12

BETRAYAL OF TRUST

Juanita Mott, who had been staying at Cromwell Street as a lodger, was another teenager from a broken home. The daughter of a US Army serviceman, Juanita’s parents had split up when she was a child. She went to live with her mother, Mary, who had remarried. Juanita left school at fifteen, and in her search for an affordable bedsitter to rent, found her way to Cromwell Street, where the Wests were offering very cheap accommodation at the time – as low as £7 per week. They advertised in the Gloucester Citizen evening newspaper, but most of their lodgers heard about Cromwell Street by word-of-mouth, and several young women were already living in the top two floors of the house. Juanita was a regular visitor over the next couple of years, eventually retaining her own door key.

By the spring of 1975 Juanita was eighteen years old: a pretty, brown-haired girl of average height who bore a striking resemblance to Carol Ann Cooper. She had worked briefly in a bottling factory, but was now unemployed and lodging with a friend of the family, Jennifer Baldwin, at her bungalow in the small Gloucestershire town of Newent. Jennifer was due to get married on Saturday 12 April 1975, and Juanita had offered to look after her children during the ceremony.

Juanita often hitch-hiked into Gloucester at weekends, and it seems that this is what she intended to do when she left the bungalow on the evening before the wedding. To catch a lift into the city, she normally stood beside the B4215. This quiet country road also happens to be the most direct route between Gloucester and Much Marcle.

Fred and Rose would have known Juanita’s habits and the place where she picked up lifts. They were probably waiting, and offered her a ride in much the same way as they had picked up Caroline Owens outside the Gupshill Manor pub two and a half years before.

At Cromwell Street Juanita was gagged with a ligature made from two long, white nylon socks (similar to those often worn by Rose), a brassière and two pairs of tights one within the other. She was then trussed up with lengths of plastic-covered rope, of the type used for washing line. The rope was used in a complicated way, with loops tied around her arms and thighs, both wrists, both ankles and her skull, horizontally and vertically, backwards and forwards across her body until she could only wriggle like a trapped animal. Then the Wests produced a seven-foot length of rope with a slip-knot end forming a noose. This was probably used to suspend Juanita’s body from the beams in the cellar.

Restriction of breathing – one part of the extreme bondage Fred and Rose found exciting – probably led to Juanita’s death. It is also possible, however, that she was killed by a blow to the back of the head with an implement like a ball-headed hammer. There was an unusual fracture at the base of her skull suggesting this, but it would be an awkward wound to inflict while she was alive and was more probably done while Fred was dismembering her body. Again, he decapitated his victim, removed her legs at the hip and kept aside three of her neck vertebrae, her eleventh thoracic vertebrae, the first rib, both her kneecaps, pieces of her hands, toes, and other parts of her feet: more than eighty bones in total. Juanita’s butchered remains were then buried three to four feet beneath the cellar floor, between the staircase and the second alcove. The lengths of washing line, and pieces of clothing including a pair of women’s briefs, were also thrown into the pit.

There had been no indication that Juanita would run away. She often went into Gloucester for the evening, and had not taken any of her personal possessions with her. Most significantly, she had promised to look after Jennifer Baldwin’s children, and it was unlikely that she would deliberately let her down, especially on her wedding day. Yet, despite these suspicious circumstances, Juanita’s family failed to report her to the police as a missing person. If they had done so, Juanita’s known links with Cromwell Street might have been investigated.

The police did visit 25 Cromwell Street, and quite frequently, but not to investigate murder. They came to interview Fred about the petty theft and receiving of stolen goods in which he was always involved. They also came to check reports that the Wests’ lodgers were in possession of cannabis, and minor ‘drug busts’ were commonplace at the house. There were at least three unannounced visits from drug squad officers in the early 1970s, one resulting in the arrest of a lodger. Gloucester drug squad detectives Price and Castle became familiar faces at the house, and former lodger Benjamin Stanniland admits that the male lodgers were ‘known to police’. This is partly why Fred and Rose began a policy of renting only to young women. Yet the police searches never revealed anything more incriminating than the occasional illegal cigarette (belonging to the lodgers, not Fred and Rose, who had no interest in drugs). The Wests’ composure during these visits was remarkable, considering what was concealed beneath their feet.

Fred continued to make regular appearances in the local courts. On 25 March 1975 he was found guilty of theft and fined £50 by Gloucester magistrates; in November he was convicted of receiving stolen goods and fined £75.

There was little to indicate to his neighbours or to the police that Fred was anything other than a normal, if light-fingered, jobbing builder. He chatted amiably with those he came into contact with and impressed all who met him with his energy and hard work. Fred had recently demolished the garage behind the house and was building a large flat-roofed extension, complete with plumbing for a bathroom, toilet and kitchen. Neighbours noticed that the whole family helped him: digging foundations, mixing cement and carrying building blocks. Fred worked late into the night, long after the children had gone to bed. ‘Dad was always building,’ says his daughter Anna Marie.

But nothing at 25 Cromwell Street was quite as it seemed, and, unknown to his neighbours and children, part of the reason for building the extension was to cover up the grave of Lynda Gough, the Co-op seamstress whose remains were buried in the inspection pit where the garage had been.

These home improvements cost money, and in the spring of 1976 Fred travelled away from Gloucester to earn some extra cash. He spent seven months in Cumbria, where British Gas were laying a pipeline across the Pennines. Fred was attracted by the high wages of £200 per week, and was taken on first as a general labourer and then as a welder’s mate. He was known as ‘The Wog’ by workmates because they thought he had negroid features.

He lodged at the Belted Will Inn in the village of Hallbankgate on the Tindale Fells, near Carlisle, and at an address in Brampton. Deprived of his regular trips to ‘bunny-land’ with Rose, Fred had to look elsewhere for sex. One evening he tuned into a radio phone-in programme on which callers offered household items for sale. A lady who had been trying to sell a gas fire on the programme later received a telephone call from Fred. ‘I’m not interested in the fire,’ he said. ‘I’m far more interested in you.’ He pestered the woman with telephone calls, often obscene, for several days.

One night Fred disappeared from the Belted Will Inn without settling his £7 bill, leaving a suitcase of clothes behind – and, more significantly, neglecting to collect his pay. He travelled back to Gloucester and was never seen in the area again. It seems he had been picking up women in his usual way when something had gone wrong, forcing him to flee.

Back in Gloucester, Fred and Rose continued to look for victims, and they devised a sophisticated new method of finding them. A children’s home known as Jordan’s Brook House was situated in nearby Upton Lane. It cared for delinquent girls, most of whom had already been expelled from other homes. They were vulnerable adolescents, often from deeply troubled families, and easily corrupted by people like the Wests.

Jordan’s Brook House had been built in 1970 as an ‘Approved School’. Girls were admitted when they were fifteen and a half years old, and part of the institution’s function was to introduce them to training and eventually full employment.

It was a strict institution, with an average of twenty-four girls sharing nineteen bedrooms. The girls were graded weekly on their behaviour, and these grades were pinned up for display each Friday tea-time. The amount of freedom the girls were allowed was determined by these grades. There were also curfews, mail was opened, and any boyfriends had to be vetted by the staff. This tough regime often caused the frustrated delinquents to run away. A favourite trick was to set off the fire alarm, as this automatically triggered the opening of secure doors and windows allowing the girls to flee across the fields. The police were immediately contacted, and, usually within a few hours, all were brought back to the home hungry, penniless and tired out.

Fred began to cruise past Jordan’s Brook in the Ford Transit van that had now become his main means of transport, offering a lift to girls he saw. The Wests did not snatch these teenagers off the street and rape them; they had thought of a more subtle, less dangerous approach. They tried to forge friendships with the girls, and invited them back to Cromwell Street for orange squash and biscuits. Rose would listen sympathetically to their problems and, at first, nothing happened to frighten or alarm them.

The girls went back to Jordan’s Brook and described the fun they had enjoyed at Cromwell Street. They told their friends what nice people the Wests were, that the woman had been in care herself and really understood them. Soon news of the sympathetic couple, and their cosy home, spread throughout Jordan’s Brook and other institutions in the area, and many young girls drifted towards the narrow little house by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. One such girl was a teenager who, to protect her identity, can only be referred to as Miss A.*

Like so many of Fred and Rose’s victims, Miss A’s childhood had not been a happy one. Her parents were divorced and she had been sexually abused by both her father and her brother. At the age of thirteen she was placed in a Gloucester children’s home named Russet House, and it was here that she heard about 25 Cromwell Street from an older teenager who gave her cigarettes. One day they visited the house together, absconding from the home – or, as Miss A describes it, ‘running away through the windows’, as this was literally and spiritually what they did when they left without authority. Rose gave them orange drinks and listened as they narrated their troubles. ‘She was nice and pleasant, understanding and caring. She said I could come and cry on her shoulder any time,’ said Miss A.

By the summer of 1976, Miss A had moved to Jordan’s Brook House, where she was given a senior ‘trustworthiness’ grade which meant she could leave the home for extended periods. Also, once every three weeks, usually on a Friday, she was granted a paid visit home to her mother in Tewkesbury. On her way to the bus station Miss A fell into the habit of dropping into Cromwell Street to see Rose.

She could not help but notice that the house was full of children. There were so many children, in fact, that Miss A assumed that some were in care, just like herself. This is odd, because only four children should have been living at the house at this time: Anna Marie, who was twelve in July that year; Heather, five; Mae, who was four in June; and three-year-old Stephen (Fred’s other son had gone back to Scotland). But Miss A may be correct in thinking there were more.

There is evidence that the Wests were working as foster parents. It is extraordinary that this could have been allowed to happen, as both Fred and Rose had a serious criminal conviction for assaulting a teenage girl. Yet Rose’s younger brother, Graham Letts, remembers his sister looking after at least two foster children. ‘She took in a boy and a girl, but she didn’t have them very long. I think they were brother and sister. They came together and then they went back to the foster home,’ he says.

Miss A ran away from Jordan’s Brook House, and went to Cromwell Street because Rose had always been so understanding. She had even received a fifteenth birthday card from the Wests. ‘We built up a trust,’ she says. When she first called at the house, there was no reply, so she went and waited in The Park, returning at 11 P.M. This time Rose came to the door. She was only wearing underwear, but invited the teenager in. Miss A told Rose about all her problems and Rose put her arm around the child to console her – after all, she had been in care herself when she was fifteen. But now Rose was a hardened 23-year-old woman, and she used her experience to manipulate and betray Miss A’s trust. ‘Rose had her arm about me. She started kissing me and my neck and touched my breasts. It was sexual and I pushed her away,’ says Miss A. She spent the night at the house and later returned to Jordan’s Brook, too embarrassed to tell anybody what had happened.

It was six weeks before Miss A was trusted to be given another visit home. When she did, she again went to Cromwell Street. Rose was wearing a see-through blouse, and this time they slept together in the lounge. When Miss A got up to go to the toilet, Rose followed and called out to Fred. Miss A heard the Wests talking together outside the bathroom door. When she came out, Rose pushed her into a room where she was startled to see two naked girls, one on the floor and the other on the bed. Fred was also in the room, wearing a pair of shorts and a shirt. One of the naked girls was blonde with brightly painted toenails. She appeared to be aged about fourteen. The other was dark and slightly older. Rose came up to Miss A and said that it was ‘all right to touch and feel affection’. Miss A recognised the same manipulative language that had been used to her years before, when she had been molested previously. Rose then undid Miss A’s dress, saying they were ‘all girls together’. Miss A felt utterly helpless, as if she were pinned to the wall of a fairground ride – terrified but unable to bring it to a stop.

Miss A watched as Rose performed a strip-tease to arouse Fred. Rose then lay on the bed with one of the naked girls, who was struggling to get away. Rose repeated her coaxing line: ‘It’s natural to touch.’ Fred peeled off a piece of brown masking tape and bound the child’s wrists, being careful to leave her fingers free. Rose turned the girl on to her stomach as Fred taped her ankles in such a way as to splay her legs apart until she was in pain. Looking around the room, Miss A saw a cat-o’-nine-tails whip (which Fred had made himself) on the wall and strange pictures of animals and people (Fred was fascinated by the idea of sex between women and animals, and it was one of his more outlandish fantasies to watch Rose having intercourse with a bull).

Fred and Rose began to kiss. Rose was holding a vibrator, a white candle six inches long and a tube of ointment. She said to Fred, ‘Are you enjoying this now?’ and buggered the girl with the vibrator so that she screamed. Rose removed Fred’s shirt and underpants as he bent down to kiss the girl’s anus. He then penetrated the child while Rose fondled his buttocks – Miss A could see the look of pain on the girl’s face. She looked like she was in ‘outer space’. When Fred ejaculated, Rose asked him, ‘Did you enjoy that?’ She then ripped the masking tape from the child, hurting her. ‘She had a look of hate on her face,’ said Miss A, describing Rose’s maniacal expression. The victim of this assault began to suck her hair for comfort.

Miss A found herself naked, with Rose caressing her and saying, ‘Enjoy! It’s all right.’ She was rigid with fear, and Rose said, ‘I like stiff ones!’ Miss A sat on the bed with her hands covering her breasts, feeling ashamed and knowing that she was next. Rose wound masking tape around Miss A’s wrists, binding them together. ‘The other girl looked terrified and really sad,’ she said. Rose became aggressive and pushed Miss A back on to the bed, where the teenager buried her head in the sheets, counting as Rose wrapped the tape around her ankles five times. She heard a buzzing sound and felt a plastic vibrator moving near her vagina. Rose asked, ‘Is that nice, Fred?’

Miss A felt a smooth female hand with long scratchy nails inside her vagina and her nipples being twisted painfully hard. Rose said, ‘This is fun! It’s great!’ Miss A was then buggered either with a candle or a perfume spray; afterwards Fred had intercourse with her. He was telling Rose how close he was to climaxing and Rose encouraged him to ejaculate over Miss A’s back. When he was finished, Rose produced a tiny pair of silver scissors which she used to snip away the masking tape, cutting the child’s thumb as she did so. Then Miss A went to the bathroom, where she used the bundle of tape to wipe herself. She noticed that she was bleeding. She put her dress back on, but left her shoes and walked barefoot from the house and away from Cromwell Street, crying.

It was now four in the afternoon, and she continued on her journey to her mother’s home in Tewkesbury, where she was told off for being late. She felt defiled, but was unable to tell anybody about her ordeal because ‘if you were in care, you were bad’ – so she hid in her bedroom and rocked back and forth with her knees drawn up under her chin for comfort.

Six weeks later Miss A was again due for a paid home visit. Before she left Jordan’s Brook House, she went to the groundsman’s shed and took a Castrol oil can filled with petrol. She carried the can into the centre of Gloucester, and says she fully intended to burn 25 Cromwell Street to the ground. But when she reached the front door of the tall narrow building, the strength of will to carry out the plan deserted her, and she left the oil can behind a shop.

‘All this occurred without my consent,’ she says of her ordeal at the house. ‘They comforted [me] and then they used me. I couldn’t trust anybody following this.’

One of the little girls that Miss A had seen in the house may well have been Anna Marie, who was twelve but looked older. As Anna Marie had progressed through puberty, she had suffered increasingly severe abuse. She had started to menstruate between the ages of nine and ten, but was denied sanitary towels or tampons by her father. ‘Dad said my period blood should flow freely.’

Rose took pornographic photographs of Anna Marie with a Polaroid camera. She also hit her, saying that nobody must ever see the marks that she made. If the bruises were too bad, Anna Marie was kept away from school. The indignities were endless and bizarre: one day Anna Marie was thrust into a bath of almost boiling water, scalding her. Afterwards Rose massaged baby oil into Anna Marie’s breasts, scratching with her fingernails until the child bled. On another occasion the West children were instructed to daub Anna Marie’s naked body with finger paints. Rose painted the words ‘black hole’ on her buttocks, with an arrow pointing down. Rose took a photograph and made the child stay in this humiliating position until Fred came home. The woman who instigated these sadistic acts even demanded to be called ‘mother’. ‘I called her Rose until Dad smacked me,’ says Anna Marie.

Rose had become very aggressive, quite different to the doe-eyed teenager Fred had first met. She flew into irrational rages from which nobody, not even Fred, was safe. But she reserved much of her anger for Anna Marie, resenting her because she was not her natural child. Rose beat Anna Marie with a stick, and on one occasion, stabbed her in the arm for being ‘a naughty girl’. Anna Marie was locked in the cellar for hours on end and made to do housework until three in the morning, only ever being allowed upstairs to clean.

The ingenuity Fred and Rose employed in their sexual sadism was extraordinary. Fred made a type of chastity belt for his daughter, consisting of a cup with a battery-powered vibrator inside. This was strapped around Anna Marie’s waist before she was made to walk around the house wearing it, purely for Rose’s amusement. When Fred came home from work, Rose gleefully described the humiliation Anna Marie had endured during the day. At school, Anna Marie became a problem child, a bully, and was eventually expelled. But she knew better than to talk to her teachers about what went on at home.

Anna Marie wanted to attend discos, but her father told her she needed ‘a man not a boy’. She was aged about twelve when Rose first made her have sex with her West Indian customers. This happened in the bedroom at the front of the house, known as ‘Mum and Dad’s Room’, which had a plaque on the wall with Rose’s name on it. Beneath this plaque was a spy-hole for Fred to look through. A wooden plug was fitted in the door, painted the same green to disguise it, and when it was removed Fred had a clear view of everything Rose was doing (although he had to kneel down to take his pleasure, because the hole was so low). There was a red lightbulb in the living room which was operated from ‘Mum and Dad’s Room’: if it was on, the other children knew not to go in.

Some of the men were workmates of Fred’s. At first he stood in the doorway and watched as his daughter had sex with them. Rose was also there in the room. ‘Rose said I would be able to please my husband [when she was older]. I was a lucky girl,’ she says. Anna Marie was only thankful that she was not being beaten. One day a man brought Anna Marie a gift of chocolates, but Rose took even this little pleasure away from her and ate them all. Rose started taking Anna Marie out to a local nightclub called Tracy’s, where they would drink Malibu and Coke and pick up men together.

Anna Marie still doted on her father, grateful that he rarely hit her. ‘I’m talking about a dad I love,’ she says. She even felt love for Rose.

Fred was working as a jobbing builder on house conversions and often took Anna Marie with him when he went out. He had put a piece of carpet down in the back of his van, and whenever he felt aroused, would stop the van and cuddle his daughter. ‘He was always ready for sex,’ she says. He did not even bother to get undressed, but simply loosened his trousers. Sometimes they had sex in the empty houses where he was working, sometimes in woods. She learned, in her childish way, that if a purple light came up on the dashboard – because Fred had switched the engine off but kept the ignition on to work the heater – then she was about to be raped. When her father forced his tongue into her mouth, she had to struggle to resist a natural urge to bite it off. He later bribed her not to tell Rose, giving her money to buy sweets.

One summer evening, Rose announced that they were taking Anna Marie to a pub. Rose helped her dress and put on makeup, ‘like an older sister’, but the real purpose was to disguise her youth. She wore a dress because Rose hated her to wear trousers. ‘She said she wanted the air to get to me.’ When they were ready, Fred took them out into the countryside and dropped them at a small pub.

Rose bought a succession of bottles of barley wine. Anna Marie said she did not want any more, but Rose insisted in a ‘nice, but subtly domineering way’. Soon Anna Marie was quite drunk. Rose was flirting with a group of men, but something went wrong and they had to leave in a hurry. It is likely that the men discovered the truth about Anna Marie’s age and relationship to Rose, possibly because of something Anna Marie said.

Rose kept looking behind her as they walked away. They were quickly picked up by Fred, who had been waiting in the van. When they were inside Rose turned on Anna Marie ‘like an animal’, tearing the child’s clothes off with such violence that she cut her. Rose said that if Anna Marie thought they could be friends, then she was mistaken; she could not have a joke with her. ‘I was held down by Rose as Dad raped me. He’d done it before so I knew what to expect,’ she said.

As she lay there, Anna Marie recalled wondering who was looking after her half-brothers and half-sisters.

‘I was only a child and I did not understand,’ she said.

* Miss A’s identity is protected by a court order.