A DEAD CLEVER WAY TO MAKE MONEY

Alasdair Palmer investigates the

extraordinary profits to be made out of a pile of corpses in Gloucester

A COUPLE of weeks ago, Inspector David Morgan, a Gloucester policeman involved in the notorious investigation into the `House of Horrors' and its owner, Freder- ick West, was interviewed by a Washington DC radio station. The interviewer was curi- ous to know how many killings West had been charged with. Inspector Morgan told him the total was now 11. 'Eleven!' came the excited reply. 'Wow! That's fantastic!'

tive- gleefully explained to me, 'Get the right book on this case, and you hit the Jackpot!'

The enthusiasm is based on solid eco- nomic analysis. Worldwide, the mass-mur- der industry is worth several hundred million dollars. There are dozens of books on mass murderers, ranging from individu- al case-studies to wide-ranging surveys. You can buy the Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, a total of 3,714 pages split into two volumes which have been printed in such large numbers that they are available at Only $5.99 each. Ann Rule's book on the American cannibal rapist and serial killer, Ted Bundy, has been reprinted 30 times since it was first published 15 years ago. The Silence of the Lambs, the film inspired by the hideous activities of the Fifties serial killer Ed Gein, has made well over $150 million, and is still earning. 'Ghoul chic' the paintings produced by mass murderers whilst they await the electric chair or serve out their life sentences — can fetch thou- sands of pounds. Death sells, sex sells, but death and sex combined, and multiplied several times over . . . that's a marketing dream. As one journalist told Rosemary, Frederick West's second wife, when attempting to negotiate for her story, `The sky's the limit in this case!' The sky has not quite been reached yet, although some of the advances for books on West are getting there: £200,000 plus is alleged to have been paid as an advance to Gordon Burn, author of Somebody's Broth- er, Somebody's Son, the acclaimed biogra- phy of the Yorkshire Ripper. Brian Masters, whose pioneering study of the mass killer Dennis Nilsen has become a classic of the genre, has been approached. Literary agents enthuse that if he does decide to write on the case, his book could be worth £150,000. Masters told me he was interested, though so far he hadn't seen anything as fascinating as the particular detail which led him to study Nilsen. Nilsen arrived in court carrying the complete works of Shakespeare. `The idea of reading sonnets and boiling heads intrigued me,' Masters explained.

Both Burn and Masters said they would never write another book about mass mur- ders after they had finished their previous oeuvres. In the course of his research, Mas- ters was given access to the 250 police pho- tographs of Nilsen's gruesome handiwork. He reached number twelve before 'I had to stop, and get out of the room fast.' The financial allure of the `House of Horrors' may bring both authors back to this repulsive field.

The book deals may be premature, but they are not nearly so precipitate as the newspaper deals which preceded them. The News of the World, the Sun, the Mirror and the Mail have been hosing Gloucester with money since the story broke at the end of February. According to her lawyer, Leo Goatley, Rosemary West was offered £100,000 by the News of the World for her story. The Mail laughed at their figure. Their representatives said that if she dealt with them the full figure — when you included her share of all the spin-offs could be closer to a quarter of a million pounds. Being charged with five murders put an end to that particular negotiation, although Mr Goatley stresses that 'Rose was never interested anyway. She hasn't a story to tell. She maintains she was as hor- rified and surprised by the discoveries at Cromwell Street as everyone else.'

Still, her friends and relatives went ahead and told their version of her story anyway. Rob Williams and Shaun Boyle, both for- mer boyfriends of girls who lived at the `House of Horrors', sold their stories to News International for undisclosed sums. They were followed by Rosemary's own son, Stephen, who was paid around £20,000 for his intimate revelations of his mother's `unusual lifestyle', as her lawyer delicately expresses it. Stephen told how his parents `stripped naked in front of their children before Fred dragged Rose off for sex, filmed hard-core porn videos, and built up a fearsome collection of sex-toys, gadgets and bondage implements'. Stephen went on to detail the large number of black gen- tlemen who called at the house in order `to have sex with my mum'. The Sun then bought Charlie 'Spud' Murphy, a travelling salesman who claimed to have had sex with Rose, and John Holmes, a 67-year-old man who also said he had given her 'a good see- ing-to'. The Mail purchased Rosemary's brother and her 79-year-old mother, Daisy Letts.

From the first discovery of bodies in Cromwell Street at the beginning of March, West's neighbours realised quickly that there was money to be made from the hordes of hacks with stacks of cash. Cam- era crews were charged as much as £1,000 for the best positions in adjacent houses. When the police started digging in a field near the hamlet of Much Marcle, the local farmer Reg Watkins charged newsmen £50 to park in his field, whilst his wife sold them cups of tea at 50p and bacon sand- wiches for two quid. Bookies offered odds on the number of bodies that would even- tually be found: 8-11 corpses, four to seven on; more than 12 corpses, six to four. Chal- lenged as to whether this was in good taste, one bookie responded, 'It's not sick at all. It's fascinating, and a bit of fun for the punters.' Neighbours in the Wellington pub, which stands at the end of Cromwell Street, claimed to be able to supply what they allege to be the Wests' more exotic home movies for a mere £50,000. 'It's a bargain. This is the real stuff,' 1 was told when I bought a drink at the Wellington. Apparently, it isn't. So far as I know, no one has actually bought any of the tapes.

The journalists have now moved on, and the money has moved with them. The financial centre of gravity in the West case has shifted from Gloucester to literary London. The local tourist trade has dropped off. People may want to read about West, but the appetite for going to look at the places where he used to live has faded away. A Cheltenham cab firm, Star- lite Taxis, had the enterprising idea of con- ducting guided tours round the sites, but it hasn't been a great success. There was con- siderable surprise when I arrived last week to take the tour. 'We charge ten quid an hour. It works out cheaper than the meter,' explained the firm's controller helpfully. The cab drivers drew lots to see who would land the task of taking round the ghoul from London. Graham Griffith, an affable amateur bowls champion with a laugh like a road drill, won. He was, he assured me, `very knowledgeable about West'. He didn't know him personally, but he played skittles twice a week with a man who did.

The journey to Cromwell Street was taken up mostly with Mr Griffith telling me Fred West jokes, of which there are dozens. 'Fred West's got a window box in his cell . . . he's asked them to bring him some top soil from Lockerbie."What grows in Fred West's garden? Heather!' That one had to be explained to me. Heather, Graham guffawed, was the name of one of West's murdered daughters. They work better in a Gloucester accent, but even then they're not that funny.

We arrived at 25 Cromwell Street. The doors and windows are now bricked up with breeze blocks. The detritus from the phenomenal excavations is still in evidence in the garden. A woman named June, who'd come 16 miles, was craning her neck in an attempt to see inside. She knew the auntie of one of the victims. She looked at the flowers on the doorstep. 'They've sold the house now,' she said mournfully. 'You know who's bought it?' I shook my head.

`Because "Onward Christian Conscientious Objectors" doesn't fit, that's why.'

`The Body Shop!' Graham hadn't heard that one, so off went the road drill.

Many of the people who live in Cromwell Street are now heartily sick of journalists. When I visited the Wellington, one cus- tomer told me to leave, saying he didn't like journalists and 'nor does anyone else around here'. I pretended that I was there simply as an ordinary ghoul, not a journal- ist, but the subtlety of the distinction was lost on my interlocutor, who wanted me out regardless. The situation is not much better out at Much Marcie. There, digging is still in progress — the police have so far removed over 3,000 tons of earth — but no one is eager to go over the saga of Fred West yet again. The policemen with the unbelievably boring job of guarding the site will talk about the chaffinches, wrens, long- tailed tits that they see while sitting doing nothing for 12 hours a day — but not about the case. They don't even tell West jokes. `Most of them are either sick, or based on the mistaken idea that we've found bodies. We haven't. What we've found are human remains, not bodies,' Superintendent John Bennett, who is leading the investigation, told me. 'It is difficult to treat human remains with respect when they're covered in sludge, but, believe me, we are trying as hard as we can.'

But while Gloucester's enthusiasm for the murders has cooled, literary London's is still very hot. 'Hey!' one literary journal- ist told me. 'Have you heard that Martin Amis is in the market for a piece on the killings? He's doing a huge article for the New Yorker.' Under Tina Brown's editor- ship, the New Yorker has made the cover- age of serial killers into a speciality, much as Vanity Fair did when Tina Brown edited that. The glossy magazine market's most successful editor has a very shrewd appreci- ation of how to make the sex-and-death mix respectable, so that it can be slotted in between ads for bubble bath and features on clothes and movie stars . 'And you know what?' my friend continued. 'One of Amis's cousins was a "House of Horrors" victim!'

The excitement around Amis and his personal, rather morbid, touch is under- standable. He would bring the cachet of high literary art to the case. 'I wish we could persuade him to write a book on the subject,' an editor at one major London publishing house told me. 'We'd eliminate the competition. This is — let's admit it a tacky genre. But if Amis wrote about it, the punters could feel they were being cul- tured when they read about sex and mur- der. That's very important . . . '

The editor knows his audience. The pub- lic's appetite for personal details relating to those charged in connection with the mur- ders is huge -- never mind the fact that Frederick and Rosemary West haven't stood trial yet, let alone been found guilty. At the same time, almost everyone feels a degree of shame about too blatant an inter- est in the hideous activities of serial killers.

Purchasing a book on the subject is like picking a magazine off the top shelf. Open- ly admitting to being titillated by the horri- ble combination of murder and sex is not easy to do in front of friends, family, chil- dren or colleagues. The pornography of violence, if it is to sell, has to be legit- imised. It has to be clothed in the accept- able cover of an effort to understand the psychopathology of mass murder. And that is how the books are marketed: they're not pornographic, they're educational. Read this, and you'll gain an insight into the mind of the murderer — an insight which is, in fact, on about the same level as the `insight' into female anatomy a man gets when he buys Penthouse.

Understanding serial killers — involving, as it must, a degree of imaginative identifi- cation with them — is actually the last thing anyone ought to want to do. How can anyone who is not themselves a psychopath possibly comprehend what motivates a multiple sex-murderer? The general fasci- nation is not with why they do it but with how. Regardless of the efforts to disguise it, the fascination has more to do with the thrill that drew audiences to public execu- tions or the Colosseum in Ancient. Rome than the aspiration to share in important advances in the science of psychiatry.

There aren't any of those to be had, any- way. Psychologists and psychiatrists are still almost entirely in the dark about serial killers, and hopelessly bad at identifying them. For example, a psychiatrist's report on Gary Heidnik, the American serial mur- derer and cannibal, stated that 'with con- tinued psychotherapy, Mr Heidnik's prognosis is good'. That report was on 18 March 1987 — the same day that Heidnik killed, cooked and ate one of his female victims.

There are no moral lessons to be learnt from serial killers either, any more than there are from man-eating reptiles. The only moral questions here relate to why the rest of us are so fascinated by the sordid and disgusting details of what they do. Pub- lishers are understandably not too interest- ed in that issue. They just keep the books coming and count the money. But the mys- tery remains: what is the attraction? While no one will admit to it, almost everyone seems subject to it. People who profess to be totally unin- terested in serial killers can be found secretly scanning articles about them, or even writing books about them. Hector Clark, the Assistant Chief Constable of Lothian who led the investigation into the serial child killer Robert Black, said mem- orably and movingly last week on the day Black was convicted, 'I care not for Black or what he says.' Clark's 300-page book on the case comes out next week. It will be available, as they say, at all good book- shops.

Alasdair Palmer is home affairs editor of The Spectator.