Couples Who Kill (22 page)

On 1st June, Rose gave birth to their daughter, Mae. She’d been due in May so was going to be called after the month of her birth. The Wests kept the name but Mae later changed the spelling of it. As a result, Fred always remembered her birthday, but he didn’t remember previous or future children’s birthdays. They weren’t unique individuals to him, simply small people he could alternately be sentimental about or abuse.

In the same timeframe, Fred’s boss lent him the money to buy a bigger house at 25 Cromwell Street, a few streets away from their existing Gloucester apartment. The house had previously been divided up into bedsits, something which suited the impoverished Wests. They took in male students who Rose enthusiastically slept with. She also slept with Fred’s boss and some of Fred’s workmates whilst an approving Fred watched or listened outside the door.

Doubtless worn out by having so many men – and by the oversized dildos which Fred liked to use on her – she turned increasingly to other women for sexual pleasure, seducing acquaintances and neighbours then becoming violently dominant towards them. Once again, the voyeuristic Fred West was thrilled.

But his happiness ebbed in the late summer of 1972 when he heard that Rena, his legal wife, had turned up at his parents’ house and was demanding to see Charmaine. If she found the child missing, she’d contact the authorities
and Rose would go to prison for murder. He himself would face jail for concealing such a horrific crime.

He’d already murdered Anne McFall and possibly Mary Bastholm by now, so killing Rena was the obvious solution. He consequently took her to the pub and plied her with drink. When she was semi-conscious he probably took her to a farmhouse outbuilding and bound her tightly before restricting her breathing for his erotic pleasure. He probably wound tape around her face, putting a pipe in one nostril to allow in a little air. Then he could have partially removed and reintroduced the pipe, relishing her terror and experiencing the ultimate control. Leastways a slim pipe was found with her remains when Fred eventually confessed his crimes.

Fred West had behaved inappropriately towards his daughter Anne Marie from the time she was an infant, rubbing her naked body against his. But when she was eight years old, Rose and Fred decided together that it was time to ‘break her in.’

The perverted couple took her to the cellar where Rose made her undress and held her down on a mattress. She scratched the little girl’s chest until she drew blood.

Fred tied Anne Marie up and raped her, whilst Rose watched. The little girl suffered internal bleeding but Rose’s only response was to keep her off school for several days, telling her ‘It’s something everybody does but nobody talks about.’ Rose also warned her to keep quiet about the abuse and denied her medical care. A few weeks later she bound Anne Marie to a metal frame and flogged her then violated her with a vibrator. She was having
consensual powerplay sex with various partners but preferred the complete power she could have over a helpless child.

Anne Marie would later accurately describe Rose as an evil torturer – but her life briefly improved when the couple took in a nanny, Caroline Owens.

In April 2004 I travelled to the Forest Of Dean to interview Caroline, who is now in her late forties. (Her name is now Caroline Roberts.) She first met the Wests in early September 1972 when they saw her walking home alone and offered her a lift.

‘I was wary at first in case there were two men in the car – then I saw Rose sitting in the passenger seat and I relaxed,’ says Caroline who was almost seventeen at the time. She had no reason to fear the friendly couple, and got into their Ford Popular. They were soon asking her all about her life.

So what were her first impressions of Rose & Fred West? ‘She was pretty young so I thought that he might be her dad,’ Caroline recalls, ‘I suppose in my subconscious I tended to see older men as father figures. But they soon told me that they were married and there was so much banter between them that it was obvious they were very happy together.’

Caroline admitted to the caring couple that she wasn’t getting on well with her stepfather, whereupon they told her that they were looking for a live-in nanny. They had identified someone who might be vulnerable enough to take part in their sex games and wanted her to move in right away. But Caroline did the sensible thing and insisted
they meet her parents before she moved into the Wests’ three-storey house in Gloucester.

When she moved into the couple’s Cromwell Street home, she noticed that they were very demonstrative. ‘Fred was always grabbing her bum and he’d kiss her goodbye in the morning then grab at her breasts.’ But, these displays of love and lust aside, it was a very domesticated household. ‘Rose taught me how to cook a Sunday roast and how to make pastry and cakes. We’d prepare the vegetables together. The children came home to cooked meals at set times.’

The Wests later cruelty to their children has become legendary, but Caroline noted that – whilst the babies were small – the violence was restrained. ‘Rose did the slapping and shoving. Fred often smiled and winked at the kids when she wasn’t looking. Anne Marie, who was the oldest at age eight, got the worst of it.’

Feminists would later suggest that Rose was completely dominated by her older husband, so did she ever appear afraid of him? ‘No, she had sex as a weapon in her favour,’ says Caroline, who is now a Substance Misuse Project Worker, ‘He was clearly in her sexual thrall.’

Caroline loved the Wests’ children and worked hard to keep them out of Rose’s way when she was in one of her darker moods. After a while she also had to avoid Fred’s sexually outrageous comments. One day he suggested that his eight-year-old daughter Anne Marie wasn’t a virgin – but when Caroline looked horrified he backtracked and said that she’d broken her hymen whilst playing with her bike.

For the first few weeks that she lived with them, Fred would make dirty jokes and Rose would eventually tell him
to leave Caroline alone. But one night she and Fred both asked the teenager to join their ‘sex circle’ which they said comprised themselves and a few men. When Caroline demurred and said she wanted to go home, Fred threatened to tell her stepfather that she’d had sex with two of her boyfriends during her stay at Cromwell Street.

The following day, one of the Wests’ friends saw that the seventeen-year-old was still upset. She told him what had happened and he volunteered to drive her to her parents house in the Forest Of Dean.

Caroline fled the West household without telling them that she was leaving, but deep down she felt guilty – Rose had been a good friend to her and she’d loved the Wests’ children and felt protective towards Anne Marie. Moreover, like many teenagers raised in a difficult environment, Caroline had been brought up to feel that everything which went wrong was somehow her fault.

A month later she was hitch-hiking home after seeing her boyfriend when the Wests drove up and apologised profusely for asking her to join their sex circle. Rose said that she missed her friendship and Fred added that the kids missed her too. Caroline’s gut instinct told her not to get into the car but she ignored it and accepted a lift home.

The couple chatted to her till she relaxed, then Rose’s mood turned ugly and she made a pass at her. When Caroline objected, Fred punched her hard in the head. They stopped the car and bound her, drove her to their house and subjected her to a prolonged and sadistic sexual assault.

Caroline recalls the attack. ‘It was obvious that I was there for her pleasure rather than his, a dummy run for her to see if she could take over the control, if she could be the
dominant party. They wanted to see how far she could go on her own.’

Rose forced herself upon Caroline both digitally and orally then Fred beat her with his belt. This obviously turned the couple on and they had sex on the bed in front of the teenager. Rose – who had often walked around naked in front of her brothers – didn’t appear embarrassed by this public display. ‘It’s as if she was in a porn movie,’ Caroline recollects.

They left her tied up overnight but when she heard someone at the door the following morning she screamed for help. Rose then started to suffocate her with a pillow. Caroline believed she was about to die – then Fred pulled the pillow away. He told her that they were going to keep her in the cellar and let her be used by the sex circle and that when they’d tired of her they’d bury her under the paving stones of Gloucester.

The couple gagged her and left the room but Fred returned and quickly raped her before bursting into tears. He begged her not to tell Rose, saying that Caroline was only there for her pleasure. Caroline nodded frantically, agreeing with him in a desperate bid to save her life.

‘After Rose half-suffocated me, I wondered if they already had another girl chained up in the cellar,’ Caroline remembers. When the couple untied her she tremblingly promised to rejoin their household, to become their nanny again. Fred and Rose had both been raised in incestuous families so they apparently believed her – they were used to sexual assaults punctuating periods of domestic harmony.

They cut Caroline’s hair free of the sticky tape that they’d wound around her head and she got dressed, her
clothing covering the rope burns and weals. They had a cup of tea together, then they all got into Fred’s car with the children and he dropped them off at the nearest launderette. ‘I felt stronger after Fred had gone,’ Caroline admits, ‘And the atmosphere changed. Rose was much more nervous now that we were alone and she busied herself putting washing into the machines. I told her that I was going to the local shop for cigarettes and she looked very worried as I hurried out.’ The seventeen-year-old was terrified that Fred West would return but he was on his way to work and ‘luckily there were no mobiles in those days.’

So why does Caroline think that the Wests let her live when, within months, they’d go on to murder another female lodger? ‘They really thought they had me completely under their control, that I’d rather be with them than face the repercussions of my stepdad finding out what I’d been up to. They could spot a victim a mile away.’

They were partly right, as Caroline’s stepfather refused to call the police – but her mother saw her bruised face and obvious distress and contacted them regardless. Caroline was worried that Anne Marie might be an incest victim and mentioned this to a detective. ‘If she’d been examined and found to be sexually abused, the Wests’ sexual assaults could have been stopped immediately.’ Sadly, no one investigated further. ‘Everything else Fred said was so
far-fetched
that it was generally believed he’d made the story up.’ (One of Rose West’s lovers would later phone social services and tell them that he thought Anne Marie was being sexually abused, but this too wasn’t followed up.)

Seventeen-year-old Caroline gave a statement about her
horrific experiences, but understandably couldn’t bring herself to go to court to testify about the rape. As a result the couple were charged with assault in January 1973 and only fined a total of a hundred pounds. A married couple with three children, the Wests didn’t superficially fit the judiciary’s image of sex criminals so they assumed that it was a consensual threesome which had gotten out of hand.

The legal system genuinely didn’t realise the extent of the Wests’ depravity at this point – but later authorities may have turned a blind eye to the fact that Rose went on to prostitute Anne Marie. Fred West had become a police informer, telling them when male lodgers were doing cannabis deals and, as a result, the police frequently raided the lodgers rooms in the Seventies but kept away from Rose and Fred’s floors of the house. By now Rose was taking paedophiliac photographs of Anne Marie. She’d go on to take such photos of all of her other children when they were about the same age, obviously the age that Rose was sexually fixated on.

There have subsequently been suggestions that some police officers attended the Wests’ sex parties. This would explain why calls to the authorities from Rose’s clients suggesting that Anne Marie was being sexually abused weren’t followed up.

It’s likely that the couple made a conscious decision after going to court that they would kill future sex slaves to evade justice. Leastways, in the spring of 1973 – a mere three months after abducting Caroline Owens – they
murdered one of their lodgers, nineteen-year-old Linda Gough.

Linda had dated two of the Wests’ male lodgers in the past and had also done some babysitting for Rose, so she fled to Cromwell Street after having a difference in opinion with her parents. At first the arrangement worked out perfectly as Linda again babysat for Heather, Mae and Anne Marie.

Rose was now five months pregnant with Stephen – and Fred told everyone that her lesbian urges were at their strongest during pregnancy. Whatever the motivation, someone took Linda into the cellar and wound brown tape around her face. They probably also suspended her from holes which had been drilled into the ceiling at the appropriate height.

It’s believed that the Wests flogged their victims and penetrated them vaginally and anally with extra-large dildos. They did this with initially-consenting partners, some of whom later testified that the consensual sadomasochism quickly descended into outright abuse.

After Linda died, she was extensively dismembered, despite the fact that the dirt floor of the shed where he buried her was big enough to take an intact corpse. But someone – presumably Fred with his love of operations and bodies found in car crashes – severed the thighbones at the hip and decapitated her. Later he built a bathroom extension over her makeshift burial site, a site which remained untouched for the next twenty-one years.

But Linda wasn’t one of the many forgotten girls who the Wests killed. Her anxious parents went to Cromwell Street but Rose claimed she’d never heard of Linda, despite the fact that she had Linda’s slippers on her feet. This
surely points to Rose’s guilt in the murder – if Fred had murdered the girl without Rose’s knowledge, Rose would simply have told the Goughs that their daughter had moved on. Later Rose told the Goughs that she now remembered Linda and that the teenager had gone to Weston-Super-Mare. (Years later she would also suggest that her daughter Heather – in reality buried under the patio – had also gone to the seaside town.)