Rose West: The Making of a Monster (28 page)

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As Anna-Marie was to say: ’Initially my mum was young and impressionable, but as she got older she became more dominant.’
Shirley’s death marked another shift of power in the couple’s relationship, whereby Rose began to look after all the money
that came into the house. Fred gave Rose his wage packet and the lodgers’ rent money still sealed in envelopes. Rose recorded
the amounts in her diary, and gave Fred enough back to buy cigarettes for the week and whatever was left, she put into her
Co-op Savings Account. Fred, however, was still very much in charge when he wanted to be and would wear Rose down, making
her sleep with his West Indian friends when she wanted a night off, or hit her if she refused. Fred also refused to wear condoms
when he had sex with Rose, although he knew she could not take the Pill as it made her ill. By making sure Rose was ‘potted’,
as he called it, by himself or someone else each year, he knew that it would be almost impossible for her to leave him. Perhaps
Bill had suggested this to Fred as a way of ensnaring his daughter, as he had done the same thing with Daisy.

For now, however, the couple were said by a lodger to be ‘very happy’ after Shirley’s disappearance; even possibly putting
in a fraudulent claim for maternity benefits in Shirley’s name after her death. A social security officer sent round to interview
Shirley found she was no longer living there, and with no midwifery or antenatal checks, that was simply the end of the matter.

The happy couple could relax again, and such was their blissful state of contentment that they carried on with their lives
in their own inimitable way. Rose placed an ad in contact magazines: ‘Sexy housewife needs it deep and hard from VWE [very
well endowed] male while husband watches …’ and Fred installed baby intercoms from Boots and Mothercare in every
room so that he could hear his wife having sex with her clients wherever he was in the house. He also carried on having sex
with his daughter, Anna-Marie, in secret, and by the end of the year, when Rose had given birth to another little girl, Louise,
their happiness was complete. This was despite the child being white, and therefore not part of Fred’s master race.

The couple’s new-found joy would soon be tested, however, when news reached Rose about the death of her former Svengali. This
culminated in Rose and Fred’s next sadosexual murder after a gap of over four years, since they’d tortured and killed Juanita
Mott in 1975 for their own pleasure.

I
N MAY THAT YEAR,
while Thatcher and the Tories swept into power and Blondie was in the charts with ‘Heart of Glass’, Bill Letts died in hospital,
aged 58. He was buried a month later, on 5 June, which also happened to be the birthday of Andy Letts’ wife, Jackie. As communication
between the members of Rosie’s family was at best fragmented, neither she nor Andy knew which hospital their father was in
– or even why he was there – before his death. The funeral was to be no different.

When Bill had left his job at Smith’s a few years earlier, he’d had to give up the house at Tobyfield Road and move into a
local authority property, a maisonette, at Crown Drive in the village. Two years later, with his redundancy money gone and
the Green Lantern struggling, Bill decided to return home, without consulting his estranged wife, Daisy, who was out at work
at the time. Bill’s eldest daughter Pat had found her father making himself comfortable in the maisonette when she’d made
a surprise visit to see her mother. As soon as Bill saw her there, he bawled at her to ‘clear off!’ Pat fled in tears; the
years had obviously not mellowed Bill as much as the family might have hoped. Pat rang Daisy at work to tell her their father
was at the house, and for reasons best known to herself, Daisy let him back into her life. Agreeing to give Bill a hand with
the cooking and cleaning at the café, shortly after, she moved in with him there.
Yet, while she was prepared to forgive her errant husband, she had cut off all ties with her youngest daughter, Rosie, since
she’d begun producing her brood of mixed-race children.

A few months later and despite Daisy’s best efforts, the Green Lantern closed its doors for the last time. Rose’s parents
then moved into a flat in Regent Street in Lydney, in the Forest of Dean. This was to be their ‘fresh start’ and Bill soon
found himself a job as an electrician at a local sawmill, while Graham and his new young wife Barbara moved into the flat
below them. But the Letts’ fresh start turned out to be anything but, for when Graham popped upstairs to his parents’ flat
he found his father had Daisy ‘pinned up against the wall’. He had already ‘slapped her’ and was about to hit her again.

Aside from Bill’s psychotic illness he was also not physically well by the spring of 1979, when he was taken into Frenchay
Hospital in Bristol, dying a few days later of pleural mesothelioma or asbestosis, the disease he’d been diagnosed with at
Devonport dockyard. Having given Daisy a life of hell, he intimated to Graham just before his death that his marriage to his
mother had been a mistake, and warned him against marrying ‘the wrong person’. For her part, Daisy did not appear to be unduly
upset by Bill’s death, and the funeral arrangements were finally made and paid for by Andy and Jackie, as no one else seemed
willing or perhaps able to do so. This wasn’t helped by Bill leaving scores of unpaid bills from his selfish lifestyle, which
Daisy had to work her fingers to the bone to pay off after his death. Summing up the feelings of most of the family, one of
the older girls said, ‘The only reason any of us went [to his funeral] was to make sure he went down that hole.’

The funeral, which was described by one family member as ‘a shambles’, took place at Cheltenham cemetery. It didn’t start
off well when some family members refused to follow the coffin into the chapel. The oldest children, Joyce and Pat, had a
falling out beforehand and sat away from each other and the main
cortège; Graham followed the coffin behind Andy, Daisy and her sisters Eileen and Dolly, while Jackie Letts and Jim Tyler
prudently sat it out at the back. Gordon arrived in handcuffs with police officers either side, which Daisy begged them to
take off to no avail, while Bill’s father, William, who had moved in with another woman and went on to live until he was almost
100, didn’t turn up.

As it was Pat and Joyce had never got along, since Pat had been favoured over the younger girl for most of her life. Daisy
was still not on speaking terms with Rosie, who clattered along to the cemetery in stilettos, schoolgirl socks and a miniskirt
– or, as Gordon Burn referred to it, ‘in clothes that the staider members of her family regarded as the uniform of her profession’.
At the graveside, Gordon Letts, looking sedated and still in handcuffs, began sobbing that he loved his father; Graham stood
opposite, professing his hatred for his old man; while Andy was upset that his cruel father had gone but couldn’t understand
why he felt this way.

Rosie’s oldest sister Pat was prim and proper, and had found visiting Rose just the once since her marriage to Fred was more
than enough. As Rose went over to comfort her big sister, it ended up in a scrap, with Pat throwing Rose into the dirt where
she might have thought she belonged. And while all this was going on, Bill’s former partner-in-crime, Fred, was a no-show.

Rose was angry that Fred hadn’t gone with her to see her father buried after they had been so close in recent years. But Fred,
who had called Bill evil, was probably the only other man he could look at and see a mirror image of himself. As Gordon was
to say many years later, ‘Everyone seemed so glad when he died. Gone and out of the way. My mother hated my dad intensely.’
Bill’s grave still, to this day, is unmarked by a headstone.

A week after the funeral, Graham broke into his widowed mother’s flat, took what he could sell to fund his drug habit,
and did the gas meter over while he was at it. Daisy had barely had time to deal with this when she was shocked to discover
the secret Bill had been keeping from her and the family for years. After reading her husband’s medical records, she found
Bill had been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in his youth, a condition that appeared to have gone largely untreated
since then. Had Daisy known about this, or if Bill had received treatment for it, how different life might have been for the
family and Rosie. Although Bill was still, of course, a sadist.

Fred later told the police that Rose’s sexual relationship with her father had continued right up until Bill’s death. And
now that Rosie’s childhood mentor had gone, the murders would peter out; although her cruelty, if anything, intensified.

A Last One For Bill

Three months after Bill’s funeral, 16-year-old Alison Chambers, known as Ally, was murdered. She too was from the Jordan’s
Brook House, and had the same profile as most of Rose and Fred’s other victims. Alison lived in a fantasy world to cope with
her sad life. She wrote poetry and drew pictures of an idyllic farmhouse where she dreamed of living one day. Ally also had
a friend at the approved school who visited the Wests, and she went with her one day to Cromwell Street.

Rose soon began to befriend Ally, exploiting her vulnerability in the most callous of ways. After presenting the young girl
with a necklace with her name engraved on it, she told Ally that she and Fred owned a farm and, to back up her story, showed
her a photograph of a picturesque farmhouse. What the young girl did not realise was that Rose had obtained the picture from
an estate agent’s ‘For Sale’ brochure. Rose told Ally that when she left Jordan’s Brook House she could stay at the farm and
spend her time writing poetry there. Going
back to the approved school later that day, Ally lay on her bed, daydreaming and drawing foliage growing around the farmhouse
door.

Perhaps the couple’s fear of being caught had also played a part in their abstinence from murder for the three years between
Juantia Mott’s murder in 1975 and Shirley Robinson’s in 1978, as Rose had begun telling the girls who called at the house
not to say where they’d been if the police stopped them. Sadly, however, the police didn’t stop Ally, who on 5 August that
year left Jordan’s Brook House and gave up her YTS scheme to become the Wests’ live-in nanny. Ally was just four weeks off
her seventeenth birthday, and wrote to tell her mother that she was now living with a ‘very homely family’. But by the following
month, she was dead. Ally’s naked remains were found with the gag still in place, which this time was a purple fashion accessory.
Rather than moving to an idyllic farmhouse in the countryside, this tragic young girl was stuffed in bits into a hole in the
garden beneath the extension. And, as usual, the couple kept their signature body parts.

When Ally’s friends from Jordan’s Brook House called round to see her soon after, Rose showed no remorse or emotion but fobbed
them off by saying she was living on their farm. When they asked to visit her there, Rose became nervous and told them they’d
have to wait a while. Later, she changed her story again and told Ally’s friends she’d gone to live with her relatives. Ally’s
murder, coming so soon after Bill’s death, seemed as if it was one last one for Bill. It was also the couple’s last sadosexual
murder; their next would not happen for another five years and, when it did, would be a matter of convenience. Rose was now
25, and perhaps she and Fred had lost their nerve, or their cruel and perverted interests lay elsewhere. But when the couple
did kill again, it would be their last known murder together, and was perhaps also their most hideous – for this time Rose
and Fred would kill their first child: 16-year-old Heather.

The 1980s and the Final Murder

After having her second son, Barry, by Fred in 1980, Rose went on to have Rosemary West junior in 1982, when the Falklands
War was in full swing, and Lucyanna the following year, by one of Fred’s West Indian friends. Having given birth to eight
children in all, Rose decided enough was enough and was sterilised in 1983. Because of the age differences between Rose’s
older children with Fred, and the younger ones, what she had in effect was two separate families (just as she’d grown up with
herself). Anna-Marie had already left Cromwell Street by this time. Unsurprisingly, the young girl had been in trouble at
school for bullying and carrying knives and, at 15, discovered she was pregnant by her father. The baby, however, was found
to be growing in the fallopian tubes and Anna-Marie had to have an abortion.

The teenager’s pregnancy did not trigger an alert with the authorities, though Anna-Marie was probably glad of this. This
was because as the last time social services had visited Cromwell Street, following up a report from a teacher who had noticed
bruising on her, Rose had beaten her again when they left. The poor girl, who had only ever known a lifetime of abuse, packed
her bags and ran away in the night with nowhere to go. The knock-on effect of Anna-Marie’s departure was that Fred turned
his attentions to his next daughter, Heather.

Although Heather was Rose’s first child, as she grew up Rose treated her only marginally better than Anna-Marie, laughing
at her distress and calling her a lesbian when she protested about her father’s abuse of her. Rose also beat Heather and,
because of the bruises on her body, Heather refused to do PE at school, which meant she was often given detention. Rose would
also time Heather coming home from school to ensure that neither she nor her younger siblings stopped off to speak to anyone
on their way home. This meant their grim existence at Cromwell Street remained hidden.

Heather left school in the summer of 1987 when she was 16. Despite all the problems at home, the young girl managed to pass
a string of GCSEs. But there was a harsh recession in Thatcher’s Britain at the time, and the young girl had been unable to
find work. This meant she had to spend more time at home which, with Fred’s abuse and Rose’s lack of protection of her, was
the last place she wanted to be. She wrote a secret code, FODIWL, in her books, and began having nightmares and biting her
nails until they bled. Then one day she simply disappeared.