Rose West: The Making of a Monster (27 page)

Rose then buggered Miss A with a white church candle as she screamed in pain. At one point she also felt Rose’s hand inside
her, scratching her. As Rose did this, she said, ‘This is fun! This is great!’ and coaxed the young girl with, ‘Enjoy!’ Fred
then raped her, Rose encouraging him to ejaculate over the girl’s back, and rubbing it in. After cutting off the girl’s bindings
with a small pair of sewing scissors, she allowed her to go to the bathroom to clean herself up. Miss A was bleeding and in
shock and pain but, using all her strength, managed to pull on her dress. However, she had to leave her shoes behind in order
to slip out of the house without being noticed – and this probably saved her life.

The rapes of the young girls had taken place in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, yet there was no sign of any other West
children in the house. Miss A then caught the bus home to her mother’s in Tewkesbury but felt too degraded to tell her or
anyone else what had happened. ‘Because,’ as she said, ‘if you were in care you were bad.’ And Rose and Fred understood this
only too well. Such was the shock and distress caused to Miss A by the attack that, some weeks later, she went back to Cromwell
Street armed with a can of petrol and matches, ‘to put through the letterbox of the house and set it on fire.’ In the end
she could not go through with it, and it would be another twenty years and three murders later before she would get her wish,
and Cromwell Street would be razed to the ground.

During that same year, Fred had met another young woman: 17-year-old Shirley Robinson. Shirley had been sexualised at an early
age; she was also an exhibitionist and openly bisexual: in short, she was a young Rosie Letts who had every intention of becoming
the next Mrs West. And, as far as Rose was concerned, that just wouldn’t do …

B
Y THE SPRING OF
that year, Fred had sent Bill Letts packing from Cromwell Street, whereupon he moved into the flat above the Green Lantern.
Bill had met Shirley and her friend when he gave them a lift from Bristol, where the teenager sometimes worked as a prostitute.
Bill had allowed the girls to stay upstairs at the Green Lantern, and Shirley soon began to work in the café below, where
David Soul’s ‘Don’t Give Up On Us’ would come on the radio, along with the Elvis hits being played after his death in the
summer.

One morning Fred had come into the café; Shirley was looking ill and he’d asked her what was the matter. Shirley, he claimed,
had confided in him that Rose’s father was making life difficult for her there. Bill had removed the locks from the bathroom
and bedroom doors and would constantly walk in on her. ‘Touching me up’, as Shirley was to say – just as Bill had tried to
do with some of his daughters.

Fred had previously called round to ‘keep an eye’ on his business partner, and on one occasion had found him on the low roof
at the back of the café, covered in hessian sacking as he spied on his two female lodgers. He jumped down from the roof when
he saw Fred approaching and, as Fred recalled in his memoirs, Bill then told him, ‘I picked up two young girls in Bristol.
They were coming to Gloucester and they stayed the
night. They’re having a bath together. If you get on the roof you can see them.’

Fred, ironically, offered the young woman a ‘safe haven’ at Cromwell Street, even giving her a hand to move the few possessions
she had to his home. Just as he had become smitten with Liz, so he had fallen for this young girl, who was so small and thin,
he, chillingly, nicknamed her ‘Bones’. Despite Shirley’s slight frame, like Rose, she was actually very strong, and helped
Fred with his latest building endeavours: turning the house into two separate units, and completing the extension which had
been started a few years earlier. Shirley slotted into Fred’s way of life just as Rose had, and with his 23-year-old wife
increasingly dissatisfied with her lot, Fred groomed Shirley to take over from her.

Rose did not appear to have a lesbian lover at the time, but continued to go out to pubs and clubs to have a social life rather
than to pick up men for Fred’s satisfaction. Liz Parry, one of the lodgers at Cromwell Street, worked at Tracy’s nightclub
in town, where Rose sometimes went. Rose’s diary entry of 24 February 1977 read:

Went to Tracy’s with Anna [Anna-Marie]. Met two fellas. Not much good … 12 o’clock got home. Hopeless! Fella not a lot of
good. 12.30 o’clock with Fred, that’s better. Got a cuddle.

Despite her desire to have her freedom from Fred, Rose is obviously still fond of him, and the diary entry reads almost like
a disappointed teenager going back to the comfort of a father-figure.

In the new arrangements at the house, Rose kept her own special room for entertaining her clients, while she and Fred shared
a bedroom on the ground floor. The children were moved into new bedrooms in the cellar, which was now more like a basement,
where they slept only inches from the remains of their parents’ victims. Since the fire regulations problem,
Fred had turned the upstairs of the house into self-contained bedsits with cookers and sinks for their lodgers, who were now
all young women. This meant Rose could have her pick of those lodgers interested in having a lesbian relationship with her,
and still have her male callers, whom Fred could watch.

Shirley was delighted to have a permanent roof over her head that spring, and Rose was happy to have her helping around the
house. This was particularly the case since Rose had discovered she was pregnant again, the baby being due that winter. Rose
was also attracted to Shirley. This was mutual and they soon became lovers, as did Fred and Shirley – all three possibly sleeping
together at one stage – until problems set in …

Tara West was born on 6 December 1977. Rose had been in bed with a client when she went into labour, and had named the little
girl after the hotel she sometimes used with a customer. Tara’s father was one of her Jamaican clients, nicknamed Rosco,
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and the strikingly pretty little girl was Rose’s first mixed-race baby. Fred was delighted. He’d been trying to breed a ‘master
race’ for years. His experiments in this field had involved syringes, copper piping and the contents of several used condoms
from Rose’s black callers, which he would mix together and use to inseminate both Rose and Anna-Marie with, making his daughter
sit still for at least an hour afterwards. Rose did not appear to turn a hair at his insanity, but later conceived two other
children naturally by her Jamaican clients: Rosemary junior (Ro-Ro) and Lucyanna (Babs); and had two further children, Louise
and Barry, by Fred, all in rapid succession.

Things were still not good between the couple though, and Rose continued to go out – even when she was pregnant – to have
the social life she’d missed out on as a young girl. During
the winter of 1977 when she’d felt Tara coming, she’d asked the man in bed with her at the time to accompany her to hospital.
Fred was hurt by this; when he asked her why she hadn’t wanted him to take her, she replied, ‘I thought you were at work,’
to which he said, ‘If you stayed at home a night or two you would see me.’ Rose was always ready to remind Fred he was not
enough for her in bed. ‘I need a man to keep me happy,’ she responded, to which he replied, ‘Thank you Rose.’ ‘I could not
believe how hard Rose could be to me,’ he recollected in his prison memoirs.

Spring 1978

By March of the following year, things were a little better between the couple, even though Shirley and Rose had discovered
they were both pregnant by Fred. Shirley’s baby was due in June and Rose’s child in November. Fred and his wife and mistress
planned to bring up their children together, but this would never happen.

During late spring, while 18-year-old Shirley was heavily pregnant, she would sit on the wall outside Cromwell Street, eating
Mr Men ice lollies and chatting away to the neighbours. She would tell them how well things were going between herself and
Fred, which must have raised a few eyebrows, but obviously the young girl was completely love-struck. During these warm spring
days leading up to summer, Shirley developed a craving for red ice lollies, which the shopkeeper at the Wellington Stores
down the road would reserve specially for her. The teenager’s childlike ways were reminiscent of Rose’s at the time, who still
wore her white schoolgirl socks with her high heels and spoke with a babyish voice. As a former lodger at the Wests’ said,
‘She dressed as a child. I didn’t think she was quite right in the head.’

Rose would sometimes join Shirley outside, sitting on the
front step of Cromwell Street in her maternity dress with no knickers on and her legs wide open. A neighbour remembered passing
when Rose pointed happily to Shirley’s stomach and said, ‘That’s Fred’s’!’ and, gesturing to her own swollen belly, pondered,
‘I wonder what colour it will be?’

During the early months of Rose’s pregnancy, she was still sleeping with Shirley, as was Fred. But things changed when Fred
began flaunting his relationship with the bubbly younger woman to make Rose jealous. Fred loved provoking Rose – usually poking
her hard in the ribs until she exploded with rage – but now he could use Shirley to provoke an even stronger reaction. His
psychological torture of Rose was made worse by Shirley parading around the house in just her underwear, or naked (as Rose
had at Tobyfield Road a few years earlier). Fred also liked to pat Shirley’s stomach to taunt Rose and tell her that the young
girl would soon become his next wife. While it was all a game to Fred, who was a sadist after all, Rose knew only too well
that she could be usurped by the younger woman as this is exactly what she herself had done to Rena, seeing her off once and
for all by having Fred’s baby.

A little before Shirley’s murder, the young pretender had made the mistake of posing for a formal photograph with Fred, the
two of them holding hands. She sent this photo to her father, a welder in Germany, enclosing a letter saying, ‘This is the
man I am going to marry. What do you think of him, Dad? I have never been so happy.’ The picture was actually taken for an
advert to sell their baby to a childless couple to make money – but, as soon as Rose saw it, she was incandescent with rage
and it sealed her rival’s fate.

Although Shirley was streetwise, she was still young and naïve in believing that because Rose and Fred had an open marriage
of sorts, she could conduct her affair with her lover right under her landlady’s nose. She had not bargained on Rose’s outbursts,
which were so terrifying she would foam at the mouth, with
spittle flying off in all directions. Shirley in fact became so frightened of Rose that she tried to stay close to Fred for
his protection, but this was impossible as he was almost always at work. Shirley became too afraid even to use her own bedsit,
and was forced to seek refuge in another lodger’s room during the day, and at night slept on her settee. It is likely that
she also became frightened of Fred, who was now tiring of his young mistress, complaining that she was always ‘mooning and
hanging around’ him.

By May of that year, as Rose became even more furious at the situation, Fred knew he had to make a choice – his wife or his
lover. And there was no contest, for as Fred was to say, ‘I’ve got Rosie, I don’t want nobody else … She’s got to fucking
go.’ And little more than a year after Shirley had moved into Cromwell Street, the young girl was dead.

When one of the lodgers returned home one evening, they found Rose in Shirley’s room, going through her clothes. Rose quickly
shut the door, but kept back the clothes she wanted, putting the others in a black bin bag – just as she had Lynda Gough’s
belongings. Rose then put the sack out for the dustmen. Fred’s brother, John West, happened to drive the council dustbin lorry
at this time and collected the rubbish from Cromwell Street. He was also abusing two of Fred’s daughters when he visited the
house.
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As well as disposing of Shirley’s clothes, John may have taken away the dozens of trophy bones Fred kept back, disposing
of them in black bin bags in the back of his dustcart.

Rose told the lodgers that Shirley had gone to visit relatives in Germany and wouldn’t be coming back. Fred felt a weight
had been lifted from his shoulders; the girl’s death would help to heal
his and rose’s relationship problems and, for a while, they were happy again. A few weeks later, Rose told the lodgers that
Shirley had given birth to a boy and called him Barry. Fred may have removed the baby from Shirley’s womb after death to find
out the sex of the child. He had wanted another son, but it would be two more years before Rose had their second son, whom
they would name Barry. Fred’s almost full-term baby with Shirley was buried in the hole in the garden beside her, beneath
the jerry-built extension that Shirley had helped Fred to finish.

There was no evidence of the tragic young girl having been trussed up and tortured before death. She had simply been got rid
of as a matter of convenience because she was a threat to the Wests’ marriage. Fred told the police he had used electrical
flex to strangle some of the victims with and, if this is true, he may have done so with Shirley. He then chopped up the corpse
into numerous pieces in what appeared to be a frenzied act of contempt. It had taken Fred several blows with an axe or meat
cleaver to smash the young girl’s thigh bone in two, and as well as chopping off her head, he removed her wrist, ankle and
rib bones and kept her amputated fingers and toes as souvenirs. Some of the little baby’s bones had also been taken. This
whole bloody scene was probably undertaken in the cellar and it would have taken Rose several hours to scrub it clean.

Unusually, no hair was ever found in the young girl’s shallow grave, which meant that either Fred or Rose had scalped her
and kept it as a grisly souvenir of their crime. The only living memento of the 18-year-old was a strip of photographs taken
in the booth in Woolworth’s that morning with her lodger-friend Liz. While Liz was sticking her tongue out in the photos,
Shirley was making her eyes bulge, as if in a horror movie – which was exactly where she would be that afternoon. And with
no one to report her missing, Rose and Fred simply got away with murder. Again.