Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  1 THE CORPSE GARDEN

  2 THE VEGETABLE PATCH AT RILLINGTON PLACE

  3 BONFIRES AND BEASTIES

  4 BACKYARD CANNIBAL

  5 BACK OF THE BOARDING HOUSE

  6 AUSSIE RULES

  7 MACABRE MARGATE

  8 A HEAD IN THE FLOWER BED

  9 THE GIRLFRIEND’S GARDEN

  10 PUSHER UNDER THE PATIO

  11 BLOCK HEAD

  12 FAMILY FEUD

  13 MULTI-FACETED MONSTER

  14 THE BLACK WIDOW

  15 THE OGRE OF THE ARDENNES

  16 A DISHONOUR KILLING

  17 NOT A ROCKERY

  18 HOUSE OF DEATH

  19 OUT WITH THE BINS

  20 THE CLEVELAND STRANGLER

  21 TINY BODIES

  22 THE FAMILY PLOT

  23 THE ORNAMENTAL GARDEN

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  On 9 October 2013, two bodies were found in the back garden of a semi-detached house at 2 Blenheim Close, Forest Town, on the outskirts of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. Post-mortem examinations of the remains revealed that each victim had died after a single shot to the head. The couple were identified as husband and wife William and Patricia Wycherley, who had disappeared from the property some 15 years earlier. Neighbours thought they had gone abroad.

  On the evening of 30 October, the Wycherley’s daughter and son-in-law – Susan Edwards, 55, and Christopher John Edwards, 57 – were arrested at St Pancras International railway station in London. Four days later, they were charged with the murders of the Wycherleys between 1 and 31 May 1998. The couple had lived in a cul-de-sac just 150 yards from Susan’s parents’ home, which was at the end of the terrace. While they told the police they had ‘no fixed abode’, it was thought that Christopher Edwards was still living there, while Susan Edwards had been living abroad before her arrest.

  Mr Wycherley would have been 100 years old, and his wife 79, had they still been alive. Mr Wycherley had been a wartime veteran merchant seaman; they had lived in the two-bedroom house for 11 years before their disappearance. The house was sold in 2005 and the new residents had no inkling that the previous occupants’ bodies were hidden on the premises. The Wycherleys’ relatives continued to get birthday and Christmas cards, which appeared to have been signed by the couple until around 2009. Neither was ever reported missing.

  Detective Chief Inspector Rob Griffin, who led the investigation, said, ‘Bones were discovered in a grave in the garden. People we have spoken to, to date, have described the Wycherleys as reclusive. They kept themselves to themselves and it didn’t appear they had many regular friends or associates.’

  One resident of Blenheim Crescent said, when she had been told that the Wycherleys had emigrated, ‘I found it a bit weird that they would have done that, because that’s something you do in your fifties and they seemed to be quite elderly. We have been in the garden having barbecues without knowing a few houses away there were two bodies.’

  In court, Susan and Christopher Edwards admitted burying her elderly parents in the back garden and theft from a bank account, but denied murdering them.

  A month after the bodies of the Wycherleys had been found, the body of a white man was found by workmen in a well in the back garden of a cottage at 11A Audley Drive in the village of Warlingham, Surrey. The well was 2ft in diameter and 11ft deep, with 4ft of water at the bottom. The gruesome job of recovering the remains was left to specialists, including police divers, and it took several hours; the corpse was in a bad state of decay. It had been in the well for around two years, although the body still showed signs of injuries consistent with an assault, prior to being disposed of in the back garden. While the cause of death could not be determined, it was clear that it had been placed there, having been bound before being dropped down the well.

  The remains were eventually identified as that of Damian Chlywka, a Polish national who came to live in the UK in 2008. The cottage in Audley Drive was one of several addresses where Chlywka had lived in the area, and he would have been 32 at the time of his discovery.

  The police initially arrested seven men, aged between 21-27. After they were interviewed, they were released on police bail. The men arrested were all Polish car-wash workers who lived at the house. One of the men said, ‘I want to clear my name. There has been a big mistake. We don’t know nothing. We just live there.’ Then, on 29 November, two men aged 33 and 41 were arrested. They, too, were bailed.

  The body in the well had been found by 17-year-old Jack Duncan and his friend, 21-year-old Rory Mulholland. They were clearing out roses and brambles in the back garden when they found a slab capping the well. ‘At first I thought the well was at ground level … I thought it was ornamental. I didn’t think there was a drop in it,’ said Mulholland. ‘When we pulled up the slab we realised that there was a big drop and we saw a blue tarpaulin at the bottom of the well. At first we thought it was rubbish dumped, so we had a good look around and started moving it, and we slowly came to realise that it was in the shape of a body. You could see the shape of someone’s legs and a bottom. Then we flipped the tarp over again and I saw someone’s upper thigh. It was definitely a man. I’ve never smelt anything like it.’

  Duncan said that he had trouble sleeping after the discovery. ‘It’s been really hard to get back to sleep the last couple of nights knowing that you found a dead body,’ he said. ‘It’s just been there … you don’t know how long it’s been there. I’m never going to look down a well again.’

  A local resident said, ‘It is really shocking. You do not expect it here. It is really quite a well-to-do area.’

  No one expects bodies buried in the back garden – it seems to be right out of Agatha Christie, though as far as I can recall there is no Christie murder mystery in which the corpse has been interred under the lawn, in a flowerbed or down a garden well; it’s much more likely to be found in the library. However, it is easy to believe that the back gardens of St Mary Mead, the village where Miss Marple lived, would be positively groaning with corpses if the residents hadn’t considered gardening to be a far more serious a matter than that of mere homicide.

  Nevertheless, bodies in the back garden does seem to be a quintessentially English occurrence, even though the body found in the well in Warlingham was that of a Pole. Perhaps it is because the back garden itself seems so quintessentially English. The Scots have rolling moors of heather, the Welsh have hills with sheep grazing on them and the Irish have bogs. Abroad, people live in fancy apartments with backyards – which are not quite the same. But foreigners do murder family, friends and foes, and bury them in that little patch of heaven outside the back door when they can. Certainly Americans, the French, Belgians, Australians and even the Mexicans have tried to get away with it.

  The cases in this book obviously deal with those who have not escaped justice – their evil deeds have been discovered and their handiwork disinterred – hopefully to be buried later in a more appropriately respectful location.

  In several cases, though, the buried corpse was not discovered for some time, which leads one to suspect that some killers have been successful in secreting the remains of their victims under the vegetable patch. Surely this is another disincentive to eat your greens.

  As well as the victims and their loved ones, one has to feel sorry for the next resident of the property. Having spent years shelling out on the mortgage, they are suddenly inundated with an army of policemen in forensic suit
s erecting a tent on the patio. After they have turned the back garden into a convincing reconstruction of the Battle of Passchendaele, the owners realise that the home they thought was their castle has now become the scene of a gruesome murder and, consequently, unsaleable – except to the mentally unstable. So it has to be pulled down.

  Better that, though, than living with bodies in the back garden and wondering, each year, why those blood-red roses you planted by the woodshed are doing so well.

  There are other ways to get rid of bodies. Myra Hindley and Ian Brady became notorious as the ‘Moors Murderers’ because they buried their victims on the bleak exposure of Saddleworth Moor; in Canada, Robert Pickton fed the bodies of numerous prostitutes he murdered to his pigs. Some gangsters feed rivals to the fish, while others favour encasing the corpse in concrete as part of some new motorway construction.

  The appeal of burying a body in the back garden – particularly to the English, who have one readily available – is the sheer convenience. In our private plot, shielded from the gaze of nosy neighbours by the leylandii, it is possible to dig a reasonably large hole while pretending to be involved merely in some innocent horticulture or, perhaps, the building of a pond. Then, in the dark of night, one can manhandle the corpse, that has previously been leaking on the carpet, out of the back door and roll it into the pit. A little more shovelling and a trip to the garden centre, and your crime can be skilfully concealed.

  Of course, serious criminals can dissolve the body in a vat of acid, or mince up the corpse and distribute it over a local rubbish dump. But for the middle-class criminal who has had little schooling in violent crime, burial in the back garden is the obvious answer.

  Now, I am not recommending this course of action. Murder is a heinous crime for which there is no justification whatever the circumstances. Usually, the motives are vile – uncontrollable greed or lust, overweening pride or envy, wrath or simple depravity. However, we are all susceptible to murderous feelings. That is why people who would never think about committing a crime enjoy reading about it.

  Having a back garden and a spade to hand, along with a kitchen knife, makes murder domestic. It tames it and brings it within the bounds of possibilities. One could at least imagine killing that unfaithful lover, or the maiden aunt who stands in the way of your inheritance and is about to squander it on some gigolo, and bury them under the petunias.

  Up to this point in my life, I have never had a compelling reason to kill anyone, and I certainly would not want to do such a thing frivolously. Besides, I live in central London. It is crowded and, one would think, there would not be very much chance of getting away with it.

  But, curiously, I do have a little garden. Not that those living in the comforts of the suburbs would consider it such. At the back of my garden – OK, basement – flat, there is a narrow patio just big enough to have breakfast on, on a sunny morning, or host a barbecue on a summer’s evening. Then beyond a waist-high wall is a bank where daffodils sprout in springtime. As I am not much of gardener, the loose soil there is sown with what my mother calls ‘ground cover’. Until recently, it was shaded by a buddleia. At the top of the bank is a metal fence, along which I have tried to train a tree to form a hedge. High trees then obscure the view from the buildings in the next street.

  So, if some murderous altercation occurred in my flat one night and I had a corpse to dispose of, I would at least have somewhere to plant it. Being a city-dweller, I don’t actually have a spade, of course. And the physical effort of digging even the shallowest grave may be beyond me – certainly in a single night.

  But over Christmas, say, when the building is practically deserted and those in residence would have little reason to venture out, it may just about be possible to conceal the evidence of my misdeeds. I fervently hope the opportunity to check this out never arises.

  Dear reader, it seems to me that, if there is a possibility that I could get away with it, so could you. So treat the following stories of those who did not succeed in getting away with their evil acts by burying the evidence in the back garden as cautionary tales.

  Nigel Cawthorne

  Bloomsbury, January 2014

  1

  THE CORPSE GARDEN

  The most notorious case of burying bodies in the back garden in recent years was that of Fred and Rosemary West, who buried the bodies of their victims at their home, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. Indeed, veteran crime writer Colin Wilson’s definitive account of the case is called The Corpse Garden.

  On 24 February 1994, the police turned up at the Wests’ ordinary three-storey house in central Gloucester – later to be known as the ‘House of Horrors’ – with a warrant to dig up the back garden. The door was answered by Stephen West, the 20-year-old son of the householders. The police told him that they were looking for the body of his elder sister Heather, who had disappeared in June 1987 at the age of 16. Stephen’s parents had told him that she had left home to go and work in a holiday camp in Devon and he believed that she was now living in the Midlands with her lesbian lover.

  ‘I wanted to know the reasons why they thought Heather was buried there, but they wouldn’t tell me,’ said Stephen, perhaps disingenuously. At his father’s request, Stephen had dug the fish pond that had become Heather’s makeshift grave when the patio was extended over it.

  Among the surviving West children, there was a running joke that Heather was buried under the patio. Indeed, Fred West himself had threatened them that, if they did not keep quiet about the terrible things that went on in the house, they would end up under the patio like Heather. Nevertheless, Stephen told one of the detectives that they were going to end up making fools of themselves. He replied, ‘That’s up to us.’

  When his mother Rosemary saw the warrant, she said, ‘This is stupid.’ Then she became hysterical, hurling abuse at the police and claiming they were invading her home. Stephen joined in, demanding that they wait until his father got home. The police told him that they were going to dig up the back garden whether he was there or not.

  As the four-man police excavation team trooped out to the rear of the property, Rosemary West tried to contact Fred, who was working on a building site about twenty minutes’ drive from Gloucester. She got through to Fred’s boss. Sobbing, she said, ‘I don’t care where he is … I want him home now.’

  Finally, they got through to Fred. ‘You’d better get back home,’ Rosemary told him. ‘They’re going to dig up the garden, looking for Heather.’

  He said he would leave what he was doing and come straight home. That was at 1.50pm and they expected him home in 20 minutes. Meanwhile, the police were taking pictures of the back garden. There were concrete slabs to take up and nightfall came at 4.00pm. Not much progress could be made that evening. The excavation team went at 5.30pm, leaving a solitary officer to stand guard all night.

  Fred did not arrive home until 5.40pm. It has never been established what he was doing during the intervening four hours. Fred said that he had pulled the lids off some paint pots. The fumes had overcome him as he was driving home and had pulled over into a lay-by where he had passed out. Detective Superintendent John Bennett, who was leading the investigation, believes that Fred West needed ‘thinking time’. Others suspected that he was disposing of evidence.

  When Rosemary was interviewed, she told the police that Heather had been both lazy and disagreeable, and they were well rid of her. Fred said that she was a lesbian who had got involved in drugs and, like his wife, he seemed unconcerned with her disappearance. ‘Lots of girls disappear,’ he said, ‘take a different name and go into prostitution.’ He was more concerned about the mess the police were making raising the paving stones of his patio.

  That night, Fred and Rosemary West stayed up all night talking. According to Geoffrey Wansel, author of Evil Love, based on 150 hours of taped interviews with Fred West, that night they cooked up a deal. Rosemary was to keep silent, while Fred said that he would sort everything out with the police the following
day. She was not to worry about anything as he would take the blame.

  In the morning, Stephen found his father staring out of the bathroom window at the garden; the digging had resumed. Fred West’s face was contorted and he gave his son a look that sent shivers down his spine. ‘I shall be going away for a while,’ he said. ‘Look after Mum and sell the house. I’ve done something really bad. I want you to go to the papers and make as much money as you can and start a new life.’

  Then Fred presented himself to the officers downstairs and asked to be taken to the police station. As Fred stepped into a police car, he told Detective Constable Hazel Savage, who had instigated the search, that he had killed Heather. He said that her body was buried in the garden, but that the police were digging in the wrong spot. At Gloucester Police Station, Fred told detectives how he had murdered his daughter, cut her body into three pieces and buried them in the back garden, adding, ‘The thing I’d like to stress is that Rose knew nothing at all.’

  Nevertheless, Rosemary West was arrested on suspicion of being complicit in Heather’s murder and taken to Cheltenham Police Station. When she was told of Fred’s confession, Rosemary claimed that Fred had sent her out of the house the day Heather disappeared. She had no knowledge of Heather’s death.

  She was also asked if Fred had mentioned the patio in their conversation the previous evening. ‘It had come up,’ she admitted. ‘We was just waiting for them to do the job and go away again,’ she said. ‘We hoped they’d put it back the way they found it.’

  Twenty minutes after his detailed confession, Fred West retracted everything he had said. ‘Heather’s alive and well, right,’ he insisted. ‘She’s possibly at the moment in Bahrain working for a drug cartel. She has a Mercedes, a chauffeur and a new birth certificate.’

  West was adamant that the police could dig up the back garden as much as they liked, but they would not find Heather.