As residents flooded out of their homes in the Glasgow cul-de-sac, they screamed as they saw two tiny legs sticking out from under an ice-cream van.
Behind the wheel was Fred West — a man who would later be known as a monster.
The serial killer always claimed the death of three-year-old Henry William Feeney in 1965 was an accident.
But now a Hollywood producer says it was premeditated murder — and claims that West developed his taste for killing by prowling the streets of Scotland, years before he began slaying women in Gloucester.
Paul Pender is convinced that the twisted killer murdered not only little Henry but countless other victims too.
And he believes their bodies are buried under a junction of the M8 motorway that used to be the site of West’s allotment next to his home on MacLellan Street, Glasgow.
Glaswegian-born Pender told The Sun: “My feeling is that there are victims buried in that allotment and I think the police need to conduct a search. I would strongly suspect they’ll find victims down there.”
Pender began investigating West’s time in Scotland after receiving a tip-off at a family funeral two years ago from a man who worked in a Glasgow abattoir with the killer’s first wife Rena Costello.
He said: “When Fred would visit the abattoir he would apparently ask lots of questions about how to use all the bits of the carcass and was fascinated by the dismemberment process.
“This is quite alarming, knowing the lengths he went to when dismembering his victims. He would bury them in small spaces and package them like meat.”
West moved to Glasgow in 1963 after marrying Rena, who hailed from the city. Rena — one of West’s 12 known victims — was murdered by the beast in 1971.
The majority of West’s murders — including that of his daughter Heather, who was buried under a patio — were carried out at his House of Horrors, 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. He was helped by second wife Rose, who he wed in 1972.
Fred hanged himself in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, on January 1, 1995, months before facing trial.
Rose was convicted of ten murders and sentenced to life in prison.
But could there be even more victims on West’s kill list from his years in Scotland?
During his time working as an ice- cream man in Glasgow, West would bring his newborn daughter Anne Marie with him on his rounds, placing her in a little wooden box.
Pender said: “It was a step up from a puppy. He used his daughter to lure young girls and women to him.
“He was the only driver in Scotland who did not return his van to the headquarters of the Walls company until 3am.
“You don’t really sell that many ice creams after the sun goes down and neighbours reported hearing strange noises coming from the shed in his garden in the middle of the night.
Neighbour John McLachlan — who was having an affair with Rena — first revealed his suspicions about the allotment days after Rose West’s conviction.
He said at the time: “West had a piece of ground which was always well-dug but which he never put any plants in.
I asked him several times why he did not use that bit for potatoes and he always said he was keeping it for ‘special purposes’.
“He sometimes did not return from the allotment until the early hours of the morning.
“I told the police and said they should check up on missing girls from that period. Nobody knows what he was up to in that allotment — but he sure as hell wasn’t gardening.”
Pender — whose Edinburgh Fringe show The Charisma of Evil begins its run tomorrow — is urging police to reopen the case of tragic tot Henry Feeney, who West knocked down with his ice-cream van in November 1965.
West had promised the boy a present and told him to wait in a small cul-de-sac in Castlemilk, Glasgow.
But when the van pulled up, West reversed into the child, killing him instantly.
Henry’s father Peter ran 150 yards from his home to find his son under the van.
Pender added: “Henry might have seen something and West decided to dispose of him. He’d promised the lad fireworks as it was the day before Guy Fawkes’ night.
But when the boy got there Fred also said he had left a ball for him in a hedge behind the van.
“The little lad went to collect it and I believe West purposely reversed over him.”
Tom McGougan, who lived only yards from the scene, gave his account of the incident in 1998.
He said: “There was an angry mob and they didn’t believe West’s story that it was an accident. The crowd was going to lynch him.”
Pender isn’t the first to investigate West’s time in Glasgow.
Howard Sounes, who wrote the biography Fred & Rose, claims that West used to boast darkly of having “a Scottish connection” — thought to be a reference to friends who could help him dispose of bodies.
The author said: “Fred’s first known murder — that of his lover Anne McFall — was in 1967.
“It’s quite possible that he had killed before then because it was an extremely weird and sexual killing.
“He probably would have had to build up to that.”
Anne was pregnant — most likely with West’s child — and the monster dissected her body, cutting her full-term baby from her and keeping bones from both the mother and her unborn child as trophies.
Sounes claims cops feared “at least four” missing women in Glasgow could have fallen prey to the brute. He added: “Criminologists say that everywhere he lived should be searched because somebody like him kills in a continuous pattern.”
While West would reach new depths of depravity with his second wife Rose — the pair tortured, raped and murdered their own children — his relationship with Rena was far from conventional.
Rena was a call girl, and West got a voyeuristic thrill from sending out his own wife to seduce other men.
Sounes said: “In his head he was this big-time gangster but in reality he was a seedy little man picking up teenage girls in his ice-cream van.”
But Sounes fears it may be too late to uncover any bodies from what was once West’s allotment as the plot has since been buried under concrete at the junction of the M8 and the M77.
He said: “You can’t just dig up the M8 — it would be total chaos. So I’m sure it will forever remain a mystery.”
West’s time in Scotland ended abruptly in 1965 when he was chased out by a razor-wielding lynch mob for abusing the 12-year-old sister of gang leader Malky Frazer.
Colin MacFarlane, the writer of three biographies of his life in the tough Gorbals area of Glasgow, said of the sinister ice cream man: “He handed out cones to young girls.
“We soon heard he was abusing some of them.
“When Malky learned his sister had been abused, he vowed to kill West.”
Frazer’s 30-strong mob waited at a street corner for three days until they heard the chimes of West’s van. MacFarlane continued: “Mad Malky and the gang all ran towards the van with knives, razors, bricks and hatchets. West got hit on the head with a large stone but he still managed to get to his steering wheel and speed off.
“The gang ran after the van as it swerved from side to side up the street. It was like a scene from a cowboy movie when the bad guy gets run out of town.
“West was lucky that day. Malky had planned to cut his head off.”
Instead West moved to Gloucester — and set out on a killing spree that would make him one of the most notorious serial killers in British criminal history.
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