Rose West: The Making of a Monster (11 page)

*   *   *

Life carried on as normal at Tobyfield Road where, just a year earlier, Bill and Daisy had celebrated their silver wedding
anniversary. Having reached the state of twenty-five years of wedded bliss by default, they then handed on their warped and
dysfunctional model for marriage to Rosie and the rest of their children. Daisy may have hoped her husband would mellow with
time, but while his violent, paranoid schizophrenia remained untreated, this could never happen. The only respite the family
had from Bill was when he bought a tent the size of a marquee, which took up the whole garden when he put it out to air. He
then packed up the tent and a sleeping bag in the boot of the car and set off for the weekend – as he would frequently do
in the summer. Where he went and what he did, no one was ever quite sure, but they were all probably glad of the break.

By now Daisy’s family had raised concerns over Bill’s heavy-handedness with the children. Bill did not let this pass, and
when Daisy’s younger sister, Eileen, came to stay the following year, he took great pleasure in making life as uncomfortable
as possible for his sister-in-law, removing the living-room door to make sure she got a nasty draught as she slept on the
settee. Andy was so embarrassed by his father’s behaviour that he offered her his bedroom in exchange for the settee; compared
to what he was used to at times, this was still luxury.

Andy was, at seven stone, far too small for his frame: ‘undernourished’, as a former neighbour was to say of all the children,
except Rose. While training as an apprentice, and even while he was still at Cleeve School, he’d often slept in fields and
under hedgerows in preference to going home to face another pasting. Bill knew his son hated violence and, mistaking it for
cowardice, hit him all the more, but was shocked when Andy finally snapped and punched him back as hard as he could. And in
the usual Letts tradition, Andy then found his clothes and belongings on the doorstep that night when he returned home from
work. Andy would still go back to live at Tobyfield Road
for short periods of time during his teens, unable to refuse his mother’s requests to come home when she turned up at his
bedsit sporting bruises at various times. But, in a response typical of bullies, Bill never hit Andy again – although his
attentions were now focused elsewhere.

At the time of her trial, Rosie spoke of how she’d ‘lost her virginity’ at 14, and it is likely that at this point Bill raped
her. She would also tell her children how their granddad had hurt her at this age, although never saying more than this. Later
she would refer to the abuse in terms of dark shadowy figures in hats and other grotesque imagery. While Rose’s relationship
with Bill would grow into something sinister and unholy as she got older, for now the young teenager would do whatever it
took to placate Bill and comfort Graham, 10, and Gordon, 8, the only way she knew how: by abusing them. Although it is unlikely
that Daisy had any knowledge of Bill’s abuse of their youngest daughter, when she had scrimped and saved enough to buy Rosie
a set of new grown-up underwear, the young girl sat on the bed with a pair of scissors and proceeded to chop them all up.
This may have been a cry for help to her mother or, more likely, an act of contempt, but it was certainly a clear sign – if
one were needed – of a disturbed young girl.

Daisy had maintained for many years that she would leave Bill just as soon as the youngest children reached their teens. And,
as that time began to approach, the normally downtrodden Daisy became stronger and more confident. The change in her had begun
since she’d started going out to work, and with Bill out of the house more often anyway, she never suffered from severe depression
again. But when she finally gathered the strength and courage to leave Bill the following year, she and the family would be
shocked by Rosie’s reaction to it.

I
T WAS FEBRUARY; ROSIE
had just turned 15 and was coming up to leaving Cleeve secondary school. The young girl loved baking and rushed home to help
her mother with the birthday cake she was making for her dad’s birthday. Today her father was 48 and her mother was trying
to make the best of it. Daisy had tried to separate from Bill in the past, even going down the official route of applying
for an injunction on the basis of his violence to make sure he never came near her or the children again. But this hadn’t
worked either, as Bill was manipulative and there was little public understanding or sympathy as regards mental-health issues
at the time. Bill told the court all about his wife’s depression and the electric-shock therapy she’d received for it, and
the case simply collapsed. Ironically, had Daisy known about Bill’s own psychiatric problems, the outcome might have been
different. As it was, the police had not intervened when Andy had asked for help and the authorities had not taken notice
when neighbours heard the children’s screams and raised the alarm. Numerous failures had conspired to keep the family together,
and now they were going to celebrate ‘Dad’s’ birthday together – except that Daisy had run out of the ingredients she needed.
Still in her school uniform, Rose popped to the shop for her mum, and picked up the extra supplies. The shop was just fifty
yards from her home,
beside the Swallow pub – a 1960s-built establishment, and the only pub on the estate.

Daisy and the children always spent their time in the kitchen, even when it wasn’t Bill’s birthday. They used the side door
to it rather than go through the front of the house and risk disturbing Bill as he watched television. When Bill went to bed,
the television set went off and stayed off. When it was on, the children would rarely want to watch it with their father,
as they were expected to sit as quiet as church mice beside him. As Andy’s girlfriend Jackie said, ‘I used to find it strange
that Andy would tell me to open the sweet wrapper quietly when we sat watching TV with his dad. I didn’t like that, I wasn’t
used to that. We used to joke and laugh around when my dad was watching telly. When I went round Andy’s house after that,
I used to stay with Daisy in the kitchen. She was always there.’

On this particular day, Rosie had only been gone to the shops a matter of minutes when Bill returned home from work. The moon
must have been full again as far as Daisy was concerned, as before she’d even had a chance to say ‘Happy Birthday’, Bill had
ripped the bowl from her arms and tossed it at the wall, and flung Daisy behind it. After battering his wife, he then turned
his attentions to the house. Rosie returned with the margarine to find the place wrecked, blood and cake mix everywhere, and
Daisy packing their bags, resolving this was the end.

Glenys, a petite blonde, was 18 and heavily pregnant with her first child when her mother, black and blue from the beating,
arrived on her doorstep with Rosie, Graham and Gordon in tow. It was a tight squeeze at the rented terrace in Union Street,
but to her credit – and that of her young husband, Jim Tyler – they made room for them all. Bill, however, was noticeably
absent; he neither chased after his family, nor seemed at all concerned about his sons having to change schools yet again.
Rather, he sat back and luxuriated in having the house all to himself.

Rosie tried to do her bit to help out at Union Street,
donning a pair of Marigolds and cleaning the windows. She was supposed to be attending school in Cleeve, but was in her last
term, so finding a job and earning some cash had suddenly become more important to her. Her sister Glenys had only recently
married Jim, a tall, personable young man who was something of an entrepreneur. By trade Jim was a car mechanic and worked
at the Audi garage in Cheltenham, but he and Glenys also ran a roadside refreshment business up at the village of Seven Springs
on the Cirencester Road. Jim would tow their Sprite Major caravan to an area of wasteland by the gravel pits each morning,
where he would set it up and then set off to work. Glenys would then spend her days serving the customers that stopped off
there: from lorry drivers and travelling salesmen, to the gas-pipe fitters connecting natural gas from one side of the Cotswolds
to the other. In the evening, 18-year-old Glenys would go home and do the books for the business.

As Glenys was only weeks off giving birth and Rosie needed a job, it seemed the ideal solution all round for Rosie to run
the refreshment bar while her sister took maternity leave in March of that year. Rosie happily agreed to the proposition,
but serving mugs of tea from a snack bar wouldn’t stay top of her list of priorities for long. On occasion, when Jim was test-driving
a car he’d just serviced, he would use the opportunity to replenish the snack bar with supplies. But each time he did so when
Rosie was in charge, he would find the caravan hatch closed and Rosie emerging from the cab of a parked-up lorry with her
clothes unbuttoned and her hair dishevelled. Jim referred to his ex-sister-in-law as being a ‘hot-arsed little sod’. Rosie
was clearly beginning to test her powers out on older men rather than mere boys from the village. During another of Jim’s
drives there, he found her clambering out of a car full of gas fitters on the pretext that the men had just run her down to
the shops because she’d run out of hot dogs. As crime writer
Carol Anne Davis suggests in her book
Women Who Kill,
the few compliments these men paid her in return for sex were probably ‘the kindest words she’d ever known and the casual
sex was the closest she’d ever gotten to love.’

Rose had only just turned 15 at this time, and in her schoolgirl socks and with her baby-like voice, she appeared even younger:
either way, having sex with her was an offence. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, a steady stream of vehicles parked
up by the caravan each day, while the snack-bar sign permanently read:
Closed.
Rosie boasted that profits had gone up since she’d been working there, but it was more likely that when Glenys next did the
books, she found profits had taken a nose-dive.

The family were overcrowded in the tiny Union Street terrace, but free at last from Bill’s unpredictable behaviour and violent
outbursts, they were likely to have been suffering from post-traumatic stress at this time.
^*
Rose, on the other hand, who had developed her own way of ‘coping’ with her father, began looking for another protector.
As well as seeing older men after work, with Glenys in hospital, her brother-in-law, six years her senior, became fair game.
Woken in the night by the sound of crying, Jim crept down to her room to investigate, where he found Rosie in bed rocking
and sucking her thumb, just as she’d done as a young child. Putting a comforting arm around her, he asked her what was the
matter. Rosie regaled him with a story of unrequited love between herself and an older man who visited the snack bar. She
also told him how lucky her sister was to have
found a man such as himself, running her hand along the inside of his thigh as she did so – at which point Jim jumped up and
made his excuses.

There is another version of this story. Some members of the family believe Daisy came home and caught the pair in bed together,
leading to a fight between Glenys and Rosie. Soon after, Daisy and the younger children moved out. At her trial, Rosie said
she’d returned home from work one day to find her mother and brothers had packed up and gone. She’d asked Glenys where they’d
gone, but her sister had been instructed not to tell her. Rosie said she could not believe her mother had abandoned her and,
at her trial, said it had left her psychologically scarred. She had left home in support of her mother when Bill had attacked
her, and now Daisy had betrayed her and she felt unable to forgive her for many years. Andy Letts refutes this story. He recalled
his mother buying a copy of
The Lady
and a week or two later finding a job in the countryside, with a tied cottage for herself and all the younger children. Rosie,
however, hadn’t wanted to go with them. ‘Mum begged her to go to Teddington, but Rosie said she was going home to live with
Dad,’ says Andy, ‘we just couldn’t believe it. After all of the violence, and everything, she wanted to go back. She wouldn’t
listen to Mum.’

The family were nonplussed at her behaviour, but at the time Rosie was staying out late with the different men she was seeing,
and moving to a rural location may not have seemed ideal to her. But neither did she rush back to her father, who she knew
would try to restrict her going out, preferring instead to wander the streets where, according to her former brother-in-law,
‘the police picked her up for street-walking in Cheltenham. She was only 15.’

If it is true that the police believed she was working as a prostitute, nothing came of it, although she was probably picking
up men in order to find a place to stay, offering them sex in return
for a bed for the night. One Sunday evening, as she walked the streets with her holdall, she was offered a lift by an older
man she’d briefly met at her sister’s house. The man had a soft, lilting Irish accent and red hair. He told her she shouldn’t
be wandering around the town on her own at that time of night, and said if she had nowhere to go, he’d have to report it to
the police. He offered her a cup of tea at his flat and, because he knew her brother-in-law, she accepted. Back at his flat,
Rosie then had sex with the man who, at 30, was twice her age. But he was ‘kind to her’ and offered her a place to stay in
return for rent when she got a job – and probably also sex. Soon after, Rose found work at Sketchley dry cleaners and from
there moved on to train as a seamstress at the County Clothes shop on the Promenade in Cheltenham.

The boys, meanwhile, had moved with their mum to Hitchman’s chicken farm at Teddington – a village near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire.
The cottage that came with the job was normally for a husband and wife: the wife looked after the farmer’s house while the
husband worked on the farm. In this case, while Daisy settled into her post as a housekeeper at Mr Hitchman’s, 16-year-old
Andy had to give up his job at Smith’s to help the farmer – both mother and son working to keep a roof over all their heads.
The move also meant Graham and Gordon had to change schools again. But despite the drawbacks, the countryside around Teddington
offered Daisy and the boys a peaceful retreat from Bill.