21

BLUEBEARD’S WIFE

The wait for justice was a long one: Rose had been in custody for sixteen months before she stepped into the dock for what the tabloid newspapers were heralding as the ‘trial of the century’.

Much had happened since Fred had died on New Year’s Day. On a bright spring morning in April, Charmaine and her mother Rena were cremated at a small ceremony in the Northamptonshire town of Kettering, near the home of one of Rena’s sisters. The remains of mother and child were placed in the same casket, and Rena’s surviving daughter, Anna Marie, chose the song ‘Memories’ to be played at the service.

A few days later, over the Easter weekend, vandals desecrated the graves of both Walter and Daisy West in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s, Much Marcle. Doug West had recently paid for a new headstone for Walter and was distressed to find that both this, and Daisy’s older memorial, had been pulled up during the night. There had been bad feeling in the village in recent weeks, partly because of sightseers coming to stare at the graves and partly because of a rumour that Fred’s ashes were scattered there.

Rose made a preliminary appearance at Winchester Crown Court in May. In a tremulous voice she pleaded not guilty to ten counts of murder, two counts of rape and the indecent assault of two young girls in the 1970s. The fourteen charges took a full five minutes to read out. The judge was Sir Charles Mantell, the 58-year-old presiding justice on the western circuit, a genial-looking, avuncular man who often appears slightly red in the face. He set the date for the trial as 3 October; the venue would be this same room, Winchester’s Number Three court. It had been chosen in preference to Gloucester, Bristol and London’s Old Bailey because, among other reasons, it was felt that Rose could not receive a fair hearing in Gloucester – while Winchester was sufficiently far away to draw a fresh jury but close enough for the large number of witnesses to be brought to and fro.

Built in the 1970s, the court adjoins the ancient Great Hall of Winchester, where the infamous Judge Jeffreys had presided, Sir Walter Raleigh had been tried for treason and where the famous ‘Rounde Table of King Arthur’ hangs. The new building is a brutal concrete fortress specially designed to accommodate high security trials, including those of terrorists: the dock, for example, cannot be viewed from the public gallery.

Queen’s Counsel Brian Leveson was the barrister who would prosecute the case. (He took over the job from Neil Butterfield, who had appeared for the Crown at the committal hearing but had subsequently been made a High Court judge.) Mr Leveson, a diminutive, balding man with formal manners, is a distinguished QC whose most notable case prior to the West trial had been the prosecution of the entertainer Ken Dodd for alleged tax evasion (Dodd was acquitted).

His opponent would be Richard Ferguson: a tall, eminent Ulsterman, former Unionist MP and Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association. The 60-year-old QC has a formidable reputation as a skilful cross-examiner and had famously, and successfully, represented the boxer Terry Marsh and the Birmingham Six.

Both QCs would be expected to claim approximately £250,000 from public funds for their work, including payments for their juniors and daily ‘refresher fees’ while the case was being heard.

As the legal teams prepared for trial, the West family continued to suffer its problems. In May, Rose’s sister-in-law Barbara Letts, who had been so close to Rose over the years, pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer who had gone to her Gloucester home to investigate a reported burglary. Barbara’s family was in chaos. One of the children was behaving in a disturbed way, and her husband Graham, Rose’s younger brother, had suffered a nervous breakdown. (One of Rose’s other brothers, Gordon, was suffering from depression and in trouble with the police. Later on he too would be admitted to hospital after a breakdown.) Barbara was given a one-year conditional discharge.

In June, less than a year after his marriage, Fred and Rose’s son Steve parted from his wife, Andrea. She took the couple’s twin children and went to live in the Midlands.

Towards the end of September Rose was transferred from Durham Prison to Winchester gaol, where she would be held for the duration of her trial. Her cell was a tiny cubicle, thirteen feet long by seven feet wide, sparsely furnished with a bed, chair, locker and combined washing and toilet fixture. It is within a suite of seven rooms intended to become a drug rehabilitation unit. Because Rose was a Category A prisoner, and could not associate with the gaol’s 505 other inmates, all these rooms were dedicated to her care alone. They included a shower room and an association area, where she was allowed to watch television and play cards with the two female warders assigned to watch her round the clock.

Winchester is a genteel city with a splendid cathedral, famous public school and many fine buildings. The pedestrianised broadway leading from the statue of King Alfred by the Guildhall up the hill to the law courts is lined with fashionable shops. It is a prosperous, middle-class place – the ancient centre of England. Winchester Combined Court sits on top of the hill where a fort has stood since Roman times; the steps up to it follow the contours of the earthworks which have defended the city over the centuries.

The morning of Tuesday 3 October 1995 was mild, slightly damp with the threat of rain. Rose was awake by 7 A.M., and breakfasted on a boiled egg, cereal and toast. She then dressed in conservative clothes especially chosen for her trial, an outfit she would wear with little alteration every day for the next eight weeks: a long skirt, blouse and black jacket. She hung a small gold cross around her neck and put on gold-coloured earrings, circular with a filigree inlay. She applied a little rouge make-up to enliven her sallow cheeks, but despite the care she had taken to look her best, she still looked unhealthy, or ‘buffeted by life’ as her QC would later phrase it.

Rose was then led to the police van that would take her to court. She was triple-locked into a steel inner capsule with a bulletproof glass panel – designed to prevent escape and to foil any attack on the prisoner. Two prison officers sat on a bench beside the capsule, and a third officer joined the driver in front. The police motorcycle outriders then switched on their headlights and the group of vehicles swept down into Winchester, where camera crews and newspaper photographers jostled behind crowd barriers.

Number Three court at Winchester is an enormous, hangar-like space. Rose would later hear, to her obvious surprise, that 25 Cromwell Street could be fitted into the court with room left over. The ceiling features a large square of fluorescent lights. To the sides of this are windows covered with plastic, so they will not shatter in the event of a bomb going off. PVC panels, coloured a dirty cream and looking like the cushions of a 1960s sofa, cover two walls. The judge sits on a vast wooden dais, so gigantic and forbidding it would have been in keeping with the brutal architecture favoured by Mussolini. Behind the dais is an expanse of wood veneer and a drape of blue cloth.

Justice Mantell entered the court dressed in his scarlet robes and bowed solemnly before sitting. Between him and the dock sat the counsel, wearing black silk and white wigs. In an attempt to speed the trial along, the court stenographers – who sat beneath the judge – would type each word of the proceedings into a computer system known as CaseView, and Justice Mantell and the counsel all had LCD monitors in front of them. The police, including John Bennett, sat by the witness box, and the press and court artists were divided into two sections facing each other on opposite sides of the room. In annexes across the hall, dozens more journalists listened to the proceedings through speakers.

Rose stepped into the dock at 10:30 A.M., bowed awkwardly to the judge (although it is not customary for the defendant to do so), then sat and looked impassively ahead, with her lips slightly parted and her sleek brown hair flopping forward over her large spectacles.

A jury of eight men and four women, apparently ordinary local people who seemed both surprised and pleased to be told which case they had been selected for, were quickly chosen without objection. Then the court clerk read out the ten counts of murder. It had been decided previously that the rape and assault charges would not be heard at this time, but set aside for a possible later trial. To all ten murders the jury were told that Rosemary Pauline West had already entered a plea of not guilty.

The judge turned in his throne-like chair, smiled engagingly at the jury, and warned them not to be influenced by anything they might have read about the case, which he conceded had its ‘sensational aspects’. He then dismissed them for the day so he could hear legal arguments. As the journalists scurried off to file long descriptions of Rose in the dock – although she had been as impassive as stone throughout – Brian Leveson and Richard Ferguson discussed legal technicalities about what evidence the jury should hear in the coming weeks.

Richard Ferguson for the defence said the evidence of Rose’s sex life and the alleged treatment of Caroline Owens, Miss A and Kathryn Halliday had no place in the trial, and therefore should not be admitted – it was ‘disputed evidence’ and the whole Crown case was built on ‘shaky ground’.

The prosecution, however, suggested the treatment of these women was ‘similar fact evidence’, meaning that it established a pattern of behaviour repeated in the killings. Justice Mantell decided the point by citing the legend of Bluebeard, who, as recounted in many folk tales, murdered a number of his wives and chopped off their heads. The judge said that if one of the wives about to be beheaded had escaped and told her story, then that would be admissible evidence of Bluebeard committing multiple murder. In the same way, he would allow the jury to hear about the ordeals of Caroline Owens and others. This was a considerable victory for the prosecution, because it meant that the jury would hear evidence of Rose’s penchant for sadistic lesbian sex.

After a day of rest, so Brian Leveson could observe the Jewish day of atonement, Yom Kippur, the case started in earnest on Friday 6 October. Brian Leveson’s opening speech was a marathon piece of oratory, sixty-one pages long in document form. It would take all of that day and a portion of the following Monday to read.

Although some in court felt his delivery was not as effective as that of his predecessor Neil Butterfield, the content of the story he had to tell was moving and deeply shocking to those who, until now, had no detailed knowledge of what Fred and Rose had actually done to those young women and girls found buried in Gloucester. Standing with one hand resting on his portable shelf of law books, Brian Leveson described how in February 1994 the police had gone to Cromwell Street to find Heather West, and had stumbled upon secrets ‘more terrible than words can express’: the remains of dismembered and decapitated young girls ‘dumped without dignity or respect’ in holes beneath the garden, bathroom and cellar. An unprecedented police investigation had followed. He said that, for at least seven of the victims, ‘their last moments on earth were as objects of the sexual depravity of this woman and her husband now dead’. In the dock Rose sat without apparent emotion, studied now by the members of the jury who looked keenly at her for the first time. She would later appear to cry, rubbing her eyes under her spectacles.

Brian Leveson said that Fred and Rose were ‘in it together’, and that although the evidence against her was circumstantial – because ‘nobody says “I saw Frederick stab” or “I saw Rosemary strangle”’ – the jury would find that evidence convincing. Mr Leveson continued: ‘At the core of this case is the relationship between Frederick and Rosemary West; what they knew about each other, what they did together, what they did to others and how far each was prepared to go. Much of what follows can be explained in the context that both were obsessed with sex … The Wests shared a knowledge of each other which bound them together.’

He went on to describe the macabre way in which the victims were found at Cromwell Street: young girls hidden in holes which formed a pattern in the cellar, a ‘circle of death’. He said that, with the help of forensic scientists, these victims would ‘speak from the grave as to what happened to them’.

The first witness for the prosecution would be Rose’s mother. Now aged seventy-six, Daisy Letts cut a tiny figure in the witness box, all but obscured by the four microphones before her – a wizened, white-haired head dwarfed by the panoply of law. She answered questions in a small voice, addressing the counsel with unnecessary subservience as ‘sir’. Rose watched her mother closely, and, at one stage between questions, Daisy darted a furtive look back at the daughter she had not seen in the flesh for many years. Their gaze met for a moment and then Daisy snapped away. This was the conclusive moment of their tragic relationship: mother giving evidence against daughter, recalling the moment half a lifetime before when Rose had said there was nothing Fred would not do, even murder.

When Daisy left the box after a little less than an hour, her handkerchief clutched in her hand, it seemed unlikely that she would ever face her youngest daughter again.

Next came Rose’s elder sister Glenys, whom Rose had also not seen for years. Glenys glared at Rose as she entered the court, declining the offer of a seat. Her voice trembled as she told how Fred had explained to her his ‘open marriage’ with Rose, and asked if she had ever thought of trying it. With every movement of her body, every inflection of her voice, it was clear that Glenys felt acutely the shame into which Rose had finally dragged her family.

One of the early dramas of the trial was the evidence of Elizabeth Agius, the woman who had lived next door to the Wests in Midland Road, and who had baby-sat for them while they went cruising the streets for young girls. Mrs Agius had travelled from her home in Malta for the hearing, and was extremely unhappy about giving evidence. A ruddy-faced, middle-aged woman with tightly permed hair, she looked like life had worn her out. Under vigorous cross-examination by Richard Ferguson for the defence, she denied telling the police that she had ended up in bed with a naked Fred and Rose after drinking a drugged cup of tea, and that Fred had had intercourse with her. Ferguson said she was lying – a suggestion indignantly denied. She also denied sleeping with Fred while Rose had been in hospital giving birth to her daughter Mae.

It was then established that Mrs Agius had already been paid for interviews given to both the BBC and independent television, and had contacted the Sun newspaper even before speaking with the police. Asked why she had not told the press to go away when they knocked on her door, she tartly replied: ‘They don’t know what going away means, do they?’ She then left the box and returned home to Malta. But the following day the court heard that Mrs Agius had indeed told a police officer that she had been in bed with Fred and Rose, but that she would deny this if asked in court because she feared her husband would leave her if he found out. This somewhat undermined her reliability.

A more effective prosecution witness was Caroline Owens, who had long prepared for her appearance. Still an attractive woman at thirty-nine, neatly dressed in dark jacket and white blouse and with her hair tied back, she retold the story of her ordeal at the hands of Fred and Rose that winter night in 1972, when she had been hitch-hiking home to Cinderford from Tewkesbury. Her evidence about being tied up, beaten and raped at 25 Cromwell Street was powerful, particularly as she recalled the moment when Fred had threatened to murder her and bury her ‘under the paving stones of Gloucester’, where nobody would ever find her. Under cross-examination she admitted having entered into a contract with the Sun newspaper worth £20,000. It was suggested that she had exaggerated her ordeal for commercial gain. But whatever damage this revelation did to her evidence was forgotten when the court heard the tragic story of how she had tried to take her own life after the rape. She then broke down in tears, sobbing that she only ‘wanted to get justice for the girls who didn’t make it. I feel like it was my fault.’

Up in the public gallery sympathy was expressed for Caroline Owens, with general agreement that if she was to get £20,000 for her story then she deserved every penny. ‘I would have done the same,’ said housewife Christine Reeves. ‘I thought she was a very brave lady.’

Gallery seats had become much sought-after, and many of those who came to watch were, perhaps surprisingly, attractive young college girls: media or law students of exactly the age and type who had been murdered by the woman in the dock. They leaned over the gallery’s glass barrier at each adjournment, stretching for a glimpse of the woman who was dominating the television news each evening, and were frustrated to find they could not see her because her chair was directly beneath where they were sitting.

The evidence of Lynda Gough’s mother, June Gough, was commanding in its poignancy. Now a grey-haired, retired council worker, she eloquently recounted the tragic story of how she had confronted Rose West on the doorstep of 25 Cromwell Street and seen her wearing her daughter’s slippers. Mrs Gough’s description of her rebellious but loved daughter was moving in its honest simplicity. She said that Lynda was ‘cheerful, happy and friendly. She accepted some advice, but as she got older – I would say eighteen or nineteen – she started to rebel against our advice, like a lot of teenagers in those days as well as today. They think they are clever, and really they are only just beginning their lives.’

The court heard from former lodgers at Cromwell Street. Benjamin Stanniland, David Evans, and others who had rented rooms from the Wests in the 1970s were now grizzled middle-aged men with receding hair and lined faces. They spoke of the free and easy lifestyle of ‘flat-land’, and Benjamin Stanniland cheerfully agreed, under cross-examination, that some of them had been ‘known to the police’. Many girls had been brought back to the house and girlfriends had been shared around – as had cannabis, and bearded David Evans nervously admitted to ‘seven or eight’ convictions for possession of drugs over the intervening years. Richard Ferguson was trying to establish that people had come and gone from the house all the time, that there had even been police raids for drugs, yet the police had seen nothing suspicious so why should Rose? Outside the court Stanniland and Evans posed jauntily for the ranks of assembled photographers before sauntering off into obscurity again.

Another former lodger, Liz Brewer, recalled how Rose had told her that when she retired she planned to spend all her time having sex. She remembered Rose’s ‘special room’ and the constant lewd talk. ‘Rose had her boyfriends and Fred his girlfriends. They were quite happy … they seemed to have a bond between them,’ she said. Just like Caroline Owens and Elizabeth Agius, this witness had entered into a contract to sell her story. She had also begun to write her ‘memories’ of life at Cromwell Street in book form. The message that Richard Ferguson was gently repeating to the jury was that many of the Crown’s witnesses had something to gain from a conviction.

The court heard evidence of ‘thumps, crashes, wails and shrieks’ coming from Rose’s ‘special room’ at Cromwell Street. They were wails of sexual excitement, but not necessarily of pleasure, and occurred late at night after male visitors went into the room.

Community nurse Jane Bayle, who had visited the house as a young girl, described how she had been unnerved by Rose, who had ‘stared a lot and dressed as a child’. Another witness told how Fred had cheerfully introduced Rose as his wife and Shirley Robinson as his lover.

Miss A gave evidence on Monday 16 October, the start of the third week of the trial. A sad-looking young woman, in a black-and-white striped dress, her face and demeanour were marked by both her upbringing in a children’s home and consequent adult life of poverty and domestic problems. When she first met Rose, she said, she had thought of her as a big sister, a shoulder to cry on, but then she had been savagely abused, tied up and raped.

Under cross-examination by Richard Ferguson, it emerged that when Miss A was only fourteen she had run away with Rose’s brother, Graham Letts, who was aged nineteen at the time. They set up home above a café in Cheltenham. When a middle-aged neighbour discovered how young Miss A was, he blackmailed her into having sex. Miss A admitted that all this was true, but denied knowing that Rose was Graham’s sister when she visited Cromwell Street – the unspoken inference being that she had a grudge against the family.

Then details of her mental health emerged: she had visited clinics on several occasions, wrongly convinced she was pregnant, and had attempted suicide. Mr Ferguson suggested she had seen a psychiatrist at the Coney Hill Mental Hospital, and had been experiencing bizarre hallucinations of a headless man. He said she tended to fantasise; she had also undergone a course of Electro-Convulsive Therapy and had heard voices in her head. Mr Ferguson asked if she had been diagnosed schizophrenic. Although Miss A denied this, she agreed that in her mind she had seen ‘a man in black’, and that this man was Fred West. The cross-examination had been a skilful one, based on her medical records, and the effect was to make the witness appear unreliable. Neither was the prosecution helped by the revelation that she, too, had agreed a deal with a newspaper, this time worth £30,000.

The next day, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Heather West’s birth, the court heard about both the cruel and, surprisingly, caring side to the Wests. When Heather had disappeared in 1987 Rose had callously told neighbour Margaretta Dix that she was ‘not bothered’ if Heather was ‘alive or dead’. But it seems Fred and Rose were also capable of compassion, for when Mrs Dix’s husband died suddenly, it was the Wests who went to comfort her.

There was also unexpected testimony about Fred and Rose’s relationship. A former girlfriend of Steve West told how Fred and Rose had argued, on occasion even leaving Rose with a black eye, and that Rose had once said, ‘After everything we have been through together, he treats me like this.’ Another witness remembered Rose saying she was lucky that Fred stayed with her.

A fascinating insight into Rose’s life as a prostitute was provided when a middle-aged man named Arthur Dobbs came to give evidence. Grey-haired and dressed in a business suit, white shirt, floral tie and silver-rimmed spectacles, he looked like a GP. But Mr Dobbs’ appearance was deceptive. After separating from his wife in 1985–86, he said he had visited a sex shop in Gloucester and bought a contact magazine. Through this he met ‘Mandy’, a woman he later discovered was Rose West. He had entered a bedroom at 25 Cromwell Street where he had been told by Rose to undress, as Fred watched. Fred then told him to ‘get on with it’ and left the room. Dobbs paid Rose £10. The relationship continued for eighteen months; after a while Dobbs carried out repairs on Fred’s van in exchange for having sex with Rose for free. One day Rose told him that Fred had been having sex with the children. Dobbs claimed he had telephoned social services anonymously some time between 1986 and 1988 to tell them about what he had discovered. If this was true, it indicated another missed opportunity by the authorities.

Fred and Rose’s former lover, Kathryn Halliday, became emotional when she exclaimed that the Wests had put children to sleep in the cellar, directly above where they had buried the remains of their victims. ‘I find that totally horrendous,’ she said angrily. ‘They put them there. They let little children sleep on them. They knew about it.’ Kathryn said she kept going back to the house, even after she had been abused by Rose, because she was like ‘a moth to the flame … He keeps going back until he singes his wings and can fly no more.’ Kathryn admitted selling her story to newspapers and television for more than £8,000. Mr Ferguson suggested that her account of Rose’s sadism was ‘complete rubbish’, but Kathryn was steadfast.

The most dramatic evidence of the trial so far was the appearance of Rose’s stepdaughter Anna Marie in the witness box (now preferring to be known as Anne Marie). A heavy-set woman with dark hair, she was unmistakably Fred’s daughter, with his distinctive broad nose and blue eyes. She spoke in a trance-like voice, leaving long pauses between sentences and frequently breaking down. She referred to Rose as ‘Rosemary’ or ‘my stepmother’ in such a way that the phrase ‘wicked stepmother’ came to mind, and each time she described one of the sexual assaults she had suffered Anna Marie glared accusingly at the dock.

Asked by Brian Leveson whether she could remember her first sexual experience, she replied in a whisper: ‘Yes … I was eight.’ There was absolute silence in the court as she went on to describe being raped by Fred and Rose, who told her that she should be ‘grateful’. Anna Marie said she wished she were dead. She also recalled her stepmother beating her with her fists, a saucepan and a belt; Fred and Rose had spoken about beating her ‘more on the torso than the face’ so the marks did not show. Anna Marie broke down many times during her evidence, and the court was palpably shocked.

The following day, a beautiful bright autumn morning, the members of the jury were taken by coach to Gloucester to visit 25 Cromwell Street – something they had unanimously requested. The garden area of the house was covered over by a white marquee. Cromwell Street was blocked to cars, and elaborate arrangements were made so that the coach carrying the jury could be driven into a covered area behind the house without the press or public setting eyes on them. Rose also had the right to go, but declined, citing the excuse that it had been her family home for many years and the experience would be ‘unduly distressing’.

Dressed in overalls and wearing hard hats, the judge and jury were led in through the back of the house and taken in silence through each room (silence, that is, apart from the clatter of several helicopters hired by the press to take aerial photographs). White tape marked out the locations of the human remains in the garden. Inside the dank, stripped house the feeling of how tiny the space was impressed itself upon everybody. There was no furniture, but many quirky features were still present: the jury saw a poster of a naked girl pinned up, and looked at the door to ‘Rose’s room’ complete with its spy-hole device through which Fred watched her having sex. In the cellar, together with the graves of five women and the beams where Fred claimed to have suspended the bodies of his victims from hooks, they saw cartoons and childish graffiti drawn by the younger West children. After forty minutes, they were driven away from the city, back across the Cotswolds and into Hampshire again – like emerging from a dungeon into fresh air.

On Thursday night Anna Marie again tried to commit suicide (her last attempt had been at New Year, after her father’s death). She was taken to hospital, but was discharged later the following morning. When she eventually arrived back in the witness box, Anna Marie was cross-examined by Richard Ferguson, her evidence having been interrupted by the pre-planned visit to the house.

The story of how she became pregnant by her father at fifteen was revealed. She remembered being beaten and stabbed by Rose, and how Fred had said her mother and stepdaughter were working as prostitutes in Scotland and that Rena had ‘all types of venereal diseases’. Anna Marie added that, despite the abuse she had suffered, ‘I did love my father. I would have done anything for both Rosemary and my father.’ Her agreement that she had accepted ‘blood money’ of £3,000 from a newspaper to tell her story detracted nothing from the power of her testimony.

On Monday a tape recorder was set up and four small speakers were arranged on the court clerk’s desk. Recordings of several of Rose’s police interviews were to be played.

The very first words the jury ever heard Rose speak (she had been utterly silent in court) formed a belligerent answer to a routine request from the police to state her name for the benefit of the tape. ‘You don’t know who I am?’ mocked Rose. The next forty-five minutes continued in the same shrewish, often foul-mouthed way. Apart from her constant cursing, Rose’s vocabulary was quirky – she frequently used malapropisms and curious words were repeated, like ‘tricky’, as in boys ‘got up to tricky things’. The nature of what she said was also bizarre: she claimed to know Heather was a lesbian partly because the child ‘knew exactly what kind of knickers the women teachers had on’.

The second interview tape ended dramatically, with Rose being told that Fred had confessed to Heather’s murder. Her response was an almost unintelligible shriek – of horror or anger it was impossible to determine. In the dock, Rose clutched a tissue as if she were distressed.

She had recovered sufficiently by the next interview, taped just hours after the last, to offer her alibi: Fred had often made her spend the night with coloured men so she could not know what he was doing. She said Fred was the dominant partner in the relationship and ‘what he says goes’. He made her sleep with other men even though she used to fight with him over it.

On another matter, Rose persisted with the story of giving £600 to Fred for Heather to go away with, but was told that Fred had said it was only £100. When put under pressure like this, Rose’s memory failed her. It seemed that there was a great deal which she simply did not remember, but the fate that awaited her appeared to be sinking in. Towards the end of the interview, she said: ‘I ain’t got a lot to live for now, have I?’

Despite her aggressive belligerence, in the next tape the jury learned something of Rose’s extraordinary alternating personality – the concerned mum and then the callous harpy. She was asked about Heather’s dentist (so the police could find dental records for identification of remains) and, like any mother, instantly remembered not only the name, but the full street address. Yet within the same interview she made harsh allegations about Heather, claiming that her daughter had hurt the other children, trapping their fingers in doors, giving them black eyes and making them drink obnoxious mixtures of ‘vinegar and salt and stuff’. In fact, what she was describing was the abuse her children said she meted out to them.

In the tape Rose told the police that she was now certain she had spent the night with a coloured lover when Heather had vanished. Rose had to do what Fred told her: she claimed she had been hit when she was younger, and had once had her jaw twisted by Fred. Going with other men was something she was doing ‘for our marriage … He can be very persuasive, put it that way,’ she said. But when asked for the name and address of this boyfriend, she could only remember that he was ‘Jamaican … big chap, I think’, and in his fifties. His name escaped her; it was one of those ‘awkward’ names.

When Rose was informed on tape that the police had actually found Heather’s bones, she was heard to wearily complain, ‘Why have we got to go through this again?’ She went on to repeat the lie that she had last seen Fred’s first wife, Rena, when she came to take Charmaine away (the prosecution had already gone to some trouble to prove that Fred was in prison when Charmaine was murdered).

In his cross-examination, Richard Ferguson said that Rose had not eaten during these interviews and asked a police witness whether he thought she was in a fit condition to answer so many questions. But this meant little to those who had heard the shrill and very healthy-sounding voice on the tape, moaning about the daughter, Heather, who ‘gave us loads of hassle’.

The pathologist Professor Bernard Knight told the jury of how he had recovered the human remains at Cromwell Street. He described how many of the graves were ‘quagmires’ of mud and decomposed human organs, and listed the dismemberment and missing bones with scientific thoroughness, using the correct anatomical names. When asked to explain what a femur was, he reached down to a box by his side and produced a thighbone, brandishing it in the air for the jury to see.

The jury later looked though books of photographs taken of the bones and the instruments of torture. One showed Professor Knight holding the skull of Shirley Hubbard, the masking tape and tube still in place around the brutal death’s-head. The mask was slack, he explained, because the flesh had rotted away. He told the court that to him Shirley Hubbard was simply ‘Number Five’ – the fifth victim he had excavated.

He afforded the court a macabre chuckle when asked how difficult it would have been to remove a shoulder blade: ‘I could do it!’ he exclaimed with some passion. The professor also gave the theoretical explanations as to why so many bones could be missing, but discounted them all bar one: the bodies must have been mutilated, and this would have involved a substantial amount of mess.

Dr David Whittaker, the oral biologist known to police as the ‘Tooth Fairy’, gave a demonstration of how he identified the remains using Facial Superimposition. The curtains in the courtroom were closed and a photograph of Charmaine as an eight-year-old child was projected on to a screen. The jury studied her grinning face: her lips were drawn back revealing little teeth, some of which had not yet fully broken through the gums. It had been taken in April 1971, just before she was murdered. Dr Whittaker then overlaid the photograph of the child’s skull as it had been when found at Midland Road in 1994 – broken and discoloured like a relic from an ancient tomb, now tinted blue to contrast with the other photo. He pointed out the exact fit of the empty eye-sockets and jaw-line, and where the court could see teeth previously shielded by gums now matured and unprotected in the most naked way. It was a highly dramatic demonstration, but Rose looked on without emotion, for all the world as if she were watching television back in Winchester prison.

The final witness for the Crown was Detective Superintendent John Bennett. He looked extremely nervous as he stood in the witness box, holding his hands behind his back like a soldier on parade and staring straight ahead so his gaze rested somewhere above the heads of the jury. For months he had been thinking about this moment, wondering what he would be asked under cross-examination by the softly spoken but incisive Richard Ferguson.

He was asked about Mary Bastholm, and replied that he had compared her case with that of Lucy Partington but there had never been enough evidence to charge Fred with involvement in her disappearance.

John Bennett admitted that the police had launched a covert operation to bug Rose’s safe houses, but said this was entirely legal (and had actually proved fruitless, as Rose said nothing incriminating).

The police had long awaited the mention of Hazel Savage and criticism of her plan to write her memoirs of the case. But even this mine was defused by the time John Bennett was led towards it by Richard Ferguson: he was merely obliged to confirm that a female officer on the inquiry team had been suspended from duties for ‘discreditable conduct’ – she was not even identified by name. After forty minutes in the box, John Bennett left with a spring in his step and it was not long before a relieved smile crept across his face.

Brian Leveson stood and told the judge, ‘My Lord, that is the case for the Crown.’

A great many testimonies for the prosecution had been powerful, convincing, even shocking, and of course the jury faced the undeniable fact of where the victims had been found: that before Rose West moved to 25 Cromwell Street there were no sets of remains buried there, and when she left – after over two decades in the house – there were nine.

But it could not have been lost on Brian Leveson or his team that the evidence thus far had indeed, from a legal point of view, been no more than circumstantial – ‘nobody says “I saw Frederick stab” or “I saw Rosemary strangle”’ – and it seemed to some that Rose was still a long way from being found guilty.