Rose West: The Making of a Monster (19 page)

Daisy would later say of her youngest three, it was ‘as if they couldn’t cope with life’; that they had a ‘weakness of character’.
Clearly Daisy was in denial and, as Carol Anne Davis rightly suggests in
Women Who Kill,
how could they be expected to cope when they’d had ‘no praise, no fun and been regularly brutalised by their hate-filled
father?’

And thus while young Gordon and Graham were out stealing cars and flashing at the neighbours, so their big sister was helping
her lover dispose of the body of the child she had murdered.

W
ITH CHARMAINE ‘GONE’ AND
Fred out of prison, Rose soon found she was pregnant again. The couple were excited by the news and hoped it would be the
son they’d been planning on having. And as they celebrated the news, Fred wasted no time drilling holes in the bedroom door
and lining up men for Rose to ‘perform’ with. These men were mostly Jamaicans with whom he’d made friends while doing up Mr
Zygmunt’s properties in the area. According to Fred, black men were better endowed than white, and he was obsessed with seeing
Rose have sex with his black friends throughout their entire marriage. Rosie did not baulk at the idea, and was already calling
herself Fred’s cow or ‘moo’. Had Rose been like most other 17-year-old girls, she might have been out with her friends or
the boy next door, but she’d never had the chance to be ‘ordinary’ and wouldn’t have known what it was. And now she was pregnant
and putting on a porn show for her lover’s entertainment, while he masturbated as he watched her through the spyholes in the
door.

As soon as Rose and her ‘client’ finished, Fred then had sex with her – although he had ejaculation problems and wasn’t able
to satisfy her. He also had insane ideas about sex and told her that by coating himself in the superior sperm from another
man (invariably black) it would help him delay ejaculation.
Rose might even have believed him at the time, although later she would brusquely remind him, ‘You didn’t last long.’

There were times later on when Rose wasn’t keen to do what Fred wanted, but he would go on at her: ‘Do it for us. Do it for
the marriage,’ nagging at her until she gave in. They weren’t actually married at this point, but Rose had been dropping hints
to Fred to make ‘an honest woman of her’, particularly now she was pregnant again. It was after they’d had sex one night,
had eaten boiled eggs and gone back to bed, that Fred proposed to his young mistress. Rose was delighted and they set the
date for January of the following year, by which time Rose would be 18 and not need her parents’ consent (which they were
unlikely to have given). Dozy Rosie and Weird Freddie were going to get hitched. But the fact that Fred was still married
to Rena and this would make him a bigamist seemed neither to concern Rose nor her intended. But perhaps there was a reason
for this …

During the latter part of August 1971, just two months after Fred had buried Charmaine, Rena came calling at Midland Road.
Not finding the child there, she went over to Moorcroft Cottage in Much Marcle, where she helped her father-in-law, Walter
West, to bring in the harvest while trying to find out the whereabouts of her eldest child. Walter had not been able to help
but, some time after this, although we cannot be sure of the date, Fred agreed to meet Rena at a pub, where he plied her with
drink. In trying to track Charmaine down, Rena had become a nuisance to Fred and, like Anna McFall before her, she too would
now have to be got rid of. After murdering Rena, Fred butchered her and interred her remains in a field close to where he’d
buried her former friend, Anna, four years earlier. It is possible that John helped him in this. Fred then placed a child’s
small red boomerang beside his wife’s remains – the type given away free in cereal packets at the time – which had probably
belonged to Charmaine. He and Rose were now free to wed.

Gloucester, Autumn 1971

Although Rena was now out of the way, the path to the altar did not run smoothly for Rose who, before the banns had even been
read, discovered Fred had fallen for another woman. This was unusual for Fred, who rarely saw women as anything other than
objects for his own sexual gratification. The woman in question was 19-year-old Elizabeth Agius, who had recently moved in
next door. Fred had seen her having difficulty lifting her pram up the steps to her front door. He’d rushed over to help and,
with his roguish charm, soon discovered her husband worked abroad. Fred introduced Liz to Rose, but continued to pursue her
in front of his young ‘fiancée’, who Liz thought looked no more than 14. At first Fred’s friendship with Liz didn’t cause
problems with Rose as their relationship was far from conventional, but this was to change.

With no relatives in the area and her husband away, Liz Agius was doubtless grateful for the couple’s neighbourliness, and
when Rose invited her in for a cup of tea, the two young women became friends. Events took a strange turn, however, when the
couple asked her to babysit for them. Liz had babysat for Rose and Fred once before without incident. However, on the second
occasion, Rose and Fred did not return home until the early hours. When Liz asked them if they’d had a nice time, Fred replied
that they’d been ‘driving round for hours, looking for young girls … virgins and runaways, to put on the game.’ He carried
on saying that the best place to find these ‘lemons’, as he called such vulnerable young girls, was at bus stations – and
that he and Rose had parked up by the main bus depot at Bristol to continue their search. A bus station was, of course, where
he’d picked up Rose and possibly Mary Bastholm.

Chillingly, Fred went on to say that it was easier to pick up girls with Rose in the car, as they would think it was safe
to get in. He then bragged that he would bring the girls home to
live with him and Rose, and he’d put them on the game if they were willing.

Liz thought Fred was making some kind of weird joke and didn’t take him seriously. As she was later to say, ‘They seemed such
a nice couple.’ But these trips were actually dummy runs leading up to the couple’s first kidnap; Fred was quite possibly
also testing Rose out to see if she would help him to ‘abduct a girl’, as he would later tell the police. Fred’s crowing was
a way of testing Liz, too, to see if he could involve her in the couple’s sex games. He had also deliberately encouraged Rose
to befriend Liz to try to talk her round. At one of their tea-drinking sessions, Rose told Liz that Fred was in love with
her as she set about entrapping her. She also told the older, lonely teenager that she had had sex with numerous men while
Fred watched her through a hole in the wall, and that he wanted a threesome with them. Rose then showed Liz a bag of sugar-cube-type
pills that were probably spiked with tranquillisers, or the ‘liquid cosh’, but which she, strangely, told Liz were to stop
her catching an STD from her clients. It is unlikely Rose actually believed this, as she also kept a pile of condoms in the
drawer. But even the condoms had a perverse reason for being there.

With Rose getting nowhere with Liz, Fred became desperate to bed her, and told her she could do whatever she liked to him,
with bondage, defecation and sadism top of the list. Still they got nowhere and, as the couple carried on trying to groom
Liz, her husband returned home briefly from abroad. Liz brought him round to meet the new neighbours, whereupon the unsuspecting
spouse put his arm around his wife, making Fred jealous, who stormed out of the room. He wanted Liz, and if he couldn’t have
her, he didn’t see why her husband should. Threatening to put Mr Agius ‘six feet under … !’, he pointed at the floor where
little Charmaine’s body parts lay. As Colin Wilson said, ‘Emotionally, Fred West was still a spoilt child,’
who could not accept Liz Agius’s husband had a prior claim. Rose too was like a spoilt child, and what these two narcissistic
children wanted, they would make sure they got …

Some time after Mr Agius went back to work abroad, Rose invited Liz in for her morning cup of tea as usual. Only this particular
morning, as Liz drank her tea, her head began spinning and she passed out. And when she woke up, she found herself naked in
bed beside Fred. She remembered him having said to her some time before, ‘Oh, what I could do to you …’ and now he apparently
had, with Rose smiling naked on the other side of her. This may have been Rose’s first lesbian experience, and soon she would
come to prefer having sex with women to men.

Soon after raping Mrs Agius, Fred and Rose tied the knot. In the event, Rose did not invite her family, and told a former
neighbour that she met on her honeymoon, ‘I don’t have anything to do with them now.’ Her parents had been against her marrying
Fred, and not knowing Rena was dead might have wondered if he was even divorced. Daisy had recently pressed Rose again on
the whereabouts of Charmaine and, perhaps as the questions got too close for comfort, it had been in Rose’s interest to fall
out with her family.

The Nuptials, Gloucester, Early 1972

The marriage between Fred and Rose took place at Gloucester Register Office on 29 January, exactly two months after Rose’s
eighteenth birthday. Fred was 31 years of age, and Rose by now was five months pregnant. Being highly adept at sewing, Rose
probably made her own dress, placing matching small white rosebuds in her shiny, long dark hair. Fred had been working all
morning on a car and turned up back at home covered in oil, with only a few minutes to get ready and get to the ceremony.
Rose pleaded with Fred to change out of his dirty work
overalls, and finally the party of four, Rose, Fred, Fred’s brother John and a criminal associate of Fred’s called Mick, walked
to the register office together. The couple then exchanged vows at eleven, with Fred describing himself as ‘bachelor’ on the
marriage certificate and his witness, who had a number of aliases, having to cross out the first name he’d signed with and
put down another. The other witness, John West, had brought with him ‘a bottle of Bristol Cream sherry,’ as Fred recalled.
‘We had a quick drink and went straight back to work.’

Rose did not ask why Fred had put ‘bachelor’ on the certificate, which means she probably knew her rival was dead. Her memory
of the wedding also differed from Fred’s. She had asked for a lager and lime in the pub afterwards, but her new husband had
snapped at her, ‘You have a bloody Coke and like it!’ Obviously he was already trying to control her. On the way back from
the ceremony, Fred found some money in the park which was enough to cover the cost of their marriage certificate, and he was
said by Rose to be ‘over the moon’ about it. But this short burst of happiness didn’t last long. When Fred found Liz in the
kitchen one day, he slapped a pair of handcuffs on her and said in front of his new wife, ‘Now I’ve fucking got you!’ Rose
and Fred began to row so loudly over his infatuation with Liz that the neighbours went round to complain but were promptly
told, with a string of expletives, where to get off.

Rose went into labour in June 1972 with her second child; she and Fred called the baby May June because she had been expected
in May but was overdue.
^*
Rose had been depressed for much of this pregnancy, which wasn’t helped by Fred barely visiting her during her stay in hospital.
The birth had again been straightforward, and Rose had been due to leave within a few days, but she refused to go until Fred
came to pick her up in the
van. But Fred didn’t come and only in fact turned up once in ten days. In the end Rose was forced to discharge herself and
get the bus home with the baby.

When Rose arrived home she was in for another shock. Anna-Marie and baby Heather were alone in the flat, while Fred was nowhere
in sight. Thumping on the door of the neighbour’s flat, Fred emerged red-faced and dishevelled. The newlyweds were supposed
to be open with each other about ‘everything’; sleeping with someone else behind the other’s back was not part of the deal,
and Rose erupted at her husband. Whether to placate his bride, or for some other reason, Fred agreed to take Rose on a belated
honeymoon – albeit that they would have the children and a mystery young blonde-haired woman in tow. Rose had wanted to show
Fred her childhood home of Northam in north Devon. Despite all that had happened there, it was a trip down Memory Lane as
she hadn’t been home since she’d left almost a decade ago. Even though Fred wasn’t a drinker, Rose stopped off to take him
into The Golden Lion, where she chatted to some of her former neighbours from Morwenna Park Road. As Rita New, a chalet cleaner
at Westward Ho! holiday camp, explained:

I used to meet my husband up The Golden Lion at lunchtime, I had my daughter Tracy with me. It was in the 70s. I sat with
Margaret Wilcox – Barry Seathe and his wife were sat by the bar. The door opened and in walked a slim man in a tank top which
had a fawn background. He had two young women with him – one with a blonde bob and one with long dark hair, who was about
eighteen. Barry chatted to them then brought the dark one over to me and said, ‘Do you know who this is?’ I didn’t recognise
her, it’d been some years since she’d left [Northam] but she said ‘It’s Rose.’ She was smiling and looked lovely – she was
a beautiful girl. We chatted and I asked how she was and her parents. She said ‘I don’t have nothing to do
with them now. This is my husband [pointing to the man at the bar].’ I saw him [Fred] at the bar with the blonde. He was all
fidgety and on edge. She said they’d got married and couldn’t have a honeymoon at the time for some reason, so they were taking
a belated one. After a while Rose said, ‘We’ve got to go now – I’ve taken them to Exeter, now I’m going to show them Ilfracombe.’
When they went Barry came over to us. He said that blonde with him at the bar, that’s his ex-missus. ‘I find it awful funny,’
Barry said, ‘he takes his ex-missus on a belated honeymoon … I find it most weird that’s his ex-missus.