Rose West: The Making of a Monster (33 page)

After difficult teenage years and a failed marriage, Anne Marie grew up to become a refined and dignified young woman, who
has done well in her new life. Nonetheless, the terror of the past is still there, and she too has made attempts on her life,
jumping into the river Severn in Gloucester.

As one of the surviving victims, Caroline Owens, was to say, ‘The attack shattered my life … I suffered low self-esteem and
tried to kill myself with a tranquilliser overdose.’ Caroline also suffered from survivor’s guilt for many years.

Leo Goatley, Rose’s lawyer, who stopped acting for her in 2004 when she dropped her appeal against the length of her sentence,
said he was haunted by the case years later. ‘It was something like a horror film, looking at pictures of skulls with plastic
tubes coming from the mouth … My wife said I could be pretty obnoxious and difficult to live with during the case and now
there are times I can’t bear to watch TV after the watershed when there’s blood and gore in films.’
^*
Legal secretaries who typed up the case were also said to be traumatised by it, as doubtless were the police and many others
involved in it.

The West children and their children have been scarred by being closely related to the world’s most infamous female serial
killer. Mae has since changed her appearance and started a new life with a whole new identity. Tara has her own family now,
and she and Louise and Barry have gone back to live in the Gloucestershire area where Anne Marie also lives. Rosemary junior
and Lucyanna moved away some years ago, to start new lives in another part of the country.

There have also been huge repercussions from the case for Rose’s siblings and their families. Rose’s mother, Daisy, also changed
her name in an attempt to escape the past. When the case broke, she dared not go out in the village for a very long time for
fear of what the neighbours might think of her, and Andy and Jackie Letts, and Andy’s siblings, have all been tainted by association.
Andy, a hard-working, honest and reliable man, had problems finding work because he is related to Rose. Sadly, Jackie, who
longed for children but suffered a number of miscarriages, now believes this was a blessing in disguise. This is because she
feels that any children she and Andy might have had would almost certainly have suffered the stigma of having a notorious
serial killer for an aunt.

At the time of Rose’s case, Andy also suffered the indignity of being made to strip off by the police. One of Rose’s younger
children had reported being raped by one of the Letts brothers, and they were looking for a distinguishing feature that she’d
reported. Andy didn’t have this feature and the police immediately apologised, but Andy said he’d never been so embarrassed
and humiliated in all his life. He still also lives with the anger and guilt of not realising the abuse his father was responsible
for and doing something about it. ‘By God! I’d have let him know about it if I had!’ he said.

Aside from Rosie, the legacy of Bill Letts has left most of his children psychologically scarred. Although, like Joyce and
Glenys, Andy has done remarkably well, he became fanatical about bathing as a young man and still feels compelled to bathe
at least twice a day. The youngest child in the family has had numerous problems. Around the time of his father’s death, Gordon
had lived with his partner Karen in the Forest of Dean. But the relationship broke down in the most tragic of circumstances.
The couple had a baby together who they called Michael, but who died in his cot. He was just 8 months of age. Gordon was accused
of murder and held for four days at the
police station, by which time Karen had left him and refused ever to see him again. Gordon hadn’t murdered the baby and was
never charged; according to Gordon Burn, in
Happy Like Murderers,
the baby suffered from eczema and they had put cream on his skin to soothe it. But the cream had stuck the baby’s face to
the bri-nylon pillow case and prevented him from breathing. Gordon sat on Michael’s tiny grave for a week after that. He then
bought a puppy but the collar was too big. The puppy slipped his head out of it, rushed into the road and got knocked down
by a lorry. ‘They done me here,’ Gordon was to say of his parents, pointing to his head. ‘All I wanted was to be happy at
home and see my parents happy at home. None of us got that … In the end I gave up. I personally couldn’t take it.’

Gordon developed a drug problem early on and still suffers from mental ill-health, spending periods of time in psychiatric
hospitals and prison. He was also prosecuted in Plymouth in 2004 for carrying an axe, but said he had to carry it in order
to defend himself against the ‘death threats’ he’d received when people found out who he was.
^*

Gordon’s older brother, Graham, became a smooth-talking charmer, like his father. And like Bill, he too became violent as
a young man, frequently beating his wife, Barbara, who had to be moved to a succession of safe houses to get away from him.
Graham also became an alcoholic, drug user and thief early on, spending time in borstal and prison. Though at one stage, Rose
and Fred offered him advice, of all things, on being ‘responsible’.

Rose’s eldest sister Pat sadly died of Alzheimer’s in her early 50s; Joyce became a nurse and finally a matron of some note.
She married a church minister and believes she is the only one to have broken the chain. It is telling that Daisy never suffered
with her nerves or from depression after Bill’s death. She even
met a kindly former Grenadier Guard, Tom Heals, with whom she lived happily for many years until his death in 1994. As Andy
Letts said of his father, ‘He had a way of twisting things to make it look like it was other people; that it was Mum who was
ill, not him.’ To outsiders, Bill had been ‘always charming’. Like a serial killer – which his quiet young daughter, who took
pleasure from knitting, would turn out to be.

Rose had been enjoying reading
The Shell Seekers
while on remand. This is a book about a middle-aged woman looking back over her life as she explores the disastrous effects
an inheritance can have on a family. In Rosie’s case the legacy that led to tragedy for so many young women and families wasn’t
about money, or property or other assets, but was of abuse.

B
ENNETT
, J
OHN WITH
G
ARDNER
, G
RAHAM,
The Cromwell Street Murders: The Detective’s Story
(Stroud, Glos.: Sutton Publishing, 2006).

B
ERRY
-D
EE
, C
HRISTOPHER AND
M
ORRIS
, S
TEVEN,
Born Killers: Childhood Secrets of the World’s Deadliest Killers
(London: John Blake Publishing Ltd, 2006).

B
URN
, G
ORDON,
Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son: The Story of the
Yorkshire Ripper
(London: Faber & Faber, 1984).

B
URN
, G
ORDON,
Happy Like Murderers: The Story of Fred and Rose West
(London: Faber & Faber, 1998).

D
AVIS
, C
AROL
A
NNE,
Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers
(London: Allison & Busby Ltd, 2001).

D
OWSON
, J
ONATHAN
H.,
AND
G
ROUNDS
, A
DRIAN
T.,
Personality
Disorders Recognition and Clinical Management
(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995).

G
ANNON
, T
HERESA
, M
ARIAMNE
, R
OSE, AND
W
ARD
, T
ONY,
‘Pathways to female sexual offending: approach or avoidance?’,
Psychology, Crime & Law
16:5 (9 February 2010), 359–80.

G
EKOSKI
, A
NNA,
Murder By Numbers: British Serial Sex Killers Since
1950
(London: Andre Deutsch Ltd, 1998).

M
ASTERS
, B
RIAN,
‘She Must Have Known’: The Trial of Rosemary West
(Reading, Berks.: Corgi, 1996).

R
OBERTS
, C
AROLINE,
The Lost Girl: How I Triumphed Over Life at
the Mercy of Fred and Rose West
(London: Metro Publishing Ltd, 2005).

S
OUNES
, H
OWARD,
Fred & Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of Horrors
(London: Sphere, 1995).

W
ANSELL
, G
EOFFREY,
An Evil Love: The Life of Frederick West
(London: Hodder Headline, 1995).

W
EST
, A
NNE
M
ARIE, WITH
H
ILL
, V
IRGINIA,
Out of the Shadows: Fred West’s Daughter Tells Her Harrowing Story of Survival
(London: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

W
EST
, S
TEPHEN AND
W
EST
, M
AE,
Inside 25 Cromwell Street: the
Terrifying, True Story of Life with Fred and Rose West
(Monmouth, Wales: Peter Grose Ltd, in association with the
News of the World,
1995).

W
ILSON
, C
OLIN,
The Corpse Garden: The Crimes of Fred and Rose West
(Reading, Berks.: True Crime Library/Forum Press, 1998).

I would like to pay special tribute to my literary agent Ben Fox Mason and to writer Gordon Burns, who sadly passed away in
July 2009.

Rose aged
6,
at infant school in Northam, Devon,
1959.

Rose’s mother, Daisy aged 31. Neighbours remarked on her beauty and exotic looks.

Rose aged 5, in the foreground, with her older sister Glenys aged
9,
and brothers Andy aged 7 and Graham aged 2, on the sand dunes at Northam Country Park, 1959. Big sister Joyce aged 15, has
taken the picture.

Fred aged 12, with his mother Daisy and father Walter. Daisy is 29 and by now Fred is having to have sex with her. It is 1953,
the year of Rose’s birth.