ROSE’S CHOCOLATES
‘They must need go whom the Devil drives.’
CERVANTES, DON QUIXOTE
By the time of their tenth wedding anniversary in January 1982, Frederick and Rosemary West were consumed by an evil, all-pervading lust. It had darkened and corroded the love that they had first shared in Bishop’s Cleeve until they could no longer distinguish one from the other. He had nurtured the viciousness that she had inherited from her father into an appetite for sadistic sexuality and domination, and she, in turn, had become his full and fearsome partner. Her wickedness had seduced him to explore the extremes of his own vile sexuality, driving him beyond gratification towards a motiveless violence. Together they had urged each other on to plumb ever greater depths of depravity.
Ultimately Frederick West remained unquestionably the master of their ugly symbiosis. West remained the hunter, the provider of their sexual prey. And West dictated the terms his wife had to live by. He had to approve her violence, sanctioning its use when he returned to Cromwell Street, for ever the final arbiter of their relationship. If his wife would not abide by his decisions, his anger could be fearful, as his children knew only too well.‘Dad was really quiet,’ West’s eldest son would remember, ‘but he snapped very quickly. He used to threaten us by saying,“I’ll fucking kill you, you bastard”.’West might only lose his temper a handful of times a year, ‘but when he did go he was like a madman’. He would punch his eight-year-old son relentlessly for twenty minutes at a time, and he would think nothing of kicking him with his steel-capped boots.
To Rosemary West, equally, violence was an everyday occurrence, a habit as ingrained in her as her prostitution. She would hit her children with anything to hand, be it a knife or a hammer – sometimes simply because she could not find a dishcloth or a tea towel. She would put her hands around her son’s throat so tightly that he blacked out, and carried the imprint of her fingers for two weeks, and never offer a word of explanation or apology. ‘We were so scared of her when she was younger,’ her second daughter, Mae, would recall, ‘because she was really nasty. She’d hit one of us, and then she’d want to hit us all because she was in the mood.’ But she never hit her husband. Rosemary West had seen at first hand the terrible damage he was capable of inflicting on a young woman.
Frederick West’s physical strength underpinned his strength of character.What he wanted he would get, by whatever means, and no matter how long it took him. He could be patient, placid and persuasive when it suited him, just as he could be violent, vicious and venal. He controlled his own inner rage with an iron hand of self-discipline and concealment, and he expected nothing less from his wife. If she failed to deliver that, his revenge could be swift and brutal.
On one occasion, probably around the time of their tenth wedding anniversary,West even confirmed this power over his wife in writing. He made her sign an astonishing declaration. It read simply: ‘I Rose will do exactly what I am told, when I am told, without questions, without losing my temper, for a period of three months, from the end of my next period as I think I owe this to Fred.’ It was a clear indication of how far the giggling couple from Lake House caravan site in Bishop’s Cleeve were driven by Frederick West’s strength of character. But the declaration also revealed how strong his wife’s own role had become, in that he needed her to signify in writing that she would not lose her temper. Their interdependence had matured in the dozen years they had been together, as each demanded more and more extreme demonstrations of their love.
In Cromwell Street they would disappear into the first-floor bathroom together, which West always called ‘his office’, for lengthy whispered discussions, more often than not about sex. It was their one consuming interest, their obsession. And it was this fascination with sex in all its forms, and the violence that both Frederick and Rosemary West always needed to accompany it, that lay behind their murderous partnership. In the last few months of his life West confirmed this in a series of conversations with his first solicitor, Howard Ogden. At the time he was intent on placing the blame for the killings of all but one of the young female victims entirely on his wife.Their conversations revealed a great deal of the interwoven, sinuous nature of the Wests’ sordid partnership, though they certainly did not reveal everything. The transcriptions do not make pleasant reading, for they demonstrate the extraordinary depths to which human beings can sink.
‘I know how they were killed,’ Frederick West explained baldly. ‘Vibrator. Pushed in with Rose’s foot. That big bastard. That’s why Shirley’s baby was fucking up the wrong place.’ West said that he had watched his wife do it.‘Obviously she bound their mouths up with that fucking tape round their gobs. And then what she’d do, she’d push the vibrator in as far as she could into them, then get hold of their legs and just push it in with her foot.’ The vibrator in question was more than a foot in length and four inches in diameter.‘She did so much damage to them with that, that she had to fucking kill them.’
West insisted that it was this that had led to the death of Alison Chambers.West said his wife had told him:‘I put her on a bloody vibrator and let her wriggle on that’, and had then confessed, ‘And she was a beautiful young juicy thing . . . She hadn’t been fucked much.’ Why did you kill her? he asked her. ‘Oh, I fancied her,’ she said.
‘She wanted to hurt women,’West went on.‘She’d have to, to do what she’s done to them.’ He then maintained that, unlike his wife, he did not enjoy group sex. He went on:
I only ever tried it once, and I didn’t like it, because Rose acted too bloody vicious.What she did to that little girl was unreal. I was making love to the girl, and Rose got a vibrator and shoved it straight up her arse. Fuck me, the girl nearly went right through the fucking wall.
I would never allow Rose to tie me up. She fucking tried for years . . . No way was I going to let her tie me up. I didn’t believe in it, and I didn’t have anything to do with it . . . But there was blokes doing it to her, and sometimes she’d come home and she’s been well beaten, mind. She’d have no knickers on, like. She’d been fucked all day, and I’d come home from work and she’d sit deliberately on the edge of the settee with her legs wide open and . . . say:‘Look at that . . . I bet you wish you had something that could fill that.’ . . . It never stopped. It didn’t stop at all. There was no let-up. She used to run around naked in front of Stephen and that. She used to run around . . . flaunting it . . . She did it everywhere. ‘It’s my cunt and I’ll show it to who I want to.’ . . . She’d go and pick up any old tramp . . . She thought every bloke would want to fuck her, and if they didn’t, she got nasty about it.
Rose didn’t want the gentle part of it. She wanted some big nigger to throw her down and fucking bang on top of her, and treat her like a dog . . . that was sex to Rose.‘I don’t want any of that soppy shit,’ she said. ‘I want fucking. Not fucking about with. Or chatting up.’And she’d get aggressive. Rose didn’t have many women friends, because she made it too blatantly obvious she was after other things . . . She used to have spates in which she just couldn’t get enough.
Frederick West also admitted to Howard Ogden that he ‘tried bondage once’, when he ‘made that harness out of plastic, so it didn’t break. The red one. I put it on her once, and even then I didn’t like it.’
The truth of the matter is that Frederick West liked it, and everything else his wife did, a great deal. He had carefully groomed a sadomasochistic sexuality in his wife, and steadily drawn her into his own fantasies, until she was capable of creating fantasies for him: no longer the willing pupil but now the dominatrix in the rituals of their sexuality. For West was no baffled onlooker during any of the events he described so crudely to his solicitor. He was the grinning watcher, the voyeur peeping through the hole that he had specially constructed in the door, the man with the film or video camera, the ringmaster subtly pulling the strings of his wife’s sexuality.
Indeed, West’s fascination with vibrators and dildos may have been the result of his own sense of sexual inadequacy. For there is no doubt that he and his wife experimented with larger and larger replica phalluses, and West made repeated reference in his conversations with Howard Ogden to Rosemary West not liking some ‘little thing wriggling about’ in her. No medical record exists of the size of West’s penis, whether erect or not, just as no record exists of his having truthfully revealed the details of his aberrant sexuality to any psychologist. But, significantly,West did admit that his favourite sexual position involved his entering his wife from the rear, while she was lying with her head far away from him, which may indicate that he may have become increasingly self-conscious about his penile size, his sexual ability, and his attractiveness to her, as their marriage progressed.
Whatever the truth about Frederick West’s fears of inadequacy, he encouraged his wife to keep significant detailed records of her sexual conquests. These not only took the form of photographs of the erect penises of some of her clients, and of her own vagina in a variety of sexual states, but also consisted of a detailed diary in which she would record the size of her clients’ penises, and in which she would also give them marks out of ten for their sexual performance. At her husband’s insistence, she would keep the photographs and the diary in her ‘Special Room’ for him to consult at any time. Frederick West even installed a two-way mirror in the bathroom of his house in Cromwell Street so that he could see for himself the size of some of his wife’s clients, creeping up the stairs after them to peer through the mirror while they were urinating.
But West did not stop there. As the 1980s progressed, he made a series of videotapes of his wife for their joint use. And once again there was an emphasis on the size of a man’s penis, and Rosemary West’s ability to ‘take it’. The bigger the man, the more Frederick West liked to record it on video – and the more enthusiastic Rosemary West would become to demonstrate that she could sexually accommodate almost anyone or anything. As these experiments with videotape progressed, she took increasing pleasure in demonstrating to the camera, and her husband’s watching eye, her capacity to derive sexual excitement from inserting into her vagina the largest vibrators and dildos, as well as cucumbers and pint beer glasses. She would then urinate over a towel, or into the glass, and pour the urine over her naked body. At one stage, a friend of the family estimated that West may have made hundreds of these amateur videos of his wife, but he took great care never to appear in any of these videotapes himself. West preferred the concealment and anonymity of being behind the camera, perhaps only too conscious of his own penile size.
The majority of these video recordings were made in the top-floor bedroom at Cromwell Street, and kept there, where they could be discovered easily by the Wests’ children. For Frederick West made no secret from his children that he wanted his wife to mate with a bull.‘That’s why they had bulls on each corner of their four-poster bed,’ Stephen West would recall later. ‘He used to say, “The only thing that would satisfy you is a bull”,’ and claim that he was going to get one to ‘sort her out’. Both Stephen and Mae West discovered rubber suits, masks, whips and vast piles of pornographic magazines in both their mother’s own room and their parents’ bedroom. Frederick West even made a sign for the end of the four-poster bed which he built himself. It was of exactly the same design as the wrought-iron sign denoting ‘25 Cromwell Street’, and he screwed it to the four-poster bed. It read simply:‘Cunt.’
Frederick West did not disregard commercial pornography either. It was as much a passion as his own amateur efforts, for he depended on it, just as he did on his wife’s exploits, to help him to sustain and satiate his own rapacious sexual appetite. As the 1980s progressed, West went to elaborate lengths to assemble his own collection of pornography. At one stage he had seven video-recorders, all of which he had stolen, and was duplicating pornographic videotapes for sale. At the outset he simply offered them to his friends and workmates, but he then gradually extended his range, possibly to the extent of supplying them to local video stores for sale ‘under the counter’. West certainly suggested to a woman friend that he had made a profit from selling some that he had made himself, telling her that he had been paid £150 a time for recordings which involved the humiliation and beating of women, adding that he ‘didn’t understand how some women survived the beatings’.
Significantly, much of West’s collection of commercial pornography featured the abuse of women by groups of men, including scenes of bondage, where the victim is bound and gagged by her attackers, and then subjected to repeated sexual abuse, often involving the use of artificial devices, including vibrators, and sometimes also involving urination. Several of the tapes showed a ‘teacher’ instructing his pupils on the elements of sexuality, a role that West clearly saw himself fulfilling to his family and to the young women who crossed his path. One tape, in particular, featured a young girl hung up by her arms from a beam in a cellar and abused by two men, one black, one white, while she is helpless. Another showed a young woman apparently drugged, and then gagged with masking tape, before being abused by two men.
Other tapes showed lesbian scenes, in one of which two women simultaneously insert the same cucumber into one another. But his collection also contained a considerable number of tapes that featured scenes of bestiality, where a woman mates with an animal or animals, including on one tape a pig, reflecting West’s fascination with animal sexuality from his country childhood. There is no doubt that although West may have drawn some ideas for his own sexual experiments from his video collection, he would also have derived an even more intense satisfaction from the discovery that he had already experimented with perversions that he subsequently found on these commercial videotapes.
The voyeur in Frederick West came out in his collection of pornographic videotapes. They, probably more than anything else, captured his sexual insecurity, his sense that he alone was unworthy of a woman’s love, and that he could never fully satisfy his partner. This in turn meant that if he did achieve some form of sexual conquest, the woman was immediately demeaned in his eyes, revealed as nothing more than ‘a prostitute’. How could she have been anything else if she had allowed him sexual contact? This mixture of vanity and self-loathing drove his sexuality to greater and greater extremes. It was one reason why West wanted his wife to become a prostitute. It was a way of resolving the conflict within him, and making a profit at the same time.
Every kind of sexual perversity fascinated him. So, just as he had experimented with making audiotape recordings of himself and his wife making love in his van, so in due course would he create a videotape version – shot from the vantage-point of a tree – which showed his wife making love to a client in the van. And when he took her out to find clients in Gloucester or a neighbouring town, West would suggest that she wore a fur coat and stiletto heels but nothing else, and would take photographs of her in the outfit. He would then offer the photographs for sale to his friends, just as he would later offer pornographic videotapes for sale. The combination of a source of profit and the indulgence of his own sexual imagination ensured that pornography in all its forms was Frederick West’s only other hobby.
West’s eagerness for experiment, and his domination over his wife, an eagerness that gave rise to his desire for her to mate with a bull, led him to refer constantly to her as his cow. Frederick West even insisted that Rosemary West sign a document confirming it, just as he had made her sign the earlier declaration promising that she would not lose her temper for three months. Once again the document reveals a great deal about their relationship, and the extent to which West set the tone for much of his wife’s sexual activity. It began: ‘I, Rosemary West, known as Fred’s cow, give my cunt to be fucked by any prick at any time he so desires without ever saying no.’
‘My arse is to be smacked,’ it went on,‘until I say I’ve had enough, my back hole is to be hurt until you say you’ve had enough. My tits I give to anyone that do not like them, to screw, bite or suck them when I’m being cocked, apart from my husband who can have them at his pleasure. My baby box is to be filled by anyone who says so when I’m told.’ The document concluded: ‘I give my mouth to be fucked by anyone I’m told and to be shut by Fred when I open it too wide. My tongue is to lick anything out when I’m told. My fingers is for wanking or fingering my cunt, or any other girl’s cunt when I’m told. I must always dress and try to act like a cow for Fred, also to bathe and wash when I am told. Signed Mrs R. P.West.’
Exactly how West persuaded his wife to agree to sign this revolting document, which he took pains to preserve in Cromwell Street, or whether indeed it was her own suggestion, is unclear. It is obvious, nevertheless, that his knowledge of her involvement in the killings of ten young women would have given him a powerful hold over her; just as her knowledge of his murderous nature would have given her an equal power over him. But the document brings into the clearest focus the intense relationship between the two. It was a relationship that had its foundation in a mutual depravity and lust, but which the Wests imagined to be love.
Rosemary West’s sexual adventures with other men and women were a vital part of her attraction to her husband, one reason why Shirley Robinson’s apparent single-minded devotion to Frederick West alone – to the exclusion of all others – may have worked against her, just as it may have worked against Ann McFall before her. Though it may have concealed his own sense of sexual inadequacy, West nevertheless made no secret of his cheerful and willing participation. One of his wife’s partners, for example, a Jamaican who lived nearby, was a regular participant in the Wests’ ménage.‘He would go out in the van with us,’West would recall in the last year of his life, ‘and knock about, like. We got in the fields and Rose would run about naked, and we were naked as well, and . . . like carry on amongst ourselves and had a very good time.We’d made sure we were well out from anywhere and nobody seen us, like. And, I mean, we never ever got caught.We did it for years.’
West even urged his wife to save her semen-soaked knickers from her sexual encounters, particularly with black men, and provided her with glass storage jars to keep them in. One jar that West provided, and which remained, when filled, one of his prized possessions, had originally contained Rose’s chocolates.The choice of that particular jar for these bizarre mementoes of Rosemary West’s sexual promiscuity was no accident, but a reflection of his sense of humour. His wife ‘didn’t wear knickers at home’, he told the police; she ‘only wore them to go out for sex’. While a relationship with another man was still going on,West insisted that his wife put her knickers in the glass jar as soon as she got home,‘as souvenirs of her sex life’, and then date them in ink.
Once the relationship with a particular man came to an end the Wests went a little further. ‘At the end of an era, at the end of the passion, when it faded out,’West explained to the police,‘then they’d be burned and put in another jar.’The charred remains of his wife’s underclothes were then kept in tiny pots on her mantelpiece.‘The idea was that in years to come we could say – well, that represents so-and-so, and that represents so-and-so . . . It was just something we thought up between us – to have these knickers in these jars – and then when you’re sixty or seventy years old, like, you could say, “Well there’s twenty in there” . . .They were nice pots, I mean, and the tops were sealed on, glued on.’
The knickers were collected systematically by the Wests throughout Rosemary West’s years as a prostitute. ‘Rose always had two bedrooms,’ West explained. ‘She would have one bedroom on her own.And her bedroom was always kept locked. She kept the set of keys on a chain round her neck, always.’ Among the decorations were pictures of his wife in a variety of sexual positions, and ‘Rose used to have the habit of putting nude figures of her niggers’ along the bar that West eventually constructed for her use on the first floor of Cromwell Street. She was still advertising for clients in sexual contact magazines, using the name Mandy, just as Rena West had done before her, as well as bringing home men whom she met in local pubs like the Pint Pot and the Wellington. The clients would be offered a drink in the bar room that West had created on the first floor, before being ushered upstairs to the top floor. He had decorated one wall of the bar room with a large photograph of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. There was a tiger-skin rug on the floor, and a chandelier in the ceiling, and West erected a sign above the bar which read ‘Black Magic’.
Frederick West also collected his wife’s knickers from the back of his Bedford van where a mattress made it their own mobile brothel. ‘We would go out to different pubs on the road to Ledbury,’ he remembered. ‘It was a regular weekend thing, possibly one night in the week as well.’ In 1985, however, he bought a second-hand white Ford Transit, once owned by Group Four Security, and fitted it out as a more sophisticated version of the same thing, once again designed to allow Rosemary West to operate as a prostitute – but under his protection. The reason for both vans, West maintained, was the ‘fear of being seen by somebody from the church’ for some of his wife’s black clients, who would prefer to ‘go by the river’ or ‘up on Painswick Hill’.West would still insist on making love to his wife immediately after she had finished with a client.‘That was part of the deal.’
Even though Frederick West was finally to try to place all the blame for the killings on his wife, telling Howard Ogden that she was a ‘callous’ woman, ‘with no feelings at all’, he would nevertheless profess his undying love for her. Indeed, West even explained: ‘I still think the world of Rose now, although these things have happened’, and went on to suggest that his original love for ‘his angel’ Ann McFall had been transformed into a love for his wife. ‘Ann was passed into Rose, and I have been living with Ann in Rose all these years.’
On another occasion West told the police that he had always taken particular care when his wife was working as a prostitute. ‘I mean, I make sure nobody harms Rose. I worship that girl, my wife. We’ve got a very special thing in our minds . . . and we didn’t get married because we had kids. We got married ’cause we love each other . . . It’s got stronger.’
Certainly, by the summer of 1982 their love for one another had been amply proven by the birth of seven children. Now that Anna-Marie had left, Cromwell Street was home to Heather, almost twelve, Mae, now ten, Stephen, nine, Tara, four-and–a-half, Louise, three-and-a-half, and Barry, just two; and in April 1982 they had been joined by the Wests’ latest child, a girl whom they named Rosemary. In fact, the Wests’ latest daughter was not Frederick West’s own child. Her father was actually one of Rosemary West’s long-standing black friends and clients. But West treated her exactly as he did Tara, his other mixed race daughter, whose father had since left Gloucester to return to Jamaica. ‘It didn’t bother me,’ he explained to the police a decade later. ‘I couldn’t care less. They’re my children and that’s all there is to it.’
By that time Cromwell Street had become home to the Wests alone. The last lodgers, Liz Parry and Ped Brewer, had finally left a year earlier after Frederick West had refused to carry out an informal notice served on him by the local authority specifying that he repair parts of the upstairs of the house. From now on the Wests would take in lodgers only occasionally, and without informing anyone, thereby allowing West to avoid having to conform to any regulations.
Shortly after Rosemary’s birth, Frederick West set about laying a concrete patio across the part of his back garden immediately outside his back door, the part that contained the bodies of Shirley Robinson and Alison Chambers.And, as he always did, he recruited his family to help. Then, gradually, West had begun to alter the two upper floors of his house. The top floor was turned into two bedrooms. In one West put the four-poster bed that he had made at work, complete with its indelicate wrought-iron sign. He also decorated each post at the corner with a wrought-iron bull, and placed a further bull and cow in the act of intercourse on its side. In the other top-floor room West put a king-sized bed with a lace canopy. Above the bed he suspended a concave mirror, and at its foot he erected a video camera. It was here that Rosemary West would make some of the amateur videos of her own sexual exploits, and here, too, that West would listen to her as she entertained her clients. He concealed microphones in the speakers of a hi-fi system in the room, so that he could listen to her on a baby alarm intercom on the ground floor.
‘Every door in Mum’s part of the house had a picture of a half-naked or naked woman on the back,’ West’s daughter Mae would recall. ‘The house was pretty shabby before Mum started working as a prostitute, but once she started earning money they started spending around the house. Dad didn’t care about our part; it was all brown paint and cheap carpets.’ The children were not allowed to go into the top two floors of Cromwell Street once West had started the conversion. But they were expected to answer the telephone to their mother’s clients, take a telephone number and tell them that ‘Mandy would ring them back’. They were not required to answer the door to the clients. Frederick West had taken care to install a second doorbell marked ‘Mandy’ for his wife. Significantly, in view of his pornographic videotape collection, her nickname was ‘Mandy the Mouse’.
‘We occasionally met some of the men who went with Mum,’ Mae West would recall. ‘They seemed OK and weren’t perverts. They just sat with us playing, before Mum was ready to see them. While she was working I would look after the younger children. It would only be for an hour at a time, and usually two or three times during the day when she disappeared upstairs.’ When Frederick West was at home he would sit in the ground-floor lounge with the speaker of the intercom pressed to his ear. ‘He sometimes put his ear to the doorway to hear what was going on as well,’ Mae West remembered. ‘To us kids it was nothing, it happened all the time,’ his eldest son Stephen would recall. ‘We would hear all the loud noises up and down the stairs and just carry on with what we were doing.’ To the West family in Cromwell Street, this was commonplace, their definition of love.
Rosemary West would sometimes summon a client herself rather than wait to be approached, referring to her ledger before she did so. Stephen recalled: ‘If she fancied a coloured bloke who was well endowed she would look it up and ring them instead.’ At other times West would continue to take his wife out in his van. ‘Dad even put a little gas fire and a carpet in back of the van,’ Mae would remember, ‘because it got so cold. Then they would take a flask of tea and his usual bag of sex aids. I think Dad used to drive along when Mum was having sex in the back, and he’d film it on a tripod that he had bolted to the back.This would happen throughout the year.’To Frederick West, as to his family, this was entirely normal: his alternative universe.
That family was not neglected, however. Sometimes West would suddenly decide that they were going out for the day on a trip to the Forest of Dean, and put seats in the back of his van for them all to sit on. He would also take them for a week’s break once a year to a holiday camp at Barry Island in Wales, and then in a caravan that he had acquired, which he would tow behind his van, for other family holidays at sites at Brean, near Weston-super-Mare, or Craven Arms in Shropshire.‘But Dad never cared for holidays all that much,’ Stephen West remembered. ‘He couldn’t see the point in them. He’d always rather be at home in Cromwell Street.’ West liked the familiarity, and the safety, that Gloucester and his house represented. He would always prefer to make forays from there, rather than risk completely unknown territory for very long.
Less than six months after the birth of the Wests’ mixed race daughter Rosemary in April 1982, Rosemary West was pregnant again.The father was the same black man – who made a habit of coming to the house on Sunday morning, thereby earning himself a nickname – and in July 1983 she gave birth to her eighth child and sixth daughter. The Wests decided to christen her Lucyanna, though they would always refer to her by the nickname of Babs. Immediately after the birth, Rosemary West agreed to be sterilised. The operation did nothing to soften her vicious temper. Her children were still made to do most of the household chores.‘One of us would do the kitchen, the washing-up and wash the kitchen floor; another would scrub the bathroom floor and clean the whole bathroom. We had to clean the inside of the toilets, putting our whole arm in and really scrubbing,’ Stephen West recalled of the year he reached the age of ten. ‘If we did it wrong, she would give us a clout and we wouldn’t do it wrong again.’
But it was not only the odd clout. Her violence towards her children was persistent and calculated. On one occasion in that year Rosemary West rang her eldest son’s school to demand that he return home. When Stephen West arrived he found his thirty-year-old mother ‘really calm, I couldn’t understand it’. She told him to go into the bathroom, and ordered him to take his clothes off. His mother then tied his hands together with wire, and ordered him to lie face down on the floor so that she could tie his hands to the porcelain base of the lavatory. ‘I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was naked and I felt pathetic,’ he remembered eleven years later. ‘Mum looked so pleased with herself. She was completely calm as she tied my feet together.’
Rosemary West proceeded to beat her son with a leather belt for twenty minutes, standing on his legs so that he could not move. ‘She kept whacking me with the belt, always the buckle end, and she aimed it at the base of my spine.’ She also kicked him repeatedly in the stomach, shouting at him as she did so: ‘What have you done wrong?’ The boy had no idea, until finally Rosemary West accused him of removing some pornographic magazines from her room upstairs. Eventually, she simply sent him back to school.That afternoon her eldest child Heather returned home with a note from her own school explaining that they had confiscated some sex magazines from her. Rosemary merely laughed and said:‘Don’t worry. Stephen got your beating.’ When Frederick West got home, ‘Dad just laughed.They were laughing together.’
‘Mum and Dad wouldn’t have changed if the Pope had knocked on the door and said,“Treat your kids better”,’ Stephen West would write after his father’s death.‘They would have told him to fuck off as well. Funnily enough, none of all this made any real impression on us as children. It’s what you got used to, it was normal life. We knew no different. All we thought was that these were Mum’s and Dad’s moods and tempers.’
Then, in the summer of 1983, three years after leaving their house without a word or an explanation, Anna-Marie West contacted her parents. She arrived at Cromwell Street with her boyfriend, Chris Davies.‘My father was very welcoming,’ she would remember,‘but that was often his way when anybody new came into the house. He would be all friendly while he worked out whether they would be of any use to him.’ Within a few months Anna-Marie (who had started to call herself Anne Marie) was pregnant, and on 14 January 1984, at the age of nineteen, she was married in the same Gloucester register office that her father and stepmother had married in twelve years before. One of the guests was West’s own father,Walter West, then almost seventy, who came with West’s younger brother Douglas and his wife, whom Walter lived with in Much Marcle. The entire West family then retired to Cromwell Street. At Frederick West’s insistence, the reception was to be held in the basement.
Walter West’s legacy still cloaked the shoulders of his eldest son. In June 1984, when Frederick West became a grandfather for the first time, at the age of forty-two, with the birth of Anne Marie’s daughter Michelle, he started telling his two elder daughters, Heather and Mae, that it was ‘the right of a father to take his daughter’s virginity’, and explaining to them that his father claimed that he had had done it to his sisters, and that he intended to do the same to them.There is evidence that he may already have attempted to abuse Heather, whom one friend of the family remembered hearing scream out ‘No, no, please’ in the middle of the night some time before this. Certainly, Frederick West told both his daughters repeatedly that he had ‘created our bodies and that this gave him the right to look at our bodies’, in Mae West’s words.
From then on the two girls, now aged thirteen and twelve, who slept in twin beds in a room in the cellar of Cromwell Street, would go to bed fully clothed, and ‘only undress under the bedclothes’ to avoid their father’s attentions. West would retaliate by trying to catch them in the shower, bursting into the bathroom and pushing his hands through the curtain to touch his daughters whenever he could. They responded by trying to stand guard for one another while they took a shower. In a rage West would call his daughters ‘lesbians’ and tell them that they both needed a ‘good sorting out’.
Their father’s sexual approaches were not entirely a surprise. There had been rumours in the family of what may have happened to Anna-Marie in the past, and neither Frederick nor Rosemary West had ever made the slightest secret of their own sex life. As Mae said: ‘Sex had to be every night or he’d think Mum didn’t love him’, and her father would put his desire for his wife in the crudest terms. ‘He’d say, “I had a good ride last night” . . . then he would say to Stephen, “You’ll soon be ready to sleep with your Mum”, and Mum and Dad would laugh.’ For his part, Stephen West remembered:‘I just ignored him and let it wash over my head. I know he would have liked it if I had shown some interest, but I don’t think he would have tried to force me.’
Frederick West reserved his principal attentions for his daughters, reminding both Heather and Mae West: ‘Your first baby should be your dad’s.’ He told them that if they got pregnant, they could hand the baby over to their mother.‘He reckoned we would just be able to call it our brother or sister.’ West made every effort to catch his daughters naked, and if they tried to cover themselves with a towel ‘would try to rip it off ’.
Recently made redundant from the Muir Hill works, which had closed in 1984, West was at home for a time, working for himself as a jobbing builder, still interested in finding ‘lesbians for filming’, as he told one next-door neighbour. With time on his hands there was more opportunity to pursue his hobbies.There was also ample time for him to abduct and kill more innocent young women. Psychologists consulted by the police after West’s arrest were certain that he had continued killing throughout the early 1980s as relentlessly as he had through the previous decade, but he refused to confirm that this was the case, contenting himself with the remark: ‘I’m not in a counting match.To try and get as many as I can.’They were clearly secrets that he intended to keep.
Frederick West saw no need to make any explanations or excuses for his actions. He saw them as a private matter, something that he need discuss only with his wife. He made it clear to the police that he thought that his business was his own, and he communicated that same thought to his children. They took it as commonplace, therefore, that he would cut holes in the doors so that he could see his daughters undress, and put his hands up their skirts whenever they were wearing school uniform. ‘He didn’t see himself as a paedophile; he just saw it as natural, natural to see what he had produced,’ Mae would explain a decade later. ‘But he’d get nasty if I tried to fight him off.’ On one occasion West broke the door when she slammed it in his face; on another he ‘threw the hoover at me for refusing him’.Yet there is every sign that most members of his family, no matter what they may have been subjected to, remained loyal to him and to their mother throughout their time at Cromwell Street. ‘That was their reality as a family, the only love they knew,’ as one social worker put it many years later.
Heather West, however, found it increasingly hard to cope with her father’s relentless sexual attentions towards her. She hated his insistence on keeping a record of her periods, for example, the suggestion that she should not remain a virgin after the age of fifteen, and his threats that if she refused to allow him to make love to her he would ‘get someone to sort her out’.All took an increasing toll on the pretty dark-haired girl as she began the progress through puberty. In the mornings West would appear in her bedroom and pull the sheets off his eldest unmarried daughter. West would then ‘sometimes get on top of us’, then go out, only ‘to come in again a minute later when we were getting dressed and fumble with us’, as Mae West described a decade later. ‘The whole atmosphere was really making Heather miserable.’
Heather West became steadily more withdrawn, rocking back and forth on her chair, biting her fingernails to the quick. At Hucclecote Secondary School she took to writing ‘FODIWL’ on the front of her exercise books, an acronym for ‘Forest of Dean I Will Live’, and a school friend recalled later that she was ‘quite unhappy, particularly at home’, and was planning to ‘join the Army or go and work in a holiday camp’. Her school attendance record, at ninety-seven per cent, was excellent. In June 1985, at the first birthday party of her niece Michelle, Heather West stood alone, apart from the rest of her family. ‘She seemed desperately afraid of her parents,’ a friend of the time remembered nine years later.
One of Rosemary West’s clients as a prostitute at the time, who had arrived at Cromwell Street after answering an advertisement in a contact magazine and became friendly with both the Wests over a period of about eighteen months, was eventually to report his fears about Heather to the local Social Services department in an anonymous telephone call. Arthur Dobbs would remember at Rosemary West’s trial for murder nine years later that he had done so ‘because I thought something funny was going on’ after Rosemary West had told him that her husband was ‘having sex with one of the girls’.
But when Frederick West was visited by a social worker he responded as he always did to anyone in a position of authority over him, by being as humble and charming as possible. ‘He always called you sir or madam,’ recalled one social worker who dealt with West at the end of his life. On this occasion he took considerable pride in showing the female social worker all over his house, and ending his tour in the cellar. He even confided to her that he knew very well who had made the complaint, that it ‘was all a matter of jealousy’, and that he ‘intended to go round and sort it out with him’. West’s obsequious manner worked. There was absolutely no firm evidence against Frederick West, and the local authority let matters rest.
Heather and Mae West, meanwhile, made a pact between themselves. They vowed that they would never allow their father to have sex with them. It was a pact that was to cost one of them her life.