Couples Who Kill (24 page)

She also rented a flat to take her clients to, and didn’t tell Fred. Unable to control his environment for the first time since childhood, he promptly went to pieces. He worked even more obsessively on the house and would pace back and forward whenever he was between DIY tasks. He spent even less time than usual on his grooming, often wearing the same clothes for days and neglecting to take a bath.

Fred wanted to take control of another female, and eventually decided to have sex with one of Rose’s younger daughters. He took the fourteen-year-old to an upstairs room where he raped and sodomised her. In typical West fashion, he also videoed the abuse. The child screamed so loudly that her half brothers and sisters tried to come to her aid, but Fred had locked the door and Rose was out at the shops. When Rose did hear of the incident, she simply told the teenager ‘You were asking for it.’

The girl remained deeply shocked after the rape and eventually confided in a schoolfriend whose father was a
policeman. The police now visited Cromwell Street.

Rose answered the door and the police told her they wanted to search the house for the video of Fred raping his stepdaughter. Rose’s typically violent response was to assault one of the two officers. After arresting her, they took the five youngest children into care. Later they spoke to Anne Marie and she reluctantly admitted the years of abuse then tried to retract her statement, afraid of what Rose and Fred might do. Meanwhile Fred was arrested for sodomy and rape and was remanded in custody.

Lonely on her own, Rose adopted two dogs from the local pound. But she beat them as brutally as she’d beaten her children. Ironically, the children were given the option of going back to her after the rape victim refused to testify and the case against Fred collapsed. But the five youngsters asked to remain in foster care – and began to tell their foster parents that Fred had joked about Heather being buried under the patio.

The foster parents told a social worker and the social worker went to the police. They investigated and found that Heather West, Charmaine West and her mother Rena West were missing. It was time to search Cromwell Street…

Mae West opened the door on 24th February 1994 to a police team with a search warrant. Rose told them that they were wasting their time, but when they started to dig up the patio she screamed at her son Stephen to phone Fred and get him home. When Stephen eventually tracked Fred down, he promised to return in a few minutes – but he didn’t arrive back for several hours. It’s likely that he
went to an outhouse where he was keeping body parts from previous victims and destroyed the evidence.

The following day, the search team found Heather West’s dismembered body – and a third thighbone. Alerted to the fact that there was a second body, they charged Fred West with Heather’s murder and continued to dig up the garden.

Rose was also taken in for questioning, though Fred told them that Rose knew nothing about Heather’s murder and dismemberment. Rose alternately cried and shouted at the police, telling them that Heather had been a lesbian and that she was glad she’d left the house. She made up various other stories to explain her eldest daughter’s disappearance, but appeared to go into shock when the police told her that Heather was dead.

After forty-eight hours of questioning she was moved to a safe house, pending further enquiries. She promptly swallowed a bottle of aspirin and was taken to hospital to have her stomach pumped out. Afterwards she was given medication for depression and began to overeat due to boredom and stress. Questioned further over her abuse of Caroline Owens, Rose answered ‘No Comment’. She was also questioned about a video, apparently taken in the Cromwell Street cellar, which showed a woman being hung from the ceiling and abused by two men. She answered ‘No Comment’ to that too, a reply she would give again and again.

During the last days of February and throughout March, the bones of further victims were disinterred from the garden at 25 Cromwell Street. They were eventually identified as the remains of Heather West, Shirley Robinson and her foetus, Shirley Hubbard, Alison
Chambers, Lucy Partington, Theresa Siegenthaler, Juanita Mott, Carol Anne Cooper and Linda Gough.

By April the authorities were digging up the Wests’ previous flat at Midland Street, and it yielded Charmaine’s remains. That same month they also found Rena West, Charmaine’s mother, in Letterbox Field, Much Marcle, in the vicinity of Fred’s childhood home. Two months later they found Anne McFall’s skeleton – and the tiny skeleton of her unborn child – in the nearby Fingerpost Field.

Rose wasn’t charged with Rena West’s and Anne McFall’s murders as the bodies were found miles away from Cromwell Street and the murder of Anne McFall had taken place before Rose knew Fred. But she was charged with the murders of little Charmaine plus the nine girls found buried in her garden and under her cellar. On each of the charges she said ‘I’m innocent.’

Fred was charged with all twelve homicides. He at first denied involvement in most of the murders, but gradually admitted killing one he called Scar Hand (one of the teenage victims had a bandaged hand at the time of her abduction) and ‘a Dutch girl’, actually the Swiss student Therese Siegenthaler. He said that he’d strangled Heather after an accident and added insult to injury by suggesting that he’d killed Lucy Partington because she wanted to marry him. He remained vague about the reason for Anne McFall’s death, writing of her as his ‘angle’ (he meant angel) and suggesting that they shared a perfect love.

On 30th June 1994 Rose and Fred were charged together. He reached out to her as they stood in the dock but she flinched away, and when he tried again a policewoman
knocked his hand aside. By now Rose was telling everyone that he was ‘wrong in the head’ and that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

Meanwhile Fred desperately rewrote history, starting a journal in which he suggested that he’d been the perfect father. Both Wests had physically, emotionally and sexually abused their children but he’d somehow convinced himself that he’d given them a perfect life. He wrote of the garden he’d made for them and of idyllic caravan holidays, sometimes taken with Rose’s incestuous dad.

Incarcerated in Winson Green prison whilst awaiting trial, Fred kept begging his son Stephen to persuade Rose to write to him but she was adamant that the marriage was over. This contributed to the depression he already felt at having Cromwell Street torn apart in the search for bodies. Everything he held dear – his house and his ownership of Rose – had gone. Like most serial killers, Fred also feared being on the receiving end of violence and he was constantly on guard lest someone in the Birmingham prison beat him up. He wept when his son Stephen visited, admitting that he constantly had to watch his back. In his last telephone call to Anne Marie he murmured ‘Goodbye my angel.’ The call took place ten days before he died.

As the winter began, Fred realised that he had nothing left to live for. He began to collect laundry ties from his prison job, weaving them through strips of his bedsheet and fashioning them into a long, strong noose. Then he waited till New Year’s Day, knowing that the prison would have a skeleton staff.

When his prison wing was quiet, he wrote Rose a letter that said ‘All I have is my life. I will give it to you, my darling.’ Then he threaded the noose through the bars of
his window, stood on the laundry basket to knot it into place, and kicked the basket away.

When Rose was given the news of her husband’s death, she was put on suicide watch, but she remained emotionless. Her supporters now believed that she’d be freed. But the prosecution realised that her surviving victims could prove that she was a sadistic sexual predator in her own right, rather than the innocent wife of a murderer. Several of them agreed to testify so the trial went ahead.

The trial opened on 3rd October 1995 at Winchester Crown Court. Several of Rose’s female sexual partners took the stand and described how the initially-consensual sadomasochistic sex had soon become increasingly frightening. One woman had been shown
breath-restricting
rubber masks which had clearly been worn. A teenage girl told of being led upstairs by Rose then terrorised by her and Fred together. The abuse had included being sodomised with a candle or a dildo, something which had made her bleed.

Caroline Owens described her kidnapping to the jury, recalling how Rose had held her still in the car whilst Fred gagged her with sticky tape. Rose had then pushed her onto the floor of the car. Later Rose kissed her, becoming angry when she pulled away. Fred had then told Rose to fetch the cotton wool – and Rose had stuffed it into Caroline’s mouth.

When the teenager was undressed and tied up on the bed, Rose had fondled her all over, pinched her nipples and digitally penetrated her. Rose had also heard Fred threaten
to keep Caroline in the cellar – and she hadn’t looked shocked. The following day Rose was the one who began to suffocate Caroline with a pillow when she screamed for help.

Anne Marie also took the stand, recalling the numerous times that Rose had beaten her. Rose had also helped her own father, Bill Letts, Fred’s brother John and several of her clients sexually assault the helpless child.

A voluntary prison worker testified that Fred had told her Rose was involved in several of the murders and that she’d killed Shirley Robinson and her unborn child.

Rose then testified on her own behalf, suggesting that she was completely dominated by Fred – but her behaviour with her own children suggested otherwise. She had often tied them up and beaten them during the day when Fred was at work, then joined in his laughter when he came home and saw how cowed they were. And she could have remained in her lounge with the various teenage girls who saw her as a mother substitute – but instead she’d taken them upstairs to Fred and had non-consensual sadomasochistic sex with them. Rose now tried to reinvent herself as a shy, softly-spoken woman, but the jury were allowed to hear tapes of her shouting and cursing at the police.

After a six-week trial, the jury retired to consider its verdict. Within two days they found her guilty of all ten counts of murder. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence she received without emotion, though she apparently wept afterwards downstairs.

In October 1996 Gloucester City Council demolished 25 Cromwell Street and landscaped the ground to create a path leading to the city centre. To prevent
the public taking away parts of the house as ghoulish trophies, the debris was removed, crushed and incinerated.

Unsurprisingly, given their violent childhoods, Rose’s children have continued to suffer from depression and low self-esteem. Anne Marie took an overdose of pills during Rose’s trial and had to have her stomach pumped out. And in 1999 she jumped into a freezing river and tried to drown herself. One of her children has subsequently spent time in foster care.

Stephen also became suicidal when his marriage broke up. He attempted to hang himself but the noose broke. His uncle John – one of Fred’s brothers – successfully hanged himself whilst awaiting the court’s verdict on whether he had sexually molested Anne Marie.

Stephen continues to indulge in self-destructive behaviour and, on Friday 3rd December 2004, he was jailed for nine months at Worcester Crown Court after admitting several counts of underage sex with a
fourteen-year
-old girl.

After her imprisonment, Rose West returned to her childhood religion. Hearing of this, Caroline Roberts wrote and asked if she’d now consider confessing for the sake of the other victims’ families, but Rose didn’t reply.

It’s taken many years, but Caroline has come to terms with her ordeal and is a lively, caring and strong woman who looks ten years younger than her actual age. She’s suffered numerous stresses (her hair fell out as Rose West’s trial approached) but has steadfastly rebuilt her life.
She complements her work as a substance abuse worker with Reiki healing and is also a trained acupuncturist.

As I prepared to leave her friendly home in April 2004, I asked her if she had any final thoughts about the Wests’ case. ‘Yes, what happened to the rest of the sex circle?’ she asks. It’s a telling point which remains uninvestigated.

It’s not just the fate of the Wests’ sex circle which has continued to cause controversy. In January 2003 a Sunday newspaper claimed that Rose West was about to wed the bass player of a Seventies rock group, but both parties – who admitted to being good friends – denied that nuptial bliss was on the cards. (Some newspaper stories are pure invention: one newspaper headline trumpeted that singer Jonathan King had been badly beaten up in prison and now had two black eyes. But King, who had a music column in prison magazine Insider, was able to report that he hadn’t been attacked.)

In 2004 an expert in witches’ covens said that the Wests’ murders were about human sacrifice and that they were probably supplying a powerful local cult with victims. He cited the fact that the bar in the Wests’ lounge was called The Black Magic Bar. But Rose preferred black lovers to white, which probably explained the reason for the moniker.

The expert noted that all of the victims had fingers and toes missing and said that this linked in with an occult spell known as ‘the magic hand’. But another expert said that the spell involved cutting off the
entire
hand, not just individual digits, though such digits could be ground into powder and used in other spells.

The reality is that we may never know what the Wests did with the missing digits, ribs and kneecaps. They may have eaten some of them – Dennis Neilson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Arthur Shawcross and Ed Gein are just a few of the world’s most notorious male cannibal killers. Female cannibals are more unusual, but there have been cases reported in Germany and Australia. Fred even ran a café for a while with Rose West’s father, so he could have cooked human flesh there.