3

THE HELLER

The girl who became infamous as Rose West was born in Devon in 1953, when Fred was twelve. To fully understand Rose, and her relationship with Fred, it is necessary to reach back several years before her birth to examine the lives of her mother and father. They were both unusual, deeply troubled people whose marriage was violent and profoundly unhappy.

Rose’s father, William Andrew Letts, known as Bill, was born in 1921 and brought up in Northam, a small village near the town of Bideford on the North Devon coast. His mother, Bertha Letts, worked as a nurse at the Battle of the Somme and became a district nurse in Northam when the Great War ended. Bill’s father (also called Bill) was a shiftless, lazy man who dabbled in a variety of jobs.

Northam was similar to Much Marcle, one hundred and twenty miles to the north-east, inasmuch as it is a small, quiet village cut off from the hurly-burly of the modern world. Northam is set upon a slight hill, on a lip of land which juts into the confluences of the rivers Torridge and Taw where their estuaries join the Bristol Channel. Laid out below the village is a rugged seaside park known as Northam Burrows, which ends in a sandy beach. The town of Bideford is within walking distance south of the village; Barnstaple is a few miles down-river to the east. The village was the scene of one great and violent historical event when, in the ninth century, a terrible battle was fought on the land where Northam now stands, between the men of Alfred the Great and an invading army led by Hubba, King of the Danes. By the time the enemy had been driven back into the sea, the Burrows were stained with the blood of eight hundred men.

There are several small hotels around Northam, but it is not a picturesque seaside village and there is only a small tourist trade in the summer. The church and the buildings around the central square are constructed of gloomy stone. Bill Letts’ family lived in a terrace house in Castle Street, one of the narrow roads that lead off the square. This part of Northam is as dark as a Rhondda Valley mining village.

The marriage of Bertha and Bill Letts was not a happy one. Neither wanted children, and they were initially disappointed when, despite their best intentions, Bertha became pregnant. They changed their view when Bill junior was born and came to dote on what would be their only child.

Bill was sickly, but his lack of strength only made Bertha love him all the more. She idolised her son, and spent hours knitting warm clothes to keep illness at bay. Bill was struck down by rheumatic fever shortly before he was due to start at Northam’s Church of England Secondary School. He was kept at home for many months, and when he finally enrolled, his classmates were astonished to see that he was wearing girl’s woollen stockings under his shorts. The stockings, together with Bill having missed the start of school, made him the butt of classroom jokes. ‘We all thought it was very queer,’ says Ronnie Lloyd, who later became a friend.

Bill was soon being bullied. When Bertha found out, she took it upon herself to go to the school and deal with his tormentors. He was also lonely at home. Bertha played cards in the evenings, leaving Bill with his father, but now the novelty of having a son had worn off, his father lost interest in Bill and often reminded him that he was only the result of an accident.

After leaving school, Bill first worked in an electrical shop in Bideford and then for the Bristol Airport Company as a radio engineer. He was a reserved and distrustful teenager, prone to the notion that people were ‘ganging up’ against him. He experienced at least one unhappy romance, when a local girl he had been courting moved away from the village to marry another man, and the rejection added to his increasingly jaundiced view of the world. This was compounded when his father began to impose strict rules on Bill; for example, locking the front door against him if he were not home by ten at night.

One of Bill’s few friends was a Jewish boy named Lionel Green, whose family were well-off people from London, where they owned a business in the East End. The Second World War had begun, and the Greens moved into a large house in Bideford to escape the Blitz. Lionel had three sisters, and his parents employed a young girl to help look after them. One day Lionel introduced her to Bill.

Daisy Gwendoline Fuller was three years his senior, but so unassuming that she appeared to be much younger than Bill. Daisy was from Chadwell Heath, Essex, a short train ride from East London. Her father was a professional soldier, a decorated veteran of several famous battles who brought up his nine children with Victorian-style discipline, giving them a ‘good hiding’ if they misbehaved.

Daisy went into service after leaving school. During the late 1930s she worked at a public house in London’s Brick Lane, where she witnessed Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts march past the door. Life there had been hard, and poorly rewarded; she was used to being up at six in the morning and often did not get to bed again until midnight.

After leaving the Brick Lane pub, Daisy was employed carrying out domestic work for the Green family, and was working for them when they decided to move to Devon.

The young man she met was not particularly prepossessing. He was small and slightly built, with stiff manners; a prim youth who hated bad language and did not smoke or drink, preferring grapefruit juice to beer when he went out. But Daisy was prudish herself, and was pleased that Bill did not manhandle her or chase after other girls. He was somebody she thought would meet with her father’s approval.

They married on 18 April 1942, at St Mary’s Church in Ilford, Essex, so that Daisy’s family could attend the ceremony. Afterwards they travelled back to Northam, and Daisy moved in with Bill’s parents in their tiny house on Castle Street. She was immediately struck by how obsessively neat and tidy the Letts were. It was also plain that Bill’s father had little interest in his son and was not looking forward to becoming a grandfather, but because of his own unhappy experiences as an only child, Bill vowed he would not make the same mistake with his marriage and told Daisy that he wanted a large family. They were still living with Bill’s parents when their first child, Patricia, was born in 1943. A second daughter, Joyce, arrived eighteen months later, shortly before Bill was called up to the services.

He joined the Navy as a radio operator, and was sent to the Philippines. While he was away, Daisy divided her time between his parents in Northam and her own family in Essex. When the war ended in 1945, Bill volunteered to stay on; he was proficient at his job and thrived on the discipline, becoming something of a martinet.

Their third daughter, Glenys, was born in 1950, and the Letts were granted a council property in Northam at 57 Morwenna Park Road. The house was a newly-built three-bedroom end-of-terrace, on a small estate laid out between the old village square and the Northam Burrows. Built on a slight incline, there are views of the estuary and the Bristol Channel, although much of the time the sea is obscured by drizzling rain.

Bill remained in the Navy for the next few years, making infrequent visits home to Morwenna Park Road on leave, always immaculately turned out in his radio operator’s uniform. When he was home, Daisy was struck by his Victorian ways. He demanded that the house be perfectly clean, and became angry if anything were out of place. When Daisy and Bill quarrelled, as they increasingly did, he accused her of being against him and worked himself into a rage. Daisy began to wonder what sort of life was in store for her.

He was reserved with the neighbours, even with his school friend Ronnie Lloyd, who now lived next door. Bill also discouraged Daisy from becoming familiar with the women on the estate, but Daisy took these oddities in her stride. She was so used to being ordered about by her father that she allowed her husband to make the decisions, no matter how unfair. Ronnie Lloyd and his wife Elsie were struck by Daisy’s extreme timidity, and noticed she would only speak when spoken to. When Elsie tried to strike up conversation while the women hung out their washing in the adjoining back gardens, Daisy would address her neighbour formally by her surname, never relaxing enough to make conversation.

Bill’s years in the Navy had been a happy time, but he could not raise a family being away from home so much, so when Daisy became pregnant with their fourth child, Bill returned home to Northam to settle down. He soon came to regret the decision bitterly, and never tired of telling his wife that he wished he had stayed in the services. The main cause of his unhappiness was the scarcity of work in Devon, and the poor wages for what little employment there was.

Bill worked for a while for Bernard Smith in Barnstaple, repairing television sets. The job came with a van, and Ronnie Lloyd said that it gave him a slightly above-average status in the village because television was so new. Unfortunately, Bill had little patience and invariably found a way of falling out with most people he knew. He did not stay a TV repairman for long.

When he did find employment, it was often casual work on the promise of payment when the summer season started. The money did not always materialise, and sometimes there were no jobs at all. One year Bill and Ronnie Lloyd tried to sell snacks to the few tourists who ventured on to Northam Burrows. ‘Work was short and we would do anything,’ says Ronnie. Daisy and Elsie Lloyd cut the sandwiches and Bill spent several dispiriting days trudging back and forth along the sandy paths by the sea looking for customers.

No matter how short money became, Daisy took a pride in turning her three daughters out smartly. She patched and mended old clothes to make do for the new ones they could not afford. They might be poor and hungry, but she would never let it show. The memory of her well-dressed children still makes Daisy proud: ‘Neighbours complimented me on how smart they looked,’ she says.

The neighbours also noticed that the children were set to work the minute they returned home from the village school. One might do the ironing, another would be told to look after whoever was the baby at the time. They were even sent out for Mrs Letts’ shopping, and housewives found themselves standing beside the earnest-looking Letts girls in the village shop.

If Bill Letts were home, the house had to be made spotless. When he came in, he would run his finger across the furniture – and if he found dust, the house would have to be cleaned again.

The children were not allowed to play outside the house; instead, Daisy led her daughters on a long walk each morning. Sometimes they would march across the blustery Burrows down to the sea, where they could search for crabs in the rock pools. Other days they walked for miles through the peaceful country lanes, glad to be away from the oppressive company of their father. ‘I wouldn’t say that they had a natural childhood,’ says former neighbour Elsie Lloyd.

It was noticed that the children had considerable respect for Bill’s word. He never played with the children or gave them any of his time – but if he called to one of his daughters to do a chore, the child would go running without a moment’s hesitation.

Arguments between Daisy and Bill were frequent, and became violent. Bill had started to hit Daisy during his tantrums, and she was often seen around the village with black eyes. One day a terrible scene unfolded outside the Letts home. The house was set down below street level, with a flight of five concrete steps from the gate to the garden path. Bill pulled his screaming wife down the steps by her hair and then slapped her. Neighbours were so shocked that they called the police. Daisy thought these outbursts had something to do with the phases of the moon; the abuse soon got to the point when she would tell herself that, if the moon were full, she would have to be careful.

The regime at home was terrifying; one of absolute obedience. Apart from their chores around the house, the children had to be perfectly behaved. They sat silently at dinner, waiting for their father to start eating, and watched him warily for any change in his mood. Any little thing would spark a row that could last for several days. The children looked up at their mother with earnest, worried faces as she implored them not to aggravate their father or get in his way.

Despite these lessons in survival, Bill Letts still found reasons to beat his children, hitting them across the face and thrashing them with the copper stick from the boiler. He had come to resemble the actor Donald Pleasance in looks, and was a truly frightening figure when angry. His eyes blazed, his face a picture of malevolence. He threw one of the girls down the stairs and banged another child’s head against a brick wall. When Daisy protested, she too was beaten, as the children wailed for it to stop. Mad with his anger, Bill shouted that she was against him as well, and tossed boiling water over her. The sound of sobbing could be heard long after the screaming died down.

Looking back at those days, Daisy says sadly, ‘He was a heller to live with. We lived under terror for years.’ She was so ashamed, and confused, by her husband’s extraordinary behaviour that she told nobody, not even her family, of the misery she lived with. ‘We literally suffered hell behind locked doors,’ she says. When some of the neighbours did challenge Bill about the way he treated his family, it only reinforced his belief that everybody was against him – and, when the front door to Number 57 was closed, he beat his family all the more. Daisy believes her husband took a perverse pleasure in hurting them. ‘He was anything but normal,’ she says. ‘He was a tyrant to live with. I would say he was sadistic because he seemed to enjoy making you unhappy.’

What she did not know was that Bill was hiding a secret from her, a secret she would only discover three decades later when she read his medical records after his death.

Bill was a diagnosed schizophrenic, suffering severe psychotic experiences. He had suffered with the illness from a very early age, but had never told his family and does not appear to have received treatment. Some days Bill was happy, planning surprises for Daisy’s birthday or their anniversary; other days he walked in the front door spoiling for a fight. ‘He was definitely two different people,’ Daisy says; she compared his behaviour with that of Stevenson’s character Dr Jekyll. Also, like many schizophrenics, Bill could be aggressive and had an irrational suspicion that people were plotting against him.

In 1952 Daisy gave birth to her fourth child, Andrew, the first of three sons. Daisy then entered into a long period of severe post-natal depression; at least, that is what she thought it was at first. But feelings of anxiety and an inability to cope deepened and lasted into 1953, when she suffered a severe nervous breakdown. Strangely, Bill was sympathetic to Daisy’s depression, perhaps due to the secret knowledge he had of his own mental imbalance. Daisy’s doctor listened to her problems, and decided she should see an expert in mental health. He referred her to a hospital in Bideford, where she became an out-patient of the psychiatric unit. A psychiatrist there suggested to Daisy that her depression was so serious it might benefit from Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT). Daisy said she would try anything, and prepared to receive what was known as the ‘electric hammer’.

Daisy Letts received her first ECT treatments in a small, country hospital by the sea in 1953. She was given a muscle-relaxing drug and then strapped down like some lunatic in Bedlam. Clumsy electrodes were attached to her scalp and she was given a piece of rubber to bite on. When these preparations were complete, the power was switched on and an electrical current crackled through her brain. Daisy remembers biting on the rubber gag – and then blackness. When the power was turned on, she says, ‘You didn’t know no more.’

ECT is a mysterious form of medical treatment, the side effects of which can include confusion and memory loss. It is as controversial now as it was in the 1950s. The theory is that electricity passed through the brain redresses the balance of chemicals which govern mood. But scientists do not know exactly why it works, and some doctors believe it does more harm than good. It is an indication of how controversial ECT still is that the treatment is banned completely in the state of California.

After two treatments Daisy again saw a psychiatrist, who evaluated her progress and decided she was a more serious case than had at first been suspected. More treatment would be needed. Daisy agreed, as nothing could be worse than the pain she already suffered at home, and went on to have a course of six treatments. During this time she continued to have a sporadic sex life with Bill, and became pregnant for the fifth time. The treatment finally ended, leaving her feeling battered and far from well, but there was no opportunity for recuperation. In the autumn of 1953, shortly after her last session, Daisy registered at the Highfield Maternity Home in Northam to have her fifth child, the daughter who would later become infamous as Rose West.

Rose was conceived from the union of two mentally ill people. Her father was a violent schizophrenic; her mother a depressive recovering from a severe nervous breakdown. The children of schizophrenics have a 1-in-10 chance of becoming schizophrenic themselves, and the children of depressives are also far more likely than normal to suffer from mental illness. The child born to Daisy and Bill Letts at the Highfield Maternity Home that autumn had both these genetic dice loaded against her. What is more, she had grown in the womb while her mother’s brain was slammed by the ‘electric hammer’ of ECT. Finally, the home that awaited Rose was one of almost Dickensian poverty and cruelty. A more troubled start in life is hard to imagine.

Rosemary Pauline Letts was born on the twenty-ninth day of November 1953. In the outside world, the young Queen Elizabeth II was touring the Commonwealth following her June coronation. Daisy could have no idea of the horrors that were to follow with this, her fourth and last baby girl. She held Rosemary – as the family would always call her – and loved the child as she had the others. Rosemary was a beautiful baby who ‘never cried and was as good as gold’. Over forty years later, Daisy Letts smiles sadly at the memory.

Soon after bringing the baby home to 57 Morwenna Park Road it was clear that Rose was different to other children. She developed a habit of rocking herself in her cot; if she was put in a pram without the break on, she rocked so violently that the pram crept across the room. As she became a little older, Rose only rocked her head, but she did this for hours on end. It was one of the first indications that, in the family’s words, she was ‘a bit slow’. If a child with such a habit were taken to a doctor now, there would be great concern, as it is an early indication of learning difficulties. As Rose grew from a baby to a toddler to a little girl, she would swing her head for hours until she seemed to have hypnotised herself into a state of semi-consciousness. When Daisy called for her, Rose did not hear, and Rose’s sister, Glenys, who had to share a room with Rose at one stage, complained that the incessant rocking kept her awake at night.

Rose was also marked out by her striking attractiveness. In the local phraseology of Northam she was described by mothers as a ‘lovely young maid’. She had large brown eyes, olive skin and glossy brown hair. But there was a vacancy in those big, doll-like eyes that made the neighbours wonder. She would stand at the gate of 57 Morwenna Park Road and gaze at the world, almost as if she were not a part of it.

Rita New, who lived nearby on the estate, says it was clear that Rose was not like other children.

‘It’s the way her used to look; she used to stare a lot. I know her was different.’