Rose West: The Making of a Monster
Read Rose West: The Making of a Monster Online
Authors: Jane Carter Woodrow
After Evil
Jane Carter Woodrow has a PhD from Jesus College, Cambridge. As a research fellow and associate, she has undertaken various
studies involving extensive interviews with offenders in prison and the community. As well as an author, Jane also works in
television. Her credits include
The Thieving Headmistress
and
Panorama
for the BBC, and
In Suspicious Circumstances
,
The Bill
and
Coronation Street
for ITV. Jane has also been a feature writer on women’s and celebritiy magazines.
WEST
JANE CARTER WOODROW
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Jane Carter Woodrow 2011
The right of Jane Carter Woodrow to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Book ISBN 978 0 340 99247 0
eBook ISBN 978 1 848 94686 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For Chad, Emily and Poppy
Dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth (Betty) Malvina French, an
exceptional person and dear friend
PART I Secrets and Lies: The Early Years
6 There’s Something About Bill
PART II House of Cards: The Early Teen Years
8 ‘The Times They Are A-Changing …’
PART III House of Bodies: The Later Teen Years
22 Welcome to the Torture Chamber
23 Rose Gets the Key of the Door
PART IV A Portrait of the Young Girl
as a Grown-Up: A Misspent Youth
26 The Death and Secrets of a Tyrant
N
O ONE OLD ENOUGH
to understand at the time will ever forget the address 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, now synonymous with the ‘House of
Horrors’ and surpassing in notoriety even 10 Rillington Place, home of serial murderer John Reginald Christie. Nor will they
forget the macabre discoveries made at the family home, where body parts belonging to the victims of Rose and her husband
Fred West were excavated from the cellar and garden.
That said, I must have been one of the few people in the country who did not follow the story when the full horrors were first
relayed into our living rooms some seventeen years ago. Yet, ironically, I had been working in prisons around this time where,
with my colleagues, I was trying to understand what led women and young girls into various types of offending, and what might
have helped prevent it.
Some of the cases I had been dealing with, though rare amongst female offenders, were highly traumatic, i.e., child murder
and paedophilia. After one particular case, I had begun to sleep with the light on. Alongside this, many of the women and
girls I interviewed (serving a range of sentences from murder through to arson and burglary) had revealed stories to me on
a daily basis of the abuse they’d experienced as children. As I began to understand the depths of depravity and cruelty that
human beings were capable of inflicting on one another, I could not then bring myself to read about, or indeed listen to,
what
had happened to the victims at Cromwell Street. I walked out of a room whenever news of it came on TV, and turned over the
pages of newspapers giving details of these most heinous of crimes. It may seem strange, a criminologist avoiding anything
to do with what could undoubtedly be billed as the crime of the 20th century in Britain, but I really could not face it: enough
was enough.
As it was, Fred hanged himself before the case came to court and Rose was found guilty of ten of the murders. It wasn’t until
many years later that, when stopping off in Gloucester, I took a shortcut from the shops to the car park and found myself
on a paved walkway where the West house had once stood. This led to my pondering the case again and to wondering how a woman,
and a mother at that, had come to commit such horrific crimes. This case exceeded that of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and Beverly
Allitt in terms of the number of victims involved, and Rose had even killed her own daughter and stepchild.
In the light of the recent high-profile child-abuse cases involving Vanessa George, a nursery worker from Plymouth, and that
of Baby Peter and his mother, Tracey Connelly (though, unlike Rose West, neither of these women are serial killers), I decided
to revisit the case. What was it that made Rose a killer? How did an ordinary little girl grow up to become someone who enjoyed
tormenting and torturing other young women before finally killing them? It was a deeply chilling prospect, but I had to know.
Armed then with only the basics of the West case, I began my research. This included tracking down relatives, former neighbours,
friends, victims and others who knew Rose during her formative years, and later as a teen mum. Some people felt able to speak
about what had happened now that the dust had settled; others, understandably, wanted to forget. New information has come
to light as a result, which is presented here and adds a further dimension to the story and to the phenomenon that is Rose
West.
Finally, I wish to take this opportunity to thank the many people who have helped me with this book. I am especially grateful
to Dr Rajan Darjee, Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist at The Royal Edinburgh Hospital, who has been a great source of help
and support in the writing of it, and Andrew and Jackie Letts for all their kindness and generosity, and with whom I feel
I have been on a journey of discovery. I would also like to say a very big thank you to Gill Job, Rita New, Joy McConnell,
Priscilla Cloke, Diane Glover, Caroline Roberts, Leo Goatley, the Blake family, Linda Margerison, Susan Greenhalgh, Rosemary
Pritchard and the Newquay Old Cornwall Society, retired Inspector Bob Palmer and Inspector Julian Frost, as well as to all
those who contacted me by various means, including those who wish to remain anonymous. A number of excellent books are cited
in the text, which I recommend to the reader.
Jane Carter Woodrow, 2011
O
NCE UPON A TIME,
in a pretty village between Bideford and Westward Ho! in north Devon, a baby was born whose olive complexion, large dark
eyes and shiny dark hair made her look like a beautiful exotic flower: an orchid rather than a rose. An innocent little child
who was welcomed into the world by her parents, Bill and Daisy Letts, to take her place in the family as the youngest of five
children, with three sisters and a brother to look out for her and to play with. The year was 1953 and the baby was named
Rosemary, though later abbreviated to Rose, or ‘Rosie’, as the family called her.
Except Northam wasn’t quite the picturesque place that features on chocolate boxes, nor did the family live in the best part
of it. Yet, with its rugged coastline, wild common land and the closeness of the community, it was still a good place to grow
up in. And if some babies are born under a lucky star, Rosie’s was blighted, and unlike a fairy tale, there was to be no happy
ending but tragedy for so very many. Rose was obviously not alone in having a difficult childhood; countless others do, but
they do not go on to kill, let alone become serial killers. It is also extremely rare for women to do so, and it would be
easy to believe she had been complicit through coercion by Fred, or that she was nothing more than a cowering bystander, but
this wasn’t the case. How then did young Rosie, an innocent child, grow up to become this hideous monster?
To understand this I have retraced Rose’s footsteps from childhood into adulthood, with information obtained from various
sources as well as expert opinion in some of its interpretation. As Rose’s young life began to unfold, it became an uncomfortable
journey, but if we do not seek to understand, then we cannot prevent such appalling devastation from happening again.
A former Home Secretary told Rose she will never be released from prison, but will end her days there. From the pigtailed
child to the plump middle-aged woman sitting in a cell with her knitting needles busily clacking away, this is a portrait
of Rose West: Britain’s most prolific female serial killer of our times.
Secrets and Lies: The Early Years
1
The Crimes
O
N
26
FEBRUARY
1994, the police, searching for a missing 16-year-old girl, Heather West, excavated the garden of a house in Gloucester where,
a few days later, they unearthed a thigh bone from a hole beneath the patio.
The pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight, reaching deep into another sludge-filled hole beneath pink and cream paving slabs,
produced two more femurs. This led Knight to comment that either this was the world’s first three-legged woman, or the police
now had two victims on their hands.
Over the next few days, as the remains of yet more young women were discovered in small, vertical holes in the garden and
beneath the concrete cellar floor, the public struggled to understand the events that had taken place at 25 Cromwell Street.
At the same time, rumours began to surface that were as hideous as they were unbelievable: of abduction, sexual abuse and
torture of the victims, before their young lives were cruelly cut short – all behind the façade of this very ordinary-looking
family semi.
Most of the victims had been in their makeshift graves for over twenty years, dating back to the seventies; for as long, in
fact, as the pair who owned the house had been married. And as each appalling rumour was confirmed as fact, so this case became
– and remains – the stuff of worst nightmares. Yet it is a nightmare from which we can never awake; the depths of depravity
and suffering that humankind is capable of inflicting on one another remain forever etched in our collective psyche
from that time; an emotional as well as forensic archaeology at 25 Cromwell Street.
The pathologist had the grisly task of piecing together the heap of bones he’d collected to determine the number of victims
involved, as well as their ages and sex. The cause of death was impossible to establish as the flesh had long since putrefied;
thankfully, Professor Knight had no sense of smell. But as the excavation continued and further body parts were discovered,
these revealed macabre indicators of what had happened to the victims before death.