“To catch the bad guys, you've got to think like a bad guy - and that's why all the best detectives have a dark side...”
― David Videcette, The Theseus Paradox

“I thought they were going to kill me there and then, which would have been a relief. To my horror, they spoke words that I will never forget: ‘We are going to keep you in the cellar and let our black friends use you and when they have finished with you, we will kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester. There are hundreds of girls there, the police haven’t found them and they wont find you!”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“I wished at that moment that the Wests had killed me, it would have been a merciful release from the hell that DC Smith was putting me through. This barrage of questions by DC Smith and his heavy-handedness into this inquiry and his bullying barrack-room interrogation style of interviewing had left me feeling shamed.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“I always thought of myself as being the unluckiest girl I knew. I was, I believed, a ‘jinx’ and I was ‘jinxed’, or so I thought!”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“As a child, I was attractive to paedophiles. I suppose being indecently assaulted when I was 13 years old should have warned me that there were some weird and dangerous men out there, but I had got over that episode in my life.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“Straightaway, they started chatting and telling me their names: Fred and Rose West. I was surprised that they were married, I wouldn’t have fancied someone like him, and she was pretty. I felt she could have done a lot better for herself, but they seemed happy and he was quite charming, in a roguish kind of way.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“At 31 years of age, Fred West was a big man trapped in a little man’s body. He thought himself to be a gynecologist and Warren Beatty look-a-like all rolled into one … the surgeon and the stud.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“Once you’d been with Freddie, you wouldn’t go anywhere else.’ (How true this was to prove.) This incessant bragging by Fred West was at best, annoying and at worst, sickening. According to him, he was God’s gift to women.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“That high pitch scream emitted by Rose made me wince! Her ear bursting howls would stun me into silence as much as it silenced the eldest child in their home, eight-year-old Anna-Marie.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“I had forgotten the fact that I had been raped, something no one would understand, how could anyone forget something as traumatic as being raped?”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“The police still found this earlier omission in my statement hard to understand, but they weren’t the ones who had been the victim of the Wests, how could they have understood?”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“I knew I hadn’t been the most innocent of victims, but I didn’t deserve this. DC Smith stood and grinned at me as he thanked me and left the room, leaving me to cry and to ponder on his not very adept handling of the situation.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“All what stuck in my mind was what the judge had said, and that was during the assault there must have been some passive co-operation on my part. Added to the fact that the Wests had only been fined £25 each for each of the charges against them, a total of £100 was all that I was worth.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“I left the court feeling sure that Rose West would never walk free again. That thought made me happy.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“Rose West was starting 10 life sentences with no prospect of ever being released, Fred West had gone to hell, I had got my life back and the media circus had moved on to the next big scoop.”
― Stephen Richards, The Lost Girl

“The head had been impaled on a railing outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand in the early hours of a cold November morning. There was a fine dusting of frost on the corpse’s hair and eyelids which gave it a festive touch.”
― Colin Falconer, Cry Justice