape her young mind into whatever twisted image he wished. On the other hand, Rose had a skill that could have empowered her to achieve the same effect on Fred. She had already proven herself adept at manipulating her father and becoming his favourite. Perhaps she realised that she could transfer that skill to another older male. Fred himself stated that he saw Rose as a replacement for his first true love, Anne, and if this is so, it would have made him even more susceptible to Rose’s wiles, had she wanted to use him. Neither reality bears out to the extent of fully exonerating either one of them. It would have been impossible for one of them to carry out nine murders without the other knowing about and abetting them. To begin with, Fred would have to have known if Rose performed the killings, since all of the bodies were buried in his home improvements. It is difficult to imagine the portly Rose shovelling soil about in the cellar and garden without attracting attention. The testimonies of the children, as well as those of Caroline Roberts and the unnamed witness “Miss A.”, all point to Rose and Fred having both been participants in the abuse. As Rose’s defence during the trial pointed out, though, a propensity for inflicting abuse does not automatically imply one for murder. But the parallel of their modus operandi as sex fiends and abusers with the circumstances surrounding the murders loom too large to ignore. In particular, Rose’s presence during the late-night pickup runs had a purpose: to put young girls at ease so that they could take the fateful first step into Fred’s vehicle. That purpose would still be expedient in looking for victims to kill. There is also the fact of the first two murders: that of Anna McFall and Charmaine. One was killed by Fred before he had met Rose, while the other was killed by Rose alone while Fred was in prison.

This shows that the capacity to kill resided independently within both of them. The Cromwell Street murders must, therefore, be considered as having been a joint venture between the two of them.

CHILDHOOD The formative experiences a person has when they are growing up invariable bear upon on the type of person they become in adulthood, the course they take, and the things that they do. It's worthwhile therefore to look back into the childhoods of people who commit heinous acts to try to figure out which factors contributed to them, but it is important to remember that nothing is ever clear-cut and that we have to be careful not to draw unsound conclusions or default to the most sensational version of the past. The most obvious factor to look at would be childhood abuse: the sexual nature of the Wests’ crimes points to an unhealthy psychological relationship with sex on both Rose and Fred’s part. When it comes to Rose, this factor was almost definitely borne out. Bill Letts’ abuse of his daughter certainly had an effect on her, and it is easily seen in the way her behaviour developed as she grew up. The other factor was his temper and violence towards his wife and children, which Rose would also inherit from him. Her children had their own tales of her legendary rages, and it’s eminently likely that this was the psychological factor that caused her to take her first victim in her stepdaughter, Charmaine. Fred claimed also to have been brought up in a sexually abusive environment. All of his siblings absolutely denied this claim, meaning that it was probably a lie on his part. What probably did have some effect on him was the difference in parental approaches taken by his mother and his father. By all accounts, his parents definitely both cared very much for their children, but they showed it in different ways: Daisy West was authoritarian and strict with her children, whereas Walter was much more easy-going. This combination can sometimes have an adverse effect on a child’s developing sense of morality: Fred may have received mixed signals from his parents, perhaps for example having a harsh punishment pronounced on him by his mother only to have it lifted by his father. This would have

given him the sense that consequences were arbitrary and wrongdoing did not matter as long as he made sure his mother (or any other strict authority figure) never knew. An important thing to realize when talking about childhoods is that nothing that happens to someone as a child excuses bad behaviour as an adult. Victimhood does not give a person free reign to create other victims in turn. It is always the responsibility of an individual to break themselves out of any negative generational cycles they may have found themselves born into. Rose and Fred’s siblings all grew up in the same environments as they did. Of Rose’s siblings, all of them managed to rise out of their abuse and refused to perpetuate it. Rose was the only one who did. Fred’s upbringing was not even nearly as extreme, but if there was some negative effect in his and his siblings’ childhood, most of them managed to overcome it. He only ever managed to pull his brother John into abusing his own niece. A short aside – in 1996, John West was tried for the abuse of Anna Marie West as well as another charge for an alleged rape he committed in 1994. On the 24th of November 1996, the day before the verdict on his charges was delivered, he, like his brother, committed suicide by hanging. In failing to rise above whatever they had experienced in their childhoods, Rose, Fred, and John West (allegedly – it must be acknowledged that he was never found guilty) all deserve the opprobrium that has fallen upon them for the lives they destroyed or ended outright.

SICKNESSES OF THE MIND The next factor to consider in relation to the Wests’ murders is whether they were influenced by mental illness. The possibility is one that is borne by a simple consideration of what they did. The callousness of their actions reveals a lack of empathy that is indicative of psychopathy at the very least. Rose’s manipulative behaviour, particularly shown by her ability to work her father over into favouring her more than her siblings, is another hallmark of

psychopaths: they tend to see other people as tools for getting what they want and learn very early through observation what buttons to push and things to say to do this effectively. Some form of obsessive disorder, which is especially evident in Fred’s behaviour, is also common among serial killers. The most gruesome manifestation of this that we see is the bones missing from all of the corpses. The ability to go through with dismembering human bodies is disturbing enough in itself, but the removal of the victims’ fingers, toes, and kneecaps takes it to another level of depravity. This may have been part of a ritual that Fred performed over each body, and it is likely that he collected the bones as souvenirs of each burial. There is also his obsession with Anna McFall to take into account. In his confessions to his solicitor and Janet Leach, he admitted to killing her, but the reason why he did this was never stated. If it was an accident, the pall of her demise may have remained over him and driven him to seek some way to find a substitute for her. By his own admission, Rose had simply been a replacement for Anne, and she may not have been enough. Killing young women may have been a way to try to fill the void that Anne’s absence left behind. There are also the “visions” that led Fred to the burial sites. It is unlikely that he was telling the truth about them and may have been trying to increase the perception of his eccentricity, but if they were real, then such hallucinations would certainly point to some form of mental affliction. An interesting thing about the Wests is that for both of them, their mental afflictions had possible physical causes that we can point to. For Rose, it was the electroshock therapy that her mother received while pregnant with her. Electroshock therapy is now recognised as having harmful effects on fully developed adult brains – how much further exacerbated such effects may have been on a developing brain can only be speculated, as no extensive studies exist on this scenario. With Fred, we have first-hand reports that make the possibility of brain damage a near certainty. Damage to the frontal lobe of the brain – the area right behind the forehead – is well documented as causing the sufferer to lose the capacity for emotional control and

the ability to manage their anger. Fred’s family all clearly recalled a stark break in his behaviour that was delineated by his motorcycle accident, after which those very typical symptoms of frontal lobe damage showed up in him. Another effect is a reduction or complete elimination of inhibition and sense of right and wrong. The kleptomania that he developed following the accident points to this, as does the belief that his abusing his children was “natural” and a normal thing to do.

THE “FAMILY OF LOVE” That the Wests seemed to truly believe that the things that they did – particularly the abuse of their children – were not only not wrong but also the good and right thing to do deserves examination on its own. This belief was common to Fred and Rosemary both, and probably had its roots in the circumstances already discussed. During interviews, the West children made mention of a term their parents used for their abuse: they called it their “family of love.” Their moral senses were so twisted that they genuinely believed what they were doing to be an expression of their love. They may have explained away the obvious pain and anguish they were causing their children the same way they possibly explained their physical abuse – that it was an expression of their love for the children, and that they really were preparing them for their matrimonial future. This type of thinking is common among parents who beat their children bloody in the name of “discipline,” and it seems to have been a small leap for the Wests to transpose this justification onto their sexual abuse. By all accounts, outside of the abuse, the Wests really did manage to maintain a semblance of a normal family dynamic. They did normal family things, they went on outings together, and they made poorly-shot home videos of themselves, like any other family. In those videos, we see the children interact normally with their parents, laughing and joking with them as children do. They formed a strong bond, to the point that Stephen and Mae chose to live in the family home long after they could have left, and elected to stay with their mother even after the lid was blown on the horrendous crimes

that had been committed. Mae, in an interview a month after Rose was convicted, stated, “Family was everything to us, and I could never let them down.” But the instruction to the children that they must avoid mentioning any detail of the abuse to anyone tells us that some part of the Wests’ minds recognised that what they were doing was, if not wrong, at the least socially unacceptable.

A DEADLY CONFLUENCE In all probability, none of these single factors alone compelled the Wests’ actions, nor did they each work in isolation. They all fed into and reinforced each other to forge forging two wicked and depraved characters capable of inflicting the most heinous of acts. For these two characters to come together as a couple was a recipe most pernicious. The fact that they both killed independently before embarking on a joint venture of serial murder shows us that each harboured individually the capacity for murder. They each developed their extreme sexual proclivities on their own. But one has to ask: had they not met, would their separate criminal activities have reached the horrifying heights that they did? Imagine if they had both met partners who did not share their particular mental sicknesses. Perhaps they could have had their appetites reined in and moderated, and they would both be entering a blissful twilight of old age right now, never having known each other and spurred each other on. Maybe if they had still shown a tendency towards violence and abuse, a partner with a better functioning sense of morality would have turned them in and prevented the later anguish of many. But Rose and Fred found each other, and in each other, they each found a dark mirror of their own self that validated rather than tempered their twisted proclivities and created a downward spiral of reinforcement. Rose and Fred truly do deserve to be studied as a single unit, because without their coming together, it is unlikely any of the tragedy they caused would have happened.

HOW DID THEY GO SO LONG WITHOUT ATTRACTING DISCOVERY? The other big question that needs to be asked is how the Wests were able to murder nine people together and twelve in total as well as sexually abuse their own children for a decade and a half without attracting enough attention to blow their entire facade of normalcy. It seems less likely that no one noticed the warning signs and far more likely that those who did, failed to act upon them – and analysis of the facts reveals that this is exactly what happened. Fred West had a history of perpetrating sexual crime long before he met Rose. The fact that this was not taken into account once the allegation of rape was laid upon them by Caroline Roberts is at first perplexing. The inquiry that followed the investigation into the Cromwell Street murders found that without the technology we have today, the ability to search criminal records was severely limited, and even the most thorough search might have failed to reveal anything. What is less forgivable, though, is that a closer eye was not kept on the Wests after that incident. It was a mere five months after receiving the slap on the wrist that was the indecent assault charge that they abducted and killed for the first time – and that first victim had actually been a tenant of theirs who was incontrovertibly linked to them. The systems that were supposed to ensure the safety and protection of the West children failed them dismally for many years. As big as the family was, some alarm should have been raised over the 31 hospital visits they made. Medical professionals should have been able to tell by examining their bruises that they were being physically abused, at the very least. And yet those professionals did have suspicions, they chose not to raise any alarm. The most heinous case of all in this respect was Heather's ectopic pregnancy. If someone had decided to diligently press her for information about who the baby's father was, she may have broken and spilt the beans. Some kind of investigation should have taken place, regardless, into what was a clear-cut case of statutory rape.

Fred never did get around to soundproofing the cellar to Number 25, which meant that the screams of their victims – including their children’s – had to have been audible in the upper floors. The house was never empty of tenants, and if any of them heard screams, then they probably ignored them, deciding they were none of their problems. The possibility of official – particularly police – complicity in some of the unlawful activities that occurred at Number 25 has to be considered with some seriousness. Multiple witnesses came forward claiming that police officers were among the clients of Rose’s prostitution business. Even if they were not, they surely had to have known about it but never moved to investigate or remove the children from the unwholesome environment. An official inquiry into the allegations cleared the Gloucester police department not only of patronising the brothel but of even knowing that there was any prostitution going on. This just seems unbelievably unlikely – a whorehouse next to a congregation of a denomination as highly conservative as the Seventh-Day Adventists has to have attracted some type of complaint. Another detail that may point to a collusion of some kind between the Wests and the police was that for a period, Fred acted as an informant for the Gloucester Police, giving them information upon which they conducted raids on his tenants in search of drugs. Each hand always washes the other in such arrangements, and it may be that the police promised to overlook certain things the Wests were doing – just how much, we will never know. If the Wests had been stopped after just one murder, it would still have been too many. If they had been able to abuse only Anne Marie among their children just once, it would have been one too many. But they got away with twelve murders combined and perpetrated years of abuse on their children. People like them are still out there today, and it remains up to all of us individually to watch out for them and to raise an immediate alarm the moment we see something suspicious. We could save other human beings a lot of pain, anguish, and loss.

CONCLUSION In October 1996, Number 25 Cromwell Street was demolished. Every single brick was crushed to powder and every bit of metal – including the infamous sign – was melted down to discourage collectors with a morbid fascination. Where it used to stand is now a footpath from Cromwell Street to the Gloucester city centre. But try as we might to eradicate the memory of that place, the scars still remain. Anna Marie West tried valiantly to move on with her life once one of her abusers was dead and the other locked up, but the stain of what happened to her may never leave her. In November of 1999, she would state in an interview, “People say I am lucky to have survived, but I wish I had died. I can still taste the fear. Still feel the pain. It's like going back to being a child again.” Less than two weeks later, she would attempt suicide by jumping into the River Severn. She was fortunately rescued from the reeds along the riverbank with a severe case of hypothermia. Stephen West would joke in an interview about how he was "so much like [his] father", but seriously state that he had decided to break the cycle of abuse. In 2004, he would fail and would be prosecuted for having sexual relations with an underage girl. He deserves our opprobrium for taking advantage of a vulnerable young person, but it is still sad that the Wests are still capable of creating new victims from behind bars and beyond the grave. Of the older West children, Mae is the one who seems to have succeeded in moving beyond her past. With the help of a name change and some minor cosmetic surgery, she has managed to create a new life for herself that is not shackled to her childhood trauma. The younger children were moved into adoptive homes and took on new identities. Two other known victims – Caroline Roberts and Miss A – managed to escape the Wests' clutches with their lives. They, too, live with their own scars and the memories that may never fully fade. But the lives of the deceased can never be returned. The years they could

have shared with loved ones will never be lived. The contributions they may have made will never enrich other lives or society as a whole. But there may have been yet more victims who the Wests never revealed. Fred West's cellmate during his incarceration alleged that he confessed twenty more murders to him that he would release one a year to the police, as well as to a secret abandoned farm where more torture had occurred and more bodies were buried. Being the testimony of a convict, we can only place so much value in it. But there was a disappearance in Gloucester just after the murder of Anne McFall which seems eerily similar to the methods Fred and Rose would use to harvest young girls for their grisly appetites. In January 1968, a fifteen-year-old girl named Mary Bastholm left her home to visit her boyfriend, carrying a monopoly set. She was never seen again, and the only traces of her that were found were a few pieces of the monopoly set at a bus stop close to her home. If Mary Bastholm was taken by Fred and there were others like her over the years, their story may be the most tragic of all: their surviving relatives will never even get the chance to know for sure what happened to them, and except by accidental discovery, nor will their remains be found and properly laid to rest.

THE KUŘIM CASE A TERRIFYING TRUE STORY OF CHILD ABUSE, CULTS & CANNIBALISM

INTRODUCTION Motherhood is amongst the most precious and revered of roles in human society. Through the ages and across species, the bond between mother and child has been sacred; and even while, with the changing of times and modernisation of society it becomes less popular or mandatory as a life goal, it still retains an almost mystical charm. If a woman has decided to weather the years of highs and lows that come with nurturing and caring for a child, there is an expectation – that she possesses a deep tenderness and care for the child unrivalled by any other, and will do anything to protect them from suffering and harm. That capacity, meant to be written into our genes, most of the time can be relied upon as surely as the world turns. But sometimes – more times than is comfortable to think about – something goes wrong. That capacity gets subverted, inverted, or erased altogether, and rather than fulfilling the role of protector, a mother becomes that very one who inflicts suffering and pain upon her offspring. In May of 2007, in a small, quiet town in the South Moravia region of the Czech Republic, a technical glitch – a simple, accidental crossing of signals – revealed just such a case, and an entire nation watched transfixed with horror as the grisly extent of the perversion of the maternal instinct was revealed. Two small brothers named Jakub and Ondrej, nine and seven years old respectively, were revealed to have suffered confinement, mutilation, psychological brutality, and cannibalism at the hands of several people – foremost among them their own mother and her sister. The ensuing investigation and trial captivated the country as a web of secrecy and manipulation were laid bare. That entire nation’s attention was transfixed as the disappearance of a teenage girl revealed a daring case of concealed identity and international intrigue, culminating in a thousand-mile chase in the depths of a Scandinavian winter.

The allegations that were levelled would keep any parent of a young child awake at night. A secretive cult operating in close proximity to children: stealing, forging medical records, and possibly attempting to create a new messiah was in full swing. All the while its members appeared, on the surface, to be models of excellent caregivers. This is the story of the infamous ‘Kuřim Case’, an investigation that engrossed the public and media of a whole country for two years. It is a story of intense cruelty and sadism, inflicted on the most vulnerable members of society; if you are especially sensitive to accounts of the suffering of children, you may find it advisable not to read any farther. If, however, you seek to understand the darker side of human nature by coming face to face with it, then this book is written for you. Through the testimony of the victims, the perpetrators and other witnesses and analysis from experts and psychiatrists who examined the case and those involved in it, delve inside to learn what happened, why it happened, and what ripple effects propagated into the future.

CHAPTER 1 – ABUSE UNCOVERED The story begins in Kuřim, a tiny town of around 10,000 inhabitants in the region of South Moravia, about 9 miles North-West of Brno, which is the second largest city in the Czech Republic. Like all small towns that lie in the shadow of a big city, Kuřim is relatively quiet and subdued, without much big business and commerce. Most of its infrastructure is low-density residential and houses, mostly singlestorey, dominate the architecture, with the occasional block of flats rising no more than a few storeys high. Aside from a church and a castle – the former dating back to the 13th century and the latter in the 15th – there isn't much in the way of sightseeing to be done in Kuřim. The most interesting things that happen on an average day are the morning and evening rush as people from the town and further out make their way to and from their jobs in the larger city. On a Monday morning in early May 2007, a discovery was made that would go on to shatter the peace and relative obscurity the town had previously enjoyed, and its reputation would henceforth be one no settlement would want to be associated with. On the morning of the 7th May, a new father tested a baby monitor of the type that relays video, which he had bought several months previously. His name was Eduard Trdý, and his wife had just gone into labour earlier that morning. She was giving birth to their first child. One can easily imagine his excitement and anticipation as he unboxed the baby monitor, thinking about the child that he would soon be nurturing. As he switched the screen on, he received a bit of a surprise. Rather than the interior of his own house, what appeared was an image he considered at first as just odd: a small naked boy he did not recognise, looking to be perhaps six or seven years of age, his hands bound up and playing with a roll of Scotch tape. The image was grainy monochrome. The camera sending the signal was operating in extremely low-light or near-complete darkness, and he could see just enough to discern that it was a small room. Clearly, this was the result of a glitch, the monitor picking up the signal of a nearby set of the same type. Perhaps distracted by his

impending parenthood, Trdý didn’t immediately connect the scene in front of him with abuse. The boy didn’t look miserable – rather, he seemed quite content with his improvised toy. Maybe he was just playing in his favourite little space, perhaps pretending to be in a bunker or secret enchanted room, as little boys sometimes do. Trdý went on with his day. At 5 o’clock that evening, following a visit to his wife and child in the maternity ward, he revisited the invading video stream once again. The boy was still in the little room. Surely if he was just playing he wouldn’t still be in there after six whole hours – children don’t usually have that much patience with any one game. This time, though, the image that confronted him was more disturbing: the boy was still tied up and was eating something off the floor. “Zůstal jsem sedět jako opařený” [“I was shocked”], Trdý later recounted to the press. He had spent about a quarter of an hour puzzling over the footage on his screen, trying to discern whether it was real or not. Eventually, Trdý decided that whatever it was, it was worth letting the police know about it. Just in case he lost the feed before they arrived, he recorded the footage. The police arrived not long after, and after looking at the footage, they decided to investigate. Miroslav Gregor, the leading officer at the scene, made a few quick deductions in his head: baby monitors are usually designed to transmit to a receiver within the same premises. “Předpokládali jsme, že zařízení má malý dosah” [“We figured that the baby monitor would have had short range”] he later recounted, “Źe může být maximálně ve vedlejším domě.” [“That it couldn’t have been further than next door.”] None of the immediate neighbours, when questioned, admitted to having a small boy in a dark room somewhere on their property. One of the doors they knocked on was that of Klára Mauerová, a 29-yearold woman who had moved in about half a year earlier, in December of 2006. Klára was a reclusive woman, and aside from the occasional glimpses, had hardly been seen by her neighbours since moving to Kuřim. When asked if there was a little boy anywhere in their house, she said no. The only child in the house was her thirteen-year-old daughter Anička, who was ill and would be upset by strangers

bumbling around the house. Out of politeness and the fact that they had no solid reason to believe she was hiding anything, the officers excused themselves. Fortunately, Eduard Trdý was still in his house watching and recording the view on the monitor. Through it, he had heard the conversation Gregor had had with Klára and immediately replayed the footage for him when he returned. Hearing the words he had traded with Klára playing back to him it was enough for Gregor to press Klára for a search. On top of that, he could actually recognise the song that had been playing rather loudly over the radio in her house. This time, Klára could not object to the search – her house was now considered an active crime scene. Gregor and his two colleagues entered and began to investigate. The girl Klára had said was her adolescent daughter reacted badly indeed, screaming loudly upstairs as the police searched the ground floor. The sweep revealed one possibility for the room in Trdý’s monitor: a padlocked door that looked like it led into a closet or small room under the staircase. Gregor and his colleagues asked Klára to open the door for them, and she answered that she could not. She had found the door locked herself when she moved into the place, she told them, and the landlord had never given her the key. That wasn’t going to be a problem – the fire department was called in. They were through the lock in no time. Just as the police had called in their reinforcements, Klára had called in her own: her sister Kateřina, who was two years her senior. As the fire department arrived with their cutting tools, the two of them, joined by the thirteen-year-old Anička sat down in front of the door, obstructing the firefighters from accessing it. Anička – the Czech diminutive form of her proper name Ana – was herself a sight to behold: dressed in a red and yellow patterned dress, with round glasses and a cap on her head, at a glance she appeared to be an adolescent. But she behaved like a much younger child – she came down to join her mother and aunt crawling on all fours, babbling and rocking herself like an infant. She seemed to be developmentally challenged in some way.

The police and firefighters had no choice but to physically remove the three of them from the door. Klára and Kateřina made a few haphazard attempts to resist but were quickly overpowered. Ana, on the other hand, put up a fight. As soon as responders laid hands on her, she got up and began kicking, hitting, and scratching at them. Tomáš Kotrhonz, one of the police officers who had to deal with Ana, bore the brunt of her attacks and described them as weak even for her age. Since she was a child, Kotrhonz and his colleagues did not respond to her aggression in kind, putting it down to her trying to defend her mother. Once they had prised her away, she ran crying “mama, mama!” – Oddly not to her supposed mother, but to her aunt Kateřina. With their obstacle cleared, the firefighters made short work of the lock and opened the door. The first thing to hit everyone at the scene was the smell – the smell of months’ worth of human excretions. All over the bare concrete floor was the source of the smell: vomit, human excrement, and dried urine. It was the beginning of summer, and the heat in the little room was unbearable. Instantly drawing the eyes, though, was the small, pale, naked figure sitting calmly in the middle of all the filth: the little boy from Eduard Trdý’s baby monitor. Despite his extreme discomfort, the squalor of his surroundings, or the sudden tumult he had been thrust into, the boy did not cry. Klára identified him as her son Ondrej. When she was asked why she was keeping her son like this, Kotrhonz recalled, “Klára Mauerová nám řekla, že tomu nerozumíme, že to nemůžeme pochopit.” [Klára Mauerová said that we didn’t get it, that we couldn’t have possibly understood]. She was so distraught, emotional, and incoherent that no information of value could be extracted from her. From Kateřina, on the other hand, they got something approximating an explanation. According to her, Eduard Trdý’s first impression upon seeing the little boy on his screen was close to the truth. The little room under the stairs reminded Ondrej of the one Harry Potter lived in at his uncle and aunt’s house, and so became his favourite spot to play in. About the sparseness and filth of the room, or why Ondrej

had to be naked and tied up while “playing,” no explanation was given. Paramedics were called to the scene, but first, the police had to take a photograph of the crime scene in the state in which it was found before they could help him. When the camera was brought in and pointed at him, little Ondrej did something that would cause the heart of anyone with a shred of decency and any kind of deductive capability to sink. Still bound up as he was, he looked straight into the camera and smiled.

SCARS, SEEN AND UNSEEN Ondrej was whisked away in an ambulance. His apparent nonchalance at the situation persisted – his demeanour reflected nothing worse happening to him than a fall from a bicycle, as medics described. Things changed when bedtime came after his arrival at the hospital, though, and the psychological trauma he bore began to manifest. He became delirious and extremely fearful, thinking the pictures on the wall were ghosts. The pictures had to be taken down, but this gave him little comfort. His sleep was riven with nightmares. Nurses tried their best to comfort him as he trembled and pleaded, “Just kill me. Please just kill me.” Immediately visible on Ondrej were physical marks that looked deliberate: long scars on his arms and back that could have been the result of slashes with sharp objects. Peculiar pale welts in his groin area. A largish circular scar on his buttocks. These details were initially suppressed in official statements made to the press, saying he was treated for dehydration and keeping mum on the rest. Ondrej had a brother two years older than him named Jakub. Jakub had been at school during the bust, mercifully spared the specific ordeal that his little brother had been subjected to. Ondrej had not been at school because of a diagnosis of hearing problems that ostensibly made learning in a classroom environment difficult for him, hence his being pulled out of school, supposedly to be homeschooled by his mother. With his legal caregiver in police custody, Jakub was taken to the Brno Children’s Institution, soon joined by Anička. Although he was

distressed and disoriented at the sudden change and not knowing where his mother was, the authorities had to try to get any information from him that might shed light on what had been going on at home. They achieved little success: he seemed extremely reluctant to speak – more, even than a child in the company of strangers would be expected to. He avoided all eye contact, keeping his attention fixed on the book he had been given to keep him occupied. Examinations of his body showed scars similar to those Ondrej’s, with the exception of the large one on the buttocks. Jakub said the scars were the result of scratches from a pet gerbil, the odd welts in his groin area wasp stings received while camping. Neither explanation seemed likely, and when caregivers pressed him gently for the truth, he finally divulged that they had been inflicted by his mother. The scratches were from a fork dragged forcefully against his skin, the welts from cigarettes being put out on his groin. She had never been a smoker, he said – she had bought the cigarettes only for the purpose of burning him and his younger brother with them. As a few days passed, the initial shock of the drastic change waned, and they began to speak more freely and openly. According to Ondrej, the confinement had begun near the end of the previous summer. When the family moved into the Kuřim house in December of 2006, he had at first been confined in the bathroom before being transferred to the under-stairs closet, and the only time he had been in the living room of the house had been Christmas day. Other than that, his entire existence had been that of a prisoner in solitary confinement in a particularly brutal prison. He had eaten his meals in the darkness, and he had had to urinate and defecate in a bucket. Both boys also mentioned a third adult they had frequent contact with – someone they called “Aunt Nenci.” According to Jakub, Aunt Nenci worked at a day-care centre both he and Ondrej had attended, and she also walked him to and from school. Ondrej claimed to have been confined in a room at said day-care centre before the move to Kuřim. During which time Aunt Nenci had watched over him and given him food.

A little detective work revealed Aunt Nenci to be Hana Bašova, a social worker and formal colleague of Kateřina. The day-care centre – which was named “Paprška”, meaning “(Light)Beam” – was, in fact where the two had worked together. Upon determining her identity, police brought Bašova in for questioning. She denied noticing anything wrong, and when the alleged confinement at the day-care centre was brought up, she put it down to a simple misunderstanding on Ondrej’s part – what he had described was a punishment room children were sent to for a “time-out” when they misbehaved, the significance of which had probably been exaggerated in his young mind. Lacking probable cause, hard evidence, or reliable testimony, the police did not make a move to arrest her at that time.

ANA The boys slowly opened up, but Ana proved more difficult to handle. Everyone who encountered her was convinced she had developmental challenges, and she seemed especially upset by the separation from her adoptive mother. Employees at the Institution had a difficult time even getting close to her, and she would raise raucous hell, fighting, biting and screaming every time anyone tried to touch her. It was likely that examinations of her body would turn up evidence of deliberate scarification, but her behaviour made it impossible to do so. Social workers decided to leave her be for a while and allow her to get accustomed to her new surroundings before trying to examine her or even give her a bath. They would never get the chance to do this: early on the 12th May, three days after the bust, Anička disappeared from the Institution. It appeared she had figured out how to open one of the windows and climbed out. No one could determine whether she had escaped on her own or had been aided by somebody. Neither prospect was palatable: either there was a mentally challenged girl alone and lost in the woods nearby, or she had been whisked away by coconspirators or participants in the torture of the boys. If the latter was the case, whatever they had planned for her was not likely to be good.

They had to find her and find her quickly before she slipped out of their grasp completely. If she had been taken away by some adult and that abductor had also been involved in the torture, they must be captured and brought to justice. Authorities immediately ordered a high-priority search, beginning with a sweep of the woods using infrared goggles, the canine unit, and DNA from items of clothing. The sweep of the forest failed to locate her, as did door-to-door enquiries in the surrounding neighbourhood. With no trace of her to be found close to the Children’s Institution, the probability that she had been aided in her escape by an adult seemed all the more likely.

UPBRINGINGS AND PASTS I’ve dealt in previous books with how the roots of the pathologies that led to my subjects’ crimes lay at least partly in their childhoods. In all of them thus far, that connection has been variable but convincing. This case defies that pattern: there is no indication that significant trauma in Klára or Kateřina’s childhoods influenced their actions. Kateřina was the firstborn daughter of Ladislav and Eliška Mauerová, and Klára their youngest. In the middle is another sister, Gabriela. The family was very tight-knit, going on frequent outings and holidays together, often with their extended family. They were moderately religious Catholics, occasionally going to church, but Ladislav and Eliška made sure to raise them on the principles of the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. With this loving environment, the sisters were very good friends growing up. Kateřina and Gabriela were more bookish and heavily invested in their academics, while Klára was more active and sporty, fulfilling that passion with volleyball, gymnastics, and synchronised swimming.

KLÁRA'S EARLY MOTHERHOOD AND MARRIAGE In 1996, at the age of 18, Klára had an unplanned pregnancy with Radek Coufal, with whom she had been in a relationship with for a year. The pair married not long after the pregnancy was discovered.

In October of 1997, they had their first child, whom they named Jakub. Two years later, in September 1999, they had Ondrej. Mothers who have unplanned children at a young age often have a hard time with life afterwards, but Klára was fortunate: she and the father of her son were in a stable relationship, and her parents were also thrilled and proud at finally becoming grandparents. They offered all the help they could, including allowing Klára and Coufal to live with them for the first year of their marriage until they could afford their own apartment. Buoyed by so much support, Klára attained a degree in economics and embarked on a secretarial career. Klára and Gabriela remained close as they grew older. Gabriela recalled Klára as having been an excellent mother. “Byla výborná maminka a pro mě vzor. Říkala jsem si, že bych jednou chtěla mít se svými dětmi taky takový vztah” [“She was a great mother and I admired her. I wished that in the future I’d have the same relationship with my own children”], Gabriela later fondly recalled. Klára had never exhibited any inclination to or tolerance of violence, and her family and those who knew her closely found it difficult to stomach the recent revelations. Klára’s marriage did not last very long – neighbours reported that she and Coufal began to have heated arguments in 2003. Their disagreements continued to mount until the relationship reached its breaking point, and by the end of the year Coufal had moved out and begun divorce proceedings. The couple’s separation was amicable. Neither party placed any fault on the other. Time had simply revealed differences in opinion between the two of them. The boys remained in the custody of their mother, and Coufal did not contest this as he, too, had the utmost faith in Klára’s fitness for motherhood. Their relationship remained amicable, and Coufal continued to play an active role in his sons’ lives, providing for them as Klára requested and spending all the time he could with them, taking them to sports practice sessions, outings, and the like.

THE ARRIVAL OF ANA

In 2004, Klára decided to follow Kateřina’s footsteps and began studying social childcare and education. A year later, another significant change occurred in Klára’s life – she gained a daughter in the form of Anička. To friends and neighbours looking from the outside, the change was as surprising as it was sudden. She had never talked about wanting to adopt, nor had they heard anything from her about the necessarily long and intricate legal process she had no doubt gone through to attain the adoption. Neighbours in her block of flats in Brno had only seen the occasional glimpse of Ana – a pale, sickly child who was often carried up and down the stairs as if she couldn’t navigate them herself. Her arrival had also heralded a change in Klára – she became increasingly hard-pressed for time, refused any company coming over to her flat, and always seemed exhausted and sad. Marcela Zednickova, a friend of Klára’s, was probably the only one of her friends to spend any considerable length of time close to Anička. Her sons were about the same age as Jakub and Ondrej, and they went on many outings together, their boys keeping each other company while the two of them were left to chat. It was on the last outing they had together, to see a movie, that she met the child. Klára didn’t say much about her, and Marcela couldn’t help but notice her odd behaviour, staring at the ground through the entire movie and steadily avoiding any contact with her or anyone other than Klára. When Marcela asked Klára about this odd behaviour, Klára replied that Anička was autistic and heavily averse to contact with strangers. Soon after that trip, Klára grew more and more distant until they stopped meeting and she began ignoring phone calls. Klára’s ex-husband also knew very little about Anička or what had driven Klára to adopt her. He did occasionally catch sight of her when he was picking up or dropping off the boys but never probed Klára about her. Klára herself didn’t volunteer much information, and Coufal wasn’t going to press her for what he saw as her own business. If she wasn’t telling him anything, she probably had her reasons for doing so, and he respected the fact that they now led separate lives.

Anička’s adoption was approved and recognised by the state. The authorities, therefore, did know a lot more about her. According to her adoption documents, the account given by Klára and her family was that little Anička was the daughter of drug addicts who were known to Antonia Drčmanová, mother to Eliška Mauerová and grandmother to Klára, Kateřina and Gabriela. Because of her developmental problems, Anička’s parents were overwhelmed by her care, a situation exacerbated by the challenges they faced with the demon of addiction. Touched by the plight of the innocent child born into such a difficult situation, Antonia would occasionally care for Anička during the day and make sure she was fed and clothed. One day in 2000, Anička’s parents dropped her off with Antonia as usual, but they never returned to pick her up. Antonia tried but failed to locate them. Perhaps they had come to some grievous harm during the course of the day but just as likely, they may have decided to run away from one of their problems and relocated somewhere else, believing that Antonia would take care of Anička and perhaps tell themselves that removing themselves from the child's life would be the best thing for her. The story goes that Antonia took Anička in and took care of her until she passed away in 2004. Klára then took over as her caregiver and soon began the process of formally adopting her. Since Anička was completely undocumented, the process was especially complicated. Fortunately, a friend of Kateřina’s – a journalist named Jakub Patočka – was an activist who frequently advocated for people seeking adoptions and was well versed in the system. With Patočka’s help, Klára managed to clear every hurdle, which included court appearances and evaluations by social workers, a DNA sequencing of Anička, and an oath-bound testimony about the veracity of this account from Klára’s mother Eliška. In October 2006, Klára withdrew from her studies citing serious personal and family difficulties, not long before Ana’s adoption was finalised and the family moved to Kuřim – during which time the abuse of her two sons had already started. The tragedy of Ana’s story and the increased pressure Klára came under after taking her in could go a long way towards explaining the change in her demeanour and pulling away from her social circles. If she had

become unsociable since Anička had appeared in her life, the move to Kuřim heralded an even more drastic withdrawal. Previous friends were almost completely cut off, and she never gave so much as a greeting to her new neighbours. Her family also received the same treatment. As involved as they had been in their grandchildren’s upbringing, Eliška and Ladislav Mauerová were told they could no longer see them. According to Ladislav, the reason they were given was that the boys were beginning to exhibit behavioural problems and that the root was an inappropriate fixation with their grandparents. “Dcera si chtěla zvýšit respekt a autoritu u kluků” [“Our daughter just wanted to gain more respect and authority with the boys”], he later explained. “Tak nám řekla, že bude třeba kontakty omezit.” [“And so she told us we would need to limit the contact with them.”] Gabriela, who had been very close with her younger sister, found herself ignored and cut out of her life. As late as the first couple of months of the summer of 2006, the boys’ father had been taking them to their practice sessions and visiting them on weekends, but things changed in late July of that year. The weekend visits were cut supposedly because of an educational program involving outings to observe animals in their natural habitat. Following that, if he ever managed to see them it was only from afar, and he never got to spend any significant amount of time with them until Ondrej was found languishing in the closet. The only person who did not receive the cut-off treatment from Klára was her eldest sister, Kateřina. Even though Klára looked up to her, the two of them had never been particularly close. After Klára took in Anička, they became closer. It appeared that Klára had turned to Kateřina and her expertise in childcare to help her deal with the change in her life, and when the move to Kuřim was made, Kateřina moved in with them. After that, Kateřina was the only person whose company Klára regularly kept.

AN EERIE CHILD Knowing this “official history” of Klára and her family allows us to make a few speculations: Ana’s appearance in Klára’s life seems to

have put a great deal of pressure on her. Taking care of a child is not an easy thing, and when that child is as mentally handicapped as Ana seems to have been, things become exponentially harder. Klára also still had her two biological children to worry about – perhaps she found herself overwhelmed, leading her out of desperation to put Ondrej away somewhere she could just forget about him, and when the stress became too much, she had also physically taken it out on both boys – and perhaps Ana, as well. As investigators took a closer look, certain things about Ana began to seem somewhat out of place. In order to calm her down following the discovery of Ondrej’s situation and the disruption it caused, she had been provided with a pencil and paper to doodle on. The doodles she had made surprised the caregivers at the Institution: strings of binary – the base-two mathematical system that underlies the deep inner workings of all our computers – covered the page. Along with them was a calculus formula, the cube-root of nine and two drawings of representations of a tesseract (a four-dimensional cube), one intact, and one an “exploded” view of how it would look in three dimensions. Complex as these concepts are even for an adult, Ana’s knowledge of them could still be explained. It is a well-known fact that people with autism often have phenomenal faculties of recall and mathematical aptitude, and Ana could have been just such a child. The photographs that were released of her opened up an intriguing new avenue of inquiry. Friends and co-workers of the accused were just as transfixed by the case as everyone else, and several coworkers of Kateřina’s noticed something: Ana looked a whole lot like someone they knew – a woman by the name of Barbora Škrlová, whom they had all worked with and who had shared an apartment with Kateřina. Barbora would have been thirty-two years old at that time. Kateřina had known her since the two of them were in university, where she had studied musical composition. Later on, it had been Kateřina who hired her at the day-care. None of their colleagues had seen Barbora in a long time – she had stopped working at the day-care centre due to illness some years previously. Right around 2005, in fact. She had

been rather plump but lost an astonishing amount of weight just prior to ceasing to come to work. Presented with this information, caregivers at the Institution came forward with an observation they had found odd but had not thought was especially significant: in their interactions with Ana, many of them came away with the impression that she was older than her claimed thirteen years. Her eyes were the greatest source of suspicion – her gaze seemed far too mature for an adolescent. She also had stretch marks – highly unusual for a girl of her age, although still plausible if she had suffered very rapid weight loss. In hindsight, some of them admitted that she could have been much older, but they still defended their lack of alarm by the fact that any of the anomalies they had observed in Ana could have been the result of illness, extremely vigorous medical treatments, or trauma. When Kateřina was questioned about whether Ana was in fact Barbora, she put it down as ludicrous – she had known both Barbora and Ana, and they were definitely two distinct people. The entire nation was spellbound by this intriguing new possibility, and as the police conducted their inquiry, there were efforts in the public sphere to unravel the mystery of where Ana had disappeared to as well as where she had originated. A popular national tabloid offered a bounty of 100,000 Czech Koruna, about £2,400 at the time, for anyone who could provide information on her whereabouts, and one of the nation’s private TV stations even brought in a psychic to prognosticate on the case, an obvious publicity stunt was of no help.

A GRIEVING MOTHER'S HOPE Meanwhile, in Krnov, the town bordering the Polish border where grandmother Antonia Drčmanová had lived and Ana had supposedly originated, the doubt now cast over Ana's identity gave lent hope of solving a tragic mystery from nearly a decade earlier. In 1996, a father named Jaroslav Sysalov was convicted of the murder of his four-year-old daughter, Karolina. Jaroslav was at the time divorced from Karolina’s mother. The little girl had disappeared while he was spending time with her. According to him, he had been on a drive with her when he was knocked unconscious by unseen assailants

while the vehicle was stationary, and that when he had awakened, he found his daughter gone. The courts found his explanation implausible, and he was convicted and sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment for her murder, even though no body was found. When the possibility that this mystery child, with a dubious origin, was not who her caregivers said she was, Karolina's mother, Bohdana, came forward with the hope that maybe, just maybe, her ex-husband was innocent after all and Ana was her long-lost daughter. There were a few inconsistencies – Karolina would have been fifteen by the year 2007, while Ana’s claimed age was thirteen, but since there was no official documentation of Ana before her adoption, it was still possible that her age was a fabrication meant to throw off any inquirers who might have suspected the connection. There was also the fact that Ana was apparently autistic, while Karolina had been a healthy and communicative child. Autism typically manifests symptoms earlier than the age of four, though in extremely rare instances, it has appeared later. The other more horrifying possibility is that the child suffered enough torture to break her mentally and had been socially deprived to the point that she manifested autismlike symptoms.

ANA SENDS A LETTER A few days after Bohdana Sysalová made her hopeful claim, the press and the Premier Ombudsman of South Moravia received a handwritten letter. Its alleged sender was Ana. It offered an explanation for why she had run away from the institution – she had seen the news of her mother's arrest on one of the televisions in the Institution and become so distraught she felt she had to find and help her. The Institution did all it could to ensure the children were shielded from anything pertaining to the case, making sure they had no access to newspapers and vigilantly watching over what they saw on the TV. This was difficult, given the massive media storm that surrounded the case from the very moment news about it broke. One of the caregivers admitted to having left Ana unattended in front of a

TV while they went to the toilet, during which time Ana could have fiddled around with it until she came across a station that was covering the story. The letter also attempted to explain why Ondrej had been locked up in the closet. It was a harsh punishment, but according to the letter, one which the little boy deserved. He was wildly unruly, it said, and would threaten to kill both her and their mother. Klára had initiated the punishment to try to work his bad tendencies out of him. The letter was met with scepticism. Even on the surface, it was dubious. It was supposedly written by a mentally challenged thirteenyear-old, and it was a full ten pages long, with no mistakes crossed out or significant errors in grammar and spelling. Its vocabulary and cadence were childlike, but certain parts of it exposed a degree of experience in the writer that no child could have. Its handwriting did, however, match that on the doodles Ana had left behind. If it had been written by her, then it had to have been done so with the guidance of an adult who could have dictated the details or censored certain information. Another oddity in the letter was that it used only male pronouns, indicating the writer experienced some form of gender dysphoria. At that moment, curiosity hinted at one of the more bizarre turns this case would take in the coming months. The letter was eventually traced to a scout cottage in the woods – one at which Kateřina and Barbora Škrlová had worked. When the cottage was searched, it was found empty. If Ana and her helpers had been there, they had long abandoned it.

A QUESTIONABLE ADOPTION One of the adults who had come to visit following the three children’s rescue was Jakub Patočka, the activist who had helped Ana get adopted. He presented himself as a concerned party, owing to his involvement in Ana’s adoption. With the difficult time they were having in communicating with her, caregivers at the institution welcomed the possibility that he could possibly get through to her as one of the few people she was likely to be familiar with and whom they were confident was not involved in the abuse. He didn’t

succeed but was present when she threw a tantrum demanding to get on the phone with her adoptive mother, to which the resident psychiatrist had acquiesced. It was a couple of days after that that Ana disappeared, and the police had subsequently reassessed the role they thought he had played. The extent of his involvement in the adoption itself was unknown, and if there had been any doubt about Ana’s true identity it was possible that he involved. If that were the case, giving him access to Ana had been a mistake. Perhaps he had used that opportunity to secretly give her instructions for breaking out; he could even have been the person who aided her in her escape. Pursuing this line of inquiry, the police raided Patočka’s apartment in Brno and searched it looking for any trace of Ana or any evidence that could shed light on her identity – some official record, perhaps, or a piece of correspondence. They came up empty-handed on both counts. There wasn’t even a trace that matched the DNA they had sequenced from the samples recovered from the Institution, so it was unlikely that she had passed through his house on the way to somewhere else. When questioned, Patočka maintained that if there was any deception, he had been neither part of it nor aware of it. He had only communicated with his old acquaintance Kateřina, and had only seen Ana once throughout the entire adoption process. Besides her apparent mental challenges, he had seen nothing out of the ordinary in her, nor did the way she behaved with Klára and Kateřina point to any fear of either of them that might have indicated she was being abused. He had acted in good faith throughout the entire process, seeing no reason to distrust the information he was being given by the Mauerová sisters. He still expressed his trust in them even after the abuse of Klára’s two sons came to light, saying that he wanted to do all he could to help them through their trying time. If Ana were indeed not who she was claimed to be, especially if she were much older than her apparent age, Patočka could be added to the long list of people who had been fooled. Police officers and firefighters had seen nothing amiss, and even experts in childcare had been unable to detect anything that raised enough flags to convert slight unease into alarm. If Patočka really had been fooled,

he revealed that this impression had stretched back all the way to around the time of the custody hearing. The fact that Ana had been legally adopted raised some questions about the hearing itself: the legal system is supposed to apply utmost scrutiny to any case that passes through it. To be adopted, Ana had to have passed through that scrutiny, which opened a myriad of questions: how could that have been possible? Had the Mauerová sisters’ powers of deception been that good, or had the officials who oversaw the adoption overlooked something or perhaps even colluded? Jaroslava Rezova, the judge who had presided over the case, maintained that she had seen a child in her courtroom – and she had had two and a half hours in her presence, so she was absolutely sure. The squaring of this particular circle came courtesy of the DNA that had been sequenced from the samples collected from the Institution: whoever the “Ana” who had been recovered from Kateřina’s house was, she was not the same person as the one who had been present in that courtroom. The DNA sample that had been taken from that girl during the adoption process did not match the one they had on hand. Speculation once again ran rampant in the public’s imagination: could the girl in the courtroom have been the real Ana, and if so, what had happened to her? Had something terrible happened to her – accidental death, perhaps, prompting the Mauerová sisters to go to desperate measures to conceal the fact? Could she still be alive, hidden somewhere and having unspeakable things done to her? Investigators were pursuing another angle with the case: they had noticed another link between Kateřina and Barbora Škrlová beyond studying and working together: Barbora had been part of a religious sect headed by her father, who was named Josef Škrla. The sect was an offshoot of an international religious movement known as the Grail Movement, and Barbora had converted Kateřina to its beliefs, probably sometime during their university years. The investigators saw this as more than just a coincidental connection – perhaps it had quite a lot to do with the case and the motivations behind it. Consequently, they began with a few inquiries into other members of the sect, and this is where they hit pay dirt:

the DNA sample taken in the courtroom was found to belong to the daughter of one Viktor Skála, an actor from Brno and member of the sect. It had been her who had been presented to the court as Ana, eliminating any possibility of the court’s extremely thorough examinations finding anything amiss. Not long after that, the one suspicion that had seemed least likely was confirmed: the DNA sample taken from the Institution did, in fact, belong to Barbora Škrlová.

SETTING UPON THE PATH TO RECOVERY While the drama was playing out in the outside world, the boys, now removed from the abusive environment, were slowly settling into the new regime. Both of them had clearly suffered a great deal of mental trauma and would probably bear its consequences for the rest of their lives. The first person to interact extensively with Jakub after the liberation was Lenka Malhocká, a caregiver at the Children’s Institution in Brno. She took Jakub to her apartment for lunch and an afternoon of board games the next day so that she could get his mind off events a little as well as observe his social behaviours. He seemed unable to perform many very simple tasks that should have been well within the abilities of a nine-year-old. He had had trouble dressing himself after taking a bath, putting his clothes on back-to-front before having to be helped into them. His table manners were appalling, and he was unable to eat without making a substantial mess. Malhocká managed to slowly work her way through the shell Jakub had woven around himself – she uncovered the true provenance of the scars and burn marks on his body. Following the meal, she played Ludo with him, and while he was progressively becoming freer with himself, his ordeal also seemed to have left him with a habit of dishonesty. Following the terror of the first night out of his prison, Ondrej began to perk up considerably. His demeanour towards strangers was the complete opposite of Jakub’s. His confinement had meant that he had never had to maintain secrecy against outsiders, so he hadn’t developed the guardedness his older brother showed. If anything,

captivity had left him with a deep longing for human contact. He was friendly and trusting with everyone, chatting with nurses and sitting in their laps even though they were strangers to him. The aspects of freedom that excited him were not what would be expected from a child – rather than access to toys, he seemed fascinated by hygiene products, commenting on how great the toothpaste was, or on how pretty a hairbrush he had been given was. A lot of the boys’ more extreme pathologies cleared up within a few days, but deeper underlying issues remained and flared up with disheartening frequency. The news of the disappearance of Ana, whom they had known as their sister, from the Institution hit them hard. Both of them spoke very protectively and fondly of Ana – she was, in fact, the only person to whom they seemed to have a warm bond of any kind. This appeared innocent enough at first, seeming like the simple fondness of two little boys for someone they had accepted as their sister, but as her true identity was revealed, investigators began to wonder if there was something darker behind it. When the news was broken to them that Ana was not who they thought she was but was instead an impostor, they reacted very badly and were reduced to a terrible psychological state for several days. The boys’ fondness towards Ana seemed to have been developed at the expense of their relationship with each other, a fact that came to light when Ondrej was deemed healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital into the care of the Institution just over a fortnight after his liberation. One would expect their reunion to have been a joyful and enthusiastic affair; instead, it was cold and subdued, as if they had some measure of distrust towards each other. Their relationship would eventually become warmer with time, but during the first few days back together they often broke out into outright hostility.

FAMILY MATTERS The rest of the boys’ family, who had all been cut out of their lives prior to the abuse being revealed, were eager to resume contact with them. During Ondrej's first few days in the hospital, he received a

visit from his father, grandparents, and Aunt Gabriela, to which he responded very positively and enthusiastically, bubbling with joy and sharing candy he had been given with all of them. Naturally, Coufal was eager to have the boys returned to his custody. He had maintained a room for them in his apartment despite Klára’s having enforced his isolation from them, and discovering her reasons for doing so had prompted him to go on a redecorating spree, repainting and redecorating the room so that they would have a pleasant atmosphere in which to start over, free from the influences of the past. However, days turned to weeks without the boys being released into his care, and his frustration built. He found his access to them restricted by the Institution’s policies – the times during which he could see them were heavily restricted and extended only to him and not the rest of the family. Out of frustration, both he and the boys’ grandparents attempted to get the situation resolved by the courts, but a judge ruled that the decision of whether and when to release them would be left to the Institution. This was not, however a court order giving custody of the boys over to the Institution, and Coufal protested that their continuing to be held in the Institution’s care was illegal. Petr Nečas, the Minister of Social affairs, eventually had to weigh in on the matter, saying that the extraordinary nature of this case meant that parental rights could be waived for the wellbeing of the children. Things eventually got even worse for Coufal and the rest of the family when the Institution decided to revoke visitation rights altogether. It turned out that the Institution extending visitation rights to Coufal, and Coufal alone, was more than just a recommendation. It was a hard and fast rule, and when he violated that rule by bringing other relatives along anyway, they used the implicit power that had been vested in them to ban him from further visits. As further justification for this decision, the Institution cited the boys’ behaviour when in the presence of their extended family members. They became restless and agitated, saying that they were forbidden from speaking, only calming down after they left. This was possibly the result of conditioning by their abusers – Klára, Kateřina, and their accomplices would have been especially vigilant about making sure

the boys never let anything slip should they ever be in the presence of the rest of the family. The fact that the boys’ reaction was no fault of the family was immaterial – the only thing that mattered was their mental welfare and that they not be exposed to upsetting stimuli. Another factor in the Institution’s wariness to allow visits was that no one could, with complete confidence, be sure that none of the family had been involved in the abuse. The possibility had been entertained from the very beginning, but the debacle with Ana ratcheted the suspicion up even further. The bulk of scrutiny centred on the actions of the boys’ grandmother, Eliška Mauerová – she had testified to the veracity of the story of Ana’s origins during the adoption hearings. This meant that she was at the very least complicit in the deception – deception committed under oath, no less. Perjury proceedings were pending on her, but the courts did not want to confuse the investigation with additional charges just yet. Investigators had questioned her about it and come away with the impression that she was likely not involved in the abuse itself, but without a hundred percent certainty, the Institution probably decided they were better safe than sorry. Once again separated from his sons, Coufal began smoking – a habit he had kicked eleven years prior. A couple of weeks later, the court ruled that the Institution had acted beyond its mandate by banning his visits completely, calling it a “gross interference to [his] parental rights and responsibilities.” If the visits were actually affecting the boys adversely, the matter should have been decided in the courts. The decision on who would have ultimate custody of the boys remained unresolved for another four years, long after all of the perpetrators of the abuse had been exposed and brought to justice.

CHAPTER 2 – NOW YOU SEE HER... On the 11th June 2007, Ana Mauerová officially ceased to exist in the eyes of the eyes of the law. At that point, there was no evidence to prove that she had ever existed. No official documents backed her existence, and the person who had been presented as her to the authorities had been proven to be someone else entirely. Numerous eyewitnesses dating back to 2003 had testified to her existence, including some who purported to have known Barbora at the same time, but none of them had had an opportunity to study her closely. Barbora Škrlová had fooled law enforcement and childcare experts, so it was probable that she could have done the same much earlier to Klára’s neighbours and family, even while she maintained her true identity to colleagues. Barbora herself was still missing, and the search for her still had not turned up a single clue as to her whereabouts. Fortunately, it was a few days after the erasure of Ana from official record that she voluntarily reappeared, but in a completely unexpected place. On the 15th June, she turned up seeking a new passport at the Czech embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark, 480 miles away from Brno as the crow flies. In her company were four men, all Czech nationals: her father, Josef Škrla, a lawyer named Zděnek Hrouzek, a former Czech police officer named Josef Kolinsky, and another man named Vlatislav Ruzička. She had been in the city for a month with relatives who lived there, hiding out of fear of being sent back to the Czech Republic because of the reprisals she might face due to her proximity to the abuse. There was much, much more to the story, they said, and people would not be very kind on her without knowing it. Kolinsky acted as Barbora’s spokesperson to the press. He revealed that she had indeed played the role of Ana, but it had not been for any nefarious purposes. She had done it because deep inside she felt like a child, and she had taken on the persona in order to occupy the “skin” she felt most comfortable in. “Chtěla být mezi dětmi” [“She wanted to be among children”], Kolinsky explained, “protože se jako

dítě cítila nejlépe a nejbezpečněji. Jako dospělou osobu ji nikdo nebral vážně. Všichni si z ní dělali legraci a zesměšňovali ji, protože se navenek opravdu chová jako dítě” [“because as a child she felt happy and safe. She wasn’t treated as an adult, no one took her seriously. People laughed at her and made fun of her because of her acting like a child.”] Barbora's behaviour while at the embassy seemed to support this story: she was clutching a teddy bear as a child would. Her personality seemed to slip between that of a person of her actual age and that of a child, begging her father for ice cream or a cake from a bakery they had passed by. Kolinsky also explained her escape from the Institution in very sparse detail: she had hidden in the woods for a while before travelling out of the country by train. There was no explanation of who had helped her, or how she had crossed multiple national borders without a passport. Since Barbora was not a wanted person at the time, the embassy was powerless to hold her. She and her chaperones left a hair sample for DNA testing and a promise that she would continue to cooperate and remain in contact. A couple of days later, Czech media and press outlets received a message from Barbora expressing her full willingness to cooperate with the authorities and to testify on every detail that she knew. She also provided a few more details about how she had created the persona of Ana: it had begun while she was working at the daycare centre with Kateřina. She had led a woodcarving group activity and played the piano, and part of the job was naturally supervising the children. That aspect of her work became problematic when she acted more like someone closer to their age than an adult. She had created the persona herself as a way to fit in with the children, hence harmonising her behaviour with what they saw. As the feeling of discomfort with who she was worsened, she sought psychological help to no avail. As a desperate last resort, she turned to her friend Kateřina, who understood and offered to help her assume a new identity. She also claimed to put to rest the speculation that the entire adoption process had been conducted with an actual child: Viktor Skala’s daughter had only been brought in for the DNA test; the rest

had been with her. She had sat through psychiatric evaluations by several experts, and all had come away believing she was thirteen years old, one even speculating that she could have been eleven or twelve. All this was presented to the press as proof that her age dysphoria was real, that she could not have been making a show of it. In an interview a few days after that, she stated that “Annie is gone." Oddly, she also spoke about herself – her true identity as Barbora – in the third person, indicating some kind of latent dissociation. Her father had also known a little about the deception, she said, but not much, and had not been involved in it in any way. When asked if she had been assisted by anyone during her escape from the Institution, she refused to divulge any information. As for Ondrej’s incarceration, that had only happened once – on the day of the raid, and he had not been in the closet more than two hours in total. She added on to the story laid out in the letter she had sent from the scout cottage: after receiving light of corporal punishment, Ondrej had screamed that he would kill both her and his brother Jakub. Klára had put him in the closet to cool down and make it known in no uncertain terms that such talk was not to be tolerated in their home.

...NOW YOU DON'T Kolinsky also sent a statement to the media explaining how he had come to be involved with the affair. Josef Škrla, along with Vlatislav Ruzička had visited him when he had become aware that Barbora was in Copenhagen. Ruzička was a business associate of Škrla’s but had in a previous career run a secret police unit that planted agents within criminal organisations. He had known Kolinsky outside of their shared work in law enforcement and had recommended that Škrla consult Kolinsky for any additional expertise he could bring. Kolinsky himself recommended that they take the matter to the authorities, arguing that if Barbora was innocent of any wrongdoing, the best way to clear her name was to cooperate with investigators and let them see for themselves.

Prosecutors, however, saw things differently. First of all, their duty was to make sure no wrongdoer in this case was allowed to go free, and the way they perceived Barbora’s involvement did not incline them to be charitable towards her. At the time, there was no indication that Barbora had been involved in the abuse, but there was still the fact that she was an adult who had probably witnessed it and yet never made a move to report it. This in itself was a crime, and even if it had happened only once as she said it had, it was her duty to cooperate with the police when they raided the house. The Brno prosecutor’s office made a statement to the press expressing this very sentiment – a move that could charitably be called “inadvisable,” considering they were making this proclamation about a person who was not only two national borders away but had also exhibited an impressive propensity to disappear when she wanted to. To compound this, a remarkable amount of time went by without their making any move against her. Further revelations about Barbora’s relationship with Kateřina surfaced: Barbora was at that very time enrolled as a student at Masaryk University in Brno, but the photograph in their records that was purportedly of her, was instead that of Kateřina, meaning that Kateřina had quite likely been studying in her name. In light of this possible academic fraud, the university filed a criminal complaint against both of them. The Institution in Brno also had a bone to pick with Barbora. Her duplicity had endangered the safety of the children who were under its care and also tarnished its reputation in the public’s eye. The Institution brought a criminal complaint against her for illegal impersonation. It was becoming abundantly clear that Barbora was not likely to walk away from this matter unscathed. The days continued to tick past. Investigators requested that she be brought back to the Czech Republic so that they could question her more thoroughly, but were rebuffed, her representatives once again citing fear of reprisal. Czech police then enlisted the aid of Interpol to act as their proxies in the questioning. The session was scheduled for the 13th July, nearly a month after Barbora had resurfaced. She failed to show up for the session, and the only person anyone could reach was the lawyer Hrouzek. Citing his impression that the real objective was to get her back to the Czech Republic by force, he

would not be pressed to divulge her address, in fact claiming that he did not know it. The police then expressed their willingness to send someone to Copenhagen to interview her themselves, to which Hrouzek communicated Barbora’s compliance before once again withdrawing and saying that the interview could be conducted via Skype. Attempts to schedule the interview came to nothing, and soon Hrouzek himself dropped out of contact, evading any attempts to reestablish it. Barbora had once again disappeared from under the authorities’ noses.

CONNECTING THE DOTS Before Barbora’s reappearance and subsequent disappearance, the name Josef Škrla had been brought up as a person of interest, in part due to his paternal connection to her. Škrla had an interesting past. Injured by a fall down a flight of stairs in his youth, he had received disability benefit payments for most of his life. This financial safety net had not been enough for him, however: he embarked on a career in “business,” though most of his commercial dealings seemed to be obscured in layers of secrecy and outright dishonesty. He was a very convincing salesman, especially good at convincing people to invest in his hidden schemes, only for them to see little or no return. Few people could say just what he traded in, but it appeared to be connected to international intelligence and military goods. One of his alleged clients was the government of Azerbaijan, and he had been almost responsible for an international incident when that relationship broke down. Škrla had offered the sale of several tanks to the Azerbaijani military in the late 1990s, which offer was turned down. He had then threatened to sell the tanks to Armenia, Azerbaijan’s neighbouring country with whom it had a bitter centuries-long rivalry. Škrla had last been seen in the Czech Republic in the early months of that year, and his whereabouts prior to turning up in Denmark with Barbora were not known. Škrla had also come up due to a peculiar connection that seemed to draw together several principal players in the case. The connection

was the religious sect that Škrla led, a splinter of the Grail Movement: his daughter and Klára had belonged to it, as had Viktor Skala, whose daughter had been masqueraded as Ana during the adoption proceedings. It was also found that Hana Bašova, who was closely implicated to the actual abuse in both Jakub and Ondrej’s testimony, had also belonged to it. The venue through which Škrla appeared to have recruited members for his sect was a scout troop he had led in the 1990s, known as Mravenci, which translates to “Ants” in English. Every member of his sect had at some point been a member of the troop.

FOLLOWERS OF THE GRAIL The mainstream Grail movement is itself a peculiar entity among the tapestry of global religious orders. Its central creed is largely based on a work titled “In The Light of Truth: The Grail Message,” published in 1926 by Oskar Ernst Bernhardt, a German national. It began as a Messianic movement centred around Bernhardt himself – who was known to his followers as Abd-Ru-Shin, meaning “Son of Light” or “Son of the Holy Spirit” depending on who you ask, which was supposedly his name during a previous incarnation in the Levant during the time of Moses. Today, the movement boasts around ten thousand members worldwide, organised into local “circles” that operate largely independently of each other. Despite his attestations of being the earthly form of “Parsifal Imanuel,” the heavenly name of the Messiah, Bernhardt shied away from establishing himself as the central authority of the movement. After his death in 1941, which was explained as his having been recalled back to Heaven by God “as a result of the failure of mankind to such an extent that had not been expected,” his message was revised to tone down its Messianic aspects and morphed into the form it currently takes today. The movement still maintains its spiritual epicentre in the Bernhardt family’s estate in Vomperberg, Austria, where initiates still make pilgrimages to be baptised. The Grail Movement already had a varied reputation in the Czech Republic. In 1991, a believer in the Grail Message named Jan

Dvorsky had come to the conclusion that Parsifal Imanuel was meant to be reincarnated in order to complete the great work he had left unfinished. After a period of soul-searching, he announced that he was the promised reincarnation, publishing his own supplementary creed titled The Son of Man: The Messiah’s Living Word for Restoration of Mankind. His following did not have an official name but was popularly known as the “Imanuelité” or Imanuelites. Dvorsky was rejected by the mainstream Grail Movement, but the book managed to sell quite well, gaining him a modest number of followers who made contact with him by post. At the advice of a clairvoyant, he trusted named Josef Klimes (who also went by the name "Mr Vidon"), Dvorsky and his wife Lucia established a compound in Northern Italy known as “The City,” where the future heavenly kingdom would be centred. Klimes predicted massive global catastrophes presaging the end of the world and sending multitudes flocking to the safety of The City. Some believers abandoned everything to make it to The City before the catastrophes hit. What they found there was a totalitarian microstate where Dvorsky’s word was final. Purity tests were common, and many were expelled, particularly at the word of Klimes. The clairvoyant conducted psychic readings and declared that those with “bad auras” were to leave. Many of those expelled were extremely devout believers and were devastated at having been thrown out of the company of the righteous. Ten such former members reportedly attempted to starve themselves to death in the mountains surrounding The City in the hope of hastening their reincarnation into purer vessels. Some members left of their own accord when the prophesied catastrophes did not materialize, but even then, Dvorsky continued to expel those who stayed behind until only his family remained. All told, about sixty individuals cycled through The City, though it never held more than fifteen at any one time. In 1995, Dvorsky and his wife were indicted for parental neglect for refusing to allow their children to attend school. The entire family went into hiding that summer and has not been heard from since.

Following this unfortunate affair, the Imanuelité were recognised as one of the most dangerous groups in the Czech Republic, and the mainstream Grail Movement had its reputation tarnished by Dvorsky’s association with it. The involvement of members of Škrla’s group in the Kuřim Case stood to be a public relations disaster of even greater scale. Artur Zatloukal, leader of the Movement in the Czech Republic, was quick to disavow Škrla and his followers, making it known that they had broken away eleven years earlier due to unspecified differences in doctrine.

A CLEAR CONNECTION Investigators still made the deduction that they could probably use what they knew about the mainstream Grail Movement to pattern Škrla’s sect’s behaviour. Believers in the Grail Message are known to cooperate fully with each other, and if the sect had been used as the medium through which the abuse was perpetrated, it was likely that other members besides those already implicated had been enlisted. Klára and Kateřina were being held separately but were almost conspiratorially silent about the involvement of anyone else. Investigators heavily suspected that there were a lot more people involved in the matter, and they were determined to root them all out. To that effect, a series of raids were launched against members of Škrla's sect, searching for anything that could shed light on the motives that lay behind the abuse of Jakub and Ondrej as well as how Barbora's transformation into Ana was orchestrated. They managed to turn up something that could be of interest: dozens of medical documents, all of them for children and containing diagnoses for very serious illnesses, mostly leukaemia and various other cancers. The names were all of real children from the daycare centre Kateřina and Hana Bašova worked for (as had Barbora in the past), but the diagnoses were forged. When medical experts looked over the documents, they came away with the impression that the forgeries had been based on a source written with professional medical knowledge, but contained technical errors, which indicated their contents had been filtered through a

person who was not an oncologist with full, intimate knowledge of the correct terminology. The investigators were willing to consider other hypotheses besides the documents having somehow been used in fabricating a paper trail for Ana. The most obvious one was that they had been used to make false insurance claims for the treatment of the illnesses, but some digging done in pursuit of that theory uncovered no evidence of insurance fraud being perpetrated using the documents. However, the documents did resemble those that had been provided to the investigators by Klára and Kateřina to “prove” Ana’s background story and also contained similar errors. Evidence of their being of the same or similar provenance. This all but confirmed the connection between the splinter sect and the fabrication of Ana, strengthening the case that there was indeed a connection with the abuse, as well. With the aid of social workers and the caregivers at the Brno Children’s Institution, investigators slowly managed to coax more information out of Jakub and Ondrej. Both stated that two other male adults had been involved in abusing them. One of the adults was known to them as Jerome – a name that did not belong to anyone thus far regarded as a person of interest. If their knowing Hana Bašova as “Nenci” was any indication, it was likely that the name was a pseudonym. The investigators showed them images of splinter sect members and scored a hit: the boys identified the other two abusers as Jan Škrla and Jan Turek. Jan Škrla was the son of Josef Škrla and brother to Barbora and studied geology at Brno’s Masaryk University, while Turek was an entrepreneur and also ran a shelter rehabilitating aggressive dogs that would otherwise have to be euthanised. Apart from being members of the sect, both had a further connection with the other abusers and persons of interest: they had both worked part-time at Kateřina’s daycare centre and had both been members of the Ants scout club. Turek was arrested for causing grievous bodily harm on the 8th September 2008, mere days after his complicity was established. The younger Škrla and Hana Bašova, on the other hand, remained free for several months, as the boys’ testimony was deemed insufficient to bring proceedings against them immediately.

THE FULL EXTENT OF THE ABUSE Along with the revelation of the two further suspects, Jakub’s and Ondrej’s testimony finally revealed the horrific complete details of the abuse they had suffered at the hands of their mother and her accomplices. The horror did not begin for Jakub and Ondrej until the summer of the previous year, 2006. Before then, Klára had shown no tendency towards abuse or violence whatsoever – it had all begun quite suddenly, and was immediately of such high intensity and brutality that the boys had been thrown into shock, unable to process what was happening to them. The boys had been taken by their mother and aunt, along with the person they knew as their sister Ana, to a cottage in the countryside in Veverská Bítýška. It was about half an hour’s drive northwest of their home in Brno later to be joined by Hana Bašova, Jan Škrla, and Jan Turek. Rather than being a regular family holiday out in the great outdoors – of which they used to have many before Ana came into their lives – this one had a darker purpose. Waiting for them at the cottage was a pair of dog cages into which they were stuffed, absolutely forbidden from communicating with each other. They had also been fed from dog bowls. Over a period of several days, they were only ever taken out of the cages to be subjected to the very worst of the cruel treatment they would experience. With bags over their heads, they were beaten with belt buckles and a bamboo pole, scratched with forks, had cigarettes stubbed out on their groins, and had hot water – hot enough to be agonising but not enough to cause permanent damage – slowly poured over their abdomens. On one occasion, Ondrej had his head held down in a bucket of water. The torture was not only physical. It extended to the psychological, well beyond even the dehumanisation of being caged like dogs, their heads covered, they could not see who was doing what to them, but they could hear their jeers and taunts well enough. They were forced to memorize vulgar words and phrases, had industrial music blared at them in order to unsettle them, and were often forced to inflict harm on each other, as well. There was also a bizarre pantomime

that can only be described as a ritual that was done to them. They were forced to dig shallow graves and lie in them, then being repeatedly told they were dead. For some reason, Ondrej seems to have attracted the bulk of the torture. This singling out culminated in what was probably the most horrific and revolting act of the entire hideous experience. Ondrej was taken out of his cage and held down tightly to stop him escaping. Klára then cut a piece of flesh from his rear while he squirmed and screamed – the source of the circular indentation in his buttocks. While he still wept, the piece of meat was passed around and consumed by the adults present. The abuse that followed when they returned from the cottage seems tame by comparison, but it was still far beyond what any child should ever experience. With stern admonishments not to mention what happened there or was happening at home, reinforced by extensive coaching on what to say should he ever be asked, Jakub returned to school after the summer. The change in his demeanour did not go without notice, though – in the 2006-2007 school year, he missed a total of 214 hours of school, divided evenly over both halves of the year. He also missed out on every swimming practice and nature outing, as well as on a class trip to the Beskid mountains on the border with Poland – all probably to make sure he was never seen unclothed for anyone to ask unwelcome questions about the marks on his body. Ondrej, on the other hand, was allowed to be home-schooled because of a diagnosis of a hearing problem, which was found to be completely nonexistent by Institution caregivers and social workers. He spent the rest of the year 2006 in the basement of the Beam daycare centre, chained to a desk and under the watchful eye of Hana Bašova, who occasionally beat him when she was aggravated. He was forced to urinate in a bucket, being released to defecate in the bathroom in the depths of the night. Jan Škrla occasionally brought him meals during this period, and he was periodically taken out for exercise by Jan Turek. When Klára had secured the lease for the Kuřim house, he was transferred to his confinement in the under-stair closet, there to

remain until his liberation --thanks to Eduard Trdy’s malfunctioning baby monitor.

GUESSING AT THE MOTIVES The revelation of the full extent of what Jakub and Ondrej had experienced left the entire country stunned, sickened, and appalled. It also brought new life to the question everyone had been asking from the very beginning: why? Why had two innocent children been subjected to such a terrible ordeal by those they trusted the most? Everything pointed to Josef Škrla’s breakaway Grail Movement sect. There was no question it had provided the network of support necessary to inflict the abuse, and it was also likely that some factor of the doctrine followed by the sect had directly inspired the perpetrators’ actions. OVERZEALOUS DISCIPLINE?

Three possibilities presented themselves. The least sinister one was that the abuse was carried out with the intention of discipline – Klára and her co-accomplices had done it all for the purpose of training up the boys according to some twisted but still well-intentioned (depending on one's perspective, of course) code of punishment for perceived wrongdoing or disobedience. This hypothesis assumed that Barbora Škrlová's story of simply trying to fit in with the way she felt inside was true, and had in fact been posited by Barbora herself during her brief resurfacing in Copenhagen. The Grail Message’s teaching on child-rearing advocates a firm and strong-handed approach to discipline if children are to grow to become righteous and upstanding adults, and it could be that Škrla’s sect took this philosophy and amplified it to a monstrous degree. If Barbora’s attestations that the boys had become excessively unruly were true (caused, perhaps, by her taking up so much of their mother’s attention), Kateřina may have turned to the sect to help put them back on the right path. SEXUAL EXPLOITATION?

The second hypothesis came from evidence that had been collected from the house in Kuřim. From inside the under-stair cupboard itself, the camera that had been used to watch over Ondrej was found to have been of very high quality – recording in high definition at a time when such was a near a science fiction concept. It was impossible to find in electronics shops within the Czech Republic and had to have been imported at great cost. Between the two of them, Klára and Kateřina rented three homes. Both had kept their original flats in Brno in addition to the house in Kuřim, which was rented in Kateřina’s name – yet on paper did not seem capable of making nearly enough to maintain such large expenses. Klára had previously been a secretary in Brno but had been unemployed for a while before making the move to Kuřim, while Kateřina managed a daycare, neither of which are usually high-paying vocations. All of this raised a big question: where had the money come from? The possible answer came from what the camera had been used for: like Eduard Trdý’s set, Klára’s was capable of recording. A videotape had been found in the house with three and a half hours of footage of Ondrej in the closet, tied by hand and foot to a shelf and, close to the end of it, falling asleep. In a sick irony, the footage was found recorded over a videotape of children’s fairytales titled “Tales from Grandmother Sheep.” Added to Ondrej’s automatic smiling reaction when being photographed by first responders, this points to the possibility that he was used to being photographed in this state and had been coached on how to present himself to the point it came to him naturally. This supported a theory that the torture was for the purpose of selling the images to sadomasochistic paedophiles. A single video or collection of photographs of that kind of material could sell for hundreds of pounds at that time. The sale of a couple of dozen of each every month would go far towards supporting an extravagant lifestyle. Also possible was that the view of the closet was streamed live over the internet to select customers. There was also the possibility of more direct exploitation. The boys had largely been unable to see anyone when they were being tortured at the cottage, leaving open the possibility that some of their torturers had

been paying “customers” who had coughed up large sums of money to directly satisfy their perverted desires. Barbora’s pantomime as Ana also factored into this theory. Her transformation was theorised as possibly having the same intent as repackaging a “product” for sick-minded individuals to better enjoy – if potential customers were under the impression that she was a thirteen-year-old girl, media featuring her would still fetch a good price. Her believably acting like a thirteen-year-old would also have worked well in fooling any customers who wished to perform acts on or with her in person. The big question here was whether Barbora had somehow been forced into this arrangement or been an active and willing participant. ESOTERIC TRANSFORMATION?

The third hypothesis posited a more esoteric explanation – that the abuse and certain other aspects surrounding it were more closely tied to the splinter sect’s most deeply held beliefs. The details of this theory more directly resemble what we can immediately recognise as “cult activity”: the commission of clandestine acts with the purpose of fulfilling some prophetic goal of the participants. Barbora’s transformation was a cornerstone of this theory. The Messianic origins of the Grail Movement were well known, and Jan Dvorsky’s Imanuelite movement had proven its propensity for creating or inspiring offshoot revivals. It was seen as possible, then, that Barbora’s transformation was initiated with the purpose of creating in her a new Messiah to deliver the faithful where previous ones had failed. Alternatively, the objective may have been less supernatural, that she was meant to be an icon or figurehead for the faithful to rally around. Under this hypothesis, the attitude of Jakub and Ondrej towards the person they knew as Ana provides a clue to the possible motivation for the abuse. Investigators had noticed how attached they were to her but had initially thought it to be a simple familial bond that had formed since she had become a part of their lives. They had both been naturally friendly and gregarious children before the abuse, and it seemed natural that they would have accepted her into their lives.

The more they spoke about her, though, the more their adoration seemed too intense and their praise of her too glowing for simple sibling love. A caregiver at the institution recalled Jakub once saying that Ana was special, and when asked how, he said that she was chosen by God. When pressed for further details, Jakub clammed up and said he could not say any more. Their attitude towards Ana, it seemed, had been moulded by the adults in their lives according to some religious worldview. Every other relationship the boys had seemed manipulated as to make them more aloof. This was observed in their relationship with each other. Before the abuse, they had been as fond of each other as two young siblings separated in age by only a couple of years could be, but that close brotherly bond had been eroded to the point that they barely acknowledged each other at all and often displayed outright hostility towards one another. Being cut off from their father and extended family created a gulf between them and the boys. They had lost friends – Ondrej had, of course, had no opportunities to make friends while he was in captivity, while Jakub had been heavily discouraged from interacting with his classmates while at school. Team sports, social outings, and other activities had been stopped, leaving them no opportunities to socialize with children of their own age. Klára herself was not spared – in the months following the visit to the cottage, she had been isolated from the boys while Jakub was watched over by his aunt Kateřina, and Ondrej had been held captive at the daycare centre under the unsympathetic eye of Hana Bašova. The only person with whom the boys had a positive relationship was Barbora, in the form of Ana. The physical abuse they suffered also often centred around Ana: in the middle of nearly every night they would be woken up and told that she was going to receive two lashes across the back – and she would only be spared if they each took one for themselves. They would comply almost without fail. These details of the boys’ relationships seemed just as purposeful as the sudden initiation of the abuse itself, and it led to the crux of this theory. If Barbora was to be some idol or icon, then perhaps the boys were destined to be her protectors, and the abuse had been

perpetrated with the objective of reinforcing their loyalty to her while purging all others. The boys’ behaviour following their ordeal hinted at an end-goal of creating a pair of unthinking, unfeeling, utterly loyal and dedicated guardians fit to stand at the side of whatever Barbora was destined to be. The breaking down of a person’s will until they will unquestioningly accept authority and act without any personal motivation or thought of self has been in practice for centuries. When the practice gained its modern name, the “newspeak” word brainwashing, as coined by the totalitarian Big Brother’s brutal one-party regime in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, the use of physical and psychological trauma was a central pillar of the act. Its efficacy in achieving its central goal while preserving the victim’s functionality has never been proven, but that has never stopped real-world aspiring totalitarians and crackpot movements from trying. By directing their effort onto the more pliable minds of a pair of young children, the splinter sect may have believed they would succeed. The child pornography and cult theories soon took prominence in people’s minds. Everything pointed toward a clear objective behind the entire affair – simple undirected frustration or random hysteria on Kateřina and her accomplices’ parts were not enough to explain it. The police, more grounded in temporal affairs, as they tend to be, leaned towards the child pornography theory but did not discount the possibility of a religious explanation.

CHAPTER 3 – THE JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND MILES The final third of the year 2007 saw a great deal of searching for further clues in the case, but with no major breakthroughs. The suspects already in custody were keeping their lips tightly sealed, with the exception of occasional statements professing either no wrongdoing or, on Klára’s part, an attestation of the purity of her intentions and regret over what happened, but without giving away any details for what had prompted it all. It seemed there would be no extracting information from the suspects until it could be prised out of them at trial. Eager as investigators were to get to that stage, there was still a massive loose end waving in the breeze, and as long as it was left untied the case could not be considered complete enough to be closed. Barbora Škrlová had neither been seen nor heard from since dropping off the radar a second time back in August. With the part she had played in the entire affair as unclear as it was, proceeding with the trial without her would leave far too many questions unanswered. At the very least, she had to answer for the deception she had pulled, and at worst she was an accomplice to, if not an instigator of, the abuse the boys had suffered. She had to be found, and her version of events had to be heard and thoroughly scrutinised in order to ascertain the complete truth. As a result, prosecutors held off on commencing the trial while the investigators worked to locate Barbora. Barbora had last been seen in Denmark. It was also known that she had passed through Germany on her way there, and there was a possibility that she had at some recent point in time been in Sweden as well. The investigators’ foreign inquiries concentrated on these three nations. Their patience in waiting before proceeding with the trial paid off shortly after the turn of the year, but true to her previous fashion, when Barbora finally resurfaced it was in a completely unexpected place – and the way she had evaded detection was a

deception even more masquerade as Ana.

audacious

and

astounding

than

her

AT THE HEART OF WINTER Situated at a latitude of about 69° north, 190 miles above the Arctic Circle (which encircles the top of the world at approximately 66°), the city of Tromsø is recognised as the northernmost city in the world. It is in the land of the midnight sun and midday darkness – between the middle of May and the end of July, the sun does not set in Tromsø, and between the end of November and the middle of January, it never rises. A TROUBLED BOY

On the 5th of January 2008, during the long night of the depth of winter, a man walked into a car rental office to drop off a vehicle he had hired several weeks before in Oslo. As he was processing the paperwork for returning the car, police burst in with guns drawn, ordered him to lie on the floor, and cuffed him. The man was named Michal Riha, and the reason for his arrest was his travelling companion: a thirteen-year-old boy who had been whisked away – apparently abducted – from an orphanage in Oslo several weeks previously. The boy was called Adam, and he was ostensibly the son of a Czech playwright named Martin Fahrner. Fahrner had immigrated to Norway from the Czech Republic at the end of the previous summer with his family and had been working for the Nordic Black Theatre, an avant-garde theatre company in Oslo. While Fahrner’s wife and their other children returned to the Czech Republic in September, Adam had begun attending a school in Oslo. By appearances, Adam seemed like a normal thirteen-year-old boy, sporting the disaffected expression common to adolescents and quite fond of skateboarding. His teachers noticed a few odd things about him, though: he looked older than his years – some estimated he looked sixteen at the least, and he was very thin and his head shaven, with seemingly permanent dark circles around his eyes,

leading them to wonder whether he suffered from cancer or some other serious illness. During his enrolment, he had been placed into a year-long intensive Norwegian language class due to his being a fresh immigrant to the country, but as he interacted with teachers and classmates, it became obvious that his grasp of the language was actually quite good. They also noticed in some of his behaviours, signs that he bore some kind of mental scarring, possibly from past trauma. He seemed nervous a lot of the time and afraid of loud noises: once, when a teacher entered a classroom, banged the door shut, and made a loud and boisterous greeting to the class, Adam had suffered a hysterical breakdown. The possible source of the trauma was revealed in the extremely disturbing stories he told: stories of being abused by his father and rented out to older men for sexual purposes. His stories were very specific, describing in detail the acts that were performed on him. Teachers were obviously concerned and had to determine if the stories were true. They brought in a psychologist to assess and counsel him. Adam also had to be removed from his father’s custody and the man locked up if he had performed any of the acts described. It took a while for the psychologist to coax enough information out of Adam to call in the authorities. The final straw was a drawing he made of seven children with blood on their hands and feet and a man standing over and verbally threatening them. Adam himself had been child number seven, he said, and he and the six other children had all been tortured and abused together. Finally, in early December, Fahrner was arrested on suspicion of child abuse and Adam placed in an orphanage. On the 16th of December, a few days after Adam was separated from his erstwhile abuser, the orphanage organised an outing for the children in its care. While on the outing, Adam suddenly dashed off into a car that was idling nearby, which then sped off. Voluntary as the escape seemed, it was immediately assumed that Adam had been abducted by child traffickers, probably accomplices of whichever ring Fahrner had been renting him out to. A nationwide manhunt commenced. Adam’s face was plastered all over the

nation’s TV stations and newspapers, along with pleas to report any sightings to the police. THE HUNT FOR ADAM

The next time Adam was seen was on the 19th of the month in Bergen, just under 300 miles west of Oslo. He was in the company of a man – likely Michal Riha – and was holding the man’s hand as a son would with his father’s. Together, they had entered the Neptun hotel in Bergen requesting to use the phone. The receptionist who attended to them was named Natalia Stormark, and she by chance happened to be one of the few people who knew nothing about the missing Adam. She later explained that she never read newspapers or watched the news. She still found their request odd: they had a mobile phone with them, so why would they need to use the hotel telephone? By their accents, she guessed that they were Russian and suspected they may have been attempting a con: in the lobby of the hotel were several valuable paintings, and she suspected they were attempting to steal them. After they left without incident, she called the police with their descriptions just in case they were what she suspected. The hotel received a return call the next day, asking probing questions about the pair’s appearance. When asked whether the boy seemed afraid or under duress, Stormark had replied that he seemed reasonably untroubled. “Vypadali jako otec se synem” [“They looked like father and son”], she said. Man and boy had been holding hands - “To u nás v Norsku třináctiletí kluci normálně nedělají” [“Here in Norway you wouldn’t find a 13-year-old boy doing that”]. Fahrner and his family had not come to Norway alone: they had travelled into the country together with Michal Riha and his sister. When police attempted to trace their whereabouts, they discovered that he had taken several weeks off sick from his job at a computer store in Oslo and had hired a car earlier on the very day of Adam’s disappearance. From this information, they deduced that Riha was likely the person who had spirited Adam away.

Finding the car on the road would be easier said than done, particularly since Riha’s intentions and final destination were not known. It was probable that he would eventually have to return the car to another branch of the hire company, though, and employees were alerted to be on the lookout for him. This strategy eventually paid off when Riha and Adam finally walked into the branch in Tromsø – 1020 miles as the crow flies away from their starting point in Oslo, twenty days after setting out. The rental dealership’s employees immediately called in the police, and Riha was arrested. Adam was finally rescued, but he had a surprise for the police – “he” was not a thirteen-year-old boy. Rather, she was a woman and she was thirty-three years old, and her name was Barbora Škrlová. SHOCK AND BETRAYAL

If those who had briefly interacted with Ana Mauerová in the Czech Republic had been stunned by the revelation of her true identity, those who had spent time with Adam felt an order of magnitude worse upon receiving the news. Not only had they spent months in his company, but they had also believed and come to empathise with the supposed horror he had gone through. Discovering that it had all been a ruse – and possibly one perpetrated with the intent of covering up real child abuse – was distressing enough for some of them to need counselling. In a press interview with a Czech outlet, Ingjerd Eriksen, headmistress of the school “Adam” had attended in Oslo, could not reconcile in her mind the truth that had been revealed with the boy who had been in her presence just weeks earlier. “Let's call him Adam instead,” she said when she was asked about Barbora. “For me, it's Adam." It had been Fahrner’s wife, Helena, who had brought “Adam” to the school for enrolment. When asked if she had been shown any documentary evidence of Adam’s identity, Eriksen recalled that she had been told that he did not have a passport. Helena had instead shown her own passport, in which Adam was listed as a dependant. The couple actually did have a biological son named Adam – he returned to the Czech Republic along with the rest of his family while

Barbora remained hiding behind his identity. Helena had also requested that the “Adam” she had brought to the school be excused from gym classes, and as a result, Barbora never had to change clothes in the presence of anyone while at school.

HOMECOMING Her true identity revealed, Barbora was arrested along with Riha. Unlike when she had turned up in Denmark, this time she had an outstanding arrest warrant for the two complaints made against her by the Institution and Masaryk University in Brno. She was extradited to the Czech Republic and on the 9th of January landed in Prague, finally stepping once again onto home soil wearing a bulky overcoat and tight-fitting skullcap, tightly clutching a teddy bear. Even though he had known the truth about Barbora’s identity and that the stories that had led to his arrest were untrue, Martin Fahrner had avoided spilling the beans about her. Once the truth came out, however, the charge for which he had been arrested was dropped. Unfortunately, his life in Norway was done – he had lost his job upon his arrest, and the truth, when it came out, was still too unpalatable for him to ever be employable there again. With his family under intense scrutiny, his wife had been forced to withdraw their three children from school to protect them from the media frenzy. Fahrner returned to the Czech Republic so that he could be with them. Shortly after his return, Fahrner gave a short interview to the press. It did not explain much or shed much light on anything. Except for an assertion that he had not had anything to do with her initial escape from the Institution, he would not answer as to when Barbora had come into his company. Neither would he tell exactly why she had taken on his son’s identity. There were many complicated parallel stories to be told that no one would understand, he said, but she had seemed afraid of something all along – what it was he could not say. When asked whether he was a member of a cult, Fahrner replied with derision. The movement to which he belonged was a recognised religion in several countries. An accusation that someone was part of a cult was a sure

way of arousing fear in the Czech Republic – as well as reaping a harvest of television ratings, website hits, and newspaper sales. Another interview that hit the papers after Barbora’s arrest was that of Josef Kolinsky, Barbora’s former spokesperson during the brief time she had raised her head above the sand in Denmark, who had recently resurfaced himself. He had first met with Barbora in Sweden, he said, together with her father Josef – along with Martin and Helena Fahrner, who had been introduced as family friends. This places Fahrner’s interaction with Barbora soon after she escaped the Czech Republic. During his interrogation and shortly after being arrested, Barbora’s brother Jan stated that he had seen a picture of Barbora in another disguise and carrying an assault rifle, and he claimed to have been told she was an agent working for Russia. When asked about this, Kolinsky said it was a fabrication, part of a story Josef Škrla had hatched to throw the investigation off Barbora’s trail. When he was presented with this plan, Kolinsky said, he had refused to be a part of it and advised going to the authorities as a wiser course of action. On the whole, Kolinsky’s involvement with Škrla and his cadre had left a sour taste in his mouth. In meeting several other members of the splinter sect, his policeman’s intuition had left him with a not-tooreassuring impression of just what they were capable of. Asked if he thought it credible that Jan Škrla had participated in the sexual abuse of his own sister, as some had speculated, Kolinsky did not completely discount the possibility. He also could not say with absolute certainty that the sect was not involved in the abuse or that, if they were involved, there were no other children besides Jakub and Ondrej being abused.

NEW ALLEGATIONS Upon landing in the Czech Republic, Barbora was immediately handed over to the custody of the Brno police and transported there. Richard Novak, a lawyer who had been representing Jan Škrla, took Barbora on as well. Novak attempted to have her immediately released on bail, but the request was denied due to the high flight risk she posed – prosecutors had learned their lesson worked to

make sure another disappearance would be impossible. Whether she had participated in the abuse of Jakub and Ondrej was also still unanswered, and with that more serious charge potentially hanging over her head, they could take no chances. Following her unveiling and arrest, Barbora appeared to be in a poor mental state and so could not immediately face interrogation. She was placed in a special “crisis cell,” separate from potential attacks by other prisoners – partly to avoid over-stimulating her and causing further disorientation, but also to protect her from other prisoners. Among the hierarchy of inmates in any corrections system in the world, those who harm children are invariably loathed and seen as the lowest of offenders. The fact that Barbora was not even a suspect in Jakub and Ondrej’s abuse at that point might not have prevented some overzealous individuals from harassing her all the same – it was better to be safe than sorry. Barbora’s psychological state stabilised over the next few days. Finally, on the fifteenth of the month, she was deemed sufficiently stable to answer investigators’ questions and went through an hourand-a-half-long preliminary session. Gone was the infantile manner of speech and action she had exhibited in Copenhagen – aside from an apparent timidity that showed itself in her body language and the softness of her voice, she spoke normally. The first interview went smoothly, with Barbora cooperating fully. She claimed to have been a victim of torture herself, and that her torturers had filmed and photographed her. A physical examination had shown possible evidence supporting this – there were scars from cuts and bruises that may have come from burns on her body. Some of the wounds did not at first examination seem to have been self-inflicted or to be the result of masochism, while others seemed more ambiguous. They would need to be scrutinised further to determine their origin. Shortly after this revelation, Richard Novak resigned from representing Jan Škrla and began to represent Barbora alone. Representing them both now presented a conflict of interest – Barbora’s allegation placed her and her brother on opposing sides of the coming legal battle -- whether she too would stand accused of abusing the boys along with him and the rest of the defendants or

not. From that point on, Škrla was represented by Zdenek Jaros, a public defender. Barbora’s subsequent interviews were a lot less successful, though. She became uncooperative, answering questions in a general sense and refusing to be drawn into divulging any specific details. Frustration with her mounted, and the courts ordered a two-month long psychiatric evaluation. Richard Novak attempted once again to have her released, stating that continuing to hold her would only be justified if she had evaded arrest out of her own volition. While in Copenhagen, she had not been a wanted person. Hence, her going back into hiding (which was prompted by fear of reprisals if she was forcefully returned to the Czech Republic) did not provide sufficient grounds to keep her imprisoned. After that, she had acted wholly at the mercy of other people, and when she had finally had the opportunity to come clean, she volunteered her identity to the Norwegian police out of her own choice and without duress. All the same, the courts once again turned down the appeal.

KLÁRA SPEAKS Since the very beginning of the case, Klára had held onto the belief that Ana had been real. Even when Barbora resurfaced in Copenhagen, she still could not be sure the confession of impersonating her thirteen-year-old adoptive daughter was genuine. The only evidence the public had of Barbora’s presence there had been news reports, none of which had featured any photographs or footage taken of her. Once Barbora had been arrested, though, the evidence was plain to see: she reiterated her confession of impersonating Ana even as she protested her own victimhood, and photographs of her as Adam proved her perfectly capable of getting away with that sort of deception. With this realisation, Klára’s reticence to cooperate with the investigation finally broke. “Ana” had participated in some of the abuse, she revealed – during the trip to the cottage in the countryside, Kateřina had instructed Ana-Barbora to forcefully hold Ondrej’s head under water, and she had complied. She and Jakub had also on a few occasions been instructed to beat Ondrej.

Armed with this testimony, prosecutors had what they needed to move against Barbora, and on the 11th February 2008, she was charged with child abuse for the part she had played. Rolled into that charge would be the consideration of her not having intervened or contacted the authorities. If she were found to have had diminished responsibility for the more serious charge due to psychological reasons, the same would apply to the less serious one, whereas if she were found to have acted with competency all along, a single sentence would cover both. As soon as she was charged, Barbora’s tune changed: she was once again willing to divulge all she could to the police. Over a series of interviews with both the police and the press, she revealed her version of events. Her new testimony differed significantly from the one she had presented in Copenhagen. She had not willingly undergone the transformation into Ana, she said, and Kateřina had not been a benevolent helper who had assisted her to assume an outward form that reflected her inner identity. Through a combination of physical and psychological abuse, coupled with a regimen of drugs, she had been forced into it by the Mauerová sisters. The ringleader in the effort had been Hana Bašova. A few years before the formal adoption, Bašova had confronted her, saying she had a “bad attitude” that needed to be gotten rid of. Barbora apparently suffered from epilepsy as well as a host of psychological problems and was at the time almost wholly dependent on Kateřina. As a result, she was unable to prevent what followed. Over the next few years, she had been forced to take a potent cocktail of psychotropics – she recalled injections and being forced to ingest pills and plant material – which rendered her mind and entire sense of self a malleable clay to be formed into whatever her abusers wished. Consequently, the entire experience was a blur in her memory, and she could only remember hazy patches of it. As Ondrej later did, she claimed that she had been locked up in the basement of the daycare centre she had worked for. Her captors had begun by training her to take on different names and identities, she claimed, being drilled on each persona for hours and receiving a beating if she slipped up at any point. Her will had been worn down

steadily until she did not know who she was anymore, and once that point had passed, the persona of Ana was built up to take Barbora's place. Barbora said that before “Ana’s” formal adoption by Kateřina, she had been allowed to contact and occasionally visit her mother. She was instructed to “be Barbora” during those visits, even when her personality had been subsumed to the point that she felt like Ana all the time. If she failed to stick to her instructions, she was warned, there would be dire consequences for both her and her mother. The amount of time she spent in her mother’s presence had to be kept as short as possible, as a long visit would increase the chances of her slipping up or her mother noticing that something was wrong. A mobile phone call from Bašova or Kateřina was both her signal and excuse that it was time to leave. Barbora alleged that the adoption of “Ana” by Klára and the commencement of the abuse of Jakub and Ondrej was simply the continuation of what had been happening to her for years. All three of them had been forced to inflict pain on each other – she admitted to drowning Ondrej, but if she had refused it would have been her head going under the water. Disobedience was never an option – refusing to perform an act would mean that it was inflicted on her to an even harsher extent. The purpose of it all had been, in Barbora's words, to sell her to "evil men who do ugly things to children," affirming one of the early hypotheses. Many times she had been tortured, while blindfolded, at the hands of males whose voices she did not recognise. She remembered one name, though – a man named Hansen had been allowed a special privilege, perhaps one he had paid a very high price for. While she was tied and bent over a table, Hansen had slit her clothes and raped her. After Ondrej was discovered in the closet, Barbora had to make sure no one had the opportunity to examine her body lest her true age be discovered. She had been helped to escape the Institution by two men she could not name who helped her out of the window, took her into the woods, and transported her to Denmark. She had been allowed to meet her father there before being whisked away to Norway, where Martin Fahrner had forced her to take on his son

Adam's identity. The escape had provided her with no respite, she claimed – she was still forced to service "customers" while in Scandinavia. Finally, she said her captors had been apprehended by the police, and she had gratefully revealed her true identity to them as her saviours.

CHAPTER 4 – THE TRIAL Barbora’s alternate account added another complex element to the case. The only way to untangle it all would be to go to trial, and with her present and apparently willing to cooperate, it could finally begin. On the 2nd April 2008, over eleven months after it had begun, the police officially closed the investigation. All told, the case file – composed of testimony, collected evidence, and expert analysis – contained six thousand pages of documents.

TYING ALL THE KNOTS Even with the closing of the case, there was still a lot of preliminary trial work to be done. Officials had to be assigned to the trial and a few other details had to be ironed out. A judge was assigned to the case through a lottery system. There are sixteen judges who preside over the Brno Municipal Court. Each of them is assigned a number, and cases are assigned to each judge in ascending order according to their availability. ASSIGNING THE JUDGE

The judge assigned to the case at first was Martin Vrbik. Vrbik was forced to resign from the case, however. He had been friends with the sister of the two accused, Gabriela Mauerová, a decade and a half earlier, and was familiar with the rest of the family. Tenuous as their connection was, this constituted a conflict of interest. He voluntarily disclosed his connection and stepped down from the case. Such conflicts are not that rare in Brno – they tend to occur once or twice a month from judges being assigned to the cases of their own relatives or acquaintances, current and former. The case was then passed to the next judge in line, Pavel Göth, who fortunately had no connection with any of the accused. On the 21st April, the accused were formally indicted. The Mauerová sisters, Hana Bašova and Jan Škrla, faced up to twelve years’

imprisonment for deprivation of liberty of minors and the abuse of persons entrusted to their care, while Barbora Škrlová and Jan Turek faced up to eight years for aggravated cruelty. The statement from the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Brno that accompanied the indictments cited the abuse Jakub and Ondrej had suffered: the beatings, physical and psychological torture, humiliation, and extended durations of imprisonment in dark rooms. It also mentioned the practical effect that the abuse seemed designed to produce: severing the children’s bonds of family and creating beings with no will of their own, desensitized to violence and pain. A MATTER OF REPUTATION

Kateřina and Barbora were also indicted for malicious damage to the reputation of the Brno Children’s Institution for the way the Ana deception had tarnished its name. The Institution had weathered a considerable share of the media storm following Ana’s escape and suffered public reprimand for it. Curious sightseers were sometimes seen lurking around their premises, and the words “Kauza Kuřim” were at one point spray-painted onto one of their buildings by a vandal. In a short hearing before the main trial, both Barbora and Kateřina were acquitted of this charge. The reasoning behind the decision was that the deception had begun long before Barbora-as-Ana came into contact with the Institution, and it had not been undertaken with the express objective of bringing the Institution into disrepute. Besides, the Institution had to take its own share of the blame: they should have done an immediate medical exam on “Ana” as soon as she arrived in their care. Doing so would have uncovered the deception without the Institution losing face. It would also have prevented the significant cost and delay that had come with the search for Barbora. The media attention they had received was not admissible as detrimental – they would have to live with it the same as any other organisation that catches the media’s eye. REQUESTS AND OBJECTIONS

The court also had to address outstanding issues brought up by the accused. Klára’s attorney Daniel Sevcik requested that the trial be held “in camera,” meaning that all hearings be held in private without any access for the public or the press. Sevcik stated that the involvement of minors in the case made it very sensitive – the boys had already faced a great deal of media attention, and having the trial itself endlessly covered would not serve their best interests. The other defence attorneys and the prosecution back the request. If it went through, details of the trial would not be available to the public in real time. Instead, they would be released in monthly updates heavily edited by the court. Kateřina’s attorney, Pavel Holub, objected to one of the experts who would be testifying in the trial. Marta Skulova was a psychiatrist who had assessed Jakub and Ondrej shortly after they were liberated. Holub alleged that she was biased: Skulova was a financial contributor to the Brno Children’s Institution and so could not be relied upon to have been impartial in her assessment. The objection failed to stand: Skulova had made a donation of 5,000 Koruna in December 2007, long after she had assessed the boys and made her report. The gift had been part of her usual round of Christmas donations, and she had made it simply because she had become familiar with the Institution through her work with the boys. ONE SMALL FINAL MATTER...

The preliminary findings of the psychiatric assessment of Barbora Škrlová were finally announced. They would have bearing on whether Barbora would be declared fit to stand trial. If her story of having been forced into taking on the identity of Ana and being a victim of extreme mental torture herself was found to be true, she could be spared before the trial even began due to diminished responsibility. The assessment had found her to be mentally fit and healthy enough to be held culpable, and that she had acted completely of her own volition. The finer details would be revealed later on during the trial, but the short statement that was released asserted that Barbora had wilfully manipulated Klára and that she suffered from a personality disorder that did not constitute grounds to block her prosecution.

With the question of Barbora’s fitness to face prosecution answered, the trial was ready to begin. On the 17th June 2008, the Kuřim Case trial opened amid another media storm. Despite both the prosecution and defence reiterating their request for the trial to be closed to the public, Judge Pavel Göth declined the request, stating that the case as a whole did not meet the necessary criteria of sensitivity. In certain extraordinary cases, though – such as the unpleasant but necessary viewing of the recordings of Ondrej – the public would be excluded. As a result, the press came out in force – over three dozen journalists were present, including a few from Norwegian outlets. The hearing had not even officially begun when they received their first morsel. As she was passing in front of the press box, Renata Škrlová, mother to Barbora and Jan Škrla, burst out, “Obžaloba je výsledkem bezbřehé tuposti policie. Má dcera je nevinná” [“The indictment is a result of the endless ignorance of the police. My daughter is innocent”].

EVENTS ACCORDING TO KLÁRA MAUEROVÁ’S TESTIMONY Klára was the first person to give her testimony in the trial. It was evident from the moment she entered the courtroom for the first hearing that she was barely holding herself together. She had shuffled in dejectedly, her head bowed and eyes red from crying, and as the charges were read, she began to weep and continued to do so through her testimony. Her voice barely rising above a mournful whisper, she began by confirming the validity of the charges laid against her, calling her part in the abuse of her own children as a terrible thing, but explaining that she had done it all with the purest of intentions. A CHILD IN NEED

It had all begun in the summer of 2003, Klára said, when Kateřina had asked her about her interest in social childcare and exactly why

she wanted to study it. It was so that she could help children, she had replied, especially abused and orphaned children. At the time, Klára had thought the query innocuous enough, but as she thought about it in hindsight, this was probably when Kateřina had found her way in. Later that year, sometime in autumn, Kateřina invited Klára to her apartment. There she showed Klára a child’s bed with children’s toys on it and confided a secret to her: she had taken in a child from Norway at the behest of a secret organisation. The girl had been rescued from human traffickers and had suffered horrendous sexual abuse throughout her childhood, she was told – and was also dying of leukaemia. Because the traffickers were still seeking the girl, Kateřina entreated Klára to absolute secrecy and asked if she could perform a test for bone marrow compatibility with the girl, who needed a transplant. Once Klára had given her word of confidentiality, she was allowed to meet the girl. The child was introduced as Vatase, and she certainly looked ill and slender to the point of emaciation. Her mannerisms were also very unusual, avoiding eye contact and speaking very haltingly in a low voice. Klára said that she had never made the connection between the child before her and Barbora Škrlová. Kateřina had told her that Barbora had passed away some time before, and the difference in appearance and mannerisms was so total and drastic that the possibility of impersonation had never even flitted through her mind. Her only direct interaction with Barbora before then had been during one camp with the Mravenci several years earlier, and the woman she remembered had been plump and had a completely different voice and physical demeanour. She also seemed disoriented and often slipped between speaking Czech and Norwegian. Kateřina explained that the trauma she had experienced over the years, coupled with her frail physical condition, had left her with severe mental scars and cognitive issues. She reacted to most people with fear – too many had hurt her throughout her short life and her sense of trust had been obliterated if it had ever had the chance to flourish at all.

As they spent time in each other’s company, Kateřina commented on how the child appeared to have a different reaction towards Klára – she seemed drawn towards her and was being more open than she had ever been with a new person. She had even confided in Klára: her real name was Ana. Kateřina seemed surprised by this, as Ana never told anyone her real name. The results of the bone marrow compatibility test returned as negative. Klára could not donate for Ana, but there was still a way she could help – the way that Ana had taken an immediate liking for her was remarkable. Ana’s existence until then had been a blur of pain and fear, but the rest of her life need not be the same now that she was free of her abusers. The time she had left was short – she wouldn’t live beyond the age of sixteen. She deserved for the rest of it to be as comfortable as possible, and if she could be around someone she trusted, her quality of life would be vastly improved. Kateřina asked if Klára could take Ana into her home and provide the stability and love that she needed. Klára was hesitant – another child would be a huge responsibility – as Jakub and Ondrej had taught her already – let alone one with the needs and challenges Ana had. Kateřina had then enlisted the help of a doctor who was one of her contacts in the organisation that had brought Ana into her care. The doctor became one of the most influential figures in Klára’s life – it was his advice that initiated and encouraged what would later happen to Jakub and Ondrej, and yet she never met him or even knew his name. It is likely that he was a fabrication – the only communication Klára ever received from him was through text messages and the occasional phone call, but the mobile phone number the communiqués were received through was traced to Kateřina’s ownership. So trusting had Klára been of her elder sister that Kateřina’s word had been all she needed to trust the doctor’s counsel. The doctor spoke to Klára over the phone and reiterated that she was the best person to help Ana live the rest of her life in comfort and security. Klára’s objections slowly dissolved as the values she had been taught by her parents asserted themselves and she began to see helping Ana as her God-given duty.

When Ana moved in with the family in December 2005, she at first reacted to Jakub and Ondrej with her characteristic apprehension but warmed up to them over time. The relationship of all three of them with each other was normal and healthy at that time – it wasn’t until the cottage in the woods that the nefarious manipulation took place. AN OVERWHELMING TASK

Taking care of Ana proved even more difficult than Klára had expected. Her health issues required a great deal of attention and regular treatment – she suffered from seizures, for which she would need restraint. Klára was also told that Ana had hydrocephaly and needed a daily spinal massage from the base of her skull down her backbone – sometimes for up to eight hours a night. She was also encouraged to stroke Ana’s genital area during these massages – in order to “comfort” her and help them “bond” as mother and daughter. Ana was also extremely emotionally demanding, directly clamouring for Klára’s attention. She demanded gifts and treats regularly, and would throw explosive tantrums when she did not get her way. She sometimes behaved very dangerously, once threatening to jump out of the window of their apartment while holding a knife, and Klára had to be on guard with her at train stations, as she always seemed to be on the verge of jumping out onto the tracks. Klára did what she could to placate her outbursts and keep her as happy as possible. Trying to balance this new home life with her studies was a monumental task for Klára, and she often went on as little as three hours of sleep in a day. The stress began to wear her down and, to make matters worse, Jakub and Ondrej began acting out, probably in an attempt to regain the maternal attention they had lost to Ana. The stress probably acted to exaggerate the boys’ behavioural problems in Klára’s mind, and she also had Kateřina (and her secret organisation) whispering in her ear and convincing her that it was a far worse problem than it really was. A SOLUTION PROPOSED

The mysterious doctor was waiting in the wings to offer Klára a solution for the boys’ behaviour: what they needed was a serious attitude adjustment. If they continued on the path they were on, she was told, their bad behaviour would continue into adulthood and they would end up in prison. A taste of the horror of prison life would give them a glimpse into their own destiny, which would swiftly set them back on the correct path. The weekend at the cottage in Veverska Bityska was thus planned. Klára claimed that she had not participated in any of the planning – all of that had been done by Kateřina, supposedly according to the doctor’s instructions, and with the help of Hana Bašova, Jan Turek (who provided the dog cages the boys were forced to sleep in) and Jan Škrla. When the abuse commenced at the cottage and continued after that, Klára acted wholly as instructed by Kateřina. She was told to participate and inflict her own share of pain on them – all the while, she said, with no other intention in her heart but to correct the crooked path she perceived her natural children to be following. As her children lay whimpering in their separate dog cages in shock after the first harsh ministrations, she was forbidden by Turek and Škrla to help or comfort them. Klára asserted that, to the best of her knowledge, torture pornography of her children had never been disseminated nor been an objective at any point, though she did not speculate on what the actual reasons were. She also claimed never to have at any point in her life been involved in the Škrla sect's activities. The only exposure she had ever had to the Grail Movement's teachings was a book Kateřina had given her several years earlier, but she had never been interested in it and had never attended any ceremonies. She claimed the only religious motivation she had was to help Ana and raise her children well. THE ADOPTION

Another issue that the trial shed a light on was the adoption of Ana. In her testimony, Klára explained the substitution of Viktor Skala’s daughter Maria for the court hearings and DNA tests mandated by the process. The deception had been explained to her as necessary

to minimize the possibility of Ana’s supposed abusers discovering her whereabouts. In their respective testimonies, Viktor Skala and his wife Zuzana claimed never to have known that their daughter was used to commit perjury. Zuzana had worked at the Paprska daycare centre with Kateřina, Barbora and Hana Bašova. She admitted to both she and her husband being members of Škrla’s breakaway sect from the Grail Movement. She maintained, however, that neither of them had privileged positions within its structure and were not party to any secret activities it might have been undertaking. Maria herself was a child, and all she had needed to be told to secure her compliance was that it was all a game. Maria Skalova was very different from Ana in both appearance and mannerisms. Kateřina and Bašova had worked on her to make her a believable facsimile: her hair was dyed several shades darker, and she wore brown contact lenses to cover the natural blue of her eyes. She had been instructed to observe Ana’s mannerisms and reproduce them as closely as possible to create the illusion that she was autistic. At the supposed instruction of the doctor, Kateřina had concocted the story of Ana having previously been in the custody of her and Klára’s grandmother. The two of them had then approached their mother Eliška and told her Ana’s story and why they needed to pull the wool over the authorities’ eyes. Out of sympathy, Eliška had agreed to perjure herself if it meant helping her daughters give an unfortunate child a safe home.

TUREK TESTIFIES Klára was the only one of the defendants to fully admit her guilt. The first of the others to offer a detailed rebuttal was Jan Turek, who maintained that he had neither known about nor directly participated in the abuse of Jakub and Ondrej. The allegations brought against him had destroyed his reputation and completely killed the business of his clothing salon. His only connection to the case, he said, was the provision of the dog cages. Kateřina, who knew about his work with canines, had

approached him asking if he could help her borrow a couple. The cages he had procured for her were not even his – he had borrowed them himself from the Brno police, with whom he had been working at the time. If he had known what the cages would be used for, he said, he would never have helped Kateřina get hold of them. Turek also claimed never to have been involved with the Grail Movement or the splinter sect. He had been on friendly terms with Josef Škrla during his time with the scout troop but said he had never been drawn into any esoteric beliefs. He also stated that he had barely known Barbora and that he had never been close enough to Kateřina to know about Ana at all, let alone the fact that she was Barbora in disguise. STORIES FROM THE PAST

Turek maintained that he was incapable of harming another human being, but his past suggested otherwise – he was divorced, and his marriage had been rife with accusations of his being physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive. His ex-wife Lucia, with whom he shared a son, had called the police several times during their marriage, and she had spent five months living in a shelter for battered women. Since his past behaviour offered a clue to his character, one of the witnesses called up by the court was Lucia Turkova herself. Her prepared statement was surprising – she called him a devoted husband and father, as well as a great teacher who was often approached for advice by other parents and mentioned nothing about the abuse she had previously claimed. When she was asked about it, she surprised the court even further: it was she who had initiated any physical attacks. Whenever she did so, Turek had never responded in kind. Instead, she said, he would leave the house with a beer in his hand and a dog on a leash and take a walk to cool off. When he failed to retaliate, she would inflict injuries on herself in order to make her allegations that he was an abuser more believable. Turek listened to this testimony with his face buried in his hands. When Lucia stepped down from the stand, he thanked her for her

supposed truthfulness, and for having the courage to express details that painted her in a bad light that he had kept private. Lucia’s testimony painted Turek in an almost saintly light, and his girlfriend at the time of the trial had nothing bad to say about him. Turek had been in a relationship with Marketa Stejskalova since 2006, and she stated that he had never shown either her or her twin sons from a previous marriage any aggression. Stejskalova had also suffered from Turek’s destroyed reputation – her ex-husband had succeeded in obtaining an injunction in November 2007 placing their children in his custody to protect them from Turek. She was only allowed four hours with them in a week, and they always asked her why they could no longer live with her. Another testimony cast doubt on Lucia’s words, however, and painted her about-face in a sinister light. Klára’s former friend Marcela Zednickova had also been friends with Lucia and had listened to her accounts of abuse at Turek’s hands during their relationship. The change in Lucia’s story had taken her completely by surprise, but she had a possible explanation – shortly after Turek was named as a suspect in Jakub and Ondrej’s abuse, Lucia had come to her and begged her to talk to no one about the divorce or anything she had confided about her treatment at his hands. There were secret agencies at work, Lucia said, and Marcela had been warned not to look too deeply into the matter.

THE BARBORA QUESTION The aspect of the case that was the source of the most controversy was what role Barbora Škrlová had played in the abuse. Ever since it was discovered that Ana had never existed, but had been a role played by Barbora, the question on everyone’s mind was whether she had been a willing participant or a coerced victim herself. Klára could not speculate on the question – she had operated wholly under the belief that Ana was Ana and had never been party to any of the machinations of the deception. But Ana had never been subjected to the same abuse as the boys and had on occasion assisted and administered it herself, such as the instance of her holding Ondrej's head underwater. Jakub had been forced to watch

that happen, and his testimony, which was read to the court, stated that there had been no reluctance to do the deed on Ana's part. FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH

Barbora's testimony painted a different picture. She reiterated that she had been forced into the role of Ana and that Kateřina had threatened that she would be drowned herself if she did not do it to Ondrej. She provided more detail about how she had been forced into the transformation. It had begun four or five years before her adoption by Klára, she said, during which time her contact with the outside world had slowly been cut until the only figures in her life were Kateřina and Bašova. The process of transforming her physically had been extremely gruelling, she said – she was allowed almost no food, with the exception of one yoghurt per day. Barbora claimed to have been subjected to physical sexual abuse by unknown individuals from the very beginning. The worst had been by Hansen, who had raped her and caused her bleeding and agony, all the while laughing and cursing at her. The reason Barbora had been targeted was her vulnerability, argued her lawyer Richard Novak. She had always been physically and psychologically fragile. Her mother Renata provided the court with some details: since childhood, she suffered from an enlarged thyroid, which had stunted her cognitive development, and had been diagnosed with epilepsy, proof of which was disclosed to the court by medical documents confirming the diagnosis. As a result, Barbora had never been able to perform most basic adult duties on her own. She had always had to rely on other people, and since their time together in university, that person had been Kateřina. EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY

Barbora presented the scars on her own body as evidence of having suffered abuse – cuts and welts she claimed had been administered by her torturers. Upon closer analysis, however, the marks told a different story. The welts – which she had claimed were the result of cigarettes being stubbed out on her body, as had happened to Jakub

and Ondrej – were quickly identified as being ordinary abrasions. Their source was revealed when medical examiners noticed that they seemed to change position slightly the next time they were inspected a few days later. They oddly matched the back end of a pen in size. It was soon deduced that they had been self-inflicted. The cuts were much older than she claimed and were actually the result of cosmetic surgery Barbora had had while in university – two symmetrical scars on her breasts were from a breast reduction, while several other marks on her abdomen were from liposuction. Finally, the medical examination revealed Barbora’s allegations of having been raped to be a lie. There was not only no sign of physical trauma, but she was also found to have an intact hymen.

PSYCHIATRISTS’ FINDINGS Over the course of their incarceration, all of the defendants underwent psychiatric analysis. The experts who were enlisted to do the job were Blanka Zapletalová, a psychologist, Miluše Hamplová, a psychiatrist, and Růzeny Hajnová, a sexologist. Kateřina, Jan Škrla, and Hana Bašová had all refused to cooperate during all of their sessions, but good analysts are capable of needling the information they need out of a recalcitrant subject. The experts’ findings were presented to the court on the tenth day of hearings. THE SIBLING DYNAMIC

Klára was found to have a histrionic personality disorder, characterised by a desire for external recognition and admiration, as well as a tendency of making excessive emotional displays. She also exhibited signs of dependent personality disorder, an inability to make decisions for herself without the approval of an authority figure. Kateřina was intelligent, creative, self-confident, ambitious, and naturally authoritative, and Klára had naturally gravitated towards her for the approval she craved. But there was another side to Kateřina: she was also self-centred, socially distant, and lacking in empathy. These features of her personality had allowed her to identify her

younger sister’s lack of conviction and devise a plan that would take advantage of her for her own ends through emotional manipulation. Klára was, in a sense, both victim and perpetrator. Ana had been perfectly packaged to appeal to her weaknesses, and the approval she received from Kateřina, the fictitious doctor, and Ana herself had become like a drug. She had fixated on it to the point that it drew away from her love for her children, and her maternal instinct had been diverted away from them and onto this one sick person. Blanka Zapletalová speculated that Ana had not even had to be a child for this to happen – Klára would likely have done the same for an adult, leaving open the possibility that even if she had testified untruthfully and had known about the duplicity all along, she would have followed down the same path. Kateřina was also found to have sadistic and paedophilic sexual tendencies, which she had sated with her treatment of her own nephews, and likely extended to her manipulation of Klára’s almost childlike nature. She had also actively participated in the sexualised “bonding” treatment that had been supposedly prescribed by the doctor for Ana. There was a possibility that she had had a preexisting sexual relationship with Barbora – former members of her woodcraft club had testified about the two of them regularly spending hours alone in a tent. TUREK, ŠKRLA AND BAŠOVÁ

Jan Turek was found to be emotionally unstable and exhibiting histrionic traits. He was impulsive and confident and showed an aggressive dominant streak. The fact that he had seemingly submitted to Kateřina’s authority and obeyed her instruction during the abuse of Jakub and Ondrej spoke to a strong sense of hierarchy in their community. Jan Škrla and Hana Bašova had been ruthlessly efficient in their uncooperativeness, but their silence revealed a great deal. The effectiveness of their recalcitrance came from very different underlying causes – Škrla's intelligence was below average, and his evasiveness was blunt and reflected his simplicity: he answered every question he was asked with an "I don't know" or "that's private." Bašova, on the other hand, was of above average

intelligence and was more creative. She naturally gravitated towards a distorted view of reality and was better able to justify that view through the use of her faculties. Škrla was also very attached to and thought very highly of his father, manifesting a tendency towards automatic obedience. BARBORA

Barbora, like Klára, was diagnosed with a histrionic personality disorder, except her case was much more acute, manifesting in overt deceitfulness and a desire to manipulate others. She was not as defenceless or submissive as she pretended to be. During her evaluation, she acted infantile and vulnerable when it seemed to suit her, but when something was brought up that she did not agree with, she was capable of aggressively attacking it in a decidedly adult way. The personality disorder explained how she was so convincingly able to pass herself off as Ana and Adam – it gave her extraordinary acting abilities to the point that, in the moment, she was probably capable of convincing herself that she was whatever character she had taken on, and she could switch between different roles fluidly as it suited her. Nevertheless, the decision to take on a character was deliberate every time. She evidently had not suffered any withdrawal symptoms from the drug regimen she had supposedly been forced to take, and neither did she show any sign of post-traumatic stress disorder like Jakub and Ondrej did. Her mind told the same story as her body – it bore none of the scars that would have been plainly evident if she had suffered any of the trauma she claimed to have. As part of Barbora's defence, her lawyer Richard Novak had procured the aid of psychiatric experts of his own. Ivan Weinberger and Jana Telcová took to the stand to present their findings, and they were very different from those of the prosecution's experts. They stated that she did suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder – she was especially fearful of court appearances, they said because she would have to be handcuffed each time, and handcuffs reminded her of her past traumatic experiences. The report also contested the assertion that Barbora was manipulative. She was the very opposite, it said, and was naturally

submissive and had a tendency to subordinate herself to authority. From her university years onward, that authority had been Kateřina, likely inspired by the splinter sect and, similar to what the prosecution’s psychiatrists stated had happened to Klára, Kateřina had recognised that submissiveness and taken advantage of it. Barbora had been used and abused and had her dignity destroyed and devastated, contended Telcová. A reprehensible experiment had been conducted on her mind, and it had left her with lasting and permanent damage to her entire sense of self. Yet she still exhibited some attachment to the very people who had abused her – the hallmark of Stockholm syndrome. In addition to all this, the report brought up her pre-existing health problems – her having been diagnosed with epilepsy and the thyroid and liver problems, all of which had rendered her wholly dependent on other people her entire life. Imprisonment would be cruel and inappropriate for her, it argued. The best outcome would be for her to receive protective institutional treatment to help her deal with and erase the worst of the damage that had been done to her and hopefully help her become well enough to be reintegrated into society. PROFESSIONAL DIFFERENCES

The polar disparity between the prosecution and defence experts’ findings caused a near-uproar in the court. Trial judge Pavel Göth went so far as to ask the defence experts about the purity of their motives in preparing their report – an unconventional move – and direly warned them of the consequences of perjury. Weinberger and Telcová stood their ground. When asked about how Barbora had managed to fit herself into the role of Adam within a few weeks, when becoming Ana had supposedly taken years of conditioning, their answer was that she had been motivated by raw fear. She had been told that the evil people who had done her such harm were after her and that she had to become Adam in order to evade them. Both sides’ experts soon devolved into flinging accusations of incompetency and ulterior motives. Rather than move the trial into its closing stages right then, Pavel Göth announced that the case would be adjourned for two and a half months, to reopen in mid-October.

During that time, a new set of experts uninfluenced by either the prosecution or the defence would evaluate Barbora in order to arrive as close as possible to a definitive report.

CHAPTER 5 – THE TRIAL, CONTINUED The trial reopened according to schedule on the 16th October 2008. Among the first orders of business was testimony that shed light on one of the mysteries that remained. Martin and Helena Fahrner took to the witness stand to recount how he had met Barbora and what had occurred until her arrest in Norway.

THE VANISHING ACT EXPLAINED Fahrner stated that he had known Barbora for a decade since his time with the Mravenci, but had only seen her very rarely, and not at all within the past few years. In May the previous year, she had turned up at his family’s home in Šumperk, an hour and a half’s road journey from Brno, in the company of two men, one of whom was Jan Tesař, another former member of the Mravenci. She had appeared extremely fearful and was in a bad physical condition, often fainting from the apparent strain she was bearing. Helena described the situation they were faced with in military terms – “Přirovnala bych to k situaci, jako když vám ve válce na dveře zaklepe partyzán a vy se musíte rozhodnout, jestli ho schováte” ["I'd compare this to the wartime; when a partisan knocks on your door and you have to decide to hide him in your house or not"]. Ultimately, they decided to take her in, thinking they were helping someone in need. Barbora had lived with them at their home for a while before departing via Poland for Sweden with Helena and the rest of the family while Fahrner remained behind. Fahrner had followed fourteen days later, and in Sweden had met with Josef Škrla, who told him the reason his family had been dragged into helping Barbora was to wait for the media storm in the Czech Republic to calm down so that she could return without facing an immediate backlash.

Fahrner stated that he had not been party to Barbora’s first attempt at repatriation, but when it became evident that the Czech legal system’s reaction to her return was going to be less than friendly, she had been returned to their care. He and his family wanted to move on to Norway, and Barbora had to come with them. She had to blend in somehow, though, and she had come up with an idea – to pretend to be Adam to throw off any pursuers. What followed was a story now familiar to the court: Barbora had begun to take over the family's life. The Fahrners at first attempted to talk her out of her idea, citing the risk of discovery and danger that it would expose their family too. They had at first stood their ground against her protestations, but her psychological health seemed to deteriorate the more they resisted her. Eventually, they acquiesced, and she took to her new role with gusto. So that she could get used to it, she insisted the entire family call her Adam all the time. The transformation had taken place before the family moved to Norway, and they crossed the border from Sweden with Barbora as Adam without immigration officials seeing a hint of anything out of place. As they attempted to settle into life in Norway, Barbora had begun to chafe at her isolation. She needed a social outlet, she said, and the Fahrner's three children were not sufficient. She wanted to go to school as Adam in order to satisfy her need. Again, the Fahrners attempted to talk her out of it, but her will proved stronger, and they ultimately complied. Helena had begun to fear for her very sanity – Barbora was so demanding that she felt herself beginning to lose touch with her own children. Fearing she would end up like Klára, so absorbed by Barbora that she would begin abusing her own children, she decided to take them with her back to the Czech Republic. Fahrner remained behind and tried to manage Barbora as best as he could – until her made-up stories caused him to be thrown in jail and eventually blew the lid off the entire deception. In addition to the emotional, psychological, and reputational cost the Fahrners had paid, Barbora’s intrusion into their life cost them financially. While in Norway, they had needed just one 200 kronor card between them for their mobile phones for a whole month, but Barbora blew through one every week or so. All told, they had spent

150,000 Czech Koruna helping Barbora evade capture – worth almost 5000 pounds in today’s money.

KATEŘINA BREAKS HER SILENCE The other testimony heard when the trial reopened was that of Kateřina. Prior to then, her engagement with the court had been minimal. Aside from short statements that Kateřina’s and Barbora’s testimonies were untrue and occasional interjected questions to other witnesses, she had largely kept silent. Whenever anyone attempted to draw her further, she declined, stating that she did not wish to incriminate herself or her loved ones. Now, though, she had prepared a statement, which she wished to read before the court. The reason she had been silent this whole time, she said, was the difficult situation she had been placed in. Two people who were dearest to her – one being Klára, whom she had always and still loved as a sister, the other being Barbora, with whom she had lived a decade and looked after and cared for like a child – stood at odds with each other. However, when the accusation that Barbora had deliberately manipulated Klára became viewed almost as a foregone conclusion, she could no longer remain quiet. Kateřina said that she had met Barbora in 1996. She recounted the problems Barbora faced with navigating everyday life – locking herself out of her apartment and forgetting that she had the bath running until it had overflowed and flooded the entire bathroom were common occurrences. Vacuuming a single room took her three hours. The cause of her problems was that she could not appraise situations realistically – her perception of reality was different from most people’s, and she had trouble with both understanding and being understood by others. Barbora had always been in need of another person to ground her, Kateřina said. Her relationship with her mother, who was an alcoholic and often neglectful, could not provide that for her. As a result, she had always turned to friends, going so far as to emulate their style of dress. Kateřina said that she had done her best to take care of Barbora and provide for her the grounding she needed. In 2003, she had turned to a specialist to provide therapy for Barbora. This is what

she claimed was the source of the stories of brainwashing and abuse – due to her skewed perception of reality, Barbora unintentionally exaggerated things that happened to her six times over. The medication prescribed to her became constant drugging in her mind, and behavioural exercises seemed like torture. In early 2005, Barbora met with Klára in Kateřina’s apartment. Klára had failed to recognise Barbora, Kateřina claimed, and Barbora had unintentionally projected an image of being much younger than she was. This had provided Kateřina with a solution for taking care of Barbora – she would pretend to be a child, and Kateřina would have Klára to help take care of her.

EMOTIONS BOIL OVER Klára had been listening to her sister’s statement in silence, but she could hold herself no more. “Proč jsi mně to zničila?” [“Why did you have to ruin it?”] She burst out screaming. “Proč jsi mně to vzala, já to chci zpátky, proč lžeš? Ty to nevidíš, žes mi vzala děti? Já je chci zpátky!” [“Why did you have to take it away from me? I want it all back! Why are you lying? Can’t you see you took away my children? I want them back!”] She collapsed in tears, and after her attorney spoke with her briefly requested to be excused from the courtroom. As she was being escorted out, Kateřina called out after her, “Já to chci uvést, jak to bylo, abys věděla, že jsem ti nechtěla ublížit” [“I want to say it exactly as it was. So you’d understand that I didn’t want to hurt you”]. After Klára left, Kateřina continued with her statement. In the summer of 2006, she and Klára had, with the help of “a man in whom [they] had implicit trust,” devised a program for “re-educating” Jakub and Ondrej, who were becoming unruly. That was the entire purpose of all that had happened thereafter, she claimed. The supposed religious connection everyone saw was purely circumstantial. Barbora had played no part in the “re-education,” with the exception of the drowning of Ondrej, which, as she had testified herself, she had been coerced into, with the threat of receiving the treatment herself. With the end of her testimony, Kateřina declined to answer any further questions.

A THIRD OPINION The task of analysing Barbora and preparing the final psychiatric report had fallen to no less than eight specialists from the Motol University Hospital in Prague. Their findings were presented on the 20th October, the second-to-last day of the trial. Unfortunately for Barbora, their report was not much different from the prosecutions. They found no trace of serious mental illness in her – the previous diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder stood but was joined by one of dissociative disorder, which manifests itself through breakdowns in identity, awareness, memory, and perception. Another, extreme symptom of the dissociative disorder is cramps that seize the whole body as the mind loses its grip on it, and these cramps can appear on the surface very similar to epileptic seizures. Finally, the report stated that Barbora had knowingly and purposefully taken on the different roles she had occupied. “Nyní se sama posouvá do role manipulované oběti” [“She is deliberately taking on the role of a victim of manipulation”], it concluded. “Jde ale o účelové tvrzení, stejně tak její naivita je účelová” [“It is an intentional claim. Her pretention of naivety is also deliberate”].

CLOSING STATEMENTS With the presentation of the psychiatric report’s findings, the case was finally ready to close. A few of the defence attorneys attempted to request for further witnesses to be subpoenaed, but Göth declined, stating that no further testimony or evidence was required to decide the case. All that remained was for the prosecution and defence to present their closing arguments and for the defendants themselves to exercise their right to the final word. FROM THE PROSECUTION

Prosecutor Zuzana Zamaravcová put forward the argument that the evidence and testimony that had been heard should leave no doubt that all of the accused had participated in the torture of Jakub and Ondrej. She specifically touched on the roles of the three main

players in the matter: being a victim of manipulation was no excuse for Klára – whatever the reasons behind it, she had gravely failed in her duty as a mother. Zamaravcová was slightly lenient on her, however – her testimony had helped bring the other defendants to justice. Kateřina’s claim to have herself been a victim of manipulation by the mysterious “doctor” was bogus – she was far too confident and authoritative to have done anything without having driven herself into it on some level. Besides, all of the communications supposedly received from the doctor had been traced back to a phone number and email addresses belonging to her. As for Barbora, Zamaravcová argued that her every action had been deliberate and self-motivated as well. She had played every role – especially that of Adam – while retaining agency and personal identity. Because of the extreme severity and systematic nature of what had been done to Jakub and Ondrej, Zamaravcová proposed for the Mauerová sisters and Barbora to receive the maximum sentences possible – ten years each for the sisters and seven for Barbora. For the other three suspects, she recommended moderate sentences but left the precise decision up to the judge. In addition to jail time, she also recommended that the defendants pay damages to Jakub and Ondrej – 240,000 Koruna for the elder brother and 320,000 for the younger, at the time worth about 6,000 and 8,000 pounds respectively. FROM THE DEFENCE

Klára’s attorney, Daniel Cevcik, argued for leniency for his client, highlighting the fact that she was the only one who had expressed sincere regret for her actions and had cooperated in revealing the full extent of the crimes. Even the prosecution’s psychiatric experts had called her both perpetrator and victim. The main culprits were Kateřina and Barbora, who had deliberately deceived her and convinced her that her children were getting out of control. If it were not for them, she never would have committed the crime. Even then, she had not performed the very worst of the torture, such as carving meat from Ondrej. She had simply been unable to force

herself to do it. Her desire had been to set her children on the right path, and the reluctance with which she had participated showed that she still had some humanity remaining in her. Turek’s attorney, Milan Stanek, and Škrla’s attorney, Zdenek Jaros, both argued that the testimony that implicated their clients was unreliable – Klára was the only one who definitively placed them at the cottage. Jaros argued that the only mention of his client by the boys was when Jakub stated that he brought him food once, and Stanek pointed out that the boys had only said that someone who looked like Turek had been at the cottage. Turek had led them in activities at the Paprška daycare centre for three years. If it actually had been him, Stanek argued, they would have been more assertive about identifying him. Bašova’s attorney, Libor Hlavak, stated that his client’s role in the case was marginal and went so far as to call the allegations against her “stupid.” Guilty or innocent, he argued, the media coverage of the case had been punishment enough for her. He requested that, if she were found guilty, she receive a wholly suspended sentence. TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE

Kateřina’s lawyer, Pavel Holub, spent more time defending Barbora than his own client. The entire trial had really been directed at establishing Barbora’s guilt, he said, but Barbora lived in a world of her own. All she had ever desired from anyone else was motherly love. After speaking passionately on Barbora’s behalf for thirty minutes, he finally mentioned his own client – admittedly, she had manipulated Klára, he said, but it had been done with the desire to provide a safe space for Barbora in which she could live the way she felt deep inside. Škrlová’s own lawyer, Richard Novak, made the final closing statement. Novak expressed his frustration about how Barbora had been handled by the law throughout the case. There were, in fact, two cases being examined in this trial, he said. The abuse of Jakub and Ondrej was the one that had been focused on, but there was also the abuse of Barbora herself. The latter had not had the necessary attention given to it. The assumption the court had held from the very beginning was that Barbora was guilty, and this had

coloured every aspect of the trial. From the very moment she had landed from Norway – after, he pointed out, having given herself up to the Norwegian authorities – she had been escorted off the plane flanked by a pair of police officers as if she were a mass murderer. Ever since then, Novak had been trying to have her released on bail, only to be rebuffed each time. Barbora’s abuse had been ignored, he argued. He mentioned sixteen separate instances of Barbora being abused that had not been brought up at all. Witnesses he had requested be brought up to stand – including a woman who had seen her in a bloodied set of pyjamas and a taxi driver who had taken her to a therapy session. He also railed against Barbora’s long-standing epilepsy diagnosis being suddenly overturned – an ailment for which she had been taking drugs with their own side effects. Novak’s final statement was directed at the public. “Je to jen člověk, chce mít klid, nechtěla nikomu ubližovat. Ptejte se sami sebe, měla nějaký motiv dětem ubližovat?” [“She is only a human being. She just wants to be left in peace, she doesn’t want to hurt anyone. Ask yourselves, what motive could she have to hurt the children?”] He implored. “Pokud ji odsoudí, ptejte se proč?” [“If she were to be found guilty, the question still remains: why?”]

FINAL WORDS After the attorneys' arguments, the defendants said their final words. Kateřina disputed the allegation that she had been the originator of the messages from the doctor and stated that Zamaravcová had mischaracterised her claim about the role the doctor had played in her own actions. “Ne tím, že tvrdím, že jsem byla osobou ovládanou” [“I do not claim that I was being manipulated”], she said. “Byla jsem ovlivněná, ne ovládaná” [“I was influenced, not manipulated”]. Klára once again expressed her remorse for what had happened and stated that her objective had been to correct her children's paths. She made it clear that she was not asking for amnesty but wanted to make it clear that without outside influence, none of the horrors would ever have happened. “Jen vím, že by se to nestalo, kdyby mě nepřesvědčili, že je Doktor, že je Anička” [“All I know is none of this

would have happened if they hadn’t convinced me he was a doctor, that he was Anicka”], she said in closing. Barbora was not present to deliver her final words, explaining that she feared being handcuffed and locked up in the small holding cell in the court building. Richard Novak read a statement from her. It alleged that the one definite instance in which she had committed physical harm to Ondrej – the drowning incident – had left her so scarred she had attempted to commit suicide, only being thwarted by the firm grip Klára had had on her handcuffs. Jan Turek's final statement was a simple assertion that there were other factors at play and that there was a need to investigate them further. Jan Škrla and Hana Bašova chose not to exercise their right to the final word, and in fact did not make an appearance at the courtroom on that day.

VERDICTS AND SENTENCES On the 24th October 2008, after three days’ deliberation, Pavel Göth handed down his verdict on the Kuřim Case trial. After weighing all of the evidence and testimony, he found all of the defendants guilty of their respective charges. To Kateřina, Göth handed the harshest sentence – ten years, in line with the prosecution’s recommendation. The greatest incriminating factor was her apparent role as the instigator and organiser of the abuse of her nephews. The fact that Klára had been manipulated the entire time did earn to some leniency for her. Her perversion of the role of mother was still a heinous crime, so her sentence was not reduced by much in relation to Kateřina’s – she received nine years’ imprisonment. Hana Bašova and Jan Škrla both received seven years, while Jan Turek and Barbora Škrlová were put away for five. All of the sentences were to be carried out in maximum security prisons.

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

While the conviction of Jakub and Ondrej’s abusers brought a semblance of closure to the case, a great deal remained unknown. The testimony the instigators of the abuse – Kateřina and Barbora – had told rang hollow. The possibility of the abuse having been initiated for the purpose of producing child pornography was also more-or-less disqualified – the investigation had revealed no capacity for the large-scale production or dissemination of that kind of material, nor had examples of it surfaced anywhere outside of Klára’s own home. The involvement of Josef Škrla’s Grail Movement splinter had been examined at nearly every point in the trial. Multiple current and former members of the sect had been brought in to testify, as had former members of the Mravenci scout troop. Their testimony had helped reveal some of the inner workings of the sect. Škrla had definitely used the Mravenci to recruit his following and had achieved this by slowly introducing spirituality into the group. Some members had resisted this and been ejected or left of their own accord, but many grew accustomed to the changes until they crossed the line into true believers. Škrla had taken several members with him to the Grail Movement’s headquarters in Vomperberg, Austria to undergo the baptismal “sealing ceremony.” The members had developed a strong culture of secrecy and cooperation, but none of them admitted to having known about or deliberately played any part in the abuse, nor did they claim to know anything about a messianic plan. Those who showed signs of having cooperated – such as those who had falsified medical documents in their possession and those who had helped Barbora evade capture – reported that they had acted on that singular part alone without any knowledge of a larger plan in play. The way everything had fit together strongly suggested an individual or a small, select cabal of insiders pulling the strings. The person to whom all indications pointed was the mastermind, Josef Škrla himself. His position as head of the sect, coupled with his mysterious transnational connections, would have been excellent tools for him to wield influence from the background. Since Denmark, though, no one had any idea where Škrla could be. At the beginning of the trial, prosecution and defence had agreed

that the trial could commence without his presence. As the defence had run out of strategies, however, they banded together and attempted to have Judge Holub issue a summons for him. Holub pointed out, however, that without knowledge of Škrla’s whereabouts, there would be no way to compel him to answer the summons, rendering it a waste of time and resources. Some still held hope that Škrla would surface on his own. The only time he had raised his head previously had been to help his daughter, and it was hoped that her facing prosecution would compel him to make an appearance. The entire trial had, however, passed by without a peep from Škrla. Following the closing of the trial, the unit for uncovering organised crime launched an investigation into whether there were any other abusers involved. Part of their search involved attempting to find Josef Škrla. After nearly four months of searching, however, they found no trace of him and, satisfied that he had at least not been directly involved in the abuse of the boys, suspended their search. If Škrla had been the inspiration and the organizer behind the abuse, he would go unpunished. Nevertheless, everyone could rest assured knowing one thing: that those who had done direct, personal harm to Jakub and Ondrej had received their punishment, and a semblance of justice had been served.

CONCLUSION – THE AFTERMATH The Kuřim Case left behind ripple effects both in the lives of those who had been directly involved in it and in the psyche of the Czech people as a whole. The media coverage of the trial was unprecedented, and no other matter has so thoroughly captured the entire Czech Republic’s attention since. Every time events had been at their hottest – moments such as the discovery of the abuse, the fiascos with Barbora, and the trial itself – news coverage had been almost constant, with the case making the top story of every bulletin and the front page of every newspaper. Whenever things cooled down and news slowed down to a trickle, outlets continued putting out opinion pieces, interviews, and occasional check-ups on Jakub and Ondrej. The media’s appetite had, at one point, caused it to cross a line. Very early on in the case, just days after the abuse was uncovered, some of the footage of Ondrej in the closet somehow leaked out to the public. The source of the leak was never discovered, but when the media got their hands on the footage, television stations broadcast the footage completely uncensored. This was forbidden by Czech law, which states that television stations have an obligation: “Bezdůvodně nezobrazovat osoby umírající nebo vystavené těžkému tělesnému nebo duševnímu utrpení způsobem snižujícím lidskou důstojnost” [“It is unjustifiable to broadcast images of people dying or people suffering from physical and/or mental abuse in a manner contrary to human dignity”]. For breaking this directive, broadcaster Prima TV received a fine of 900,000 Koruna (then worth about £22,500), while the station's TV NOVA and Česká Televize were fined 600,000 and 200,000 Koruna (£15,000 and £5,000), respectively. All of the stations attempted to appeal the fines by arguing that showing the footage constituted part of their prerogative as disseminators of information and was protected by freedom of expression, but were overruled. Association with the trial and the surrounding media scrutiny gave a few organisations trouble. In addition to the Institution in Brno, whose case against Barbora and Kateřina for tarnishing their reputation had

been thrown out of court, the Paprška daycare centre came under intense scrutiny for the fact that five out of six of the abusers had worked for them, as had a few of the individuals who had provided them support. Karel Kincl, head of the organisation that owned Paprška, was quick to point out that background checks of all of the abusers had turned up clean, and at the time of their employment, none of them had shown any tendency towards abuse. In addition, Kateřina had run the centre with near-complete autonomy and executive decision making power over her hires. None of the people associated with her worked at the daycare anymore, and Kincl made assurances that hiring practices would be heavily revised. When the extent to which Kateřina had used the daycare for her purposes was revealed, the remaining management considered shutting down in response to the scrutiny. Parents of children who still attended there objected to this, though, and with this explicit statement of trust from their own customers, they shelved the decision. The centre’s name had acquired too much negative baggage, though. In June 2008, Paprška changed its name to Sluníčko, which means “sunshine.” The mainstream Grail Movement also suffered greatly due to its former association with Josef Škrla. Since the very beginning of the case, the Movement’s Czech leader, Jan Paduček, had had to issue vociferous denunciations of Škrla and his group. It was indeed true that Škrla had not been involved with the mainstream Movement in over a decade, but this was not of much consequence to the majority of the nation’s public. Like their earlier association with Jan Dvorsky, the Grail Movement in the Czech Republic would have little choice but to live with the stigma of Škrla’s acts. Time, therapy, and tender patience were what Jakub needed to help them overcome the terror of their past, and it seemed to be working. The pathologies they had exhibited at the very beginning were slowly lessening in severity – their fear, distrust, and hostility towards each other and the world ebbing away as their relationship edged closer to normality. The path was not easy, though, nor was it linear. The media coverage of the case was one of the culprits for this. Caregivers tried their best to prevent them from being exposed to it,

but the boys had to go to school, and they couldn't exert full control over that sphere. Children can be insensitive sometimes. Their schoolmates, who had seen Ondrej naked on TV, would occasionally mock Jakub and Ondrej. The odd newspaper featuring front-page pictures of their crying mother also slipped through to them. Whenever these things happened, Jakub and Ondrej would either lash out or break down. The truth about the one person they had been trained to adore also hit them badly – when Ana escaped from the Institution, they had both become inconsolable for several days, and when she was revealed to have actually been some 34-year-old stranger all along, it set the progress they had made back by weeks. However, they were getting better. They also had the overwhelming sympathy and support of practically the entire nation. Gifts for them poured in, and an anonymous donor twice sponsored them on summer trips to the Italian seaside to give them a change of surroundings and get their minds off events back home. The boys’ custody was not resolved until June 2011. Due to being unemployed, their father was deemed unable to adequately provide their care. Eliška Mauerová’s perjury case had concluded with the judge deciding that her motives in falsely testifying about Ana’s origin during the adoption procedure had not been malicious, and so she had only been required to make an admission of guilt and was not prosecuted. Thus cleared, she and Ladislav were awarded custody of the boys. Part of the boys' therapy was to help them forgive the wrongs that had been done to them. This was a delicate process and had not been attempted when they were younger out of fear they would begin to blame themselves for what had happened. As they grew older, however, they were deemed ready and began occasionally visiting their mother in jail. Their first meetings was rocky, but things had smoothed out with more time spent together. In October 2013, Klára was released from prison, having served five years of her nine-year sentence. The rest of her sentence was suspended for four and a half years, an abnormally long probation period that would make sure that if she exhibited any criminal behaviour again, she would instantly be thrown right back in prison. Relations with the rest of her family had been improving as well, and

her sister Gabriela provided her with a place to stay and helped her find a job as a secretary for an employment agency. Though she could interact with them more, she was not allowed to live with Jakub and Ondrej. Klára’s fellow convicts were mostly released earlier, though the details of their liberations never hit the news. In June 2014, Kateřina was set free, the last of them to be allowed out. Details about her were also sparse, but it appeared she had failed to rebuild the bridges with her family as Klára had. And so, as of the writing of this book, the perpetrators of the abuse of Jakub and Ondrej all walk free again. Whether they all have been truly rehabilitated is something no one can be sure of. They will forever live in the shadow of their past actions – and considering that their victims will, too, this is rightfully so.

WANT MORE? Enjoyed The Ryan Green True Crime Collection and want some more?

Get a free copy of Robert Maudsley: Hannibal the Cannibal when you sign up to join my Reader’s Group.

Click Here To Get Your Free Book

MORE BOOKS BY RYAN GREEN If you’re interested in uncovering more True Crime cases from some of the darkest human minds, then look no further...

On 29th February 2000, John Price took out a restraining order against his girlfriend, Katherine Knight. Later that day, he told his coworkers that she had stabbed him and if he were ever to go missing, it was because Knight had killed him. The next day, Price didn’t show up for work. A co-worker was sent to check on him. They found a bloody handprint by the front door and they immediately contacted the police. The local police force was not prepared for the chilling scene they were about to encounter.

Price’s body was found in a chair, legs crossed, with a bottle of lemonade under his arm. He’d been decapitated and skinned. The “skin-suit” was hanging from a meat hook in the living room and his head was found in the kitchen, in a pot of vegetables that was still warm. There were two plates on the dining table, each had the name of one of Price's children on it. She was attempting to serve his body parts to his children.

Get ‘Man-Eater’ Here

Herb Baumeister was a husband, father of three, and successful businessman—but he was hiding a very dark secret. In the fall of 1994, Erich Baumeister (13), was playing in a wooded area of his family’s estate, when he stumbled across a partially buried human skeleton. He presented the disturbing finding to his mother, Julie, who inquired about the skull to her husband, Herb. He told her that the skeleton belonged to his late father, an anaesthesiologist, who used it for his research. He said he didn’t know what to do with it, so he buried it in the back garden. Astonishingly, Julie believed him. In June 1996, whilst Herb was on vacation, his wife granted police full access to her family's 18-acre home. Within 10 days of the search, investigators uncovered the remains of eleven bodies.

Get ‘You Think You Know Me’ Here

4 books for the price of 2 (save 50%) Four chilling true crime stories in one collection, from the bestselling author Ryan Green. Volume 2 contains some of Green’s most fascinating accounts of violence, abuse, deception and murder. Within this collection, you'll receive: Obeying Evil The Truro Murders Sinclair You Think You Know Me

Get ‘The Volume 2 Collection’ Here

You can check out my complete book collection by clicking on the link below:

Complete Book Collection on Amazon More books coming soon... You can sign up to be notified of new releases, giveaways and prerelease specials – plus, get a free book!

Click Here To Get Your Free Book

SUPPORT RYAN GREEN If you enjoyed the book and have a moment to spare, I would really appreciate a short review on Amazon. Your help in spreading the word is gratefully received and reviews make a huge difference to helping new readers find me.

Amazon Review Link (US) Amazon Review Link (UK) Thank you!

ABOUT RYAN GREEN

Ryan Green is a true crime author in his late thirties. He lives in Herefordshire, England with his wife, three children, and two dogs. Outside of writing and spending time with his family, Ryan enjoys walking, reading and windsurfing. Ryan is fascinated with History, Psychology and True Crime. In 2015, he finally started researching and writing his own work and at the end of the year, he released his first book on Britain's most notorious serial killer, Harold Shipman. He has since written several books on lesser-known subjects, and taken the unique approach of writing from the killer's perspective. He narrates some of the most chilling scenes you'll encounter in the True Crime genre. "Ryan Green is an incredible storyteller...he doesn’t just tell the story, he allows you to be part of it." ~Blackbird

You can sign up to Ryan’s newsletter, with giveaways and the latest releases, here:

Click Here To Get Your Free Book

FREE TRUE CRIME AUDIOBOOK If you are interested in listening to a chilling True Crime story, click on the link below to download a FREE copy of Torture Mom. Download Your Free Audiobook Here (US) Download Your Free Audiobook Here (UK)

“Ryan Green has produced another excellent book and belongs at the top with true crime writers such as M. William Phelps, Gregg Olsen and Ann Rule” –B.S. Reid “Wow! Chilling, shocking and totally riveting! I'm not going to sleep well after listening to this but the narration was fantastic. Crazy story but highly recommend for any true crime lover!” –Mandy

“Torture Mom by Ryan Green left me pretty speechless. The fact that it's a true story is just...wow” –JStep “Graphic, upsetting, but superbly read and written” –Ray C

Download Your Free Audiobook Here (US) Download Your Free Audiobook Here (UK)