An Inconvenient Truth Lies

Fred West: a glimpse of extreme evil

In 2006, I met the late Gordon Burn for a drink in a Manchester pub. It was Burn's brilliant book about the Yorkshire Ripper case, Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, which had given me the confidence to write my 2000 television drama , This Is Personal, about the police investigation of the Ripper murders. At the time of our meeting, I had just written a new television drama, See No Evil, about the moors murders – a subject Gordon too had explored in his novel Alma Cogan.

We discussed how these notorious crimes had come to have such profound resonance in our national life, indeed had in some ways come to define certain places and periods – and why it seemed important for writers to engage with them. During the conversation, Burn spoke about his book about Fred and Rosemary West, Happy Like Murderers. He told me that he had found it the hardest of all to write, that the effect of peering into the moral abyss that the Wests' crimes presented had been deeply unsettling. There was more to be said about the case, he was sure, but if I were ever to explore it I should expect to feel the same way.

Five years later my two-part drama Appropriate Adult, which tells the story of Janet Leach, the Gloucester woman asked by the police to sit in on their interviews with Fred West, has been filmed and is due to be broadcast on ITV this autumn. During the research and writing of the drama I thought often about that conversation with Burn and, looking back, realise that its theme was born during that meeting.

Putting the crimes of serial killers into any kind of order of horror would be a futile and tasteless task, but it is worth considering what made the crimes of the Wests particularly abhorrent. Like Peter Sutcliffe, they sometimes targeted women who were complete strangers, such as Lucy Partington, who was abducted on a main road in Cheltenham while on her way to catch the last bus home. Like Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, they committed appalling sexual crimes against children (their own and their stepchildren). But most of their victims were vulnerable young women who, for one reason or another, needed a home and were offered one at 25 Cromwell Street. An offer which ultimately led to violation, torture and death.

It is perhaps this violation of our sense of what a home should be – safe, secure, loving – that is most troubling. The Wests carried out their crimes while (to most outside eyes) living a relatively normal domestic life in a quiet street in a picturesque English cathedral city. Few were aware that the authorities had suspicions of child abuse (there had been a failed prosecution), and though there was gossip about Rose's activities as a prostitute, the Wests were generally well-liked locally. Fred West especially was genial, affable and possessed of a beguiling charm which he used equally on men and women. If you look at photos of him cracking the police up with laughter after his arrest you can see this.

A Foundation of Lies - From On High

• Charles Monnett, the scientist who predicted that polar bears would drown from a lack of sea ice, "is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity" of the article in which he makes that claim, the Associated Press reported Thursday. Monnett, a federal wildlife biologist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, has been placed on leave pending the probe's outcome. The Environmental Protection Agency placed polar bears on the endangered list in 2008, four years after Monnett's observation and two years after Gore's movie filled audiences' heads with nonsense. But the claim that man-made global warming is a threat to polar bears has been debunked and the scientist who ginned up the narrative is now under scrutiny.

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