ROSEMARY’S BABIES
‘Life’s aspirations come in the guise of children.’
RABINDRANATH TAGORE, FIREFLIES
Juanita Mott was the last young woman to be buried in the cellar of Cromwell Street. By the spring of 1975 there was hardly any room there, and the smell, which Frederick West could not blame on a broken sewer for ever, had begun to permeate the rest of the house. If there were to be more killings, he knew the bodies would have to be planted elsewhere. And there were to be more killings. Now he could not stop.
On 1 April 1975 Frederick West rented an allotment at Cheyney Close in Saintsbridge, Gloucester, and went on to construct a small shed, six feet by three feet, six inches, on the site. It was another place to take his friends where they could smoke dope and watch pornographic films, and it may also have been another place at which to dispose of a body. The fact that he planted runner beans, potatoes, rhubarb and tomatoes, but seemed rarely to bother to cultivate them – even though he had a growing family – may give some indication that its purpose was not solely horticulture. Besides, West was no stranger to allotments; there had been others in the past, not least in Glasgow. They were a natural hide. What could be more innocent?
Another reason for abandoning the cellar as a repository was the simple fact that West now needed the room for his family.West had realised that his children were rapidly reaching an age when they would begin to ask more and more questions about what was happening down there. His eldest daughter, Anna-Marie, was almost eleven now, sullen at one moment, aggressive the next, and due to change to senior school in September 1975. His second child, Heather, was already four-and-a-half, while Mae was almost three and Stephen almost two. West knew that the cellar could provide bedrooms, especially if he wanted to keep a ‘special’ room for his wife to entertain her ‘clients’.The cellar had to be habitable.
West also needed the cellar for storage. His appetite for petty theft was still insatiable, and he had invited a local burglar, whom he had first met when they worked together in 1971, to come to Cromwell Street and live with them. The two men would use the cellar to hide whatever they needed to, secure in the knowledge that the police raiding the upstairs of the house never bothered to look down there. Rosemary West was the only other person to have a key to the door.
Rosemary West was twenty-one now, a woman who had had three children, mature enough to start to question what she wanted from life, a woman anxious to make her own stand, even if she was also still hypnotised by the small, swarthy man who used to come home stinking of the factory and the building site night after night. She started to develop longer-lasting lesbian relationships, and, as the year progressed after Juanita Mott’s death, she began to stake her claim for at least some independence. In the summer Rosemary West took a holiday in Devon with another girl, leaving her husband to look after the children with Anna-Marie’s help. ‘They went for a week in a red Mini,’ West recalled rather plaintively in the last weeks of his life.
Shortly afterwards, Frederick West threw the lodgers out of Cromwell Street, not because he did not want to keep them but because the local authority had inspected the house and told him that he would have to install a fire-escape and a fire-alarm.West had no intention of doing either. He simply decided to wait until the council had re-inspected the house, seen that there were no lodgers, and gone away. No sooner had the inspectors done so than West started to advertise in the Gloucester Citizen his ‘bed-sitting-rooms’ for £7 a week.
West also advertised for partners for his wife in contact magazines like Experience, and would arrange for the candidates to come to Cromwell Street to be vetted. If they proved acceptable and agreeable he would then film them with his wife. ‘He was always looking for people to be in one of his films,’ one fellow worker from the time remembered many years later. But Rosemary West’s viciousness, a sadistic streak that she revealed only gradually during a sexual relationship, sometimes made it difficult to find willing partners. Frederick West also told one of his workmates at the time that he had ‘invited three lesbians down from Birmingham for Rose’, but one of them had been so terrified when ‘her pubic hair had been bitten out’ that she had ‘run out into the street half-naked’. West said that he had been forced to ‘run down the street after her, catch her, calm her down and take her back inside’.
West would also drive his wife to meet lesbians in other parts of the country. In the autumn of 1975, for example, Rosemary West embarked on an affair with a woman in Swindon who had replied to one of his advertisements in a contact magazine. His wife had never learned to drive – indeed, she never would – but her husband was only too happy to take her there, wait for her and then drive her home. On the way back to Gloucester he would insist she tell him ‘every single detail’. For her part, Rosemary West was quite content to satisfy his curiosity. It gave her a sense of power over him. It was proof she was now capable of standing on her own two feet, a sexual being in her own right rather than simply her husband’s creation. Frederick West, meanwhile, liked to brag about her sexual conquests.
One seventeen-year-old girl who found her way to Cromwell Street in the second half of 1975 bears witness to this. First taken there by a friend, she thought the Wests were a ‘very pleasant couple’, especially when Frederick West offered ‘to run her home’ in his A35 van. She went back a few weeks later, and Rosemary West invited her to her bedroom to see a jacket she had been making, and then persuaded the girl to take off her clothes and lie down on the bed. As Frederick West himself explained years afterwards: ‘Rose had terrific powers of persuasion over these girls. If you could persuade a girl to undress in a bedroom, and that you’re measuring her up for a dress, you’ve got some power.’ When the girl was naked, Rosemary West had proceeded to kiss her neck, and then work down her body until she was sucking and licking her vagina.
‘I was bewildered by it all,’ the girl remembered later. But, a few weeks afterwards she returned to Cromwell Street, and on this occasion Rosemary West took her down into the cellar and laid her on a ‘single mattress on the floor’. The rest of the room, she remembered, ‘was full of toys’. Once again Rosemary West persuaded the girl to take off her clothes, and licked her vagina, but this time she went on to insert a vibrator into her. ‘She did it so quick, it hurt me a lot,’ the girl told the court at Rosemary West’s trial two decades later, ‘and she held it up there inside me. I had to ask her to take it out because it was hurting so much.’
The seventeen-year-old was a virgin. She ended up bleeding so badly that Rosemary West handed her a baby’s nappy to use as a sanitary towel. But the girl did not complain. She simply put on her clothes and left. The events were never reported to the police. The girl never visited her family doctor. She was too embarrassed.There was never any official investigation, no official visit to Cromwell Street, no enquiry to ask how on earth the girl came to be harmed.There was no investigation whatever. Instead, Rosemary West joined her husband in the firm belief that she could always get away with whatever she wanted. Like him, she was untouchable.
Another person who suffered at the evermore confident hands of Rosemary West was her stepdaughter Anna-Marie. Now eleven years of age, the girl had ‘never really been happy at school’, and years later she would confess: ‘I felt I didn’t fit in . . . I was never allowed to invite other girls and boys home or to go to their houses to play.’ In fact, this was part of Frederick West’s plan. He and his wife were intent on maintaining their private world, away from the gaze of anyone who might not approve of it, and that depended on their absolute control over their children. Anna-Marie had become the guinea-pig for that control, just as she believes she was a guinea-pig for some of their attacks.
‘They frequently practised forms of restraint of me,’ Anna-Marie was to remember twenty years later. Rosemary West experimented with sheets ripped into strips, builders’ rope, nylon clothes-line, carpet tape and ‘fabric to put across my mouth’. Once her stepdaughter was bound, she would assault her with belts, canes and whips, as well as the cat-o’-nine-tails. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the attack reflected a little of what must have happened to the Wests’ victims, not least because ‘when she completed her experiments she would encourage Dad to rape me, or they would both insert objects into me’.
Between them, Frederick and Rosemary West carefully created their own bizarre and distorted reality. As the distinguished clinical psychologist George Kelly described it, the Wests formed their ‘own distinctive alternative universe’, and used this as a guide for their own actions and their responses to the world. It was a world that neither of them wished to see invaded. Their house might be filled with lodgers, but they did not finally impinge on the reality of the Wests beneath them. Nor did they impinge on the horrifying reality of what went on in the cellar. It was only when one of the young women lodging or visiting there stepped across that invisible threshold, and thereby joined the Wests’ alternative universe, that they were in danger for their lives.
Frederick West would impress on his children, for example, that they should remain within the confines of the house whenever possible.‘We don’t want to have anything to do with people outside. We don’t need them.There are people out there who will hurt you . . . You’re with people who will protect you,’ he told his eldest daughter time after time. It was the reason that West would come to construct the extraordinary wrought-iron gates that barred the way to the front door of 25 Cromwell Street throughout the last twenty years of the family’s time there. The gates were his protection against a world that he did not want to intrude upon him, a barrier to be crossed only on invitation.
Within the walls of Cromwell Street,West was the master of his universe. Still a thief and a part-time fence – he was fined £75 for receiving stolen goods in November 1975 – he relished his wife’s prostitution, and her appetite for lesbian relationships, just as he relished the medical details of her pregnancies and menstrual cycle. He took an equally fascinated interest in the development of his daughter Anna-Marie’s breasts, and her journey into puberty. It was a fascination that he would retain throughout the rest of his life. His crudeness expressed itself in phrases like ‘I see Harry Rags is riding in the two-thirty’, as a way of indicating that his wife’s, and later his daughter’s, period may have started. ‘We always wondered how he knew, but he did,’ his eldest daughter was to remark.
It was not the only indignity that Anna-Marie West was subjected to. Rosemary West also took pornographic photographs of her stepdaughter with a Polaroid camera, and hit her repeatedly, although always taking care to make sure that the bruises did not show. On another occasion, when Anna-Marie West displeased her, Rosemary West stripped the girl, and instructed her younger children to paint the words ‘Black Hole’ on her stepdaughter’s naked buttocks with an arrow pointing towards her anus. Rosemary West took a photograph of the girl, who was then told to remain naked until her father came home. When he did so, Frederick West simply laughed.
West exercised a delicate and subtle control over the house and its inmates. He took particular pleasure, for example, in goading his wife to lose her temper, and standing back to see what damage she might inflict on her children once he had ignited the fuse to her formidable and vicious temper. Rosemary West, in turn, would try to amuse him by humiliating Anna-Marie, or beating one of the younger children, knowing that he would never object. On one summer evening, for example, she took her stepdaughter out to a pub for the evening, persuaded her to drink rather too much barley wine, and then helped her husband to rape her in the back of his van on the way home. It was Rosemary West’s means of keeping her husband entertained and calm.
Frederick West would demand sexual intercourse at any time, just as he had always done, referring to it as ‘going off to bunny land’, and Rosemary West had become only too willing to oblige. West’s sexual grooming of the young Rosemary Letts had borne fruit; she was now as sexually obsessed as he was, and equally determined that she should be guaranteed her own gratification. Under Frederick West’s instruction, sex, and everything to do with it, had become an addiction, to dominate his wife’s life just as intensely as it dominated his. As Anna-Marie West would put it: ‘That was Rose for you. Sex on demand – at any time, any place and with anybody she could get her hands, on. If she wanted it at that moment, she got it. It didn’t matter if it was Dad, one of her so-called friends, a woman or a child.’ Frederick West had created a woman in his own sexual image, and seen her appetites grow until her perverse desire matched his.Their evil love had blossomed.
In the years to come, Frederick and Rosemary West would do everything within their power to usher all their female children into their alternative universe, their world of sexual experiment. Before the end of 1975, for example, Anna-Marie was being offered as a sexual favour to some of the men who came to the house as regular clients of her stepmother. Sometimes her father would watch through the spyhole he had made in the door of ‘Rose’s Special Room’.West himself would have sex with her ‘quite frequently’ in the back of his van and ‘sometimes in the woods’. And in time her two younger stepsisters, Heather and Mae West, would find themselves used as sexual bait for men. Anna-Marie West reacted to this abuse she suffered by becoming aggressive and delinquent at school, her rage and unhappiness expressing itself in a determination not to be ignored, a desire for revenge on a world that had not allowed her a childhood. As one friend in the first year at Linden Secondary School in Gloucester remembered:‘Anna seemed to know more about sexual things than the rest of us. Her knowledge of sex seemed beyond her years.’
One man who had been ushered into the sexual world of Cromwell Street by Frederick West was his father-in-law William Letts. Letts’s relationship with his wife Daisy had hardly improved in the years since their separation at Bishop’s Cleeve, and he had become an increasingly regular visitor to his daughter’s and son-in-law’s house. One reason was simple enough. Letts had retained a sexual relationship with his daughter throughout the years she had been married to West, and with her husband’s blessing. Only two decades older than Frederick West, Letts was also attracted to the house by the possibility of other sexual conquests. Indeed, he may well have been one of the men invited into the cellar from time to time.
In the last months of his life Frederick West talked at length about his father-in-law and his relationship with his wife. ‘He was fucking her regular. That’s why she was going over there. He was bringing her back, and fucking her on the way. But I actually caught them in bed. He was well in.’ The idea appealed to the voyeur in West. ‘I never knew that Rose was ever abused. Rose never told me that her father had ever abused her. Whenever I seen her with him she was more than willing to get them off, and having a good time at it.’
Rosemary West’s sexual relationship with her father did not put her husband off for a moment, even though he would describe Letts as ‘an evil bastard’ with an ‘evil look’, who had a ‘little round face, and little beady eyes’. Early in 1976 West started work on the cellar with ‘the idea of making it into a self-contained granny flat’ for Bill Letts. He had already concreted over the ash and gravel that had been its flooring originally, in the wake of Juanita Mott’s death. The project was shelved, however, probably not least because of the dangers of disturbing the bodies of five young women, but West nevertheless invited Bill Letts to stay in one of the lodgers’ rooms at Cromwell Street.
Frederick West’s and Bill Letts’s friendship went even further than a sexual ménage à trois. When Letts decided to take early retirement from Smith’s Industries in Bishop’s Cleeve in 1976, at the age of fifty-five, the two men decided to go into business together and launch another café in Southgate Street in the centre of Gloucester. The few thousand pounds that Letts had received on retirement was used to buy the lease and acquire the necessary catering equipment, and as his share West did all the conversion and building work that was required. In doing so he was almost certainly realising one of the dreams that had filled his life since his days above the Rendezvous Café in Newent, the dream of owning a place at which to meet young girls. The two men called the café the Green Lantern. It even had the benefit of a cellar.
During the hot summer of 1976 Letts took his daughter and the West children to a holiday camp in Westward Ho! in Devon, not far from his family home at Northam. Frederick West remained in Gloucester, working night shifts at Muir Hill and spending what time he could during the day preparing the café for its opening. But the holiday did not turn out exactly as Bill Letts may have planned. He rapidly became incensed at his daughter’s promiscuity. Rosemary West started to work her way through the camp orchestra, ‘like a dose of salts’, as Anna-Marie West remembered. ‘There was an almighty row between Rose and her father and the result was that we packed our bags.’
In the last months of his life Frederick West would recall some of his experiences with his father-in-law in a section of his prison memoir I Was Loved by an Angel. He did so in fourteen pages of his ninety-eight-page memoir which describe his relationship with Shirley Robinson, another young woman who was about to enter his life.The memoir starts with his memories of Bill Letts and their café, and it reveals precisely the byzantine sexual relationships of Cromwell Street at the time.
‘Rose’s father . . . was living in my family home in Cromwell Street,’ West wrote. ‘Rose’s mother and father were separated. I was working nights and helping to get the café ready for opening day.’ One night West injured his thumb on the heavy press he used at Muir Hill, and went to hospital for treatment. His memoir continued:
‘I stopped home to see Rose. It was about 11 p.m. Rose was in bed, so I went into the bedroom . . . I didn’t put the light on in the room. I sat at the bottom of the bed. I was telling Rose what had happened to my hand at work.Then Anna came running downstairs and said to Rose: “Grampy’s going to sleep with me.” Anna had not seen me.Anna thought I was at work. Rose said:“Go back to bed. He’s not going to eat you, he’s only going to fuck you . . . I am sure you will love that”.’
Frederick West insisted in his memoir, which he hoped would eventually be published, that the thought appalled him. ‘I went upstairs to him and said, “What’s going on?” Anna was with me. Bill said,“Rose said Anna could sleep with me but Anna is playing up” . . . I said to Bill, “You’re out of this house in the morning”.’ West maintained that he then took his eldest daughter to her room, where ‘Anna told me Rose had been sleeping with her dad and now Mum got men coming from the pub at night, when you’re at work, and Mum told me to sleep with her dad so he did not go downstairs to Mum’s room’. According to his memoir, Frederick West’s only response was to tell his daughter to ‘lock her door’ and to go back to work himself.
‘When I got home in the morning Rose and her dad was in the kitchen having breakfast . . . He said to me: “Do I have to go?” I said, “Yes.” “Where can I go?” I said: “To the café.” There was a flat on top of the café. “You can go there”.’ At that point, according to Frederick West’s version of events, his father-in-law left Cromwell Street and went to live above the Green Lantern. But their partnership did not dissolve. As West would explain eighteen years later: ‘It was a joint venture. I wanted to keep an eye on him, what he was up to . . . He was a devious bastard, and he was a bastard with young kids too.’ In that respect, as in many others, the two men had a great deal in common.
‘I was going home from work one morning,’ West wrote in his memoir. ‘I stopped to see Bill. I went to the back door. I looked up to the roof at the back of the café. There was Bill by the bathroom window. He had sacking over him. I said: “What you doing up there?” He said:“Shhhh.” He came down to me. He said,“I picked up two young girls in Bristol.They were coming to Gloucester. And they stayed the night. And they’re having a bath together. If you get up on the roof you can see them”.’ Frederick West maintained in his memoir that he refused the offer. ‘I said: “No way. I am not into that”.’
In spite of what Frederick West may or may not have told his father-in-law about his dislike for the abuse of his daughter Anna-Marie, there is no doubt that both he and his wife independently sexually abused the twelve-year-old. In the same year that Letts moved to live above the Green Lantern, for example, the girl was forced to perform oral sex on her stepmother.‘She kept urging me, “Come on, do it properly”,’ the girl would recall. ‘And then, “Use your fingers”. It was absolutely horrendous. And all the time it was happening she was squeezing and scratching my breasts. She had long fingers and quite long nails, and she scratched me until I bled. She grabbed the skin at the base of my throat and twisted it until I could barely breathe.’
Meanwhile, West himself would take his eldest child with him on his part-time building jobs, many of which were in other houses in the neighbourhood, and often for members of the West Indian community. ‘What they didn’t know,’ she was to recall, ‘was that when they left us alone in the house, or in a different part of it, my father would have sex with me. On other occasions he would do it in the back of the van he used to transport his tools. He would park somewhere remote on our way to or from a job. Often he would give me money afterwards, and said: “Sorry, love. Here, have some pocket-money, but don’t tell your mother”.’
The delicate but immensely strong thread of love that binds an abused child to her abuser is only too clear. ‘It was the only kind of love I knew from him, and I never complained. I didn’t mind keeping it a secret from Rose.’ Frederick West was subtly choreographing a jealousy between his wife and eldest daughter which would persist throughout the rest of his life, redoubling his influence over them both. At one level they were rivals for his sole attention; at another they were merely members of a harem of women prepared to do his bidding. But both were to play up to the roles he cast for them.
In the late summer of 1976, for example, Rosemary West started to dress up her stepdaughter and take her out with her in the evenings to pubs and clubs, where she would introduce the girl as her ‘sister’. One seventeen-year-old who met them together one evening at a local sports and social club was absolutely convinced they were sisters. ‘They looked very alike,’ he remembered. When Rosemary West suggested that he leave with them and go back to Cromwell Street, the young man thought he was being offered sex with her younger ‘sister’, but, in fact, he made love to Rosemary West herself against a wall in the street after Anna-Marie had gone inside the house.
In the autumn of 1976 Frederick West resigned from the Muir Hill Wagon Works and devoted all his energies to the Green Lantern. His sister-in-law Glenys Tyler was also working at the café with her father Bill Letts, while West was helping every day. Now, as well as the old green A35 van with the windows down the side, which were covered by curtains, West acquired a blue Transit van with scaffolding poles welded to it, which supported a large roof-rack. West would use it for transporting jobs, some of them for Glenys Tyler’s husband Jim, but in the evenings he had developed a new pastime.The size of the van allowed West to indulge this hobby. He would take his wife with him to look for clients, and allow them to have sex in the back of the van while he stood and watched.
West was still using what other spare time he had for building work for a variety of people in Gloucester. ‘He was a meticulous plumber and painter,’ one resident recalled many years later, ‘even though he looked terrible. And he was extremely reliable.’ West’s ability as an odd-job man and builder was particularly popular among the West Indian community, and he took every opportunity to encourage the black men he met to consider having sex with his wife, not least because he was convinced they had ‘larger ones’ than white men. Frederick West approved: ‘Rose only had big fucking blokes. She didn’t want little worms playing about with her.’
Certainly, by the end of 1976 Rosemary West having overcome her initial suspicion of black people, had had a number of Jamaican and black West Indian lovers and clients at 25 Cromwell Street. She had another objective beyond prostitution, however. Still only twenty-three, Rosemary West wanted another child, and her husband was fascinated by the possibility that she might become pregnant by one of her black lovers. In the first weeks of March 1977 both interests were satisfied. Rosemary West discovered that she was pregnant – by one of her black lovers.The news delighted her husband, for they kept no secrets from one another.They were, in the words of one of their lodgers at the time, ‘always together’, and ‘they always knew what each other was doing’.
Rosemary West’s appetite for sexual intercourse did not diminish during pregnancy: quite the opposite. ‘When Rose was pregnant she was always extra sexy for some reason,’ as Frederick West put it. She might be slightly less mobile, but that did not mean that either she or her husband wished to abstain from their diet of violent and perverse sex. It simply meant that she needed to stay at home rather more. That did not present the Wests with a problem, as Cromwell Street was still providing shelter to large numbers of itinerant young people. Its reputation as a safe haven among the vulnerable and unhappy girls in Gloucester had grown steadily, carefully nurtured by Frederick West. In Jordan’s Brook Community Home in Gloucester, for example, a former approved school, several of the resident girls knew that Cromwell Street was a place where they could find temporary accommodation if they absconded – even if only overnight. Over the preceding year Jordan’s Brook girls had been finding their way to the Wests’ house with increasing regularity.
One Jordan’s Brook girl, who first visited Cromwell Street in 1976, remembers Rosemary West as a ‘big sister’ or ‘young mum’, who was ‘always a shoulder to cry on’ and said she could ‘go there any time’. Many years later the girl, who was then only fourteen and had been placed in care the previous year, would recall: ‘It was nice because I felt as if someone really cared.’ She met Frederick West, but ‘only casually, and very briefly’. During the first part of 1977 she visited Cromwell Street regularly, usually on Friday mornings between ten o’clock and midday. She would sit and talk to Rosemary West before returning to Jordan’s Brook. ‘I was a bit upset about the people in care,’ she would recall, ‘and about the system. We would talk about it and she was fine. A couple of occasions we would talk about girls’ things, periods and sex and things, which seemed pretty normal for that age.’
On one occasion early in 1977 she and another young girl absconded from Jordan’s Brook and slept rough on the streets of Gloucester for a night. The next evening they went to Cromwell Street together, where the door was opened by Rosemary West wearing only a bra and pants. ‘I got the impression she was going to bed,’ the girl remembered many years later. Frederick West appeared, and there was a suggestive conversation, but ‘Yvonne and myself stayed the night – on the sofa’. Not long afterwards, however, on one of her Friday morning visits to the Wests’ house, things went a little further.While Rosemary West was comforting the girl: ‘She was quite close and started kissing my neck and touching my breasts on the outside of my clothes,’ the girl recalled eighteen years later.‘It was a bit odd and a bit strange. I didn’t like it at all. I pulled to one side and she stopped and didn’t apologise or anything.’
Nevertheless, throughout the early summer of 1977, the first months of Rosemary West’s new pregnancy, the girl, who was now fifteen, continued to go to Cromwell Street on most Friday mornings, continued to visit the place she had come to think of as a home, and continued to talk to the ‘big sister’ cum ‘young mum’ who lived there. Until, on one Friday morning, on the way to visit her mother, she called to use the lavatory. As usual, Rosemary West answered the door; but that was the last familiar thing that would happen to the girl that morning.‘She was wearing a chiffon blouse type of thing, loose, and a skirt. She was wearing nothing under the blouse as far as I could see.’
Rosemary West ushered the girl inside her house, and suggested she use the first-floor bathroom. But afterwards she did not simply allow the fifteen-year-old to leave; instead, the pregnant twenty-three-year-old mother led the girl into a first-floor front bedroom. Nothing could possibly have prepared her for what was about to happen.‘There were three other people in the bedroom,’ the Jordan’s Brook girl would recall. ‘Fred and two young girls.They were both naked. He had some shorts on.’ One girl was thirteen or fourteen and blonde, the other a little older with a tattoo on her forearm had dark spiky hair. ‘I was dumbstruck with what I was seeing.’
Without uttering a word, Rosemary West started to undress the fifteen-year-old that she had just led into the room.‘I didn’t know what to do. She started. I ended up finishing,’ the girl remembered afterwards.‘It felt like a fair-ground ride where you are stuck against the wall.’ Not to her hostess, however. ‘She said it was OK, things like that. We are all girls. It just seemed as though everything was supposed to be normal.’ Rosemary West then removed her own clothes, while her husband stood on one side of the bed.The room now housed four naked women and Frederick West.
The young blonde girl was led towards the bed by Rosemary West, who started to caress her, all the time reassuring her that there was nothing unusual in what was happening. ‘She looked very distressed and frightened,’ the girl from Jordan’s Brook recalled.‘She was face downwards. I looked away.’When she looked back, she saw Frederick West wrapping one-and-a-half-inch-wide brown parcel tape around the young blonde girl’s wrists, fingers and thumbs – ‘and across her chest’, so that they seemed ‘like bandages’. The parcel tape was then tied around her ankles, and she was turned over on the bed so that she was now lying on her back. Her legs were then tied ‘quite far apart’. The girl looked away again, and then heard a noise, the noise of a vibrator.
Remembering these events almost two decades later, at the trial of Rosemary West, the girl broke down in tears time after time as she relived the events on that Friday morning in Cromwell Street. It had taken her many years even to pluck up the courage to tell the story in the first place, and she agreed to give evidence only on the understanding that she would remain anonymous, so ashamed and upset had she been by what took place on that summer’s morning in 1977.
‘Rose had a vibrator, and a candle, and a tube of what I presume was lubricant,’ she explained. The vibrator was used on the bound young woman.‘I could see tears on her face.’Then Rosemary West said suddenly: ‘Are you enjoying this, Fred? Is it turning you on?’ West by this time was also naked. As soon as his wife removed the vibrator, he had sexual intercourse with the helpless fourteen-year-old lying on the bed in front of him. His wife put her hands on his buttocks as he did so.‘She had tears on the side of her face. She looked very pale.’ Frederick West left the first-floor front bedroom shortly afterwards, and his wife removed the tape from the prone girl’s wrists. ‘Rose was stroking her cheek and saying, “It’s OK”. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. All aggressive one minute, then all motherly again.’ The remains of the tape were ripped off her body, leaving the young blonde ‘in a trance-like state’.
The fifteen-year-old from Jordan’s Brook, who was known at Rosemary West’s trial as Miss A, was then herself led towards the bed. She told the court that she thought, God, I’m next. The woman who had acted like a big sister towards her for almost a year ‘held my wrist and led me to the bed and sat me down. I wanted to scream. I wanted to kick. I wanted to cry. But I just felt numb. She used words like,“Relax, it’s fun”.
Frederick West came back into the room as his wife, who’d got some tape, started taping the girl’s wrists and arms behind her back. Her ankles were then taped apart, and she ‘felt something hard and cold go inside me – in my anus’.
‘It seemed like for ever,’ Miss A would recall, until West himself ‘came up from behind’ and started to have intercourse with her. His wife meanwhile started twisting the girl’s nipples viciously, and then turned to caressing her husband’s bare buttocks again. ‘He was talking about coming over my back, and I remember stuff being rubbed into my back. It must have been by Rose, because the hands were quite soft.’ Frederick West then left the room again, and his wife took a tiny pair of scissors and snipped through the tape around her wrists.Then:‘It was pulled off hard, like the hairs being pulled out of your arms.’
Eventually, the Jordan’s Brook girl was allowed to pick up her dress and return to the bathroom. ‘I felt horrible. Dirty. I just wanted to scrub it away,’ she remembered. ‘Blood had gone down my leg. From my anus, I believe. I just wanted to cover myself up. I came out of the bathroom and stopped for a second and then I just ran down the stairs and went.’ She fled barefoot across the park at the bottom of Cromwell Street and started to hitchhike. ‘I felt so ashamed. I felt thick and stupid. I couldn’t go to the police because then there was a stigma about children in care, that if you were in care you were bad. I couldn’t go to my mum. I couldn’t go to my dad.There was nobody.’
Miss A finally went home to her mother’s house, but she did not tell her, or anyone else, about her experiences at the hands of the Wests on that Friday morning in 1977. When she returned to Jordan’s Brook on the following Monday she still did not confide in anyone. But six weeks later she went back to the Wests’ house in Cromwell Street. It was another Friday morning, but this time she ‘took a can of petrol and some matches’, which she intended ‘to put through the letterbox of their house and set it on fire’.The girl stood by the iron gates that Frederick West had just erected to bar the entrance to his front door, but she did not push the bell. ‘I wanted to do it so much,’ she recalled, but her nerve failed her. ‘I walked back – and just went home to Tewkesbury.’ It was to be seventeen years before the girl from Jordan’s Brook would tell anyone what had happened to her in Cromwell Street in the summer of 1977.
Once again the Wests had chosen their victim with meticulous care. Miss A was no stranger to Frederick or Rosemary West (although at her trial Mrs West denied she knew her at all). In fact, the Wests probably knew far more about her than even she suspected, for her visits to Cromwell Street on Fridays were not her only contact with the West family. Miss A certainly knew Graham Letts, Rosemary West’s brother, because they had run away together, and lived for a time in a flat above a tea-shop in Cheltenham. Miss A had almost certainly told Graham Letts that she had been abused by her father and her brother at the age of twelve, and she may well have told Rosemary West exactly the same thing during their conversations in Cromwell Street. Miss A may also have told her that her brother had not been her only boyfriend.
Although the opportunity to abuse Miss A may have presented itself unexpectedly, there is little doubt that the Wests would have targeted her as a potential victim shortly after the start of her visits to Cromwell Street. Because of her history of sexual abuse, proven sexual track record, and suggestion of mental instability, the Wests would have been certain that there was every chance that she would never be believed – even if she did report the events of that morning to the police or the Social Services. Frederick West, in particular, would no doubt have prepared his own subtle version of events should he ever be questioned about the girl and what may have occurred in his first-floor bedroom, which would have maintained that she had been both a willing and active participant in a ‘gang bang’, as he liked to call them.
Miss A was not to be the last girl from Jordan’s Brook Community Home to find her way to Cromwell Street, nor was she the last to be brutally abused there by Frederick and Rosemary West. During her visits, however, West began an affair with a seventeen-year-old girl called Shirley Robinson, a young woman who looked for a time as though she might become the third Mrs West. Not surprisingly, their relationship did nothing to endear her to the increasingly pregnant Rosemary West.