Margaret Newman has spoken for the first time about her dealings with the monster while teaching his daughter Heather – who he would go on to murder
A teacher has lifted the lid on a chilling encounter she had with serial killer Fred West, before he murdered his own daughter.
Margaret Newman used to teach young Heather at Hucclecote Secondary School in Gloucester. She has revealed how her father arrived one parents evening to discuss his daughter’s English progress.
Describing how he seemed “stand-offish and disengaged”, Newman said she had no idea the man in front of her would go on to torture and murder the ‘sweet’ Year 9 pupil she loved.
She said: “Heather was very nice, a very sweet girl with a quiet personality.
“She knew we had a similar birthday, and I remember she once came to the school with two glass tumblers all wrapped up in tissue that she’d brought from home, bless her. She was really a very nice girl, but she didn’t appear to have many friends.
‘”I think it wasn’t the sort of family where kids went to spend time with each other after school or visit. They were a very private family – and now we know why.”
She said she first met Fred, alone, when he turned up at school to see how his daughter was getting on.
“Fred came on his own to parents’ evening. He was just very casual, and not particularly well-spoken,” she said: “He had a grumpy sort of personality. I didn’t suspect anything at the time – not a bit – but what a nasty piece of work.
“The parents were very guarded about communicating with the school and we only ever had the father at parents’ evening. We never saw her mother.”
She said it was only later that this rang alarm bells when the property Heather had been going home to was unveiled as the notorious “House of Horrors” in 1994.
Nine girls and young women were tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered, behind the front door – including Heather.
Ms Newman recalled that when Heather stopped attending school in Year 11, shortly after completing her GCSEs in June 1987, her parents claimed she had left for a ‘job in London’.
The truth was horrific. Heather had been tortured and raped, before being murdered and mutilated with a bread knife.
Ms Newman said: “They said Heather had gone to London, she’d disappeared – but she was dead by that point.
“But they told the story at school that she’d got a job in the city so [the authorities] obviously didn’t think to look for her.”
Heather’s remains were eventually unearthed in 1994 when police obtained a search warrant following comments made by the Wests’ other children that their parents would ‘joke’ that family members would end up “under the patio like Heather.”
She said: “I think it was such a shock to think that all that time we thought she’d been in London, she was actually dead. They were evil, evil.
“I was very sad because she was such a nice girl.”