Fred West's forgotten first victim, 3, he killed with ice cream van for 'thrill'

Daily Mirror

5 days ago

Police found nine butchered women at Fred and Rose West's House of Horrors. But Fred's first kill was actually a TODDLER. Today, the family break their 60-year silence.....
IT'S been three decades since the victims of Fred and Rose West finally received some justice - three decades since West hanged himself in his jail cell and three decades since Rose was handed a whole life sentence. The serial killer murdered at least 12 people between 1967 and 1987 but incredibly that wasn't the first time he had had blood on his hands.
West ran over and killed three-year-old Glaswegian Harry Feeney in an ice cream van, two years before his presumed first victim Anne McFall disappeared. The death was ruled an accident, but now speaking for the first time Harry's family are adamant it was deliberate.
Author, TV producer and former Mirror journalist Howard Sounes was granted gained access to more than 100 hours of police interviews for his new book The Fred West Tapes:Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation. Here, in Day Two of our exclusive serialisation, he exposes the family secrets that led to the making of the monster…..
Adapted from The Fred West Tapes by Howard Sounes:
FRED West often lied in his police interviews. But some of his most colourful stories proved to be true. One of the most shocking was that of Harry Feeney.
West was living in Glasgow with his first wife, Rena, when he got a job driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van, touring the estates. One of the areas he visited was Castlemilk where cheap new homes had been built since the slum clearances. He told police he befriended a three-year-old boy, a lad who regularly came to his van.
But one day, when Fred was driving out of the cul-de-sac where the boy lived, he heard a dreadful sound.
'There was an almighty bang, and I stopped,' Fred told the police, as seen in these previously unseen in the newly-released 1994 interview transcripts. 'I was on top of his head, and it was his head that made the bang.'
He looked under his van. 'I see that the child was lying underneath, under the back axle …' Fred continued.
In the days after the incident on November 4, 1965, and again after police questioning in 1994, investigators decided Harry's death was most likely a tragic accident. But according to Harry's cousin Isabel Kirby - who was there that day - the boy's parents, labourer Peter Feeney and his wife Patsy, were convinced it was deliberate. Peter went to his grave believing Harry was Fred West's first victim.
Isabel, now 72, recently told me the whole story for the first time. Young Harry had been playing with her brother Raymond, when West's ice cream van appeared. Seconds later there was panic.
'I saw people running, a lot of yelling and screaming,' says Isabel. 'It was wee Harry lying in the street.'
Harry's family and friends maintained there had been no need for West to reverse - a reason they became convinced it was not an accident.
'He done it for the thrill of it,' says Isabel. 'He was just plain evil.'
Fred was questioned at the time, and while he was never charged with a crime, he fled Glasgow and returned to his home village of Much Marcle, outside Gloucester.
According to Isabel, who now lives in Canada, the family never forgot West's name. When Fred and Rose made national news in March 1994, Harry's father recognised him immediately.
'The first thing my Uncle Peter said was, 'That's the f**king bastard that done it to young Harry,'' says Isabel. 'He said, 'that f**king bastard murdered my boy'.'
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It was by no means West's first scandal. He was born in 1941 and grew up to become one of the 'most handsome', eligible, 'charming' and popular bachelors in his rural area.
But even as a boy Frederick Walter Stephen West had an innate darkness within him.
His parents Walter and Daisy West were poor, semi-literate farm workers who lived by the seasons and could appear almost as ignorant as the beasts they tended.
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There were eight children, two of whom died in infancy, leaving: Fred, John, Daisy, Doug, Kitty and Gwen. 'We were a very happy family ... Very close,' Fred told the police during the murder investigation in 1994, as revealed in the new transcripts. 'We all protected each other.'
Few that knew them - like Kitty's schoolfriend Jean Korbi - would agree with that statement.
In reality, Fred's mother wore a thick leather belt which she used to beat her children, a habit Rose West later adopted.
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His strict mum also banned girlfriends until he was 21, but his father offered different advice: 'Whatever you enjoy, do. And make sure you don't get caught doing it, you know?'
Fred's daughter May later claimed: 'He [Dad] said it was a father's right to break his daughters in. According to him, that is what his father had done.'
Speaking for the first time about her friend Kitty, Jean reveals the day she learned an awful secret.
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'I'm pregnant,' Kitty, then 13, announced to a group of friends. They didn't know that Kitty had a boyfriend. 'Oh, it's not a boyfriend, me brother did it. Fred.'
Fred, then 19, was eyed as prime marriage material in the rural area.
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'He was one of the handsomest,' recalls Jean. 'He had a lovely smile, a nice wide smile, it lifted up his face. I had a schoolgirl crush on him.'
But then she learned that same boy – that 'nice' boy – had made his younger sister pregnant. Jean thought the Wests a bit backward, but this was still a shock.
'I mean she [Kitty] was a bit Dolly Dimple,' says Jean. 'The whole family seemed a bit odd [but] I'd never heard of anything like incest, and then she proceeded to tell us how it was done, where it was done.'
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Kitty told them that she and Fred had sex in her bedroom, they did it 'lots of times'. She felt nervous at first. ''But Fred said because I'm his sister I wouldn't get pregnant'', Jean recalls her saying. Her friends suggested Kitty should have slapped Fred. 'She said, 'I wouldn't do that ... I quite like it', adds Jean. 'She seemed quite cool about it, 'It's normal, haven't you done it?' sort of thing.' Jean never forgot the conversation, adding: 'I remember it to this day, even where we were when she said it, because we were all in shock.'
The story reached the local police, and in June 1961 a detective interviewed Kitty and West. 'Well, doesn't everyone do it?' West asked the officer.
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By the time West was brought before a judge, charged with incest, he pleaded not guilty, Kitty refused to testify and West walked free.
The repercussions were significant. Kitty was expelled from school and had an abortion. She never got over it and died in 2006, haunted by her past.
Also, Fred learned that he could commit a sexual offence and get away with it, even if the police became involved.
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Shortly after, he began dating a 14-year-old, who can't be named for legal reasons. Despite getting his own sister pregnant, he was still popular.
'[Fred] was still liked,' says Jean. 'All the teenage girls, his age group, they were all drooling ... a lot of girls were after him.'
When the new girlfriend turned 15, Fred pulled over while driving her home one day and attacked her. 'He pushed me on the bank and raped me,' the girl later told police. The girl felt numb. '[I] just didn't know what to say.' Not long after this Fred raped her for a second time, at a flat. But she didn't report the matter to the police until the murder investigation in 1994.
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Once more Fred escaped without repercussions. His 20s would only get darker still. He fell for Scottish teen Catherine 'Rena' Costello, already pregnant with another man's child, married her, went to Glasgow, left her to prostitute herself to help make ends meet - and got himself work driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van.
When he killed young Harry Feeney, Fred was just 24. Whether intentional or not, he was now a killer, a rapist, and had almost fathered his sister's child.
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Two years later, his 18-year-old mistress Anne McFall, went missing while eight months pregnant. Her body - and the body of Fred's unborn baby - would not be found for 27 years.
Once again it could have stopped there - but it didn't. It later emerged Fred confessed to his father. He told Walter he had buried Anne's body on the edge of the woods and even took him to the site. 'I couldn't go up there on me own at that time,' Fred later told his solicitor. "So he walked up there with me. He said, 'Look, son, I'm your father, I'm not going to turn you in. If you can live with it then I'll say nothing.''
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Walter told his wife Daisy who then told his brother John: 'Freddy's killed the girl [Anne] and buried her in Kempley Woods!' No one however told the police. If they had, Anne McFall may have been his only victim. Instead, Fred remained at large. And then….he met Rose.
Howard Sounes helped break the West story and coin the term 'House of Horrors' for the Mirror in 1994, becoming an expert on the story. He was also Senior Producer on the recent Netflix series, Fred & Rose West.