Rose West: The Making of a Monster (20 page)

Fred was known to be a liar and braggart; but there is often a kernel of truth in people’s boasts and lies, and there may
have been here. For it is possible that Rena, who was blonde, might still have been alive at this point, as it is by no means
certain when Fred actually killed her (and a few writers believe it wasn’t until August 1972 that she died). Rena was unconventional
and would not have turned a hair that Fred had married someone else while still married to her, or at going on honeymoon with
the couple if she thought it might help her find out what had happened to Charmaine. But if it was Rena, she was no longer
with them by the time they’d made their way down to Rose’s old home in Plymouth. It was here, at Benbow Street, that Rose
caught up with her little friend again: Joan Scobling. Joan invited them in, but Fred wouldn’t get out of the car. He sat
with the children as Joan passed orange squash through the car window to them while she and Rose chatted.

Had Rose then been involved in Rena’s murder? Or was the unknown girl Liz Agius, who was also blonde and whom Fred might well
refer to as ‘the ex-missus’? Or was it someone else? Whoever it was, it is almost certain that all three were sharing the
honeymoon bed.

During the stop-off at The Golden Lion in Northam, a
Transit van – the kind of vehicle that Fred owned – had been parked outside a nearby house. The lady who lived at the house
came out when she heard loud noises coming from the van, as if there were children inside it, kicking and banging to get out.
She looked in the window, where a sheet of boarding separated the long driver and passenger seat from the back so that it
was impossible to see inside. She then went into the pub and asked if anyone knew whose van it was, but no one laid claim
to it. Moments later, however, Fred, who had been listless and edgy at the bar, suddenly said, ‘Come on, we’re going now’
– and the honeymoon party upped and left. So had this been their van, or did the Plymouth trip take place another time? One
chilling thought is, as Rita recalled, ‘She [Rose] looked beautiful and spoke so nice, I’d have let her take my little daughter
to the shops. It makes you think.’

When the newlyweds finally arrived back in Gloucester, they were about to embark on another adventure together. Old Mr Zygmunt
liked Fred: he’d proved to be a fast and reliable worker doing up his properties, and he had availed himself of Fred’s young
wife on a regular basis. Now Mr Zygmunt wanted to return the favour and suggested, as Rose was pregnant again and their family
growing, that they move to one of his more spacious properties around the corner; a three-storey semi at 25 Cromwell Street.
The couple jumped at the chance, and walked the few hundred yards with the children and their belongings to their new home.

Rather like Midland Road, Cromwell Street was bedsit-land, with a mixture of students and immigrant workers; the house itself
had once been elegant, but was now rundown and gloomy. At the end of the road, close to number 25, was a car park with a cut-through
to the main shops in town, which Rose would often use when she went shopping. The house itself had an attic, a garage at the
back and a single-storey corrugated hut stood at the side of the house, used as a church by Seventh Day
Adventists. Number 25 also boasted a large cellar with a separate set of stairs down to it at the front of the house; pictures
of it which would be beamed around the world some twenty-three years later.

Despite the condition of the house, Fred knew he could soon get it round. At first they rented the house and then later accepted
Mr Zygmunt’s offer of a loan as a deposit to obtain a mortgage on the house. Rose was now on the property ladder: not bad
for a young girl from her impoverished background, or for her husband, who had spent his young life in dark and unsanitary
tied cottages. The newlyweds were proud of their achievements, and the very first person they invited round to show off their
home to was their friend Liz. Taking Liz on a tour of the house, Fred took her down the stone steps to the large cellar beneath.
The cellar was also dark and damp, with a low ceiling that made it difficult to stand up in. ‘I could soundproof it and use
it as my torture chamber,’ he joked to Liz. And very shortly, this is exactly what he and Rose would do, carrying out a test
run on Fred’s own little daughter.

Taking on Cromwell Street meant the couple had overstretched themselves – at least this is what Fred told his young bride
as he began turning the upstairs of the house into bedsits to get rental from them. Rose was said to have been against the
idea, and he’d hit her, letting her know he was in charge. They’d also drawn up a master and slave contract between them,
in which Rose agreed to give in to his every whim, although this was more of a private joke or sex aid in their perverted
marital toolbox.

As soon as Fred got home from work each evening, he started knocking down walls, banging nails into plasterboard and drilling
and wiring. The children had their rooms on the ground floor and, at the other side of the house, Fred had made a special
bedroom for his young wife where she could continue to entertain her Jamaican clients to boost the household coffers. ‘You
gotta do your bit for the marriage,’ he told Rose. But in reality,
Fred was earning enough from all his different jobs to keep the family without Rose having to obtain money for sex, when she
paid for it at all, or from letting out the top of the house. What Fred was actually doing was turning their new home into
a cross between Clarence Road, which had so impressed him with its numerous lodgers, drifters and others passing through,
and his fantasy house, where sex would be on tap and he could indulge his voyeuristic desires whenever it took his fancy –
which was most of the time.

The first lodgers moved in two or three weeks later. They were two boys, Benjamin Stanniland and Alan Davis, who were both
18, the same age as Rose, and which was likely to have been a deliberate move on Fred’s part. On the day they moved in, Rose
and Fred insisted on taking the boys out for a drink, where they were said to have talked nonstop about sex. Ben and Alan
were taken aback by this, but the couple were obviously ‘testing’ them out, as they had done with Liz the previous year.

That evening, when they all got back to the house, the boys were in for another shock when Rose changed into a see-through
top and got into bed with Ben and, later that night, with Alan. Fred had either put her up to this or the young girl was learning
fast from her Svengali. A night of enthusiastic sex with her lodgers probably also gave Rose a sense of power over the boys,
who in the morning dreaded bumping into the landlord. But Fred, of course, had been observing his wife’s performances from
behind the freshly drilled holes in the wall. And, as the lodgers were soon to find out, while drink and drugs were barely
tolerated at Cromwell Street, sleeping with the landlord’s wife was a fundamental rule of the house. Thus, between cooking
dinner, taking the children to school and keeping house, Rose would happily oblige. As another new lodger, David Evans, was
to remark: ‘She was the landlady but came upstairs now and then because she liked sex.’

Practising

Fred’s jest to his former neighbour, Mrs Agius, would soon prove true when he started work on the cellar at Cromwell Street.
The cellar would undergo many changes over the years as Fred dug out vast quantities of earth. At first he divided it into
a playroom, a place for his tools and another, larger area, which he soundproofed and equipped with vibrators, some implements
he’d fashioned in metal, duct tape and ties made from ripped-up old sheets.

Just a year after Charmaine’s murder, and within a few weeks of arriving at Cromwell Street, the couple turned their attentions
to little Anna-Marie, whom they led down into the cellar. Anna-Marie’s account of what happened next is the first evidence
of Rose and Fred abusing together, and of the sheer cruelty and callousness of which 18-year-old Rose was capable.

As the child asked what was going on, Rose grinned weirdly at her, a look that meant ‘she was really going to enjoy herself’.
Fred ordered the little girl to strip off, but she wasn’t quick enough for Rose, who ripped her dress from her. ‘You heard
your father! Get that off!’ she told the terrified child. Having been forced, naked, onto a mattress on the floor, Anna-Marie
began to cry and begged her parents to stop. But Rose coldly ignored her distress and snapped, ‘Just shut up and be quiet!’
After Fred spread-eagled her legs and tied her hands above her head, Rose squatted on the child’s face to stop her struggling
and started ‘scratching and pawing’ the little girl, until her undeveloped breasts bled (something she would later do with
their other victims).

The couple then produced a glass, Pyrex-type bowl with liquid in it, which later turned red like rosehip syrup. This could
have been blood, but Fred’s ideas were so insane – he’d even become obsessed with trying to breed Rose with a bull – that
the substance could equally have been animal sperm mixed with
blood. It could also have been sperm from Rose’s black clients, whose used condoms Fred insisted she saved, so that he could
mix the contents together and use them for his weird experiments. Whatever the material was in that bowl, he inserted it into
the child’s vagina using some kind of implement or vibrator, as she screamed in agony. Rose and Fred then left her lying there
and returned an hour later, to torture the little girl all over again. And as she tried to resist, Rose repeatedly told her
‘not to be so silly’ and encouraged Fred to ‘get on with it’.

Fred then raped the child as Rose stood by. Perhaps Rose was trying to understand her own experiences as a child, as can happen
in cases where women who are abused in childhood go on to abuse with a male partner. At the very least, it demonstrates that
Rose was not just Fred’s willing assistant in the abuse, but that she’d joined in with it and lacked all compassion for the
child. Strangely, however, Rose did apologise to Anna-Marie afterwards. At first, when the little girl couldn’t walk because
of her injuries, Rose had laughed at her; but then, following her into the bathroom, she had given her a sanitary towel to
mop up the blood. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Everybody does it to every girl; it’s a father’s job.’ This remark possibly speaks
volumes about Rose’s own childhood experiences with Bill and her subsequent attitude. She then went on to say, ‘Don’t worry
about it, and don’t say anything to anybody. It’s something everyone does but they don’t talk about it.’

This attack marked the point when Fred had taken Rose onto the next stage in their sadosexual games, and where they would
begin to look further afield for their enjoyment.

I
T WAS ONE SATURDAY
evening in September that Rose slipped into the passenger seat beside Fred and they went out for a spin in his grey Ford
Popular, leaving the lodger’s girlfriend to keep an eye on the children. One of the places the couple liked to drive around
was the Tewkesbury area of Gloucestershire. Fred and his brother John had gone to dances there in their teens, and it was
not far from where Rosie used to live in Bishop’s Cleeve.

The newlyweds had not had much success earlier that evening, and it was getting towards half past ten when they finally spotted
their prey: a teenage girl hitchhiking on the other side of the road. Fred turned the car around and they drove back down
the road, pulling up alongside the young girl. Sixteen-year-old Caroline Owens looked worried until Rose wound down her window
and, smiling sweetly at her, asked, ‘Where are you going?’

Caroline ‘relaxed’ at seeing a teenage girl not much older than herself in the car and went over to talk to her. She told
Rose she was hitching back to her home in Cinderford, in the Forest of Dean. Hitchhiking was common practice amongst young
people at the time and Caroline knew to be careful. Rose was immediately attracted to the very pretty young girl with an urchin
haircut and offered her a lift home. As Caroline
had chatted through the window to Rose, she’d noticed the driver of the car was a grubby little man who was much older than
his passenger, but felt safe getting in because Rose was there.

Although Caroline was very much a teenager of the time in her check flares and tank top, Rose wore a full-skirted red dress
with a Peter Pan collar and white bobby socks – looking more fifties rock and roll (her husband and her father’s era) than
seventies glam rock of the time. Caroline soon found this was Rose’s own unique style of dress – the frock was the same one
that Rose’s former neighbour, Rita, had seen her wearing on her honeymoon, and both women were struck by how very attractive
Rose was at this age.

The couple asked Caroline about herself: who she’d been visiting and where she went; information they would later use to hunt
her down. Rose, in particular, made her feel comfortable, so Caroline poured out her heart to her, telling her how she’d been
to see her boyfriend Tony in Tewkesbury and about the difficulties she had getting on with her stepfather at home. As she
spoke she could see Fred possessed a roguish charm, but still wondered why someone as young and pretty as Rose would be married
to him. In the course of the conversation, Caroline went on to tell them she was looking for a job. Rose and Fred glanced
at the girl and back at each other, replying in unison, ‘We need a nanny to look after our daughters.’

Dropping Caroline off at her house in the Forest of Dean, the couple returned the following day. Only this time they had their
two small children in tow, and Rose was clutching the baby. Caroline’s parents were apprehensive of Fred, but as he and Rose
gave every impression of being an ordinary family, they welcomed them over their threshold. Caroline cooed over the baby and
‘fell in love with the children’ straight away. Fred knew only too well the power of using his toddlers to entice teenage
girls back to his caravan, and now he and Rose were
brazenly using the same ploy to entice the young girl to move in with them right under her parents’ noses.