Fred West And Felicity Nightingale
Wikimedia CommonsFred and Rosemary West killed and raped at least eight young women together. Fred impregnated his daughter while Rosemary beat and killed one of their other daughters.
Felicity Nightingale started hitchhiking when she was 22 years old. Fred West, together with his wife Rosemary West had already murdered several women after raping and torturing them in their home by the time he happened upon Nightingale. It was April 1980, and Nightingale would be working in mid-Wales village all summer.
With no car, she frequently hitchhiked to and from work. One day, she met Fred West. According to The Guardian, he never told her his name, but Nightingale remembers his presence clearly.
He “was the strangest I met thumbing rides,” she recalled. “It was an encounter I would never forget.”
After hitching a ride to a service station on the M5, somebody offered to give her a lift. She found it odd that he offered without her even asking, but he seemed nice enough.
“I’ll give you a ride,” the man said. “Throw your rucksack in. It’s perfectly safe, don’t worry.”
She kept insisting that she’d rather have her bag upfront with her, but the man repeated that she shouldn’t worry. When he said he was actually in the mood for a cup of tea, Nightingale was relieved. She thanked him and said she’ll just try somebody else.
“Come for tea,” he responded. “What’s the harm in a cup of tea?”
The two mismatched strangers sat in the service station and had tea together, with the stern driver asking her all about her family, and how they felt about her hitchhiking habit. She explained they weren’t too happy about it, but allowed her some independence.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said angrily. “They obviously don’t care about you. No parent who cared about their daughter would let her hitchhike.”
Nightingale thought him rude, but certainly not dangerous. She thought “he had a volcanic temper…but he certainly did not seem to have any sexual motive,” so she hitched a ride with him after tea. He kept urging her to meet and stay with his wife and family in Tewkesbury, which she found odd. She just wanted to get home to Weymouth.
He got increasingly angry at Nightingale, lying to her that they needed to drive through Tewkesbury to get to Weymouth — blatantly incorrect. The man told her he needed to see a friend nearby, and that he’d drop her off and pick her up on the way back.
“He was so cross I actually thought he was going to lean across and hit me so when he stopped I did what he had said and got out of the van,” said Nightingale.
Fortunately, she quickly caught another ride which dropped her back off at the service station, from which she safely found her way home. It was 14 years later that she found out that it was Fred West who’d picked her up that day.
Only then did she realize the angry old man and his wife, Rosemary, had tortured, raped, and killed 10 women between 1967 and 1987, including their own daughter. Nightingale’s husband joked that she must’ve been the only woman to be rejected by Fred West.
“I can still picture the man I now know as Fred West telling me how delighted his wife would be if I came to stay.”
