5. Meet The Wests
Going back to that idea of 'normality', the worst serial killers of the 90s were a happily married couple with five daughters and a large house. The West family may have appeared perfectly normal to their neighbours, but 25 Cromwell Street was the setting for an extraordinary run of murders that only came to an end after Fred West made a particularly stupid joke. If the Wests didn't exist, then somebody would have invented them possibly Danny Boyle. His 1994 horror movie Shallow Grave follows three flatmates after they discover the dead body of their new lodger. The film mostly takes place in a flat in Edinburgh, which looks about the same as any other flat in any other major city- until Christopher Eccleston's character drills peepholes through all the walls. It's a mundane setting, which makes the trio's descent into paranoia and violence all the more shocking. No work of fiction could be as outlandish or as squalid as the life the Wests led, however. Fred grew up in the countryside, and as a boyhood rite of passage his father taught him the correct way to perform intimate relations...with sheep. A motorbike accident in 1958 put him in a seven day coma, after which he became prone to terrifying fits of anger (and apparently, psychic powers). West eventually met Rose Letts, who became his second wife. She killed Fred's first daughter and he ended up killing his first wife. These were the first of many victims, followed by female lodgers, nannies or drifters, most of them the unwilling focus of Fred and Rose's sexual overtures. The killings culminated when Fred murdered his daughter Heather (his alleged daughter- Rose's own dad was rumoured to be the father). The exact body count remains uncertain twelve for definite, though West admitted to thirty. West's offhand threat to his children that they would 'end up under the patio like Heather'- led, in 1994, to his arrest and imprisonment. He committed suicide on New Year's Day 1995, probably still regretting that he hadn't given them a clip round the ear instead. Underneath the tabloid sensationalism that soon gripped the British public, mundane details like that gave the story resonance. The iconic image of the Wests, the sort of photo that could have been taken in any supermarket or shopping centre, proves that the appearance of normality is not a guarantee of normality.