14

HEATHER

During her last years at Linden Road Secondary School, Anna Marie West was given the nickname ‘Tank’ by the other pupils because of her size and her aggressive, bullying personality. She used the aggression to camouflage her miserable life as a child prostitute, a secret she was too frightened ever to speak about with friends or teachers. Fred and Rose were so worried she might talk that they allowed Anna Marie just ten minutes in which to return home from school each day. She could only complete the journey in time by leaving as soon as lessons ended and running virtually the whole way, and was viciously strapped if even one minute late.

The future held an even greater terror than the present for this unhappy schoolgirl: Anna Marie believed something dreadful would happen to her when she reached her sixteenth birthday. She was not certain exactly what this was, but instinctively knew it would not be wise to wait and see. After all, she had already suffered a lifetime of sadistic abuse – and had even been made pregnant by her own father. In the past Fred had rarely struck her, but eventually this changed. Anna Marie had been viciously kicked in the face by Fred, who was wearing steel toe-capped boots at the time, when she tried to intervene in an argument between him and Rose. When her stepmother saw blood on the child’s face, she laughed and told her that this would teach her not to be so ‘cocky’ with them. It was largely because of this increasing violence, and the vague but pervasive fear of even greater terrors, that Anna Marie left home at the age of fifteen, when she went to live with friends.

The children at 25 Cromwell Street in 1980 fell into two groups: the older ones, all of whom Fred had fathered, and the younger children, some of whom were Rose’s by other lovers, including coloured men.

The first of the younger children was three-year-old Tara, who was of mixed race. (Because Fred was not her natural father, he had little to do with the girl.) Then there was two-year-old Louise, whose paternity was also in doubt, and in June 1980 Rose gave birth to Barry, a white child, who appears to have been fathered by Fred.

The eldest of the senior group was Heather Ann, who turned ten in the autumn of 1980. Heather was a slim, serious girl, with prominent front teeth, dark eyes and thick black hair, looking much like her mother had at the same age. Heather was an intelligent and able pupil at St Paul’s Infants and Junior School, and she also did well when she moved to Hucclecote Secondary. Fred had an antipathy towards Heather; lodgers and visitors noticed how he called her names, said she was ugly and was generally cruel to her. After Heather came eight-year-old May, or Mae as she preferred to spell her name, who took after her father’s side of the family in looks. She was Rose’s favourite, and shared a room with Heather on the first floor of the house. Rose liked to dress the girls in rather boyish clothes, and had their hair cut very short. Stephen, seven, known as Steve, had the same startling blue eyes as his father. He was Fred’s favourite and slept on the second floor.

Fred and Rose needed complete control over their children to ensure that what went on in the house remained secret. Every effort was made to keep the children away from other adults, or from situations where they might arouse suspicion. They were not allowed to go out and play on their own in the street, no matter what the weather, being confined instead to the back garden and cellar play room, and they visited the homes of relations only when Fred and Rose were there too. School friends were not allowed back to 25 Cromwell Street and the West children were forbidden from visiting the homes of these friends.

The children’s free time was mostly occupied with household chores, in exactly the same way that Bill Letts had made Rose’s brothers and sisters work. When the elder West children reached the age of seven, Rose demonstrated washing and ironing for them – from then on, they would be expected to do their own laundry. Heather, Mae and Steve were despatched to the shops to buy their own provisions, and from the age of ten, they cooked a number of their own meals in the kitchenette Fred had built as part of the extension. ‘We had a job every single day when we came home from school, in the living room, kitchen or bathroom. We used to come home and do it straight away without talking. If you spoke or if it wasn’t done properly, Mum would go mad,’ says Steve.

Care of the children was Rose’s sole responsibility, and it was her that they were afraid of. Her disciplining of the older children was outright sadism; her rages frightening and unpredictable. Even years later, most of the West children – including Anna Marie – retained affection for Fred simply because he did not beat them with Rose’s insane violence. ‘Mum hit us for no real reason,’ says Steve. ‘It could be anything. She made reasons up, like if the dishcloth went missing. She would stand there and keep screaming, “Where is the dishcloth?” You used to be running around trying to find it and she beat us until we found it.’

The older children were fully aware that their mother was a prostitute – there was even a photograph album containing provocative pictures of Rose with her boyfriends. The children knew that these things went on in ‘Mum and Dad’s Room’, which was now on the first floor of the house, and that they must not go in there. (The bedroom had a plaque on the door which read ‘Rose’s Room’, and its interior was decorated in garish fashion, with a painting of a naked woman on a horse, the silhouette of Rose in the nude that Fred had made in Leyhill in 1971, a candelabra hanging from the ceiling and special knick-knacks on the window ledge.) One day, however, Steve broke the rule and barged in to find his mother in bed with a man. Steve turned and ran back down the short flight of steps, across the passageway into the living room, lifted the trap door and disappeared down into the cellar, which at this time was divided into a play room for the children and a workshop for Fred. ‘My dad ran down after me and I got the beating of my life,’ he recalls.

Fred was usually more concerned with work than with the children, and this was a rare example of his hitting them. After coming home from the Wingate factory, where he was a general labourer, Fred ate a quick meal before going out on his ‘cobbles’. This was the Gloucestershire phrase he used for work that was not declared to the Inland Revenue – usually general maintenance for neighbours. Fred often did not return home until the rest of the household was getting ready for bed. Fred also continued to dabble in petty crime, and on 2 October 1980 he was convicted at Gloucester Crown Court of receiving stolen goods. He was given a nine-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, and was fined £50.

The children seldom received presents at Christmas, being told by their mother that they ‘did not deserve any’. One winter night, Heather, Steve and Mae were sent to bed with the familiar order to go straight to sleep. Fred had fitted a baby intercom in the upstairs rooms where the children slept, so Rose could hear what they were saying. Suddenly she came out of her bedroom on the ground floor and pounded upstairs to their landing, appearing at the foot of their beds naked. She had Fred’s leather belt in her hand and beat all three of them, making sure to catch them with the buckle. Then she ordered the children downstairs and pushed them out the front door.

A foot of snow lay in Cromwell Street that night. The children huddled up together for warmth by the door as midnight came and went. Occasionally a drunk stumbled past the house, heading for one of the seedy bedsitters in the street. Three hours passed before they were let back in and sent to bed with another beating. Small wonder the children remained silent when asked at school if they had enjoyed a happy Christmas.

Heather was receiving even more beatings than the other children. One of the few friends she had at school was Denise Harrison, the daughter of Fred’s Jamaican-born friend Ronalzo Harrison. Denise liked Fred, as most people did, but was struck by the odd way in which Heather lived. ‘It was like they were in a prison camp,’ she says.

Heather was self-conscious about her body, wearing long-sleeved cardigans and shirts even at the height of summer. During PE lessons she was more concerned about keeping her socks up than taking part in the games, and afterwards, when the other girls carelessly dropped their sports kit and ran for the showers, Heather refused to join in despite the strict rule that girls had to shower after sports. She was frequently sent to the Headmistress’s office because of her refusal to comply with this rule, yet nobody appears to have investigated why this normally studious girl was repeatedly being so disobedient. Denise Harrison discovered the reason one day when her friend was forced to take a shower: Heather had red weal marks and bruises all over her legs and arms where she had been beaten.

Heather was in a desperate situation at home, but was too terrified to tell anybody what was happening to her. Now that Anna Marie had left 25 Cromwell Street, Fred transferred his demands for sex to Heather, telling her it was a father’s right to touch his daughters, that he had ‘made her’ and could do what he wanted with her. Fred commented on the development of her breasts and ordered her to show him her body after she had a bath.

Her younger sister Mae has since claimed that she was also pestered by their father. She has said that he threw a vacuum cleaner at her, splintering her bedroom door, when she rejected his advances. Mae says that she and Heather used to stand watch for each other when they took a shower, and became used to Fred bursting in on them early in the morning when they were getting dressed, or pulling the sheets from their beds. He touched and fondled Heather, even wrestling her to the floor and beating her when she refused to succumb to him. Fred and Rose were always careful not to touch her face, so the marks would not show.

Anna Marie, who was working as a cleaner in a café, met a window cleaner named Erwin Marschall, and began a relationship with him. They spent one night together at Cromwell Street, but Erwin could not sleep. In the middle of the night he heard a protracted scream, lasting between ten and twenty minutes. It was the voice of a young girl, and he could make out the words ‘No, no, please!’ In the morning Rose told him it was only Heather, having one of her nightmares.

Shortly afterwards Anna Marie went to live with a boy named Chris Davis, lodging with him at a public house in Gloucester. She was using tranquilliser drugs to help dull the memory of her childhood, and had been to see a psychiatrist when she felt unable to have sex with Chris. (Some years later, Anna Marie would undergo a hysterectomy. Doctors told her that her tilted womb was a result of the two daughters she eventually bore, but it seems possible the abuse she suffered as a child also contributed to the condition.) In 1982 Anna Marie and Chris had to leave the pub, and, with nowhere else to go, reluctantly moved into a bedroom on the first floor of 25 Cromwell Street. Anna Marie told her boyfriend all about what had happened to her as a child. She made him promise not to say anything to Fred and Rose, and never to leave her on her own with them. A month after they moved in, Rose gave birth to Rosemary Junior, another mixed race child whom Anna Marie and Chris helped look after.

Chris noticed how withdrawn Heather was. She bit her fingernails, day-dreamed about leaving home, and had developed a habit of watching Fred warily from a corner, or doorway, of whichever room he was in. Her reproachful gaze disturbed Fred. He demanded to know what was wrong with her, and complained that she was always ‘miserable’.

Heather took up smoking and began to drink alcohol. She also went shoplifting, and in August 1982 was caught stealing from WH Smith in the city centre. Heather, who was then coming up for twelve, was charged and signed a note admitting three other offences, but because of her age the case did not go to court.

She was uneasy in the company of males. When one of her uncles began talking to her about boys, and what they might want to do with her, Heather replied that if any boy touched her she would ‘put a brick over his head’. She also absconded from a school camping trip because she did not like the male teachers. Fred and Rose convinced themselves that she was a lesbian, and were furious about it, even though Rose herself was actively bisexual.

The family increased in size again in July 1983, when Rose went into hospital to give birth to another mixed race daughter, whom she named Lucyanna. Fred did not appear upset by this. In fact, he seemed to think more of these children than he did of his own; they were ‘perfect’.

After Lucyanna’s birth, Rose flew into increasingly violent rages, lashing out with her hands or with whatever she was holding. She punched her older children in the face and stabbed them with kitchen knives, jabbing at them in a frenzy until they were covered in cuts. When she caught Steve sitting on one of her new kitchen units, she picked him up by the neck and throttled him, actually lifting his body off the floor. Afterwards his face was blotchy, and there were livid marks on his neck where her hands had been. ‘I had to take a note to school to say I was messing around with a rope in a tree, and fell out with the rope round my neck,’ he says.

Her anger was often irrational. One day Heather broke the rule about going into ‘Mum and Dad’s Room’. She found her mother’s pornographic magazines and decided to take a selection to school. When Rose discovered that part of her collection was missing, she assumed that Steve had taken them and telephoned for him to be sent home. Steve ran all the way, thinking something was wrong, and when he got back he found Rose alone in the house. She ordered him to go into the bathroom and take off his clothes. (The bathroom was also known within the family as Fred and Rose’s ‘office’, because they would ensconce themselves in there with the door closed when they wanted to talk privately.) As he undressed, Steve saw two pieces of wire and a belt hanging on the towel rack. When he was naked, Rose came in and tied one of the wires around the boy’s hands, and then, ordering him to lie on the floor, tied him to the toilet bowl with the other wire. Then she beat him, screaming, ‘What have you done? You took my magazines from upstairs!’ When Steve denied it, she lashed him until he was bloody, then told him to get dressed and go back to school. Later that day Heather was found to have the magazines and was sent home, but Rose laughed at her mistake, telling Heather not to worry because Steve had already received her punishment.

Fred lost his temper on occasion, although not nearly as often as Rose. One night he came in late, and Heather, who was ironing in the living room, told him in a lighthearted way that his dinner would be spoiled yet again. Fred’s blue eyes opened wide in anger and he jerked out a quick, hard punch which connected with Heather’s shoulder, knocking her several feet sideways. With his anger vented, Fred returned to his normal self and sat down to eat.

If the violent anger which Fred and Rose regularly exhibited took the form of murder during this period of their lives, there is no direct evidence of such crimes. It is highly probable that the Wests, having killed at such an intensive rate just a few years previously, would not suddenly have ceased murdering young girls – they were, almost certainly, still abducting unfortunate victims like Shirley Hubbard and Lucy Partington, and killing them after their lust had been satisfied. But the graves of these other, unknown victims have never been discovered.

The abuse and misery suffered by the older children were so intense that Heather ran away from home; but she soon returned, finding the outside world even more hostile than Number 25. Steve was the next to try and escape. For three weeks he slept rough, sometimes staying with friends, until it dawned on him that his parents were not at all concerned that he had gone and would not be coming to look for him. He slunk home like a whipped dog, and was welcomed with another beating. ‘I got used to the beatings after a while. It was the fact that she laughed afterwards. She just laughed at me. It is the worst thing anybody could do,’ he says.

More degradation was in store for the boy. Fred told Steve that he would soon have to have sex with his mother. Fred said to Rose, ‘When he’s seventeen he’ll be ready to sleep with you.’ Then he turned to his son, winked, and said, ‘You’ll be all right then!’ Steve looked in amazement at his parents, and saw that they were laughing.

Heather was then studying for eight Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) examinations, and was expected to pass them all. She was such a good student that Denise Harrison would copy Heather’s homework on the bus to school in the morning. It was guaranteed that Heather would have completed her assignments; Heather knew she had to work hard because she had to find a good enough job to leave home by her sixteenth birthday.

As her birthday approached, Fred’s attempts to rape her became more frequent and more insistent. Heather began to fear for her safety, believing that ‘something terrible’ was about to happen to her – just as Anna Marie had. Her sleep was broken by nightmares.

At the same time, gossip about Rose’s eccentric sex life reached the pupils of Hucclecote Secondary School. The West children had been virtually brainwashed into keeping silent about what went on at home, but when Heather’s classmates asked her whether the stories about black babies were true, she unwisely confirmed that her mother did have coloured lovers. She let a few other details slip as well. Fred and Rose soon found out about the indiscretions and were not pleased, wondering what else Heather might now say. Fred was so concerned that he began to escort her to and from school.

Anna Marie married Chris Davis in 1985, and they moved into a house on the White City estate in Gloucester. Heather confided in Chris one day, smoking nervously as she spoke. She did not explicitly say what was wrong, but talked about her home life in such a way that it was obvious there was a serious problem. She said she was thinking of running away, and had considered living rough in the Forest of Dean. She said she never wanted to see any other people. Chris told Anna Marie he was going to talk with Fred and Rose. ‘I said I’d had enough and was going to do something. She said, “For Christ’s sake don’t, because they’ll kill us both!”’ Heather also begged her half-sister to let her stay with them, but Anna Marie said it was pointless because Fred and Rose would only come and take her back.

Heather sat her CSE examinations in the summer of 1986. In the last week of exams, a little less than a month before the official end of school, she finally broke her silence about what was happening to her at home. Her friend Denise Harrison was walking home through the Eastgate Shopping Centre one day, and as she approached Cromwell Street she saw Heather standing on the pavement, and noticed she was upset. When Denise asked what was wrong, Heather started crying. Denise assumed it was because Heather had spoken at school about Rose’s lovers, but Heather sobbed that it was worse than that: she said that her father came into her room at night. ‘She said he was having sex with her. I said, “Haven’t you told your mum?” and she said her mum didn’t believe her.’ Denise encouraged Heather to go back to school and tell the teachers; she had seen the marks on Heather’s body during PE. Heather confirmed that Fred had done it, adding that Rose thought she was a ‘little bitch’ and deserved her beatings.

‘I asked her whether she had told anyone, and she said she was too frightened,’ remembers Denise, who decided to tell her parents. But Ronalzo and Gloria Harrison were friends of the Wests, and Mrs Harrison told Denise that Fred would not do such a thing. Denise did not consider it her business to repeat at school what she had been told in confidence, so she let the matter drop. ‘We left school about three weeks after this, so I never saw her again,’ she says.

Heather was in a very dangerous position when she left school: Fred and Rose were extremely concerned that she was on the verge of talking about what they had been doing to her. Heather knew she had to leave home as soon as possible, and began looking for a job that would take her away from Cromwell Street. But finding a good job was no easy matter, and Heather became even more dejected and withdrawn. Years later, Rose described her daughter during this time in these words: ‘When she left school she just sat in the chair. She didn’t want to know me anymore … She was a stubborn girl. She didn’t want to do her own washing, didn’t want to clear up muck.’

Heather’s sixteenth birthday came and went that October, and still she had not found a job to escape to. Months went by, so she registered for unemployment benefit, and was seen at Gloucester’s Department of Social Security on 29 May 1987. She continued to write off for jobs, and by early summer was pinning her hopes on an application she had made to work at a holiday camp in Devon.

One June evening Heather received a telephone call. A lady from the camp said that she was sorry, but her application had been unsuccessful. It was a crushing disappointment, reducing Heather to tears and making her cry all night, so loudly that she kept her brothers and sisters awake.

It was raining hard the next morning when the West children trooped off to school. Heather had nowhere to go, so she stayed in bed; Fred could not work because of the weather so he also stayed indoors. When Heather came downstairs, wearing culottes and a blouse tied in the middle, she found she was alone in the house with Fred and Rose.

An argument developed between them as they spent the day cooped up in that little house with the rain pelting down. It may have started with Fred trying to rape Heather, although it is just as likely that Rose turned on her ‘miserable’ daughter, upset after losing the holiday camp job, and picked a fight with her: she was no good; she should do what her father wanted. Rose later told a neighbour that there had been a ‘hell of a row’. It should also be remembered that Heather had grown up in the West home as a number of women had been murdered, one after another; if she had discovered any of her parents’ terrible secrets – and logic dictates that she must have learned something of them over a lifetime in close proximity with Fred and Rose – she would have been a particular threat to their well-being, and this may be another reason for what happened to her.

It is also likely that Fred and Rose accused Heather of being a lesbian, which had become almost an obsession with them. They may have attempted to force her into having sex with them both, tying her hands with two lengths of rope, 22½ and 15½ inches long, which were later found by police. Orange, brown and green nylon fibres from a tufted carpet were later found to be trapped in the rope, suggesting that Heather had been held down on the floor as she was being tied up. Interestingly, there was no gag found: Heather’s terror alone was probably enough to keep her quiet. The fact that her remains were found without any clothing also suggests that she had been stripped naked before death, and that some sex act had been forced upon her.

Whatever started ‘the row’, or assault on Heather, it soon spun madly out of control. Somebody put their hands around Heather’s throat. Fred later claimed that he did it, but it was an action more typical of Mrs West; it was always Rose who lost her temper. Father, mother and daughter were in the hallway. When the hands came away, Heather was dead.

Whichever of the two actually strangled their first-born child, it was Fred’s job to dispose of her corpse. He cut her body into pieces with the same passion he had used to dismember Shirley Robinson, hacking at her with a cleaver, or, more likely, with a heavy serrated knife which had come with the Wests’ fridge/freezer, for the cutting up of frozen meat, until he chopped her left thigh clean in two. He then held the corpse of his daughter face down, and cut through the back of her neck while her chin was pushed on to her chest, decapitating her. He removed her kneecaps and parts of her hands and feet, and may have tortured his child by ripping out her fingernails. (Fingernails – but not corresponding fingers – were later found in her grave.) Covered in her blood, Fred put the remains into black bin bags. He may have stored them overnight in a dustbin under the stairs on the ground floor of the house. He told the children when they came home from school that the dustbin was full of old plaster.

Then the children noticed that Heather was gone. ‘Where’s Heather?’ asked Steve.

‘She’s left home,’ said Fred.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Steve and Mae together.

‘A girl picked her up in a Mini, and she’s gone to work at the holiday camp,’ their father replied, explaining that the lady from the camp had telephoned again while the children were out, and had given Heather the job after all. Fred said that he and Rose had given her some money to help her on her way. He seemed perfectly calm as he told this cold-blooded lie, just a couple of hours after he had finished hacking at her body. Fred was so calm, in fact, that he asked his son to help dig a hole in the garden: he said he was thinking of installing a fish pond.

A couple of days later Steve noticed that the hole he had dug had been filled in – his father had apparently changed his mind. Steve believes he unwittingly helped bury his own sister.

Over the following weeks several people asked where Heather had gone, and Fred and Rose gave a variety of conflicting reasons for her disappearance. Rose told one friend, Anne Knight, who had an office in Cromwell Street, that ‘There was a hell of a row here a couple of nights ago. We found out that she was going with a lesbian from Wales, and has gone to Wales with her.’ She told a neighbour named Margaretta Dix that she ‘didn’t care if Heather was alive or dead or if she ever saw her again’. Fred, on the other hand, told his friend Ronalzo Harrison that Heather had been assaulting the younger children, which had resulted in Rose giving her a good hiding, a few days after which she had left home. When Ronalzo said how concerned he was about Heather, Fred replied that they knew she was living somewhere in the nearby village of Brockworth, and that she would telephone them. He also seems to have forgotten the lesbian story, because he told Denise Harrison that Heather had run off with a boyfriend. The Wests were asked again and again about Heather over the following years; at one stage they even claimed to have reported her to police as a missing person, but this was yet another lie.

Fred decided to pave the back garden. He acquired several dozen square slabs, half coloured a ruddy pink and the other half vanilla yellow. The slabs were molded so that the surface had the texture of slate. Fred called upon Rose, Mae and Steve to help with the work; when they were finished, a cheerful patio in nursery colours was laid out over the pit where Heather’s remains lay buried two feet deep near the fir trees.

Flushed with the success of concealing another crime, Fred and Rose gathered the unsuspecting children together to celebrate their work with a barbecue supper.