COLUMN ONE : England’s Love for the Macabre : The British have long been fascinated by sensational serial slayings. Cases like Gloucester’s ‘House of Horrors’ seem to satisfy what one expert calls the public’s need ‘for a good shudder.’

For years, Frederick West and his family appeared to live a rather ordinary, even dull, English life at 25 Cromwell St., in a three-story row house on a quiet, working-class street.

Then the police went searching for West’s 16-year-old daughter, Heather, who the Wests said ran away seven years ago. They found her body buried beneath the back yard patio. And, the more they looked, the more they found, uncovering the remains of eight more women.

Now West, a 52-year-old construction worker, is in Her Majesty’s Prison here, charged with nine murders dating to 1977. And there may be more.

The digging continues, and police plan to move later to a house around the corner where West lived with his first wife and their 12-year-old daughter. Police have been unable to locate them.

No. 25 Cromwell St., already dubbed by Fleet Street the “House of Horrors,” has joined the most notorious addresses in Britain’s rich serial murder lore.

It is the rare Briton, indeed, who cannot identify 10 Rillington Place as the home where John Reginald Halliday Christie strangled 12 women from 1943 to 1953, or 195 Melrose Ave. as the place where Dennis Andrew Nilsen strangled or drowned most of his 15 young male victims from 1978 to 1983.

And who can forget the ones who got away?

Jack the Ripper slit the throats of five prostitutes in London’s East End in 1888, touching off a debate over his identity that continues to this day. And Jack the Stripper was a psychopath who killed seven prostitutes in London in the 1960s.

For the British, a people proud of having one of the world’s most civilized societies, uncivilized murder has long captured the national imagination.

Although this country of 50 million people counts only about 600 homicides a year, about the rate in New York City, it has a remarkable history of serial killers, one surpassing any other country in Europe and one well tended by Britain’s tabloid press.

“There’s no question that Britain has been bedeviled by these characters over the years,” said Anthony Busuttil, a professor of forensic medicine at Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland. “These things have become almost part of the folklore of our country.”

Back in 1946, in an essay titled “Decline of the English Murder,” George Orwell acknowledged the pleasure that he and his countrymen received from reading about the ultimate crime in the comfort of their drawing rooms.

A really good murder, Orwell wrote, would take place “in a semi-detached house, which will allow the neighbors to hear suspicious sounds through the wall.” The perpetrator would be a little man “living an intensely respectable life.”

Orwell also lamented a decline in juicy cases from what he called “the great period in murder, our Elizabethan period, so to speak,” from 1850 to 1925.

But even as he was writing those words, John Christie was ushering in a new era of homicide at 10 Rillington Place.

Barbara Amiel, the British author of the 1977 book “By Persons Unknown,” suggests that it is precisely her country’s civility that denies psychopathic killers an outlet for their urges. In less civil societies, such as Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany, there is “legitimate room for the ambitions of deranged people,” she wrote recently in the Sunday Times of London.

And in Britain, “the notion of people who seem to behave just like us, with the exception that they are carefully carrying out the murders of other human beings, is quite riveting,” she says. “Part of our attraction to horrible murders is, I think, our need to get a good shudder.”

The events at 25 Cromwell St. have certainly given the British public, and people around the world, a good shudder.

One reason is the setting, a quintessentially English community on gentle hills 100 miles west of London. Gloucester is one of England’s treasures, a place of tea shops and abundant history where Beatrix Potter set her children’s story, “The Tailor of Gloucester.”

Gloucester’s 100,000 residents trace their roots back 2,000 years, to the city’s founding as an outpost of the Roman Empire.

William the Conqueror built the first castle here, in 1068, and Henry III was crowned 200 years later at St. Peter’s Abbey, a glorious church that still stands as the center of a strong tourist business. Buried beneath the abbey is the body of Edward II, the victim of, yes, a murder in 1327.

The West family house is a drab, narrow and, as Orwell seemed to have predicted, semi-detached home whose occupants seemed to be respectable people. About the only thing that sets No. 25 apart from other houses on Cromwell Street is the window frames, which West painted a grass-stain green.

The neighborhood, next to Gloucester’s tidy downtown, is what the British call a “bedsit,” because many residents rent rooms to students and others seeking temporary, low-cost shelter.

The Wests too rented part of their house to boarders. In fact, at least one of them, Shirley Anne Robinson, 18, was found in the soil beneath the house. She was, say the London papers, “heavily pregnant” at the time of her death.

The case began late last month with a tip to Gloucester police about the disappearance of Heather West, prompting them to obtain a search warrant for the house, where they began looking for her body.

Neighbors and relatives said Heather, one of Frederick West’s 10 children, had been missing since 1987 and that the Wests said she had run off with a friend.

West, a short, burly man with a head of curly black hair, was arrested a day after the search began.

“I didn’t kill her!” he shouted as he was escorted away.

Police tore out the patio stones that West had installed in his 60-foot back yard, then used ground-penetrating radar to detect what turned out to be the skeletal remains of Heather and Robinson, buried four feet below the surface. Then the remains of a third woman, in her 20s, was found.

West’s basement floor was removed, and 12 days after the search began, nine sets of remains had been found. His wife, Rosemary, was questioned and released; her attorney says she knew nothing and was “deeply shocked and upset.”

Bernard Knight, 62, a professor of forensic medicine at the College of Medicine at the University of Wales in Cardiff, has been brought in to study the remains.

In the history of British murder, Knight is something of a legend. The author of several crime novels in the 1960s, including “The Thread of Evidence” and “The Lately Deceased,” he is known to enjoy “murder parties” at which guests act out and solve whodunits.

Knight has taken the remains to his laboratory, where it will be weeks before he is able to determine the identities of the victims or the causes of death. The 70-member investigative team is fielding dozens of calls daily from worried families of missing persons; nearly 100 of those believed to have been lost have been located--alive--through public appeals stemming from the case. Publicity about the hunt in West’s yard has led to reunions of loved ones in at least 80 families.

Soon, the police will take their shovels to 25 Midland Road, where West once lived with his first wife, Rena, and their daughter, who are still missing. Then they will dig into a vacant field outside of town, where the special radar detected irregularities.

Understandably, many Britons wonder how so many people could simply vanish. For years, locating missing people fell to charitable groups rather than police. Scotland Yard only recently established a missing persons department.

Four police investigators have been assigned to answer the never-ending questions from the media.

Daily headlines scream of scoops in the case, using catch phrases such as “Garden of Death” as well as the more common “House of Horror.”

In their battle for circulation, some papers have published appeals to people who knew West, hired him to do work on their houses or have photographs of him to contact them.

David Canter, a professor of psychology at Surrey University and author of a book on serial killers, defends Britain’s curiosity about 25 Cromwell St., arguing that ghoulish cases “can refresh our understanding of what it means to be human.”

When the world’s media “no longer think a ‘house of horrors’ is a newsworthy story, that will be the end of civilization as we know it,” he wrote recently in the Sunday Times.

For Terence Morris, a criminology professor at the London School of Economics, the Cromwell Street case fits the serial killer profile. Virtually all such criminals in Britain’s history have been men. Their victims, often single and lonely, usually lived on society’s margins.

“People in that category are vulnerable,” Morris said. “These are the people who can disappear and not be missed.”

But Morris said this case has elements that make it different.

Most of Britain’s serial killers have tried to dispose of their victims’ bodies. Dennis Nilsen, who is serving a life prison term for killing 15 men, was discovered only when his victims’ dismembered bodies blocked the sewer system. John Haigh, hanged in 1949 for killing eight women, dissolved his victims’ bodies in acid.

“It’s a matter of considerable criminological interest to find multiple sets of human remains,” Morris said. “I can’t recall a case quite like this one.”

If more bodies are found, the case could become the worst serial killing in British history. Nilsen’s 15 victims are the highest toll, followed by those of Peter William Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed 13 women during a five-year spree in the late 1970s. Sutcliffe is in a mental hospital.

Much of the interest in the West case has been generated by the appearance of normality on Cromwell Street and the lack of an identified motive.

“The feeling is that it could happen on anybody’s street,” said Russell Trott, a local reporter for BBC-TV. “People feel close to it, without actually visiting it.”

But visit it they have, by the hundreds. Some have handed bouquets of flowers to police guards, who dutifully place them against the front of the house. Others have their pictures taken with the house in the background. When one of the street signs was stolen as a souvenir, police removed the wrought-iron black number plate on the front of the house.

“It’s just such a major topic of news,” said Zoe Slatter, 23, explaining why she and two friends came, with their cameras, from 45 miles away.

Rumors and questions spread through the neighborhood and across the pages of newspapers, fed partly by police reluctance to reveal too much about the case.

Were the Wests, as some suggest, into kinky sex parties? Does the house have a mirrored room and pornographic videotapes? The police call the rumors “pure speculation.”

“We’re just keeping an open mind,” police spokeswoman Hilary Allison said. “We went down initially looking for one body, and now we’ve found nine. We don’t know what else we’ll find.”

In Gloucester, which averages fewer than two homicides a year, “this is a rare event,” she added. “We mostly deal with burglaries and car thefts.”

West’s attorney, Howard Ogden, has complained that the news coverage is making it impossible for his client to get a fair trial.

But Ogden himself has posed for photos in a London tabloid and once advertised his services on radio with the slogan, “If you’ve been nicked (arrested), call Oggie.”

He got the West case because, at the time of West’s arrest, he was the “on-call” lawyer for the county, a duty for which he regularly volunteers, he said, to make ends meet.

On Cromwell Street, opinion on West is freely offered and frequently divided.

“He’s a sick, perverted man,” said Liz Steadman, 22, who lives three doors down. “We’re all just sickened, disgusted.”

Chris Brothwell, a 23-year-old neighbor, remembers West had helped him a few weeks earlier, when Brothwell locked himself out of his apartment. West brought a ladder and they broke into one of the windows.

“He was helpful enough, pleasant enough,” Brothwell recalled. “But this isn’t the kind of street where people usually mix with each other. It’s scary to know some guy lived here for all these years and was bumping people off.”

At the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a small, one-story house next to 25 Cromwell St., Robert Bennett, a church elder, said the pastor had invited West to services many times, but West had always declined politely.

“This is a consequence of something that’s gone wrong in this world,” Bennett said. “This is really a close-knit community. But I saw something in the eyes of all the people who have come here. It was total disbelief. The people here will never be the same.”