Marian works with a secular organisation called the Forgiveness Project and tells her story to male and female prisoners as part of restorative justice work. Lucy was gagged… I felt if I didn’t speak about what had happened, I might as well be dead too.” One huge thing was her not having a voice. But I couldn’t talk about it without facing the horror of what had happened to her.
“Lucy’s death was about sexual exploitation and cruelty,” Marian says. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In the November of the same year, Rosemary was convicted of ten murders, including those of her 16-year-old daughter, her eight-year-old step-daughter and her husband’s pregnant lover.
She had been tortured, murdered, dismembered and buried in the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, along with other victims of the serial killers Fred and Rosemary West.įred West took his own life in prison on New Year’s Day 1995. It was two decades before Lucy was found and the grim truth about her death could emerge. She was 21 years old and in her final year of an English degree at the University of Exeter. Lucy disappeared in December 1973 while waiting for a bus in Cheltenham. For Marian Partington, 20 years of not knowing what happened to her sister, Lucy, ended with one such visit on a Saturday morning in March 1994. The police arrive at your home to tell you that a family member has been murdered. It’s the visit that we all hope we’ll never experience.