A HOLLYWOOD screenwriter claims to have new evidence that serial killer Fred West had more victims than previously thought.

Sensational claims from Paul Pender include that the killing of a three-year-old by West in 1965 was murder, rather than an accident as it was deemed at the time.

Mr Pender has been investigating following a tip-off at a family funeral, two years ago, from a man who once worked in a Glasgow abattoir with West’s first wife, Rena.

He believes further victims may lie buried at the site of a Glasgow allotment used by West in the early 1960s.

West and his second wife, Rosemary, were arrested in 1994.

He was charged with murdering 12 people between 1967 and 1987, and Rosemary with the murder of nine. Nine bodies were buried at their home in Gloucester.

The following year he killed himself in jail and she was sentenced to life.

Mr Pender claims there is an “inarguable” case for police to look afresh at West’s time in Glasgow and investigate a site beside West’s former home there.

He also wants them to interview surviving witnesses about the case of Henry William Feeney, a three-year-old who was knocked down and killed in November 1965 by West, who was driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van.

At the time it was treated as an accident, but some locals suspected it was a deliberate act and possibly West’s first killing at a time when the trial of Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley dominated the news.

Mr Pender told the Times newspaper: “He was notorious for not returning his ice cream van until 3am.

“There is no evidence that he drove his young female companions home.

"The allotment is buried under concrete, but who knows what increasingly effective imaging equipment might reveal beneath?

“I would call on Police Scotland to investigate the site. We owe it to the victims.

"They should also reopen the file on the boy killed by West’s ice cream van, re-examine witness statements and talk to witnesses who are still alive.”

Mr Pender, who intends to present the findings of his investigations at an Edinburgh Fringe show this week, believes West lured the boy to a quiet spot with the promise of fireworks, and brought along a small ball which he then claimed was stuck under a hedge behind the van.

When the child went to retrieve it, West reversed over him at high speed, according to the writer, who claims Rena believed a witness who said the killing looked deliberate.

Mr Pender thinks the little boy may have seen something that compromised West, leading the killer to silence him.

His source told him that Rena objected to West’s bizarre practice of taking their baby daughter in a wooden box onto the ice cream van with him to lure girls inside.

She also objected to the noises she heard coming from the potting shed in his allotment behind their MacLellan Street home on Glasgow’s South Side.

Mr Pender also argues that West, who would go on to dismember many of his victims at Cromwell Street, Gloucester, learnt butchery skills at the Glasgow abattoir where Rena, who is believed to have been murdered by strangulation, worked as an accountant.

West was a frequent visitor to the abattoir and became fascinated with the dismemberment of carcasses, according to Rena’s former colleague.

Pender, who wrote and produced the 2002 film Evelyn, starring Pierce Brosnan, said: “Much of what he told me was easily confirmed.

"I decided to check out the rest. I wanted to find out what Fred West really got up to in Scotland.

"West asked a lot of questions on the efficient dissection and disposal of dead meat.

"I think it is clear that he learnt his trade in Scotland.”

The abattoir was in an East End area that Pender visited as a child. His aunt ran a dress shop in nearby Gallowgate.

He learnt that he might even have unwittingly bought ice cream from West, who often parked his van there in 1964 and 1965.

Amid rumours of a plan to exact revenge on him for the three-year-old boy’s death, the killer headed back to Gloucester, where his newfound knowledge of dismembering carcasses got him a job with a local abattoir.

Mr Pender said: “This enabled him to do an astonishingly professional job when he came to disposing of corpses in Gloucester."

The screeenwriter had regular meetings with another serial killer, Roy Fontaine, the so-called “monster butler”, who began writing to him from prison after seeing his BBC drama The Bogie Man.

Mr Pender wrote a book about their relationship called The Butler Did It.

A spokeswoman for Police Scotland said: “We investigate all reports regardless of what time has passed and would encourage anyone who has information to come forward.”

The Charisma of Evil: Why Are We So Obsessed by Serial Killers? is at the Stand’s New Town Theatre, until August 26