22

ENDGAME

Richard Ferguson rose to his feet on the morning of Monday 30 October, turned to his left, placed a clenched hand on the wooden rail behind him and looked straight at the jury sitting six feet away.

Some of the evidence they had already heard had been harrowing, he said, ‘but I tell you now, as loudly and clearly as I can, that Rosemary West is not guilty’. The fact that she may be a lesbian did not mean she was a murderer, neither did having sex with her lodgers or being forced into prostitution. He suggested the jury might consider it as ‘plain as a pike staff’ that Fred West had committed all these murders on his own, and that Rose had known nothing of what went on. He said the normal assumptions that a wife is always aware of what her husband is doing did not apply in this case, because ‘Number 25 Cromwell Street was not your typical suburban household with 2.4 children … It was a refuge of the flotsam and jetsam of modern life,’ and Rose was as much a victim of her husband’s ‘evil’ ways as anybody else. As for the prosecution witnesses, he admitted he had dealt with Kathryn Halliday with contempt, and suggested that many may have embroidered their stories so they could sell them to the media at a higher price. He concluded by telling the jury that they would now hear from Rose West herself that she was innocent. By the time he sat down he had succeeded in sowing a seed of doubt in many minds.

It had always been thought that Rose herself would not give evidence, because of the subsequent and potentially hazardous cross-examination by Brian Leveson, but she had insisted against advice that she should have a turn to speak.

As the second hand on the large clock on the wall clicked together with the hour hand to twelve noon, Rose stood and walked out of the dock, across the court, climbed up behind the police seats and into the witness box. It was the first time the court had seen her full length, and it appeared she was wearing almost the uniform of a school girl – a long green skirt and flat black shoes, together with a white blouse and her customary black jacket.

She began poorly, by incorrectly giving her age as forty-two instead of forty-one – a silly blunder, but indicative of what was to follow. She then addressed a series of questions about her childhood, sometimes answering with a half-smile and a chuckle in her throat, a characteristic she shared with her mother. It was her mother she seemed to want to talk about in these first few moments of her evidence, claiming that when Daisy had left her husband and taken the children to live with Rose’s sister Glenys and her former brother-in-law Jim Tyler, she had abandoned Rose, and this consequently had had a devastating effect upon the child. This is not a version of events that accords with the memory of other members of her family, however.

She described her first meeting with Fred, and said her reaction to being chatted up by him was ‘Shock! Horror!’ – a curious, and seemingly contrived, answer. ‘He promised me the world. He promised me everything,’ she said. ‘Because I was so young I fell for his lies. He promised to care for me and love me and I fell for it.’ This was partly because she still felt vulnerable after being ‘abandoned’ by her mother, she claimed.

Rose appeared to become emotional as she asserted her love for the children she was accused of abusing and killing. Asked about her feelings for Heather, she answered perhaps a little too emphatically: ‘I loved her very, very, very much.’ But the rancour still showed when, minutes later, she told the court how Heather had ‘been an awkward baby … I was inexperienced as a mother and she would sleep all day and be awake all night.’ Charmaine, too, was a problem: ‘misbehaving, not eating, running away and just generally disagreeing with everything I said or did’.

After lunch Rose’s answers became longer, she seemed to pre-empt questions and give rehearsed answers. Worst of all, she made little jokes, about her always being pregnant, for example, about Fred drinking the vitamin supplement Sanatogen to keep his strength up, and she even made a derogatory comment about Lynda Gough’s appearance. She did not seem to realise that, as she sat chuckling about Lynda Gough’s ‘grandfather’ glasses, members of the jury were staring at her with apparent distaste.

When she was questioned about the time she had come home from hospital and allegedly discovered Fred and their former neighbour Mrs Agius together, the half-smile faded from Rose’s face. She told of how she had barged into Elizabeth Agius’ house ‘very angry’, shouting and banging on doors – ‘I was getting louder and louder demanding either of them - I was angry.’ There was no doubting her.

She also said that she and Fred had led separate lives, and that he often locked himself in the cellar with his DIY work.

Rose spoke about being bisexual, saying she enjoyed sex with other women because it was ‘warmer … closer’. She said that Fred had manipulated her into trying to seduce Caroline Owens, and when she realised Caroline was not a willing partner Rose had stopped. Again she showed a flash of anger, when asked what she had said to Fred after the assault on Caroline. ‘I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing,’ she replied hotly. This did not seem to fit in with her earlier assertion that whatever Fred did, she had to accept.

At the end of the day Rose was shown photographs of the dead girls and was asked, in turn, whether she had known them or had had anything to do with their deaths. ‘No sir,’ replied Rose, but her nose turned bright red, she bit her lip and stumbled over her words. When Justice Mantell called for the court to be adjourned, Rose almost staggered back to the dock, completely exhausted.

Richard Ferguson seemed to have altered his style of questioning for the start of the second day of Rose’s evidence. He became almost curt with her, trying to stop her long rambling replies and pressing her to address questions that ‘have to be answered’ when she broke down apparently in tears, as happened increasingly often. But again Rose showed herself to be unsympathetic witness: she made fun of Shirley Robinson, describing her as a ‘silly … flittering’ girl, and told an absurd story about Fred saying that Shirley’s baby was his only because he was covering up for a respectable businessman who was the real father. Asked again about the £600 she had allegedly given Heather, Rose announced that she could remember now: this money had come from her post office account, a story never heard before. Asked about Miss A, Rose first said she had never met the girl, but later told the court that Miss A had been about to marry at the time of the assault – evidence not heard by the jury, who must have wondered how Rose could have known such a detail about a girl she had apparently never met.

Rose said her lesbian relationships had all been ‘one hundred per cent consensual’, a contrived phrase which she used repeatedly through the remainder of her evidence. Rose claimed that she derived no thrill from making people do things against their will. She spoke about herself and Kathryn Halliday playing records and talking about film stars – ‘things that girls do’ – as if they were innocent teenagers rather than two mature lesbians satisfying each other with dildos. She added that Halliday had agreed to everything. ‘You don’t come back if someone is hurting you,’ she said, revealing more than she possibly intended.

Her evidence ended with her most dramatic, and bizarre, outburst of all. She informed the court that when she discovered Fred had confessed to killing Heather, she saw him in the guise of the devil. ‘I hated him. I didn’t see the man I had known all those years. He was just a walking figure of evil. I saw him – it might seem daft – but I saw him with horns and complete with a satanic grin. He never looked sorry for what he did or anything. He just used to grin, like it was some joke.’ She added that she was not a murderer, and, sobbing loudly, that she could never have lived with a murderer.

Brian Leveson stood and began cross-examining Rose almost before she could stop crying. Starting quietly, he asked whether she had known nothing of the horrors committed between 1971 and 1994. ‘That’s right, sir,’ she replied, quickly recovering. With increasing sarcasm Leveson asked if she had known nothing of the bodies, and of the blood on her husband’s hands and clothes after he had cut them up. The questions, and denials, came thick and fast.

Within a few minutes Rose had lost her composure, and she became angry when asked about the day she had told her parents there was nothing Fred would not do, even murder. ‘Right!’ exclaimed Rose, with ill-disguised belligerence. ‘I would like to answer that, sir … given the chance.’ Brian Leveson glanced up at the judge with theatrical resignation and invited her to go ahead. Rose launched into a long, rambling explanation, the net result of which was her agreeing with what had been put to her in the first place.

The court was reminded of the love letter Rose had sent Fred, in which she had talked about how Charmaine liked to be ‘treated rough’:

BRIAN LEVESON: You abused that girl, didn’t you?

ROSE WEST: Not to the extent that you would like to think I have.

BRIAN LEVESON: You tied her arms?

ROSE WEST: No sir.

BRIAN LEVESON: Tied her to the bed?

ROSE WEST: No sir.

BRIAN LEVESON: You beat her?

ROSE WEST: No sir.

BRIAN LEVESON: You killed her and kept the body for Fred to bury … and from that moment on you were tied together forever.

Cross-examination continued for the rest of that day and all of the next. It was an unmitigated and self-inflicted disaster for Rose’s case.

Whenever she was asked a difficult question she replied ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘I don’t recall.’ Each time she was about to tell a new version of events she preceded it by crying, as if she were taking time to gather her thoughts. She became angry and blamed everybody apart from herself for what had happened. Most of all, she blamed Fred. Peevishly she complained: ‘It’s all very well for someone to say I said this or did that, because I’m the one now in the spotlight. Fred West is dead and I’ve got to take responsibility for what he’s done.’ It was noted that she said ‘Fred West’ now, as if she had never known him, not ‘my husband’ or even ‘Fred’.

Asked if she would like to see the masks of torture found with her victims, Rose shuddered and said, ‘I have seen enough of the horror, thank you.’ Brian Leveson suggested that she had been lying and was trying to put all the blame on Fred; they had contrived a story the night before Fred was arrested, talking it over for hours.

Richard Ferguson’s brief re-examination succeeded in proving that Rose was incapable of getting even the date of birth of one of her children correct. As this was discussed, one of the court officials choked on something and took some water to clear her throat – the noise of a woman gasping for breath seemed to divert Rose’s attention. Like a bird eyeing a worm, she studied the woman closely.

A few minutes later Rose left the witness box: after three days of answering questions, and having impressed many in the courtroom that she was a wholly untrustworthy and unpleasant woman who had told lies – both petty and great – from the very first to the very last.

The next defence witnesses were a succession of women who claimed to have been attacked or frightened by men who might have been Fred West. By calling these witnesses the defence sought to establish that Fred was capable of abducting women on his own, and possibly killing them. The first of these witnesses, Janette Clarke, said a man had followed her in Gloucester in 1966, and had tried to abduct her on two occasions. This had been reported to the police. In 1994, when she had seen Fred West’s face on the television news after watching the Antiques Roadshow, she had been convinced it was her attacker.

The next witness, known only as Mrs C, told how she had been given a lift by a builder in 1966. The man attacked her and then masturbated in front of her. She thought there was a ‘possibility’ that it had been Fred.

Alison Clinton said she had been grabbed by a man in 1968, when she was aged thirteen, and that she thought he was Fred. There were other similar stories, but none of these women could be certain who their attacker was, and although most of them had informed the police at the time it was hard to identify any lack of diligence on their part because the descriptions of ‘Fred’ varied so wildly: one witness said he had ‘fair hair’, another that he had a beard, and a third that he had ‘staring brown eyes’. The evidence these women put forward was slight, and, as Justice Mantell pointed out, it had never been disputed that Fred probably attacked a great many women.

On Friday 3 November the court heard the voice of Fred West: four out of a total of 145 tape recordings of police interviews with Fred would be played to the court as evidence in Rose’s defence. Again, this had been Rose’s decision. She wanted the jury to hear her husband say loud and clear that he had committed the murders and that she knew nothing about it. (Rose had carefully read transcripts of Fred’s interviews before making her decision.) She was warned that if some of the tapes were admitted in court the prosecution could call other evidence in rebuttal – evidence that might show Fred changing his story, and not always in Rose’s favour. But she would not be dissuaded.

The first tape played had been recorded the day Fred was arrested for the murder of Heather. He was asked to say in his own words what had happened. Fred began, in this businesslike way: ‘Right! what happened was …’ and went on to tell a virtually unbroken, if largely imaginary, story of Heather’s murder that lasted many minutes.

He quickly established that Rose had left the house to get some money for Heather, who wanted to leave home. His daughter was leaning against the spin-dryer in the tool room, and had told Fred that if he did not let her leave home, she would administer the hallucinogenic drug LSD to the younger children so they would ‘jump off the church roof and be dead on the floor’. Fred claimed to have been enraged by this: he grabbed Heather’s throat and held her until she turned blue. He tried to revive her, but failed. Her bowels opened involuntarily. He tried to force her corpse into a dustbin, but she did not fit. He then fetched a heavy, serrated knife bought from the frozen food shop Iceland, and set about dismembering her.

‘I cut her legs off with that and I’m not telling you I have lived that a million times doing that since then and then I cut her head off and then I put her in the bin and put the lid on and rolled it down to the bottom of the garden behind the Wendy house,’ he said. The casual voice on the tape was astonishing. The only emotion came momentarily after Fred said he had cut his daughter’s head off: he seemed almost to break down, but then recovered.

Fred claimed he sent Rose out for the night to one of her ‘coloured blokes’, and used the time to dig Heather’s grave.

The conversation then took a bizarrely banal turn as Fred started looking at photographs of the garden to help the police locate Heather’s grave. The relationship between him and Hazel Savage was so amiable that at one point she announced she was just popping out to ‘get [his] specs’, because Fred could not see clearly without them. When Fred had located the grave on the photographs, with the aid of his glasses, Hazel Savage asked, ‘And what’s going to be in this hole in the ground?’

FRED WEST: Heather.

HAZEL SAVAGE: In how many pieces?

FRED WEST: Three.

HAZEL SAVAGE: What?

FRED WEST: Two legs and a head and a body.

After a pause, Fred announced that he had cut up the body in the downstairs bath, above the grave of Lynda Gough. The court had earlier heard a forensic expert say that, if there had ever been bloodstains in the house, they would have worn away over the years and it was not surprising that none were found.

He said he had loved Heather, but lost his temper when she said she was going to ‘do the little ones’.

Rose was never far from Fred’s thoughts, and he wanted to make it quite clear that she had played no part in this. ‘The thing I’d like to stress … I mean, Rose knew nothing at all … [when] Rose finds out about this I’m finished.’ At another stage in the interview this exchange took place:

HAZEL SAVAGE: Right, who else knows what you’ve told us?

FRED WEST: Nobody … nobody at all. That is something I’ve had to live with for eight years. It’s not easy, I’ll tell you, because I loved Heather. That’s why I was trying to persuade her not to go – I mean, what happened … in that brief moment when she was laughing about going to kill the rest of the children with acid, I couldn’t believe it was Heather.

The second tape had been recorded on 4 March 1994. Again, it was extraordinary how helpful and genial Fred was in interview, drawing diagrams for the police so they could find the victims in the cellar of the house he referred to as ‘our place’. At one stage he even flirted with Hazel Savage, saying that when he first met her in 1966 she had to be ‘about the beautifullest woman in Gloucestershire’, and indeed it was a charming, rather than leering, observation – although Hazel’s reply was curt: ‘All right, let’s stop the rubbish, Fred.’

He was anxious to explain why he had killed the girls. ‘What ’appened, all these girls did exactly the same thing – it was made quite clear that I was married to Rose, and I don’t want nothing to do with them, nothing serious, it was just thank you ma’am and finished, and every one of ’em did exactly the same thing of these: “I love you, I’m pregnant, I’m gonna tell Rose, I want you to come and live with me” and that was the problem.’

It was hard to image Lucy Partington, the cerebral medieval art student, begging Fred to marry her. But Fred even had an elaborate story to explain that girl’s demise, an account the prosecution later said bordered on the obscene. He said he knew her as ‘Juicy Lucy’ because of the amount of vaginal juices she produced when they had sex, and that they had a secret affair – secret because of her ‘other’ boyfriend (Lucy did not have a boyfriend at the time). She had apparently wanted to make the relationship more serious, and had found Fred’s home telephone number. Fred said he was furious. ‘I mean I always made it clear to these girls that there was no affair, it was just purely sex, end of story.’ They had an argument and he had grabbed her by the throat. Fred strangled her, drove her home and cut her up.

In yet another interview he gave an even more unlikely account of how his ‘affair’ with Lucy had ended: he said that she had become pregnant and had come after Fred, saying ‘I have been bloody looking for you - I’m pregnant and want a thousand quid for an abortion.’

Fred agreed to try and help the police identify the victims – whom he referred to as ‘the girls’ – partly because he said he had come to like the police officers and thought he owed it to them, and partly because the families of the victims deserved a decent funeral. But his help was limited. ‘As for these,’ he said, looking at a plan of the cellar with numbers marked over graves, ‘I ’ave no idea what their names are.’ He later claimed to have picked them up at night, and had thus never seen their faces clearly. Again he was anxious to exonerate Rose: ‘She knew nothing whatsoever about this.’

He claimed to have murdered Charmaine the same night he killed Rena (although this cannot be true because he was in prison when Charmaine died), saying he had strangled her while she was asleep in the back of his car – apparently panicking after killing her mother – and had buried the child behind the back of 25 Midland Road. Asked if he would go and help the police find Charmaine’s grave, Fred breezily replied, ‘Oh yeah, no problem.’

He was interviewed again the next day, and told detectives that two of the girls in the cellar at Cromwell Street were prostitutes he had picked up hitch-hiking. He knew them for what they were ‘by their looseness’. One had started fondling his penis as he was driving, so they stopped, and, in Fred’s words, ‘made love’ – but then she demanded £5 and said she would report him for rape unless he paid. ‘We had a right set-to, and the next minute I smacked her up against the window and she just dropped and, um, anyway, I strangled her, or held my hands around her neck anyway, and um, that was it. She just slid down.’

He said he killed another girl for exactly the same reason. ‘She said that’ll be ten quid … I said, if you’d have said that in the first place I said I’d have told you to get lost and then she started shouting and said, you’re the sort of person who goes with slags … and I just lost my head with her. Because as soon as she said that, I thought of Rose and Rose is no slag as far as I was concerned.’

All his victims ‘were prostitutes going to know what they’re doing’, said Fred – a slightly different story to them all being in love with him and wanting to marry him. He said he had attacked a Dutch girl, knocked her cold, taken her back to the house and strangled her in the cellar. The belongings of all these girls were put into black rubbish sacks and left out for the dustmen. He said they had permed hair and make-up half an inch thick. Conveniently, when he came to bury the girls Rose would be away on holiday or out at the Jamaica Club.

In the final tape interview, DC Geoff Morgan was heard telling Fred that he had become upset in a previous interview when they asked about Rose’s involvement. They then asked him about bondage. ‘The bondage side of it was mine – Rose never had nothing to do with it,’ he said. Asked about Caroline Owens, he indicated that she had indeed almost died. ‘I think I would have went too far with it if Rose had been willing.’ He added that he had been ‘trying to get Rose involved with my sex life’. Fred also claimed that Caroline Owens had wanted to have intercourse with him the night they abducted her.

POLICE: Are you saying she agreed to it?

FRED WEST: Well, she didn’t do a lot about it, put it that way. I mean she could have screamed and the whole house would have heard her.

POLICE: Women don’t always scream when they’re being raped – they’re terrified very often.

FRED WEST: Rubbish!

His attitudes both to rape and to murder were revealed further in this exchange with Hazel Savage:

HAZEL SAVAGE: You find things like that very difficult to cope with, don’t you?

FRED WEST: What?

HAZEL SAVAGE: Allegations of rape.

FRED WEST: Well, yeah, ’cos I never raped nobody.

HAZEL SAVAGE: And yet you killed people.

FRED WEST: Yeah, see you’ve even got the killing wrong. You’re trying to make out that I just went out and blatantly killed somebody.

HAZEL SAVAGE: No I’m not … they went through hell actually.

FRED WEST: No, nobody went through hell. Enjoyment turned to disaster.

After the tapes had been played, Brian Leveson’s junior, Andrew Chubb, questioned the interviewing police detectives for the prosecution to establish that these excerpts had only been part of what Fred said, and that he also told many insane lies. In an interview almost directly after admitting to killing Heather and burying her in the garden, for example, Fred told police that Heather was in fact not under the patio but ‘in Bahrain working for a drugs cartel’. Fred had told the police ‘lie after lie’, for example that Shirley Robinson had sexually abused Anna Marie; that he had killed her because she was jealous of Rose having a ‘black babby’ and that she had called Rose ‘that bitch, that slag, that cow’. Fred told police that after this insult to his beloved wife he had ‘lost all sense’ and strangled his lover.

He related a pornographic fantasy about the death of Lynda Gough, saying she had been tied up in the cellar, where they had been enjoying bondage sex together. ‘She had a massive bust on her. She was all roped – kept laughing her head off and making weird noises.’ Fred said she had been dangling over a hole in the cellar floor, supporting herself with her arms which were clasped around the beams. He had been smearing her with oil and ‘love potions’. Then he went to answer the door, and when he came back she had slipped and hanged herself.

POLICE: So she was strangled accidentally?

FRED WEST: I never killed anyone outright.

The most damning evidence of all was that, on 29 April 1994, after consulting with his lawyers, Fred had instructed that a note be handed to the police by his solicitor. It read: ‘I have still not told you the truth about this matter. The reason is that from the very first day of this inquiry my main concern has been to protect another person or persons.’ There was little doubt who that person was.

Because the defence had convinced the judge to have Fred’s tapes entered as evidence – on ‘express instructions’ from Rose herself – the prosecution was allowed to call new witnesses in rebuttal; in other words, to disprove material arising from the tapes. This was to prove dramatic.

The first witness was George Guest, a retired probation officer who had interviewed Fred at the time of the attack on Caroline Owens. The account he remembered Fred giving of the attack was quite different to the one heard in Fred’s tapes. Mr Guest remembered Fred saying Rose had taken a very active, if not a leading part in the abduction and sexual assault. Furthermore Fred had explained that Rose alternated between heterosexual behaviour and being ‘like a raging queer’, depending on whether she was pregnant or not.

This was good evidence for the prosecution, but was superseded by what was to follow. The court first heard from a Detective Constable Steven Harris, who had interviewed Fred in May 1994 and recalled him saying that he was protecting somebody, but was not prepared to say who because he felt that his life, and the lives of his children, were in danger. Fred asserted that he was quite innocent: ‘I had nothing to do with these girls’ deaths at all. I have lied through the statements and at this moment I am not prepared to change that … I am not prepared to say who I am protecting in this case.’

With the next witness the finger of accusation began to point more towards Rose. Dr James McMaster had been the medical officer at Winson Green in Birmingham when Fred was held at the gaol on remand. Warders became concerned about Fred when they heard he was making arrangements for his own funeral, and on 1 August 1994 Fred sat down with Dr McMaster to talk about his feelings. At the beginning of the interview Fred was agitated and depressed, especially about his solicitor Howard Ogden, whom he felt was not representing him correctly.

The conversation turned to Fred’s interviews. Fred said he was innocent of the charges and had been telling the police lies to protect another person. He then said that Rose was responsible for restraining his daughters while they were raped, that she was running a brothel in the house and had tried to murder him with a knife. He said that Rose enjoyed cruelty and abusing the children and that she had been burying people in the cellar without his knowledge; he did not know the bodies were there and had only been told to pour the concrete. ‘He [Fred] claimed that he was protecting her [Rose], and was prepared to go to jail for life,’ said Dr McMaster, who considered Fred to be rational when he made these allegations.

The prosecution then called Fred’s ‘appropriate adult’: Janet Leach, a 39-year-old voluntary worker who had been assigned to become Fred’s friend when he was taken into custody in 1994. She had sat in on eighty taped interviews and became a regular visitor and confidante of the prisoner, even receiving telephone calls from him at home.

In a broad Midlands accent, she told the court that when she had first met Fred, on 25 February, she did not even know what he was charged with. She sat through the interviews, listening to Fred’s version of events, and then heard a quite different story in his cell when they were alone together (an extraordinary situation in itself, which was later picked up by the defence).

She claimed Fred had said he was protecting Rose, and that the girls found at Cromwell Street had been ‘some of Rose’s mistakes’. Mrs Leach explained: ‘When he was arrested, he wanted to know whether Rose had been let out. That was important to him because they had made a pact that he would take the blame for everything.’ When Rose was released on bail, Fred told Janet that the pact was working. Later Rose was arrested again and this distressed Fred. ‘He was upset. He just said that the police were getting too close and that they would find out that Rose was involved.’

Fred told Janet Leach that there had been other people involved as well, including Rose’s father; several coloured men; and somebody who (for legal reasons) can only be referred to as ‘another person’. Janet Leach wept in the witness box as she said, ‘I have got children growing up … and I needed to know that, if there was somebody else out there, that they had to be found.’

She said that Fred had told her fingers had been removed from the victims to foil identification, and indicated that he and Rose had chopped the victims up together (contradicting his earlier claim that he had only poured the concrete). Fred said he was not very good at sex, that Rose was very demanding and that he would do ‘anything’ for her. Fred had spoken about his own sexual tastes, saying he liked to ‘break girls in’. He then changed his story yet again, claiming that the first he had known about the bodies in the cellar was when Rose telephoned to tell him the police were at the house in February 1994. ‘He said he had a long discussion with Rose and Rose told him what had happened and where the bodies were.’ Fred said he had suffered a black-out before he could return to the house.

He also stated that he had been in custody when Charmaine was killed, as the prosecution had claimed, and that it was Rose who had killed and mutilated Shirley Robinson, including removing her unborn child.

Under cross-examination Janet Leach said neither her nor any of the voluntary workers she knew who served as appropriate adults had ever encountered anything like this before. They were more used to dealing with juveniles. She had found the experience so disturbing that, at the recommendation of the police, she had been taken off the case and had then suffered a stroke.

When Fred died without confessing to what he had told her, she felt angry and confused about what she should do. She had never told anybody what Fred had said because she considered that they had been speaking in confidence. Richard Ferguson asked if it had occurred to her that Fred was using her, and she replied, with disarming simplicity, ‘I suppose he was.’

She adamantly denied having been paid money by any newspaper, or having spoken to journalists, or that there was any substance in a rumour about her relationship with Fred going further than it should.

As the clock indicated it was time to break for lunch, Richard Ferguson informed the judge that he had not finished cross-examining the witness. Although much of what she remembered Fred saying clearly did not make sense (of course he had been involved in burying the bodies) many felt that Janet Leach’s evidence had been like a breath of fresh air: at last somebody had told the truth – that Fred and Rose were in it together and that Fred had covered up for her. Janet Leach had been a very convincing witness.

The court was adjourned until 2:15 P.M., but minutes later Janet Leach turned deathly pale and suffered what later appeared to be another stroke, being unable to move or speak. An ambulance was called and she was taken to hospital. The court was adjourned for the rest of the day.

When the court reconvened the next morning Janet Leach was still in hospital, unable to give evidence for perhaps several days. But Richard Ferguson had dramatic news for the judge: it appeared that Janet Leach had lied to the court about her dealings with the press. Information had been received overnight that, far from not speaking with journalists, she had been paid £12,500 by the publishing subsidiary of a large newspaper group to write a book. In light of this, Richard Ferguson felt it was very important that he had a chance to continue cross-examining.

The hospital doctor was summoned to court, and it was agreed that the case could not proceed until the following week – and even then Mrs Leach would have to give evidence with a medical officer on standby, in case she became unwell. Considering that she was the last witness, the witness upon whom the whole case could turn, this long weekend could hardly have been loaded with more suspense.

On Monday morning an ambulance brought Janet Leach back to court from the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, where she had spent the weekend. She entered the witness box in a wheelchair, with a doctor standing behind her to monitor her condition, and looked both extremely unwell and very anxious.

Richard Ferguson skilfully cross-examined her, soon extracting her agreement that, contrary to what she had told the court the week before, she had struck a deal with a newspaper group – and a lucrative one at that. She had verbally agreed that the serialisation of her book would be sold to Mirror Group for £100,000. She had also told the police she would sign an affidavit regarding her conversation with Fred in the ‘worst case scenario’ of a possible acquittal of Rose, to make sure that she was convicted. All this represented a body-blow to the prosecution.

It further emerged that Fred had written personal letters to Janet Leach, including one with the words ‘keep it up, kid’, but she denied any suggestion that she had become emotionally attached to Fred, as a police officer had said at the time, saying she had kept going to see him only because he was going to tell her more about the crimes.

In re-examination there was a revelation which dwarfed the lies she had already told: Janet Leach told Brian Leveson that Fred had claimed there were at least twenty more victims. Some were buried on farmland, and one was Mary Bastholm, whom he said he had picked up at a bus stop. She said Fred had told her other people were involved in these killings also: among them Rose, her father Bill Letts, at least two coloured men and the ‘other person’. Fred said some of the girls had been killed outside Cromwell Street and brought back to the house by this ‘other person’, who had also apparently killed Anna McFall in collusion with Rena.

Much of this information – assuming Fred had ever imparted it at all – was clearly fiction, and there were many reasons for Fred to concoct such stories: he may have been trying to make himself more appealing to Janet Leach by shifting the blame on to somebody else; he probably wanted to keep her intrigued so she would return and see him; and Fred was also known to invent stories for visitors who he thought were selling information to newspapers in an attempt to catch them out (in the final months of his life he became jealous of the money made in this way).

But there may be a residual grain of truth to what Janet Leach claims Fred told her: a story that echoed what Fred told other visitors of a ‘farmhouse’ where victims, including Mary Bastholm, were buried. No doubt other men had been involved in the rape of girls alongside the Wests, but where the farm is and whether these men were actually participant in murder is another matter altogether. As Janet Leach said under cross-examination, Fred ‘just talked all the time’. Truth and fantasy were one to him.

Despite this, it was the revelation of TWENTY MORE that made the headlines in the morning newspapers, not the fact that Janet Leach had lied in court.

Brian Leveson’s closing speech for the prosecution included a detailed analysis of each part of the evidence. He spoke well, using slightly theatrical gestures – grimacing, and at one stage thumbing behind him at the dock when he said, ‘He [Fred West] is not on trial, she is.’

He told the jury they had all travelled to a place that plumbed the depths of human depravity and there found a ‘tough and resourceful’ woman who was obsessed with sex – the perfect partner for Fred West – but, like the three brass monkeys, a woman who claimed to have seen no evil, heard no evil and spoken no evil, despite living in a house where women were raped, mutilated and buried.

He said Fred’s death was the greatest gift he could have given Rose, because it meant he could not be cross-examined and (in all likelihood) proven in court to be both a liar and her accomplice. ‘Picture him in cross-examination,’ said Mr Leveson, and all eyes turned to the empty witness box, where the spectre of Fred West struggling gamely to deny Rose’s involvement was all too easy to imagine.

He said there were common themes running though all the killings, and that those in the court who had seen the ‘terrible pictures’ of the exhibits, including Shirley Hubbard’s mask with the pipe still in place, would live with these images for a long time.

The sky outside became overcast in mid-afternoon, heralding a storm that would soon drench the city. Suddenly the electric lights seemed to brighten the room and Mr Leveson concluded his speech in a sickly yellow glow: ‘Frederick and Rosemary West were perfect companions and they were in it together. On that basis, you can be sure these allegations are proved.’

The next day was the turn of Richard Ferguson for the defence. His approach was broader, even poetic. Rather than detailing the flaws in the prosecution case, he simply asserted that there was not a shred of direct evidence that Rose had killed anyone. He conceded that as a woman and a mother Rose may have fallen below the standards required, and that, if she had abused children, she would have to be tried for these crimes in this world or the hereafter. He agreed that the jury may not have liked her, or believed some of what she had said in evidence, but maintained that this did not mean she was a killer.

It was Fred who had committed these crimes, he said, and Fred had not killed himself to aid Rose’s case, not being the stuff of which martyrs are made. Fred had been a depraved and morally bankrupt man who had opted out of the human race. He had killed before he met Rose, and continued to kill, without her knowledge or help, during their marriage.

Mr Ferguson finished with an inspired extended metaphor: Brian Leveson was a kind of mountain guide, leading the jury up a perilous path until they came to a gap, a void of no evidence. Mr Leveson had leapt across the gap to where the path continued on the other side and turned, beckoning the jury to follow, assuring them that it was quite safe. On the other side of this void, said Mr Ferguson, was a guilty verdict. But the void itself was a lacuna of hard evidence. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, looking at the jurors. ‘Don’t jump. Don’t jump.’

Justice Mantell took no less than three days to sum up what he had already said was a remarkable case. He said the jury would have to consider carefully and individually each of the ten counts. They did not have to be certain that Rose had actually been responsible for snuffing out lives herself – she would be just as guilty if murder had resulted from a ‘joint plan’ with her husband to kill or inflict serious injury. The alternative, lesser verdict of manslaughter was open to them, he said, but they might think it was only a theoretical alternative, as there was a common thread through most of the killings. Unfortunately, they would have to spend time considering what was involved in killing and cutting up a human body. He then addressed the many other issues arising from the case with the same balanced, good sense, conceding that whatever he told the jury, and whatever had been seen or heard in court, only they could now decide on the verdicts that should be returned. Justice Mantell sent the jury out to consider their verdicts on Monday 20 November, forty-nine days after they had first been selected for the case.

The jury deliberated for the remainder of that day and most of the next, carefully re-reading the transcripts of Rose’s interviews before they began their discussion about verdicts.

The corridor outside Court Three became a waiting area for journalists and members of the legal teams, who paced back and forth expectantly. Jokes and predictions regarding the verdict were exchanged as the hours ticked by, and the air became thick with cigarette smoke. The court Tannoy system regularly intruded on this hum of conversation, and there would be a brief lull to hear which case was being called. Finally, just after 3 P.M. on Tuesday afternoon, the Tannoy voice requested that anybody having anything to do with the case of Rosemary West should return to court.

The jury had selected as their foreman a man in his early middle age, wearing a grey business suit. After being asked by the court clerk whether they had reached a unanimous verdict on any of the counts, he replied that they had. Rose, who was dressed in the same schoolgirl-like outfit she had worn practically every day for the last eight weeks, was called to her feet. Her mouth was slightly open and she appeared to be breathing deeply, nervously – for this was the moment upon which the rest of her life would turn.

The foreman was asked by the court clerk about the first count of murder, that of Rose’s stepdaughter Charmaine.

‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of murder?’

‘Guilty,’ replied the foreman, speaking so softly he was barely audible. There was a faint exclamation of relief, or anguish, from high up in the public gallery. Rose closed her eyes momentarily, as if trying to concentrate on what had just been said, and then opened them again.

The clerk read through the next eight counts, but the jury had not reached verdicts on any of these as yet. She came to count number ten, the murder of Heather West, and the foreman announced that they had a verdict in this case.

‘Guilty,’ he said again.

Justice Mantell sent the jury back to their room to continue their deliberations. Rose was taken down to her holding cell, where she collapsed in a spasm of tears and shock. But she did not have long to come to terms with what she had heard. At 4:30 P.M. the jury were called back. They had reached a third unanimous verdict, this time on the count of the murder of Shirley Robinson – again ‘guilty’.

The foreman said he did not feel the jury could reach any more verdicts that evening, so court was adjourned for the day. Richard Ferguson went down into the cells where Rose was blubbing uncontrollably, her heavy shoulders heaving, her hands covering her eyes, the tears streaming down through her fingers.

The evidence for Rose murdering Charmaine, Heather and Shirley had been different to the evidence concerning the other seven women. The first three had been killed because Fred and Rose needed them out of the way, not because of a sexual motive. Now that the jury had accepted Rose to be a liar and murderess, they had to decide whether they agreed with Brian Leveson’s ‘similar fact evidence’ – that the remaining seven had all died after being sexually abused in the way Caroline Owens, Miss A and Anna Marie had been.

At 12:15 P.M. the next day, Wednesday 22 November, the jury passed a note to Justice Mantell asking if the absence of any direct evidence was a hindrance to returning a guilty verdict in these seven counts. The judge said that it was not, so long as they accepted the Crown’s case. They further asked if they could consider the evidence of Caroline Owens and the other women in relation to the charges of murder. Justice Mantell said the answer was yes.

The jury retired, but this time they were out for only thirty-five minutes. When they returned, Rose was told to stand. She then heard that the jury had unanimously decided on the seven counts, the seven girls whose remains had been found at Cromwell Street together with masks, binds and other evidence of torture. The foreman said that Rose was guilty of murdering them all.

The sentencing was as damning as it was brief. Justice Mantell first ordered: ‘Stand up.’ He then intoned these words: ‘Rosemary Pauline West, on each of the ten counts of murder of which you have been unanimously convicted by the jury, the sentence is one of life imprisonment. If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released. Take her down.’

Without a flicker of emotion having crossed her face, without any sign to the world she was saying goodbye to, Rose turned and was led away from view.