Lucy Never Came Home

Lucy Partington Never Came Home.
On December 27, 1973, a 21-year-old Exeter University student called Lucy Partington set off from a friend’s house in Cheltenham to catch a bus back to her home in Gretton, about nine miles away.
And then what?
When her older sister Marian came home the next day, she was greeted by their mother, her voice full of panic.
“Lucy didn’t come home last night”.
Lucy never came home.
No one knew what had become of her.
She was officially classified as a missing person.
Marian was 26 when Lucy disappeared.
It was not for another 20 years, when she was 46, that she finally found out what had become of her.
Lucy had been offered a lift by Fred and Rosemary West, taken back to their house, imprisoned, gagged, tortured, raped and murdered.
In Marian’s plain words, the Wests then ‘beheaded and dismembered her and stuffed her into a small hole, surrounded by leaking sewage pipes, head first, face down, still gagged.
Her flesh decomposed into a tarry black slime that stained the clay walls of the hole and coated the bones.
The rope that held her in bondage, two hair grips, a few strands of hair and the masking tape gag survived with most of her bones.
After Lucy’s remains were found, they were kept by the police, so the funeral was long delayed.
Marian felt the urgent need to know where Lucy’s bones actually were.
She traced them to a mortuary in Cardiff.
At her request, the kindly mortician unscrewed the lid of the coffin and allowed her to see them.
“I will never forget the look of understanding that come into his eyes when I emphasised that I wanted to place some special objects in with Lucy’s bones. It was a chance to reclaim her from her murderers and the hugely disrespectful hole in the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street”.

Who Murdered Penny Bell?
In the summer of 1991, Penny Bell, a 43-year-old mother of two, was found in the car park of a sports centre in Greenford, Middlesex.
Penny was stabbed more than 50 times as she sat in the front seat of her stationary car.
Not content with inflicting multiple wounds from the passenger seat, her killer got out, walked round to the driver’s door, pulled it open then continued the onslaught.
Despite the ferociousness of the attack (which would have surely left the murderer soaked in blood), and despite the fact it happened in broad daylight in a busy area, Penny’s killer has never been caught.
Her murder remains one of the biggest unsolved crimes of modern Britain.

Hundreds Of Sahrawis Murdered By Morocco’s Secret Police.
UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg faces embarrassment after it was disclosed that his wife represents a firm that has been accused of trampling on the human rights of ‘Africa’s last colony’.
A ‘substantial’ part of lawyer Miriam Clegg’s work, for which she is paid up to £500,000 a year, is understood to come from Moroccan mining giant OCP.
The company is at the centre of international controversy over the treatment of the Sahrawi nomadic tribesmen of the Sahara.
Morocco, which runs the mining firm, annexed Western Sahara, where the tribesmen live, in 1975, enabling it to seize the world’s biggest phosphate reserves worth billions of pounds.
It embarked on a ruthless campaign of forced removals of Sahrawis to refugee camps and Moroccans were brought in to run the mines.
The United Nations has called for the ‘illegal occupation’ of Western Sahara to end and demanded the Sahrawis are given a vote on independence.
Morocco has failed to comply with both requests.
It has also been accused of an orchestrated programme of ‘disappearances’ of independence campaigners in Western Sahara.
Pressure groups including Amnesty International claim that hundreds of Sahrawis ‘disappeared’ in Western Sahara at the hands of Morocco’s feared secret police.
The victims included pregnant women, children and the elderly, according to a 1996 Amnesty International report.
Some were thrown out of helicopters or buried alive, it was reported in Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2008, with hundreds more held in secret detention centres.
The remains of 43 Sahrawi ‘disappeared’ were exhumed from secret prisons.
Two years ago, seven corpses were found by workers in a phosphate mine in Bou Craa, the centre of OCP’s operations.
They were thought to be the remains of Sahrawi murdered by Moroccan forces.
( Simon Walters and Glen Owen )