Fred West: Police to excavate cafe toilet in missing girl search
- Published
Police searching a cafe for a suspected victim of serial killer Fred West have found six "anomalies" they want to excavate.
Mary Bastholm went missing in Gloucester in 1968 and police have been searching the cellar of the premises where she used to work.
Six parts of a toilet area are to be excavated, Gloucestershire Police said.
The force is in contact with West's son Stephen, who said his father admitted killing the 15-year-old.
Officers were contacted on 7 May by a TV production company who were filming at The Clean Plate Cafe in the city.
Initial searches of the cellar had revealed what looked like blue material. Miss Bastholm was wearing a blue coat, blue and white dress and was carrying a blue bag on the day she went missing, the force said.
Det Ch Insp John Turner said the excavations, expected to take about two weeks, would reveal "once and for all" if the teenager's remains were buried there.
He said: "My job as an investigator is to search for the truth and that's why we're here now, on behalf of Mary's family, to look in the basement and find out what is in there.
"I'm not saying that Mary is in there, what I am saying is, there was sufficient evidence from the production team to justify the search."
He dismissed media reports circulating on Monday evening that bones had been found as untrue and "unhelpful and hurtful to Mary's family."
West, who took his own life in 1995 before he could stand trial for the murders of multiple women and girls, was a regular at the cafeteria, then called the Pop-In Cafe.
Det Ch Insp Turner said since West and his wife Rose were arrested in 1994, there had "always been a story" in Gloucester about a link between Miss Bastholm's disappearance and the cafe basement.
"The trouble is we [the police] have to pick out fact from fiction," he said.
"I'm not saying that Mary is in there. What I am saying is, there was sufficient evidence from the production team to justify the search of the basement."