A FATHER’S RIGHT
‘The act of evil brings others to follow, young sins in its own likeness.’
AESCHYLUS, AGAMEMNON
Heather West was not forgotten in the months after her disappearance. Neighbours would enquire from time to time whether the Wests had heard from her, and Rosemary West would normally ignore the question or dismiss it truculently. Frederick West, on the other hand, would take just a little more care, explaining: ‘She’s phoned in the early hours of the morning and been abusive to Rose.’ West would then conclude firmly: ‘I’ve told her not to phone again.’ As the months passed the questions began to die away.
West himself did not forget his daughter; he may even have mourned her in his own way. He took to standing on his new patio staring into space, or sweeping it aimlessly,‘as though he were thinking about something’, as his daughter Mae remembered later. But her death taught him no lessons. West still could not control his obsession or desire. As time passed he turned his attention increasingly to her younger sister Mae, who by the spring of 1988 was almost sixteen herself. The girl knew that it was only a matter of time before her father forced her to have intercourse with him. ‘He often talked about the right of a father to take his daughter’s virginity,’ she would recall seven years later.
For the moment West merely hinted at the strength of his own need. The spectre of his now dead daughter may, momentarily at least, have given him pause. But Mae West was also saved from the intensity of her father’s desire for her by his own temporary departure from Cromwell Street. Since the closure of the Muir Hill Wagon Works he had been working for himself as a freelance builder, sometimes taking on small contracts to work away from Gloucester for a time. Late in 1987 he had gone to work in Weston-super-Mare and Bristol, returning home in the first months of 1988.
West next found himself a full-time job, working for Carson’s, a firm of building contractors based in Stonehouse, just outside Gloucester, but he also kept up his part-time building work and odd jobbing for the landlords of the properties in Cromwell Street. His house and the street were still the focus of his life, the centre of his own alternative universe. It was there that he recruited participants for his amateur pornographic videos, there that he encouraged his wife to expand her list of clients, there that he would listen on the intercom system while she made love, or peep through the holes he had cut in the doors to watch, and there, too, that he would indulge his passion for perverted sexuality.
Everyone in Cromwell Street knew about Frederick West. One sixteen-year-old girl who moved in during 1988 remembered him and the street very clearly. Seven years later she would paint a portrait of West and his house, a portrait so vivid that it would bring this small street within five minutes’ walk from the centre of Gloucester to life for anyone who read it. Her portrait also underlined West’s particular and enduring charm.
Cromwell Street was, she began by explaining, ‘a very rough, run-down area’ where the majority of the houses were run as ‘bed-and-breakfast businesses’, which meant that the population was ‘transient . . . with a lot of movement between the various establishments on the street’. This brought ‘a large number of young, single people’ to Cromwell Street.
‘During the period I was resident there,’ she explained,‘I would say only three of the houses in that street were occupied as family residences.’ One of those, of course, was number 25. And it was no time at all before she was introduced to West, who was doing odd jobs for her landlord. By then, ‘Fred West was known to me by reputation’. Her landlord had already told her cheerfully that he was ‘kinky’.
The Wests’ sexual reputation in Cromwell Street was well established. ‘Apparently Fred would watch Rose having sex with other people,’ the girl remembered, and was also ‘very interested in group sex and in making pornographic videos.’ It was also common knowledge among the young residents that ‘Rose would have sexual relationships with people other than Fred, both male and female’, and that the Wests would have ‘sex parties which involved visitors to the home watching videos made by Fred featuring Rose and various partners, and then going on to have sexual intercourse themselves’.
But when the teenager actually encountered Frederick West in the early part of 1989, she, like so many other young women in the past, fell under his spell. ‘When I first met Fred,’ she remembered, ‘my impression was that he was a very hard-working, caring man. Although I had initially been a little wary because of his reputation, I was quickly reassured by how kind and caring Fred appeared. When I met him, his main topics of conversation were his job, his family and his house.’ In no time West had invited her to look around 25 Cromwell Street.
By now aged seventeen, the young woman was very impressed. Some years later she was to recall West’s conducted tour, especially around the two upstairs floors, which she remembered as being ‘immaculate’ and ‘beautifully maintained – it was really smart’. On the first floor there was a sitting room with a bar in it, plus a bathroom and a kitchen, while on the floor above there were two bedrooms, one of which had a video camera and microphones attached to the bed. There was a Yale lock on a gate at the foot of the staircase leading to the upper floors.‘Fred told me his children were not allowed in this part of the house,’ She explained. And even though she was alone with him at the time, ‘he didn’t alarm me at all’.
West and the young woman became close friends. ‘I felt towards him like a father or a brother,’ she recalled, although she also admitted: ‘Fred loved to talk about sex, and make sexualised comments.’ She did not take them seriously. ‘Even with all the sexual suggestion and innuendoes that Fred made, I still felt safe with him,’ she remembered, safe enough to sit talking to him wearing ‘only pants and a short T-shirt, or sometimes just a short towel and nothing else’.
At this stage she had not encountered Rosemary West. ‘As with Fred, I had a bit of a preconceived opinion of Rose, because of all the gossip I had heard about her.’The gossip was that she loved sex and made love to anyone, man or woman. When they met, ‘My first impression of Rose was that she was very stern, with no sense of humour. She appeared to be a private, withdrawn sort of person. Fred was always the one everybody knew, liked and talked to; Rose was quieter altogether.’ As time went on, she realised that Rosemary West could also be a ‘very moody person, unlike Fred who was very even-tempered’, and that she ‘would get bad-tempered for no reason’, which meant that she would also become ‘very nasty and vindictive’. Nevertheless, the two women ‘quickly became very good friends’.
Now aged thirty-five, Rosemary West was in the middle of a long-standing lesbian relationship with a much younger woman, who had been a resident at Jordan’s Brook Community Home. It had lasted for almost two years, and for a part of that time her lover had lived with her at Cromwell Street. But that had not prevented Rosemary West from having a series of sexual relationships with other young women, sometimes recorded on video, and neither had it prevented her from working as a prostitute in the local pubs.
Just as she had done for more than fifteen years, Rosemary West would visit a pub wearing a miniskirt, a see-through blouse and no underwear, and approach one of the older men to ask if he wanted a drink. If he accepted, she would then offer to have sex with him in Cromwell Street for £10 or £20, thereby undercutting the other local prostitutes who were charging £50. It was a technique she and her husband had refined over the years. Sometimes Frederick West would watch, and sometimes she would video the experience so that he could see it later.
But Rosemary West soon confessed to her new young friend in Cromwell Street that this was not her favourite sexual pastime. She preferred group sex and sadomasochism, especially when it was being video-recorded, and she particularly liked to ‘punish people’ by tying them up and spanking or beating them. She told her that she would regularly tie up and beat her lover from Jordan’s Brook, just as they would sometimes approach other lesbians in bars and arrange for group sex sessions in Cromwell Street. And whenever possible Frederick West would video the proceedings. Indeed, he was regularly asking the young people he came into contact with in Cromwell Street if they knew ‘anyone trustworthy’ to take part in one of his pornographic videos.
West would invite young people from Cromwell Street to visit him, and play them one of his videos while they were having a drink. Sometimes this would become a prelude to some form of group sexual intercourse, but at other times he would simply offer to lend his guests one or more of the videos if they wanted to borrow it. They included his own amateur productions, often featuring his wife masturbating with a large dildo, or inserting a rolling-pin into her vagina, as well as commercial videotapes, which regularly included scenes of the bondage and humiliation of young women, often by an older man who appeared to be her ‘teacher’ or ‘uncle’. West even offered to supply one of the local video stores. Most of the young residents of Cromwell Street considered this no more than ‘just a bit of fun’.
Frederick West’s employers saw him in very much the same light. ‘Charming’ was one description at the time; ‘a pleasant man who would always pass the time of day’, and ‘obliging’, ‘never abusive and certainly not violent’ were two others, while a third employer remembered West as ‘never aggressive, honest and hard-working’. Just like the young men and women in his street, they, too, were seduced by West’s carefully groomed image of himself, the image of the down-to-earth little man, a man who knows his place and yet is always prepared to oblige.
West’s employers, like the residents of Cromwell Street, and the men who had worked alongside him in the light fabrication shop at Muir Hill, knew his smutty reputation, and recalled his leprechaun grin whenever a dirty joke was cracked or a sexual suggestion made, but they never appeared to sense the darker side that lay beneath. Perhaps they can be forgiven for that. How could they sense it? What cleverer scheme can the devil think up than to convince the world that the devil does not exist? Everything is permissible, nothing is ever too dangerous, providing ‘you’re among friends’.
West used the same technique within his own family.There was ‘nothing wrong in violence and sexual abuse’; quite the reverse. They were ‘completely normal’ and ‘nothing to worry about’.After all, they were a father’s right. ‘We didn’t know anything different,’ Mae West would recall after her father’s death. ‘What was really confusing was that Mum was a really nice mum if she wasn’t being nasty. And if Dad hadn’t been abusing us, he would have been a really good dad.’
Mae West spoke for all her brothers and sisters when she explained: ‘I couldn’t ask him why he was doing this to us. There was no point in appealing to Mum. She knew about it, but she ignored it. She’d just say that Dad was playing, but she never really put it down to much. I think she thought that as he wasn’t really hurting us, there was nothing to worry about.’ To Frederick and Rosemary West, abuse was a normal part of family life, as familiar a part of their world as the string of young visitors who came and went night after night at Cromwell Street to watch pornographic videos or to have sex.
Kathryn Halliday, who was to be called as a witness for the prosecution at Rosemary West’s trial, was among those who found themselves invited to join the motley flood of humanity washing through the elaborate iron gates at the entrance to 25 Cromwell Street. A divorcée, she had moved into 11 Cromwell Street in October 1988, along with her new lover, a lesbian. Halliday had hardly lived there a week when water started leaking through her ceiling, and she asked her landlord to recommend someone to help her to stop it.The landlord suggested Frederick West.
Ever helpful,West duly stopped the leak in the thirty-one-year-old woman’s ceiling, engaging her as he did so in his inevitable sexual banter. When he discovered she was living with a lesbian partner, his eyes gleamed. ‘If you see my missus – she’ll sort you out,’ he told her, adding by way of explanation: ‘She likes a bit of both.’West then invited her to his house that evening, and Kathryn Halliday accepted the invitation.
When she arrived at 25 Cromwell Street, just a few doors down from her own house on the same side of the street, Halliday was immediately ushered upstairs to the sitting room and bar on the first floor, where ‘Fred asked me if I wanted to see any videos – pornographic videos. Anything I wanted he could put on for me.’ The suggestion was that she could watch every kind of sexual perversion, including sex with animals and children. But the square-jawed woman simply asked if he had ‘a straight video – showing ordinary sex’, and West promptly put one on.
Moments later Rosemary West joined them. ‘Rose came straight into the room and sat down beside me,’ Kathryn Halliday remembered seven years later. She was wearing a miniskirt and a low-cut top. ‘Nothing else. No underwear at all.’ There were no niceties and no formalities. ‘She began to undress me very quickly,’ Halliday would recall. ‘I must admit I was very taken aback. I’d never been in a situation like this. I was dragged upstairs to the front bedroom. It was very, very quick, very forceful.There were mirrors on the wardrobes and there was a double bed. I was pushed down on the bed, and Rose West joined me. She was quite aggressive. She proceeded to make love to me.’ Frederick West, meanwhile, disappeared for ten minutes, then came back with a tray of drinks and a video camera. By now naked himself, he started to film the two women. ‘It appeared that Rose was trying to get me sexually excited, and then Fred joined in. He made love to me while Rose was sitting astride me, on top of me.’ But it did not last long.‘Mr West climaxed very quickly, and went downstairs to get another drink.’
Like many other young women before her, Kathryn Halliday had not bargained for the Wests’ persistent and violent sexual desire. ‘Rose became very aggressive. She held me down on the bed very hard. She gripped my wrists and began to taunt me. She was saying, “Are you woman enough to want to do all the things that we want to do to you?”’ Rosemary West wanted to use a variety of vibrators and dildos on Halliday, and then for Halliday to use them on her. The thirty-one-year-old tried, but ‘couldn’t use them all’, even though ‘the session went on until one o’clock or one-thirty in the morning’. Even then, Rosemary West was not anxious to bring it to an end.‘But Fred didn’t join in again, after the first time.’
In spite of the aggression and the taunts, Kathryn Halliday embarked on a sexual relationship with Rosemary West after that first evening.The two women met ‘about once a day, mostly during the day – but some evenings as well’ for months. ‘Rose would knock on the window at number 11 after taking the children to school,’ Kathryn remembered, although she was told not to come to 25 Cromwell Street on Thursday mornings, because that was kept for male clients. During the day the two women would be alone, but in the evenings Frederick West would be there too.
Each time she went, Kathryn Halliday remembered, ‘vibrators were there’, to be used ‘very very physically’, along with ‘dildos of different shapes and sizes’. One of the dildos was eighteen inches long and covered with nodules. Rosemary West liked to call it her Exocet, the name of a missile used during the Falklands conflict, but there were many others. Their meetings always started ‘very gently and she was very persuasive. But once she had got you into the bedroom she wanted to make you vulnerable,’ Kathryn Halliday was to confess to the jury at Rosemary West’s trial for murder seven years later.‘When she got you into a vulnerable position physically and mentally, she would use that against your person.’
When Frederick West was there, he ‘would often put on videos while we were having a drink, like most people would put on background music. They were all to do with bondage and sadism,’ Halliday remembered. ‘They were amateur videos. There was one of a girl in a black rubber suit having sex with a man. There were others with girls who were tied to a bed with chains and straps’, and in one of them Kathryn even recognised the Wests’ front bedroom. ‘A girl with fair hair was being whipped and tied to the bed’ by a man who might possibly have been West himself.‘She was forcibly being made love to – very, very forcefully.’ A large dildo was being used, and the camera focused specifically on the young girl’s distress.
During these evening sessions ‘Fred would watch rather than take part’, Kathryn Halliday would recall. ‘He took part sometimes, but not very often at all.’ On one occasion he ejaculated into his wife so quickly that she told him ‘You needn’t have bothered’. Indeed, if West took part at all, Halliday remembered, it was usually only when ‘I had my hands and feet tied. Rose would sit across me. She would hold me down and Fred would make love to me. She was quite a big woman and very, very physically strong.’ Frederick West made sure that the element of bondage increased steadily when he was present during the months that the thirty-one-year-old went to Cromwell Street: ‘Most times I went in the evening, it would end up with me being tied up,’ she remembered. On one occasion Frederick West even threatened to leave her tied up all night.
Inexorably, the Wests began to extend their sexual demands. ‘She wanted orgasms all the time, like a machine,’ Kathryn Halliday would recall.‘They wanted me to do more and more.They pushed me beyond my personal limits, and they hurt me.The first time was making love – the second time had become more forceful, more aggressive, more demanding. Rose West wanted me to do things to her which were very, very aggressive.’ In her own words, Halliday had become ‘like a moth to a flame’.
The Wests blindfolded their guest ‘several times’, and put a pillow over her head ‘twice’.With the pillow over her victim’s head, Rosemary West whispered: ‘What does it feel like not to be able to see?’ Then, after leaving the pillow in place for some time, she whispered again:‘Can’t you breathe? Aren’t you woman enough to take it?’ Kathryn Halliday gradually came to understand that there was nothing the Wests enjoyed more than causing her pain, and that Rosemary West in particular ‘had no limit to what she would do. They played with me and the idea that I was frightened. They got their thing from seeing other people frightened.’
Finally, the Wests took her to the top back bedroom at Cromwell Street. She was shown the four-poster bed, with two large wooden hooks in the pelmet, in the darkly decorated room, and then the contents of the wardrobe. Alongside a collection of short leather skirts and lingerie, there was a suitcase. Inside it: ‘There were black rubberised masks and suits. There were all-in-one suits with slits for the nose.’ But there were also masks with no nose or mouth holes, which Kathryn Halliday realised offered ‘no physical means of being able to breathe’. But the masks and suits had obviously been worn, ‘because they smelled of sweat’. When the Wests asked her if she would wear one of the suits:‘I said no and I edged out of the room. I was frightened. I never ever went back into that room.’
Even then, Kathryn Halliday did not break off her relationship with the Wests.They had become so close that Frederick West even tried to persuade her to move in with them, and bring her partner. She refused. But gradually, as their sexual relationship continued, they began to taunt her again about her inability to accept larger and larger sex aids, as Rosemary West could.They steadily increased the sexual pressure, showing her two large whips, a bullwhip and a cat-o’-nine-tails, and tying her to the bed more and more often. On one occasion West punched her in the face while his wife was holding her down, and on another she felt a sharp stabbing pain in her stomach which she discovered was a half-inch cut in her navel. ‘Each time they pushed me a little further.They became more and more violent, physically and mentally. Fred would beat me around the head with his fists and Rose slapped me.’ But gradually the Wests grew bored, ‘because a lot of the time I couldn’t take any more’. Finally, she accepted: ‘I was getting way out of my depth. I realised just how dangerous things were getting. I never returned to Cromwell Street.’
In June 1989 Kathryn Halliday left Cromwell Street altogether. She was fortunate to escape. For had she not had a permanent lesbian partner living in the same street, there is every possibility that she would never have managed to. Once again,West had chosen his target well. Kathryn Halliday made no complaint to the police, or to anyone else for that matter, after she left Cromwell Street.
Kathryn Halliday was not the only person driven out of Cromwell Street in 1989. Both Mae and Stephen West were forced out of their home by their parents.The previous summer, at the age of sixteen, Mae West had started to pretend that she was sleeping with her boyfriend Rob Williams so that her father would stop trying to abuse her. She knew that West was becoming ever more insistent, and that it would only be a matter of time before he forced her to have intercourse with him. But Frederick West responded by pushing her boyfriend into her room in the basement ‘and making him stay the night’. West then took to asking him: ‘How was she?’ Early in 1989 she and her boyfriend took refuge from his leering attentions in a flat two streets away.
That summer Stephen West, then almost sixteen, also left Cromwell Street, getting a job as a motor mechanic shortly after leaving school. In March a teacher at Oxstall’s Comprehensive School, where he was a pupil, had expressed concern that he might have been subjected to ‘physical abuse’, and the NSPCC had been invited to investigate. The Society contacted the Social Services Department in Gloucester, which had no record of the boy, and when he was interviewed he made no complaint about physical abuse at home, even though the NSPCC received a report in April that he had been hit with a mallet.The Society’s records show only that he received a ‘minor physical injury on the face’ for which he gave ‘a satisfactory explanation’.
In fact, between March and May 1989 the representatives of the Society held four meetings with Stephen West to explore the possibilities of abuse. In the end they decided to take no further action after Stephen himself decided that he did not want them to. Looking back six years later, the Society noted: ‘On the evidence before it at the time . . . the NSPCC did not believe the case was a serious one.’ Its case file was later to go missing, and there is certainly no record that Frederick West or his wife were ever questioned about the suggestions of abuse to their fifteen-year-old son. Not long afterwards the Wests themselves forced Stephen to move out of 25 Cromwell Street. They found him a bed-sitting-room not far away. It was not only a punishment. Frederick West was as determined as ever to preserve the privacy of his own bizarre world.
Cromwell Street was hardly left empty by the departures. Mo, as the Wests always called their first mixed race child Tara, was eleven, her younger sister Louise ten, and Barry nine, while the Wests’ two other mixed race children, Rosemary and Babs (as Lucyanna was called) were seven and six. But for a time Frederick West was careful not to abuse his children.Though he had attacked his first daughter at the age of eight, they were, apparently, ‘too young’ for the time being. Instead he began to plan to have another child.
He may have wanted Rosemary West to make love to black men, and to have their children, but as he once told Howard Ogden: ‘I am colour-prejudiced a lot.’ This made him even more determined to have another child with his wife. Frederick West’s desire to perpetuate the cycle of incest within his own family had not dimmed.
Not long after the two remaining elder children left home, the Wests decided to try to have another child together. First they visited a venereal diseases clinic in Cheltenham to ensure that they were not suffering from any sexually transmitted diseases.They also wanted more information about the dangers of AIDS, but neither took a test to discover whether or not they were HIV-positive.‘But I knew we didn’t have an ordinary sex life, like,’ West admitted. ‘That’s why me and Rose went along in the first place.’And then, at the age of thirty-six, Rosemary West had her sterilisation operation reversed. At the age of forty-eight Frederick West set about becoming a father for the tenth time.
West’s other principal interest at the time was his full-time job as a general maintenance man at a home for the autistic in Minchinhampton, seven miles south of Gloucester. Still working for the firm of Carson’s Contractors, who had a contract to look after the home,West was on call ‘twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for odd jobs’, as he put it, and for all sorts of minor tasks, including carpentry, plumbing and decorating. He never minded being called out, and would often disappear to the home at odd hours of the day or night in the red Vauxhall Astra van that he had recently been supplied with by the contractors. With thirty-two adult residents and sixty-one staff, Stroud Court was in the middle of a seventeen-acre country estate, where Frederick West had keys to all the buildings. The main house itself had a series of rambling cellars, which one resident described as ‘like a rabbit-warren’, and where West was regularly to be found.
Frederick West clearly enjoyed working at Stroud Court, where he would engage the staff and residents in endless conversation: ‘talkative as anything’, as one would remember. And, as usual, West would take a particular pride in his sexual conquests and criminal connections, at one stage even boasting that he was ‘involved in diamond smuggling’. Once again ‘no one took him particularly seriously’; he was just a hard worker who seemed happy to do even the dirtiest jobs, like working on the cesspit.West would never complain. As he told the police proudly after his arrest: ‘I mean, I got a good reputation with my work and everything else I do . . . If anybody was in trouble, I helped them out the best I could . . . with no bad intentions whatsoever . . . I like people to look upon me as somebody they can trust.’
Naturally, whenever West went to Stroud Court he seized the opportunity to pick up any female hitchhikers he came across on his way home, haunting the Stroud to Gloucester and the Cirencester to Gloucester roads just as he had done in the past. He would often drive between Stroud and Cirencester, stopping off at a small farm at Camp, near Painswick, where his employers had a workshop, before turning north again, back towards Cromwell Street. ‘I’ve never done anything up the workshop,’ West told the police after his arrest. ‘I’ve never dug one hole up round that area.’
On Sunday afternoons he and Rosemary West would go out for drives in his van, and they would be ‘gone for hours’, as one of their daughters’ school friends remembered later. Old habits died hard. It was nearly twenty years since the Wests had first started touring the area on the lookout for vulnerable young women.They saw no reason to stop now. The suspicion must be that they had also not stopped killing any young women unfortunate enough to fall into their hands. But that was a secret that neither Frederick West nor his wife was prepared to share with anyone.
At 25 Cromwell Street life continued much as it had before. One friend from the street recalled visiting the house ‘almost daily’ throughout 1990 and 1991 to find ‘just the children downstairs’. When she asked where their mother was, the younger West children would explain politely that she had brought a man home and was upstairs with him. ‘The intercom was always on, and it was switched to work both ways,’ the woman remembered later. ‘Consequently, on these occasions the children and I were able to hear Rose and her unknown male visitor having sex. Rose was very noisy, screaming and moaning, and it was very embarrassing for me in front of the children.’ But, like so many other people who came into contact with the Wests, she did not feel the children’s knowledge of their mother’s sexual drive ‘was particularly harmful or undesirable’. She simply concluded:‘Although my description of the Wests’ family life probably sounds bizarre, at the time I accepted it as perfectly normal.’
Rosemary West’s younger brother Graham Letts once approached his sister about her activities as a prostitute. ‘What shocked me most was how casual she was about the whole thing,’ he said later. ‘She and Fred seemed to take pride in how slick the operation was.’ Letts and his wife Barbara would often be there when the telephone rang, and ‘Rose would disappear for half an hour’. But the Letts, too, did not think it dangerous. Even though they had been invited to watch pornographic videos, had seen the pictures of Rosemary West in the nude that decorated the bar upstairs, and had seen her take off all her clothes in front of them when she wanted to change – ‘She wasn’t wearing knickers. I don’t think she ever did’ – they thought life in Cromwell Street was normal enough. All Graham Letts could offer by way of explanation was: ‘If I had known just how much deeper their perversion went I would have blown the whistle.’
Frederick West’s sexual abuse of his own children finally resumed. In 1991, not long after one of his daughters had started at a local comprehensive school in Gloucester, West started to touch her indecently, just as he had touched Heather and Mae before her, taking her upstairs to the top bedroom in Cromwell Street, removing her clothes and telling her he was ‘checking her over’. In the last months of 1991 he did so on four or five occasions, insisting on taking his daughter’s clothes off himself. A year earlier, in her final months at her junior school, West had started making preliminary attempts to touch her developing breasts every few days. But he had not persevered. Now, he started making crude jokes to her about female anatomy.
Just as he had done with Anne Marie, Heather and Mae West before her,West would tell his daughter that it was perfectly ‘all right for him’ to touch her because she was his daughter ‘and I produced you’. Her sister remained untouched by West, at least for the time time being but she, too, knew of his incestuous desire. She even confided to a friend at school that Heather ‘had run away because of her father’s abuse’. But that was a secret meant to be kept within the locked doors of Cromwell Street, guarded by Frederick and Rosemary West with meticulous care, and reinforced with violence. When she felt it was necessary, Rosemary West continued to punish her children viciously, beating her children with a wooden spoon or a leather belt, just as she had beaten Stephen. She would often wait to do it until her husband came home, so that the Wests could laugh about it together.
Not that Rosemary West was completely in her husband’s thrall. Late in March 1991 she rented a bed-sitting-room for herself in Stroud Road, not far from Cromwell Street, without telling her husband. Calling herself Mandy West, she explained to her landlord that she was ‘a nanny’ at Cromwell Street, who ‘wanted to get away sometimes’. To prove the point she took her youngest daughter Lucyanna with her to meet him. The top-floor flat cost her a little over £100 a month, and she furnished it herself with considerable care. She rented it for more than six months, visiting it regularly during the day, and not leaving until late September. When she suddenly did so, she left all her newly acquired possessions, including a new hoover in its box.
After her sudden disappearance, the landlord at Stroud Road went to 25 Cromwell Street in search of ‘Mandy’ West and encountered Frederick West, who clearly knew nothing about his wife’s arrangement. West told the man that there was no Mandy living there, but there were ‘two Rosemarys’: ‘Did he want the older one or the younger one?’ But at that moment Rosemary West emerged from the house to see who her husband was talking to. Flushed with embarrassment, she tried to deny that she had anything to do with the flat in Stroud Road. Ever keen to sense danger, West took charge immediately, saying he would ‘clear the place out in a hour’, and doing so. In his interviews with Howard Ogden three years later West would claim that ‘Rose had flats all over Gloucester’ that ‘he knew nothing about’, but it is far more likely that this represented her only attempt at independence. Rosemary West clearly wanted to keep some of her earnings and activities secret from her husband. But another reason may be that she had recently suffered a miscarriage.
In fact, Frederick West’s carefully ordered life was about to fall apart, but the harbinger of his downfall was not his wife’s small attempt at independence: it was the death of his father Walter. Now almost seventy-eight years of age, Walter West had been living in Much Marcle with West’s younger brother Douglas and his wife for some years. But in the first months of 1992 his health had begun to deteriorate rapidly. Frederick’s other brother John had called on him to visit their father in hospital, but Frederick categorically refused to do so, causing a rift between the two brothers which would never be healed. He was afraid of hospitals. He was also, probably, slightly afraid of his father, on whom he had once modelled himself, but whom he had now come to see as his rival as the dominant male in the West family.
But, characteristically, West managed to produce a romantic explanation for his failure to visit his father.‘I wanted to remember my father as I’d seen him the last time, that day in the garden,’ he told Ogden two years later. ‘That day I was sat in the garden with Dad under the plum tree, he said that he hadn’t got long to go, and I felt really wonderful with him. Me and my father was close. Me and Dad always stuck together.’ And he told the police:‘I set myself up round my father. I still am to this day trying to keep myself the way my father was. Me and him got on ace. He was my God, like. I wanted to be my father. I admired all he stood for.’ Though West may have felt secretly that he could never live up to his father, he had spent his life trying to prove that he was worthy of his love, and using what he saw as Walter West’s own sexual appetites as his archetype to do so.
Walter West died in Ledbury Cottage Hospital on 28 March 1992, less than four miles from the village that had been his home throughout the seventy-eight years of his life. Five days later he was buried in the parish church of St Bartholomew’s, Much Marcle, where his eldest son had been christened and confirmed into the Anglican Church four decades earlier. Frederick West stood at the graveside, with his wife and his eldest daughter, Anne Marie. The wake was held at Moorcourt Cottage, now the home of his younger brother, Douglas, and the site of Walter West’s own abuse of his eldest child.
Seven weeks later Frederick West took a further sordid step along the path that had begun in his father’s cottage in Much Marcle. But this time it was a step that would eventually contribute to his downfall. Disregarding the risks inherent in the fact that his children were now growing up, ignoring the awareness that had begun to permeate every section of British society in the wake of Childline (a nationwide counselling service for young people in trouble), overlooking the fact that publicity that had surrounded a number of sex-abuse cases – all of which had been reported on his own favourite news programmes – West calculatedly and repeatedly returned to the abuse of one of his own daughters. It was his right; why should he not exercise it? The family would always be loyal. They always had.Where was the danger?
One evening in late May 1992 West asked one of his daughters to help him to take some bags upstairs. Rosemary West had gone out, and the rest of the children were on the ground floor watching television, or in the basement. Frederick West ushered his daughter through the door leading to the top two floors of Cromwell Street, then locked it behind him as he followed the girl upstairs towards the bar room on the first floor. He wanted her to take a bag of wine bottles into the room.
Once they were both inside West told his young daughter to sit on the small sofa under the window. West then adjusted the video camera opposite them and pointed it towards her. He then took off his daughter’s clothes and knelt down in front of her after unzipping his own trousers, telling her to ‘look at the television’. West inserted his penis into her, after using some lubricant but without a condom.Then, even though she was plainly terrified, and shouting,‘Stop, Dad, it hurts’, he turned the child over and abused her from behind, before turning her on her back again on the sofa and raping her a second time. The girl remembered afterwards the programme showing throughout her ordeal. It was Just Good Friends (a light-hearted situation comedy).
Downstairs, two of the other children had heard the shouts and had started banging on the locked door to their parents’ part of the house. West shouted back, ‘For fuck’s sake’, but otherwise took no notice. After he had finished he left the room and came back with a pad of toilet paper for the child to put into her knickers. Mascara was running down his daughter’s face from the tears, but as he followed her back down towards the ground floor he told her only: ‘Don’t say anything.’
When they got back downstairs he warned her again: ‘You mustn’t say anything, you know, because I’ll go to prison for five years. We’ll all be split up, and you need a mum and dad at your stage of life.’The girl did not reply, she simply went to bed and cried through the night.
She spent the rest of the week off school, as her father had encouraged her to in the first place, and he made no further approaches to her, beyond asking her if she was ‘bigger’ and whether she had ‘put anything inside herself ’.The girl told him that she had not. That weekend, while her father was out at work, she told her elder sister what had happened. But her ordeal did not end there.
One evening the following week West took his daughter to one side and told her that he ‘would have to do it again’, because ‘there were two layers that needed breaking’ and, as she herself recounted later, it ‘could be dangerous if he didn’t do it’ as a ‘man might hurt me in future’. The confused and terrified girl believed him, and later in the week he kept his promise, repeating the abuse in exactly the same way.The girl was in tears throughout the ordeal, begging her father to stop. His reply was: ‘It’ll be OK just this time. I won’t need to do it again.’
This time, when his daughter went back downstairs she found that her mother had returned.The girl disappeared into the ground-floor bathroom, but both her parents followed her inside.West told his wife what he had done, and invited her to examine the girl. Rosemary West told her daughter to get off to bed.
Even that was not the end of the abuse. Before she went to bed her father told her that he wanted her to go with him the following day, a Saturday, to a warehouse he was painting near Reading.When they arrived at the deserted building the following morning, he raped his daughter for a third time, even though she was again shouting and trying to push him off.After he had finished, and they were sitting in his van, West patted her thigh and said: ‘I’ll leave it alone now.’
That weekend the girl told her sisters and her brother Barry what had happened. But none of them told anyone. They talked about calling Childline, and even discussed trying to find the video as evidence of the assault, but in the end, because the abuse stopped, they decided to do nothing. For all the West children, this was still their father, the head of their family, the man who gave them part of their definition of love.
In the days that followed the rape of his daughter at the warehouse, Frederick West took to collecting her from school even more diligently than he had in the past. He had to protect his world, and his family, from the suspicions of prying outsiders. Rosemary West, meanwhile, put a new lock on the front door to make sure that her children could not go out without her knowledge once they had come back from school. She kept the key, like so many others, around her neck.
Soon, however, through the voices of two of his children, one of them from beyond the grave, the depravity of Frederick West’s nature would be exposed for the world to see.