Rose West: The Making of a Monster (9 page)

In reality, though, as Joan recalled in the
Plymouth Evening Herald
^*
at the time of Rose’s trial, ‘It was very, very rare that Rosemary was let out to play, and she seemed quite happy to stay
in after school and help her mother with the chores.’ Rosie was also remembered as a ‘good little girl’ and ‘obedient’, with
no signs of the monster she was to become just a few years later. On occasion she was allowed to help the old lady next door
with her laundry in return for some biscuits. Rosie delighted in pretending to be a housewife and, although still only 8,
she was a dab hand at the ironing by now (which she’d make her own children do from a very young age).

Since arriving in Plymouth in early 1962, Rosie 8, Andy, 9, and Graham, 5, had been enrolled at the local school in Devonport.
The school was on the High Street and had suffered heavy bombing during the war. A new school opened that same year as part
of the regeneration programme in the area, and the Letts children, along with the rest of their classmates, moved to the Morice
Town Primary in September. Despite this, little else had changed for the Letts children for, as one of their neighbours in
Plymouth recalled in the press at the time of the trial, while Rose ‘wasn’t academically very bright’, she and her siblings
were always turned out as ‘clean as new pins’. What the new neighbours probably didn’t realise was that the children’s smart
clothes often hid bruises, as Daisy instructed Bill to only hit them where it wouldn’t show – although with the older girls
gone, this applied to the boys rather than to Glenys and Rosie.

When the story of the House of Horrors first broke, the family who’d lived in the flat below them at Benbow Street
remembered the Letts ‘for their cleanliness – it was almost an obsession with Rosemary’s mother’, Joan Scobling was to say.
Daisy’s depression had also returned around this time and Bill’s OCD was still very much hers. She had become particularly
worried about the shared toilet and she scrubbed it with bleach at least four times a day (which was something Rose would
make her own children do some years later).

Andy recalled how his big sister Joyce was ‘lovely’ and ‘always brought us little treats’ when he and his siblings were small.
She’d come back to Benbow Street that Christmas with a hamper for her little brothers and sisters, bought with money she’d
saved each week from her job. She’d been forced to take refuge with her friend’s parents in Northam after Bill’s last attack,
but travelling back to Plymouth, she was heartbroken when her mother shut the door in her face. Glenys, on the other hand,
still seemed able to get away with more as far as Bill was concerned. The neighbour’s cousin, Brian Scobling, who lived next
door, recalled how he’d had a crush on Glenys: ‘I remember I asked Glenys for a kiss. I suppose we were about 13 or 14 years
old, and she was my first girlfriend.’
^*

If Bill knew about Glenys’s friendship with Brian, his response was very different from when the young engineer at Smith’s
in Barnstaple had showed an interest in his oldest girl, Patsy. While Glenys had her little pal next door, and Andy would
lose himself in the city, Rosie – when she wasn’t spending the rare occasion playing with Joan – was left isolated once more
with only her mother and baby brothers for company. And when Daisy took the little boys out, Rosie would possibly once more
be left alone in the flat with her father.

Since moving to Plymouth, Rosie had begun to suffer nightmares. She was being bullied at her new school, and would run home
in tears. A former school pal in Plymouth recalled later
how vulnerable she’d been. The little girl was also exhibiting other disturbed behaviour at this time: she came home from
school and cut up the bedclothes she shared with her brothers and sisters to make clothes for her dolls. And, as can be symptomatic
of ‘troubled’ children, Rosie frequently told lies. These were not practical lies to get her out of trouble, or even childish
boasts, but were transparent and pointless. ‘She said stupid things,’ as her brother was to say.

Most children grow out of lying as they get older, but the little girl from Benbow Street with the long plaits in her hair
would go on to become a pathological liar, i.e., lying to get her own way with no concern for anyone else. But as her little
friend, Joan, was to tell the press at the time of her trial, ‘I find it all totally unbelievable. If someone had told me
Rosemary had become a nun, I would have found it easier to believe.’

In early January 1964, when Rosie was 10, her father learned his lungs were diseased from working with hazardous materials
in the docks and he would have to leave his job. With the baby of the family, Gordon, only just enrolled at Morice Town Primary
School, it was a matter of days before the family suddenly upped sticks and moved again.

Bill was, if nothing else, a hard worker – and found full-time work almost immediately in another part of the country. He
had always boasted he could turn his hand to anything to earn a living, and in truth he did: from electrical engineer and
wireless operator to steward, TV repair man and cook. However, despite Bill’s unhealthy interest in young girls, his next
job was in the kitchens of a children’s home near Chipping Camden, on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire border. The job
came with a rambling, detached Victorian house in the nearby village of Mickleton. The house was ‘dark and cold, like a fridge,
even in the summer’, Andy was to say, but it had long gardens and an orchard where the children loved to play and watch the
swallows nesting, their only respite from the violence and shouting.

Rosie and her brothers went to school in the picturesque Cotswold village of Moreton-in-Marsh but, nine months later, just
before the start of the new school year, Bill either lost his job or decided to move on again. The freedom and space which
Rosie and her siblings had enjoyed for the first time in their lives at the old house was now gone as they moved back into
cramped lodgings while Bill looked for another job and alternative accommodation.

In the latter part of 1964, Bill found work with an electronics firm in the pretty village of Bishop’s Cleeve, on the outskirts
of Cheltenham. Like the housing provided around Dagenham for the Ford car workers, the village boasted solid, red-brick housing
built to accommodate the workers at the new industries in the area, including Smith’s Aerospace, the local defence company
that Bill now worked for. This meant another two changes of school for Rosie and her siblings, while the family remained in
rooms above a coach builder’s, Leo Tudor’s, in Cheltenham, until they were allocated a house on the Smith’s Estate. The few
bits of furniture they’d accrued since leaving Northam then arrived out of storage.

Their new house was a modest semi occupying a corner plot in Tobyfield Road. With Bill’s improved pay and conditions at Smith’s,
it seemed as if things were at last looking up for the family. But, of course, this could never be, as they had taken the
same toxic problems with them. Added to which, everything about the family was built on secrets and lies. The girls who went
to ‘naval school’ had no idea it was in fact a children’s home, the younger siblings had no idea why their older sisters had
to leave home; nor did the extended family realise that Bill’s new job working on flight simulators was actually not so much
‘hush-hush’ as rather lowly. Bill’s disappearance during his naval career, when he’d lived in Australia with another woman,
remains to this day shrouded in mystery for some family members – even though he was gone for
two years. His father having had an affair closer to home also seemed to have slipped under the radar.

Bill’s own parents also kept secrets, for had they known about their son’s psychotic illness, which, as Bertha was a nurse,
they surely did, they hadn’t told Daisy about it. In the family’s new house at Bishop’s Cleeve, as with the others, the truth
was fragmented and compartmentalised between the parents and children, so that no one really knew what was going on right
under their noses. The only one who had a complete picture in fact was ‘Dad’, whose moods continued to lurch from manic laughter
to brooding silences and delusions until, like a pressure cooker without an air vent, he blew his lid. And while Rosie, in
her formative years, would have grown up believing her father’s behaviour was normal, she was being coached by Bill to share
secrets with him that no child should.

This, then, was Rosie and the family’s fresh start. While some twenty or so miles down the road in a village on the other
side of the Forest of Dean lived a man twelve years her senior, who would be both Rosie’s prince and her saviour: the young
Freddie West. Or ‘Weird Freddie’, as he was known to his peers. But it would be another five years until they would meet and
six years before she would kill for the first time, alone and unaided.

B
Y THE SPRING OF
that year, Harold Wilson’s Labour government had swept into power and the swinging sixties were well under way, with music
from Dylan to the Beatles, Red Bus films, Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the Pill. Jobs were also readily available and if
you didn’t like the one you were in, you could be in another by the next morning. During the autumn of 1964, Rosie turned
11 and the Letts were settling into their Gloucestershire home, where this new dawn wasn’t wasted on Bill, who grasped at
the opportunities it offered.

Having just started his new job at Smith’s Aerospace, Bill went out and bought himself a briefcase and brand-new car. Already
‘fanatical’ about wearing a suit and tie every day, he began swanning around the village ‘like he was a managing director
of a company’, as one of the family remembered. Bill was now earning about £30 a week. This was decent money at the time,
although Daisy still wore the same old red winter coat she’d had ever since they’d been married. This wasn’t something that
concerned Bill; after all, he handed over his pay packet to his wife every week. But, as Daisy said, she was always the one
with the ‘worry’ for the family budget, and if Bill had spent more than they could afford, she and the kids would be the ones
that suffered as usual.

Rosie, following in Andrew and Glenys’s footsteps, began Cleeve secondary school that autumn. All three needed new
uniforms again – navy blue this time – which Daisy scrimped and saved to provide, ensuring the children were well turned out
as usual. While Daisy was left to juggle the household budget, items Bill purchased such as the briefcase, hi-tech stereos
and a smart new car were not necessary to his job, but all part of his delusions of grandeur: symptoms of his illness. Bill
didn’t even have a driving licence and would never possess one, not even when, a few years later, he began taking Rosie out
to the countryside to give her ‘driving lessons’.

By this time, the two oldest girls, Patsy and Joyce, were making their own way in the world and had no contact with the family.
Pat went to Australia with her new husband and Joyce was starting a family and training as a nurse. The five children who
were still at home: Glenys, 14, Andy, 13, Rosie, 11, Graham, 7, and Gordon, 5, were crammed into two bedrooms in what was
essentially a compact semi at 96 Tobyfield Road.

Once more, 11-year-old Rosie was the new kid on the block. She had begun overeating just before the family left Northam, and
was a little plump by now. Overeating is often a way of trying to cope with stress and negative feelings, and it was something
Rose would also do in later years. Rosie didn’t find life at her new school any better than she had at her former schools,
where she did not shine academically and found it almost impossible to make friends. With her puppy-fat and babyish ways,
the young girl cut a solitary figure in the playground. One of her former peers at school remembered her as ‘a social outcast’,
while the boy who had sat by her in class said she was so quiet that he barely remembered her. With no pals to play with,
Rosie spent her spare time with her pet hamsters. She and her siblings would also fuss over Andy’s dog, Ben, whose glossy
coat was maintained by the raw eggs the dog loved to eat.

On one particular day, Ben had leapt over the fence and returned with a box of eggs the milkman had left on a neighbour’s
doorstep. As Daisy struggled to free the egg box from the
reluctant dog’s mouth, Rosie and her siblings burst into laughter. Eventually winning the tug of war, Daisy insisted the giggling
children returned the box, complete with the teeth marks in it, to its rightful owner. But happy times such as this were few
and far between, and certainly did not happen if Bill was at home – although he was never cruel to the dog, or any other animals
they had, reserving this for his family.

While Rosie had no friends, her older brother Andy was also bullied at their new school. He became popular, however, as he
was good at sports, particularly long-distance running. But just as Daisy had not visited her older three daughters at the
children’s homes, neither did she come to see Andy at sports day or Rosie and her siblings in anything they did at school.
Daisy possibly didn’t attend the children’s school events early on because of her illness, but as one of the older girls was
to say many years later, their mother didn’t know how to nurture. Certainly there were no books in the house and the children
were never read a bedtime story. Daisy also found it hard to comfort and support the children, particularly the girls as they
grew older. This was possibly due to Daisy’s own mother, Rose, who throughout Daisy’s childhood had suffered from sclerosis
of the liver, which is often associated with alcoholism. Rumour had it in the family that Daisy had actually gone into care
as a child for a period of time, and that she’d received mysterious burns to her body. Having a seriously ill parent can in
any case cause a young child to suffer from anxiety and depression. And with her mother being frequently hospitalised, Daisy’s
maternal role model was at best absent. This, coupled with Bill’s own paternal role model, did not bode well for Rosie and
her siblings.