Book description
Frederick West cheated everybody when he hung himself on New Year's
Day 1995. Was this a sign of overwhelming guilt? Was West criminally
insane or merely a sexual sadist of the worst kind? Brian Masters sets
out to answer these questions.
Attending the Rosemary West trial on a daily basis, Masters has come
up with a penetrating study of the sexual obsession that led to the
measured killing of twelve women and girls. In the wake of the
horrific detail of murder, sadism and torture that has come to light
in the last few months, Masters, from his privileged courtroom vantage
point, looks closely at how and why ordinary human beings were driven
to serial killing of the most devious kind, and how an evil psychopath
was able to ensnare so many in a web of unseeing complicity. He
unravels with particular precision the legal means used to bring the
whole matter to trial and weighs the evidence coolly and objectively.
Brian Masters has established his reputation as an authority on the
criminal and psychopathic mind. This is his highly reasoned and
psychologically acute look at what has become Britain's serial-killer
trial of the century.
Brian Masters has written over twenty books on subjects as diverse as
French literature, the dukedoms in Great Britain, E. F. Benson and Marie
Corelli. His groundbreaking study of mass murderer Dennis Nilsen,
Killing for Company, won the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger for
Non-Fiction in 1985. He is the author of the critically acclaimed The
Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer and The Evil that Men Do. He is also highly
regarded for his journalism, in particular his weekly column in the Mail
on Sunday's magazine Night and Day. He lives in France.
