Rose West: The Making of a Monster (14 page)

By the end of the ride, Freddie had not only impressed Rosie with his stories, but had made it look as if fate had somehow
played a hand in their meeting. More importantly, he also evoked her sympathies, telling her that his wife had gone off, leaving
him to bring up their two little girls alone. Fred often used his toddlers as bait to entice underage girls to come to his
home, and with Rosie the ploy worked a treat. Rosie had loved looking after babies since her little brothers were born, and
the fact that this smooth talker had two small motherless children attracted her like a moth to a flame. Asking her out for
the third time, Rosie agreed. Thus, a simple bus ride had quite by chance become the ride to Hell, culminating in multiple
murders and a case that would become infamous around the world. Or was it by chance?

Freddie, who owned both a car and a van, must have smiled to himself as Rosie agreed to a date: taking the bus home had really
paid off. For, although the couple’s meeting appeared accidental, Freddie had almost certainly planned to ‘bump into’ Rosie.
Living in the same close-knit community as Rosie meant that he would have heard all the local gossip about her (where he too
had a reputation, as both a flirt and a ladies’ man). It is also likely that he had passed the sexually precocious teenager
in the village as he drove around in his van looking for young girls. He may also have believed he wasn’t going to need to
produce one of his rings to get this one into bed.

Freddie was now 28 years old, and had become a charming and seasoned manipulator since leaving Much Marcle to make his way
in the world. Finding out which teashop Rosie worked at, he sent his mate round with a present for her, gift-wrapped in brown
parcel paper and string. Although Rosie lived just yards from The Swallow pub in Tobyfield Road, she met Fred some miles away
at the Odessa pub in Tewkesbury so
that Bill wouldn’t see her. Freddie bowled up outside the pub in his rusty old ice-cream van. This wasn’t a black mark against
him for, just as Rosie’s mother had at first been impressed by Bill wearing a suit and not drinking more than a half, like
her own father Fred Fuller had, Rose was impressed by this Fred wearing a suit and eschewing drink, just as her father did.
As the older man and the teenager sat starry-eyed across the beer-stained table, Freddie spotted the gifts he’d bought the
girl. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t ya like them?’ he asked her in his country burr, though puzzled, as most girls he took out
would have had the fur coat on their backs by now. ‘No, they’re great,’ she might have replied, casting her eyes sadly over
the fine lace dress, which was probably of nylon mix, and the fur coat which, if not rabbit, was probably stolen, or both.
She couldn’t accept them, Rosie told him, because if her father saw them, he’d kill her.

In a flash, Freddie turned the situation to his advantage. It was a shame a pretty young girl such as herself couldn’t wear
the glamorous clothes she deserved. But he had, he told her, the perfect solution. He would keep the outfits at his home,
where she could come round and wear them whenever she wanted. She could also meet his two little girls while she was at it:
Charmaine, 6, and little Anna-Marie, not yet 5. Thus, by the time the couple drained their glasses, the man with sparkling
blue eyes and something of the romantic gypsy about him had persuaded the young girl to come back to his lair.

As far as Fred was concerned at the time, Rosie was probably no more than a potential notch on his bedpost. But what Fred
could provide Rosie with was an exciting escape from life at home with her restrictive parents who insisted she stay in at
night. But, as Andy Letts was to say of his little sister, ‘Going out with older men made her feel grown-up.’ What Andy actually
didn’t realise at the time was an attachment to an older man
was something Rosie was both accustomed to and possibly even seeking as a means of leaving Tobyfield Road forever. As a letter
to her pen pal Victor, written in 2005, reveals, ‘I started to believe this [Fred] was my way out of the oppression my parents
had kept me under for so long.’
^*

B
ISHOP’S CLEEVE AND THE
nearby hamlet of Stoke Orchard possess a number of static caravan parks. During the 1960s, as now, some of these were used
by holidaymakers, while others were permanent mobile home sites. The Lakehouse Caravan Park, though now a landscaped, luxury
holiday park, was said in the 1960s to have a reputation locally as a place that decent folk avoided. Those who lived there
were a mixed bag of itinerant workers, recluses and others who got by in the black economy and on the fringes of crime.

Stepping cautiously along the dirt track between the faded Bluebirds and Sprites, the young girl passed clapped-out cars supported
on bricks on her way down to number 17: her prince’s castle. In some parts of the site, chicken and goats roamed freely, while
geese hissed as they guarded the piles of scrap metal accumulated on the site, and barking dogs strained on leashes to sound
the alarm. To one side of the park was a dark lake in which the only forms of life were said to be the rats and the algae.

If there was something lawless, uncertain and machismo about this insular little world, it exhilarated Rosie, who had spent
most of her life on housing estates in the suburbs. The interior of Freddie’s caravan was also very different to Rosie’s clinically
clean home. The surfaces were caked in grease and
grime, while rusty jemmies, spanners, angle-grinders and other workmen’s tools were scattered on the sides and the floor amidst
dog ends, wood shavings and the children’s toys. It was here that Rosie had first been introduced to Fred’s little girls as
they played amongst the mess. Charmaine was 6, and a bright little girl, whose father was a bus driver from an Asian-Scottish
family (though Fred told people the child’s father was a wealthy businessman). Fred had married Rena (Catherine) Costello
when she was pregnant with Charmaine, and the couple had given the child the West surname. Anna-Marie was now 5, and Fred’s
biological daughter, who had a mass of blonde curls at this age, just as her father had as a baby.

The little girls had a history of being in and out of care, depending on when Fred hit Rena and Rena upped and left him to
go off on another of her travels, working as a prostitute in Bristol and her home town of Glasgow. Rena was a spirited young
woman of about Fred’s age, who had also had a chaotic and troubled childhood, culminating in her finding her way into a girl’s
borstal in Scotland. During her absences from her little girls, Fred would either put the children in care, or entice underage
girls from the local Cleeve School to babysit so that he could go to work. Invariably, this resulted in him getting the naïve
young girls into bed.

The children had two little pack-away beds and a play area at the back of the caravan that was fenced off with chicken wire.
Inside this, Fred had made the toddlers a Wendy house, cobbled together with old bits of wood and nails; beside this was a
fish pond, drained of water and filled with rubbish. An old van he was in the process of breaking up also stood in the fenced-off
area, along with oxyacetylene cylinders and tools he used to break up vehicles with. But Fred had other, more sinister, purposes
for the welding equipment and bits of metal scattered around the caravan.

Fred liked to fashion crude metal devices to perform ‘homemade’ abortions with. He had used one of his rudimentary
prototypes on his first wife, Rena. They had gone to a remote spot on the Gloucestershire hills to try to abort the baby that
would be Charmaine, while Rena’s friend Margaret played lookout. He also carried the bizarrely shaped tools in his van, and
boasted to acquaintances that he would help them out should they get a girl ‘into trouble’. West’s obsession with abortions
was such that he kept Polaroid photos in his pocket featuring close-ups of a bloody termination. As well as looking at the
pictures for his own perverse enjoyment, he liked to show them off to people, including Terry Crick, his young lodger. Terry
left soon after and reported the abortion equipment and photos to the police. But, unbeknown to him, Fred was a police snout,
and the very officer he reported it to was West’s handler, who took no further action. Later, Fred would fashion implements
in metal for other, hideous purposes. Rosie however, knew nothing of such gruesome hobbies at the time, but was just a young
teenager who had met a man she believed to be her Knight in shining armour. There was certainly nothing to suggest that she
would become the type of person to use some of Fred’s terrible inventions for torturing their victims.

On Rosie’s first visit to Freddie’s caravan, she ate the same meal as his little girls: two eggs, sausage and beans, making
a face with them and topping it off with ‘hair’ fashioned out of the chips. As Gordon Burn remarked, it is interesting that
he treated Rosie like one of the children – but then, despite being sexually precocious, she was still childish. With her
high, babyish voice, miniskirts, stilettos and her white, knee-high schoolgirl socks – which were her trademark until she
went to prison – there was something of the Lolita about her. This appealed to Fred, who liked his women young – the younger
the better.

Fred farmed the girls out to a neighbour for the rest of the evening and then courted Rosie with a cup of tea rather than
alcohol. It was the late 1960s, but Freddie’s taste was more 1950s – just like her father’s. Fred played her ‘I Hear the Sound
of
Distant Drums’, and other Jim Reeves ballads, and Country and Western music including ‘Lay the Blanket on the Ground’ and
‘The Crystal Chandelier’. Given her age, Rosie might have preferred one of her own favourites, Neil Diamond’s ‘Cracklin’ Rosie’,
but if she did, she didn’t say so.

Rose began taking time off from work, sneaking down to the caravan park a mile away from her home rather than catching the
bus into Cheltenham. Here she would look after the girls while Fred was at work, and have sex with him when he got home in
the evening. Her excitement soon stalled, however, when she was met at the caravan door by some girls her own age babysitting
for Fred. She recognised them from Cleeve School and soon realised Freddie’s caravan was a magnet for truants and runaways.
Rosie, with her foul language and the reputation for being hard, saw off her rivals that day but considered her position as
she knew she couldn’t be there all the time …

Fred’s daughter, Anna-Marie, or Anne Marie, as she later called herself, remembers her first meeting with the girl who would
become her stepmother a little differently. In her 1995 book,
Out of the Shadows,
Anne Marie recalled that she and her big sister Charmaine were in local authority care when her father brought his 15-year-old
mistress to meet them. On the second visit, Rose brought her a present: an old-fashioned doll with long blonde locks that
moved by battery power. Rosie had played with her dolls until she was older than is usually the case, so the toy was probably
one of her cast-offs. It was also the only present Rose would buy her that wasn’t a bribe or a threat.

Sometime after this Fred, somewhat amazingly, was allowed to take the girls out of care and bring them home to his caravan,
where Rosie became more than just another notch on his bedpost. The couple began to spend time together, playing in the fields
around Stoke Orchard with the children, collecting wild flowers and planning a future together where they would have more
children. They also talked about his earlier life in
Much Marcle, though probably not the worst excesses of it, as even Freddie knew this wasn’t appropriate at the start of a
relationship. Rosie was, however, one of the few people who would have understood where Fred was coming from, and she began
going into work less and less as their relationship developed.

Fred no doubt found his new young girlfriend uninhibited and open to new experiences. Having been highly sexualised as a girl,
she, like Freddie, had abused her younger siblings. Whether each was aware of this at the time is unlikely, but they would
very possibly have had the same outlook and, subconsciously, felt comfortable with one another. It might also have marked
Rosie out as different to Fred’s other conquests – as it had his wife, Rena. Rena had also been a victim of incest, and although
she did not go on to abuse, was completely sexually uninhibited.

Despite Rosie’s sexual experiences, she’d never had a normal teenage friendship or a friend at school. Now that she had a
proper boyfriend whom she could confide in and who didn’t laugh at her, she wanted to show him off – to let the bullies know
who’d tormented her that ‘Dozy Rosie’ had someone of her own. She also decided to introduce him to her parents. And, to her
surprise, he agreed to meet them. How sad then that Fred, like her father, was a paedophile.

Fred was working as a labourer for Costain’s at the time, laying the new M5 which was just a mile from the Letts’ family home.
Some of Fred’s workmates would have known Rosie already from when she’d served them at her sister’s snack bar earlier in the
year, as the men went there for their lunch breaks. For some reason best known only to Fred himself, he didn’t go home to
change before the meeting with Rosie’s parents, but turned up at her house in his oil-stained work clothes and on his digger,
parking it on the grass verge outside. Her parents refrained from asking him through the front door, but invited
him to step into the kitchen, where he proceeded to rattle off a succession of fantastical stories about his life in his West
Country brogue. He told them how he’d owned a chain of hotels like the Fortes, and was a businessman with caravan parks and
ice-cream parlours in Scotland; babbling on and on with his ridiculous lies, interspersed by maniacal laughing, he didn’t
even stop as he rolled up a cigarette. If Bill had been less than impressed with his son-in-law Jim, who was a small businessman,
he got the shock of his life with the ‘grubby, lying little tramp’ he called Fred. Daisy and Bill looked at each other aghast
as Fred set off up the road towards the M5 on his digger. Bill had every square inch of the house scrubbed that night where
Fred had been, and, when it was clean, no doubt had it scrubbed again just to make sure.