Rose West: The Making of a Monster (3 page)

But if Northam was a magical place for children such as Rose to grow up at this time, it was not so for their parents. For,
when Northam men had returned home after the Second World War, it was to unemployment – except for the lucky few who found
work at the shipbuilding works at nearby Appledore, or at Westward Ho! building amphibian landing craft. This meant poverty
for many in the village, including the Letts family. Yet if Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s words, ‘You’ve never had it
so good,’ grated on the nerves in this part of the country, the 1950s was still a time of free health treatment for all, and
a new housing programme from which Rose’s parents would benefit.

Rose’s father, Bill Letts, had been a seafarer and naval man since being called up in 1943. An electronics engineer before
enlisting, the Navy deployed his skills as a wireless operator on board aircraft carriers and at naval airfields across the
country. Able Seaman FX 681316 had not long been married when he set sail for Australia, leaving his young wife and newborn
baby behind.

Bill’s petite, dark-haired wife, Daisy, was so beautiful she could have been a Hollywood movie star. She wasn’t from the north
Devon area as Bill was – or from Devon at all – but had met her husband while working in nearby Bideford at the start of the
war. Bill had always been a serious young man who preferred his own company at the best of times, but after he met Lionel
Green, a newcomer to the area from London, the two young men struck up a friendship. It was through Lionel that Bill was to
meet his sweetheart, Daisy.

Rose’s mother, born Daisy Fuller, originally came from
Chadwell Heath near Romford, which was still mostly fields with grazing sheep and cattle at the time. However, it was close
to the East End of London, and moving to this tiny backwater of north Devon was quite a change for Daisy.

Rose West’s Maternal Grandparents

As luck would have it, Daisy’s parents were called Fred and Rose. Named by Daisy after her own mother, the young Rose would
– many years hence – coincidentally marry another Fred; the couple’s names becoming synonymous with evil. But this Fred, Fred
Fuller, was a decent man. Originally from picturesque Grantchester in Cambridgeshire, Fred was an ‘Old Contemptible’ who had
joined up in 1898, at aged 18, to serve as a professional soldier in the Queen’s 2nd Essex Rifles. During his long and distinguished
career, Fred had served both in the Boer War and at Mons, where he was decorated. He also met and married Rose (Woolnough),
who lived close by his barracks at Warley.

Rose’s Maternal Grandparents: The Fullers

This Rose and Fred would go on to have eight children: just as their namesakes, Rose and her husband Fred West, were to do
many years later. When Fred Fuller retired from the services, he took a job as guard on a Sunlight Soap delivery van. And,
just as he had when he was in the Army, he took home his pay packet to his wife each week rather than heading off to the pub
as many men often did during the Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Daisy remembers her father as a kind man who, every Friday
after work, would pop into the shop while she and her siblings waited excitedly on the street corner until he returned with
his pockets full of sweets for them.

Ironically, given that Daisy’s father was used to a regimented way of life, it was not Fred but her mother Rose who was the
strict disciplinarian, punishing the children if they stepped out of line. Rose senior was also often sick, and would spend
long periods in hospital with ‘sclerosis of the liver’ during much of Daisy’s childhood. The quiet and genteel Daisy left
school at 14 to go out to work to relieve pressure on the family, knocking on doors until she found a live-in post. Eventually
she obtained work as a domestic and barmaid in a pub in the cosmopolitan area of Brick Lane in the East End of London. In
the 1920s and 1930s Brick Lane was a magnet for immigrants fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, and Bangladeshi seamen who brought
their exotic foods and cooking skills to the area. It was here in 1936 that Daisy also witnessed Oswald Mosley’s Black Shirts
marching past, on their way to a rally to take the Fascist salute.

Working long hours for poor pay and with rowdy customers at times, Daisy began to look round for other employment. She found
this with the Greens, a wealthy Jewish business family who lived in nearby Wanstead, where she became a domestic and nanny
to their three young daughters. When war broke out and the Germans began their heavy bombing raids on the capital, the Greens
decided to head off to the safety of the countryside: to north Devon, asking Daisy to come with them.

Bill was 20 at the time, and working in an electrical shop in Bideford. Always a hard worker, he earned extra cash at night
by undertaking private wiring jobs for farmers and householders in the area – something he was frequently called on to do,
as many dwellings in the north Devon area were only just becoming connected to the national electricity grid. When the Greens
arrived in Bideford and needed their wiring fixing, Bill was called in. It wasn’t long before Lionel Green noticed his shy
pal’s interest in the nanny, and played Cupid.

‘Bill, meet Daisy! Daisy, Bill!’

As Bill and Daisy glanced coyly at one another, little could anyone have guessed that a child produced from their subsequent
union would cause such unimaginable horror and tragedy.

Bill, though short at under five feet six inches, was a slight and dapper man who always wore a suit and tie, even when he
was working. Whatever the weather, Bill was a familiar sight around the village in his formal attire. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
he asked Daisy, pulling a chair out for her. Daisy smiled. Unlike her more boisterous customers at the pub, Bill rarely touched
alcohol, preferring fruit juice or having half a light ale at most; he also didn’t smoke and shunned bad language. His polite
though stiff manner, which smacked of a bygone era, struck a chord with Daisy as, like Bill, she had been brought up to be
prim and proper, and was very ladylike in her ways. In Bill she’d found a man who wasn’t interested in other women in the
live-for-the-moment sexual freedoms that existed in wartime Britain, but one who was kind and caring: a ‘true gent’ as they’d
say in the East End. At least, that’s how Bill appeared to love-struck Daisy who, with little experience of life, thought
all men were like her father …

Daisy’s appeal for Bill was not difficult to see. A beautiful, exotic creature, rumoured locally to be Maltese, this quiet
Essex girl was always respectful and homely, which attracted Bill as
much as her looks. But, unbeknown to Daisy, she was Bill’s rebound girl. There had been an earlier doomed romance, when Bill’s
girlfriend had moved away and married someone else. He’d taken the rejection badly and was a broken and disillusioned man
– almost paranoid at times – until, that is, he met Daisy, and, after a while, proposed to her.

Daisy took Bill home to meet her parents at their new, larger home in Ilford. Soon after she was to become a war bride, ‘making
do and mending’ with whatever materials she could lay her hands on during rationing in wartime Britain, to produce a bridal
gown and veil. The young couple, who were not yet lovers, tied the knot on 18 April 1942, at St Mary’s in Ilford, the service
followed by a modest ‘do’ to celebrate. They were aged 21 and 23; and, although Daisy was the older of the two, some say her
modest and childlike ways made her appear younger than her new husband. These ‘babyish’ ways were something that would later
be said of one of her daughters, Rosie, when she grew up.

The happy couple stayed with Daisy’s parents for the first year of marriage, then moved to their own place in the East End.
They were about to spend their first Christmas together with their new baby, Patricia, when Bill’s ‘call-up’ papers from the
War Office dropped through the letterbox. Kissing his wife and baby goodbye, the young family man set off for HMS Gosling
Fleet Air Arm, near Warrington, a Royal Naval training base for air mechanics, fitters and radio mechanics such as Bill.

Daisy was already pregnant with her next child, Joyce, who was born the following year at a hospital set up temporarily in
the Northamptonshire countryside after the local maternity hospital in West Ham was bombed during the Blitz. Soon after the
second little girl’s birth in 1944, Daisy decided to take a leaf out of the Greens’ book and took her little family to the
safety of the north Devon countryside, moving in with Bill’s parents in Northam. But, despite escaping the nightly
poundings of air raids in London, she found a strange atmosphere at her in-laws’.

Rose West’s Paternal Grandparents

Like Daisy’s family, Bill’s parents owned their own home. It was not as grand as the Fullers’ place, but a pretty stone cottage
nonetheless, set in the heart of the village, with steps up to the front door. Bertha Letts was well-respected locally though,
like her daughter-in-law, Daisy, she too was not originally from the area. Bertha was the local district nurse and a familiar
sight on her bike as she made her rounds in the village and nearby Bideford and Torrington, visiting the sick. Bill’s father,
William Letts, was also well known in the village where, always smartly turned out, he worked as a butler serving various
rich women in the area. Or, at least, that’s what he said he did, while rumours going round the village suggested that Bill’s
dad did something quite different for a living.

Rose’s paternal grandmother, Bertha, was a member of the Barter family from Lymington, near the New Forest. As a young girl
she had trained to become a nurse and, during the First World War, had bravely set off for the Somme to care for soldiers
on the front line, coming face to face with all the horrific injuries that the fighting men had sustained. Rose’s paternal
grandfather, William Letts, was a Northam man born and bred. The son of a house painter, he was the youngest child and only
boy, whose many sisters spoilt him as he grew up. At 19 years of age, William was called up to serve in the First World War.
He joined the Royal Devon Yeomanry Guards, sailing off to fight with the Australians, possibly at the Dardanelles. On his
return to England, William met Bertha while both were stationed at Plymouth. They married there towards the end of the war,
settling first in Lymington and then, finally, at Bill’s birthplace of Northam.

Rose’s Paternal Grandparents: The Letts

William (Bill) Letts Junior

(Rose West’s father)

b. 1921 Hampshire

d. 1979 Gloucestershire

As both William and Bertha came from large families, they were adamant that they did not want any children, with all the financial
problems and struggle for space this could bring. Three years later, when Bill Letts Junior arrived, it was as a result of
an accident and unwelcome news to them both. However, although they soon got used to the idea, Bertha now had a young son
to care for, as well as a full-time career. On top of that, she kept the house as neat as a pin. It was so clean and tidy
and ordered, in fact, that young Bill grew up hardly daring to breathe.

Later, this level of tidiness and organisation also proved difficult for Daisy to cope with when she moved in to her in-laws’
house with babies Patsy and Joyce while Bill was away fighting at sea. Daisy felt she was walking on eggshells with her relatives,
and the situation was not helped by the icy atmosphere that prevailed between Bertha and William as the latter’s reputation
as a ladies’ man began to reach his wife’s ears.

But while Daisy was finding life difficult at the Letts’s cottage, Bill was discovering he actually enjoyed being away at
sea and the routine that the services provided. As well as sailing off to places he’d never dreamt of going to before, including
the Philippines and Australia, Bill enjoyed his new life so much that
he decided to stay on at the end of the war. First he signed up for national service for six months, and when this ended,
he became a volunteer. The Navy had little need for his wireless skills after the war, however, so Bill retrained as a steward
and, as his records show, did very well at this.