A Scots victim of Fred West has spoken of her “pure terror” on being abducted by the notorious serial killer.
Speaking for the first time about her ordeal, Jackie Stanton told how Fred West lured her into his van for a lift home – but instead drove her to a remote location.
Despite begging to get out, West refused and Jackie, then aged 13, had to leap from the van to escape his clutches. She ran away down a secluded country road with West chasing her, calling her a “little bitch”.
House of Horrors monster West killed 12 young women, most of them with wife Rose. He killed himself in prison while awaiting trial for the sex killings in 1995.
Before the murder spree, West had moved to Glasgow in the 1960s with his first wife Rena Costello where he ran an ice cream van. It was here that Jackie suffered her ordeal after meeting West when she was with a group of girls at his van.
She said: “He started talking to me, which I thought was quite nice of him. It wasn’t that I fancied him or anything, because he was older, you know, but he said he knew my father. He was safe – he knew my dad.
“He said he would give me a lift home. He said he knew a shortcut. And, as we drove out, I could see it wasn’t really a shortcut at all.
“We were leaving the estate. It was getting black, dark, I didn’t like the looks of it. And that’s when I said to him I wanted to get out – I would just walk home the rest of the way.”
Jackie, from the Easterhouse area of Glasgow, said he belted out an evil cackle after she begged to get out of the van.
She added: “I started to think, where’s he taking me, what’s happening? There’s no houses, it’s getting darker. I can see a cottage up ahead – one cottage. He had to stop the van to open the gate – I saw my opportunity and I threw myself out.
“When I fell out, I fell out big style, my legs were all skinned and everything. But I knew I had to run. Run, run, run, run. Just run. Pure panic. Pure terror.”
Jackie said: “I could hear him, furious, behind me, saying, ‘You little bitch, you little f****** bitch’.
“I went home to my mother and she just said, ‘Jesus Christ, Jacqueline, what’s happened to you?’, when she saw the state of my legs. I was all bleeding, cut, all down my legs. I just said I fell over, because I would’ve never been allowed out again.”
Telling her story in a Sky TV documentary on West’s time in Scotland, Jackie only made the connection to West years later.
She told how she immediately knew it was West who had kidnapped her when she saw his face and heard his voice on TV in 1995 after his arrest for the House of Horror killings.
The 69-year-old said: “I just knew, I just said, ‘That’s that guy, that’s that man!’.”
Jackie is convinced she could have been killed if she had not escaped, and regrets not reporting the incident at the time.
West was in his 20s at the time and was living in Scotland after fleeing England, where he’d been cleared of raping his 13-year-old sister. He walked free after his sister Kitty, who passed away in 2006, refused to give evidence against him.
He moved north in 1962 with wife Catherine “Rena” Costello, of Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, just months after they wed in England.
The documentary also tells how West could have been stopped in the 1960s if he had been snared by police in Glasgow. PC Russ Williams, who worked on the police probe that exposed West as a serial killer in the 1990s, said: “I think it’s worth remembering that Scotland and England are two completely different countries and two completely different police forces, so Fred’s history would not have followed him.
“There was always a dark side to Fred. We could see that through his time in Glasgow. He continued to involve himself in deviant behaviour with other women at that time.”
Sandra Brown, of Coatbridge, is the daughter of convicted paedophile Alexander Gartshore and a childhood friend of Rena. The 73-year-old believes her dad, the main suspect in the disappearance of Moira Anderson, was in a paedophile ring with West.
She added: “Had Fred West come under the scrutiny of the police in Glasgow when women on the ice cream vans were complaining about his behaviour, if they’d done a bit more sleuthing at that stage, it might have changed everything.”
Fred West: The Glasgow Girls, is due to air on Sky Crime on February 19.
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