Rose West: The Making of a Monster (2 page)

The remains still had fetters and gags in place; duct tape mummifying one victim’s head had a straw poked through the mask
into a nostril, to allow just enough air to keep her alive during the torture; another had a wide leather belt strapped around
her head and fastened beneath her chin. Most victims had been decapitated and one young woman had been scalped. In some cases,
victims had been suspended from a hook in the ceiling to increase their pain before death, and at least one young woman had
been kept alive for several days during the torture. All the bodies had been dissected and trophies kept of fingers, toes,
kneecaps and other body parts which, to this day, have never been found. The victims had been dehumanised.

Some years earlier, on Radio 4’s
In the Psychiatrist’s Chair,
Professor Knight had said, ‘I think the human race is pretty rotten. The more I see of it, the more rotten it becomes … We
are a malignancy on the face of the earth.’

This case could only have served to confirm his view and, unsurprisingly perhaps, he then went on to say how he preferred
animals to human beings.

By the time Professor Knight had assembled all the bones found at Cromwell Street and two other burial sites, the tally of
victims had reached twelve. Identification of the bodies took some time as half the victims had not been reported missing,
but they were all found to be the remains of girls and young women
estimated to be between the ages of 15 and 25. They ranged from students passing through to young girls who had been in care,
and others.

Yet, incredibly, these most heinous and sickening of crimes were said to have happened at the hands of the friendly, middle-aged
couple who owned the house: Rose and Fred West, the smiling assassins, whose names were to become forever linked with evil.
At the time, as pictures of the couple appeared on every news media, showing Fred, a slight man with curly hair and a gap
in his teeth, with his arm around his wife Rose, a dumpy housewife, it seemed absurd to even begin to contemplate the notion.

But, more incredible still, when Fred West took his own life while on remand for the murders, it was widely held that the
lesser charges brought against his wife would be dropped as there would not be enough evidence against her. Based on the fact
that men are almost always the dominant partner in serial-killer relationships, many people believed that Rose would surely
have been, at worst, complicit under coercion, possibly covering for her husband, who carried out the murders. But this wasn’t
the case. The prosecution brought charges against Rose West for ten of the twelve murders for which Fred was to have faced
trial, including one she was alleged to have carried out on her own while Fred was in prison. A woman standing trial for ‘stranger’
murder is extremely rare, for serial murder is exceptionally so; and, as Rose pleaded ‘not guilty’, the public waited with
bated breath for the outcome.

What Constitutes a Serial Killer?

Put simply, in the UK it is someone who kills a minimum of three victims on separate occasions with a ‘cooling-off’ period
of at least thirty days between each death. (In the US it is defined
as five murders over a set period of time.) A serial killer differs from a spree killer who kills a large number of people
in a short space of time, usually in just a few hours and within the same geographical area. Spree killings also tend to be
highly visible and usually result in the perpetrator killing themselves. These are cases such as the Dunblane tragedy, and,
more recently, Derrick Bird in the Lake District, who slaughtered twelve victims within a few hours before turning the gun
on himself. A serial killer is defined as someone like Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, who murdered thirteen women
over a five-year span, with a cooling-off period of a few weeks or months between each murder.

Serial killers are also referred to as ‘addictive killers’. This is because, once they have passed the psychological and moral
boundary of the first murder, they then develop a taste for it and, to satisfy their hunger, kill again. While a spree killer
usually has a build-up of psychological problems that come to a head before they set off on the rampage with a gun, serial
killers often operate by stealth, so that we do not even know they are there. Examples include Dennis Nilsen, Dr Harold Shipman
and, of course, Fred and Rose West.

The Rarity That Is Rose

Aside from Rose West, there have been only three other cases of women standing trial for serial murder in the UK in modern
times. They are Myra Hindley (who, like Rose West, acted with a male partner); Beverly Allitt, a nurse convicted in 1991 of
killing children in her care: an ‘Angel of Death’; and Mary Wilson, an elderly woman in the north of England who killed a
succession of husbands in the 1950s, falling into the category of a ‘Black Widow’. None of these were mothers like Rose and,
in each of these cases, the tally fell far short of the ten murders for which
Rose stood accused. And in the US and elsewhere across the globe there are fewer than a handful of such examples.

Standing in the dock at Winchester Crown Court in November 1995, the plump, 42-year-old Gloucester housewife and mother of
eight, in her frumpy skirt, sensible shoes and oversized spectacles, looked as if she’d be more at home addressing a Girl
Guide meeting, or up to her elbows in flour, rolling out pastry for a steak and kidney pie, rather than on trial for serial
murder. But because the murders took place over twenty years earlier, she hadn’t looked like this then – but had been a beautiful,
slim, dark-haired teenager and young woman.

Rose had always denied any knowledge of the murders and because there was no hard evidence against her – no one had seen her
kidnap the girls or take them down into the cellar, and there wasn’t even a fingerprint to link them to her – the judge permitted
the prosecution to try her on ‘similar fact’ evidence. This meant the jury would hear from other West victims whose attacks
formed part of a pattern of behaviour repeated in the killings. A number of young women, all of whom had been lucky to escape
with their lives from the Wests, then took to the witness stand, where they testified to Rose’s grooming or abduction of them,
and her sadistic sexual attacks on them. Two of these young girls had been a test run for the couple’s appalling crimes, and
all the victims spoke of Rose as having exceeded even the brutal excesses of her husband Fred. It was the grimmest of Grimm
fairy tales.

As the jury returned to give their verdict on each murder over a period of two days, Rosemary Pauline West stood rigidly before
them, staring straight ahead. Each time the foreman was asked, ‘How do you find the defendant?’, his reply was the same: ‘guilty
by a unanimous verdict’ of the murders of Lynda Gough (19), Carol Ann Cooper (15), Lucy Partington (21), Thérèse Siegenthaler(21),
Shirley Hubbard (15),Juanita Mott (18), Alison Chambers (16), Shirley Robinson (18), Charmaine West (8) and Heather West (16).

Rose was found not simply to have been an unsuspecting wife and victim of Fred, as she had maintained, but a primary player
along with Fred in the murders of all the young women found at Cromwell Street, including her own daughter, Heather. In the
case of her little stepdaughter, Charmaine, Rose was found to have killed her while Fred was in prison. This was at a previous
address in Midland Road, Gloucester, where the remains of this once happy little girl were found buried beneath the concrete
floor. The other victims had either worked for the couple or been plucked or lured off the streets by them, with Rose playing
a leading role.

However, as Rose continues to maintain her innocence, startling new evidence has recently come to light which appears to lay
to rest her guilt or innocence in at least one of these murders. It is a shocking eyewitness account and included in this
book.

As the judge sentenced Rose to ten terms of life imprisonment for the murders, he told her, ‘If attention is paid to what
I think, you will
never be
released.’ The gallery then erupted into cries of ‘Hear, hear!’

Staring blankly back at him from behind her large plastic-framed glasses, the defendant was then taken down and driven away
from the baying mob, to spend the rest of her days behind bars. Yet Rosemary Pauline West had once been a young girl full
of hopes and dreams for the future, just like her victims. She’d even had a plan … Where did it all go wrong? And could it
have turned out any differently?

T
HE VILLAGE OF BISHOP’S
Cleeve is just a few miles from Cheltenham and lies at the foot of the highest hill in the Cotswolds. To the south of the
village is a new estate, built in the 1950s to house young families coming into the area to work in the growing industries
there. This estate, The Smith’s, as it is known, is surrounded by fields, fresh air and glorious views of the Gloucestershire
countryside.

It was here as the swinging sixties petered out, bringing in the new dawn of the seventies, that a beautiful, slim dark girl
jumped out of bed and yanked open the curtains to let in the day. Such was her excitement that she barely noticed the smoke
rising from the neighbour’s bonfire as it began forming a giant curl up to the sky. It was a crisp, sunny winter’s day; the
girl had been waiting for what seemed like an age for this moment, and had slept only in fits and starts the night before.
Taking the rag dolls she’d made for her two little friends from the window ledge, she stuffed them into her bag, along with
the few items of clothing she had and a pair of shoes. Then, taking a last look around the room and the bed she shared with
her two younger brothers, she closed the door on her childhood forever.

Running down the stairs, the girl hugged her auntie Eileen and bade her mother, Daisy, a fond, if awkward, farewell. Her father
stayed in the kitchen; he’d already let her know how he felt on
the subject of her leaving. There was nothing more to be said. Her mother watched her go, worried: although her daughter was
growing up, she was still very young in her ways. Even down to the white, knee-high schoolgirl socks she wore with her heels.

Kissing her little brothers Graham and Gordon goodbye, the girl set off towards the Gloucestershire hamlet of Stoke Orchard,
humming ‘I Say a Little Prayer for You’ to herself, her long, dark hair billowing behind her in the breeze.

‘Come back and see us, Rosie!’ the boys called to her from the front gate.

Rosie turned and smiled at them. ‘Promise!’ she called back, not sure if her father would let her, then carried on her way,
swinging her bag as she went, not a care in the world.

She had not long since had her birthday and today was the start of the new life she’d promised herself. Sweet 16 and she was
off to meet her boyfriend. Well, a
man
in fact, some twelve years older than her, but who would protect her and take care of her, she was sure of that – just as
her own father had …

‘Forever, forever, you’ll stay in my heart and I will love you; Forever, forever, never to part, Oh how I love you …’ The
words of the Aretha Franklin song swirled round in her head. Elated at the prospect of moving in with Fred and his two little
girls, she was full of hopes and dreams for their future together. She had big plans, starting with finding a new, permanent
home for them all.

Yet, little more than eighteen months later, at 17, Rosie, as the family affectionately called her, would kill her first victim
alone and unaided. And a year later, she and her husband would entice and murder another two young girls, making Rose a fully-fledged
serial killer while still in her teens: a disturbing, if unprecedented, accolade by any standards.

In her early twenties, Rose would kill again and again. Her last known murder was in 1987 when she was 33 years of age: the
victim was her own daughter, Heather. But how did an ordinary teenage girl and young woman become a cold and
calculating serial killer? Or was she never ordinary? What was it eating young Rosie West? To discover this we must go back
further still.

Northam, north Devon, 1950s

In earlier times, the village of Northam had been an insular and remote community which, with its craggy coastline and surrounding
countryside, was as wild and rugged as any described in
Wuthering Heights and Jamaica Inn.
Dark and desolate during the long harsh winters, with tales of smuggling, shipwrecks, drownings and jilted lovers, it was
the place of the lost and the damned. Certainly Hubba and the Danes, who invaded there in the ninth century, must have thought
so. The village still bears a plaque at ‘Bloody Corner’ to mark the mass slaughter of Hubba’s army of almost a thousand men,
now buried at Bone Hill near the back of the church. In later times, during the expansion of the British Empire, Northam boasted
a railway line that came from neighbouring Bideford but went nowhere, the line closing almost as soon as it had opened. All
in all, the stuff of Gothic fairy tales.

Yet, though the winters were difficult in Northam, the summers were a different matter, particularly in more recent times
of the post-war years of the 1940s and 1950s, when the village and surrounding areas became a holiday destination. And, just
as the tourists enjoyed it, so too did local families – particularly the children, who spent long hot days on the beaches
or exploring the wild countryside of the Northam Burrows coastal plain, stealing rides on the horses that roamed freely there.
There was also the excitement of finding unexploded Second World War bombs on the beach, when the children would rush off
to tell their parents. The whole village had to stay inside until the army bomb-disposal unit detonated them, the children
letting out a loud cheer as the window frames rattled as if to signal the all-clear.

This was to be the birthplace of Rosie Letts, who would join the ranks of the village’s few famous inhabitants, including
Sir Walter Raleigh, who once had a house there, and Charles Kingsley, author of the
Water Babies
and
Westward Ho!,
after which the nearby holiday resort would be named. Though Rose, of course, would become infamous.