The newspaper repeated the claim elsewhere in its coverage of the case, in almost identical words: “Rosemary was the dominant partner, people said, the strategist.”Quite how “people” knew this, when the evidence of an unprecedented number of witnesses was tainted by cash offers from the media of up to pounds 100,000 is not easy to establish. The notion of Rosemary West as the dominant personality was echoed by the Daily Telegraph, which characterised her immediately after the trial as “the strategist behind her moronic, doting husband”. In the final week of the trial Colin Wilson confidently asserted on Radio 4’s Today programme that Rosemary West had gradually become the dominant partner in the couple’s crimes, a claim as unsubstantiated as his observation in the same interview that her husband’s murderous proclivities were the result of a head injury. It is this impulse which lies behind the concerted attempt, in the aftermath of the trial, to suggest that the Cromwell Street murders marked the moment when Britain finally achieved the dubious distinction of having a female Jack the Ripper.THE RUSH TO present the Cromwell Street murders in this light was predictable and immediate. By standing trial alone, Rosemary West’s case can be manipulated to foster the myth not of the lone female serial killer – the most dramatic way of redressing the alarming gender imbalance described above – but of the next best thing, a murderous relationship between a man and a woman in which the latter is the driving force.

She is the wrong gender, not a loner but a married woman living in an unusually populous household, variously described as a cheap lodging-house and a brothel; detectives investigating the case have apparently identified 150 people who passed through 25 Cromwell Street during the Wests’ residence there, staying for periods as short as two or three days or as long as several years.But there is another factor which complicates the West case, perhaps fatally damaging our chances of gaining an insight into how, and indeed if, she became a murderer – the prosecution case against her was by no means proved – and that is the suicide in prison of her husband, the builder Frederick West. And when we are faced with a criminal like Rosemary West, who deviates in almost every respect from the prevailing notion of a serial killer, such theories are worse than useless. Canter, who is head of the Liverpool University investigative psychology unit, asked rhetorically: “Why do we get no women serial killers living with their over-indulgent, elderly fathers?” The truth is that while the numbers of serial killers have been increasing exponentially – from 644 individual murders in the United States in 1966 to an estimated 4,118 in 1982, according to the FBI – their motivation is still poorly understood. This theory has an obvious flaw, as Professor David Canter pointed out in his book Criminal Shadows: Inside the Mind of the Serial Killer.

In a symbiotic process, “Jack” has enjoyed a long and varied career in films and novels, while fictional serial killers such as Hannibal Lecter, the psychiatrist turned anthropophagic murderer from Thomas Harris’s accomplished thrillers Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, have become archetypes of the hero/villain who enthrals both Hollywood and the popular imagination (Lecter has appeared in two movies, played by Brian Cox in Michael Mann’s stylish Manhunter and Anthony Hopkins in Jonathan Demme’s version of The Silence of the Lambs).Because the victims of so many serial killers, from Jack the Ripper onwards, have been female, the theory has frequently been advanced that serial murderers live with smothering mothers and hate them so much that they are compelled ritually to destroy them over and over again. Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, urged readers to “let the Ripper rip you into an awareness of the urges and forces most of us will neither admit nor submit to”. Alban Berg’s adaptation of both plays into an opera, simply entitled Lulu, was first performed in the Thirties and remains popular to this day.)Charles McCabe, a columnist on the San Francisco Chronicle, notoriously saluted Jack the Ripper as “that great hero of my youth, that skilled butcher who did all his work on alcoholic whores”. (This combination, Lulu and the Ripper, was so seductive that Wedekind’s plays had already been filmed four times when the German movie director G W Pabst cast the American actress Louise Brooks as the seductress/victim in his eerie and compelling post-expressionist film Pandora’s Box in 1928. Once this transfer to the symbolic realm is complete, they can even become heroes.