Rose West: The Making of a Monster (12 page)

The farm cut across a sizeable acreage of land, with long rows of wooden huts with mesh runs attached for the hens to roam
around in and lay their eggs. As well as the hens, there were horses and other kinds of livestock. By now, it was the early
summer, and Gordon and Graham would play in the fields around the farm and collect the eggs from the runs at different times
of the day. Andy was set to work haymaking and painting the long rows of wooden hen houses spanning one entire field.
At first he loved being on the farm, where he watched the new chickens hatch, until the farmer wrung the necks of all the
male chickens. Living in a rural idyll, he realised, was not quite all it appeared to be – just like his father’s ‘charming’
persona with strangers.

Rosie had still not returned home by this time, but turned up out of the blue to visit her mother and brothers, bringing her
new boyfriend along with her, a soldier from the local army barracks. According to Gordon Burn in his 1998 book on the Wests,
Happy Like Murderers,
she brought other men there too, having sex with them in the fields around Teddington, followed by a drink in the local pub,
before setting off home again – wherever that was. Rosie’s whole life, it seemed, had become about sex.

Since Rosie’s first brush with the law, or possibly as a result of a tip-off from Bill, the police had begun keeping an eye
on her. She was now working at a baker’s-cum-teashop in Cheltenham, where, for several weeks, a policeman would wait outside
until she left for the day, then take her in for questioning. The police knew she was seeing a lot of older men and were particularly
interested in the one whose flat she went back to each night. They wanted to know whether an offence had been committed as
she was still under age. By now Rosie’s use of language had become ‘choice’. This is ironic given that her parents didn’t
swear, let alone use the ‘c’ word, as Rose now did and would continue to do, even at her arrest some twenty-five years later.
In the event, the police did not charge the older man from whom she rented the flat, but neither did Rose stay away from him
or any of the others as she promised the police she would. And so a police constable continued to wait outside the baker’s
until Rosie finally gave in and returned home.

Although Daisy continued to ask Rosie to move in with her and the boys at Teddington, the 15-year-old preferred to stay with
her father. A chicken farm in a remote village might not, of
course, be an ideal place for any young girl to live who’d rather be out enjoying life. However, despite the family’s astonishment
at Rosie going back to live with her violent father, it was not quite the extraordinary decision it might at first appear.
Rosie, after all, did not have the same relationship with Bill as the other children – or even her mother – had. She was not
frightened of Bill, and knew how to keep him happy. Recognising she shared a special bond with her father, they had even seen
her take his side during one of his violent outbursts against other family members. What they didn’t realise, however, was
that this ‘bond’ was based on abuse; nor could they have guessed that Rosie and Bill’s ‘relationship’ would continue right
up to his death. Her warped and brutal experiences with Bill as a child had forged her template at a young age and would mean
that once she met the older ‘Weird Freddie’ West, she would neither find his behaviour abhorrent or particularly strange,
but would have felt comfortable with him, even excited by him, when most other young girls would have run a mile.

To understand Rosie’s relationship with Fred West, it is necessary to look at his background, and how the two would have been
drawn together.

M
UCH MARCLE IS A
pastoral idyll in Herefordshire that remains almost untouched by time. Bounded by the Malvern Hills on one side and the Forest
of Dean on the other, it is equidistant from Ross-on-Wye to the west and the city of Gloucester to the east. During the 1940s,
Much Marcle was as insular and inward-looking a village as any that might have been found in the Fens of East Anglia or remote
areas of north Devon at the time, not unlike Rosie’s childhood home of Northam. The poet John Masefield described the area
as ‘paradise’, while another former resident, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, immortalised it in her poem ‘The Deserted Garden’.
The village also has the dubious accolade of being the birthplace of serial killer Frederick West, or Freddie, as he was known
to his family.

From being a weak child, Freddie grew up to be a short and slight man, with a crop of curly hair and a gap in his teeth. He
also had an easy manner and, as Rosie would later say, he could ‘charm the birds off the trees’. This was in spite of his
country burr which rendered his speech almost inaudible at times, and the smell of pigs’ muck that accompanied him when he
was younger. Freddie left school at 14, barely able to read and write, and began working on the land with his father where
the two of them would bring in the crops at harvest time, go ‘ratting’, tend the sheep and set off poaching by moonlight.
Walter West
taught his oldest son everything he knew about the country way of life, and the little boy came to love it himself. At least
initially.

Walter, like his son, was also barely educated. He had left school aged 11 to help his grandfather with his horses and carts.
Freddie’s mother was also called Daisy. Like characters in a Thomas Hardy novel, Walter – a tall, muscular and weathered man
– had met his young bride-to-be at the village fair just months before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was 23, and
already a widower. His first wife, Gertrude Maddocks, had died just two months earlier. Walter had married Gertrude when he
was 21 and she was 45. Two years after their marriage, Walter had come home from work to find his beloved Gerty dead in their
cottage garden; she had been killed by a bee sting. Unfortunately Walter found he wasn’t able to look after the little boy
he and Gerty had been in the process of adopting, and so he returned the child they’d named Bruce to the local orphanage.
And now Walter was off to the fair.

At the fair Walter met Daisy Hill, whose father was a local cowman. Daisy and her family lived out of the village and were
said by the locals to be a little strange and on the ‘slow’ side. For this reason, and because their last name was Hill, they
were known locally as ‘The Hillbillies’. Walter proposed to Daisy, who had only just turned 16 and was almost thirty years
younger than his first wife, Gerty. Selecting a naïve young girl for his bride this time was possibly a deliberate move on
Walter’s part, as he then began to groom her to satisfy his often perverse sexual desires. At this time, rumour began to circulate
that something ‘wasn’t quite right’ about poor Gerty’s death. After all, as local people remarked, there’d been no witnesses
to the first Mrs West’s bizarre death, and hadn’t her young husband been quick to send the child back? Whatever the truth
of the matter, Walter kept Gerty’s picture with him, inside the West family Bible, until he died.

Soon after Walter and Daisy married at the local parish church of St Bartholomew’s, Daisy became pregnant, and eight months
later gave birth to a little girl they named Violet. Violet died the following day and 17-year-old Daisy was devastated. But
there was something odd about this turn of events too. Walter would explain to people how his wife had been affected by a
policeman calling at the cottage to enquire about a road accident in the village. According to Walter, with his wife being
so young and inexperienced in the ways of the world, her being confronted by a policeman had given her a shock that had sent
her into premature labour. As Geoffrey Wansell points out, this story is even more implausible than the bee sting, as everyone
in the village knew each other, including the local bobbies, whom Daisy would have grown up with.

It was more likely that Walter beat Daisy, resulting in her going into premature labour. Like the sadistic Bill Letts, Walter
had also been brutalised as a child by his violent father, a sergeant major in the First World War. Violence, it seems, was
a legacy passed down throughout the generations in both the West and the Letts families. And there was to be another shared
legacy, that of incest.

A year after baby Violet died, Daisy gave birth to a boy and christened him Frederick Walter Stephen West, or Freddie, as
they affectionately referred to the boy. Daisy and Walter then moved into a cottage on the edge of the village, where they
would go on to have another six children. This was Moorcroft Cottage, close to the cornfields of Letterbox and Fingerpost
Hills, where half a century later the dissected remains of Freddie’s first wife, Rena, and his mistress Anna McFall and her
unborn child, would be found in three separate graves.

As with the Letts children, all seven of the West siblings would share just two bedrooms. Although the cottage was detached,
and bigger than their previous home, the accommodation for such a large family was cramped and basic at best. It
did, however, have a tin bath and outside toilet, whereas the family only had a bucket between them before. The bucket had
to be emptied into an open sewer that was full of rats. Like something out of the Wild West, Daisy would come out with a shotgun
and blast them away.

As soon as Walter’s daughters became a little older, he saw them as fair game and would openly proclaim it was his right to
‘break them in’, a notion which he would pass down to his oldest son. Alongside this, he would beat ‘the living daylights’
out of Daisy if she did not give in to his desires for sex at various times of the day. Walter was said to have sex on his
brain from the moment he got up, until he went to bed late at night. As well as abusing his daughters, he assaulted any other
little girls who should cross his path, pushing them down in a field while making his young son watch. Walter also instructed
young Freddie on the delights of having sex with animals. By the time the little boy was 8, he’d learnt how to grab a sheep
from behind, tuck its hind legs down the front of his Wellington boots and penetrate the poor beast. Freddie was also believed
to have been sexually abused by his father and, given Walter’s voracious and varied sexual appetite, this seems likely. Fred
would later say of his father, ‘Dad was obsessed by sex’, but he could equally have been talking about himself. As Geoffrey
Wansell says, ‘his father’s example, in the sexual abuse of children, and his own son in particular, led Frederick West to
the conviction that everybody does it.’ Because of this, ‘Sex … became his only hobby and consuming passion.’ Yet, for all
this, Walter and Daisy West would not allow Freddie and his brother John, just a year younger than him, to have girlfriends
until they turned 21.

As their mother Daisy grew older, she began to pile on weight and became plain-looking and dumpy. She also started to wear
a thick leather belt around her waist to discipline her boys with. If Freddie and John so much as talked about going out with
a girl, Daisy immediately whipped off the belt and beat them with it.
In Freddie’s case, however, it was not always about discipline, but jealousy. Daisy doted on her blond, blue-eyed, eldest
child from the moment he was born; by the time he turned 12, she took the already highly sexualised boy to her bed, where
she taught him to have sex with her. This took place on a regular basis, possibly with Walter sometimes present.

Having been initiated in matters of incest before his teens, on Freddie’s fifteenth birthday his parents took him into Gloucester
to have him fitted for his first suit. This was in the West family tradition, for while they may have been simple farming
folk, it was a matter of pride amongst the men in the family that they always wore suits, even to undertake the most mundane
of tasks, just as Bill Letts did. The suit was brown and double-breasted, and his next new suit would not go unnoticed when
young Rosie eventually met Freddie.

Freddie, like Rosie, was not bright at school; he was also bullied and isolated. This was not helped by the smell of animal
dung that lingered on the little boy, or by his mother packing him off with a raw turnip each day for his lunch. And, just
as the Letts children were assigned chores after school, so too were the Wests, although everything about them was more extreme.
For Fred not only had to carry out tasks such as chopping up firewood and trapping hares for the pot for the family dinner,
but he also learnt at his mother’s knee how to cut a pig’s throat and drain the blood, watched cows being slaughtered and
skinned rabbits and squirrels at a young age. And then, of course, he would have to stop to have sex with his mother.

Freddie Leaves Home

In 1957, when Freddie was 16, he started going to dances in Ledbury, where he proved to be popular with the ladies in his
new suit, which he wore with his farm boots. His success with the opposite sex ruffled Daisy’s feathers who, being only 33
herself, saw the girls as rivals for her lover-cum-son’s affections. Fred was in fact becoming so successful that he soon
learnt not to use a girl’s name when he had sex with them in case he called them by the wrong name. He also carried a number
of cheap or stolen engagement rings in his pocket, proposing to the particular girl he was with at the time so that they would
have sex with him; otherwise, as he said, it would be, ‘no ring, no sex’: such were the social mores of the time.

In the summer of that year, Fred got up in the night and left home without telling his parents. He was particularly concerned
about how his mother might react. ‘Cause we were that close’, as he was to say; he knew she would be broken-hearted at his
going and that she would try to prevent it. Having earned little money on the land at Much Marcle, and after paying a large
proportion of it to Daisy for his keep, Freddie put away what he could into a Post Office savings account. His plan was to
buy a motorbike and move to Gloucester, the city he had felt at home in when he had first visited on his fifteenth birthday.
Finding himself a job as a builder’s labourer in Hereford, Fred slept in one of the half-built houses on site to save money,
returning home covered in cement dust – but bearing gifts for the family – some months later.