THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
‘My companion must be of the same species, and have the same defects.’
MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN
The murder of Ann McFall in the summer of 1967 was arguably the single most significant moment in Frederick West’s life so far, the moment at which he crossed his own personal Rubicon. Before her killing he was a violent man with violent emotions. After it, he was not only a murderer but a murderer who could never turn back, a man who had discovered the irresistible sexual excitement it aroused in him. In West’s mind the killing gave him a sense of power – power over women, women who had formerly had power over him, women who had despised him. In one sense her death was his revenge on the whole sex.
In the years since Much Marcle, Frederick West’s life had become a quest for an innocent young woman to share his world. And Ann McFall had been the first to suggest that she might actually fulfil his dream, thereby satisfying the hidden fantasy that was now driving him. She was an innocent, someone whom he could turn into a compliant, endlessly admiring companion. His first wife, Rena Costello, could never have been that companion. She was more experienced in the ways of the world, and the sexual world in particular, than he was, and that inhibited him. By contrast, Ann McFall had been his first blank canvas, the first young woman whom he could groom in his own likeness, and mould into his own perfect partner. The fact that she had then let him down, failing to satisfy his most extreme demands and then threatening to leave him, was a tragedy for which her death was the only solution. If he could not have her no one else would. His creation was to be destroyed, and the process started again.
That is why West’s prison memoir, I Was Loved by an Angel, is of far greater significance than may at first appear. For West’s insistence that ‘Ana’ was the only person who ever truly loved him is, in some degree, a reflection that she was the first woman whom he ever truly loved, the one woman who satisfied his distorted vision of what love really meant. Frederick West loved his ‘angel’, but once she betrayed him he was capable of killing her, and systematically abusing and destroying what remained of her body. In the murder of Ann McFall Frederick West was both her lover and her torturer, tragic at one moment, exultant at the next. And the act of sexual union was the obvious moment to kill, the snuffing out of her life mirroring West’s own orgasm as certainly as if he had been a villain in his own Jacobean tragedy.
Like Mary Shelley’s creature, created by novel’s eponymous protagonist Victor Frankenstein,West was also a creature in pursuit of his own version of love. As a child he had struggled to develop a loving relationship with his mother, and had been rewarded with abuse rather than affection. He had resented it, and had nursed that resentment deep within him, concealed from the preying eyes of every woman thereafter. Tragically for her, Ann McFall had failed to live up to West’s dream of a perfect mate – the dream that he was giving voice to in I Was Loved by an Angel – the dream that had come to preoccupy his mind. She had betrayed his inner fantasy, but nevertheless she had been a willing accomplice, an apprentice to learn the trade of sexual excitement and exploitation at his shoulder. Rena West had first demonstrated to him how exciting that could be, and how valuable in encouraging young women to trust him, but West had always been a little afraid of her, in awe that she knew more than he. Now, with Ann McFall dead, he wanted another innocent to school in his own version of love.
Ann McFall’s death made it inevitable that he would continue the search for his perfect mate, as Victor Frankenstein’s creature had done, and so West’s pursuit of his own version of love became the hidden narrative that he would live by, the explanation he gave himself for his own behaviour. It is conceivable that West believed, for a moment, that the young waitress Mary Bastholm might have been a candidate to replace Ann McFall, only to discover that she was not willing to participate in his sexual experiments. As a result, West may have forced her into a sexual union and killed her, while she, too, was a bound and helpless victim.
But even when West believed that he might have found someone who came close to his ideal mate, as Ann McFall had done, his search for another was not abandoned in case the first were to be found wanting. West could never allow himself to trust a woman completely. They were always likely to betray him at the last moment, just as his mother had done when she asked him to leave Moorcourt Cottage in 1961. The memory of the incest case fuelled his private anger against a society that did not approve of what he, and his father, saw as perfectly acceptable behaviour, their own version of family love.The memory rankled still.
West’s rambling prison memoir I Was Loved by an Angel demonstrates precisely how far he could conceal the hidden nature of his desire, even from himself. His sentimental narrative displays at one level the explanation that he was presenting to himself, and to the world at large, for his actions, but disguises at another level the far darker story of a man determined to express and experience his own bizarre and perverted version of love.
The memoir also reveals the method that Frederick West depended on throughout his life when he was cornered. The rambling digressions, the lengthy descriptions of the stunningly mundane, the endless repetition, all would appear time after time in his interviews with the police, and with anyone in authority. West used this smokescreen of minor detail and irrelevant description to befuddle anyone attempting to analyse his motives. Lie set against lie, half-truth portrayed as truth – these were the methods he used to escape from trouble. For Frederick West talk was camouflage, a disguise that allowed him to creep closer to his victim.
Movement was another way of concealing his intentions. In the past West had depended on motorcycles, cars, vans and lorries as a means of escaping attention and freeing himself from the prying eyes of neighbours. But shortly before his mother’s funeral in the first week of February 1968, and not long after he had moved Rena, Charmaine and Anna-Marie to the Lake House caravan site in Bishop’s Cleeve, West was obliged to stop driving his grain lorry ‘’cause there was nowhere to park a lorry at Lake House’. Instead, he got a job in the packing department of Oldacres, working on a bagging machine. It meant that he could walk to work, but it also meant that, for the moment, his freedom of movement was curtailed.
For a time, therefore, Frederick West contented himself with inviting girls to his caravan at Lake House rather than driving around in search of them. He would talk to girls in the village, offering to help with odd jobs, ‘making himself useful’, and would use exactly the same excuse that he had used in Scotland to tempt them back to the caravan. West told any likely candidate who presented herself that he was looking for someone to help him to take care of the two girls, Charmaine and Anna-Marie, now aged five and four.
Rena West, meanwhile, had taken a job near Tewkesbury, as a waitress in a mobile canteen for the workers on the M5 motorway, then under construction nearby. Not that West had encouraged her to give up prostitution: far from it. It brought in regular money, and he enjoyed arranging her sexual appointments, and watching surreptitiously if the chance presented itself. Besides there was always the chance that if he could find a ‘nanny’, the girl might be ‘persuaded’ to work as a prostitute with his wife.
One experience that made a lasting impression on Frederick West was a party to which Rena took him and where he stayed for several hours despite claiming in his prison memoir that ‘All I wanted to do was to get back to Ana’. There is evidence that the party itself involved the deliberate humiliation and abuse of young women, some of whom were ‘sold’ to the organisers and forced to attend. One friend of West’s recalled many years later that West had told him that he had seen a man stub out a lighted cigarette on a young woman’s breast that night. The twin attractions of sexual excitement and financial gain that such a party offered almost certainly proved difficult for Frederick West to ignore.
Certainly, West would repeatedly ask the men he worked with at Oldacres whether they were interested in sex, and where he could meet girls. The older girls at Bishop’s Cleeve school soon began to talk about him among themselves, discussing what went on when they went up to Lake House after school and he ushered them into the caravan with its curtains drawn. There were tales of photographic sessions, and of the offer of abortions, of how much money a girl could make ‘on the streets of Cheltenham’ if she were willing. One girl at the time remembers that West was given the nickname ‘Weird Freddie’.
Rena West also set out to find clients for herself, and even started to call herself by the ‘working name’ of Mandy James.‘When Rena left the caravan one time,’ Frederick West recalled later, ‘I cleaned it all out, and I found all her letters underneath an old fireplace.’ His wife had taken an advertisement in the local newspaper saying: ‘Young, attractive lady looking for employment. Anything considered . . .’‘She got loads of letters. People actually offering real jobs. But a load of them were from actual men. Prostituting. And she had quite a round going on.’
Rena West came and went increasingly throughout their year together at Lake House in 1968. Their familiar pattern of argument, violence, departure and then reconciliation, which had been set in Scotland, continued, with West wheedling and encouraging at one moment, vicious and jealous at another, oscillating between a fascinated, lascivious delight in his wife’s sexual conquests and brutal retribution for her success. But this was not a face he showed to the young women he enticed into his caravan at Lake House. To them, as to outsiders in general, he was, on first acquaintance at least, the affable, engaging ‘friend’ that no one could possibly be afraid of, even if he were a little preoccupied with sex. The nudging innuendo, the smirking suggestion that he had employed with such success on the ice-cream van in Glasgow still stood him in good stead.‘He could be very, very persuasive,’ one young woman remembered from that time. He took photographs of the girls – or rather, more often than not, of their vaginas – with a new black-and-white Polaroid camera he had stolen. West’s fascination with the female anatomy had not disappeared.
Frederick West’s life was lived on the periphery of the law. Chances were there to be taken, and usually they came off. If sometimes they did not, there was nothing lost; he just kept on doing what he fancied. In the early summer of 1968 West was arrested for stealing a cheque and using it to buy a record-player for the caravan, and on 10 June 1968 he was convicted at Cheltenham Magistrates’ Court on one count of theft and another of obtaining goods by deception. He was fined £10 on each count, £20 in total, but it served only to encourage him. He vowed never to pay for anything unless he had to, and kept the vow throughout the rest of his life.
Now that Daisy West was dead, West took to taking his wife Rena and their two daughters to Moorcourt Cottage more regularly, and the young Scottish woman’s relationship with Walter West deepened still further.‘Cath’, as Walter West always called her, got on increasingly well with the rest of his family. In the summer of 1968 she even taught West’s youngest sister Gwen to drive in an elderly green van. Indeed, the young Scottish woman, who by this time had taken to abandoning her yellow peroxide dye from time to time and allowing her hair to return to its natural brown, seemed more content with her husband than ever before. Even though Frederick West had claimed at first that his marriage to Rena ‘wasn’t a wedding anyway . . . it was a convenience thing to cover the rules of me getting paid and that’, their relationship had now endured for more than five-and-a-half years.
Indeed, in spite of Frederick West’s violence towards his wife, he insisted in the last weeks of his life: ‘We didn’t get upset with each other over anything . . . Me and Rena, when we were at home, we used to go for long walks round the fields and that was our spot. It was an oak tree, and it sprayed out like an umbrella – it wasn’t very big.There was a hunting stile by the side of it.We used to sit up on this style and just look out over the valley, the woods, Much Marcle and all that.You could see the church clock. It was so peaceful, we loved it, and we used to make love there – regular. Whenever we had problems.When I was trying to persuade her to come back to the kids and all that, we used to go up there.’The tree and the stile were in Letterbox Field, only a few hundred yards from the site of Ann McFall’s body.
Rena West’s job on the mobile motorway canteen gave her plenty of opportunity to extend her activities as a prostitute, and for a time her husband joined her there, not only to help her to gather more clients but also to work as a trench digger for Costain’s, the motorway construction firm, and to drive one of the road-building machines. The hyperactive Fred West became known as ‘the best trench digger on the M5, a man who would keep on digging when everyone else had stopped’, and he himself was more than happy: ‘We were in a few bob then.Things were going well.’
His appetite for sexual abduction had not deserted him, however, and neither had his ability to escape detection. A thirteen-year-old girl would recall almost thirty years later how, in the late summer of 1968,West had tried to grab her but she had managed to get away. Once again, however, he eluded detection. She reported the details of the attack to the police, but he was never even questioned. Nor is she likely to have been his only intended victim that year. For West still could not control his desire for conquest, and there were always unsuspecting young girls to be found by the roadside.
‘Then Rena got pally with one the big boys on the motorway, and she pissed off with him and left me again,’ West would recall. It meant that he found himself on the dole, which he despised. As a result he became more determined than ever to persuade a local girl to look after his two daughters when they got home from school so that he could go out to work. It did not prove a particularly difficult task.The attraction of looking after a five-year-old and a six-year-old to the thirteen and fourteen-year-old girls West habitually targeted, in return for cash, and with the suggestion that they might earn even more, or ‘learn something about sex’, proved irresistible.
In spite of the fact that RenaWest had left Lake House for lengthy periods at the end of 1968 and into 1969, Frederick West never approached the local authority with the suggestion that perhaps his daughters should be taken voluntarily into care.With the help of a variety of schoolgirls, as well as a ‘fat girlfriend of Rena’s’ who had come down from Scotland, he managed to maintain the outward appearance that his daughters were being well looked after. If the truth were different, the local Bishop’s Cleeve schoolgirls he enticed to help him were not going to tell anyone – especially not after he had made sure that they were compromised by their own actions in making love to him. And it was while Frederick West was employing this system, and Rena West was away, that he encountered the girl who was to become his true apprentice.
Rosemary Pauline Letts was, in her mother’s words, ‘a babyish’ fifteen-year-old who had just left Bishop’s Cleeve comprehensive school when she met Frederick West. She almost certainly knew who he was, not least because so many of her contemporaries at school had made the illicit pilgrimage to his caravan at 17 Lake House. Indeed, he may have encouraged one of her friends to orchestrate their first – apparently chance – meeting, so exactly did she fit the pattern he always looked for in young women. This naive, unworldly girl, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, would have been only too susceptible to his particular form of flattery. What Frederick West did not know was exactly how perfect a target Rosemary Letts would turn out to be, or how alike they were.
Frederick West was twelve years of age and working in the fields alongside his father when Rosemary Letts was born in a maternity hospital on the North Devon coast near Westward Ho! on 29 November 1953. A small, brown-eyed baby, with olive skin, brown hair and an eager smile, she was the fifth child and fourth daughter of William and Daisy Letts of Northam. Indeed, though it may not have seemed so on the surface, her parents had much in common with Walter and Daisy West of Much Marcle, Herefordshire. Like Frederick West’s own mother, Daisy Letts had been in service when she met her husband, and she, too, had been at the start of her marriage as reserved as Daisy West had been at the start of hers.And like her counterpart in Herefordshire, she had rapidly discovered the violence that lay at the heart of her husband’s character. But, though William Letts was not as large and intimidating a man as Walter West, he was capable of even more extreme violence.
Married in April 1942 in Ilford, Essex, not far from Daisy’s parents’ home, the twenty-one-year-old Bill Letts and his twenty-four-year-old wife returned to the Letts’ family home in Devon immediately after the wedding, where he worked as a radio engineer.Their first child, Patricia, was born a year later, while they were still living with Daisy’s parents-in-law, and a second daughter arrived eighteen months after that, just as William Letts was about to be called up to join the Royal Navy as a radio operator. He was to remain in the Navy for the next seven years, serving at one stage on the aircraft-carrier Ark Royal, and volunteering to stay on after the end of the war in 1945. Indeed, it was not until after the birth of his third child, another daughter, Glenys, and the family had been given their own council house in Northam, that William Letts finally decided that the time had come to retire from the sea. He was still only thirty.
Bill Letts did not find it easy to fit into the family that he now suddenly found himself a member of. His three daughters were noisy, boisterous and untidy, and that offended his obsessive desire for neatness and order. And life in Northam rapidly became intolerable, not least because he found it difficult to keep a job when he found one. The martinet’s manner that he had depended on in the Navy was out of place among the high-hedged lanes, the holiday cottages and the caravans lined up overlooking the North Devon beaches.When his first son, Andrew, was born in 1952, Letts was briefly working as a television repair man, but his unbending attitude did not endear him to customers and he quickly lost the job. Letts took out his resentment on his family.
The Letts household rapidly became not so much a family home as a prison with only one sadistic jailer, William Letts. Letts would punish any infringement of his rules, or orders, with violence. If his wife disobeyed him he would hit her repeatedly; if the children did not perform their household chores on time and to his exact standards they would suffer the same fate. He thrashed them, throwing one daughter down the stairs, banging the head of another against a brick wall. If their mother protested she would be beaten again. As a result the children were taken on long walks across the sand by their mother to keep them out of their father’s way, to protect them from his temper. But, as Daisy Letts admitted many years later:‘We lived under terror for years.We literally suffered hell behind locked doors.’Though Bill Letts had never admitted it to his wife and family, he was a diagnosed schizophrenic, prone to violent mood swings, persecution mania and aggression.
By the beginning of 1953 Daisy Letts was suffering from anxiety and depression, and a psychiatrist recommended a course of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). At her husband’s insistence she went on to be given six treatments. It was while these violent electric shocks were being administered to her shaved skull that her fourth daughter, whom they were to christen Rosemary, was conceived.The foetus grew to its full term in the womb while the shocks were still being administered to her anxious and depressed mother. And, by the time she was two years of age, Rosemary Letts was regarded by her father as ‘thick as two short planks’. She would sit rocking from side to side for hours at a time, staring into space.
Rosemary Letts was to spend a good deal of her time as a child lost in her own world of make-believe. She would delight in her dolls and pet hamsters, but remain reserved when it came to her elder brothers and sisters. But the arrival of first one and then another younger brother, Graham and Gordon, provided the focus she came to depend on. The developing young girl kept herself a child by looking after children, making her younger brothers her own live dolls, happy in the knowledge that they at least looked up to her.The ‘slow’ baby grew into a ‘babyish’ child, dressed to suit her father’s old-fashioned rules, then an uncertain teenager, uncomfortable in the company of anyone except her own family.
Bill Letts had another unique inheritance to offer his ‘slow’ daughter, however, another of the secrets which she was to keep. Hardly had her elder sisters left home and thereby escaped his tyranny than the man who would suddenly take it into his head to scrub the carpets, or steam-clean a room, was to turn his attention to the sexual possibilities of his fourth daughter. The example of parental love that Rosemary Letts was to receive at her father’s knee was every bit as distorted as that offered to Frederick West by his own father.The male love that she saw as a child was brutal, irrational and perverted, but she learned to cope with it and to turn it to her advantage. Rosemary Letts may have been babyish, but she was not a fool.
At school, Rosemary Letts struggled to make sense of the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic, although eventually she did learn both to read and write. She took refuge in playing with her younger brothers, and any other small children who might take an interest in her, thereby following her father’s example, for he, too, took what some people in the village saw as an unhealthy interest in other people’s children. He secretly groomed her in an interest in his own sexual desires, and she, in response, learned quickly that satisfying her father’s demands meant a happier life. And so it did. He forgave her for her slowness, stupidity or misdemeanours for which he would brutally punish his other children. It did not take long for her to understand that this gave her power.
The gossip about Bill Letts finally drove him to leave Northam, and in 1960, at the age of thirty-nine, he moved his family across the county to Plymouth, where he found work in the Naval Dockyards at Devonport. The change of scene did nothing to soften his vicious temper. His wife’s depression, already manifest, became more serious, and within two years Bill Letts decided that the family should move again, this time to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he had been offered a job in a children’s home. But shortly after starting there he was evidently found unsuitable, and he moved on again, this time to a job with Smith’s Industries near Cheltenham.The Letts family moved with him to a semi-detached house on the company’s estate in the nearby village of Bishop’s Cleeve.The year was 1964, and Rosemary Letts was almost eleven.
In other respects the family’s circumstances remained much as before. Bill Letts’s finances improved, but not his temper, which he lost with increasing violence and agonising regularity, beating his children when the mood took him, and threatening his wife with a knife. He would turn off the electricity, insult the neighbours, lock his children out in the street if they were late home, and insist that his wife clean meticulously every inch of their semi-detached house. And he set out to make his fourth daughter his sexual puppet. He would remain a man she both feared and manipulated throughout the rest of his life.
Rosemary Letts learned her father’s lesson well. At Bishop’s Cleeve school, around the corner from her parents’ home at 96 Tobyfield Road, she soon began to show the same aggressiveness as her father, hitting anyone who annoyed her or who threatened her beloved younger brothers. By the age of thirteen, she was also the dominant force in the lives of all her brothers and sisters. Her father went out early in the morning to Smith’s Industries, not returning from his job as an electronics engineer until after six; her mother had taken a cleaning job starting at half-past three in the afternoons lasting into the evenings, which meant that she hardly saw her husband during the week.The eldest son Andrew was now working, and Rosemary was left in charge of her two younger brothers, Graham and Gordon.
All the Letts children were given household chores to do by their father before he left for work, but when they returned from school it was Rosemary Letts who saw that they were carried out. Taking her lead from him, she was also discovering and exploring the strength of her own sexuality. She took to walking around the three-bedroomed house naked when her parents were out, and bathing her brothers while she was alone in charge of them. Rosemary Letts would dry the two younger boys with infinite care as they stood naked in front of her on the bathmat, preparing them to sleep in the double bed which she shared with them both. It was not long before she started masturbating her brother Graham when she was in bed with him, finally tempting him into intercourse by straddling him.
Rosemary Letts did not restrict her sexual interest to her brother. She also revealed it in Bishop’s Cleeve, though not to her contemporaries at school. By the age of fourteen, Bill Letts’s daughter had focused her sexual energy on older men, flirting with them whenever she got a chance. Indeed, one of the men she may well have flirted with outside the shops in the centre of the village was Frederick West, by then settled at Lake House. By her own admission, she was to lose her virginity at fourteen, and within a matter of weeks of her fifteenth birthday in November 1968 she was to be raped by a stranger after he offered her a lift home from a Christmas party, an attack she did not report to the police.
By the first weeks of 1969 Daisy Letts could stand life at home with her husband no longer. She took her fifteen-year-old daughter Rosemary and her two younger sons Graham and Gordon to live with their elder sister Glenys, who had recently married a motor mechanic, Jim Tyler, in Cheltenham. Glenys ran a mobile snack-bar on Cirencester Road, while her husband worked in the town, but she was in the final stages of pregnancy, and asked her younger sister to stand in for her. Rosemary Letts agreed, and each morning Jim Tyler dropped her and the mobile snack-bar off at the roadside in a lay-by at Seven Kings, undertaking to return to collect them in the evening. And just as it did for Rena West only a few miles away, the mobile canteen provided Rosemary Letts with every opportunity to explore her by now promiscuous sexual appetite. Jim Tyler would often return to the snack-bar during the day to find his young sister-in-law climbing out of the cab of a lorry looking distinctly flushed and with her clothes dishevelled.
Removed from her father, Rosemary Letts embarked on a sexual relationship with an older man of thirty, who was a friend of her sister’s, and she left home briefly to live with him in Cheltenham, working as a trainee seamstress while she did so.The affair continued until the police discovered it, and she was warned to stay away from the man. That did not deter her. At first she would creep back to see him late at night, but eventually the relationship came to an end. Soon afterwards she went back to live with her sister Glenys. News of her affair with a man twice her age created something of a local scandal in Bishop’s Cleeve, and the gossip it had stirred up had its effect on her mother. Shortly after Rosemary’s return, Daisy Letts took her two younger sons and moved out of Glenys Tyler’s house without telling her daughter where she was going.
Rosemary Letts was alone, vulnerable and still only fifteen years of age. Inevitably, she turned back to the only person she believed truly loved her: her father. She moved back to Tobyfield Road to share his house, and this time there was no one else there to inhibit them. He went out each day to his job at Smith’s and his daughter took a job herself, at a baker’s shop in Cheltenham. She would start each morning at seven o’clock, and sometimes Bill Letts would collect her from the shop in his car, but as she often did not finish until after nine o’clock in the evening, more often than not she would wait for the bus to take her the four miles or so from the city to Bishop’s Cleeve.
It was while she was waiting for the bus that Rosemary Letts was raped for a second time. In her version of the events, a man approached her at the bus stop and started ‘chatting me up’, but she ‘resisted his advances’. He would not be put off, and started grabbing her, at which point, she later insisted, she ‘ran away’. She did not run towards the city centre, however, or to a nearby house to bang on the door. Instead, she ran ‘towards the park’ in Cheltenham.The man caught her at the entrance to the park, ‘smashed the padlock off the gate’ and dragged her down by the lake under some trees, where ‘he raped me’. But once again Rosemary Letts neglected to report the attack to the police, or indeed to anyone else. She simply returned home to her father, and resolved ‘to catch the bus in future from the main depot in Cheltenham’.
In fact, it is just possible that the man who raped Rosemary Letts in Pittville Park when she was fifteen, after standing beside her at a bus stop, was Frederick Walter Stephen West. And it is also possible that the violence of his attack stirred up such intense feelings within her that from that moment on she would be for ever in his grasp. It may just have been at that moment that West first identified a woman who shared his perverse sexual tastes, and who took as much delight in them as he did.
Whatever the truth, it was while she was again waiting for a bus, in the summer of 1969, that Frederick West first acknowledged that he approached Rosemary Letts. It was certainly not the first time he had seen her or heard about her. He knew her reputation in Bishop’s Cleeve. She and her father were a topic of conversation in the village, and she was among the girls from her school whom he would invite into his caravan. He would also know of her reputation for being ‘babyish’ and keen on children. At that particular moment,West would later recall,‘Rena had disappeared again’, and he was ‘on the dole – trying to find someone to help me look after the kids’.
‘I first met Rose at the Cheltenham bus station,’West explained in the last years of his life. ‘She was going on the same bus as me to Bishop’s Cleeve.’ The small, grimy man, wearing the inevitable overalls, had probably been waiting for her for some time, and he sat in the seat beside her without waiting to be asked. ‘I made a date with her there and then on the bus,’ he recalled.That was not how Rosemary Letts remembered it. In her version of the events, she refused West’s invitation to go out with him, and did so again a few days later when he approached her again at the same bus stop. But, eventually, she agreed when he came into the baker’s shop she was working at and shouted across to her:‘The Swallow – eight o’clock.’
‘You could see the pub from her house,’ West explained later. ‘That’s the reason I chose it.’ According to his version of events on that summer evening in 1969, he met Rosemary Letts outside the Swallow in Bishop’s Cleeve, but he did not take her inside for a drink. Instead, he took her ‘on home’ to his caravan at Lake House.‘There was a girl staying there,’ he explained,‘staying in the caravan, but she was on drugs and I couldn’t allow her near the children. But Rose refused to come in the van because the girl was there. She knew her.They went to school together.’ A disappointed West walked part of the way back to Tobyfield Road, according to his recollection, before returning to his caravan, waking up the sleeping girl and telling her that he was ‘taking her back to her mother’ the next morning.
Again, Rosemary Letts had a different version of events. According to her account,West not only bought her a drink in the Swallow, but he also produced ‘a fur coat and a lace dress’ as presents for her.‘I wanted him to take it back because I had no intention of getting involved with this man,’ she explained more than a quarter of a century later.‘But he insisted I took it, and I said there was no way I could take it home because my parents would not agree to it. So he took it and kept it in the caravan he lived in.’
Whichever version is true, there is no doubt that both Frederick West and Rosemary Letts agree that she started looking after Charmaine and Anna-Marie very shortly after that first meeting. ‘The next day I came home,’ West insisted, ‘Rose had been down and stripped the caravan – cleared it completely out. Loads of girls had been staying there. But Rose puts all the girls’ clothes and that. She put it all in a big tea-chest and said: “Dump that”.’ West did nothing of the kind. He gave the clothes, which included ‘knickers, bras, pants, God knows what’ – which he had been keeping as trophies of his sexual prowess – to another girl he knew.‘There was loads of Rena’s clothes as well, ’cause Rena never wore the same clothes twice. She never washed a pair of knickers in her life.When she took a pair off, she’s put a brand-new pair on.’Within a matter of days Rosemary Letts had become Frederick West’s newest partner.
West was now supporting himself partly from augmenting his income by stealing whatever he could, whenever he could, as ever determined to avoid paying for anything at every opportunity. ‘I would steal sand off the side of the road,’ he would admit cheerfully later, ‘and load it into my van.’ In June 1969 he was convicted of four motoring offences, including stealing a tax disc for the white camper-van with a blue stripe on its side which he was then driving. In August he was caught again, this time for straightforward theft. On the first occasion the Cheltenham magistrates fined him £22 and required him to pay £12 in road-fund duty, while on the second they fined him £50 and gave him a six-month prison sentence ‘suspended for two years’. He made no effort to pay either of these fines.
In the late summer of 1969, just as Daisy Letts was deciding to return to Tobyfield Road with her two youngest sons to live with her husband again, Rena West reappeared at Lake House. Unabashed, Frederick West introduced her to the fifteen-year-old girl who had been ‘babysitting for him’. This would not have deceived the twenty-five-year-old Scottish woman, who would have known exactly what West had been doing with the babyish Rosemary Letts, and now probably joined in.This would have had the added advantage of protecting her from the violence – the beatings, the abuse – to which he had so often subjected her.While he had a new young woman as a plaything, her husband would be more amenable, less vicious, than during those periods when she had to deal with him on her own.
There was another benefit too. Rena West did not intend to remain at Lake House for long, and she knew that the bait that her husband had used to lure Rosemary Letts into a sexual relationship with him was her two daughters, Charmaine and Anna-Marie. It meant that she could come and go as she pleased. There is little doubt that Rena West was only too pleased to see another ‘nanny’ looking after her girls as Ann McFall had done. Even a quarter of a century later Rosemary Letts would insist ‘I loved them straight away. I felt sorry for them because they never had their mother around to look after them’. What Rena West did not know was Rosemary Letts’s ambition to replace her – completely.
For his part Frederick West sensed how excited Rosemary Letts was at the prospect both of looking after the two children and of enlarging her sexual repertoire. By now she was a voluptuous young woman, with the generous breasts that West always sought, prepared to join him in any experiment he suggested.‘Rena got on well with Rose,’ West maintained in the last year of his life. ‘But I don’t think Rose liked Rena that much. Rose wanted her out, and, of course, when Rena disappeared, Rose stepped in a bit quick.’
In the third week of October 1969, when Rena West duly left her husband again, Rosemary Letts was there to ‘look after the children’. By now Frederick West had persuaded her to give up her job at the baker’s shop and to act as the children’s full-time nanny. He had agreed to pay her enough to give her mother the £3 a week she expected to receive, but had suggested it would be best if she said nothing about the arrangement. Instead, she pretended to leave every morning for Cheltenham as she had been doing, a deception which appealed to her and seemed to satisfy her parents.
At first all went well, but four weeks later, on 18 November,West was arrested for the non-payment of the two sets of fines imposed on him earlier in the year. Knowing that the Gloucestershire Children’s Department would not consent to Charmaine and Anna-Marie remaining in the care of a fifteen-year-old girl, he asked for them to be placed in care for the three days of his prison sentence. But when he was released, he found that the local authority had contacted his wife, who had returned to Bishop’s Cleeve and the caravan at Lake House.Their official ‘reconciliation’ was not destined to last.Three days after his release from prison, Rena West left him again, and her two daughters were returned to care, first with foster-parents and then at a children’s home not far away in Whitminster. It was to prove a wise decision, as, in early December 1969, Rena West was arrested for soliciting in Gloucester.
But even though Charmaine and Anna-Marie were now in care, and therefore not there to be looked after, Rosemary Letts was still a daily visitor to West’s ‘scruffy’ caravan at Lake House. For her parents’ benefit she was still pretending to go to Cheltenham, but by now she was living openly with West.To celebrate her sixteenth birthday in November, Frederick West maintained that he bought her ‘a fur coat – it was only imitation, mind, not the real McCoy – and a white lace dress and underslip, and bra and pants to take her out . . . ’cause she only wore school uniform all the time’.
Early in January, however, when Frederick West took her to the Swallow in Bishop’s Cleeve for a drink one evening, he encountered ‘her father standing there, with his crash-helmet on, and a big coat, wanting to fight me. I couldn’t do nothing. So anyway he hit me on the jaw and I walked away, and he took Rose home, and shouted down the road “I’m gonna burn you alive in the caravan tonight” or summat like that.’West ignored him.
The following evening West went round to Tobyfield Road. ‘Rose came to the door and nearly passed out with fright when she seen me stood there. I said:“Can I see your parents and let’s talk this over?” But they wouldn’t come out.’Two days later the meeting did take place, but it was not a success. Letts already sensed that his daughter’s relationship with this dirty-looking twenty-eight-year-old man with thick, bushy hair and sideburns was not platonic, and the thought enraged him. The more West boasted about the ‘hotel and caravan site’ that he owned in Scotland, the more incensed Letts became, and as West left his house he instructed his daughter that she was never to see this ‘dirty gypsy’ again. To make sure, he locked his daughter into the bedroom he had given her after his wife had returned, telling her that she would not be allowed to leave the house until she agreed to do as he said.
‘I wasn’t welcome in the family at all, by anybody, not from the beginning,’ Frederick West recalled later. ‘Rose had been banned from seeing me, by her parents. So I never seen Rose all over Christmas.’At the time he was working on a ‘big sandpit’ at Bishop’s Cleeve, driving a lorry on the site, transporting sand.‘It was snowing when I went to work after Christmas. The foreman said: “There’s a young lady at the cabin to see you.” It was Rose. She was stood outside the hut this morning. She said:“We’ve got to do something, ’cause Mum and Dad’s going to get a court order on me.” She said: “The only answer to it is . . . for you to get me pregnant.”And I said: “Is that what you really want?” And she said: “Yes.”’
It was indeed what she desired.West had touched a nerve in the young Rosemary Letts, a nerve that would never cease to vibrate through her body. Though she was not a virgin when they met, the sexuality that he introduced her to, sometimes with his wife’s assistance, had fanned a flame that would never be extinguished. Even before she knew she was pregnant by him, she wrote to West to confirm how much she loved him, and yet also to underline how afraid she still was of her father. ‘Last night made me realise we are two people, not two soft chairs to be sat on . . . I love you, Fred, but if anything goes wrong it will be the end of both of us for good.We will have to go somewhere far away where nobody will know us. I will always love you. Rose.’
Rosemary Letts suggested that she could meet West that Sunday afternoon by the boating-lake in Pittville Park, Cheltenham.‘I will have to get Lynda to say I’m going with her . . . Keep saying your prayers and remember I’ll always love you.’ Within a fortnight she knew that she was pregnant with Frederick West’s child, just as Ann McFall had been almost exactly three years before. But Rosemary Letts was not to suffer the same fate.