Rose West: The Making of a Monster (13 page)

He then got himself a job at a local cider works and by the autumn had saved up enough to buy his much-desired Bantam motorbike
– using it to impress the girls and to proudly show off to his family, being photographed on it with four of his younger siblings.
However, while out on his motorbike in a country lane, he ran over a pushbike, left in the road by one of the village girls,
and crashed. Freddie was unconscious for over a week, and kept in the local hospital on the John Masefield Ward. Sex was always
uppermost in young Freddie’s mind. As he began to recover, he told his brother
he hadn’t been concentrating on the road when the accident happened, but had been consumed by the idea that the girl who owned
the bike was behind the hedge, ‘dropping her knickers’.

Fred’s skull was heavily stitched up and he had to wear metal callipers and a special shoe to support his broken leg, and
from then on he walked with a limp. But, aside from this and his broken nose, some of his family believed that the knock on
the head changed his personality. While Fred himself always denied it, one of his sisters felt he became a loner, while others
thought that he became bitter in the years after the accident, even blaming the murders he subsequently committed on his injury.
However, given his hideously abusive childhood, his template, like Rosie’s, had also been cast in stone at a very young age,
and he would have been sex-obsessed, with or without the injury.

Fred was now 18 and having written off his motorbike, decided to leave home again. Over the next two or three years he worked
at Gloucester docks, and became a deckhand on ships going out of Bristol. Although he spent a lot of time shifting manure
around and working on the dredges, he later sailed off around the Pacific, going to such places as Australia and Hong Kong
and working on the Jamaican banana boats. In between working on the boats, Freddie took a job as a bread delivery man in Bishop’s
Cleeve, where he got a housewife pregnant and set off to get another ship. Soon Freddie had enough money to rent a flat in
Newent and to purchase a more powerful motorbike: a Triumph 1000, joining a bikers’ group in the area and picking up girls.
After two years away from home, Freddie returned home at Christmas, 1960. Daisy was 35 by now, and had become a strong and
obese woman. As soon as she saw Freddie approaching the cottage, she untied her leather belt with its knotted leather laces
attached, rushed out of the cottage and rained blows on her prodigal son. Then,
putting the belt back on, she told him, ‘Welcome home, son, now we’re even.’

Freddie went back to working on the farm with his father and brother John, and it is likely he also began sleeping with his
mother again. During his time away, his little sisters had grown, which Freddie of course immediately noticed. Kitty, Little
Daisy and Gwen were now aged between 10 and 16, and by November the following year, Freddie was to stand trial at Hereford
Assizes for ‘illegal carnal knowledge’ of a 13-year-old girl, having got one of his sisters pregnant. Daisy senior turned
up at the court to give evidence in her son’s defence. Freddie’s doctor also told the court how the head injury his patient
had received three years earlier still caused him to black out. Fred hadn’t actually denied the offence when he was accused
of having sex regularly with his young sister. He was simply incredulous that he’d been charged with something he’d been brought
up to consider as perfectly normal. As Gordon Burn said, he probably thought to himself, ‘Well of course he’d had sex with
his sister! Wasn’t that what her was there for?’

And when a person grows up accepting incest as an ordinary part of family life, they are more likely to continue to do this
with their own children. Just like the young Rosie.

Unfortunately, Fred West’s sexual offences were never set on record, which could have helped when he and Rose were accused
of raping their first victim, Caroline Owens, and later when they raped some of their own children. However, Freddie’s sister,
probably out of family loyalty, refused to name her baby’s father in court, and the case was dismissed. The effect of this
on Freddie was to give him increased confidence; he became cocky, there was nothing he couldn’t do. And the only thing he
had a record for was petty theft of some materials from his works, and a pocketful of ladies’ watches he’d stolen in Ledbury
earlier that year and given as presents to the women in his family.

After the court case, Fred went out and celebrated by forcing himself on a 15-year-old girl in a field. The young girl was
left so traumatised by the rape that she was unable to report it for another three decades, until murder charges were brought
against the Wests in the 1990s. In the end, Freddie’s sister was believed to have had a termination, after which Freddie developed
a morbid fascination with abortions that continued throughout his life.

While the incest charges meant little to the Wests, he’d brought disgrace on the family by being caught out. He’d been sent
to stay at his auntie’s cottage in the village during the trial, but now had to leave Much Marcle for good. At the time, he
and his brother John had bought a car between them. This was a Ford Popular – the same make and model of car that, just a
few years later, he would drive around with teenager Rosie Letts beside him, as they went hunting their prey.

Freddie’s upbringing had been both brutal and perverse and, having been highly sexualised by both parents, he lost any inhibitions
early on. Brian Masters also suggests that his mother, by mollycoddling Freddie, did not give him the chance to grow up and
he was to remain grossly immature all his life. The same could be said of Rosie, who on the one hand was childlike and intellectually
‘slow’, but on the other, having been abused and corrupted by her father, was easily sexually aroused. As Consultant Forensic
Psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee – an eminent specialist in sexual offenders at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital – has found, where
a child is neglected or isolated – and Rosie had certainly been isolated – the closeness of the sexual contact with their
abuser can be confusing, as it is both frightening and pleasurable at the same time. The victim can then become preoccupied
by sex as a means of self-comfort and coping with negative mood. Rosie had certainly become fixated with sex at an early age,
before she’d even met Freddie. As one of her lovers, Kathryn Halliday, was to say,

‘Rose was absolutely insatiable. She used to say no woman or man could ever satisfy her.’
^*

And when this disturbed young Daddy’s girl met her older, amoral Mummy’s boy, it was to be a highly toxic combination of two
sex-crazed adolescents.

S
OMETIME DURING THE SUMMER,
Bill treated himself to a Lambretta scooter, put some two-stroke fuel in the tank and set off to visit his family at last.
He did not, however, ask Daisy back at this point, but then he didn’t need to for, as Colin Wilson points out in
The Corpse Garden,
Rosie had ‘lost no time stepping into her mother’s shoes.’ Rosie and her father were believed to have been involved in an
incestuous relationship while they lived together at Tobyfield Road. Rosie’s former brother-in-law, Jim Tyler, also believed
that Rosie was involved in an incestuous relationship with her grandfather, old William Letts, who had moved from Northam
to be closer to his family. He said there was something about the grandfather that ‘just wasn’t right’. If he was abusing
Rosie, Bill is likely to have known about it and perhaps even encouraged it as a way of seeking his father’s approval which
he’d always craved. Jim also thought Bill showed an unhealthy interest in Jim’s own little girls, aged three and four, as
he cuddled and teased them. ‘I didn’t like the way he did it. There was … something I didn’t trust’, he was to say.

Only Rosie and her father knew what went on during those weeks of their being alone together at the house but, despite the
bond they shared, they soon fell out. Rosie was a teenager and wanted to go out. Bill forbade her, but she carried on staying
out late, disobeying his orders. He knew she was going out and meeting older men, which would have put his nose out of joint.
Fed up with him trying to stop her, Rosie then, surprisingly, took the upper hand in the relationship, contacting social services
and telling them that her father was being ‘restrictive’. A 15-year-old reporting her father to the authorities, at a time
when children did not often have a voice, was a rare occurrence, and shows a certain kind of intelligence, if not manipulation.
The fact that Rosie did not report Bill’s abuse of her means she possibly didn’t regard it as such at the time, but saw it
as something merely to keep ‘Dad’ happy. After social services visited the house, life carried on as before.

Daisy’s break for freedom with the boys was short lived. The job at Teddington paid very little, and she could not afford
to buy furniture for the cottage or to provide new clothes and shoes for her growing children. The cottage was also damp and
cold and, with winter just round the corner, Daisy realised it would be impossible to keep warm. Caught in an impossible situation,
she then made the tough decision to move back in with Bill.

Settling into married life again, old habits died hard as Bill continued to beat Daisy, but this time even harder to teach
her a lesson for leaving him. Daisy did, however, make a stand. Refusing to sleep with Bill again, she spent her nights on
the settee downstairs, dreaming perhaps that one day he might just pack up and disappear. But, as luck would have it, the
family hadn’t been back together long when Daisy’s younger sister, Eileen, turned up on the doorstep that autumn with her
small son, Ricky, having left her husband. This meant another change of sleeping arrangements at Tobyfield Road, forcing Daisy
to share a bed with Bill once more and Rosie to share with Graham and Gordon to accommodate the new arrivals.

Rosie at this time was still working at a baker’s-cum-teashop, some six miles down the road in Cheltenham. Neither Bill nor
Daisy had expected much of their youngest daughter, who
lacked the academic abilities of her sister Glenys, who’d gone to college and worked at GCHQ before having a family, and Joyce,
who had by now trained as a nurse and would go on to become a well-respected matron. Despite Rose’s limitations, Bill in particular
had always encouraged her to try to do well for herself, and he and Daisy were pleased when she found the job at the baker’s,
even bringing home cream cakes and bread left over from the day for the family.

One evening, as Rosie waited at a bus stop after work in the dark, she claimed to have been frightened by a man also waiting
there who’d told her he’d been in the Army. The bus stop was opposite Cheltenham’s famous pump rooms and park and, taking
fright, she’d run away from the man, across the road towards the park, whereupon he’d chased after her. The park gates were
locked, but the soldier, she said, ‘just smashed the padlock off with his fists’, before dragging her under some trees and
raping her. This claim did not come to light until she mentioned it at her trial some twenty-five years later, along with
another rape she said had taken place earlier, by a golf course near Cleeve, after she had accepted a lift home from a stranger
at a party.

After the second attack, Rosie said she began to catch the bus home in the evening from the main bus station in Cheltenham.
And it was here, amidst the gloomy surroundings of the bus depot, the stench of burning oil and the rev of engines, that Rosie
was to meet her Prince Charming. She had only been catching the bus home from there that week, when a man in his late twenties,
whom she initially took to be a tramp, shuffled over. With his mop of curly hair, shabby suit and a limp, he might have asked
the young girl in his usual forthright manner, ‘You coming out with me tonight, darling?’

Rosie was frightened and looked away, but not before she’d noticed his twinkling blue eyes and the cocky grin plastered across
his face, albeit that she was to say his teeth were ‘all
ganky and green’. For all of this, the older man with the lucky gap in his teeth and thick country brogue was soon capturing
Rosie’s attention with his line in banter. An impressionable young girl of tender years, with a short skirt, high heels and
sleek dark hair down to her waist, was just Fred’s kind. And of course ‘her was gagging for it’, if Fred knew his women. Yet
when he asked her out a second time, she still turned him down; Prince Charming was going to have to work a little harder
to get his princess.

By chance, Freddie found out the young girl lived not far from him in the next village, and they travelled back the six miles
on the bus together – he taking the empty seat beside her. (Serial killers Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, and Dr Harold
Shipman were to meet their much younger future wives at bus stops too.) Though probably flattered by the older man’s attentions,
Rosie studiously avoided his eye during the journey home as he piled on the charm. He soon found out she worked at a bakery
in the town, and probably told her about the Sunblest bread round he used to do in Bishop’s Cleeve, but possibly not about
the child he’d had there with a married woman several years earlier. As he chattered on, the couple seemed to have a lot in
common – more even than either realised at this point, including incest. They laughed instead about both having mothers called
Daisy, while Fred then regaled Rosie with tales of having sailed around the world, to places like Australia where her father
had also sailed – another coincidence. Fred, however, always embellished his experiences, or indeed made them up – he was,
after all, a habitual liar. He told the young girl of icecream parlours and hotels that he owned in Scotland, omitting to
mention that this was where he’d met his wife, and that while working on an ice-cream van in Glasgow he’d run over a small
child he’d befriended, killing him. Rosie might have wondered why the man beside her was dressed so poorly and travelling
on a bus, but she hadn’t been paid this much attention since she
‘served’ the lorry drivers at Seven Springs and the experience would have been heady for her.