Rose West: The Making of a Monster (22 page)

As they busily worked together, they swore at the girl, calling her a ‘fucking bitch’. Fred waved a fist in her face, threatening
her: ‘Do you want some more of this, bitch?’ He and Rose then stripped Caroline, and bound her hands together with rope. Having
rendered the poor girl helpless, they then pushed her onto a stained mattress on the floor. Rose stripped her off and assaulted
her digitally, examining her vagina. Fred joined in, both describing the appearance of her vagina aloud for some time, as
if the pair were, once more, performing some strange laboratory experiment like two white-coated, insane boffins. Fred instructed
Rose to hold the girl’s legs apart and then lashed her with the buckle end of a leather belt, telling her he wanted to ‘flatten
her clitoris’ and how she’d ‘enjoy sex much more after this.’

Fred and Rose would always tell their victims they were torturing them for their own good; and perhaps they even believed
it, as they might have been told this as children, although it was actually about their pleasure as they stood grinning at
Caroline’s pain.

As soon as Fred finished, Rose left the room and came back with some water; which she proceeded to wipe Caroline with to ‘cool
her down’. Once more Rose was the kindly caregiver. As Caroline remarked, Rose ‘was a sadistic, demonic, sex-crazed beast’
one minute, and a softly spoken ‘Gloucester housewife’ the next. Rose then performed oral sex on Caroline while Fred had sex
with Rose from behind. Rose and Fred eventually fell asleep with Caroline still tied up beside them. Early that morning, the
doorbell went and Fred answered. The girl could hear a man in the hall and called out for help. Rose began cursing at her
and pushed a pillow over her face, pressing all her weight onto it, smothering her. Caroline acted dead in the hope she would
release her grip, and when the pillow was finally removed it was Fred’s face staring down at her.

He was furious with Caroline, and threatened to keep her in the cellar and let his ‘black friends’ have her. ‘And when we’re
finished we’ll kill you and bury you under the paving stones … !’ Fred had used this same threat to Liz Agius regarding her
husband. He then told Caroline there were hundreds of girls killed and buried in the cellar, and that nobody would find her
there. Although this was just a boast at the time, Fred was becoming increasingly preoccupied with the idea – to such an extent
that he was now fantasising about it.

It was breakfast time and the children were starting to get up. While Rose went out to see to them, Fred took the opportunity
to rape Caroline. As soon as he saw she was upset he, bizarrely, started to cry himself. He begged her not to tell Rose and
insisted Caroline was there ‘solely for Rose’s pleasure’, and the young girl had no doubt he was telling the truth. ‘When
Rose is
pregnant, she gets these lesbian urges … and she wanted you,’ he explained, looking nervously at the door, fearing his volatile
wife would ‘kill both of us if she finds out!’

His fear of Rose finding out appears to have been genuine as he didn’t ejaculate inside Caroline, but withdrew rather than
leave traces of what he’d done. And in a bid to buy Caroline’s silence, Fred then struck a deal with her. Rose desperately
wanted Caroline to stay, he told her, and if she kept quiet about the rape and agreed to move back in with them, he’d let
her go. Doing whatever it took to stay alive, Caroline agreed. Fred then tied the naked girl to the chair so that Rose didn’t
suspect anything, and went out to tell his wife the ‘good news’. Rose came rushing back into the room and threw her arms around
Caroline, delighted she was staying.

Caroline was untied and they helped her bathe: Rose washing her hair in the bath while Fred gently brushed the gum left from
the duct tape from her hair afterwards. They then allowed her to get dressed and have breakfast, after which she helped Rose
with the vacuuming as if nothing had happened, as the young girl silently looked for her escape route. Later that morning,
Fred ran Rose, Caroline and the children down to the launderette at Eastgate Street, then drove off to his job at Permali’s.
After helping Rose sort the washing into the machines, Caroline told her she was popping out to get some cigarettes but ran
home to her mother’s again, who, on seeing the purple cuts and bruising to her daughter’s face, called the police. Caroline
believes that the rape saved her life. ‘I think I was going to be taken to that cellar. It was her hands around my neck,’
she said.

When police officers knocked at the door of Cromwell Street later that day, Rose launched into an onslaught of expletives:
‘Don’t be so fucking daft! What do you think I am?’ The police then asked to search the couple’s car, at which Rose snapped,
‘Please your bloody self!’ Once more, Rose was either in denial of what she’d done, or she arrogantly believed she wouldn’t
get
caught. This is typically symptomatic of narcissism. Narcissists see themselves as special and as not having to follow the
same rules as others. They are also self-centred, with little regard for anyone else. As well as being to some extent genetic,
this behaviour is also partly as a result of early disturbing experiences. It is seen in abused and neglected children and
can develop from feelings of worthlessness in childhood. Narcissists also often fantasise about getting their own back on
others, and this is important in the development of sexual sadism. Rose appeared to exhibit this personality trait. As did
her father, Bill Letts.

As the police looked over the car, they found a button that had been ripped off Caroline’s trousers in the struggle. Officers
then searched the house, where they found evidence of the parcel tape that had been used to bind her head, and a substantial
amount of pornographic films and photographs. The newly-weds were arrested.

At the police station, Rose admitted sexual assault, but said she had stopped when Caroline had asked her to. Fred denied
raping Caroline, which, again, was because he feared Rose’s reaction if she found out. The case was heard by Gloucester Magistrates’
Court on 12 January 1973. Caroline was too traumatised to relive her ordeal by giving evidence in the witness box. Facing
the perpetrators of her attack in court was a hideous prospect for any teenager still suffering nightmares from it. Partly
because of this, charges of rape against Rose and Fred were reduced to indecent assault and ABH, which the couple agreed to
plead guilty to.

The prosecution argued that as Caroline had not screamed when the gag came off, and because she had not tried to escape the
following morning, she had offered ‘passive cooperation’. They might as well have said, ‘She’d been asking for it.’ Fred wore
a suit and did his best to look remorseful. ‘I don’t know why I did it, Your Honour sir, it just happened’, he told the bench.
And because the case had collapsed against him some
years earlier when he’d got his young sister pregnant, it meant he had no sexual offences on record. Besides, the Gloucester
builder looked a ‘docile’ kind of chap, the court decided. Rose, who had no record of any kind, must have looked pitiful as
she stood in the dock in her schoolgirl socks, a teenage mum with three children at home and another on the way. In trying
to get herself off the hook, Rose bizarrely told the court that she was going to receive psychiatric help for her ‘lesbian
ways’.

After weighing it all up, the bench looked favourably on the psychopathic couple, and fined them just fifty pounds each. It
barely rated as a telling off, and a small piece featured in the local paper, the
Gloucester Citizen,
that night: ‘City Pair Stripped and Assaulted Girl’. Knowing her family would see the article might have shamed most people
into stopping, but Rose lacked all inhibition and never once cared what others thought of her. This kind of grandiosity, and
being only able to focus on one’s own needs at the expense of the feelings of others, is also found in individuals who are
narcissistic and psychopathic.

As Stephen West was to say of his parents’ case many years later, the court had effectively told them to ‘go for it’. And
they did, for just two months later a young girl would be dead, and there would be five more murders in the next two years
alone.
^*

The case was also a slap in the face for 17-year-old Caroline, who had been brave enough to report her terrifying ordeal.
‘It made me feel like I wasn’t worth anything,’ she said years later, and after the case she attempted suicide. Some crime
writers believe the verdict also led Rose and Fred to make a pact to avoid finding themselves in this situation again. That
is to say, they would not let their future prey go, but would quietly murder and dispose of them instead. As author Colin
Wilson suggests, this
may have encouraged Fred to increase his sadism towards his victims, as he knew they were not going to live to tell the tale.
The same could probably be said of Rose. But what seems more likely is that, as the couple became increasingly wrapped up
in their joint madness, death was almost certain to have happened sooner or later as their sex games escalated to the next
level to get their kicks. Caroline had lived, as they had not yet reached the next stage; the court case had the effect of
hastening this.

The couple also appeared to be delusional, as they did not seem to think they would be caught or even that, given half a chance,
Caroline would run off from the launderette and call the police. Neither Rose nor Fred believed normal rules applied to them.
This was, however, the last chance of diverting Rose from the path she was now on with Fred, as the cruel, perverse couple
left the court to carry on with their sex games. And in the New Year, Fred would finish his work in the cellar, turning it
into a torture chamber.

R
OSE WAS FIVE MONTHS
pregnant and, already having three small children to care for, decided she needed another nanny. It was then she remembered
Lynda Gough. Or, at least, she remembered Lynda, and the job was the pretext for luring her to the house. Lynda had been the
girlfriend of Ben Stanniland, one of the lodgers at Cromwell Street. When her relationship with him had broken down, she’d
gone out with another lodger and had become a regular visitor to Cromwell Street. During that time, Rose had taken a fancy
to the pretty girl and encouraged her to share her ‘men problems’ with her; Lynda had also babysat for the couple on occasions.

Lynda worked as a seamstress at the Co-op on Barton Street, and still lived at home with her parents in Gloucester. Fred took
Rose round to see Lynda one evening, waiting in the car, out of sight of the house, while she knocked the door. He’d learnt
from their last sortie to Caroline’s parents that it was less likely to arouse suspicion if Rose turned up alone. Rose smiled
sweetly at Lynda and suggested they go for a drink together, where she asked the young woman to move into Cromwell Street
to be the couple’s nanny. June Gough, Lynda’s mother, briefly caught sight of the young woman who called round for her daughter,
describing her later as dark, slightly overweight and several months pregnant.

The following month, just two weeks before Lynda’s birthday, June Gough came home to find her oldest child had gone, taking
her clothes and belongings with her. She had left her parents a note to say:

Dear Mum and Dad,

Please don’t worry about me. I have got a flat and will come and see you sometime.

Love Lyn.

But, tragically, her parents never saw her again.

Lynda, like Caroline before her, was vulnerable. While Caroline had problems with the fallout of her parents’ divorce, Lynda
had slight learning difficulties. She had attended Longford Special School and completed her education at a private school
in Midland Road, close to where the Wests had lived before. Her mother, June, and father, a fireman in the city, worried about
their daughter, but being sensible parents wanted to give her enough rein to achieve her independence and find out what she
wanted to do with her life, rather than being overly protective towards her.

Lynda was petite with long fair hair, and wore a maxi-coat and black-rimmed glasses that were fashionable at the time. She
was also feisty and headstrong and it wasn’t long before Rose wanted to possess her. Rose and Fred had already rehearsed with
their children and Caroline Owens, and were now about to give full vent to their brutal sexual fantasies with the new nanny,
whose murder would mark the start of a pattern of grooming, kidnap, bondage, sodomy, torture and death of at least another
eight victims.

Whether Lynda died from her injuries or by being strangled or by some other means is not known. But when her body was eventually
unearthed from beneath the bathroom floor, her decapitated head was still gagged and bound with the same
sticky brown parcel tape that the couple had used on Caroline Owens. Lynda’s eyes had, however, been deliberately left uncovered
so that she could see what was about to happen to her. This meant Rose and Fred could enjoy watching the young girl’s terror
and pain as they meted out the kind of sadism they’d seen in the hard-core pornographic materials – possibly including snuff
videos – they kept in the house. At some stage during Lynda’s horrific torture in the cellar, her trussed-up, naked body was
suspended upside down from a hook in the ceiling, where further abuse took place over a number of days. (Fred had drilled
holes in the cellar ceiling to hang the girls from, as he would later tell his son.) Lynda was believed to have been anally
and vaginally raped during the attack, and Fred’s handmade implements used on her before death.

Rose’s actions immediately after the murder demonstrate her cold and callous attitude towards the young woman she had deliberately
sought out to replace Caroline as her lover, nanny and, finally, victim. Going up to Lynda’s room, Rose began sifting through
her belongings. The clothes Rose didn’t like, she discarded in black bin bags and burnt them; those she took a fancy to, she
kept and wore herself without a shred of remorse. Fred even expressed shock at this, for, as he was to say many years later:
‘Fuck me, she’d killed her and had her fucking clothes on. She’s wearing the girl’s shoes … and her dressing gown. I said
“You wore her fucking clothes after you killed her.” To which she replied, “I washed ’em.”’