Rose West: The Making of a Monster (29 page)

Fred shoved her naked remains into a dustbin until he was able to bury them in the back garden at night. With the help of
his sons, Barry and Stephen, he then built a pink and cream patio over her and turned it into the barbecue area. And in the
summer, Rose dished out hot dogs and burgers to her children by their sister’s grave.

Before her death, Heather had discovered that the father of one of her school friends was also the father of two of her little
mixed-race sisters. Heather was becoming belligerent as she made it clear she didn’t like what was going on in the house,
and this had made her even more ‘difficult’ for Rose to manage. She had already spoken to her school friend, Denise, about
the abuse at home. Her friend had seen her terrible bruises and knew she was telling the truth. But when word got back about
it to Rose and Fred, they gave the 16-year-old a terrible beating and kept her under guard, making sure she didn’t speak to
anyone, not even her half-sister. When Anna-Maria had tried to approach Heather in the garden to find out what was wrong,
‘My stepmother or my father would be there in an instant,’ she recalled in her book.

Anna-Marie hints at other excesses going on at Cromwell Street at the time that made it too dangerous for Rose and Fred to
let Heather live. This ties in with her friend Denise’s theory that the Wests deliberately waited until Heather finished her
last term at school before killing her, so that she wouldn’t be missed.

Heather might have lived, however, had she succeeded in finding work away from home. She had been desperate to escape Cromwell
Street and had found a job at a holiday camp in Torquay. But when this fell through at the last minute, Heather was devastated;
it also meant she had to die. Fred told the police he’d choked Heather to death as she’d lolled against the washing machine,
‘coming the big lady’, and that he’d then shoved her remains in the wheelie bin behind the Wendy house until he’d buried them.
He said Rose had played no part in their daughter’s murder, or any other of the young women’s murders. But according to one
of their younger children, this was a lie …

After Heather’s murder, Rose told the children that their big sister had gone away to work at the holiday camp. They were
shocked that she’d gone without saying goodbye, as the older children had always stuck together and tried to protect each
other from their parents. But they were even more shocked to realise their mother had been crying. Rose never cried, but her
daughter’s murder was perhaps one of the few times she
ever
displayed a shred of remorse. And such was Rose’s desire to avoid confronting the truth of what she and Fred had done, they
made a rare trip to see her brother Graham and his wife Barbara, telling them, ‘She’s disappeared. She’s a lesbian. That’s
it, closed … I don’t want you coming round in future if you do mention Heather.’

Heather’s siblings were also told they were not allowed to mention her name again and photographs of her were removed from
the house. The 16-year-old had loved to be in the outdoors: alone and free, and barefoot. And when the secret code she’d written
in her diary was finally cracked, it turned out to be both her dream and her escape plan: ‘Forest of Dean I Will Live’. She
had gone on a school camping trip to the forest once and, enjoying the freedom she’d experienced there to such an extent,
had decided she’d move there one day to live
as a hermit – surviving only by nature. It was reminiscent of the desires of the couple’s penultimate victim, Ally Chambers,
who’d dreamed of living in an old farmhouse in the countryside where she would spend her days writing poetry.

A
FTER HEATHER’S DEATH, ROSE
cut back on her hours of prostitution and was said by some of her children to have become a better mother. As her (now) oldest
child, Mae, was to say, ‘she never hit me again, you could really see the change.’ That Christmas, Rose bought the older children
bikes when all they’d ever had before was one gift each costing under ten pounds, which they’d had to choose from the Argos
catalogue. The three younger children even got a gift each, wrapped in Christmas paper: one of the girls received crayons,
the other slippers and Barry a toy car – whereas before Rose would simply blurt out that Father Christmas didn’t exist.

Rose and Fred began taking more interest in the children’s schooling: Rose made costumes on her sewing machine for the little
ones for a school competition, and Fred picked them up at the school gates, giving a lift to other young mums and their children
in the van when it was raining. Fred even became romantic towards Rose again. Taking his teenage son Stephen out to teach
him how to steal bikes, he also insisted on showing him the bus stop where he and Rose had first met: number 13. This indicates
some degree of remorse on both Rose and Fred’s part, as well as romantic fantasy. However, not all the children appear to
agree with Mae’s view of their mother at this time. In an article in the
Daily Mirror
supplement, ‘Britain’s Worst Serial
Killers’,
^*
Barry remembers Rose tucking him and his siblings up in bed at night and cuddling them, then the next morning ‘we’d wake
up to her kicking us in our beds. She’d be shouting, “Wake up you little ****s.” There’d be no reason for it. We were terrified.’

Long before Heather’s death, Fred had been pestering his next oldest daughter, Mae, for sex. Mae and Heather had always looked
out for each other and the younger girl had managed to thwart her father. Now that Heather was gone and Mae had a boyfriend,
Fred began focusing his attentions on a neighbour who had moved into the street at number 11; this was 31-year-old divorcee
Kathryn Halliday. Fred was called in by Mr Zygmunt to repair a leak in the flat above the one Kathryn was renting with her
female partner. Possibly in an attempt to take Rose’s mind off her daughter, Fred invited the dark-haired young woman back
for a drink. Fred had installed a bar in their lounge, complete with a tropical motif and a row of optics – he and Rose called
it the Black Magic Bar as both a double entendre and private joke – where the couple invited friends and clients to their
sex parties. Rose and Kathryn soon began a sexual affair, with Fred usually watching or occasionally joining in. Kathryn was
older than the couple’s victims, but she soon became frightened by their increasing acts of sexual sadism. This was particularly
the case with Rose, who starved her new lover of oxygen, cut her stomach with a knife and tried to force enormous phalluses
into her, including an eighteen-inch flesh-coloured one with nodules on which she called her Exocet.

The couple also took her to their secret room in the house, where they showed her whips, a bed with wrist and ankle restraints
on it and meat hooks over the bed-head, rubber bondage suits and leather masks with zips over the eyes and mouth. Kathryn
had seen these worn by young women in the porn
films that Rose had showed her, and which Fred had shot in their bedroom. Rose became very excited by the films, especially
the part where a young, fair-haired girl was in pain and the camera zoomed in on her fear. During sex with Kathryn, Rose had
placed a pillow over her head, keeping it there for some time and taunting her, ‘What’s it like not to be able to see?’ and,
‘Can’t you breathe?’

As Kathryn was to tell the court at Rose’s trial: ‘Once she got you to the bedroom she wanted to make you vulnerable.’ Rose
asked her how she would like to be tied up all day and only returned to occasionally to be tormented. This is a telling indication
of what she and Fred did to the girls and young women who they tortured and murdered. ‘She would cause as much physical pain
as she possibly could,’ Kathryn would later say of Rose, who she believed dominated the clowning Fred. ‘She had no limit to
what she would do,’ Kathryn said.

Kathryn was not a young girl, but soon realised she was out of her depth and stopped the relationship. Luckily, as she lived
with her partner, Rose and Fred did not pursue her as they had others who’d left them – otherwise the outcome might have been
very different. By this time, however, Rose no longer appeared to be enticing young girls back to Cromwell Street. This may
have been because she was said to have been in a long-running relationship with a much younger girl from Jordan’s Brook House
at this time. Or perhaps, since Heather’s death, neither she nor Fred had the stomach for it …

In a shift of power in the Wests’
folie à deux,
Fred bought into Rose’s denial about Heather’s murder and, quite soon after, Rose found herself answering phone calls from
her eldest daughter. Her children remember her saying as she took the first call, ‘Hi Heather, it’s your mum.’ After mother
and daughter chatted away, a row broke out and Rose thrust the phone at Fred in anger, ‘She’s calling me every name under
the bloody sun! You can talk to her!’ Fred ‘calmed her down’ and told Rose she’d
call another time. A few days later, Heather called again and Fred asked her if she was okay, then put Rose on to speak to
her although, once again, Heather’s siblings were not given the chance to speak to her. Rose told Stephen after her arrest,
that as far as she was concerned the calls were from Heather.

Later Rose told her son that Fred had set up the calls using someone he knew to impersonate Heather and that as there was
always background noise on the line, as if she was in a pub, it was hard to hear properly. Rose, however, knew they couldn’t
be from her daughter and, to this day, the caller’s identity has never been established. Fred had set the calls up as a means
to placate Heather’s siblings, who missed their big sister and were upset that she hadn’t even sent them a postcard, and to
deter any unwelcome enquiries from outsiders. But primarily it was his way of helping Rose keep up her pretence to herself
that her eldest child was ‘working away in a holiday camp’, and Rose was happy to do this. It was only some years later, when
Fred claimed to have seen Heather in the street, that Rose would tell him to shut up – acknowledging, if only between themselves,
the truth of what they’d done.

Rose had never dressed or behaved like other people since she was young and she had always stared a lot, but as time went
on, she became increasingly odd. Around the time of Heather’s death, Rose had taken to wearing a bobble hat and her white
socks while pushing a shopping trolley to the shops. When the children begged her not to go out like that she replied, ‘If
you don’t fucking like it, you shouldn’t be looking.’

Neither Rose nor Fred had any idea what normal behaviour was. As Mae and Stephen West were to say of their parents in their
book,
Inside 25 Cromwell Street,
Rose would answer the phone and snap, ‘What?’ and hang up without saying goodbye. Shopping trips with Rose were little better:
on one occasion, when she’d taken the children with her to choose a new fridge, to their horror she began walking around the
store opening
the doors of all the fridges and kicking them shut to see which closed best with a kick. She also never used changing rooms,
but stripped in the middle of the shop floor to try on new clothes.

In the summer, the kids’ swimming trips consisted of Rose taking them for a dip in the public fountain at the King’s Walk
Shopping Centre, despite there being a pool in the leisure centre just down the road. Stephen and his siblings would fish
out coins thrown into the fountain for luck, while horrified shoppers looked on. But Rose seemed to neither notice nor care.
She’d always spoken in a whiny, baby voice, but over the years had taken on Fred’s country brogue, using phrases such as ‘Watch
it boy!’ and ‘Stop it fella!’ These were the types of thing she would say to Stephen when she made him eat a fried egg that
she’d plucked from the waste bin or when he looked away from the porn films she made him watch as a boy. The films featured
bestiality and adults abusing children, and to stop him turning away, Fred made him a metal head cage at his new job at Wagon
Works. The cage had a hook at the back that went over the settee and if Stephen still tried to look away from the screen,
Rose would hit him in the face with an ashtray.

The 1990s

Three years after Heather’s death, in 1990, Rose began to pull away from Fred again. Fred was approaching 50, but his interests
remained the same: work, sex and voyeurism. Rose, on the other hand, was still in her mid-thirties and itching to have the
young life she’d missed out on. Reading an advert in the local paper for a singles club, she turned up at the hotel on the
Bristol Road, where she met one of the bar staff and started a relationship with him. Rose became a regular at the ‘Bristol’,
and started going to country and western ‘dos’ there. Fred, for the
second time in their relationship, became jealous, and beat his wife when she returned home from a New Year’s Eve party at
the hotel. Rose hit Fred back, but he could always get the better of her because of his physical strength – and he beat her
black and blue. But as Caroline Owens said, Rose wasn’t frightened of Fred but ‘stood her ground with him’ during the six
weeks she worked as a nanny for them. She also didn’t feel Rose was coerced by Fred during their attack on her, and it was
Fred, in fact, who had been frightened of Rose finding out about the rape.

Rose continued going out to the Bristol Hotel, where she would tell her friends that her miserable so-and-so of a brother,
Fred, had a cob on. By March of 1991, Rose was so aggrieved with her lot that she took a flat in the Stroud Road to start
a new life. Calling herself Mandy West, she told the landlord she worked as a ‘nanny’, even taking little Lucyanna with her
to back up her story (and probably telling the child not to call her ‘Mummy’ in front of him). Although she kept the flat
a secret from Fred, he was devastated by developments and began obsessively cleaning – from the house through to the back
garden, sweeping the patio over and over where his daughter’s remains lay. When there had been problems between he and Rose
in the past, he had lost sleep. But now, although he slept, he began to have terrible nightmares. And, in the day, he would
see horrific car smashes with dismembered bodies. His appearance became wilder too, as he let his hair grow until it resembled
a bird’s nest. Fred was on the edge of a breakdown and appeared not just terrified at the prospect of losing control of his
wife, but of actually losing her. Unlike his first wife Rena and his lovers, Anna McFall and Shirley Robinson, he’d never
once thought about murdering Rose. And Rose never appeared frightened or concerned that he would, as either she was reckless
or she knew that Fred really loved her, as he was to say while on remand for the murders.