13

FLESH AND BLOOD

Twenty-five Cromwell Street had been divided into two distinct sections by 1977. The upstairs floors had been fully converted into bedsitters, complete with self-contained cooking and bathroom facilities. The West family lived on the ground floor, which had been enlarged by an extension built where the garage had been.

The lodgers were mostly unskilled, single women who worked in local shops and factories. Up to seven of them lived at the house at one time. They became friendly with one another, holding parties in their rooms, going out as a group and inviting boyfriends back to the house. None stayed for long and there was always a new girl around. One of these was a plain young woman named Shirley Robinson.

Shirley had been born in the county of Rutland, the daughter of RAF Corporal Royal Baden Robinson, known as Roy, and his partner, Christa Carling. They lived near RAF Cottesmore in Lincolnshire. Christa left home when Shirley was three, taking the child with her, but it did not work out and Shirley went back to live with her father, then based in Wolverhampton. Shirley soon fell into delinquency, and by the age of thirteen was selling herself as a prostitute. By the age of fifteen she was living in a children’s home in Bristol; in 1977, she was transferred into the care of Gloucester social services. Her social worker described her as ‘extremely withdrawn and sullen’ and noted that Shirley had lesbian girlfriends much older than herself.

She was working as a prostitute in the Gloucester area when she met Rose. Shirley, then aged eighteen, came to live at 25 Cromwell Street, taking a tiny room on the first floor at the back of the house. She found both men and women attractive and was entirely open about being bisexual. Fred and Rose were excited by this, and a ménage à trois developed between them.

Fred and Rose were experimenting with the concept of a completely open relationship. Rose went out at nights on her own to pubs, sometimes returning home in the morning with presents of alcohol and boxes of chocolates, sometimes staying away for several days. She even came close to leaving Fred, taking a flat in Stroud Road where she entertained various boyfriends, but Fred found out about this and put a stop to it. ‘My father wasn’t very pleased,’ recalled Anna Marie.

As well as their relationship with Shirley Robinson and others, both Fred and Rose continued to abuse Anna Marie. Rose forced her stepdaughter to bring her to orgasm by performing cunnilingus, while Fred had developed an obsession with trying to breed the ‘perfect child’. Tired of simply raping Anna Marie, he attempted to carry out bizarre experiments with her.

One day Anna Marie remembers Rose having intercourse with a coloured man. When the man had ejaculated, the condom he had been using was removed and handed to Fred, who then placed it inside Anna Marie’s vagina. She was made to sit for a while before Fred took it out again. Other children were nearby, and Anna Marie watched them as Fred continued with his experiment. She noticed copper piping, a dish and a syringe in the bathroom, and these things also seemed to be involved in what was happening. ‘I heard somebody say, “We will see if this works and gets you pregnant,”’ she says.

Fred was delighted when Rose became pregnant by one of these coloured men. He said that blacks were ‘better breeders’ than whites, and more likely to sire the perfect child. He also hoped Rose had a boy, because there were already enough girls in the house. With all this going on it is little wonder that lodgers remember wails of sexual excitement coming from Rose’s room, sometimes so loud that lodger Gillian Britt says she had to turn her radio up to drown them out. But these disturbing noises were not only made by Rose. Another lodger, Jane Haymer, remembers children screaming in the night, and the piercing cry ‘Stop it, Daddy!’ coming from the cellar on one occasion. It was the voice of a young girl, but she did not trouble to report it to any of the authorities.

Shortly afterwards Shirley discovered she was carrying Fred’s child. This, too, was quite open. During the hot part of the summer Shirley spent hours sitting out on the wall in front of the house, trying to keep cool and chatting to neighbours about her relationship with Fred, while devouring the red Mr Men ice lollies she reserved specially at the Wellington Stores. One day Rose came outside and cheerfully confirmed the news, pointing at Shirley’s stomach and telling neighbour Linda Greening, ‘It’s Fred’s!’ She then pointed to her own, more advanced pregnancy and said, ‘I wonder what colour it will be?’ Rose said they planned to bring up the two children together.

Both Rose’s character and appearance became increasingly eccentric as her pregnancy developed. She took to wearing maternity dresses without underwear, and often sat on the back step of the house with her legs open and skirt up. There were other oddities, as one lodger remembers: ‘She dressed as a child, always wearing white schoolgirl socks. I didn’t think she was quite right in the head.’

Rose strode about the house in this unconventional clothing, screaming at the children and giving orders to the lodgers, and even Fred – she had become much more assertive in the relationship. ‘Initially my mum was young and impressionable, but as she got older she became more dominant,’ says Anna Marie. It was noticed that Fred shied away from Rose when she was angry. ‘Out of the two of them, Rose would be expected to lose her temper,’ says Liz Brewer, who lodged at the house at this time. Liz also remembers a conversation she had with Rose when Liz had said that a relation of hers was leaving her husband. Rose commented that whatever Fred did, she would never leave him.

Rose had tolerated Shirley’s pregnancy at first, but as Fred took his lover into their bed and flaunted the relationship, Rose became jealous. Shirley and Fred were seen kissing outside her room, and boastfully announced their affair to other lodgers. He taunted Rose by patting Shirley’s bulging stomach and saying that she would be his next wife. Rose’s relationship with Shirley worsened as her rival’s pregnancy began to show, and she insisted on walking around the house dressed only in her underwear. Fred revelled in the idea of two women competing for his affection. However, he could also be curiously secretive about Shirley, and was eager to hide the truth from outsiders, including Rose’s mother, Daisy, who had become suspicious. When she questioned Fred about his friendship with Shirley, he replied, ‘I’m not with that woman. I’ve got the woman I want – I’ve got Rosie. I don’t want nobody else.’ Daisy accepted this assurance, just as she had accepted the disappearance of Charmaine. In the years since the girl had vanished from the West home, Rose’s family had done nothing to locate the child other than having one conversation about possibly hiring a private detective to trace her.

In November that year Shirley and Fred devised a bizarre plan to profit by her pregnancy – they decided they could make money by selling their baby to a childless couple. They even had their picture taken for an advertisement. Shirley put on a cream- coloured jacket and a floral dress. Fred brushed his hair and wore a grey three-piece suit with an aquamarine nylon tie. They visited a photographic studio in Gloucester and paid £5.10 for a set of four prints.

Shirley wrote to her father Roy, who was then working as a welder in Germany, enthusing about the relationship and enclosing one of the photographs. The picture showed her and Fred holding hands while looking straight at the camera. ‘This is the man I’m going to marry,’ she wrote. ‘What do you think of him, Dad? I have never been so happy in my life.’ Shirley unwisely repeated the marriage boast at 25 Cromwell Street, and it was this that Rose could not tolerate; she became mad with jealousy and Fred realised the affair had gone too far. It had never been his intention to allow Shirley to take Rose’s place, and now he began to regret that she was having his child.

Rose’s father, Bill Letts, had taken voluntary redundancy from Smith’s Industries, leaving with a sizeable pay-off. When Bill received the money, he left Rose’s mother and travelled around Devon, living the high life, but became unwell after a couple of years and returned to Gloucester to find a business in which to invest his remaining money. Bill had come to accept Rose’s marriage, and had developed a grudging respect for Fred, so they agreed to go into partnership together. They first tried to launch a small industrial cleaning business. When that failed, they opened a café, with Bill putting up the money, Fred carrying out the renovation work and Rose’s brother-in-law, Jim Tyler, supplying the materials.

By the time the café was finished, Fred had decided to end his relationship with Shirley Robinson. One day over dinner in the café, he told Jim Tyler, ‘She wants to get between me and Rose. She wants Rosie out so she can take over and take her place. I’m not having that. She’s got to fucking go.’

Rose gave birth to a baby daughter on 9 December 1977: a child of mixed race whom Rose named Tara. Fred was delighted. He thought Tara was a beautiful baby, particularly because of her colouring, and gave her the unusual nickname of ‘Moses’. This was meant blasphemously: Fred felt he was God-like because he was overseeing the breeding of ‘perfect children’. Both Fred and Rose later told the police about their extreme excitement at the birth of this child, and how they had been ‘ecstatically happy’ because of it.

The atmosphere of tension and impending violence intensified nevertheless. Rose was more and more antagonistic towards Shirley, intimidating her rival to such an extent that Shirley moved out of her room and began to sleep on fellow-lodger Liz Brewer’s sofa, even staying there during the day. Liz believes that Shirley had become frightened of the Wests, and says she ‘needed to keep away from them’.

Shirley’s baby was due on 11 June 1978. She was nervous and emotional as the date approached. ‘She was a lonely person who latched on to people. She didn’t have many friends,’ says Liz Brewer. On 2 May, Shirley visited a health centre in Cheltenham to see her GP, Dr John Buckley; on 9 May, she posed with Liz for a picture in the Photo-me booth at Woolworths. It was the last picture that was ever taken of her, and the last time she was seen alive.

The Wests murdered Shirley, probably strangling her to death, because she was a threat to their relationship. Whether it was Fred or Rose who actually throttled her is unknown. If Rose had been in one of her rages, she would have been quite capable of killing her rival. The crime was not motivated by sex, and there is no evidence that Shirley was subjected to torture before she died, like many of the Wests’ other victims. Fred and Rose simply wanted to get rid of her.

The cellar was already full of human remains, so Fred dug a hole for Shirley in the back garden, although he probably carried out the dismemberment of the body in the cellar, rather than over the grave. Fred seems to have hacked the corpse into pieces like a man in a rage. Eight distinct marks on Shirley’s right thighbone show that a heavy cleaver, or axe, was brought crashing down on her leg. With the ninth blow, Fred managed to chop the bone clean in two. Her kneecaps were removed and her head cut off. He removed two of her ribs, parts of her wrists and ankles – numbering twenty-eight bones – and many of her fingers and toes. It is also possible that Fred scalped his former lover: no hair was ever found in Shirley’s grave. This is highly unusual, as human hair can last for decades – even centuries – after death, and hair was found with the remains of all the other victims. This whole extraordinary mutilation of a pregnant young woman would have been a vile undertaking, soaking Fred in blood from head to toe, making his hands sticky where he gripped the cleaver and the floor slippery with human remains.

The foetus in Shirley’s womb was eight months advanced, almost full term. It is not possible to know for sure if Fred cut the foetus from her body, but with his expressed interest in abortions, it is not unlikely that he was curious to find out if they would have had a son or a daughter. It has been suggested that Fred removed the foetus after Shirley was dead because he wondered whether it would still be alive. Whatever happened that night, the unborn child’s matchstick-like skeleton, also missing several tiny bones, was later found nestled beside the jumbled remains of its mother.

The Wests told the other lodgers that Shirley had gone to Germany to live with her father, and ‘probably wasn’t coming back’. Fred said she had ‘done a bunk’, insinuating that she had not paid her rent, and added that he did not care about their baby. Both Fred and Rose seemed very happy. Fred told Liz that she was lucky Shirley had gone, because she had been planning to seduce her roommate and ‘rip [her] knickers off’. A month later Rose was seen sorting through Shirley’s clothes, putting the ones she did not want into a black rubbish bag.

Nobody bothered to report Shirley to the police as a missing person, and consequently no search was made for her. In a bizarre coda to the murder, a bogus claim was later made in Shirley’s name to Gloucester social services, for maternity benefit. Because of existing claims, the request was questioned and letters were sent to Cromwell Street. When the letters went unanswered, a DSS worker called at the house only to find that Shirley was no longer living there. It seems that Rose had been using her dead lover’s name to try and make some extra money.

It is surprising that Shirley’s disappearance, the non-arrival of her child and the bogus maternity claim did not alarm the midwifery service sufficiently to instigate an investigation. Health visitors, who would have carried out such an investigation, were supposed to keep in contact with this department, and could have contacted the police if they felt something was seriously wrong. But Peter Gregson, the DSS worker who visited the house in 1978, admits he was not authorised to question what he was told and had to accept the information given to him about Shirley going to Germany ‘on face value’. As a result, there was no investigation into her welfare that extended to informing the police.

Several weeks later the Wests informed their lodgers that they had heard from Shirley in Germany; she had given birth to a baby boy and named him Barry, they said.

But the dreadful truth was that the dismembered remains of Shirley, and her unborn child, were buried behind the back door of the house.

To help out further with the family finances, Rose had begun to advertise her services as a prostitute in contact magazines. A typical ad read:

SEXY HOUSEWIFE NEEDS IT

DEEP AND HARD FROM V.W.E.*

MALE WHILE HUSBAND WATCHES.

COLOUREDS WELCOME

Fred had installed a special doorbell for Rose’s customers, who were known within the family as ‘Mum and Dad’s good friends’. The bell was labelled ‘Mandy’, which was Rose’s working name, and when it rang Rose stopped whatever she was doing and disappeared into her room, often leaving food on the stove. Everybody in the family, and many of the lodgers, knew what was going on. ‘Fred said prostitution was a good way of making money. Fred and Rose were very open about sex. Each knew the other’s activities and discussed their exploits,’ says Liz Brewer. Fred had fitted baby-listening intercoms in the house, and sprawled on the living room sofa with a receiver pressed to his ear while Rose was entertaining.

Many of Rose’s customers were what the family described as ‘oddballs’. One had a wooden leg; another, a glass eye. Several requested unusual sexual services. The money she earned from prostitution was hidden in a drawer, and later paid in to Rose’s Co-op savings account. It was she who had sole control over the family finances, collecting the tenants’ rent and even taking Fred’s pay packet from him each week. He delivered it to Rose unopened, and she gave him back only enough pocket money for cigarettes. Rose recorded details like this in her diary.

Fred and Rose’s relationship stabilised after Shirley’s murder. They began to sleep together regularly again, and decided to have another child. In Fred’s terminology, he decided to ‘pot’ Rose (meaning make her pregnant) to stop her ‘getting topsy’ (meaning bad-tempered). A baby daughter, Louise, was born on 17 November 1978, bringing the total number of children in the family to six. There is, however, some doubt whether Louise is Fred’s natural daughter or whether her father was one of Rose’s boyfriends.

Fred continued to have full intercourse with Anna Marie, and Rose continued to ill-treat her (the child was admitted to hospital in 1978, with puncture wounds to her feet suspiciously similar to injuries suffered by Charmaine years before). Fred believed that incest was natural, and told his daughters, ‘I made you. You are my flesh and blood. I am entitled to touch you.’ He said that ‘Dads’ were better at sex than boys, and it was a father’s right to take his daughter’s virginity. His incestuous relationship with Anna Marie culminated in 1979, when he made her pregnant. Rose took Anna Marie to a doctor, who said that she was two months advanced, but that the pregnancy had begun in her fallopian tube. A termination was carried out at the Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. It was also during this year that a teacher at Anna Marie’s school noticed bruising on the child. Social services were informed and a welfare officer came to Cromwell Street, but somehow Rose talked her way out of the situation, and after the visitor had gone Anna Marie received, as she says, the ‘hiding of my life. I then presumed what was happening was right and I shouldn’t make a fuss. I was told how ungrateful I was.’

Rose’s father Bill Letts had been unwell for some time. He also had financial problems after spending his redundancy money. He was sharing a house with Rose’s mother in Lidney, a small town in the Forest of Dean, and, even at this stage in his life, was still capable of cruelty. One day Graham Letts walked in to find his father attacking Daisy. ‘He had her pinned up against a wall and had already slapped her. He had his hand raised, and was ready to do it again.’

In the spring of 1979, Bill fell seriously ill with plural mesothelioma, the lung complaint he had contracted working in the Plymouth dockyards. Shortly before he died he told Graham he felt his marriage had been a mistake. ‘His last words to me were, “Don’t get married to the wrong person.”’ He died on 24 May 1979, aged sixty. Although Daisy was naturally upset, she felt that Bill had made his own life miserable and did not mourn him for long. ‘I always felt my husband was a weak character, really,’ she says.

Both Fred and Rose attended the burial at the council cemetery in Cheltenham, and Rose did seem to be moved by the experience – although she scandalised her family by arriving for the burial in ‘tarty’ clothes and black stiletto heels. But few tears were shed for Bill, and no headstone was erected to mark his grave. It is identifiable only as number 1528, a bare patch of earth in a row of marble tablets, like a gap in a set of neglected teeth.

The most tragic girl to visit Cromwell Street from Jordan’s Brook House was a freckle-faced teenager named Alison Chambers, also known as Ally. Her father, Robert Chambers, had been in the armed services, and Alison was born in Hanover, Germany. She later lived with her mother Joan in Swansea, after her parents divorced. Alison was a headstrong girl who kept running away from home. She was passed into the care of social services in South Wales, and because of her absconding from there, was transferred to Jordan’s Brook House. Even here, she managed to run away, once getting as far as London’s Paddington Station.

Alison was an unhappy child who frequently withdrew into a fantasy life: she composed romantic poetry and liked to draw pictures of an imaginary farm where she dreamed of living. The other girls at the home could be quite ruthless, and Alison was mocked continually.

Alison was friendly with a teenager named Anne, who already had links with Cromwell Street. One day Alison and her roommate Sharon Compton arranged to play truant from the home and meet Anne outside a Gloucester cinema. Anne then took them to Cromwell Street, where they had orange squash and biscuits with Rose. Two weeks later the girls absconded again and went back to Cromwell Street, where Rose allowed them to stay the night. In the morning, they met a Dutch girl who was arguing with Rose about her rent. The girl wore the distinctive heavy walking boots and thick socks of a hiker, suggesting that the Wests were still meeting young women who were travelling.

Fred and Rose made a point of befriending Alison, even giving her a gold-coloured necklace with her name on it. Rose understood Alison’s fantasy life, and told her that she and Fred owned a peaceful farm in the countryside – when Alison reached seventeen and could legally leave Jordan’s Brook House, she could come and visit the farm. Rose showed Alison a colour picture, and told her she could lay in the long grass all day and compose her poems. Alison was completely taken in by this, not realising she had been shown a picture from an estate agent’s brochure. ‘Alison was captivated by it,’ says Sharon Compton. When the girls left the house, Rose told them that, if they were picked up by police, they must not say where they had been. Back at Jordan’s Brook, Alison lay on her bed and drew ivy around the door of the farmhouse in the picture.

Soon after this, Alison told the other girls at the home that she had met an older man. She said that he was in love with her and gave her gifts, including jewellery. The girls thought this was just another fantasy. ‘Alison had a vivid imagination. When she was talking about this older man who loved her and was buying her this and that, nobody believed her,’ says another young woman who knew Alison at the home.

On 5 August 1979, four weeks before her seventeenth birthday, Alison packed up her things and absconded from Jordan’s Brook House for the eighth time in nine months. She failed to show up for work the next day as an office junior in Gloucester, where she was employed on a Youth Training Scheme. It seems she had decided to move into Cromwell Street, and was no doubt looking forward to being invited to visit the West’s farmhouse, where she could lay in the long grass and compose her poetry. She wrote her mother a long letter in which she spoke about living with a ‘very homely family … I look after their five children and do some of their housework. They have a child the same age as me who accepts me as a big sister and we get on great … The family own flats and I share with the oldest sister.’ Other girls at Jordan’s Brook had noticed that Alison had a key to 25 Cromwell Street.

She had probably already begun a sexual relationship with both Fred and Rose, but the sex soon became frightening. One day the Wests gagged her with a purple fashion belt, three-quarters of an inch wide. Unable to scream, she was raped, tortured and finally killed, just like Lynda Gough, Carol Ann Cooper, Lucy Partington, Thérèse Siegenthaler, Shirley Hubbard and Juanita Mott.

Alison was almost certainly dismembered, although her bones were not marked by knives as the remains of several of the other victims had been. Fred buried her remains in a hole dug in the garden next to the wall of the recently-built bathroom extension. He kept a number of her body parts aside: sections of her wrists, fingers, ankles and toes, two ribs, both kneecaps, the second thoracic vertebrae and part of her breastbone.

When Alison’s friends asked what had happened to her, the Wests gave them the impression that she was living on their farm. Sharon Compton asked if she could visit Alison there, and Rose nervously replied that she would have to wait. Then she changed her story, saying that Alison was not at the farm, but was staying with relatives. ‘It was obviously a sore point,’ says Sharon.

Alison was reported to the police as missing on 5 August, but because of the letter received by her mother she was later officially discharged from care and police no longer considered her a vulnerable person.

It seemed that Fred and Rose’s latest secret was safe.

* Very well-endowed.