Rose West: The Making of a Monster (31 page)

At first the police couldn’t find Heather’s remains, but when they did, they almost immediately unearthed a third leg (of
Shirley Robinson) and the game was up. Fred still tried to keep Rose out of it, asking detectives such questions as, ‘Have
you told her what I’ve done?’, so that she would know he had kept to his side of the pact by taking the blame. Despite Fred’s
attempts to establish her innocence, Rose was arrested and taken to the police station, where she continued to be morose and
either said ‘no comment’ to police questions or protested her innocence. Rose didn’t know Fred had admitted to killing Heather
at this point. The police didn’t tell her until 6 o’clock that evening, but when they did, she immediately distanced herself
from him.

Since the day Fred had walked out of the house, the couple had not been allowed to have any contact with each other. While
Fred was on remand in prison, however, he managed to pass on messages of love and support to his wife through their two oldest
children, Stephen and Mae. But Rose did not respond, and it would be another six months before the couple would see each other
again. During this time, and even though Fred often changed his story, he cooperated with the police in trying to help identify
the victims and pinpointing where he’d buried the remains of all twelve.
^*
Rose, on the other hand, who was interviewed almost fifty times over the same period of time, gave the police nothing other
than to profess her innocence.
^†

The couple finally saw each other again when they stood side by side in Gloucester Magistrates’ Court to face the initial
charges against them. Fred had twice gently touched his wife on the arm to get her attention, but each time Rose shrank from
him – refusing even to catch his eye. The third time he put his hand out to her, an officer moved between them: ‘Rose and
Fred forever’ was over and the hearts and arrows all gone. The apprentice had betrayed her tutor, husband and co-accused.
And Fred, the sexual sadist and serial killer, was hurt deeply by it. Their
folie à deux
of the past twenty-five years had been broken, and Rose was now looking out for herself.

Parenting the Parents

Rose was 39 and Fred was 51 by this time, yet, separately, they still behaved like a couple of disaffected juveniles. When
the police asked Rose if she felt she’d been naïve about Fred murdering Heather, she replied, ‘I feel a bit of a cunt, to
be blunt about it.’ And even though Fred was on remand for twelve counts of murder, he continually worried about the police
messing up his home improvements back at Cromwell Street. It is particularly telling that once the police began to interview
the couple, they immediately appointed each of them an ‘appropriate adult’ to support them through the process. Appropriate
adults are normally called in where the police consider a person is ‘vulnerable’: that is to say, anyone who is under 17,
or who has mental health issues or learning difficulties.

Stephen and Mae, the couple’s eldest children, had already taken on the parental role in relation to Rose and Fred since the
last court case, and their parents had responded like children.

While Mae worried about her mother’s well-being, Rose was ‘demanding’, as her daughter put it, asking her to send her money
for clothes, cigarettes and batteries. At the time of Rose’s
trial it was costing Mae £300 a month which, as she said, ‘puts a great demand on my income.’ Rose did not appear particularly
concerned about whether Mae could afford this, or even how she was coping, given that the case was attracting worldwide media
attention and with all the stigma it inevitably involved. Instead, Rose again comes across as self-centred, like a child who
believes they are the centre of the universe. Fred was only a little better in his dealings with Stephen, but did at least
tell him to sell his story to make some money from it. But Fred was also completely deluded, for when he wasn’t worrying about
his new patio being ruined by the police, he was busy telling detectives about the relationships he’d had with some of the
victims, including medieval scholar, Lucy Partington.

Fred was devastated that Rose had abandoned him and broken her side of the pact, and later began implicating his wife. Of
16-year-old Ally Chambers’ death he said to his solicitor, ‘Rose was too bloody vicious. What she did to that little girl
was unreal. I was making love to the girl and Rose got a vibrator and shoved it straight up her arse. Fuck me, the girl nearly
went right through the fucking wall. I would never allow Rose to tie me up …’ He also said his brother John was involved in
the murders, as was Rose’s father, Bill. In fact, there was only one more sadosexual murder after Bill’s death – that of Ally
Chambers – before the series stopped.
^*
But then came an even bigger shock; for, having admitted to murdering his eldest daughter Heather, Fred went on to say he
was
not
her father – that Bill Letts was. If this is the case, and some members of the Letts family believe it is probably true,
then Rosie would have become pregnant by her father around the time she left home in early 1970, when she had just turned
16. By killing Heather, Rose could have been snuffing out every last memory of Bill.

Rose was first remanded to a safe house and then to prison, where she started to read for the first time in her life: books
such as
The Shell Seekers
and
The Prince of Tides,
becoming an avid reader. At the same time, it became obvious to Fred that Rose had not only outgrown him but that she actually
despised him; there would be no reconciliation that he had been hoping for. During the autumn, Fred volunteered for shirt-mending
duties, cutting off and saving the cotton ties from the laundry bags as they arrived in. Just after midday on New Year’s Day
1995, Fred knotted all the ties together and quietly hanged himself in his cell in Winston Green Prison. One of the notes
found in his cell afterwards had been intended for Rose’s birthday at the end of November. It read:

‘The most wonderful thing in my life was when I met you. Keep your promises to me. You know what they are. You will always
be Mrs West all over the world. I have no present. All I have is my life. I give it to you. Come to me, I’ll be waiting.’

Fred had told Stephen on several occasions that he planned to kill himself so that all charges against Rose would be dropped.
However, this letter could be asking Rose to kill herself too – ‘Come to me, I’ll be waiting’. Even if Rose had received the
note before his death, Fred knew he’d lost her; when he killed himself it was in fact his final act of control over his victims,
the authorities and, more importantly in Fred’s mind, Rose herself.

When Rose was given the news of her husband’s death she was busily crocheting baby clothes in her cell for her grandchildren.
^*
She remained unperturbed by Fred’s death, not shedding even a single tear for the man she’d been married to for over twenty
years. Sister Mary Paul, who had befriended Rose on
her visits to the prison, suggested they pray together, but as far as Rose was concerned it was Amen to Fred as she focused
on getting herself off the hook.

Or could it have been, as she claimed while pouring out her heart to Sister Paul, that she loathed Fred because he’d deceived
her? That she had no knowledge of the murders as she claimed all along, and that she was actually innocent of murder?

Was Rose Innocent?

The evening after her arrest, when the police told her that Fred had admitted to Heather’s murder, she sounded genuinely shocked.
‘What?’
she shrieked in anguish, unable to take it in. She asked again, ‘So she’s dead? Is that right?’ When the police confirmed
it a second time, she rallied briefly when told it implicated her, but she began sobbing and had to have a break. After she
returned to being questioned she was upset and subdued, and later threatened to kill Fred should she ever get her hands on
him.

With Cromwell Street surrounded by the press and TV crews, Rose was bailed to a series of safe houses in Cheltenham for her
own protection. One of the houses she stayed in for several weeks was bugged entirely by police listening devices – from the
curtains through to the three-piece suite and the cupboards. But despite Mae staying with her mother, and with all the background
interference on the tapes from the TV and stereo playing, Rose was never once heard to mention the murders. Instead she watched
children’s cartoons on television and played Scrabble, where the only words she made were crude sexual references. Clearly
old habits died hard for, although the police had excavated twelve sets of human remains by now, sex was still uppermost on
Rose’s mind.

As regards the case, there was no hard evidence whatsoever against Rose; no one had seen her kill anyone or even witnessed
her with the young women near to the time they met their deaths, and there was no forensic evidence to directly link Rose
to any of the victims. In the end, however, Mr Justice Mantell allowed similar-fact evidence to be heard, which meant that
the jury would hear from the surviving West victims, the attacks on whom formed a pattern of behaviour repeated in the killings.
^*
That is to say, Caroline Owens, Miss A, Kathryn Halliday and Anna-Marie, amongst others, all took to the witness stand. However,
as the four main witnesses had all sold their stories to national newspapers, the defence suggested they therefore had a vested
interest in making their evidence sound as lurid and sensational as possible. As Rose’s QC, Richard Ferguson argued, ‘No newspaper
is going to pay out large sums if Rosemary West is acquitted.’

Rose was initially charged with nine murders and Fred with twelve, which included Anna McFall, in 1967, and Rena and Charmaine.
A few days after Fred’s suicide, however, charges were brought against Rose for the murder of her 8-year-old stepdaughter,
after dental records examined by an expert dubbed the ‘Tooth Fairy’ established that the little girl had been murdered while
Fred was in prison.
^†
There is, however, another view: that with a relaxed regime at the open prison where inmates sometimes stayed out all night,
Fred could have hitched a lift the twenty miles to his home, raped and murdered Charmaine, and got back in time for the next
roll call.

It is also possible that Charmaine was murdered after Fred’s release from prison, as the dates are not definitive regarding
her dental growth, and were refuted by another dental expert whose report was lost. Fred had in any case confessed to the
police that he’d murdered Charmaine while taking Rena for a drink. He said he’d left the little girl asleep in the back of
the car while he plied Rena with alcohol to get her drunk, took her back to his childhood home of Much Marcle, where he’d
strangled her in a field, dismembered her body and buried the remains. He had apparently forgotten about the child until he
went back to the car and, not knowing what to do, had strangled Charmaine and taken her back to Midland Road to dispose of
her body. The child would have slept through her mother’s murder because he had given her alcohol. Fred had recalled the ground
was hard as he tried to dig it to bury Rena and so, as Brian Masters points out in
She Must Have Known,
it was likely to have been July or August.

The prosecution also drew on Rose and Fred’s letters, written and received while Fred was in Leyhill prison in 1971,
^*
to imply that the couple had planned to kill Charmaine. Rose wrote: ‘I would keep her [Charmaine] for her own sake, if it
wasn’t for the rest of the children. You can see her coming out in Anna now. And I hate it.’ But they argue she is simply
suggesting sending Charmaine to her mother’s, rather than murdering her. Fred replies, ‘So you say yes to Char, that good.
I will see to it when I get out but don’t tell her for you know what she is like …’ He is talking about arranging for Rena
to have Charmaine when he comes home which, according to Rose, is what he did. ‘He advised me that I would be better off if
I was not around,’ she said, and so she went to her parents’ house when
Rena came to collect the little girl. There were also discrepancies about the date that Mrs Giles had brought her daughter
to see Charmaine, and it is possible Fred was out of prison by then. If so, he could have murdered the little girl and Rena
by then.

When Rose left Fred in 1971, she had said to her parents, ‘You don’t know him, he’s capable of anything.’ Adding, under her
breath, ‘Even murder’, as she went back out to Fred as he waited in the van. Her parents wrongly assumed she was being overdramatic.
In any case, these do not sound like the words of a killer, but of a girl who has been shocked to discover that her boyfriend
is. There is always the notion with the wives of serial killers that ‘she must have known’. But this is often not the case
as, for example, with Primrose Shipman and Sonia Sutcliffe. Mrs Shipman would often drive her husband to his patient’s house.
She would then wait in the car, unaware, as he gave a lethal injection. On one occasion, she was even asked to ‘hold the fort’
and wait with the body for the deceased’s relatives to arrive, while Shipman went on to the next patient.

The Yorkshire Ripper’s wife had no idea that her husband’s bloody clothes from each murder went into their washing machine,
where their missing kitchen knives went, or that Sutcliffe had sewn himself a revolting undergarment to wear beneath his jeans
to make life easier for himself as he bent over his victims, performing his hideous acts on them. Through no fault of their
own, Mrs Sutcliffe and Mrs Shipman had no idea what was going on right under their noses, as was the case with the lodgers
at Cromwell Street. Fred had also killed Anna McFall before he even knew Rose. The series of murders afterwards bore all the
same hallmarks. He had also said Rose was out the night he killed Heather, and as he often sent Rose out to stay the night
with other men, this is perfectly feasible. A former worker at the Westward Ho! Holiday Centre has also recently revealed
to the author how, during the summer of 1987, Rose had written to the ‘Top Camp’ to try to get her
daughter Heather a summer job there, not realising that the camp had closed down a few years earlier. The letter was sent
only a few days or weeks before Heather’s murder, and seems more the handiwork of a caring mother than one standing trial
for killing her daughter.