The case of Fred and Rosemary West is unique in British criminal history, for the chances of a sex maniac and a nymphomaniac forming a murderous alliance must be a million to one.
In August 1991, the Gloucester builder Frederick West was charged with sexual offences against some of his seven children. But the case came to nothing when one of the key witnesses, a daughter, changed her mind about testifying. A year later, in August 1992, the children—who had been in care—were allowed to return home.
Detective Constable Hazel Savage had become friendly with the daughter who refused to testify, and was worried in case her life might be in danger. In May 1987, 16-year-old Heather West had disappeared—the Wests claimed she had run off with a lesbian. Heather had told friends she intended leaving home and taking a job in a holiday camp. Yet she had failed to collect her social benefit. Would a girl about to start a new life leave her benefit behind? Hazel Savage pressed the reluctant girl to tell her everything. The girl shook her head. ‘If I say anything, my dad says I’d end up in the back garden like my sister Heather.’
When Hazel Savage took this story to her superiors, they were reluctant to take her seriously. If they began another investigation, and failed to back it up with evidence, West would have grounds for suing them for harassment. And now Hazel Savage was suggesting that they should dig up his back garden. Eventually, her persistence triumphed. On 23 February 1994, Detective Superintendent John Bennett obtained a search warrant; the following day, policemen disguised as council workmen began digging up the back garden.
The West’s home, 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, was a three-storey semi-detached house; the Wests had been there since 1972. Rosemary West, a small, plump, bespectacled woman of 41, was interviewed that evening in her sitting room by a detective sergeant. Asked about Heather, she claimed that she had left home while she, Rose, was out shopping. The problem, Rose West explained, was that Heather was a lesbian. Asked what made her think so, she explained: ‘She knew exactly what kind of knickers the woman teacher had on.’
The following day, Fred and Rosemary West were arrested, both protesting loudly. Newspaper photographs of Fred West showed a swarthy looking man with long sideburns, piercing blue eyes, and a gap between his front teeth. The features were slightly simian—for a man who, according to workmates, boasted of having dozens of illegitimate children, he hardly looked the Casanova type.
That night, in police custody, Fred West confessed to the murder of his daughter Heather, and described exactly where the police would find her body. When digging began again the next day, the police soon found a skull, identified as that of a teenage girl. Three feet further down they found the rest of the body, cut into pieces. Dental records identified her as Heather West. During the next two days, they found another dismembered female body. A few feet away, there, was a decomposed foetus. The girl was identified as 18-year-old Shirley Ann Robinson, who had lived in the Wests’ house as a lodger in the late 1970s. Other lodgers declared that she had been the lover of both Fred and Rosemary West, and that West was the father of the baby. She had last been seen in May 1978.
A few days later, on February 28, another body was found under the patio in the back garden. This was identified as 16-year-old Alison Chambers, who had vanished in 1979, and who had been a regular visitor at 25 Cromwell Street. Like the others, she had been dismembered, a rope and masking tape found with the body indicated that she had been bound and gagged. She had been naked at the time of her death.
Suddenly, the ‘House of Horror’ was on the front page of every newspaper in England, and the road outside was permanently crowded with sightseers, supplied with refreshment by hamburger stalls and ice cream vans. Local landladies made a fortune letting their rooms at top rates to reporters and paparazzi—one television team paid £1,000 for a room facing the Wests’ home.
The Wests had let out three bedsits for as little as £5 a week (‘the cheapest rooms in Gloucester’) and the press theorized that their victims had all been lodgers, or girls who visited the house regularly. This was disproved when a body found under the floor of the basement proved to be a 21-year-old Swiss student, Therese Siegenthaler, who had vanished on 15 April 1974, when she was hitch-hiking her way to Ireland. The next body—the fifth—was that of 15-year-old Shirley Hubbard, who had been training as a shop assistant in Debenhams, Worcester; she had last been seen as she left the shop at 5.30 in the evening. It looked as if she had been abducted. But would it be possible to drag a girl into a car in the midst of the rush hour? And was it likely that she would accept a lift from a lone man? The police began to formulate the theory that both Fred and Rose West had been in the car, and that this was why Therese Siegenthaler and Shirley Hubbard had accepted lifts.
Three more dismembered bodies were found in the basement, and identified as Lucy Partington, 21, a student at Exeter University, who had vanished after she left the home of a girlfriend to catch a late night bus, Juanita Mott, 18, who had vanished on her way from Newent to Gloucester on 11 April 1985, and 15-year-old Carole Ann Cooper, who had spent the afternoon with her grandmother before she vanished in Gloucester on 10 November 1973. Under the bathroom floor, the searchers found a body identified as Lynda Carol Gough, who had been a regular visitor to the Wests’ home before she vanished in April 1973.
Fred West was charged with the nine murders. Rose West had been released on bail, and was living in a ‘safe house’, spent much of her time in tears. She insisted that she had no idea that the bodies were buried in the house.
Fred West had been married twice; his first wife, Catherine (known as Rena) was a Scot, who had not been seen since 1968. Her daughter Charmaine was also missing. So was a friend of Rena’s called Anne McFall, who had lived with West and Rena in a caravan. The search now moved to Letterbox Field, not far from the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle, where West had spent his early years. Rena West’s body was found buried in Letterbox Field on 10 April 1994. The body of the child Charmaine was found underneath the kitchen floor in the Wests’ previous home at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. Finally, the body of Anne McFall in nearby Fingerpost Field on 7 June, brought the body count up to twelve.
It seemed that Fred West was not only one of Britain’s most prolific murderers; he had also been killing for longer than any of them.
On 20 April 1994, Rosemary West was also charged with five of the murders; later, this charge was increased to ten, including baby Charmaine. She was also charged with two cases of rape of an 11-year-old girl, in association with two men, William Smith and Whitley Purcell. By this time, Fred West, who had been charged with twelve murders, had confessed to them, but insisted that his wife was innocent. Looking at photographs of the small house in Cromwell Street, newspaper readers wondered how it was possible that a man could murder nine women, while his wife remained unaware of what was going on.
What looked like the answer began to emerge when reporters located Caroline Raine (later Owens), a girl who, in 1972 when she was 16, had lived with the Wests as an au pair (Rose herself was then only 19). Caroline had met the Wests when they gave her a lift from Tewkesbury, and soon after she went to work for them at £4 a week. She had left in November 1972 because she alleged that Rose had made lesbian advances, and Fred talked endlessly of group sex (although she later admitted that she herself had had sex with two of the male lodgers, one immediately after the other).
Four weeks later, on 6 December 1972, Caroline went to Tewkesbury to meet her boyfriend, and was later offered a lift home in a car by Fred and Rose. She felt she was perfectly safe, so she accepted. Rose West climbed into the back with her. As they drove along, Fred asked her if she had had sex with her boyfriend that afternoon; she blushed and said no. Then Rose then began trying to kiss her on the mouth, and fondling her breasts. She tried to push her away, and Fred stopped the car and punched her until she was unconscious. When she came round her hands were tied behind her back; the Wests then put adhesive tape around her mouth.
At 25 Cromwell Street, West dragged her upstairs, ‘laughing and mauling me’. West cut the tape from around her mouth, and untied her hands; Rose West then sat beside her on the settee, and began kissing her and fondling her breasts. After that, they all drank tea—Caroline later suspected hers had been drugged. Then the Wests undressed her, tied her hands behind her again, and gagged her with cotton wool. She was placed on a mattress on the floor, her legs spreadeagled, and West then beat her between the legs with a belt, using the buckle end.
After about a dozen blows, Rose lay between her legs and performed oral sex. While this happened, Fred West, who was undressed, lay on top of Rose and had sex with her. Ten minutes later, when it was over, Rose West went to the bathroom, and Fred took advantage of her absence to move on to Caroline and briefly have sex. Apparently he was anxious for Rose not to see.
Finally, the Wests fell asleep, and Caroline tried to escape out of the window; but her hands were tied and she was unable to raise it. In the early morning someone came to the door, and Caroline did her best to make a noise; Rose was furious, and held a pillow over her head. When West returned, he was also angry, and told her that he would keep her in the cellar for his black friends to use, then bury her under the paving stones of Gloucester—where, he said, there were already several girls buried.
Rose West went off to see the children, and West again took advantage of her absence to rape Caroline. Then, astonishingly, he apologized to her, explaining that ‘it was all her [Rose’s] idea’. Rose came back, and both the Wests asked her to return again as a nanny. Seeing her opportunity to escape, she quickly agreed. She even hoovered the room, as she used to, to indicate that she was again a member of the family. She was then made to take three baths in an attempt to get the gum of the sticking tape off her skin and hair. And finally, Fred West dropped off his wife and Caroline at a launderette. After a few minutes, Caroline walked out, and was given a lift by a friend to her home in Cinderford.
She felt too ashamed to tell her mother what had happened, feeling that she was somehow to blame; instead, she went to bed. But when she got up, her mother saw the bruises, and got the story out of her. She rang the police, and Fred and Rose West were arrested and charged with assault. But Caroline felt unable to face the ordeal of telling her story in court. So when the Wests appeared, on 12 January 1973, they were charged only with indecent assault and actual bodily harm. The magistrate obviously felt that since a man and wife had been involved, it could not be too serious. He fined the couple £25 each, and Fred and Rose West walked free.
Their near escape seems to have made them recognize that it was dangerous to allow their victims to remain alive to testify against them. From now on, if they felt there was any danger of the victim going to the police, they killed her. Later, at the trial of Rose West, Caroline Owens sobbed in court, ‘I feel like it was my fault.’ This is obviously untrue, but some blame must attach to the magistrate who failed to send the Wests to prison.
Who was Fred West, and how did he turn into a serial killer?
He was born on 29 September 1941, in a farm labourer’s cottage in Much Marcle, a small Herefordshire village that even today has a population of only 700. His father, Walter West, was a 24-year-old widower when he met Daisy Hill, a 16-year-old maidservant, at the Ledbury Flower Show, where she was displaying her needlework. She was three months pregnant when they married in January 1940, but the child lived only one day. Later, after Fred’s birth, the Wests would have five more children, two sons and three daughters.
In the West household, sexual abuse was commonplace; the father often told his daughters, ‘I made you—I’m entitled to touch you’ (words Fred West would later repeat to his own daughters.) His wife retaliated by seducing Fred when he was only twelve years old. The two of them were always very close; West’s brother said, ‘In her eyes Fred could do no wrong.’ In this intense atmosphere of incest and seduction, Fred’s interest in sex became a non-stop obsession. He was later to tell his daughter Mae’s boyfriend that he used to play a game with his sisters and other young girls in which ‘they all used to dive in the hay so just the back end was showing, and I just used to take pot luck.’
As a child and teenager, West was mild and unaggressive. His sister-in-law remarked, ‘He was soft as hell…He would sooner get a bloody nose than fight.’ But when Fred was 16, there occurred what may well have been the most fateful event of his life. Walking up a fire escape behind a village girl, he reached up her skirt. The girl turned and gave him a violent push; he struck his head, and was unconscious for twenty-four hours. After this, the family noticed a change in his character. Two years later, when he was 18, he had a motorcycle accident which again injured his head.
Many sex murderers have sustained head injuries as a child, including the French ‘Ripper’ Joseph Vacher, the Hanover butcher Fritz Haarmann, and American mass murderers Earl Nelson, Albert Fish, John Wayne Gacy and Henry Lee Lucas. It is also interesting to note that the personality of the British ‘burning car murderer’ Arthur Rouse underwent a complete change for the worse after a head injury in the First World War, and that from being strongly religious he became a libertine, multiple seducer and eventually particularly callous murderer, burning an unconscious man alive.
Dr Jonathan Pinckus, a neurologist from Georgetown University in Washington DC, has described the case of killer who had been involved in a serious car accident at the age of sixteen, in which his head had made violent contact with the roof of the car. He was unconscious for seven days. After his recovery, his personality had changed completely, and he became explosive and inclined to violence. The double murder—for which he was sentenced to death—involved stabbing both victims more than a hundred times. He showed no remorse, or any other emotion, at the death sentence. A brain scan subsequently showed heavy scar tissue in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, where his head had hit the car.
The brain has the consistency of a jelly, and is easily damaged. Behind the prefrontal lobes lies an area called the limbic system, which is concerned with feeling, emotion and aggression. The prefrontal lobes seem to be the part of the brain that inhibits violent responses and strong emotions: if they are damaged uncontrolled behaviour can result. This is almost certainly what happened to Fred West. Normally quiet and good tempered, he could be thrown into a violent rage by frustration or opposition. In effect, West became a Jekyll and Hyde character—a comment actually made by a woman who knew him well.
When West was 19, he impregnated one of the girls in the family, and had to leave home. His brother Douglas later commented that they were so shocked by this that they refused to speak to Fred.
He took a job as a lorry driver, and eighteen months later met a pretty Scottish teenager with dyed blonde hair, Rena Costello, who was working as a waitress in the New Inn at Ledbury. Rena had been born in Coatsbridge, Glasgow, in April 1944, and when she became pregnant by an Asian bus driver when she was eighteen, she decided to move south. Fred appeared not to mind about her pregnancy, and they were married in the Gloucester Register Office on 17 November 1962. In early 1964, they moved into a slum council house in Glasgow. Fred was working on an ice cream van, and the marriage was already under strain because of his overpowering impulse to sleep with every woman he saw—while other drivers returned their vans at midnight, Fred was usually out until four in the morning.
In spite of the marital problems, Rena became pregnant again, and another daughter, Anne Marie, was born on 6 July 1963. Where his wife was concerned, Fred’s Mr Hyde aspect was dominant; he often dragged her out of bed in the early hours of the morning to beat her. She seems to have taken these thrashings with working-class resignation. But she finally retaliated for the infidelities by starting an affair with a neighbour called John McLachlan. One night when West caught them kissing in the park, he hurled himself on her, punching and slapping her, and McLachlan defended her and ended by giving Fred a beating. The next day, Rena was badly bruised and had a broken tooth. Yet Fred and McLachlan remained on speaking terms, and McLachlan later recorded that he once lent Fred his gardening shed for one of his assignations.
Rena became friendly with a girl called Anne McFall, who was five years her junior. Anne also came from a slum home, and was accustomed to seeing her mother beaten up in domestic quarrels. Oddly enough, Anne became increasingly interested in Fred West, and was soon convinced that she was in love with him. And when Fred and Rena announced they were returning to the Gloucester area, Anne decided she might as well go too.
Fred returned south, and when he came back, announced that he had rented a house large enough for all of them—including a friend of Anne’s called Isa McNeill. The four Wests and their passengers set out in a van that stank of butchered meat—for Fred’s latest job was in an abattoir. When they arrived at the village of Kempley, near Much Marcle, the women were disgusted to find that the ‘large house’ was, in fact, a small caravan on a caravan site. West was a pathological liar, who always said what he thought other people wanted to hear. But they moved in—Fred and Rena in a tiny room at the end with a draw-across shutter, the two children in beds that pulled down from the wall, and Anne and Isa at the other end. The two young girls found it boring. They had hoped to get jobs and earn some money, but they were four miles from Gloucester, and could not afford bus fares. They had to be content with occasional baby-sitting jobs on the site, for which they were often paid in cigarettes.
Fred became more violent; Anne and Isa found it all so traumatic that they would take the children to a neighbour’s caravan until he stopped beating Rena. It was Isa who was to describe Fred as a Jekyll and Hyde.
Finally, Isa managed to telephone John McLachlan, and begged him to come and collect them all. He agreed to drive down with a friend at the weekend, while Fred was at work. But Anne McFall was unable to keep her mouth shut; she told Fred, and when John McLachlan arrived, Fred was waiting. There was a screaming row; Fred refused to let the children go. Finally, Rena and Isa drove off. Anne declared that she would remain behind because she had a job in Gloucester. It was undoubtedly a lie; she looked forward to having Fred to herself.
A few months later, in September 1966, Anne McFall was pregnant. But in April 1967, a month before the baby was due, she disappeared. Fred later told his son Stephen that he had stabbed her, but was vague about the reason; she may have decided that she also wanted to return to Glasgow. West also told Stephen that he had killed a 15-year-old Gloucester waitress named Mary Bastholm, who vanished on 6 January 1968. A man named Vincent Oakes went to the police soon after her disappearance, and reported that he had seen her ‘four or five times’ in the autumn of 1967 with the same man, often sitting in a car a few hundred yards from her home. When, in 1994, he saw a picture of Fred West as a young man, Oakes identified him as the man he had seen with Mary. If this is true, then it is possible that the murder of Mary Bastholm was not a sex crime, but that West became romantically involved with her, then killed her in one of his Jekyll and Hyde rages.
By 1967, Rena was missing her children, and in July she asked Isa to return with her to Gloucester to try to get them back. But Isa was about to get married, and wanted to stay where she was. So Rena returned alone. She seems to have moved in with Fred again. But on New Year’s Day, 1969, she was also murdered. West later said that she had decided to take the children back to Scotland; he had got her drunk—Rena enjoyed her alcohol—and strangled her. He later claimed she had run away with an engineer. Rena, like Anne McFall, had never been close to her family, and no one asked her whereabouts. Fred was now again working as a lorry driver and he was living in another caravan, this one at Bishops Cleeve, near Cheltenham.
A friend named Fred Crick shared the caravan for a while. He later described how Fred had become an abortionist, picking up pregnant girls in pubs. He performed the abortions in a garage next door, and kept polaroid photographs of the bloodstained women—he obviously derived satisfaction from the sight of blood. (This could explain why he later seemed to enjoy dismembering victims.)
It was in 1968, on the Stoke Road between Tewkesbury and Cheltenham, that Fred West, now a baker’s roundsman, saw a schoolgirl in a revealing summer dress, and pulled up to try his luck. He must have felt it was his lucky day when the schoolgirl, 15-year-old Rose Letts, showed little hesitation in accepting a lift.
Rosemary Pauline Letts was one of a family of seven children. She was born on 29 November 1953, in Barnstaple, Devon. Her father, Bill Letts, was an electrical engineer in the Royal Navy. He was also what psychologists describe as a ‘Right Man’—a man driven by some deep psychological insecurity to behave like a dictator towards his family, and who will on no account ever admit that he might be in the wrong. Such men have an almost pathological desire to be a ‘somebody’, and if the world fails to bolster their craving for self-esteem, they try to satisfy it by entering into a domination fantasy with their wives and children.
Bill Letts would order his children to clean the house, and if he found a speck of dust, would make them do it all over again. When they dug the garden, he would inspect it like a sergeant major. He would beat the children brutally on the slightest pretext, and his mild-mannered wife Daisy was treated just as badly. One daughter took an overdose after he had beaten her black and blue. Neighbours complained to the police so often about the screams and shouts that he had to move home twice.
Yet Rose was never beaten and for a simple reason: from an early stage, Bill Letts had been committing incest with her. In some ways, the situation was weirdly similar to that in the West family home in Much Marcle. Even when Daisy Letts, driven to desperation by her husband’s violence, walked out with her children and moved to a derelict farmhouse, Rose stayed on with her father. Some relatives had no doubt about the reason: she enjoyed the sexual attention she received from him.
At her trial, Rose West was to try to gain sympathy by describing in some detail how she had been twice raped in her teens, then ‘seduced’ by Fred West. The truth, as her younger brother Graham revealed, was that Rose had never needed any encouragement to have sex. In spite of the puritanism of her home—no one was allowed to walk around the house even partly undressed—Rose always left the bathroom door open, and paraded naked along the landing. While her parents, now back together, were out working in the evening she climbed into bed with her brother Graham and introduced him to sex.
By the time she was fifteen, her preference for older men was unmistakable; she would return home late at night in cars driven by boyfriends twice her age. She began working for her brother-in-law Jim Tiler, in his roadside snack bar. On a number of occasions, Tiler arrived there at four in the afternoon to find its shutter down, and Rose in a lorry with a driver.
Some time in that summer of 1968, Rose accepted a lift from Fred West. It took little persuasion for Fred to entice her into his caravan for sex. Soon, he had persuaded her to give up her job, and become the nanny of his children. Rose continued to take home her wages every week, but the money was from Fred.
Finally, Rose decided to take Fred West home to introduce him to her father. The result was predictable: Bill Letts exploded in jealous rage, and ordered her never to see ‘that gypsy’ again. He divined, correctly, that Fred was a pathological liar when the labourer told him that he owned a caravan and a hotel in Scotland. And when Rose ignored her father’s orders, and continued to spend most of her free time in West’s caravan, Bill Letts had her taken into care.
As soon as she was sixteen, the local authorities were unable to hold her, and she moved into Fred’s caravan. Her father never spoke to her again. Living with West removed the last of her inhibitions; her brother Graham was later to say that Rose had always been a quiet girl, but that after moving in with West she became obsessed by sex, talking of nothing else. She even began to adopt Fred’s rough, coarse manner of speaking.
It seems clear that there was some incredibly powerful chemistry between them. For West, the original attraction was undoubtedly that she was a teenage girl who still looked younger than her age, and that by contrast with his own her background seemed almost middle class. Socially, she was ‘above’ him. For Rose, Fred represented freedom from a life of repression, and she found him as exciting a contrast as he found her. She had always enjoyed sex; now it became the centre of her life. Fred’s first wife Rena had told a friend that Fred had some ‘kinky’ demands. Rose apparently had no objection to these, and the sequel makes it clear that her sexual appetite developed until she was virtually insatiable. It is a curious thought that she was probably not even aware that Fred was a sex maniac; years of intimacy with her perverted father would have made it seem normal.
It never emerged during the trial why Fred murdered his wife Rena. Earlier newspaper reports had stated that Fred met Rose Letts after he murdered Rena on New Year’s Day 1969. The knowledge that he met Rose many months earlier—and that Rose needed so little persuasion to climb into the back of a van—throws new light on the murder. He was having an affair with an underage girl, and he wanted to bring her back to the caravan. While Rena was there that was impossible. That is almost certainly the reason that he strangled Rena when she was drunk and buried her in a field. Fred had been morbidly jealous with Rena, but when he realized that Rose was a nymphomaniac it excited him, and he began to dream of watching her having sex with other men—and women. Rose (who soon realized that she liked women as much as men) found her husband’s fantasies as exciting as he did. Life became a non-stop sexual orgy. They experimented with ‘kinky’ variants—later evidence points to leather gear, rubber face masks that covered the head, whips and handcuffs. At this point Fred asked the social services if they would take the children into care while he tried to ‘sort out’ his marriage; it seems more likely that he wanted to be able to have uninhibited orgies in the caravan.
In October 1970, less than a year later, Fred and Rose West married and moved into 10, then 25 Midland Road, Gloucester. (Fred seemed to have an odd preference for 25—the caravan had also been no. 25.) Here they launched themselves into trying to involve others in their sex life. Their next-door neighbour was a 19-year-old girl named Liz Agius, who had two children; her Maltese husband worked abroad. Fred made her acquaintance when he helped her downstairs with a pram, and invited her to tea. Oddly enough, Fred introduced Rose—whom Liz Agius describes as looking about fourteen years old, and heavily pregnant—as his girlfriend, which suggests that he already had designs on their new acquaintance, and that she might be more willing to betray a girlfriend than a wife. On two occasions Liz Agius baby-sat for them, and on the second, they told her that they had been driving around looking for young girls, preferably homeless. They explained they would offer them a home, then get them to work as prostitutes. Liz Agius was not unduly shocked when Fred told her that Rose was a prostitute.
Fred also made no secret of the fact that he wanted to sleep with Liz Agius; he went into detail about what he would like to do to her in bed, including tying her up; in return, ‘I could tie him up and do all sorts of things to him,’ Liz Agius said. She refused. Then Rose West called on her, and tried to persuade her to join in three-in-a-bed sex; Liz Agius told her indignantly that if she wanted to keep her friendship, she should not mention it again.
But finally, Fred had his way. After being given a cup of tea, Liz Agius felt strangely drowsy; when she woke up, it was morning, and she was naked in bed between the Wests. Fred told her that he had had sex with her while she was unconscious. Throughout the rest of that day, she felt drowsy and sick. But apparently she held no grudge against the Wests, for she later visited them at Cromwell Street, and was shown around their new home. When Liz Agius’s husband turned up, West was violently jealous, particularly when her husband put his arm round her shoulders—West later told her that her husband should be under ground.
In 1971 and 1972, Fred West spent two terms in prison for dishonesty, on one occasion for stealing tyres and a car tax disc from his landlord. He and Rose exchanged letters that reveal the intense romantic chemistry between them; he signs himself ‘your ever worshipping husband’, while she begins her letter, ‘To my dearest lover’, and writes across the top, ‘From now until forever.’ She tells him, ‘I know you love me darling, but it just seems queer that anyone should think so much of me.’
According to the prosecution, it was during West’s first period in jail in 1971 that the child Charmaine, then eight, disappeared. On 22 May 1971, Rose had written, ‘Darling, about Charm. I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it? I would keep her for her sake if it wasn’t for the rest of the children.’ It seems clear that she had already decided that Charmaine had to go.
Rose seems to have made a habit of handling Charmaine ‘rough’. A neighbour named Shirley Giles told how she had sent her daughter downstairs to borrow some milk; the child had walked into the kitchen without knocking, and found Charmaine standing on a chair, her hands tied behind her with a leather strap, while Rose West was menacing her with a wooden spoon. Fred was also capable of treating Charmaine brutally. A neighbour in Glasgow recalls how, when Charmaine reached for an ice cream in West’s van, he slapped her face.
Rose West was to insist that Fred was out of jail when Charmaine vanished, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Fred West was sent to jail for the first time on 4 December 1970, on several charges of theft. The total sentence was ten months, and he was given a four-month remission, coming out of prison in mid-1971. But Charmaine was seen for the last time in the spring of 1971, while West was in jail. Questioned later by the police, Rose West said that Charmaine had been taken away by her mother Rena. Asked when was the last time she saw Rena, Rose West answered, ‘When she took Charmaine.’ By this time, Rena West had been dead for more than two years.
Rose West would continue to deny that she killed Charmaine, insisting that the child vanished after Fred West came out of prison. But the police believe that Rose strangled Charmaine and hid her body in the coal cellar until Fred came out of prison and buried her under the floor at 25 Midland Road. The evidence seems to show that Charmaine was already dead when Rose wrote the letter about ‘treating Charmaine rough’.
In December 1972, the Wests picked up Caroline Owens in Tewkesbury and raped her. The following January they were fined £25 each by Gloucester magistrate John Smith. Three months later, they committed what seems to have been their first joint murder. One of their male lodgers, Ben Stanniland, had met a 19-year-old girl named Lynda Gough in a Gloucester cafe, and brought her back to Cromwell Street, where the couple had sex. Lynda Gough also had sex with another lodger, David Evans. Both males were also Rose West’s lovers—Stanniland described how Rose West had climbed into bed with himself and another male lodger the evening they moved into Cromwell Street.
Linda Gough was on bad terms with her parents, and had had a number of quarrels. In early April 1973, she had been collected from her home by a man and woman who took her out for the evening. Two weeks later, on 19 April 1973, she left home, leaving a note telling her parents that she had found herself a flat. Her mother, June Gough, made enquiries at the Co-op, where Lynda had worked as a seamstress, but she had not been back there since she left home. Finally—two weeks later—June Gough found her way to 25 Cromwell Street. The woman who came to the door (Rose West) was the same one who had called for Lynda to take her out, and Mrs Gough realized that she was wearing Lynda’s slippers and her cardigan. She also noticed some of Lynda’s clothes on the washing line. Rose West explained that Lynda had left them behind when she left for Weston-super-Mare to look for work.
It was Lynda’s body that was found under the bathroom at 25 Cromwell Street. It had once been the garage, and Lynda had been buried in the inspection pit. She had evidently been bound and gagged, and two-inch masking tape had been wrapped tightly around the head to form a mask. What had happened can be inferred. Lynda had originally been brought back to Cromwell Street by a male lodger with whom she had had intercourse. She later had sex with another lodger. We know that Fred West would have become feverishly excited at the thought of a girl giving herself to men, for his nature was basically voyeuristic; we also know that both lodgers were also Rose’s lovers, and would certainly have told her about it. And when the Wests learned that Lynda was on bad terms with her parents and looking for a flat, they knew that it should not be too difficult to lure her into their home. They probably discussed the move when they took her out for the evening. They also undoubtedly warned her to tell no one where she was going.
Caroline Raine had also been gagged with masking tape six months earlier, but its only purpose was to keep her silent. To bind the whole face and forehead in tape, so that the victim would have looked like a mummy, was obviously unnecessary if the only purpose was to keep her silent. The purpose of the tape was to make Lynda Gough look like a mummy, to satisfy the Wests’ enthusiasm for bondage. Unlike Caroline Raine, Lynda was almost certainly intended to die. They even had a place ready to bury the body—the inspection pit of the garage, which was going to be turned into a bathroom…
It was also at about this time that West began to have sex with his nine-year-old daughter Anne Marie. At the preliminary hearing, she would describe how, at the age of eight or nine (in 1971 or 1972), her father had tied her to a U-shaped metal bar, with her legs apart, and then inserted a vibrator into her vagina. When she screamed, Rose West sat on her head. Later, West made a device rather like a chastity belt, which would hold the vibrator inside her. Rose West used to strap it on, ‘then I had to walk around the house with it inside me. I could hear the buzzing noise. I was left like that for a few hours.’
When she was nine, West began having regular intercourse with her, and the incest continued until her late teens, when she married and left home. When she was 12, she had also been made to go to bed with Rose West’s lovers—about five of them. While this happened she was aware that her father was spying on her through a hole in the wall—there was a plaque with the word ‘Rose’, which could be unscrewed for a spyhole. She was aware that this excited him. ‘I never wanted to be with these men. I often told her that, but she never answered. Rose is a very strong character.’
When she was 13, Rose made her perform oral sex on her, while Rose squeezed her breasts. After Rose reached orgasm, Anne Marie rushed to the bathroom to wash out her mouth with gargle. ‘I made sure Rose did not see me.’
West obviously found the idea that he had turned his daughter into a kind of prostitute intensely stimulating—on one occasion, he inserted a condom tied at the end and full of sperm, inside her vagina, and made her wear it inside her as she watched television. The sperm came from Rose’s lovers.
But Rose was jealous of her step-daughter, whose relationship with her father had always been exceptionally close. (As a child, Anne Marie had wanted to marry him.) So West had to have sex with Anne Marie without Rose’s knowledge. This would happen when he took her out in the van, or when she was helping him on decorating jobs in empty flats. For some unexplained reason, there was a purple light on the dashboard, and West would switch this on when they stopped. ‘I would have a funny feeling in my tummy then. I knew that we would have intercourse.’
At 15, Anne Marie became pregnant by her father. It was a fallopian pregnancy, and ended in a miscarriage. At this point, Anne Marie left home, to live on the streets.
The next of the Wests’ murder victims was 15-year-old Carol Ann Cooper, known as Caz. She had been born in 1958, and her parents had separated when she was a child. She went to live with her mother, but her mother died when she was eight. Her father married again, and she returned to live with him; but when this marriage broke up, she was placed in a children’s home, The Pines, in Worcester. She settled down well, and her social worker described her as ‘a lovely, intelligent girl who never gave any trouble’.
On 10 November 1973, Carol and a group of friends went to the Odeon cinema, and afterwards, Carol’s boyfriend, Andrew Jones, saw her to the bus. They had been quarrelling, but had made it up before she climbed on the bus. She waved to him as it pulled away. That was the last he saw of her. Fred and Rose West probably picked her up as she walked the short distance from the bus stop to The Pines. Her body was one of the five found in the cellar at Cromwell Street. The Wests must have intended to kill her when they picked her up, since she was unknown to them, and was unlikely to remain silent about being kidnapped and raped.
The next victim was Exeter University student Lucy Partington, 21, niece of the novelist Kingsley Amis. She spent the Christmas of 1973 at home with her family, and on December 27, went into Cheltenham to see a disabled friend, Helen Render. Lucy was a quiet, serious girl who was intending to become a Catholic. That evening, she wrote a letter applying for a place in the Courtauld Institute, and when she left at 10.15 to catch her bus, was carrying the letter to drop in a nearby post box. If she missed the last bus, she intended to return to Helen Render’s, whose father would drive her home. That night the bus was late, and she may have assumed she had missed it—which is why she almost certainly accepted a lift from the Wests. Her body was also found in the cellar. By the end of that year, 1973, when the Wests had been fined £25 each for assaulting Caroline Raine, they had gone on to murder three girls.
Almost exactly a year after their first murder, the Wests picked up another hitch-hiker—a 21-year-old Swiss girl name Therese Siegenthaler, who lived in a flat in Lewisham, and was studying sociology at the Woolwich College of Further Education. On 15 April 1974, she set out to hitchhike to Ireland to see a priest she had became friendly with. Friends had advised against it but Therese was skilled in judo, and was convinced that she could cope with any emergency. She intended to travel via Holyhead, in North Wales, and her most direct route would have taken her via Gloucester. Her body was also found in the cellar at Cromwell Street.
Once again, as if following a pattern, the Wests waited until November before searching for another victim. It was another 15-year-old girl, Shirley Ann Hubbard, who, like Carol Cooper, had been in care since her parents split up. She was working as a trainee shop assistant in Debenhams in Worcester, and on 5 November 1974, she went to have tea at the home of a youth who also worked in the shop, Daniel Davies, and they went to a cinema. She arranged to go out with him again the next day, but never returned to the shop. She was on her way home to her foster parents in Droitwich when she disappeared. When her body was found in the Wests’ cellar, her skull was completely covered with a mask of adhesive tape, and plastic tubes had been inserted up her nose to allow her to breathe.
Juanita Mott, 18, the last of the women found buried in the basement, was another of the Wests’ lodgers. Like so many of the victims, she had found herself without a home when her parents split up. She had lived in a flat with a boyfriend for a while, then moved into Cromwell Street, but soon left there, for reasons that are not clear, and moved in with a friend of her mother’s at Newent. She was due to baby-sit a large group of children on 12 April 1975, when the woman she was staying with was to be married, but on the previous day she left Newent for an evening out. It seems fairly certain that she either returned to see someone at Cromwell Street, or was offered a lift by the Wests. When her body was found, there was also a clothes line that had been used to tie her—it came from Mrs West’s back garden. When asked later whether she had not noticed that one of her clothes lines had gone missing, Rose West replied that there were clothes lines all over the place as Fred West had an odd habit of picking up bits and pieces of rope and bringing them home. Juanita’s sister Belinda continued to frequent the Cromwell Street house, unaware of the part played in her sister’s disappearance by the Wests.
After the death of Juanita Mott, there is a three-year gap before that of the next victim, Shirley Ann Robinson. It is unusual for serial killers to stop killing for that long, and it may be that Fred West, having filled his basement with as many bodies as it would hold, began burying victims elsewhere—he later told his son Stephen that there had been other victims. But West was a fertile liar, and it may be that this was fantasy.
What we do know is that, in 1975, a 13-year-old girl called Sharon Williams was taken to 25 Cromwell Street by a friend who lived in the same children’s home, Russet House. Like so many of the Wests’ victims, she came from a broken home. She was also to allege that her father and brother had sexually abused her. Rose West treated her kindly, and she often called at Cromwell Street. In 1976, she moved to the Jordan’s Brook Children’s Home. On Fridays she was allowed to go to spend the weekend in Tewkesbury with her mother, and on her way to the bus, often called in at the Wests. They had sent her a birthday card on her fifteenth birthday.
One night in the summer of 1977, she ran away from the children’s home and spent the night walking the streets. The following evening she called at 25 Cromwell Street. It was 11 o’clock at night, and the door was answered by Rose West, dressed only in a bra and panties. She was taken into the lounge, and sat beside Rose on the sofa. As she was crying and explaining her problems, Rose began kissing and caressing her breasts through her blouse. Sharon pushed her away. Rose then got her a blanket, and the girl slept on the settee. The next day she was found on the streets by the authorities and taken back to the home. She lost her privileges, and it was six weeks before she again called on the Wests.
Again it was Rose who let her in. Sharon had to hurry to the toilet—a bladder cyst had made her incontinent, and she left her wet knickers in the lavatory. When she came out, Rose told her there were two girls of her own age in the next room, and took her in. It proved to be a bedroom, and Sharon was startled to discover that the two girls were naked, and that Fred was wearing only his shorts. One girl was black, one white, both about fourteen. Rose West put her arms around Sharon and said that it was all right to feel and touch and enjoy affection. Then she unbuttoned Sharon’s dress, and went on to undress her until she was naked. After this, Rose went over to Fred and did a kind of strip tease, wriggling seductively as she undressed.
The white girl was then laid on her back, and Fred West bound her wrists together across her chest. Then she was turned over, and her legs spread apart and taped down to the bed. After this, Rose West inserted a vibrator into the girl’s vagina, and she groaned in pain. Rose helped Fred remove his shorts, and Fred climbed on the girl and had intercourse. Then he left the room, and Rose untied the girl.
Now it was Sharon’s turn. Rose approached her and began kissing and caressing her. Then, as Sharon sat on the bed, her wrists were also taped across her chest. While Fred stood by the bed masturbating, Rose turned Sharon on her face, and taped her ankles apart. Rose then teased her by allowing the vibrator to approach close to her genitals, then taking it away. After that, Rose pushed two fingers into her vagina, caressing her breast with the other hand, and twisting the nipple hard, repeating ‘Enjoy’. Then Sharon felt something hard and cold enter her anus—she thought it was a candle. It was very painful. After this, Fred climbed on her, and entered her vagina. Rose held his penis as he did so. Finally, she was released and the tape was cut off.
Sharon went into the bathroom with her dress, and saw that her anus was bleeding. She put the dress on and crept out of the house, leaving her underwear behind.
She was too ashamed to tell anyone what had happened, but felt angry and betrayed. Two weeks later she returned to Cromwell Street with a can of petrol and box of matches; she intended to pour the petrol through the letter box and throw in a match. But at the last minute, she could not go through with it. When she told the story seventeen years later, her identity was shielded under the pseudonym of Miss A. By this time she had been married and divorced twice, been in a home for battered wives, and attempted suicide.
The next murder victim, 18-year-old Shirley Ann Robinson, was again a lodger in the Wests’ home. But she seems to have enjoyed it there (her best friend later said that the years she spent in Cromwell Street were the happiest of her life), and became the lover of both Fred and Rose West. She also worked as a prostitute for the Wests, sleeping with Rose’s ‘clients’. Shirley Robinson seems to have been in love with Fred, who occasionally teased his wife by telling her that Shirley was going to be his next wife. Another witness, Janet Leach, claimed that Shirley had tried to persuade Fred to leave Rose and set up home with her.
In the autumn of 1977, Shirley Robinson became pregnant, and applied for supplementary benefit on 10 April 1978. She later moved into the room of another friend who lived in the house, Liz Brewer, who was also pregnant by her boyfriend—she told Liz that she was afraid of the Wests. Her baby was due in June. On May 9, she and Liz Brewer went into Woolworths together to get their photographs taken in a booth. The next day, Shirley vanished. Her body was discovered under the patio, with the eight-month-old foetus nearby. Janet Leach reported that West had told her that Rose had killed Shirley while he was out at work.
There was, so far as we know, only one more victim to be murdered for purely sexual reasons. Again, 16-year-old Alison Chambers had found herself in a children’s home after her parents split up. She and another girl had been taken to Cromwell Street by a girl whose middle name was Ann—probably Shirley Ann Robinson. In September 1979, Alison’s mother received a letter in which Alison said she was living with a ‘really nice homely family’, and that one of the girls treated her like a big sister. This was not entirely true, for Alison was still living in the Jordan’s Brook home, and working in a solicitor’s office. One day she packed her clothes in a rucksack and left the home. Her body was one of the three found under West’s patio.
Did the Wests then give up killing for sex? It is just conceivable. West was 48, Rose 36. Most sex killers are young—between 18 and 28. Even sex killers who go on longer than that gradually ‘burn out’ as they approach middle age. Fred and Rose West had been conducting a more-or-less continuous orgy for more than twenty years; even they must have begun to lose their frantic desire for ‘forbidden’ pleasures. Rose had her regular male visitors, and Fred often accompanied them upstairs and filmed the sex. On one occasion, Rose had walked into the street in a negligee and accosted a Jamaican named Andrew Angus, asking him if he knew anything about televisions. Angus went into the house and looked at the set; when he turned round, Rose West was wearing only some revealing underwear. Minutes later, they were in bed, in a room whose ceiling was a huge mirror. Angus found her insatiable. She told him that she was ‘turned on’ by black men, and that several of her children were half-castes. When Fred West came home from work, Angus was astonished that he appeared to have no objection to his wife seducing a stranger. Angus remained Rose’s lover, and described how they often made love for three hours at a time. ‘She was totally sex mad. She always knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it.’
A housewife named Mary Halliday, who had just separated from her husband, and was depressed and vulnerable, told a Sunday Mirror reporter how she had met Fred when he came to repair a leak at her home in Cromwell Street. She said he talked non-stop, ‘a real Jack-the-lad’. He told her his wife liked ‘a bit of both’ and invited her home. They sat at a bar, and as Rose—in a miniskirt—wiggled against her, the skirt rose revealing that she was wearing no underwear. After several large drinks, Rose led her upstairs by the hand, followed by Fred. ‘She literally ripped my blouse off.’ Then they undressed and had sex, watched by Fred. After that, Fred joined in, obviously excited by the spectacle.
From then on, Rose would call for her after the West children had gone to school, and they returned to drink coffee, then retire to bed. ‘She was absolutely insatiable. She used to say that no man or woman could ever satisfy her. I don’t think she got much sexual pleasure from Fred—he wasn’t very well endowed.’
The Wests often urged her to move in, but Mary felt an odd sense of unease. ‘Something stopped me.’
The only day Mary was never allowed to call was on Thursday. This was the day when Rose had a string of clients. They paid £40 each, although some long-term lovers were not charged. She often had as many as eight men in an afternoon. When Fred came home he enjoyed watching, and often videoing the sex. He constructed a hole in the wall through which he could watch Rose without the client knowing. There were also intercoms, so he could listen to it. Afterwards, he always went in and made love to Rose.
Mary Halliday described how, one day, Fred asked her if she would like to see inside their ‘secret room’. It contained a huge four-poster bed, and there was a torture chamber with whips, hooks and chains. Then Rose brought out a pile of porno magazines showing people in black latex suits, and a suitcase with similar black suits in it, all looking well-worn. The bedroom cupboard was full of whips, dildos and other ‘sex toys’. Mary Halliday declared that she felt ‘out of her depth’—particularly when Fred showed her videos of young girls being tied up, whipped and tortured. Some of these videos did not seem to be commercial; one of the girls looked as if she was in agony. Mary Halliday participated in some of the ‘games’, allowing herself to be tied up with a pillow over her face, after which West flogged her with whips, or abused her with huge objects. But when he cut her stomach with a knife, she seems to have felt he was going too far. She broke off the relationship.
The last known victim, 16-year-old Heather West, had been sexually abused by her father for at least two years. As soon as she was a teenager, West began asking her when she was going to lose her virginity, and urging her to find a boyfriend; but finally he himself took her virginity. Heather was a quiet girl, but seems to have been a less compliant character than her sister Anne Marie (possibly she inherited some of her mother’s dominance). When at the age of 16, she announced she was leaving home, the Wests must have known that she was unlikely to keep silent about her ordeal. According to Fred West, he killed her in the hallway by strangling her, ‘to wipe the smirk off her face’, then sawed off her head and legs with an ice-saw, so she would fit into a dustbin liner.
He told detectives this on the night he was arrested, and described exactly where her body would be found. But he insisted that the death had been an accident—he had grabbed her by the throat because she was being insultingly defiant, and was shocked when he saw that she had ‘gone blue’. ‘I blowed air into her mouth and that, and pumped on her chest, but she just kept going bluer…’ Rose, he claimed, was out at the time—he had sent her out so he could have a long talk to Heather. Rose knew nothing of Heather’s death.
But his attitude towards Rose was not entirely one of chivalry. He was later to tell Dr James McAlister that Rose had been burying girls in the cellar without his knowledge. He had been away from home for a few days, and when he came back, Rose persuaded him to concrete the cellar floor. He does not seem to have been struck by the absurdity of his story—that he would have had to be away from home at least nine times to be unaware of his wife’s activities.
During his period in prison, West unburdened himself to his son Stephen, and told him that there had been many more victims, some murdered and dismembered on a deserted farm near Much Marcle. (According to Stephen he named the farm.) West was also to tell a social worker, Janet Leach, who acted as an independent observer at 80 of his interviews, that there had been 20 more victims, and there had been other people involved in the murders—his wife, ‘another person, and some coloured men’.
But then Stephen was to describe how his father would switch between confessing and claiming that someone else was the killer. ‘He blamed it on everybody but the milk man.’ And West told Janet Leach that Anne McFall was killed by ‘another person’ and his wife Rena—although Rena was (as far as we know) in Glasgow at the time. Even when confessing to murder, West found it hard to stick to the truth.
Frederick West committed suicide on New Year’s Day, 1995, by hanging himself in his cell in Winson Green prison, Birmingham. He found it tough being among the prison ‘hard men’—child killers are always hated—and he addressed guards and even fellow-prisoners meekly as ‘sir’. He was being carefully watched, but took advantage of the fact that fewer staff were on duty because of the holiday, and that there was a change in shift at midday. It was the twenty-sixth anniversary of the murder of his first wife Rena. Rose West claimed to be delighted by the news. Her story was that she had been ‘duped’ by West, and was as much his victim as any of the women he killed. After hearing of Heather’s death, she claimed that if she could get her hands on him, ‘he would be a dead man.’
Two days later, newspapers announced that there was mounting speculation that the accusations against Rose West would now be dropped. Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, declared that the case against her had always been flimsy, and that it was flimsier now. The police had good reason to disagree. They had the testimony of Caroline Raine, Sharon Williams and Anne Marie West (now Davies) that made it very clear that Rose West was at no point a ‘victim’, or even an unwilling participant. In fact, her part in the rapes had been more active than that of her husband. She was the dominant one, not the unwilling tool.
The trial of Rosemary West opened at Winchester Crown Court on 9 October 1995, before Mr Justice Mantell. The prosecution was led by Brian Leveson, QC, and the defence by Richard Ferguson, QC. But the defence had a virtually impossible task: to convince the jury that Rose West, who admitted taking an active part in the sexual assaults on Caroline Raine and Sharon Williams, had played no part in the rape and murder of the seven girls found at Cromwell Street. And even if she was given the benefit of the doubt in these cases, there remained the evidence that pointed to her involvement in the murder of Charmaine in 1971. Even if, as she alleged, Charmaine had been killed by Fred West after he came out of prison in June, there was still the fact that Rose had lied to the police, telling them that Rena West had taken Charmaine away even though Rena had died in 1969. On 23 November 1995, Rose West was predictably found guilty of ten murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. The judge’s recommendation was that she should never be released.
The West case is certainly one of the most unusual in British criminal history—in fact, it is difficult to find a parallel elsewhere in the world. In the early 1930s, a Serbian confidence man who called himself Captain Ivan Poderjay married a Frenchwoman named Marguerite Ferrand, and the two began a sex life that Sigmund Freud described as one of the most complex cases of sexual perversion that he had ever encountered. Both were sadists, masochists and fetishists, as well as fantasists who liked to dress up as the opposite sex. But Poderjay is remembered solely for having married, bigamously, a wealthy Scandinavian named Agnes Tufverson, whom he murdered shortly before setting out on a transatlantic crossing, then took aboard ship in a trunk, and disposed of by cutting her up with razor blades and feeding her to the fishes. He forced the larger bones out of the porthole by greasing them with cold cream. Poderjay was never convicted of murder, although he was sent to prison for bigamy. But he and his wife are not known to have collaborated on murder.
The case of Gerald Gallego and Charlene Williams (p.428) is perhaps the closest to the Wests in modern criminal history, and according to Eric van Hoffmann, the author of a book on the case, the bisexual Charlene played as active a part in the murders as her lover. But their killing spree lasted for only four years, a mere quarter of the Wests’ period of collaboration. And although Charlene was a woman of high dominance, she was undoubtedly less dominant than her lover.
What makes the West case almost unique is that it was Rose West who was the more dominant of the two. Everyone who knew them acknowledged this. Fred had committed murder before he met Rose but it was meeting Rose that turned him into a serial sex killer.
This ‘chemistry of dominance’ throws a floodlight on the murders. In the early 1940s, the American psychologist Abraham Maslow conducted a lengthy study of dominance in women, and found that they fell into three groups: high dominance women (who were exactly 5 per cent of the total), medium dominance women, and low dominance women. High dominance women were promiscuous, often bisexual, and adored sex. Medium dominance women tended to be romantics who wanted to find ‘Mr Right’, and liked the kind of lover who would take them to candlelit restaurants, and give them flowers and chocolates; they liked sex, but not to the point of obsession. Low dominance women were terrified of sex. All three types preferred a partner within their own dominance group, and found it hard to become personally involved with anyone outside that group. (A dominant male would happily sleep with any woman, but there would be no personal involvement unless she was also high-dominance.)
Maslow also discovered the curious fact all women prefer a male who is slightly more dominant than themselves—but not too much. One woman was of such high dominance that she could never find a man to satisfy her; she felt they were all too weak, and that she was unable to give herself to them. Finally, she found a highly dominant male, but he still wasn’t more dominant than she was. So she would provoke fights that ended with his slapping her violently, then throwing her on the bed. This was the only time she really enjoyed sex.
Now Fred West was dominant, but not quite dominant enough. That meant that Rose was the Boss. He adored her and saw her as a goddess; she probably had her reservations about him, and would have deserted him instantly if a more dominant male had come along. Yet the extreme closeness of their relationship was due to the fact that they belonged to the same dominance group. West felt he was lucky that she put up with him. She was the master, he the slave. He kidnapped for her, presented her with victims, like a dog carrying a partridge to its master’s feet. This is why, in due course, he committed suicide, hoping that there would not be enough evidence to convict her.
Fred’s upbringing had turned him into a sex maniac. Like the Boston Strangler, he went around in a continual state of violent sexual desire. Yet he was almost certainly not sufficiently aggressive to be a rapist or—to begin with at least—a sex murderer. What is certain is that what made him capable of murder was the blow on the head he sustained in his teens; it meant that when he became angry or frustrated, he was unable to control his impulse towards violence. This is why he killed Anne McFall and his wife Rena.
It was a million to one chance that a sex maniac like Fred West should meet a schoolgirl who was a potential nymphomaniac, like Rose Letts. Rose’s strict upbringing had turned her into a shy, quiet girl who knew little of sex. (Her claim that she was raped twice as a teenager can almost certainly be dismissed as an attempt to gain sympathy from the jury and portray herself as a victim.) Fred West released in her a flood of sexual desire and dominance. All sex is based on ‘forbiddenness’, but for someone whose adolescence had been a saga of incest, Fred West was in the grip of a compulsion to discover new degrees of transgression. Like the Victorian author of My Secret Life, he felt that a life devoted to the quest for the further reaches of sexual experiment would be a life of total and ultimate satisfaction. Unlike Ian Brady, he was too illiterate to read de Sade; yet he carried Sade’s compulsion to extend sex into a kind of religious experience even further than Brady.
Even so, without Rose it is doubtful that he would have been anything more than a would-be Casanova. Her aggressive lesbianism made her the ideal partner. Together they could lure girls into their home and use them as playthings. Each offered the other unrestricted satisfaction of their sexual desires. They were like two Alsatian dogs that together decide to kill sheep. And the fact that Fred had killed before he met her (and undoubtedly told her so at a fairly early stage in their relationship) meant that she came to accept murder as a norm, just as she came to accept ‘kinky sex’ as a norm. Fred conditioned Rose; Rose conditioned Fred. They are a perfect textbook example of what the French called folie à deux.