Rose West: The Making of a Monster (18 page)

Another view amongst those who have studied the case is that Rose stabbed Charmaine with a kitchen knife, just as she’d probably
stabbed her in the ankle a few weeks earlier when she’d taken the little girl to hospital. Some years later, Rose would also
cruelly cut and stab two of the West children. As coal dust was found on the little girl’s remains, it is likely that Rose
hid Charmaine’s body in the cellar until Fred came home to bury her. Rose would then have had to fob Rena off when she called
for the child later that day, as she was to fob Daisy off when she too asked where the little girl she had taken a shine to
had gone. However, this logical murder scenario begs the question: why wasn’t Rose worried about how Fred would react when
he eventually came home? Although Fred wasn’t Charmaine’s biological father, he still included her in his ‘family
of love’ and sent kisses for Charmaine in his letters to Rose from prison. We now have the benefit of hindsight and know that
Fred was a killer, but at this point Rose didn’t know he was. Or did she? Having killed the little girl, why didn’t she run
away? The most plausible reason for her staying and waiting for Fred to come home and deal with the situation was because
she already knew that he too had killed.

Somewhere during the months they’d been together, he’d either confided in Rose his most grisly of secrets, or she herself
had found out that four years earlier Fred had killed his mistress, 18-year-old Anna McFall. Anna was a gentle Scottish girl
who had been Rena’s best friend before she began an affair with Fred. Unlike Rose and Rena, Anna had refused to join in with
Fred’s sex games but, once she’d become pregnant by him, pressed him to get a divorce in order to put things on a more formal
footing between them. But Fred did not want Rena to find out and killed Anna as soon as she became a nuisance to him, cutting
their almost full-term baby from her. After dissecting the bodies and keeping bones from both mother and unborn child as trophies,
he’d buried their remains separately in a field at Much Marcle, just in sight of his childhood home of Moorcroft Cottage.
He then told his father about it, and his mother Daisy a few days later, who cried when she learned what her favourite boy
had done.

At the same time as telling Rosie about Anna McFall, Fred may have confessed that he’d killed missing waitress Mary Bastholm
before this. And there may have been other murders, including a young boy found hanged whom Fred had been friendly with at
his works in Gloucester. Fred could never resist bragging at the best of times, and had been cultivating in his young lover
a morbid fascination with sadistic sex as they watched S&M films together, which at some point would include bestiality, paedophilia
and snuff videos. Fred probably crowed about the murders to Rose enough times in jest for her to eventually realise he was
telling the truth, by which time it would be less of a shock to her. She might even have become accustomed to the idea. (Fred
did much the same in the 1980s and 1990s, making jokes to his children that they’d end up under the patio like their sister
if they misbehaved. Only when his ‘jokes’ were taken seriously did it lead to his and Rose’s arrests.) It is also possible
that John West, the quieter but more cunning and ‘manly’ of the two brothers, might have told Rose, as he too was sleeping
with her at his brother’s behest.

There are other plausible theories as to how Charmaine died. Writer Howard Sounes believes that when Fred came home and Rose
showed him what she’d done, he shared his own grisly secrets with her and together they forged ‘a pact made in blood’. This
bloody pact would then keep them together for the next twenty or so years. This still begs the question that if Rose didn’t
already know Fred had murdered, what made her think he wouldn’t go to the police? It’s fair to say, however, that Rose knew
her beau had no time for the law, constantly being on the wrong side of it himself, and that despite ‘his family of love’
he actually had little love for the child who wasn’t his.

Whatever happened that day, Rose carried on as normal, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. One of Rose’s relatives
believes that she and another of her siblings learnt to block things out as children as a way of coping with their abusive
home life. In Rose’s case, this appears to have led to a complete state of denial. A photo of her sitting smiling on Fred’s
lap soon after Charmaine’s murder is particularly disturbing, as it shows she lacks even a shred of guilt or remorse – which
she wouldn’t of course, if she was in denial of what she’d done. Her state of mind regarding the murder is also evident by
her reaction when Charmaine’s little friend called round to see her soon after the murder. The Giles family had moved out
of the upstairs flat to a place in the Forest of Dean some months earlier, but made a trip back to Midland Road especially
so that Tracy could see her
little pal again. When Rose answered the door, Tracy excitedly asked her if she could see her ‘best friend’, only for Rose
to snap back at her, no she couldn’t! ‘She’s gone to live with her mother, and bloody good riddance!’

Rose’s cold and inappropriate response to the 8-year-old gives us an insight into her lack of maturity at best, and at worst
reveals her contempt for the child she had just murdered. Tracy burst into tears at this and sank down onto the hall stairs
where Anna-Marie comforted her. Anna-Marie was also missing her big sister, but was too frightened to ask Rose where she’d
gone. Instead, she waited until her father came out of prison some weeks later who, knocking the ash from his cigarette, confirmed
Rose’s story.

After returning from prison, Fred had taken the child’s lifeless little body back upstairs, where, using all the skills he’d
learnt from working in an abattoir some years earlier, he began dissecting it. Rigor mortis would have already set in, but
Fred managed to remove numerous small bones from the feet, toes and kneecaps which he kept as mementos. Whether Rose saw his
trophy bones is unclear, but what we do know is that Fred then dug a deep, narrow hole outside the kitchen door that night
and, possibly with Rose’s help, stuffed the child’s body into it, pushing her severed legs down beside her. This was to be
the little girl’s resting place for the next three years, until Mr Zygmunt asked Fred to build a kitchen extension onto the
property. Fred then moved the body parts to beneath the new kitchen area, where the poor little mite would remain for another
twenty years.

Rose then had the presence of mind to keep the school Charmaine attended off her back by informing the teacher that the little
girl had gone to live with her mother. ‘Moved to London’ was recorded on the child’s file, and that was the end of the matter
for the next twenty-three years, until police bulldozers moved into 25 Cromwell Street. But Rose either did
not have the wherewithal to get her story straight or arrogantly believed she would not get caught. Having told the school
Charmaine had moved to London, she then told Mrs Giles that the little girl had gone to live with her mother in Bristol. These
were the kinds of contradictory and obvious lies that Rose was to tell the police some twenty or so years later when they
questioned her about her daughter’s disappearance.

A
ROUND THIS TIME, CHARMAINE’S
murder and Fred’s own secrets appear to have become too much for the 17-year-old to bear. Perhaps Rose had a heart after
all; or perhaps she was simply terrified at what she’d got herself into. Whatever the case, Rose got up one Sunday morning,
put baby Heather in the pram and fled to her parents’ house. But Daisy was not the only one who had been visiting Rose at
Midland Road in secret. Despite the state of the place, Bill had also been making secret trips there, where he’d repeatedly
asked his daughter to come home. Rosie had turned down his requests, but now that she’d finally sought refuge at her parents’
house, Bill told her, ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.’

These were, of course, the words of a cuckolded man whose ‘mistress’ had dumped him for another. Rosie had chosen Fred over
Bill, and now Bill was making her pay for it. His refusal to protect his daughter and allow her to come back home was critical,
as it could have diverted Rose from the course of becoming one of the world’s most infamous serial killers. Instead it propelled
her back into Fred’s arms, and later to the house at Cromwell Street that would eventually become their killing fields.

Fred had turned up at the Letts’ home later that day and called to his young mistress at the back door in his coaxing, hypnotic
voice, ‘Rosie … Come on Rosie … You know what we’ve got between us …’

What they had between them was, of course, like no other young couple who’d been living together for less than a year. Rose’s
father had come to the door, and Fred had said, ‘What’s the crack then? What’s wrong?’

‘You treat her like a child,’ Bill replied.

Fred then went back to the van telling Bill, ‘Right, tell Rose that I’m going to sit in the van out the front there for ten
minutes, and if she ain’t there, there’ll be somebody else in her bed tonight.’

When Rose heard this, she picked up the baby and turned on her parents, ‘You don’t know him! There’s nothing he wouldn’t do!’

Bill must have changed his mind, for when Rosie went out to Fred, he ran after her telling her, ‘He’s only kidding.’

But the damage was done, and Fred was now driving her away, on the road to murdering together as they descended into Hell.

Life Without Rosie

Although Rose had sexually abused her younger brothers for a number of years, when she’d left home at 16, Gordon and Graham
no longer had anyone to protect them from their psychotic father. The boys were the only children left in the house, and so
when Bill wasn’t hitting Daisy, he focused his rages on them. They then began sleeping rough as Andy had done – in public
toilets, under hedgerows and in coal holes – anywhere, in fact, rather than go home and get beaten. On one occasion, a neighbour
had stumbled across Graham covered in ice where he’d had to sleep out in the winter. Daisy would go out and look for the boys,
and the police would sometimes pick
them up and bring them home to face more violence. Yet still they received no help, just as the older children hadn’t.

Daisy changed her job at this point and began working in the kitchens at the Delancey Hospital during the evenings, which
meant she saw even less of Bill. However, relations had begun to thaw a little between Bill and Daisy’s sister when he helped
Eileen to obtain a job at Smith’s. Eileen was much younger than Daisy and still a very attractive woman, which the grey-haired
Daisy had once been. This was unlikely to have escaped Bill’s attention as he offered her a lift into work each morning. His
assisting Eileen, however, was not about any attraction or fondness he may have felt towards his sister-in-law, but simply
a means of ensuring that she brought money into the house since Bill was, as ever, money-obsessed.

While the adults were out of the house, the boys, now aged 14 and 11, stole anything they could get their hands on. They used
the money to buy drink and drugs as they attempted to block out their miserable lives. This had been going on for some while
and, by 12 years of age, Graham had become an alcoholic. When Bill caught the boys stealing, he reported it to the police,
whereupon they were hauled before a juvenile court, but again were punished rather than helped. Daisy had even written to
Joyce, begging her to come home and help her out with the younger children as they ran wild, including Rosie before she left
home. Joyce reminded her mother that she had been the one who’d asked her to leave in the first place, and that the last time
she’d tried to visit her little brothers and sisters with a Christmas hamper for them, Daisy had shut the door in her face.

The boys were so disturbed by the time Rosie left home that 11-year-old Gordon had begun stealing women’s lacy and satin underwear
from the neighbours’ washing lines and cross-dressing. He also flashed at people in the street from his bedroom window. This
was obviously a scream for help from the child, which could not have been made plainer when, a year later,
aged 12, Gordon took himself off to Cheltenham and asked to go into care. He was only in the children’s home a matter of weeks
when he ran away and went to stay with Rosie, but Fred made him leave when he stole from the couple. He also stole from Daisy’s
purse, but didn’t worry about getting caught as he knew he was ‘going to get beaten anyway’.

As an act of rebellion against his cruel and sadistic father, Graham stole Bill’s new Toyota from Smith’s car park and burned
rubber as he hit the motorway. Andy Letts was completely in awe of his younger brother’s courage in taunting their father,
but terrified about what would happen to the boy when Bill finally caught up with him. As it was, the police got him first
and Graham was packed off to borstal, which must have felt like a holiday camp compared to living at home with his father.

The three older girls had fled the nest into early marriages, and Andy had a girlfriend whose family he could stay with. Although
when Andy was at home he had no idea about the sexual abuse going on there, he was fortunate in being older than Rosie as
he too might have suffered the same fate at her hands as his two little brothers did. As far as Bill’s violent mood swings
were concerned, Andy believes these mellowed over time. This is a frightening thought as, later on, Bill would lift Gordon
up by the ear and swing him round as the mood took him. On one occasion he had accused his son of stealing a radio and picked
him up by the ear in front of Jackie Letts, who was so upset by it, she’d had to leave the house. Bill would also send the
younger boys up to bed, strip them and flog them with a leather belt as they lay there. This bears all the hallmarks of Rosie’s
later ‘disciplining’ of Fred’s little girls. Perhaps Fred hadn’t had to ‘train up’ Rosie in sadosexual practices from scratch
after all, as he told the police, for she’d already got a head start.