9

CROMWELL STREET

The man on top was West Indian and the woman was white, very young with wavy brown hair and large breasts. She urged her lover on until he reached a bellowing climax; then they fell back and relaxed on the bed. Rose turned to face the wall of her shabby room, focusing on a detail in the pattern of the paper. There was a quick movement, something like the scuttling of an insect. It was perceptible to Rose only because she knew what it was: the blink of a startling blue eye, Fred’s eye, leering at her through a spy-hole in the wall.

Rose regularly entertained men at their flat in Midland Road in this way, and Fred derived great pleasure from watching her, only complaining if he thought she had not been enthusiastic enough with the customers. He liked her to yell out and scream her enjoyment. If she had sex with a man while he was out, Rose had to tell Fred about it when he returned. Voyeurism stimulated him far more than the act itself.

He referred to sex with Rose as ‘going off to bunny-land’, because rabbits ‘did it all the time’ and their couplings were bestial. They had sex almost every day – brief episodes in which Fred penetrated Rose for a few moments and then ejaculated.

Normal sex did not stimulate him greatly. He only became truly aroused if a fetish was involved, like bondage, defecation or sadism. He was excited by Rose’s developing interest in lesbian sex and threesomes, where he would usually be happy to watch. Fred also liked to use a vibrator on Rose, and was extremely excited either by being tied up himself, or by tying her up. It was bondage, above all else, that turned him on.

On the other hand, however, there were certain ordinary activities in which he would not take part. Rose often complained that there was never any foreplay with Fred – he just mounted her and came. Also, he flatly refused to perform cunnilingus and was squeamish about her period.

Many of Rose’s customers were from Gloucester’s large West Indian population. Thousands of Caribbean islanders had settled in Gloucester in the 1950s and early 1960s, tempted by advertisements for work placed by the British government. A typical advertisement in Jamaica’s Daily Gleaner enthusiastically invited ‘Come to England!’, and went on to promise good jobs and homes. The reality was very different. Many found Gloucester a hostile city where life was depressingly hard. There was a deep prejudice against blacks and an unofficial colour bar preventing them from finding work, renting homes or even drinking in the pubs. ‘For Sale’ boards on houses sometimes had the words NO BLACKS added.

One of the few landlords to welcome the West Indians was Frank Zygmunt, the owner of 25 Midland Road, who was himself an immigrant from Eastern Europe. And one of the few English families to make friends with the new arrivals were the Wests, who often had coloured men as guests in their home.

In fact, Fred’s closest friends were Jamaicans: he trusted and respected them more than white men. One such friend was Ronalzo Harrison, a house painter, who came to Britain from Jamaica in 1958 at the age of twenty-two. They met when Fred carried out some repairs on Ronalzo’s car, and went on to work together on building sites, often borrowing tools from each other and helping with home improvements. The bond between them was strengthened because Heather West and Ronalzo’s daughter, Denise, had both been born in the same month at the same hospital and were growing up together.

Fred had much in common with the immigrants. He was a countryman from a little village in Herefordshire, and therefore an outsider in the city. Fred’s neighbours and colleagues often laughed at him, calling him a ‘country bumpkin’, just as they mocked the blacks, thinking them slow-witted. As Ronalzo puts it, ‘Fred was different to Gloucester people.’ Also, like many of the immigrants, Fred had limited reading and writing skills. He did not like paperwork and always preferred to be paid in cash. Fear of being conned was an insecurity which Fred shared with many West Indians.

Rose liked West Indians for a different reason. She was sexually excited by coloured men and considered them to be the best lovers. Many of her customers were coloured, and these were the encounters that Fred most enjoyed spying on through the hole in the bedroom wall.

After Fred had disposed of Charmaine’s body and settled back into a domestic routine with Rose, he turned his attention to the problem of his wife. Rena was becoming an intolerable threat to his well-being because of her natural desire to see her eldest daughter. She had always worried about Fred mistreating the girl, and had kept in touch with Midland Road in case anything was wrong. It is therefore probable that Rena quickly found out that Charmaine was missing. This must have alarmed her and caused her to ask Fred and Rose questions about Charmaine’s whereabouts. It was, of course, of the utmost importance that Rena did not discover the truth: that her daughter was in fact dead and buried behind the back door of the flat.

The air was scented with the smell of cut hay when Rena knocked at the front door of Moorcourt Cottage in August 1971. She was met by the jolly figure of Christine West, who had recently married Fred’s youngest brother, Doug, and who was now living at home in Much Marcle with her husband and father-in-law. Christine had her baby son, Christopher, with her – he had been born the previous year – and was pregnant with her second child, due the following January.

It was very unusual for Rena to turn up unexpectedly at Moorcourt Cottage; indeed, Christine had never met Fred’s wife before, understanding them to be separated. Rena explained to her sister-in-law that she was looking for Walter. It was harvest time, and the old man had been down at Moorcourt Farm since dawn, helping to bring in the corn. He would not be back home until the evening. Rena said she would go down and see him at work, but did not explain what she wanted to talk about. Later on that day she came back to the cottage, and, because she had helped with the harvest, had a bath before leaving again. Neither Rena nor Walter offered any explanation for the meeting, or what she had wanted, but it is likely that she asked Walter if he knew where Charmaine was. It is an indication of her extreme anxiety and desperation that she turned to Fred’s father for help: after all, she hardly knew him.

Some time later, in an apparent attempt to placate her, Fred agreed to take Rena to see Charmaine. She got into his car expecting to be reunited with her daughter. But first Fred took her to a pub, where he made sure she got staggering drunk. Then, when she was incapable of resisting, he strangled her to death.

It is not known exactly where Fred murdered Rena, but he probably killed her in the car, while she was helplessly intoxicated. Strangulation was the most likely cause of death; it was also an aspect of sadistic sex that excited him. He may have constricted her breathing by inserting a pipe in her throat: a short length of narrow chromium tubing was later found with her remains, together with a child’s toy – a small red plastic boomerang. It is also possible that both these items were used to abuse Rena’s body in other ways. Eventually she died. Fred then wanted to dismember her body, just as he had Anna McFall’s. To do this, and to be able to enjoy it, Fred needed a place where he would not be disturbed, a place where he could take his time, wash afterwards and change his clothes.

Fred probably took Rena back to 25 Midland Road, where he could make as much mess as he wished. He cut up Rena’s body carefully, exactly like Anna McFall: disarticulating her legs at the hip, removing her left kneecap and a total of thirty-five finger and toe bones. When Fred had finished, he put her remains into bags and put the bags into the car.

Late at night, Fred drove out towards Moorcourt Cottage. He stopped the car a few hundred yards away by Letterbox Field, so-called because a red mailbox is attached to the fence. Fred was near to the spot where he had crashed his motorcycle into Pat Manns when he was a teenager, and next to Finger Post Field, where he had buried the remains of Anna McFall. Letterbox Field is on a slight hill, so Fred could see the lights of Much Marcle in the distance, and, with the engine switched off, could hear crickets chirruping in the fields.

Once he had negotiated the five-bar gate, Letterbox Field rose up ahead of him in the gloom. He struggled a little under the weight of the sacks containing Rena’s remains as he climbed towards a cluster of trees known as Yewtree Coppice. He chose a spot next to the hedgerow, where he felt he would not be disturbed, and dug a deep pit, placing sections of her corpse into it together with pieces of her clothing. He then refilled it and crept back to the car.

In the months following Rena’s death, nobody reported her to the police as a missing person, and, just like Anna McFall, there is no record of anyone looking for her – not even health visitors, who should have known about Rena and checked on her welfare, because of her children being fostered and the struggles she had experienced with Fred in trying to get them back. It might also be expected that Rena would have appeared on the ‘At Risk’ register, if only because of her criminal history. Yet her disappearance, if noted at all, was never seriously investigated at the time.

Fred had got away with another extraordinary crime.

In November 1971 a young mother named Elizabeth Agius moved into a flat at 24 Midland Road, the house adjacent to Fred and Rose. Elizabeth Agius was married to a Maltese man, but was bringing up their child on her own. Fred first saw this pretty young woman as she struggled to get a pushchair up the steps to her flat next door. He gallantly offered to help, and had soon charmed her into coming in to meet Rose and have some tea, adding, ‘My name’s Fred.’

The good neighbours asked a series of personal questions about Elizabeth Agius’ family. Fred and Rose were both sexually attracted to her, but they did not want an angry husband or father coming to cause trouble. They were pleased with what they found out: with the exception of her mother, their neighbour had few relations in the area.

With her husband living many hundreds of miles away, Elizabeth was naturally lonely and began to pay regular visits to Number 25, finding Fred and Rose to be most solicitous hosts. Fred explained the domestic arrangement to her frankly: Rose was his girlfriend, and his wife had moved back to Scotland. Elizabeth got on well with Rose, who looked to her to be no more than fourteen, and began to drop in on her neighbours almost daily. Fred often went out at night, saying he wanted to ‘see what I can find to bring home’. But Elizabeth thought little of it, and did not hesitate when Fred and Rose asked her to baby-sit for them. She did this on two occasions.

The first time Fred and Rose returned at a normal time, but on the second occasion they did not get back until the early hours of the following morning. Elizabeth naturally asked where they had been: ‘I said, “Did you go anywhere nice?”’ The answer astounded her. Fred said they had been ‘driving around looking for young girls’. He said it was easier if Rose was with him because the girls would think it was safe to get in the car. ‘If he could get a young girl between fifteen and seventeen, hopefully she would be a virgin, and he could get more money for a virgin. [The girls] had the opportunity to come and live with [Fred and Rose] and be on the game if they wanted to,’ says Elizabeth Agius. Fred and Rose added that they preferred to pick up runaways, because they had nowhere to go.

They claimed to have travelled all the way to London and back looking for a girl to pick up – a six-hour round trip in their small car – and that they frequently drove down the A38 beside the Severn estuary to Bristol. Here they parked the Ford Popular by the bus station. Fred used a callous logic in choosing this place to look for girls; he told Elizabeth that teenagers passed through the city on the way to the bright lights of London, and that they would do anything for money.

Elizabeth now says she did not believe what she had been told, because Fred and Rose were ‘such a nice couple’ and because Fred was always laughing and joking. She therefore continued her friendship with her neighbours, but several months later made another shocking discovery about them.

She was alone with Rose in the kitchen at Number 25 one day when a direct sexual proposition was put to her: Rose confided that Fred was in love with her and wanted to have sex. In fact, Rose continued, Fred wanted to have sex with both of them, together in the same bed. Rose went on to tell her neighbour extraordinary details about her unconventional life with Fred. She said that she was a prostitute, and boasted of the large number of men she entertained on a regular basis, showing Elizabeth the condoms she used and the special pills, shaped like sugar cubes, that she believed would prevent her from contracting venereal diseases. Fred was ‘all for’ this and would watch Rose through a spy-hole in her bedroom wall. If he were out when she was with a man, she had to describe what had happened when he got home.

Elizabeth’s husband returned from Malta, and one evening the couple visited Fred and Rose together. When Mr Agius put an affectionate arm around his wife, Fred leapt up from his seat and stormed into the kitchen in a rage. Elizabeth followed and asked what was the matter. Fred was enraged because he had not succeeded in seducing her and did not want another man to have her, even if that man were her husband. He pointed to the floor and yelled, ‘Your husband should be six feet under fucking there!’ Fred ranted that if he could not have her, then why should any man. ‘I told him he was nuts,’ says Elizabeth. Fred then produced a pair of handcuffs and snapped them roughly around her wrists, snarling, ‘Now I’ve fucking got you!’; but Rose pulled him off and freed her neighbour, realising that Mr Agius was in the next room.

It was several days before Elizabeth visited Fred and Rose again. When she did, Fred was still insistent that they go to bed. ‘Fred said he would like to tie me to the bed [or] I could tie him to the bed, burn him or whip him, anything I wished.’ Rose encouraged her to carry on. ‘They were really close. They were the type of people who didn’t hide anything from one another,’ she says.

Each time she visited, Elizabeth was given her customary cup of tea, but on one of these visits she began to feel drowsy and soon passed out. When she woke up, she was in bed with Fred and Rose, who were both naked. She was told that Fred had raped her while she was unconscious. Fred and Rose helped their groggy neighbour dress and then took her, and her baby son, home.

Anna Marie and toddler Heather were always within yards of these extraordinary scenes, and Elizabeth noticed that the children were also badly neglected. The baby in particular was often wet and left in soiled nappies.

Rose’s prostitution, Fred’s voyeurism and all sorts of bizarre and violent sex were so open at 25 Midland Road that the children became precociously knowledgeable.

Anna Marie was now coming up to eight, and her adored father started to ponder the pleasure she could give him. Fred and Rose told Elizabeth that Anna Marie had lost her virginity in an accident, when she fell off her Raleigh Chopper bicycle. They said that one of its handles had entered her vagina, and she had needed to attend hospital because of it. Whether they were testing their neighbour, to see if she too were interested in paedophilia, or whether they were deliberately introducing a story that could excuse later abuse, is unclear.

Rose had been agitating for marriage for some time, and in January 1972, Fred and Rose finally became man and wife. They did not tell their families about this, and the service was conducted secretly, just as Fred’s first marriage had been. The ceremony took place at Gloucester Register Office on 29 January 1972. Fred described himself incorrectly as a bachelor on the certificate, and there was no reference to his first marriage, which had never legally ended. None of their family or friends were invited.

The happy couple went away on a short, and unconventional, honeymoon. They visited various places in the West Country that Rose had known as a girl. One evening they appeared in the Golden Lion public house in Northam, the Devon village where Rose had been born. She had not been back for over ten years. In the crowd at the bar that night was Rita New, who had grown up in Morwenna Park Road with the eldest Letts girls, Joyce and Patricia. Rita was drinking with friends when two young women and a man were brought over to be introduced by a young man named Barry Seathe, who had formerly dated one of Rose’s elder sisters and happened to be in the pub that night.

‘It was Rosemary with her husband. They were on honeymoon,’ said Rita New. But there was a second young woman with them, a blonde girl who was obviously intimate with the couple, and was, no doubt, a bisexual whom the Wests had asked along on their honeymoon so they could indulge in three-in-a-bed sex. Her identity remains a mystery; Rita and her friends were told that she was a girlfriend of Fred’s. The idea of bringing another woman on honeymoon astonished everybody. The strange threesome stayed long enough for just one drink, but behaved so oddly during those few minutes that the evening left a deep impression on all those present: both Fred and Rose talked in a fevered, disconnected fashion, gesticulating excitedly with their hands as if they were high on drugs, or insane. ‘It was weird,’ said Rita New.

Fred and Rose also appeared in Benbow Street, Plymouth, outside the house owned by the Scobling family where the Letts had lodged. The Scoblings’ daughter, Joan, was at home, and she came out to talk to Rose. She was introduced to Fred and two small children, probably Heather and Anna Marie, but Fred did not seem to want to get out of the car so Joan brought out glasses of orange juice and passed them through the windows for the girls. Rose stood on the pavement and chatted for a few minutes, then said that they had to be going. As Joan Scobling watched them drive away, she thought about the huge responsibility her friend had taken on.

Back in Gloucester, Fred and Rose started to plan their future together. They decided that they needed a house large enough in which to raise a family, but which would also have separate facilities to enable Rose to continue her work as a prostitute. A broken-down place for Fred to renovate and modify to their own requirements would be perfect. To help pay for it, they would take in bed-and-breakfast lodgers. It was not long before Fred found exactly what they were looking for.

Number 25 Cromwell Street is a large, semi-detached house in a faded residential street on the opposite side of The Park, just a few hundred yards from where they already lived, and like their present home, was also owned by Frank Zygmunt. The Wests agreed to rent the property at first. On the day they moved in, they simply packed up their belongings in suitcases and walked to their new home. Fred did not bother telling his family in Much Marcle that he was moving. (When his brother, Doug, called at Midland Road a few weeks later, he had to be redirected by neighbours.)

From Midland Road, Fred and his family crossed into The Park and then strolled for about five minutes along the path that curves between an avenue of mature trees. This path led them to the weathered statue of Robert Raiker, founder of the Sunday School movement and one of the city’s most famous sons. The Wests crossed Park Road by the statue, with the United Reform Church on their right, and turned into Cromwell Street.

The street is straight and quite short, with rows of small, three-storey terrace houses crowding in on either side. These are slightly shabby homes with small areas in front and cars parked on the kerb. About two-thirds of the way up on the left stand a pair of box-like semi-detached houses; the one on the right was to be their new home. Next door was a prefabricated building made of tin, used as a church by the Seventh-Day Adventists. The road ends in a cul-de-sac, and beyond this is a large car park for city centre shoppers. Most of the locals use the Wellington Stores corner shop in the next street.

Cromwell Street had once been a very desirable address. Until 1964, the car park at the end had been the playground of a famous public school, Sir Thomas Rich’s School, and many of the teachers had lived locally. But by the 1970s, Cromwell Street had fallen into the same state of decay as Midland Road: a seedy back-way of the inner city. Most of the houses had been sub-divided into flats and bedsitters, often used by students from the nearby campus of the Gloucestershire College of Art and Technology (GLOSCAT). The flats had been allowed to deteriorate, and the street was noisy at night, especially in summer. There was a lot of petty crime.

Number 25 is larger than many of the neighbouring houses. It also had its own garage, which was unusual. This was behind the house, but could be reached from the front via a narrow drive that ran between the house and the church next door. Behind the garage was a long thin garden, fenced in with wire, with three trees. An alley at the bottom of the garden leads into St Michael’s Square, which could be seen from the upstairs rear windows. The square had been turned into another car park for shoppers.

The house itself was relatively spacious, with two upstairs floors and a ground floor, all with open marble fireplaces. There was also an attic room and an extensive cellar. Compared with their little flat at Midland Road, it seemed quite enormous, especially to little Anna Marie who could not quite believe that they had the whole house.

From the outside, Number 25 was a featureless brick building. There were three sash windows at the front, one to each floor, with simple white pediments above them. There was a doorway below street level for the cellar, and this opened on to a small area. The main entrance to the house was at the side of the building. Because street lighting was poor in Cromwell Street (the nearest lamp was three doors away) the doorway to Number 25 was particularly dark at night.

Shortly after they moved in, Elizabeth Agius paid a visit. Fred showed her the cellar, which was divided into separate rooms. He said that he was thinking of using it as a special area for Rose’s clients. ‘I could soundproof it and use it as my torture chamber,’ he smirked. Fred and Rose also invited Elizabeth to come and live at the house, saying that she could go on the game and that ‘the soshe’ (social security) would pay her rent. But Fred made it clear that she would have to leave her husband first.

To help pay the bills the Wests took in lodgers, installing a cooker and washbasin on the first-floor landing so the tenants would not have to come downstairs to where the West family lived. The family had also grown in size again, as one of Fred’s illegitimate children from Scotland, the boy named Steven, had come south to stay with his father.

One of the first lodgers was an eighteen-year-old youth named Benjamin Stanniland. He shared a room on the top floor of the house with Alan Davis, who was about the same age. On the evening that Benjamin and Alan moved into the house, they were both taken out for a drink by Fred and Rose, and were amazed by the open way in which they discussed sex. They returned to Cromwell Street later that evening, and Rose changed into tight leggings and a revealing Spandex top. When Benjamin was in bed that night Rose slipped in beside him and they had sex together. She also had sex with Alan, who shared the room. In the morning the boys were worried about meeting their landlord, but apparently it was not a problem: ‘She discussed it with Fred and he didn’t seem to mind,’ Benjamin said.

The young lodger began to bring a brunette named Lynda Gough back to the house. Lynda was a short, buxom girl, who wore National Health Service spectacles and pieces of jewellery she bought at Woolworths. She was the daughter of fireman John Gough and his wife, June, who also had two younger children. Lynda was a difficult adolescent, and had recently left a private school in Midland Road for children with learning problems. Aged sixteen, with no qualifications, she went to work as a seamstress for the Co-op store in Barton Street, where she was employed when she started to see Benjamin Stanniland.

By the time Lynda reached the age of seventeen, her parents had noticed a change in her behaviour. ‘She made it clear to us that what she did was her business,’ said her mother. Although she and her husband loved and cared for Lynda, they felt that they should allow her some freedom.

Lynda conducted relationships with both Benjamin Stanniland and, after the break-up of their relationship, other male lodgers at the house. As a result, Lynda became friendly with Fred and Rose, who explained that they needed a nanny for their children. It would later prove to be a fateful meeting.

Rose was in need of extra help about the house because she was heavily pregnant. In June 1972, Rose gave birth to her second child by Fred, a baby girl they initially named May (but would later change the spelling to Mae). There were now four children in the household.

It was later claimed at Rose West’s trial that she had come back from hospital to find that Fred was sleeping with their former neighbour Elizabeth Agius. Mrs Agius strenuously denies this, but it is clear there was a sexual free-for-all at the house during this time.

One day, during the summer of that first year at Cromwell Street, Anna Marie was led down to the cellar by her father and stepmother. Fred had soundproofed the cellar, as he had told Elizabeth Agius he would, creating his ‘torture chamber’. The first victim would be his own eight-year-old daughter.

It was so warm that day that Fred wore shorts. Outside, Cromwell Street was filled with light and heat. But when Anna Marie came down into the cellar she found it damp, illuminated by electric light. The door was closed and locked behind her. Fred told his daughter that he was going to help her; he said that what he was about to do was his duty as a father.

Anna Marie saw a Pyrex bowl, some cloths, a vibrator and tape on the floor. She asked what they were for, but there was no response. Rose removed Anna Marie’s clothes. Anna Marie started to cry, and again asked what was happening. ‘I was told that I should be very grateful and that I was lucky I had such caring parents who thought of me. They were going to help me and make sure that when I got married I would be able to satisfy my husband and keep my husband. I was led to believe that all loving parents were the same,’ she says.

Rose sat on Anna Marie’s face while Fred forced his daughter’s legs open; her hands were bound and she was gagged. Fred then raped his daughter while Rose watched. Anna Marie could see the Pyrex bowl, and watched as her father removed strange red-coloured matter from inside her and put it into the bowl. She thought it looked like red frogspawn. The pain was so excruciating that she wished she were dead, but Rose was clearly having fun: ‘She was laughing, smirking and saying to me it was for my own good and to stop being silly.’

When the ordeal finally ended, Rose took Anna Marie to a bathroom, where she helped her clean herself. Anna Marie was in considerable pain, and would be kept home from school for several days. Rose said that if she ever spoke about what had happened, she would ‘get a hitting’. She added that what they had done to Anna Marie happened in other families, too.

One day Fred brought home to Cromwell Street a curious metal object: a long bar, bent into a U-shaped frame and fitted with handles. He had made it at the Wingate factory, where he was now employed as a machinist, and at first the children played with the frame as a kind of toy, rocking back and forth on it. But Anna Marie felt uncomfortable about the object.

Some time later Rose told her to go and tidy up in the cellar, which was also used as the children’s play room. Anna Marie was apprehensive because of what had already happened down there, but she did as she was told. She saw that the U-shaped frame was against the wall and, because this scared her, turned to go back upstairs, but Rose was blocking her way. Anna Marie was ordered to undress by her stepmother, who was becoming ‘somewhat agitated and annoyed’. She was strapped to the frame naked with her legs apart, and gagged. Rose lifted her own skirt up, and underneath Anna Marie saw a belt with a vibrator in it. Rose removed the belt and started lashing Anna Marie, swearing at the child and calling her names. Then Fred entered the room. ‘I looked at my dad, pleading with him with my eyes.’ But it was no good. Fred raped his daughter. He was quick about it because it was his lunch hour, and he had to be back at work.

When he had gone, Rose abused Anna Marie with the vibrator and then left her tied to the frame for a while. Later in the afternoon, Anna Marie, who was cut and bruised, was made to take a bath. Rose poured salt into the water first, saying it would sting, but that this was good for her, too.