THE UGLY DUCKLING
‘And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin Is pride that apes humility.’
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, THE DEVIL’S THOUGHTS
William Letts underestimated his daughter’s stubbornness and guile. Used to being obeyed without question, and to her willing participation in his sexual life, he did not believe that she would disobey him. He thought she would see sense. Although he kept her locked in her bedroom at Tobyfield Road for the first weeks of 1970, he failed to realise that she would soon find ways to escape. The sixteen-year-old Rosemary Letts did so frequently, sneaking across Bishop’s Cleeve to visit Frederick West at Lake House, and relishing the secrecy and deception these exploits involved.The beating her father had administered when he had first discovered her affair with Frederick West had failed in its effect. She was flattered to be the subject of this older man’s attentions, and also more than a little pleased to have made her father jealous. Above all, she was also utterly delighted to be pregnant. The childish girl who liked to play with babies was about to have a baby of her own.
Rosemary Letts was fascinated by the world she had found herself being drawn into. The unbridled sexuality that oozed from her every encounter with West thrilled her and left her wanting to discover more and more about their sexual possibilities together. What is more, she knew that Rena West had been prepared to do almost anything to satisfy his appetite for sexual experiment, and she did not intend to be outdone. If Rena was a prostitute, she would be one too. If Rena was prepared to be tied up and whipped during intercourse, so would she be. If Rena was prepared to encourage young girls into the caravan for Frederick West to abuse, so would she. If Rena West’s pimp was Rolf, so he would be hers. If Frederick West wanted to make her his sexual slave, so would she be. Rosemary Letts knew how to do that: her father had been a good teacher.
Rosemary Letts was not, however, Frederick West’s only sexual partner. The Full Moon pub in the High Street in Cheltenham attracted crowds of young people, and West liked to sit in a corner of the bar and engage whomever he could in conversation. At twenty-nine, dressed in worn jeans, and with his hair as dark and unkempt as ever, he was an unlikely figure among the teenage hippies who made up the pub’s regular clientele. But Frederick West’s extravagant fantasies about his life, woven in an endless, unselfconscious stream, made him an object of some curiosity, which he turned to his advantage. West was looking for female companionship, especially the companionship of young women who might need a home for the night, and he was prepared to go to almost any lengths to find it. On one evening at the Full Moon, West ran into Terry Crick, a young man who had lived at the Watermead caravan site at Brockworth with him in 1965. Crick was hitchhiking with his girlfriend, and West offered them both a bed for the night at Lake House.
Terry Crick could not have bargained for what he was to discover at West’s caravan in the two nights that followed. Indeed, a quarter of a century later, when he was aged forty-eight, the memory was to drive him to commit suicide. But when he first accepted the invitation, Crick explained many years later, West just seemed ‘like a very nice bloke. I thought it would be fun’. It turned out to be a nightmare. Frederick West’s caravan had grown even gloomier in the weeks since Charmaine and Anna-Marie had been taken into care. Now there were tools, piles of old clothes and strange pieces of metal strewn around the small rooms in place of children’s toys.
The atmosphere was dismal, made even more so when West started to boast about his skill as an abortionist. If they ever ‘got into trouble’, he told Crick and his girlfriend, he could sort it out for them, and he produced what he called his ‘tools’ to prove it. Crick would remember many years later that one was a steel rod about a foot long with ‘something that looked like a corkscrew’ attached to the top of it. West then produced a set of black-and-white Polaroid pictures of what he said were the ‘vaginas of the girls’ he had operated on, and went on to inform Crick and his girlfriend that if ‘things went wrong’ during one of his operations, he would ‘sort the girls out once and for all’. The next morning West even took Crick to a ‘large wooden shed’ with a ‘dirt floor’ on the caravan site, and showed him a set of oxy-acetylene bottles and equipment.
For all that, the pair stayed that night and the next. One reason may have been that the Full Moon had a reputation at the time as a ‘drug pub’, and West made no secret of his interest in drugs, or of his approval of them. If young people wanted to take them, he was only too happy to play the willing host, the non-judgemental adult prepared to accept the vagaries of young people experimenting with their lives. If he did not take drugs himself, no more than he now ever drank more than a glass or two of shandy, that should not put them off. Frederick West liked the company of young people who were prepared to allow themselves to lose control. Once they had done so, they were at his mercy. It was his latest technique, a subtle addition to his repertoire of seduction, and one that he would refine in the years to come.
On their second night in the caravan, Crick and his girlfriend were introduced to Rosemary Letts.Terry Crick remembered more than two decades later how they lay awake that night listening to West and his newly pregnant sixteen-year-old girlfriend talking, making love and giggling.Towards the end of his life, Crick became convinced that during that night he had heard Frederick West and Rosemary Letts plan to commit murder, although he did not report the events to the police at the time. Instead, Crick and his girlfriend simply left West’s caravan the next morning.Terry Crick was never to return, although his girlfriend was to do so, one of the many young women who fell under Frederick West’s seductive spell, but not one of the young women who paid for that with their lives.
When William Letts discovered that he had been mistaken, and his daughter had given him the slip, he called on the local authority for help. In early February 1970, repeating his claim that Frederick West had been having sex with his daughter when she was still underage, he applied for an injunction to keep West away from her. West ignored the order, and a few weeks later Letts followed it up by insisting that his daughter be taken into care. Frederick West himself explained later:‘The reason she was put into care was she was expecting my baby, and they wanted to force her to have an abortion. It wasn’t until Rose was pregnant that all the trouble started. There was no hassle before, ’cause I never met ’em and didn’t know ’em.’ Letts was convinced that this would make his daughter see sense at last, and at first it seemed as though it had. After three weeks in a home for troubled teenagers in Cheltenham, Rosemary Letts announced that she was now prepared to have the abortion. ‘I came home on the Wednesday,’ she would remember later, and was ‘due to have the abortion on the following Monday.’
Rosemary Letts never had the abortion. She never planned to. She had simply hatched a plan to escape with the man she loved, Frederick West. On the Saturday before she was due to go to the clinic, she made an excuse to go into Cheltenham and met West, who was then working as a tyre-fitter at Cotswold Tyres. Together they agreed that instead of climbing into the ambulance that was coming to collect her on the following Monday morning, she would run across the road and climb into his van instead. But that plan, too, never came into effect. On the Sunday evening Bill Letts gave her an ultimatum:‘My father told me that I could stay at home as long as I went to work and earned money, and had an abortion, and had no boyfriends. Or I was told I could go off with this Fred West and never see my family again.’ Letts also told her that if she chose the second option, and he saw them together in the street,‘he would knife us’.
Rosemary Letts left home, and Bishop’s Cleeve. She chose to have her child, and to take on Frederick West’s two children. ‘I wanted them to have parents and a better home life, and I wanted my baby,’ she maintained later. Frederick West was delighted. He was under no illusions about why Bill Letts had made his daughter’s life so difficult. He sensed the sexual abuse in the Letts family as surely as he recognised it in his own.‘Why her father wanted to get rid of the baby and get her back home was ’cause he’d lost her, sort of thing, when her was with me.’
His delight was short-lived. Just as Rosemary Letts decided to leave home, Rena West reappeared. She had turned up at Cotswold Tyres and announced that she had come back to him. They could take the children out of care. West could hardly refuse, and no sooner had she settled back into Lake House than Charmaine and Anna-Marie were reclaimed from the Parkland’s Children’s Home. But then Rena ‘did the dirtiest trick she’s ever done on me in her whole life’. After collecting the two girls, ‘We took ’em home, put them to bed. I got up the next morning and Rena had scarpered. So I had to put them back again.’
By now the local authority was beginning to lose patience, and it insisted that West should find a ‘permanent home’ for his family. If he failed to do so, it would take his two daughters into care formally, rather than simply offering them voluntary foster-homes when he ran into temporary difficulties. It was one reason why Frederick West had been keen for Rosemary Letts to join him, ‘so I could get the girls back’. But even before her father’s ultimatum, West had told the local authority that his brother John would be moving into a small flat in Clarence Road, Cheltenham, with his wife to live with him and provide a permanent home for the children. It was another of his plausible lies, another invention to keep the prying eyes of authority at bay, but Frederick West calculated that the arrival of Rosemary Letts would fill the gap before the local Children’s Department discovered the truth. Or at least, he could lie to make it appear that way.
It was with his customary sly subservience that West rang the local authority in the last days of February 1970 to tell it that ‘their mother had returned again’ to live with him and Rosemary Letts, and therefore there was no reason for his two children to remain with the two separate sets of foster-parents they had been with for the past week. The ruse worked because, like so many of his lies, it was partly true. The Children’s Department had no particular reason not to believe him. As far as it could see,West was the single stable element in the lives of the two little girls in the Department’s temporary care, and he was doing everything in his power to help. What the Department did not do, it would appear, was to check the living-conditions that West was intending to provide for his children.There is no evidence that the local authority ever went to see the single room that he and the two women were supposed to be living in with Charmaine and Anna-Marie at 9 Clarence Road. As Rosemary Letts was later to recall: ‘It was a real pit. We were all in this little room together . . . There was just a tiny sink in the corner. It was hopeless.’
In fact the ménage was to last only a few days. When Bill Letts discovered where his daughter was, he informed the police rather than the local authority, and insisted formally that Frederick West had been having sex with his daughter while she had been under the age of sixteen, thereby breaking the law. At the police’s insistence, the local authority intervened and placed the two children back in a foster-home. But yet again Bill Letts was to be thwarted. When a police surgeon examined Rosemary Letts, he discovered that she could not have conceived before her sixteenth birthday, as her pregnancy was not sufficiently advanced. As a result West was interviewed only briefly, and not detained. In the circumstances the local authority decided it could not hold on to the children.
The experience of being interviewed had convinced West that he had to do something. Partly annoyed by his wife Rena, who had insisted on visiting her daughters while they were being fostered ‘and only taking Charmaine out . . . not Anna-Marie. I mean, Anna-Marie was a complete failure as far as she was concerned, never should have happened’, and partly furious with Bill Letts for subjecting him to the police interview, Frederick West decided to disappear.Without telling his wife or Letts,West arranged to collect his two daughters on the morning of Good Friday, 27 March 1970. But he did not take them back to 9 Clarence Road. Frederick West and Rosemary Letts had decided to start their life together in the city that he had always loved: Gloucester.
In the first week of April 1970 they moved into a one-bedroomed flat at number 10 Midland Road, on the east side of the city’s central park. Filled with once-respectable Victorian villas, the area was to be their home for the next quarter of a century. Down at heel, with bags of rubbish littering the pavements, it was a long way from the days when the villas might have housed a local solicitor’s clerk. Now each house was broken up into flats, the houses’ once-proud front gardens often obscured by paving-slabs, the rear all too often overgrown with nettles. The area reflected something of Gloucester itself – itinerant, shifting, perched at a crossroads, a city that was somehow doomed to be a meeting of railway lines and canals that took its inhabitants in other directions. Its population always seemed to be wondering where to set off for next, be it the River Severn, the Cotswolds or the West Country.
Rosemary Letts refused to stay in the new flat for more than a fortnight.‘It was the first experience Rose had ever had of coloured people, and she didn’t enjoy it,’ West recalled, and he arranged for them all to move to 4 Park End Road.Then two months later they were back in Midland Road, though at number 25. The flat was on the ground floor of a substantial square villa, with a bedroom, living room and small kitchen. There were two other flats in the house, on the first and second floor, and a basement, which, when they moved in, was occupied by an elderly Polish gentleman: ‘But it was uninhabitable, really, and he moved out.’ There was also a small unkempt garden at the rear, where an elderly coal cellar was attached to the house.
Frederick West was still working at Cotswold Tyres, but spending more time each evening working for the owner of the flat, a Polish immigrant called Frank Zygmunt, who was encouraging West to learn about the building trade. The harder West worked, the more work Zygmunt gave him and the more grateful he became. The faster Zygmunt could make habitable some of the run-down houses he had been buying up in the area, the sooner he would be able to rent them out. Zygmunt came to rely increasingly on the willing Frederick West.
Charmaine West was now a bright, energetic seven-year-old, and in September 1970 she joined the nearby St James’s School, while Anna-Marie West, now six and more subdued than her elder stepsister, remained at the Hatherley Infants’ School that she and Charmaine had attended earlier that summer. Each afternoon they would return home to the increasingly pregnant sixteen-year-old girl who was now acting as their mother. Charmaine was the prettier of the two girls, her soft brown skin setting off a sparkling childish smile, while her sister was coarser featured, with her father’s broad nose and wide-set eyes.
In spite of their time in foster-homes, they were lively, interested children, obviously only too happy to be back with their father again. But Charmaine made little secret of the fact that she preferred her mother Rena to Rosemary Letts. ‘For a start Charmaine hated Rose and told her so,’ Anna-Marie was to write a quarter of a century later. ‘She never missed a chance to remind Rose about our real mother.’ West was well aware of the animosity, but he did nothing to soften it. If anything, he seemed instead rather to encourage it. Indeed, from their first weeks together West had instructed his two daughters to call Rosemary Letts ‘Mum’, even though they were reluctant to do so, just as he told them to call their mother Rena ‘Aunty’ on the few occasions that she came to stay with them. Neither child wanted to obey him, but both knew just how vicious his temper could prove to be in private. Charmaine, in particular, suffered the same coldness from Frederick West that she had in Glasgow. She was not his child, and never had been. ‘He always favoured Anna-Marie,’ was how one of her mother’s sisters described it.
Rena West was not there to protect her first-born daughter, although she had not forgotten her. On one of her many trips back to Scotland in 1969, Rena West had formed a new relationship, and had taken her new boyfriend to meet one of her sisters that Christmas. Now, as 1970 progressed, she told her family that she was considering taking both her daughters to Saudi Arabia with her in the near future, as her new boyfriend was getting a job there. She was going to make an exploratory trip, and then go down to collect them as soon as she had decided what to do for the best. One thing was abundantly clear. Rena West did not want to leave Charmaine with her husband for very long, because she had always been worried about his attitude towards the bright-eyed little girl with skin the colour of light chocolate.
But it was not Frederick West who disciplined the ‘lovely’ little mixed race girl who had just come out of care. He had handed over the task to the pregnant sixteen-year-old girl who had become his willing pupil. West had told her firmly that Charmaine was ‘about old enough for the strap now’, and the childish young girl with long dark hair and wide brown eyes had lost no time in putting his wishes into practice. Rosemary Letts preferred a wooden spoon to the leather strap West remembered from his own childhood, but in every other respect he approved of her violent, often brutal, punishments. The violence that had been part of life at Tobyfield Road now surfaced in Midland Road, with the encouragement of the man who had replaced her father as the one significant male in her life. When she administered her punishments Frederick West would never complain, only ever advising her not to hit them ‘where it would show’. And, as her pregnancy wore on that summer, so her temper shortened still further.
But Frederick West did not only expect Rosemary Letts to look after the children; he also expected her to take over from Rena West and trade as a prostitute. In his mind there was no reason not to continue with a system that had worked perfectly well in the past. West suggested that she start working the bus garage, just as Rena had done in Glasgow. For her part, Rosemary Letts was quite prepared to go along with the plan. She even gave herself the same professional name that his wife Rena had used, Mandy. Meanwhile, West took a job as a milkman, delivering for Model Dairies in the early mornings before going on to his other job as a tyre-fitter. The milk-float presented him with a chance to see what ‘opportunities’ might present themselves during his rounds, and West was still an incorrigible thief, taking whatever he could, whenever the opportunity presented itself.
One night in late September 1970 Bill and Daisy Letts turned up without warning at Midland Road, having discovered from one of her sisters where their daughter was living. ‘There was a knock on the door, and Rose went to the door. She was very near due to have her baby,’ West recalled. ‘Rose come back to me and she looked as white as a sheet . . . and she said,“Mum and Dad’s at the door”.’West went to the front door himself, and said:‘Look, I’ve got nothing against you whatsoever, but give me any trouble and I’ll give you more trouble than you brought me.’Then, after consulting their daughter, West invited them in. ‘We got on quite well . . . It was only a matter of days before Rose fell into labour, and her mother and father said they would have the children . . . Charmaine and Anna-Marie, while she was in hospital.’ Someone to look after his daughters was not the only advantage Frederick West may have seen in a reconciliation with the Lettses. He may also have sensed a way in which he could draw Bill Letts into his own plans, knowing his lust for his own daughter, and aware that the knowledge gave him a hold over him. ‘He was bloody everlasting there after that,’ West would remark in the last months of his life.
On 17 October 1970 Rosemary Letts, who now called herself Mrs Rose West, gave birth at Gloucester Royal Hospital to the child she had conceived shortly after her sixteenth birthday. She and West decided to christen the dark-haired, blue-eyed baby girl Heather Ann. But the child had been at home in Midland Road for only two weeks when West was arrested for ‘swapping’ a vehicle excise disc from one of Frank Zygmunt’s vans to his own, and changing the details. Two weeks later he was arrested again, this time for the theft of four tyres from his employers at Cotswold Tyres. Not surprisingly, West was dismissed as a tyre-fitter, and he went to work for Frank Zygmunt every day, after he had finished his milk round, still apparently convinced that he could get away with anything. In this he was to be proved wrong.
His new daughter was barely seven weeks old when Frederick West was fined £50 and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment at Gloucester Magistrates’ Court for the theft of the tyres and the road fund disc. In turn, that conviction breached the suspended sentence he had been given the previous August in Cheltenham for the theft of some fencing, which brought him a further six months’ imprisonment. On the afternoon of 4 December 1970 Frederick West left court for Gloucester Prison, barely a mile away from his house, and the first night of a nine-month sentence. But his problems did not end there. On 31 December he returned to court again to receive a further one-month sentence for another theft, which brought his total sentence to ten months. Frederick West was to spend the next six months and three weeks in prison, first in Gloucester and then at Leyhill Open Prison. Meanwhile, Rosemary Letts was left alone in Midland Road with Charmaine, Anna-Marie and her new baby daughter Heather. She was just seventeen.
In Leyhill Open Prison at Wotton-Under-Edge in Gloucestershire, twenty-one miles from his home, Frederick West acted exactly as he had trained himself to do in the presence of anyone in authority. Prisoner Number 401317 calmly settled into life there from 27 January until 24 June 1971 aware that he was not entitled to either ‘home leave’ or ‘outside work’. Even had he been able to,West would have been reluctant to abscond. He would not have been anxious to risk the possibility of a return to theVictorian prison at Gloucester with its locked cell doors, rather than the more relaxed atmosphere of Leyhill, where the prisoners could walk around the grounds between five and nine o’clock each evening if it was light. He passed his time by making elaborate models out of matchsticks, including one of a gypsy caravan.
Frederick West was nothing if not a model prisoner at Leyhill. Without fail he called the prison officers ‘sir’ at every opportunity, and presented himself to them, as he did to the world at large, as a meek, humble man who was ‘only too anxious to please’ and ever prepared to ‘help out’. It was the approach that West had perfected with the local authority Children’s Department over the past four years of his ‘asking for their help’ in finding ‘a temporary home’ for Charmaine and Anna-Marie. West would never argue or use bad language in the presence of a prison officer, or anyone from the Children’s Department, just as he would take particular care to treat every policeman or policewoman with whom he came into contact with an almost obsequious humility. To the outside world he made sure that he seemed no more than an insignificant petty thief with a taste for slightly smutty jokes.
But within the privacy of his own home Frederick West was quite a different person. In her first months in Gloucester, Rosemary Letts had been subjected to the same violence and rapacious sexual demands that Rena West had been forced to put up with seven years before in Glasgow. But, unlike Rena West, Rosemary Letts had found the experience intensely exciting. It had steadily begun to bind her ever more tightly to the dark, brooding man she now shared her life with. She had increasingly sought to excite him herself, vying to outdo his imagination with her own sexual experiments. And now, even though he was incarcerated twenty-one miles away in Leyhill Prison, she saw no reason to stop. Rosemary Letts took great pride in recounting her sexual experiences to Frederick West in hushed whispers during her afternoon visits every four weeks.They would huddle together, their new baby on her lap, giggling like children while Charmaine and Anna-Marie amused themselves nearby. Frederick West and Rosemary Letts had begun to forge the unique and secret bond that would bind them together for ever, insulating them from an inquisitive world.
So even though West was temporarily no longer resident at 25 Midland Road, it was his personality that was the dominant force there, he who shaped how the family lived. It was his encouragement that led Rosemary Letts to beat Charmaine with a wooden spoon, and his enthusiasm that led her to continue working as a prostitute while he was away. West did not only do so to increase her sexual enjoyment, however; he did so for a more practical reason. Frederick West had organised a system of sexual barter for some of the goods and services Rosemary Letts would need while he was away. He almost certainly offered her to his landlord, for example, in exchange for the payment of rent, as well as to other people whom he believed might be useful in looking after her. For her part, Rosemary Letts was only too happy to agree to the arrangement. Sex fascinated her.When Bill Letts appeared to try to persuade her to leave Midland Road and return to Bishop’s Cleeve with him, she had no difficulty in turning him down.
Even though he was in prison, FrederickWest ruthlessly exploited his young partner’s interest in sex, instinctively recognising that her brutalising experiences with her own father had coarsened her attitude to intercourse.‘Making love to your father, you don’t have a chat-up, I shouldn’t think,’ he confided towards the end of his life. ‘So she lost that part of her life. Rose didn’t want foreplay; she wanted rough sex.’ West put her appetite to his use. And he could not have had a more willing pupil.
But West not only called on his landlord to take advantage of his wife; he also asked Rena’s pimp, Rolf, to provide her with clients. In fact, towards the end of his life West suggested that the pimp had taken an interest in Rose after being introduced to her by Rena West. Indeed, his wife was the other person whose help he called upon while he was in prison. His daughter Charmaine had told him that Rosemary Letts had ‘tied up and gagged’ her and Anna-Marie while he was in Leyhill. And even though the seventeen-year-old had told him,‘It was only play’,West nevertheless ‘got Rena to keep an eye on Rose and the kids while I was in prison’. Another reason for doing so was that he wanted the two women to compete for his attentions. It confirmed his power over both of them.
Rena West and Rosemary Letts were in constant contact while West was in Leyhill Prison, just as they had been before his sentence.Towards the end of his life West remembered that all three of them had briefly stayed at 9 Clarence Road in Cheltenham, and explained that he had also seen his wife just before being sent to prison, when Rena had returned from Reading to ‘work for some Irish blokes in Gloucester – prostituting’.Although Rosemary Letts was to deny it repeatedly during her trial, there is no doubt that she was only too well aware of Rena West’s activities – and of her ambition to return to Frederick West’s protection.
‘Rose used to come down and see me in prison regular,’ he recalled, ‘and she told me that Rena was seeing the girls at school.’ West relished the idea that the two women were competing for him, just as he knew that Rena’s visits to her children, and particularly to Charmaine, would not endear her to Rosemary Letts: ‘’Cause this was giving Charmaine ammunition to use on Rose . . . Charmaine used to say to Rose: “I’m going with my mammie shortly, so I’m not taking no orders off you”.’
The possibility that his lively stepdaughter might annoy the young woman who was just nine-and-a-half years older than she was suited Frederick West. It was another means of control over both his wife and Rosemary Letts. If Charmaine felt the rough edge of Rosemary Letts’s tongue, or the back of her hand, West was perfectly happy. He even told his wife so, and on 4 May 1971 Rosemary Letts acknowledged it in a letter she sent to West in Leyhill Prison. Headed ‘From Now Until Forever’, her letter explained: ‘Darling, about Char. I think she likes to be handled rough. But darling, why do I have to be the one to do it.’ She went on: ‘I would keep her for her own sake, if it wasn’t for the rest of the children.You can see Char coming out in Anna now.And I hate it.’ The letter was signed: ‘Well, Love, keep happy, Longing for the 18th.Your ever worshipping wife, Rose.’
During her visit on 18 May, when Rosemary Letts took both Charmaine and Anna-Marie with her to Leyhill, Frederick West discussed with her the possibility that the elder child might leave them. In a letter to her dated that day,West wrote a rare letter: ‘Let me know about Char, yes or no. I say yes, but it is up to you darling, and then we can have our son, ha ha, darling and we will keep our own darling.’ Significantly, he concluded:‘I love you and Anna and Heather forever my darling.’
The power West wielded over the ‘babyish’ young woman who was now calling herself his wife was clear in another letter Rosemary Letts sent to Frederick West a little later. Once again headed ‘From Now Until Forever’ it explained: ‘I know you love me darling. It just seems queer that anyone should think so much of me.’ Dated 22 May 1971, the letter concluded: ‘Sending all my love & heart your worshipping wife, Rose. PS Love, I’ve got the wireless on and its playing some lovely romantic music. Oh! How I wish you were here beside me. Still remembering your love & warmth, Rose.’ It was decorated with a heart and a set of crosses for kisses.
Rosemary Letts had become confident enough to tell West that the one person not welcome in her life was Charmaine. On one of her visits to Leyhill, she clearly told him that she would be quite happy to see Charmaine West disappear. West confirmed it in a letter he wrote that day: ‘So you say yes to Char, that good. I will see to it when I get out, but don’t tell her for you know what she is like and you can have our son as soon as I come out.’ For her, the child was a potent reminder of the woman she wanted to replace. For West, Charmaine was simply a tool with which to extend his power over Rosemary.
Exactly as he had planned it should, Rosemary Letts’s dislike of Charmaine West developed into loathing during his period in Leyhill Prison. It meant that years later Frederick West could pretend that the dislike was all hers, suggesting that ‘we were going to let Charmaine go off with Rena . . . ’cause what I wanted to do was to just come home, grab the kids, get another place, and forget about it. But Rose didn’t fucking want that because Charmaine was giving Rose a hard time.’ At her trial for the murder of Charmaine West, Rosemary West admitted herself that the eight-year-old ‘could be very awkward . . . disruptive’, that she ‘would shout and throw furniture about . . . and wouldn’t eat’, concluding, ‘if she thought I wanted her to do something, she wouldn’t do it’, and made it clear that she wanted to ‘be with her natural mother’. But the truth of the matter was that Frederick West himself had orchestrated their hatred of one another.
One person who remembered the animosity between the eight-year-old and her babyish minder was West’s other daughter, Anna-Marie, who wrote later:‘For a start Charmaine hated Rose and told her so. She would go out of her way to antagonise and aggravate our volatile stepmother. She never missed a chance to remind Rose about our real mother.’ And that did not in the least improve Rosemary Letts’s temper. As the weeks passed she became steadily more and more aggressive towards both children. ‘She made us do most of the household chores despite our ages,’ Anna-Marie remembered, ‘and if we didn’t do them right she erupted. Doing them right, of course, meant doing them Rose’s way: there was no other. If you did it wrong you got a hiding.’
Another person who witnessed Rosemary Letts’s loathing for Charmaine West was her upstairs neighbour at 25 Midland Road, Shirley Giles. She had moved into the house at about the same time as Frederick West, and Mrs Giles’s elder child Tracy, who was only two months older than Charmaine, had started to play with the eldest of the three children in Rosemary Letts’s care. One morning Tracy went downstairs to borrow a cup of milk from her friend’s flat. Years later she would recall: ‘Charmaine was standing on a chair with her hands behind her back. All I could see was this huge brown leather belt. It held her wrists. The prong of the belt was stuck into the leather above the buckle.There was a lady beside her with a spoon in her hand.’ Mrs Giles was told later by Rosemary Letts that ‘Charmaine had been very naughty and she had to teach her a lesson, to teach her wrong from right’, but the words might almost have been spoken by Frederick West, and the brown leather belt could certainly have belonged to his late mother Daisy.
Shirley Giles and her family left 25 Midland Road shortly after the incident with the spoon and the leather belt, but the injuries to Charmaine had not come to an end. At six-fifty in the evening of 28 March 1971 she was treated at the casualty department of Gloucester Royal Hospital for a ‘puncture wound’ to her left ankle, which was the result of a ‘domestic accident’. In fact, it was in all probability a knife wound – a stab from a kitchen knife. Not long afterwards Anna-Marie was taken to the doctor with a deep gash in the side of her head, requiring stitches, which Rosemary Letts insisted was the result of a fall. Once again it was nothing of the kind.The truth of the matter, as Anna-Marie was to recall, was that the seventeen-year-old Rosemary Letts had snatched her cereal bowl from her hand one morning ‘and lashed out, breaking it across my head in one movement’.
The only child safe from Rosemary Letts’s temper was her own baby daughter Heather, still only a few months old. She ‘absolutely adored children until they were about one year old’, Anna-Marie remembered years afterwards. ‘She loved the helplessness of them, and she loved to do things for them . . . But the moment children developed signs of independence, such as crawling, walking or talking, things changed. Then they became a nuisance and would feel the sharp end of her tongue and her temper.’
No matter the punishment inflicted, however, Charmaine West never allowed herself to lose control. She refused steadfastly to let Rosemary Letts intimidate her, and took whatever violence was meted out to her stoically, never once allowing herself even to shed a tear. The tiny smiling girl, who still wet the bed, and whom Frederick West himself called ‘fiery and comical’, even had her collar-bone broken by her new ‘Mum’, but she was not even taken to the hospital for an examination. In the cold dark nights she would simply lie in the narrow single bed under the window in the rear bedroom that she shared with her half-sister, listening to the wind rattling the panes above her, and whispering: ‘Anna-Marie, Anna-Marie, the witches are trying to get in.They’re going to get us.’
Frederick West was released from Leyhill Prison in the early hours of the morning of 24 June 1971, and he took the bus home to Midland Road, Gloucester. Rosemary Letts and he celebrated by going to bed together as soon as Charmaine and Anna-Marie had gone to school, but otherwise it was a miserable home-coming. The floorboards were still bare, there was hardly any furniture, and as soon as he returned both the electricity and the gas supply were cut off.‘When I came out of prison they didn’t pay any of the bills, just told the gas, electric and all that. So we all, more or less, slept in the front room . . . with a candle and an oil fire,’ West recalled. ‘Actually, the oil fire blew up some months later and set fire’ to the small kitchen/breakfast-room. But the lack of light and heat served only to exacerbate further Rosemary Letts’s already short temper. She had been left to ‘hold the fort’, she told West fiercely; now he had to ‘sort things out’.
Exactly what happened to the West family in the next few weeks remains shrouded in mystery. Both Frederick West and Rosemary Letts have given relentless, conflicting versions of the events surrounding these summer months in 1971. One thing is clear, however. After these weeks were over, the lives of two more young people, Charmaine and Rena West, had been snuffed out, and their bodies buried in narrow graves. Rosemary Letts was to see her rival, and her rival’s first child, brutally murdered.
Throughout the last months of his life Frederick West insisted regularly that Charmaine West did not disappear until ‘about two or three weeks’ after he was released from Leyhill Prison, although at one moment, as he did on so many occasions, he changed his mind and said he could not ‘quite remember’ when she left. But West did not deny that ‘Rose never liked Charmaine really. I turned a blind eye to it, because I couldn’t do nothing about it. I wouldn’t separate ’em. It was either getting rid of Rose or putting them in a home . . . What the hell! I didn’t know what to fucking do about it.’
In the end, however, with Rosemary Letts’s insistent barking voice in his ear,West decided to ‘sort it out’.Whatever the truth of exactly when Charmaine disappeared, there is no doubt whatever that Frederick West eventually confessed to the murder of the half-caste daughter of his wife Rena and the Pakistani ‘Billy Boy’. In his early interviews with the police after his arrest in 1994, West admitted that he killed Charmaine ‘about a week’ after his release from prison, while she was sleeping in the back of his wife’s car, and immediately after he had killed her mother.
In this first version he explained:‘Rena came and seen Rose when I was in prison, and Rose said, “Look, you’ll have to wait ’til Fred comes”, ’cause it was only a couple of weeks.’West then maintained that Rena had come to collect her daughter from Midland Road to ‘take her away’, shortly after his release from prison, but that he had arranged to meet her later, at a local pub, because Rosemary Letts was ‘so upset’ at the prospect of losing the child.
‘I took Rena in the pub and got her absolutely paralytic, and then took her out to Dymock in the country where I know, and I strangled her and buried her.’ He then went back to his wife’s car, where Charmaine was asleep ‘because her mother had given her lager or something’ in a bottle with a straw.
‘There was Charmaine in the back of it. I thought, What am I going to do now? . . . So, anyway, I strangled her while she was sleeping ’cause there’s no way I could have touched her in any other way and wrapped her up in the back and drove back to Midland Road.
‘I sat there for . . . must have been an hour, just thinking, and then . . . I suddenly thought to get Charmaine and take her in . . . so I went to pick her up and of course she was stiff . . . I picked her up . . . out of the back and I mean she just flopped over, like . . . and I thought she was dead. There was no doubt about it . . . She’d peed all over the back seat and . . . everything and I mean you know her eyes was just open. She was lying looking at me and I closed her eyes, and then I carried her round the back.’
West admitted matter-of-factly that he had put the dead child’s body in ‘a coal cellar under the kitchen’, where there was ‘probably two foot of slack coal in the bottom of it. So I dug that out and laid her along the back of the wall, on the house wall, the main building wall, facing in towards the wall . . . Charmaine was wrapped up in a lot of blankets,’ West maintained. ‘She wasn’t cut up or nothing . . . she was fully clothed and everything. There were no clothes taken off her or nothing . . . She wasn’t dismembered at all.’ As soon as he had finished, he had gone back upstairs and climbed into bed to cuddle Rosemary Letts, who was crying – because she was ‘so upset to have lost this girl she loves’.
That version of events bore little resemblance to the truth, and not long afterwards West adapted his story to disguise what had actually happened to the child. He suggested that the child’s body ‘must have been removed to the municipal tip’ in Gloucester when a demolition firm had worked on an extension to the back of 25 Midland Road.Yet again, this was an attempt to throw the police off the track, and to maintain his story that nothing whatever had happened to the child – beyond his strangling her. Before the police began excavating Midland Road,West went even further in his effort to persuade them not to search for her body, and retracted his confession altogether, telling the police:‘You won’t find nothing at Midland Road, ’cause Charmaine’s in India.’
It was yet another of Frederick West’s lies. The ugly truth was quite different. When Charmaine West’s remains were eventually recovered from a small, square, nine-feet deep hole under the kitchen area of 25 Midland Road at seven-ten in the evening of Wednesday 4 May 1994, there was every sign that she had been both naked and dismembered when she was buried.The four-feet, five-inch tall girl had been planted, just as Ann McFall had been planted, her tiny naked body stuffed into a well-dug hole just two feet square. Her hands were missing, and so were a great many of her foot and toe bones, as well as both her kneecaps, and there was also evidence that she had been all but cut in half, her legs torn out from her pelvis at the hips.
After the discovery of her skeleton, Frederick West refused to confirm that he was responsible for her death, repeatedly saying ‘No comment’ when questioned by the police. Nevertheless, only a few weeks later West told his first solicitor, Howard Ogden, that Rosemary Letts had killed the girl. It was an accident, West said in July 1994: ‘She grabbed her by the throat and killed her.’ But even that version of events he was to retract, suggesting just two weeks later that Rosemary Letts had told him:‘I gave her an overdose of aspirin or something, because you were trying to find Rena.’
West then revised that version, suggesting that Rosemary Letts had killed the girl after he had come out of prison, but that ‘I never knew nothing about Charmaine’. In this version Rosemary Letts had told him that Rena had taken the girl ‘to India’, and he had not discovered until much later that Rosemary Letts and the pimp Rolf had disposed of Charmaine’s body, putting it in a suitcase.They had then told him later that ‘They wanted to put it on the municipal tip’. Not one of Frederick West’s many versions of these events, whether to the police or to his original solicitor, rings true.
No one can be entirely sure how eight-year-old Charmaine West met her death, but there are a number of clues to suggest that she may have died in an even more horrifying way than West had the courage to admit. Shortly after the discovery of her body in Midland Road, for example, West was asked if sex or bondage had anything to do with the child’s death, and, although he refused to answer the question directly, he nodded his head.
There is no doubt that Frederick West regarded an eight-year-old girl as ‘a sexual object’ who had to be ‘broken in’ to the ways of sexuality by her father.‘It’s a father’s job’ he would tell his daughter Anna-Marie only a year or so later. ‘I’m just doing what all fathers have to do. It’s a normal thing, so stop carrying on.’ Indeed, in the years to come West was to tell some of his other female children exactly the same thing, just as he was to sexually abuse some of them, telling them that his own father had done exactly the same thing before him.
Although the thought is a terrifying one, there is every reason to suspect that Frederick West raped his eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine in the coal cellar of 25 Midland Road just weeks after his release from prison in the early summer of 1971. West was almost certainly assisted in the task by Rosemary Letts, who was to help him do exactly the same thing just eighteen months later to Rena West’s other daughter, Anna-Marie. The giggling couple from the caravan at Lake House were thereby to be forced even closer, their intimacy, forged by her father’s adverse reaction and West’s subsequent imprisonment, now confirmed. It was West’s last test for the young woman from Tobyfield Road, her participation the final proof that she was trustworthy, and the final tie to him that she would never be able to break. For ever afterwards they would be isolated together in their own bizarre, evil world.
Bound with tape so that she could not move, her naked body tied with sheeting, gagged and then penetrated by a man who should have been her protector, with the help of a young woman then still only seventeen who pretended to be her mother, Charmaine West’s murder was an act of irredeemable evil.
Whether the spirited eight-year-old girl with a large gap between her front teeth was killed because she threatened to tell her mother, or the school authorities, what Frederick West and Rosemary Letts had done to her in the cellar of 25 Midland Road can only be a matter for speculation. It is equally possible that she suffocated on the gag around her mouth, or was strangled by West in the act of intercourse, or stabbed by Rosemary Letts to stop her from screaming when the gag was removed. All are equally horrifying possibilities. What is certain is that her naked body was cut in half and more than forty of her bones removed. Charmaine West’s young life was snuffed out as if it were no more than a candle’s flame.
There was not even the faintest flicker of contrition. Frederick West and Rosemary Letts merely saw to it that her attendance record at St James’s School was brought to an end that summer with the note:‘Moved to London’. And when her half-sister Anna-Marie arrived home from school on that July day in 1971, she was told Charmaine had ‘gone off with her mother’. Charmaine West’s death made Frederick West and Rosemary Letts partners. No longer simply the apprentice, she had become his accomplice.