Rose West: The Making of a Monster (24 page)

Lynda and Carol’s murders had taken place when Fred was making further changes to the house. In particular, he was lowering
the cellar floor to make it possible to stand up without having to crouch. This would make it easier for the couple to carry
out the torture and murder of their next victims, and indicates a high degree of planning and organisation. Indeed,
they were so well prepared that the police and their forensic advisers believed the victims murdered in the cellar had been
killed over the holes Fred had dug for them beforehand. The young teenager, who’d only been looking for affection, was Rose’s
third murder, which now gave her the dubious accolade of being a serial killer.

Mr and Mrs Cooper knew Carol would not just go off and leave her belongings at the home, and reported her missing to the Worcester
police. But there was nothing to link their daughter to Rose and Fred or the Gloucester area. And, although the police were
regular visitors to Cromwell Street, they were usually there for drug busts at the lodgers’ upstairs or to nick Fred for one
of his many petty thefts. Neithe they nor the public had any idea there was a serial killer team on the loose. Or that one
of them was a teenage mum of four.

A
ROUND THE TIME THE
couple murdered their first victim together, Rose began taking driving lessons from her father – despite Bill not holding
a driving licence. Fred would refer to the driving lessons with a nod and a grin, realising this amounted to little more than
father and daughter going off into the Forest of Dean to have sex. As Fred later told the police, ‘He was fucking her [Rose]
regular … I actually caught them in bed. He was well in.’

Fred, like Rose, had blurred boundaries, and maintained that his wife had never told him she was abused by her father. ‘Whenever
I seen her with him she was more than willing to get them off, and having a good time at it.’ And soon Fred would join them
for threesomes, just as he had on holiday that summer, doubtless finding comfort and sexual pleasure in recreating sleeping
with his parents as a boy in Much Marcle. Possibly to please Fred, Rose also took to wearing a thick leather, weightlifter-type
belt beneath her skirt, just as his mother Daisy had done. Only before lashing Fred or a client with it, Rose would wet it
to make it more painful.

The friendship between Rose’s father and husband had begun after Fred had invited Bill to join him and Rose on one of their
drives out to the countryside, where they’d stop off for a drink. Paedophiles soon find each other out and, after a few of
these
trips, Fred and Bill would drive round together looking for girls. Bill also picked up and befriended a young prostitute,
Shirley Robinson, on his own, who, in a few short years, would become another one of the Wests’ victims.

Fred and Bill had slept with their daughters as a matter of course, and Rose had little problem with this. On one occasion
when Anna-Marie was 12, the little girl had rushed into her stepmother’s bedroom, telling her, ‘Grampy’s going to sleep with
me!’ Rose snapped at her, ‘Go back to bed. He’s not going to eat you; he’s only going to fuck you … I am sure you will love
that.’

And when the little girl told her that her Uncle John (Fred’s brother) was also abusing her, Rose had simply laughed it off.
‘It was of no consequence … it was all perfectly all right,’ Anna-Marie was to tell the court many years later.

This gives us an insight into Rose’s attitude about her own abuse as a child. On the one hand she has contempt for the little
girl and relishes her suffering at the hands of Bill, as she had herself as a child, while on the other she tells the young
girl she is sure she will ‘love that’. Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist Dr Rajan Darjee found that men who had been sexually
abused as children and involved in sexual activity from an early age to the extent that it became a preoccupation, did so
as they found it self-soothing and a way to cope with negative moods. The same could be applied to women, as Rose frequently
uses the word ‘enjoy’ when abusing her victims.

Fred’s attitude to incest appears to have been pragmatic when he said of Rose’s relationship with Bill, ‘Making love to your
father, you don’t have to have a chat-up line, I shouldn’t think.’ It has been suggested that Fred manipulated Bill into joining
their sex circle to give him a hold over his father-in-law. Even so, he was still a powerful figure in Rose’s life for, as
Fred was to say, ‘Rose’s father is heavy into her, and she was heavy into him, because what Rose tried to do, I think, was
to get me the same as him.’

As the two men came to share Rose, Bill was increasingly to be found at Cromwell Street. After his arrest, Fred hinted to
the police that there were others involved in the murders and told his solicitor repeatedly that his brother John and Rose’s
father were ‘both mixed up in it, up to their necks’. Bill certainly had the stomach for it and was – as even his son-in-law
hadn’t failed to notice – an ‘evil bastard’.

27 December 1973

It was the day after Boxing Day, when Christmas lights and tinsel still hung in shop windows and people were still full of
seasonal good cheer, that Rose took Fred and the children to visit her parents and her brothers, Graham and Gordon, in Bishop’s
Cleeve. Some time later that evening, another young woman went missing at a bus stop on the A435, the main road between Cheltenham
and Evesham.

Lucy Partington was studying English at Exeter University and had recently celebrated her twenty-first birthday. From a middle-class
background, Lucy had attended the private Pate’s Grammar School for Girls in Cheltenham and was the niece of author Kingsley
Amis and cousin to writer Martin Amis. Lucy’s mother and father had separated when she was younger, and now Lucy had come
home to spend Christmas with her mother Margaret at Gretton, the small Cotswold village where she’d grown up. Lucy was pretty,
with long brown hair and trendy John Lennon-style wire-rimmed glasses. On this particular evening she’d been to visit her
old school friend, Helen, in a suburb of Cheltenham. Helen had not been well and she’d been keen to see her. During the evening,
as the two girls chatted Lucy compiled an application to do a Masters at the Courtauld Institute. Helen’s mother gave Lucy
a stamp and she set off to catch the grey Kersey bus home at just gone ten. The Kersey
bus was the one that most people used as it was cheaper than the normal service. It also stopped along the A435, the Evesham
Road, which Rose and Fred often used on their way to Rose’s parents in Bishop’s Cleeve; and this particular evening was no
exception.

Lucy was last seen as she hurried towards the bus stop, by a man out walking his dog. She was wearing a terracotta-coloured
mac, pink jeans and red mitts; clothing which might have caught a person’s eye in passing, even though the streets were badly
lit – or not at all – that winter because of the fuel crisis. Lucy was not particularly vulnerable, except for those few minutes
while she waited alone in the dark for the bus to come, when a pair of serial killers would just happen to pass. Lucy’s family
and friends were certain that she would not have accepted a lift under any circumstances, even with a woman in the car. She
had become extra-cautious after her friend had been scared by a man fitting Fred’s description, who’d tried to get her into
his car a few years earlier.

It was, however, a filthy night as the sleet came down and the bus was already ten minutes late. Perhaps because the Wests
had the children with them – baby Stephen might even have been on Rose’s lap – Lucy felt safe enough to accept a lift from
them. She may also have recognised ‘cheery’ Fred, from when he did his bread round in the village she grew up in. A former
in-law of the Letts, Ellen White, claimed to know that Fred and Rose had baby Stephen with them in the van that night when
they picked up Lucy but, as Gordon Burn says in his 1998 book,
Happy Like Murderers,
Ellen has never spoken about how she knows this. However, if Lucy wasn’t enticed into the couple’s van that night, then she
may have been abducted by force. Fred and Bill Letts had disappeared from the Letts’ house and hadn’t been seen all that afternoon
and most of the evening, while other members of the family had waited for them. After this, Lucy was not seen or heard of
again, until her remains were
unearthed from the cellar over twenty years later. She was the second victim to be buried there.

Just as before, Lucy was bound, gagged and kept alive for several days while she was tortured, terrorised and sexually abused
as she hung from the ceiling. Her head was found buried in a hole in the cellar, still heavily bound with tape, and there
were pieces of knotted rope that had been used to bind her limbs, and the gag, beside her. Her clothes were never found. Fred
presented himself at the Casualty Department of Gloucestershire Royal Hospital just after midnight on 3 January, exactly one
week after Lucy had disappeared. He had a deep knife wound to his hand but, as he was skilled at dismembering bodies, he was
highly likely to have sustained this while Lucy was still alive, as the prosecution maintained at Rose’s trial.

Rose’s bedroom for entertaining was at the front of the house, above the cellar. One of her clients was alarmed by hearing
a scream coming from below at night, but Rose had merely shrugged it off, ‘It’s nothing.’ Lucy was buried at the front of
the cellar, in the ‘nursery alcove’, as the police dubbed it, because of the fairy-tale-type wallpaper in that room. Unusually,
one of the knives used in the attack was buried with Lucy’s remains, and was later identified as a cheap stainless-steel kitchen
knife that is normally given away free as part of a mail-order set. It usually sat amongst the other knives on the kitchen
shelf, and Rose admitted in court she had probably been the one to sharpen it. Rose may have used the knife to torture Lucy
with, as she had cut and stabbed her own children and stepdaughter.

Two young women were now reported missing and despite appeals in the newspapers and on television, including a reconstruction
of Lucy’s last movements, Rose went about her daily life as if nothing had happened. One of Rose’s relatives believes she
learnt to completely blank things as a way of coping as a child, and carried this on as she grew up.

I
T WAS JUST FOUR
years since Rose had left home, full of hopes and dreams for the future – but instead she now had the blood of four victims
on her hands, including her own little stepdaughter’s. The voting age by this time had been lowered to 18, as had the right
to marry without parental consent, but Rose had still not reached what was considered adulthood at the time: 21. In fact,
it would be another year, two more murders and many more rapes before Rose would have the ‘key to the door’.

Steven was still living at the house and although his mother, Margaret, had fully recovered from her breakdown by the autumn
of the previous year, neither Rose nor Fred would allow the little boy to go home. This was sheer spite on Rose’s part, who
didn’t want him there but could use him as a means to torture Fred’s former lover and exert some control over the woman she
probably saw as a rival. Rose was also very cruel to the little boy, spearing him in the face with her stiletto heel when
she caught Anna-Marie reading him a letter from his mother that Rose had deliberately kept from him. She also enjoyed humiliating
the child, making him stand and watch her naked on the toilet until she’d finished, just inches from where the remains of
Lynda lay, and on one occasion insisting that the 8-year-old watched while she had sex with his father.

In the springtime, with numerous calls made to the house from social services, Rose and Fred were forced to let the little
boy go. And, in his wake, they went out cruising again.

Filling the Cellar

Thérèse Siegenthaler’s murder took place in April. Like Lucy Partington, Thérèse’s life was as different to Rose’s as it could
possibly be. She was a little older than Rose, at 21, and a German-speaking Swiss from Bern. Thérèse had been studying for
a degree in sociology at a London college and had a part-time job in Bally’s in the Swiss Centre. She lived in Lewisham and
had gone to a party the night before setting off to see a friend in Ireland. She was not worried about hitchhiking from London
to Holyhead to catch the ferry, as she had taken self-defence lessons in judo, telling her friends, ‘I can look after myself.’
How she fell into the path of her murderers only Rose to this day knows, but Fred mistook her German accent for Dutch and
nicknamed her ‘Tulip’.

After taking the poor girl back to the cellar in Cromwell Street, Rose and Fred gagged her with a brown scarf, possibly her
own, and tied it behind her head with a bow. It is highly unlikely that Fred tied the bow as a man would be much more likely
to knot it and leave the ends dangling. The bow is a damning indictment of Rose’s handiwork while Fred kept a grip on Thérèse.
The murder then followed the same pattern as before, and a rope used in the killing was pushed into the hole along with the
young woman’s remains. Chillingly Fred was to say that he’d decapitated the body ‘to make sure she was dead’. Numerous bones
were kept as trophies, including fingers, toes and wrist bones, along with part of the collarbone. Fred disguised Thérèse’s
narrow grave by building a false chimney breast over it. He also kept the
cellar locked – with just one key for himself and the other for Rose.

Although the young woman was reported missing, there was nothing to link her to ever having been near Gloucester. Four months
after the murder, at 11.00 p.m. on 13 August, Rose went into hospital with a knife wound to the fingers of her right hand.
It was similar to the laceration Fred had presented with the year before, and it was also late at night. If it was another
murder victim, the body has never been discovered, but Rose was to change her story at least twice as to how she sustained
the injury – from ‘playing about with knives’ to ‘cutting wood’. The injury was bad enough for Rose to be admitted to a ward
and kept in for two nights. Her explosions of anger may have been responsible for the wound, just as when Fred had come in
from work one day and had been prodding her to tease her as she cooked his dinner.