Rose West: The Making of a Monster (10 page)

If little had changed for Rosie at Bishop’s Cleeve, neither had it for her less favoured siblings, who were still expected
to rush home from school each day to perform a list of chores. The chores now took precedence over any homework they might
have been set and put paid to the possibility of a social life, had
they been allowed one. The only difference between the old life and the new was that some of the children were now growing
into cowed and resentful young adults, while the bond between Bill and his youngest daughter would soon show signs of having
intensified. Alongside this, Bill was finding new ways to bully and torture his family.

As his eldest son, Andrew, said: ‘He would take pleasure in punching me in the stomach.’ There were times, in fact, when Andy
believes that if his mother had not stepped in, Bill would have killed him. ‘Once he started beating you he couldn’t stop,
he just kept on going.’ And he didn’t just reserve such beatings for the older children. Graham, too, as a young boy had had
his head smashed against a stone wall by his father. When Daisy intervened, it fed straight into Bill’s paranoia that everyone
was against him and he would turn on Daisy. As well as his fists, Bill also began using anything that came to hand, including
an axe handle and a knife – cutting and jabbing at Andy with it when he took longer about getting his breakfast cereal than
Bill wanted him to. Andy had just started an apprenticeship at Smith’s, and the distressed boy plucked up the courage to go
into the local police station to report the attack, his face and hands covered in blood. After telling the police the whole
sorry story of life behind closed doors at Tobyfield Road, they decided not to take it any further and, once again, an opportunity
to help the Letts children was missed. Only a few short years earlier, Patsy had been treated at two different hospitals for
the injuries received after Bill had attacked her. She had been aged 14 at the time of the first attack, but there had been
no police or children’s services investigation into the assault.

These incidents gave clear signals to the Letts children – if any were needed – that there was no help out there, even when
they asked for it. In a letter written to a pen pal from prison in 2005, Rosie says, ‘My parents were sick people who should
never have had children in the first place. They were control freaks and at
their hands we suffered mental, physical and sexual abuse … No one cared for us EVER!’
^*
She might as well have said ‘nobody helped us either’. Ironically Andy, who was closest to Rose in age, and who often bore
the brunt of his father’s beatings, came to abhor violence, while Rosie, who mostly escaped his rages, came to be violent
herself. Andy was better equipped to process and reject this kind of behaviour, while Rosie, as Brian Masters suggests in
his book,
‘She Must Have Known’,
saw her father’s conduct ‘as worthy of emulation, but had not the intelligence or subtlety to appraise its likely effect.’

Andy had also seen another version of family life at his girlfriend’s house in Cheltenham, where he began to stay for periods
of time. He had met Jackie Hughes while staying with his sister Glenys, who lived next door to her in Union Street. Having
spent time with the Hughes family, he found family life there very different to his own at Tobyfield Road. It took him some
while to adjust to the freedoms there, and he was astonished that the children could laugh openly and even chat over the meal
table without fear of being beaten. ‘I couldn’t understand it,’ Andy said. ‘I didn’t get it at all.’

There is of course, another dimension to this. While Daisy tried her best to protect Andy from Bill, she had failed to notice
Bill’s dark and insidious abuse of their daughter. Having realised there was no help coming from outside for herself and her
siblings, this would have had the effect of reinforcing Rosie’s position of siding with the strongest parent, and of acquiescing
in Bill’s grooming of her to ensure her survival.

The only time there was any respite from Bill was when Grandad Letts came to stay. Since Bertha had died shortly before Bill
took off for Plymouth, William would often turn up to visit his son and family in their new home. The children would watch
open-mouthed as Bill redirected his violent outbursts from Daisy
and themselves to William. As far as Bill was concerned, it was ‘payback time’ for the cruelty he’d suffered at his father’s
hand. He would hit the old man on the back of the legs and scream abuse into his face, berating him for owing him money which
he would borrow off Bill and never pay back. (Bill would later do the exact same thing with his oldest son.) But, despite
Bill’s treatment of him, Grandad Letts continued to visit. He even set up home with the family for a while where he insisted
the place was kept meticulously clean and tidy, just as he had with Bertha, and which his son Bill insisted on with his own
family: an OCD legacy, as it were.

Rosie Fights Back

A little before Rosie reached her teens, she’d become ‘hefty’, as a family member recalled. She had also quite literally begun
throwing her weight around as she turned on her tormentors at school. And such was her revenge that she became known on the
Smith’s Estate as someone best avoided. ‘A swipe from Rose and nobody messed again,’ Graham was to say of his sister. Not
only did she lash out at the girls, but she also gave the boys a good hiding as well. As boys are usually smaller than girls
at this age, it was perhaps not quite so remarkable, but sticking up for herself and gaining a reputation for being ‘hard’
would have given her a feeling of power and being in control: something she’d never experienced before.

Most people who are abused as children do not, of course, go on to kill. Criminologist Lonnie Athens in the US developed a
theory to try to explain this: he believes that excessively violent people are socialised to become that way. (He used men,
but his theory works for women too.) The first stage is where the child is dominated by a violent parent and sees their mother
or siblings being frequently beaten and humiliated. They then
go through a belligerent stage and, noticing violence is used to resolve arguments, decide to try it out for themselves the
next time they are provoked. They then learn by hitting others that the victim both fears and respects them. This gives them
a sense of power, as Rose was beginning to realise. Rose, however, was not retaliating in a major way. It would be some years
before she would be ‘coached’ to gravely hurt someone, which is a critical stage, as the young person may then move onto the
next, dangerous, stage of being ready to use extreme violence to settle all arguments with no or only minimal provocation.

For now, however, Rosie was enjoying ‘getting her own back’, just as her own father was ‘enjoying’ this with William. But
she was not entirely self-centred or sadistic like Bill; or yet a bully like him. She was a young girl who, aside from sewing
and playing with her hamsters, used her new-found powers to protect her younger brothers, going after anyone who hit Graham
and Gordon and delivering them a powerful whack.

Around the time that Rosie began to fight back, William Letts decided to settle permanently in Bishop’s Cleeve, buying a caravan
on one of the static sites in the village with the money from the sale of his cottage. Though why William should want to live
so close to his son in the face of such hostility from him might seem baffling, the likely reasons for this when they began
to emerge after Rosie’s trial would shock any ordinary person. Except perhaps Bill.

I
T WAS
1967
AND
the Summer of Love. Rosie was 13 and enjoying the hot weather as ‘Let’s Go to San Francisco’ played on the radio, followed
by one of her favourites, Glen Campbell singing ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’. During the school holidays, the young teenager
also liked to help her mother with the boys’ care, and began masturbating her 7-year-old brother, Gordon, as she towel-dried
him when he got out of the bath.

Daisy had got herself a job in the canteen at Whitbread’s brewery in the village. The job started in the afternoon and went
on until late evening. It was Daisy’s first taste of independence since she’d married Bill, and at last she had some spending
money in her hand at the end of each week. Glenys had finished school and moved out by this time, and Andy was working in
Cheltenham and staying over at his girlfriend’s house. Bill was rarely home in the evenings as Smith’s Aerospace had a social
club where he would go after work to unwind, having his usual half of light and playing a few rounds of pool. This meant Daisy
had to rely on Rose to get the little boys – Graham, 10, and Gordon, 7 – their tea when they came home from school. Rose also
had to get them to bed on time and then babysit them.

In theory, playing the housewife and little mother was the role Rosie most enjoyed; it made her feel grown-up, as her brother
Andy was to say. But, in practice, left alone at night
with her brothers, she foisted the list of chores she herself was now expected to do onto them. Graham and Gordon, however,
happily undertook the vacuuming and cleaning; they looked up to their big sister, who had become their protector. This was
not just from the local children, but from their father too, as she tried to shield them from Bill. But at 13, Rose was just
a child herself, and began taking herself off to the village each evening, leaving her brothers to their own devices and the
house in chaos. Soon the boys began to wander down to the centre of the village too. And, from having absolutely no freedom,
the three youngest now had time on their hands to do as they pleased – and they became feral. Rose started to hang out by
the shops where she took up smoking to look older, and chatted and laughed with bus drivers and local boys. Her little brothers,
meanwhile, behaved like jackdaws, pilfering whatever small goods took their fancy to sell on and buy alcohol with.

All that Rosie had learnt at her father’s knee was now becoming alarmingly apparent. She had begun by masturbating her brothers
and would soon progress to exhibiting other kinds of sexual deviancy. Yet, ironically, the mention of sex was completely taboo
in the Letts’ home. Bill had been nicknamed ‘The Sunday School Teacher’ by his teenage children, as he quickly turned off
the television if the merest hint of anything sexual came on screen. By the same token, neither he nor Daisy explained the
facts of life to the children. Grandmother Bertha had been left to tell Joyce and Pat about sex as she was a nurse; this was
then passed down to Rosie before she reached puberty. Yet, for all this coyness around the facts of life, sex was secretly
and illegally practised regularly within the Letts household. Although less so in a normal marital way as since the birth
of Gordon in 1960, when Rose was six, relations had pretty much ceased between Daisy and Bill.

Rosie began practising her sexuality on her brothers, where she would parade around the house naked after a bath. Bill had
tried to accost Patsy after a bath, so perhaps he had done the same with Rosie and met with less resistance as he’d been grooming
her for years. Indeed, Rosie appears to have been used to being naked around her father. On one occasion she’d stripped off
and stood naked in front of him, telling him about all the children she was going to have one day. When she became bored by
her sexual explorations with her brothers, and possibly even Bill, she began testing her powers further afield, with boys
from the village, asking them round when her parents were out, or going to their houses, where she would invite them to touch
her. This was not the behaviour of a normal 13-year-old girl; this was a girl who had been highly sexualised and who was sexually
precocious as a result.

In the past, Andy had taken the youngest boy, Gordon, for long walks with the dog over the fields to escape their brutal father.
But during the periods that he was living away from home, he could do little to help. The only one showing the little boys
any affection at this time was big sister Rosie, who, when she returned home at night, would climb into bed with them. The
three of them would then huddle together for comfort: a tight-knit little band with Rosie as leader.

Because of a lack of space, the Letts siblings of both genders had, at various times, shared bedrooms and beds with each other.
When Rosie first began to share a bed with Graham, she masturbated him in the morning and again late at night, graduating
to having full sex with him when he was twelve. This continued up until Rosie left home. Graham had thought this was just
sisterly affection and, having frequently been beaten senseless by his father, was grateful of any little bit of warmth shown
to him. Gordon possibly also found comfort in it too.

Rosie, however, hadn’t become sexually active by accident, and was showing all the signs of being highly practised in such
matters. In satisfying Bill’s demands as a young girl, he would
typically have made her feel this was to do with love and affection. Emotionally, this meant she had grown up with what experts
call ‘blurred boundaries’. In abusing her brothers, she was probably showing them the same form of ‘love’ and ‘caring’ she
had learnt from her father. Even so, Rosie knew this was wrong for, as Graham was later to say, ‘She knew I wasn’t going to
say anything.’ This indicates that Bill, like many fathers who abuse their children, had warned or frightened his little girl
into keeping the abuse their ‘little secret’.

A Mysterious Case

In January 1968,just after Rose had turned 14, a young girl disappeared as she waited at a bus stop on Bristol Road, Gloucester.
This was Mary Bastholm, a 15-year-old waitress, who had been on her way to play a board game with her boyfriend. To this day
her body has never been found, but pieces of the Monopoly set: hotels, paper money and icons such as the iron and top hat,
were found strewn in the snow where she waited. There had been two rapes in the same area shortly before this incident, so
Gloucester police set up a vast search using tracker dogs and helicopters, but still found no trace of Mary. Andy, who was
almost 16 at the time, used the same bus route home to Bishop’s Cleeve as the young girl. He was on the bus when the police
came on board appealing for information. When Andy arrived home that evening and told his parents what had taken place, Bill
immediately warned Rosie to be wary of ‘strange men’ – yet the ‘strange man’ was within, and the damage already done. And
although Rose had no idea of it then, Mary’s disappearance was to have a significant bearing on her future life. It is now
believed that Frederick West was responsible for abducting the young girl.