THE CELLAR
‘Your worst enemy,
becomes your best friend,
once he’s under ground.’
EURIPIDES, HERAKLEIDAI
It bore all the hallmarks of a lair. The cellar was dark, dank and windowless, ‘like a cold, wet, damp cave’, in Rosemary West’s own words, when she and Frederick West moved into 25 Cromwell Street in August 1972. The floor was wet underfoot, and the only light came from a single bulb at the top of the narrow wooden stairs that led down from the hallway above.The cellar stretched the length of the house, but without a torch it was almost impossible to see even that, though there was a small grating at the rear. A tall man would have had to bend down to stand, but neither West nor his wife needed to, the wooden beams across the ceiling just inches above their heads. A prison cell would have been more welcoming.
The cellar of Cromwell Street suited Frederick West’s purposes admirably. It was remote, but still within sight; he could control who went into it, and who left it, and when. No one could visit it unless he asked them to, and no one could leave it without his permission. There was no window to tempt the inquisitive eye of a passer-by, and the brick was thick enough to be rendered soundproof with the addition of a membrane and some plasterboard. The square vent in the rear wall could be covered up easily enough. It was the perfect place in which to experiment.The first thing he did was to renew the lock on the door in the hallway opposite the front door. West kept one key for himself and gave another to his wife. She wore it around her neck, as she would wear a number of other keys to other rooms in the years to come.
The house above was neglected and run-down. The one room back and front on each of the three floors was separated by a simple wooden staircase, and the bare floorboards echoed to the tread. They had been used as bed-sitting-rooms, and were to be so again before long, but they alone were not the attraction to Frederick West. Nor was the small rear garden, bordered by the tin wall of the prefabricated Seventh Day Adventist Church to the right and three trees to the left, which backed down towards St Michael’s Square beyond, with an elderly wooden garage just outside the kitchen window. All this was useful for his growing family, but it did not make West’s eyes gleam. Only the cellar did that.
In the autumn of 1972 Frederick West started work on the house with the unusual degree of enthusiasm that he was to retain for his house throughout the rest of his life. Number 25 Cromwell Street was to become his proudest possession. In the years to come he would sit outside it and offer to show passers-by around the property, so intense was the pride he took in it. He would spend money on its renovation and improvement rather than spend anything on his family. When he stole, or received stolen property, it was usually for the benefit of his house. It marked him as a man of property, a man to be taken seriously. Much more than a mere accumulation of bricks and mortar, it represented everything that West wanted to demonstrate to the world. It was his kingdom.
But as far as Rosemary West was concerned, 25 Cromwell Street was every bit as much her house as her husband’s, and she intended to make sure that West clearly understood that. She wanted a bedroom of her own, apart from him, in which she could entertain her clients, and she did not intend to be taken for granted. She was almost nineteen, the mother of two of his children and stepmother to a third, and she was not about to be ignored. He might think he controlled her, but she was still not ‘a big soft chair’ to be sat on. And a few weeks after they moved in, she set out to prove it. Rosemary West left her husband and went back to her parents.
Frederick West described what happened, and why, in his last months, and in doing so he explained a great deal about his relationship with the extraordinary young woman he had married. In particular, West acknowledged that while they lived together in Midland Road, ‘Rose was actually treated like a schoolgirl by me, and this came to a head in Cromwell Street. Rose was sort of Anna-Marie’s schoolgirl mate, and still more or less acted like a schoolgirl sort of thing.That went right on up until she’d had May, and suddenly one morning Rose had obviously realised that she was a schoolgirl part of this marriage.’
‘What she did was, she didn’t get any shopping in on Friday, and on the Sunday morning she got up early and said,“I’m going out for the day”,’ which came as a great surprise to her husband, who knew ‘Sunday dinner was always something really special’. Anna-Marie elected to stay with her father, but Rose took her other two children with her and disappeared, not telling her husband where she was going.When she had not returned by five o’clock that evening, Frederick West decided to take his daughter and go to find her.
‘I mean, I knew exactly where she’d be. I gets there, and I jumps out of the van, because you had to go across the green to her place in Tobyfield Road, and I crossed the green. By the time I’d got to the door, her father’s standing there, protecting his daughter, and he says, “Rose has left you”.’ Even twenty-two years later the idea made Frederick West laugh.‘So I said,“What’s the crack then, what’s wrong?” and he says, “You treat her like a child”. I said, “Right, tell Rose that I’m going to sit in the van out the front there for ten minutes, and if she ain’t there, there’ll be somebody else in her bed tonight.There’ll be another girl in her bed tonight”.’With that he walked back across the small green verge outside the Letts’s house and climbed into his van.
‘Within four minutes Rose was in the van with me and her father’s following her, and he’s saying: “Oh, he’s only kidding, he’s only kidding.” Rose turned round and said:“I know him, you don’t, so shut up, Dad.” And so we went back home and we sorted it out. And from then on, that was where Rose had always had the say in the house, and I’ve had the say outside, work, my work, and everything.’
As Rosemary West left the house with her two children to join her husband in his van, she told her mother Daisy Letts:‘You don’t know him. You don’t know him. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do.’ More than two decades later, Mrs Letts remembered that her daughter had paused at the doorway, then added as she walked away from her parents: ‘Even murder.’
But neither Bill Letts nor his wife took their daughter’s remark seriously. ‘We just thought it was the words of a highly strung girl.’
It was the first public sign that Rose West was no longer her husband’s apprentice, that she had become his junior partner, and an indication that the force of their joint personalities was to prove even greater than his alone. But it would always be Frederick West who would dictate the pace and direction of their activities. No matter how strong her personality, or vicious her temper, it was he who told his wife what to do, and when. She became the creature he had always wanted her to be, and accepted the role willingly, recognising the influence it gave her.
Nevertheless, it was Frederick West who dictated the terms of their relationship. He was still capable of the violence that he had demonstrated to his first wife, still capable of holding her around the throat until the air all but left her lungs, still capable of smashing her head against the door if she annoyed him. He did not break any of her bones, and tried to choke her only when ‘he’s been angry’. But she was not afraid of the man she was now locked together with in a partnership that would not be broken for two decades. Rosemary West did not believe that he would kill her, confident that in the end her wits would save her from the excesses that she knew he was capable of. Besides, she, too, was capable of violence. Frederick West had been a good teacher.
Rosemary West had grown into an attractive young woman. With shoulder-length dark hair and wide-set brown eyes, she was slender but full-bosomed, with the look of a startled fawn. But the look was deceptive. As her stepdaughter Anna-Marie would remember, she ‘made no attempt to hide her cruel streak’. The young mother would push the child’s fingers into boiling water, or beat her stepdaughter repeatedly ‘for not stirring the gravy in the right way and not mashing the potatoes properly’, as well as for failing to hand her a tea-towel promptly enough. ‘I was hit across the head with a broom on more than one occasion and I still have a small scar where she knifed my hand.’
‘It was as if she had mental blackouts,’ Anna-Marie suggested, ‘almost as if she didn’t know she was doing it. When she had finished, she might look at you and say: “Your fucking fault. You should have done it properly.” On other occasions she wouldn’t speak; she’d just carry on with what she was doing as if nothing had happened.’ When the eight-year-old girl complained to her father, Frederick West simply laughed and went back to work on his house. He would work there all day, then set off for the night shift of his new job as a fibreglass presser at Permali’s factory on Bristol Road.
In the last months of 1972 West managed to make the cellar habitable. It was not an easy task. In the first week he lived in the house, water and sewage had seeped up through the floor, submerging the cellar under two feet of water, a result of both a break in the sewer pipe that ran under the house and a rise in the water table. ‘Cromwell Street used to be part of the moat round Gloucester,’ West would explain later, ‘that’s why it was always flooding.’ Nevertheless, West managed to divide the cellar into three interconnecting rooms. In the back room, nearest the garden, he kept his tools; the middle room, where the stairs came down from the hallway, he left empty; and the front room he began to convert to a playroom for his three children. He would work down there all day, after getting just a little sleep after his job at Permali’s, sometimes bolting the door from the hallway behind him. When he emerged, his eldest daughter remembered the whispered conversation with his young wife, and their giggling.
On the top two floors upstairs, West installed two small kitchenettes, between the front and back rooms, and quickly started to look for lodgers to fill the four rooms. Frank Zygmunt’s loan of £500 had to be paid back quickly, and he did not want to waste any time.The rent he intended to charge was £3 a week, and if he could get two lodgers into each one of the rooms, so much the better. His loan would be repaid more promptly. Frederick West offered Liz Agius, his neighbour from Midland Road, one of the two second-floor rooms, but told her ‘she’d have to leave’ her husband if she wanted to take up his offer. The implication was clear enough: she would have to consider working as a prostitute from the house. But when she refused West did not press the idea; he simply repeated his plan to look for young girls, and single mothers, who were receiving ‘benefit – ’cause that way they can pay the rent.’
Rosemary West had different ideas. She wanted young men as well as young women in the house. If he was still pursuing young girls in his van, she saw no reason why he should not supply her with young men in the house. And it was she who won the argument. In the early autumn of 1972, when the first lodgers moved in to 25 Cromwell Street, they were all young men. One was Ben Stanniland, an eighteen-year-old, who shared the top-floor back room with another young man, Alan Davis, always known as ‘Dapper’.
On the night they moved in, Frederick West invited them both out for a drink with his eighteen-year-old wife. The conversation was laced with sexual innuendo, and West’s nudging questions about their ‘girlfriends’, full of suggestions that he had no objections whatever to their bringing them back to Cromwell Street. Not long after they returned to Cromwell Street that evening, Rosemary West appeared upstairs in the top back room the two young men shared and climbed into bed with Stanniland. After they had made love, she climbed out of his single bed into bed with his room-mate, Dapper Davis, and made love to him. ‘In the morning,’ Stanniland recounted later,‘we were a bit dubious about going downstairs, but Frederick West made it clear it was OK.’ What they did not know was that he had been watching them through a hole in the door.
Meanwhile, West told two of his other lodgers that ‘if they couldn’t pay the rent they would have to have sex with Rose’. He was drawing his young wife further and further into his bizarre sexual world, a world that probably also saw him supply young girls for prostitution in Bristol in return for a fee. Nevertheless, it was a world that Rosemary West found increasingly captivating. She wanted to explore it as much as he did. And if that was also what he wanted her to do to prove her love for him, she was more than happy to oblige. It provided her with a role in her husband’s life, and she had no intention of neglecting him as she thought Rena West had done.
But Frederick West had also been encouraging his new wife to experiment sexually. Now eighteen, Rosemary West had discovered that she was attracted to both men and women, and the idea fascinated her husband. What had started as the acting out of his fantasy in making love to two women at the same time in his own bed had been adapted and extended by Rosemary West to West’s becoming the voyeur watching her make love to another woman. The more she indulged her own new-found passion, the more excited he became at the prospect. Together, they had then added the element of bondage to their experiments, she anxious to capture a female partner, he to subjugate her so that she would never leave him. A young woman was now not simply to satisfy her husband’s desires, but to satisfy hers as well. Now they were both a male and female rapist working in partnership, her bisexuality adding fuel to the flames of his all-consuming secret passion. It was to become a lethal combination.
And as soon as Frederick West had made 25 Cromwell Street habitable, he set out to re-establish the system that he had first used in Glasgow and then taken with him to the caravan sites of Gloucester. He went looking for a new ‘nanny’ for his children, another young woman to groom as a potential partner, but this time also a playmate for his wife. And, as ever, West went looking for her in his car. Relying on the lodgers to babysit for them, Frederick and Rosemary West resumed the tours they had told Liz Agius about in Midland Road.They drove around the area looking for young women who might need a lift, and who might offer the possibility of sexual excitement. But now there was the added frisson of Rosemary West’s sexual interest in young women as well as young men.
Shortly after ten-thirty one evening in early October 1972, one of their expeditions bore fruit. Frederick and Rosemary West drew up beside a young woman standing outside a pub in Tewkesbury, less than ten miles north of Gloucester. Just a few weeks away from her seventeenth birthday, Carol Raine was five-feet, two-inches tall, slim, with straight dyed chestnut hair and a wide-eyed smile. She was hitchhiking back to her home in Cinderford in the Forest of Dean from her boyfriend’s home in Tewkesbury. Rosemary West spoke first.‘She asked me where I wanted to go,’ Carol Raine would remember at Rosemary West’s trial almost a quarter of a century later.‘They said they’d give me a lift, and I got into the front of the car.’ At the time West owned a two-door beige Ford Popular, an unassuming little box of a car, in which the rear seat passengers had to climb over the front seat to get into the back. His wife climbed into the rear, as Carol Raine settled herself in the passenger seat, and they set off south towards Gloucester. Carol Raine said later,‘A woman in the car was a bonus; you felt safer.’
On the journey West and his wife asked the sixteen-year-old girl why she was hitchhiking and whether she had a job. She told the Wests that she used to hitchhike ‘three or four times a week’ and that she was unemployed. ‘They were quite nice,’ the girl recalled later, and by the time the car had reached Gloucester the couple had offered Carol Raine a job as a ‘nanny’ for their children.‘I was a bit surprised, but I’d always wanted to be a nanny. I told them that my parents would have to meet them first.’When West and his wife had dropped the girl outside her home in Cinderford, not long after eleven that evening, they arranged to come back and meet her mother and stepfather the following Sunday.
The Wests duly arrived at Carol’s parents home in Cinderford the following Sunday, bringing with them Anna-Marie, Heather and their four-month-old daughter May June.‘They told Mum and Dad that they’d look after me,’ Carol Raine recalled two decades later. ‘And the children were cute, actually. I was pleased to get the job.’ A few days afterwards the Wests returned to Cinderford to collect Carol and her belongings, and moved her into Cromwell Street. She was to share the first-floor back room with Anna-Marie.
Pretty, impressionable and a little vulnerable, Carol Raine had had sexual problems in the past. West sensed this; his extraordinary antennae had not let him down. An elderly family friend had abused her when she was six, and she had been indecently assaulted in a Gloucester park at the age of thirteen. Each of the experiences made her a perfect target for his sexual attentions, but for the moment West bided his time. Neither he nor his wife objected when her boyfriend came to stay for the night each week, nor did they object when – on the night before her seventeenth birthday in late October – an old boyfriend turned up to stay. The Wests even lent them their double bed in the ground-floor front room for the night, no doubt with a view to his watching through a spyhole in the door.To both Frederick and Rosemary West, Carol Raine must have seemed the ideal ‘nanny’, a dependent, sexually active young woman who could be groomed to do their wishes.
Paid £3 a week ‘spending money’, Carol Raine settled into life at 25 Cromwell Street, happy enough in the liberal atmosphere and relaxed sexual code. This was not the stiff world of a parental home where no one was allowed to do anything: quite the opposite. Cannabis and other drugs were available freely among the young people who came and went through the upper floors, visiting the lodgers, staying for a while in their rooms before disappearing again. And sexual intercourse was just as freely available. She herself had sex with both Ben Stanniland and Dapper Davis, just as Rose West had done. As Carol herself put it many years later:‘It was the hippie era and people were generally very friendly.’There is no doubt that sex, and everything to do with it, was the one persistent topic of conversation in Cromwell Street, and the Wests did everything they could to foster the atmosphere. It allowed them to participate in it too. And, as if to prove how liberal an environment they wanted it to be, the Wests made sure that there was no lock on the bathroom door.
Just as he had done at Lake House caravan park, Frederick West started to brag to his new nanny that he ‘could do operations’ and that he had carried out abortions – ‘in case you ever get yourself into trouble’. Meanwhile, his wife got into the habit of walking into the bathroom while Carol Raine was in the bath. Rosemary West would stroke her hair, and tell the seventeen-year-old,‘you’ve got lovely hair’ and ‘lovely eyes’. Carol Raine remembered: ‘I was a bit embarrassed really, uncomfortable.’The girl was also only too aware that West would pick on his wife from time to time.‘I didn’t like Fred. I’d try to stick up for her and he would tell me to mind my own business.’
After six weeks or so with the Wests, their continued bickering, his bragging and the relentless sexual innuendoes began to take their toll on Carol Raine, and she announced that she wanted to leave. Rosemary West did not want her to go, but her husband ‘didn’t mind one way or the other’. In fact, he did mind. Frederick West was almost certainly incensed that she had refused his repeated invitation to take part in the ‘gang bangs’ that he and Rose had been proposing, and which other visitors to the house had witnessed with girls other than Carol Raine. Nevertheless, West was careful to disguise his fury behind his perpetual grin, and they parted amicably enough. Carol Raine went back to her parents’ home in Cinderford, and back to hitchhiking to Tewkesbury on three or four nights of the week.
Only a few nights later, on Wednesday 6 December 1972, Carol Raine was standing outside a pub in Tewkesbury, trying to hitchhike back to Cinderford, when, once again, Frederick and Rosemary West pulled up beside her in their Ford Popular. Almost twenty two-years later, at the trial of Rosemary West, Carol Raine was to describe the events that followed that evening, events that Mrs West insisted she could ‘hardly remember at all’. In contrast, Carol Raine’s recollection was particularly detailed, and utterly horrifying.
‘I felt a little bit wary,’ she recalled. ‘But Rose asked me if I wanted a lift back to Cinderford. I said, “Yes”. Rose got out and pulled the seat forward for me to get in the back.’ Carol Raine climbed in, but rather to her surprise Rosemary West climbed in beside her ‘for a chat’. They drove to Gloucester, and then turned south towards the Forest of Dean. After telling the seventeen-year-old that they had missed her and their children had missed her, ‘Then they started to talk more in a smutty manner’. Frederick West asked if she had had sex with her boyfriend that evening. ‘I was embarrassed and said,“No”. He said,“Have a look, Rose”, and she grabbed me in the crotch. I had never spoken to them about my personal life before. Rose had her arm around the back of me, and she started touching my breasts over my clothes. I think that’s when Fred said,“What’s her tits like?”’
Rosemary West was trying to grab hold of the girl in the back of the Ford Popular with her and was laughing – ‘not a nice laugh’, in the words of Carol Raine. ‘Then she tried to grab me between my legs. I was wearing trousers. I was struggling with her. I started panicking.They were saying things to each other. It was smutty talk about me, about my body.’With the street-lamps of Gloucester now behind him, Frederick West pulled the car up on to the grass verge beside a gate to a farm field near Highnam. He stopped the car, turned around, and started to punch the girl. ‘He was calling me a bitch and that’, and his wife was still struggling with her.After three blows to the mouth and side of her head, Carol Raine passed out.
When she woke up Carol Raine found that her arms ‘had been tied behind my back with my scarf ’, and that both Frederick and Rosemary West were ‘putting tape all the way round my head, over my mouth, and round the back of my hair. It was brownish, textured gummy tape. Rose was holding me and Fred was putting the tape round.’ The seventeen-year-old was terrified. She could not open her mouth, and could breathe only through her nose. ‘I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I didn’t think I was going to go home again.’The defenceless girl was pushed down on the back seat, and Rosemary West sat on top of her, while Frederick West turned the car around and headed back towards Gloucester.
When they arrived at 25 Cromwell Street, West got out first to make sure that there was no one about, and then led the bound and gagged girl into the house and up to the first-floor room at the front, which contained a sofa and a double mattress on the floor. ‘They told me to keep quiet. Fred said if I was good they would cut the tape off ’, which after a little time he did, using a sharp double-sided knife, a knife so sharp that it cut the frightened girl on the cheek. ‘He apologised. He said he didn’t realise the knife had two blades.’ Apologetic or not, West then urged Carol Raine to sit on the sofa.‘Rose sat next to me and started trying to kiss me. She was touching my breasts and legs over my clothes. Fred was still there. I said something like, “Get off, leave me alone”. She just continued. But I think it was then that Rose went and made us cups of tea.’
For a moment it seemed that the ordeal was over. Frederick West untied the girl’s arms and gave her a mug of tea. But there was a naughty boy’s smirk etched on his face. Neither West nor his wife had the slightest intention of allowing their former nanny to leave Cromwell Street without her taking part in the sexual plan they had for her. As soon as she had finished her tea, they both started to undress her.Then ‘they tied my hands back up and gagged me with cotton wool’.While his wife undressed herself,West led the panic-stricken girl across to the double mattress on the floor. ‘I had no clothes on at all. I was put on the mattress on my back.’ West then blindfolded Carol Raine, and he started to do exactly what he had bragged he did to so many of his friends over the past few years. He started to examine her as if he were a back-street abortionist.
‘It was like being examined in the genital area,’ the seventeen-year-old would recall two decades later. ‘It was both of them. I could feel fingers inside me. They were discussing my genitals, about the size. They said I had “chubby lips”, and Fred said he could improve my sex life. He could flatten the vaginal lips, and the clitoris would be showing more. I’d get more pleasure.’ The blindfolded, bound girl recalled: ‘I was scared they might put something in me, or even operate in some way.’ Frederick West’s operation did not involve surgical instruments, however. It depended only on a two-inch-wide leather belt that his father and mother would have recognised at once.
Rosemary West held the girl’s legs apart, and West hit her vagina with the belt’s buckle about ten times. ‘I remember seeing the belt when he was hitting me. I can’t remember if the blindfold was taken off, or just rolled up.’ No consideration whatever was shown for the helpless girl lying in front of the Wests. Indeed, no sooner had her husband finished hitting Carol Raine viciously with the belt buckle than Rosemary West knelt between her legs and performed oral sex on her. ‘Fred was watching and then took his clothes off and went behind Rose and started having sex with Rose at the same time. I could see all this. It lasted only ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.’ Throughout, Carol Raine recalled later, ‘Rose was grinning and laughing.Wickedly, I suppose. She looked evil to me.’ By contrast, Frederick West ‘seemed quite calm’.
When Rosemary West left to go to the bathroom outside the door, West raped the naked, bound girl, though ‘It was only a few seconds’, she recalled. But moments after he climaxed, he started crying and apologising for what he had done, and when his wife returned to the first-floor room he did not mention the rape. Instead, West settled down to sleep on the sofa beside her, leaving Carol Raine bound and gagged on the mattress. Not surprisingly, the seventeen-year-old did not sleep. She even tried to escape by getting up and going to the window, but she could not lift it. Demoralised, she went back and lay on the mattress on the floor.
At about seven o’clock the next morning there was a knock on the front door downstairs. ‘Fred got dressed and went to answer the door. There was a man’s voice outside the door. I tried to make a noise to get this person’s attention’, but the attempt failed. Rosemary West put a pillow over her head to stifle the screams. ‘When Fred came back into the room they were both really angry.’ Frederick West told the terrified girl that he would ‘keep her in the cellar and let his black friends use her, and when they had finished they would bury her under the paving-stones of Gloucester’. West also told her:‘There’s hundreds of girls buried under there.’
But Frederick West did not carry out his threat. Though Carol Raine was utterly helpless on the mattress in front of him, and even though he had already buried the bodies of at least two young women and a child,West decided to keep his former nanny alive, at least for the time being. He was intent on abusing her still further. When his wife went downstairs to see the children, West raped Carol Raine for the second time. ‘When he had done it, I was crying.’ After he had pulled up his trousers, West again ‘started crying’, his victim remembered years later, and ‘apologised for hurting me’. He told her she was ‘there for Rose’s pleasure’, adding that his wife ‘gets hard to handle when she’s pregnant’ and ‘needed a woman to play with’.
As soon as his wife returned to the room, and as if nothing untoward had taken place, Frederick West suddenly announced to Carol Raine that they ‘would really like me to come back and live with them’.The astonished girl recalled,‘Fred asked me first, when he was on his own’, but she quickly realised that ‘this would be my chance to get away from them. I said, “Yes”.’ But she also said that she would have to go back to Cinderford to collect her things. Clearly pleased at the prospect,West untied the girl and encouraged her to take three baths and wash her hair, to get rid of the sticky gum that was still stuck to it from the adhesive tape she had been gagged with the evening before.
‘I helped clean the room, and saw the children when Rose brought them upstairs.’While she was doing so, one of the lodgers, Ben Stanniland, knocked on the door to borrow the hoover, but she did not say anything to him. She had already decided to stick to her own plan of escape.The Wests wanted to go to the local launderette; not long after eleven o’clock that morning, she went with them. ‘Fred went off to park the car or go somewhere and dropped us off.’ Luckily for Carol Raine, Ben Stanniland came into the launderette shortly afterwards, and, while Rosemary West was talking to him, the seventeen-year-old girl seized her chance. Had Stanniland not been there, it is entirely possible that Rosemary West would have set off in pursuit. As it was, Carol Raine left the launderette. ‘I just kept walking. I walked straight through Gloucester.’
But Carol Raine did not go home to Cinderford.Too embarrassed to tell her mother what had happened, she went instead to see a friend.‘I didn’t tell anyone else straight away.’ She just sneaked into her home later in the evening and ‘got into bed’. It was to be the following evening before she plucked up the courage to talk to her mother.Then, although her stepfather was reluctant, the police were called. For a moment it looked as though the truth about Frederick and Rosemary West’s sadistic sexuality might emerge into the bright light of day. In fact, it was to remain in the shadows for the following twenty years.
Though her face was puffy and bruised, and there were rope burns on her legs and back, as well as grazes where the tape had been cut off, Carol Raine was not exactly treated as an innocent victim. ‘The police found out that I had slept with two of the lodgers,’ she remembered many years later, ‘and made me feel so bad about it that I didn’t want everybody finding out. If I had been a little innocent convent virgin it would have been different, but because I’d had partners it was as though it was nothing important.’
Nevertheless, on Saturday 9 December 1972 the police arrested Frederick West at Permali’s, where he was working weekends as well as night shifts, and then went on to question his nineteen-year-old wife at Cromwell Street. When one detective asked if Carol Raine’s allegations were true, Rosemary West replied: ‘Don’t be fucking daft. What do you think I am?’ And when he then went on to ask if he could search their Ford Popular, she merely added: ‘Please your bloody self.’ In the car the detective found a button from Carol Raine’s coat, and a subsequent search of the house itself revealed both a ‘partly used roll of masking tape’ and a collection of pornographic photographs. After her arrest, Rosemary West told the police she would not say anything ‘because I promised my husband I would say nothing’.
But Frederick West’s uncanny sixth sense of what made a victim was vindicated once again. Although Rosemary West admitted a lesbian approach to Carol Raine, just as her husband admitted assault, their victim’s reluctance to embarrass either herself or her family saw to it that both he and his wife would be let off.Though there was talk of a charge of rape, the police did not press it. Perhaps West seemed too innocuous, too placid and humble a man to fit the stereotype of a sexual offender at the time, and the police accepted without much hesitation that he and Rosemary West would each plead guilty to one charge of indecent assault, and another of actual bodily harm, if rape was dropped. After being warned about what cross-examination in the witness-box might reveal about her sexual encounters, and with her stepfather still reluctant to see her involved, Carol Raine agreed to drop the more serious charge.
When Frederick and Rosemary West stood beside each other in the dock at Gloucester Magistrates’ Court in the morning of Friday 12 January 1973, West could not have felt more confident. He had done all this before and got away with it. He knew Carol Raine had decided not to give evidence ‘to save embarrassment’, and he was quite prepared to appear contrite, if it would speed their release. West also knew enough about the legal system to apply for legal aid, even though he was pleading guilty, and not to make the mistake of defending himself. The thirty-one-year-old West and his nineteen-year-old wife listened intently as their counsel made the pleas of mitigation on their behalf. Conrad Sheward painted a portrait of them as a happily married couple, telling the three magistrates that, although his clients were newly married, they had been living together as ‘man and wife for two years’, and had two children of their own, as well as one from ‘Mr West’s previous marriage’. Sheward then revealed that Rosemary West was pregnant with her third child.
As he was to do so many times in the years to come,FrederickWest had sensed instinctively how to operate the legal and administrative system to his advantage. He may well have consulted his friend and patron, Frank Zygmunt, over some of the details, but his innate ability to confuse those in authority with his special mixture of humility and obsequiousness was being honed all the time. The chairman of the magistrates, John Smith, told both him and his wife that although the court was bound to take a very serious view of ‘offences of this description’, ‘We do not think that sending you to prison will do you any good’. Frederick West bowed to the bench and clasped his wife’s hand. For her part, Rosemary West just stared straight ahead. Once again Frederick West had proved to himself that he could get away with anything. More important still, he had proved it to his wife.
Though Rosemary West would strenuously deny that she was responsible for the assaults on Carol Raine, just before the end of his life West was to give another version of the rape, this time one that placed all the blame on his wife.‘Rose had tape in the car, ready to tape her mouth up, and she tied her hands with the whatsername,’ West told his solicitor in 1994.‘So when Rose attacked the girl that night, I didn’t know what to bloody do.’West confirmed, however, that his wife had suggested that they give her a lift. ‘I was busting for a pee, that’s what it was, and when I turned towards Cinderford there’s a big lay-by, which I knew, and I pulled in there, got out, walked to the gate, dropped me zip, and next minute she screams. I run back to the car, and Rose said, “I got me hand up her cunt”. I said, “What?” She got her over on the side, wrapping tape round her and God knows what ’er ain’t doing. What can I do? Take the blinking girl home like that?’
Impossible though it is to believe, West insisted that he took Carol Raine back to Cromwell Street to cut off the tape. But when he went to get a knife,‘the next minute when I come back through the door Rose has got her legs open beating her between the legs. I said: “For fuck’s sake, keep away from her, leave her.” I got her together, and sorted it out, and apologised and everything. That’s why we only got fined twenty-odd pound.’
In the last months of his life Frederick West maintained steadfastly that he had never once mentioned anything about putting her under the paving-stones of Gloucester, even though Carol Raine was the second person to remember his threat about burying someone ‘down there’. Liz Agius, too, had heard West say her husband should be ‘down there’, pointing to the cellar, and Rosemary West herself suggested during her trial that her husband had always maintained that the cellar ‘was not a place to have pregnant women or small children’.
Nevertheless, Rosemary West also explained that her husband could be both ‘very persuasive’ and ‘very intimidating’. Frederick West, she insisted, ‘could charm the birds out of the trees, literally. He had the gift of the gab’.
Frederick West intended to put that to good use. There would be no more mistakes like Carol Raine. In future no one would be given the opportunity to report to the police what he did to them. He did not intend to return to court again, to risk a more serious charge being levelled against him. Carol Raine had been a trial run, an experiment. In future there would be no more mistakes. He would see to that. And the cellar was the perfect place. No one would interfere there. No one was likely to come in.