Rose West: The Making of a Monster (23 page)

Fred, meanwhile, had the body to dispose of. Using his skills from the abattoir to dissect the body was something he was likely
to have derived sexual pleasure from, as there was no practical reason for him to do so: there was plenty of room to bury
the girl intact either at Cromwell Street or in the fields around Much Marcle. Yet none of the victims would remain whole.
Fred’s apparent addiction to death and dismembering corpses also tied into his obsession with abortions. While there is
nothing to suggest Rose shared his enthusiasm for dismembering, she didn’t appear to care what he did to the bodies as long
as he ‘got rid’ of them.

Fred cut down the tiny girl and laid her out, then began slicing off her legs at the hips and decapitating her. Finally he
removed over a hundred bones which, along with the fingers and toes, he kept as macabre trophies. Lynda’s remains, such as
they were, were then dropped into a concrete hole (the mechanic’s pit) in the garage-cum-lean-to at the back of the house.
The clothes Lynda had been wearing were also tossed into the pit, along with her partial denture for the front tooth she had
lost. The hole was then filled in with rubbish and dirt, as if the poor young woman was garbage herself. After this, Rose
probably scrubbed the copious dark blood from the cellar, as she was to do at their last murder scene in the 1980s. The couple
then went back to their normal daily lives: Rose cooking the children’s meals and Fred at Permali’s during the day and building
at night – neither sparing a thought for their victim whose young life they’d so cruelly snuffed out.

Ten days after Lynda left home, there was a knock at the door. Rose opened it to find Mrs Gough on the doorstep. June Gough
had been to the Co-op where Lynda had worked prior to going to the Wests’. The manageress of the needlework room had pointed
her in the direction of Cromwell Street. Lynda’s concerned mother asked to see her daughter, but Rose denied any knowledge
of her. ‘No, never heard of her,’ she told the poor woman, as did Fred when he came to the door behind her. But Mrs Gough
recognised the pregnant woman as having called round to her house to see Lynda just a few weeks earlier. However, still getting
nowhere with the couple, she was about to go when she spotted something familiar about the slippers and cardigan Rose was
wearing: they were Lynda’s. Looking around the side of the house, she also saw her daughter’s clothes flapping on the washing
line in the breeze.

Rose had to think quickly, and came up with the story of yes, now she thought about it, Lynda had been there for a short while.
But they’d had to sack her because she had been hitting Anna-Marie (this was clearly a case of Rose projecting what she’d
done to the child onto the nanny). Lynda had simply left the things she didn’t want any more at the house, she told Mrs Gough.
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June Gough then asked the couple if they knew where her daughter had gone. ‘Ah yes.’ They suddenly remembered she’d mentioned
something about going to Weston-super-Mare, the nearest seaside to Gloucester, and shut the door on her.

To put an end to any questions that might be raised in the house, Rose then went upstairs, sat on one of the lodger’s bed
and told him, ‘She hit the children while she was babysitting. She won’t be round the house any more.’

There were by now eight young male lodgers at Cromwell Street. And, with all the comings and goings of the house – Rose’s clients,
the lodgers’ music blaring out, the parties and Fred banging away in the cellar doing his building work – no one suspected
any different. Not least Mr and Mrs Gough, who went to Somerset to look for Lynda, and tried the Salvation Army and other
missing persons’ agencies, but who would have no word of their daughter for over twenty years. While back at Cromwell Street,
Rose and Fred breathed a sigh of relief some weeks later as they realised they’d quite simply got away with murder.

By this time Fred had committed at least three murders, which under UK classification made him a serial killer; for Rose,
it was the second. Lynda was, however, Rose and Fred’s first murder together, and sharing this evil act would have increased
the sexual excitement and sense of power they derived from it. Rose, in particular, would have felt empowered by murdering
a young woman her own age, and may have wrought her revenge on Lynda as an act of contempt for her peers who had spurned and
bullied her since her childhood. It would also have made her realise she could kill anyone, not just a small child, and this
would have felt as heady as it was compelling when, six months later, she and Fred went out hunting again.

D
URING THE HOT SUMMER
that year, the Seventh Day Adventist church in Cromwell Street was having work done, which meant there was scaffolding all
over the neighbouring garden at number 25. This gave Fred an idea and, just a few weeks after murdering Lynda, he decided
to extend the house to make a second bathroom with toilet and shower on the ground floor – all ‘knock-off’, of course, as
were most things in the house.
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The new bathroom would be for the use of Rose and the family, rather than their having to share the upstairs facilities with
the lodgers. After knocking down the garage-cum-lean-to attached to the kitchen, Fred built a brick extension and put in a
concrete floor over Lynda’s remains. Rose helped him with this work. ‘She could mix plaster all right. Dig holes, everything,’
Fred was to say of his wife who, although small and heavily pregnant at the time, was still as physically strong as ever.
One of Fred’s former workmates who called round remembered seeing a pregnant Rose standing on the extension roof at night
in a pair of boots, applying tar from a bucket by lamplight. The only time Rose stopped was to see to the children or to have
sex with Fred’s workmates. ‘When I was at Permali’s,’ Fred bragged, ‘the blokes were taking an hour off and going up and fucking
Rose.’

By August the work was almost finished when Rose went into labour. Bringing the new baby home and admiring the extension,
effectively a mausoleum to Lynda, the couple then set off on holiday with all the children and Bill (Grampy) Letts in tow.
Rose’s parents had made their peace with their daughter some time before, and her father had become a regular visitor to Cromwell
Street. Perhaps because Fred was not literate and Rose had always been the organiser of the two, she booked the family holiday
at Westward Ho! caravan park, just a mile down the road from her childhood home of Northam. Fred and Bill took turns with
the driving, while Anna-Marie sat beside her dad making roll-ups for him. Rose had only booked one caravan, which would have
to be shared between Fred, the newborn baby, three small children, Bill and herself. Daisy, possibly not wanting to spend
any time in such close proximity with either man, declined to go.

Rose, who by now had broken every taboo, including murder, was sleeping with her father again. As Rose’s loud groans came
from the family trailer at all hours of the night and day, her appetite for sex continued to be insatiable, even though she’d
only given birth two or three weeks earlier. In Gloucester Maternity Hospital, Rose finally received the news – ‘it’s a boy’
– which she and Fred had been longing for since his spell in prison two years earlier. Fred was so delighted to have a son
that he’d rushed down the ward bearing a huge bunch of flowers and a box of chocolates for Rose – her only presents from him
since the coat and dress he’d given her three years earlier and, like them, probably stolen. The happy couple called the little
boy Stephen – but were about to find out that Fred already had a son by the same name when the Department of Health and Social
Security (DHSS) and a
former girlfriend got in touch after his return from holiday.

Fred had worked with Margaret McAvoy on the Mr Whippy ice-cream van in Glasgow in 1966, eighteen months after Rena had given
birth to Anna-Marie. Margaret had been a quiet girl who had fallen for Fred’s charms only to be let down by him. Now she was
having a breakdown and needed help with the 8-year-old until she recovered. On top of this, the DHSS were after Fred for back-maintenance
for the child he’d denied was his – yet with the same curly hair and twinkling blue eyes, Steven was the spit of his father.
And, strangely, given Rose’s attitude towards her other stepchildren, she agreed to take the little boy in.

Bill offered to take Fred to pick up his son from a car park in Preston, which was halfway between Fred and Margaret’s homes.
He’d volunteered as it gave him a chance to show off the brand-new Mazda he’d recently bought himself. While spending next
to nothing on his family, Bill had taken out an annual replacement deal with a garage in Cleeve. This caused further problems
between he and Daisy, who must have wondered what the unlikely friendship that had recently developed between her husband
and her son-in-law was all about. What she couldn’t have guessed was that it was based on their mutual obsession with sex,
and was now as cemented as the concrete floor Fred had just laid in the bathroom.

While Rose might have welcomed the little 8-year-old to her home, she probably changed her mind when she opened his little
suitcase, as it was full of nappies. Her own baby Stephen was just six weeks old, and Mae, a year old, was also in nappies.
With Heather not yet 3, Anna-Marie coming up to 9 and Steven now living with them, Rose had five little ones to care for,
including the baby. On top of this, Fred insisted she still see her clients and made a large sign for the house at work, spelling
out ‘25 Cromwell Street’ in metal letters, to make sure no one who might want to call missed it. And the services on offer
at the
house soon became so well known that the local sex shop directed their trade there. Rose was 19 and washed out, and Fred’s
suggestion to buy herself a bottle of Sanatogen to keep up her strength did little to help matters. Soon the couple decided
they needed a new nanny.

November 1973

Just days before Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips, when the country was awash with souvenirs and bunting for the
occasion, 15-year-old Carol Ann Cooper fell prey to Rose and Fred. Carol, who called herself Caz, was a willowy girl with
pretty blue eyes. She was also vulnerable. Her parents had separated when she was 4, after which she’d lived with her mother.
But her mother died suddenly when she was 8, and Caz was sent to live with her father, who had since remarried and was living
in Worcester. Colin and his new wife did their best to care for Caz, but she had been through a difficult time, and it didn’t
work out. By the age of 13, Caz had arrived at the Pines Children’s Home in Worcester, just a few miles from the Gloucester
border.

Caz wore denims and inked her name on her forearm, making a permanent tattoo. She became a rebel and would sometimes sleep
rough and shoplift to get by. She had biker friends in the Scorpion gang who occasionally dossed with the lodgers at Cromwell
Street, and may have been part of the trail of people passing through the house at that time, although no one will ever know
for certain.
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Caz was having her first official stay away from the children’s home that weekend, and had been on a night
out in Worcester with a group of pals including her boyfriend, Andrew Jones. The group had stopped off to have fish and chips
after seeing a film at the Odeon. Caz had then said her goodbyes to her friends and Andrew had accompanied her to the bus
station, where he waited until she boarded the number 15 for her grandmother’s house. As he waved her off at 9.15 p.m., little
did he realise that it would be the last time he would ever see his girlfriend again.

Caz had stayed at her grandmother’s the night before, and there was no reason to suspect she was going elsewhere that Saturday
evening when she got off the bus at her destination. It is likely, however, that Rose and Fred spotted her when they were
out cruising as she walked the last part of her journey home. They may even have been hanging around the bus station looking
for young girls, as they’d told Liz Agius, and could have followed the bus when they saw her get on it alone. As they pulled
up beside the young girl, Rose would have wound down her window and smiled at her. Caz was wearing a bandage on her left hand
from a burn she’d received from holding a firework on Bonfire Night; this would have given Rose the opportunity to ask her
what she’d done. Caz was a young girl who craved attention and would have enjoyed the Wests showing an interest in her. ‘I
just want to be loved,’ she’d told the other girls in the home.

Pushing back the front seat to allow the girl to climb into the back, it is not too difficult to imagine Rose and Fred exchanging
a smirk, as they had with Anna-Marie and Caroline: they’d got their next victim. As the two girls chatted away, Fred would
have joined in, demanding answers to more personal questions – while both he and Rose relished the prospect of getting their
prey home. If they didn’t know Caz already from passing through Cromwell Street, they would have discovered she was a frequent
absconder from the children’s home where she lived. If she just happened to disappear again, it wouldn’t even look
suspicious. Keeping everything normal and calm at first, Rose probably mentioned baby Stephen to her and asked her if she’d
like to come back to their house to see him. ‘We need a nanny,’ she might have said. ‘When you leave school, we have just
the job for you.’

The young girl’s remains were unearthed in March 1994 from beneath the cellar floor. Her severed limbs and trunk still had
their bindings on them, and surgical tape and strips of fabric were wrapped in layers around her head. Before death, she had
been terrorised and tortured – much of which is believed to have taken place while she was dangling from a hook in the ceiling.
After the couple had tired of indulging their sadistic and merciless pleasure, the 15-year-old was cut down. While on remand
in 1994, Fred had intimated that he’d indulged in necrophilia with some of the corpses. He also later admitted that Carol
had died as a result of ‘kinky sex’. The pathologist, however, found a large dent in Carol’s skull. This might have been caused
by her being stabbed as Fred dismembered her body, although it is possible that the young girl was still alive when she received
this injury and that it happened when Fred decapitated her. As Geoffrey Wansell suggests, Carol’s fingers and toes were probably
also removed prior to death to increase the pleasure of her tormentors. After dissecting the body and scoring her thigh bone
in the process, a vast number of bones – the Wests’ signature to the murders – were kept; although, as with all their victims,
these were never found. Fred then dropped the bones into the shallow hole, carefully positioning Carol’s head the right way
up, on the top.