Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (21 page)

‘If he felt we were in bed too late,’ said Rose’s brother Andrew, ‘he would throw a bucket of cold water over us. He would order us to dig the garden, and that meant the whole garden. Then he would inspect it like an army officer, and if he was not satisfied, we would have to do it all over again.’

A martinet, he enjoyed disciplining his children and was always on the lookout for reasons to beat them.

‘We were not allowed to speak and play like normal children,’ said Andrew. ‘If we were noisy, he would go for us with a belt or chunk of wood.’

His wife Daisy also suffered in the violent outbursts.

‘He would beat you black and blue until Mum got in between us,’ Andrew said. ‘Then she would get a good hiding.’

His savage attitudes and his mental instability did little to recommend him to employers and he drifted through a series of low-paid, unskilled jobs. Short of housekeeping money and in the thrall of a violent husband, Daisy Letts suffered from severe depression. She had already given birth to three daughters and a son when she was hospitalised in 1953 and given electroshock therapy. At the time she was pregnant with Rosemary and it is thought that these shocks could have had an effect on the child as she developed in her mother’s womb.

Rosemary was noticeably different from the other Letts’ children. In her cot she developed the habit of rocking violently and sometimes she rocked so vigorously that she could move her pram across the room, even when the brake was on.

As she grew older, she rocked only her head – but for hours on end as if she was in a trance. The family soon realised that she was a bit slow. They called her ‘Dozy Rosie’. However, with big brown eyes and a clear complexion, she was a pretty child. This appealed to her father and, by doing everything he asked without question, she became the apple of his eye and escaped the beatings he meted out to the other children although there were rumours that she had an incestuous relationship with her father and that he molested young girls.

Things did not go well for Rosemary when she went to school though. With no appreciable intellectual gifts, she did not do well academically. As she grew older, she developed a tendency towards chubbinesss and was teased relentlessly. In response, she lashed out.

As an adolescent, Rose became precocious sexually. After taking a bath, she would walk around the house naked, then climb into bed with her younger brother and fondle him. Her father forbade her to go out with boys her own age. Not that many were interested. Both her reputation as an ill-tempered, sullen, aggressive loner and her chubbiness put the local boys off. Instead she concentrated on the older men in the village.

After 15-year-old Mary Bastholm disappeared from a bus stop in Gloucester in January 1968, girls in the area were on their guard. But Rosemary’s growing interest in sex meant that she would not stay home and, on one occasion, one of the older men she was seeing raped her.

At the beginning of 1969, Daisy Letts could stand life with her violent husband no longer. She left and moved in temporarily with her older daughter Glenys and her husband, Jim Tyler. Free from her father’s strictures, the 15-year-old Rose spent all her time going out. Her brother-in-law said that Rose carried on with a numer of older men and that she had even tried to seduce him. After a few months, to everyone’s surprise, Daisy moved back to Bill, bringing Rose with her. It was then that Rose met 28-year-old Fred West.

Whatever Bill Letts’s shortcomings as a parent, he tried to keep his underage daughter away from West. When Bill discovered that Rose was having sex with West, he reported him to the Social Services. This proved ineffective, so Bill turned up at West’s caravan and threatened him. The relationship was halted briefly when West went to prison for theft and failure to pay fines. But Rose was already pregnant with West’s child. At 16, she left her father’s house and moved into West’s caravan to take care of Rena’s two daughters.

In 1970, Rose gave birth to the ill-fated Heather. With Fred in jail, no money and three children to take care of, the teenage Rose found it hard to cope. Her temper flared constantly. She particularly resented having to take care of another woman’s children and treated Charmaine and Anne-Marie abominably.

In the summer of 1971, eight-year-old Charmaine went missing. Rose told Anne-Marie that their mother Rena had come to get her. There is no doubt that Rose killed her. Colin Wilson, author of
The Corpse Garden
, believes that she was not responsible for her actions. He thinks that Rose ‘simply lost her temper, and went further than usual in beating or throttling her. She was, as Anne-Marie said, a woman entirely without self-control; when she lost her temper, she became a kind of maniac.’

West could not have killed Charmaine as he was in jail at the time. However, he was complicit in concealing her body under the kitchen floor of 25 Midland Road, a house in Gloucester they had recently moved into. When the body was found, the fingers and toes were missing, just like Anna McFall’s. Fred and Rose were now bound together by their crime. Later, when Rose’s father came to take her away from West, West said: ‘Come on, Rosie, you know what we’ve got between us.’

This upset Rose, Bill Letts noted. Afterwards Rose told her parents why she could not leave

‘You don’t know him!’ she said. ‘You don’t know him! There’s nothing he wouldn’t do – even murder!’

In the 1960s, a large number of West Indian immigrants had come to Gloucester. They were largely single men and Rose invited many of them over to the house for sex – both for fun and to earn a little extra money. Fred encouraged this. He was a voyeur and enjoyed watching her have sex through a peephole. Although over-sexed, Fred would only join in if the sex involved bondage, sadism, lesbianism or vibrators. He also took suggestive pictures of Rose, using them in advertisements in magazines for ‘swingers’ and other publications where he advertised her services as a prostitute.

Eventually Rena came to look for her daughter Charmaine. Unable to get any sense out of Fred or Rose, Rena visited Fred’s father, Walter, in August 1971, hoping he could shed some light on what happened to Charmaine. As a result, Fred decided to kill Rena. It seems that he got her back to the house in Midland Road, got her drunk and strangled her. He dismembered her body, put the bits in bags and buried her in Fingerpost Field near Much Marcle in the same general area as he buried Anna McFall. Again the fingers and toes were missing.

Fred and Rose began employing their neighbour, Elizabeth Agius, as a babysitter. On more than one occasion, when the Wests returned home, Elizabeth asked them where they had been. They said they had been cruising around looking for young girls, preferably virgins. Fred explained that he had taken Rose along, so then they would not be afraid to get into the car with him. Elizabeth thought they were joking, but later Fred propositioned her. The Wests later drugged and raped her. They were deadly serious.

In January 1972, Fred and Rose married at Gloucester Registry Office. And in June, they had another daughter who they named Mae. They decided they needed a bigger house to raise their growing family and accommodate Rose’s prostitution business and they moved into 25 Cromwell Street. It had a garage and a spacious cellar. Frank as ever, Fred told Elizabeth Agius that he planned to convert the cellar into a room where Rose could entertain her clients. Or he would soundproof it and turn it into his ‘torture chamber’. This, in fact, was what he did.

Its first inmate was his own eight-year-old daughter, Anne-Marie. He told her that he and Rose were such caring parents that they were going to teach her how to satisfy her husband when she got married. They stripped her and gagged her. Her hands were tied behind her back and Rose held her down while Fred raped her. This hurt her so much that Anne-Marie could not go to school for several days. She was warned not to tell anyone, otherwise she would be beaten. The rapes continued. On one occasion she was strapped down so her father could rape her quickly during his lunch hour.

Fred and Rose continued cruising the vicinity, looking for young girls. At the end of 1972, they picked up 17-year-old Caroline Owens, who they hired as a live-in nanny, promising her family that they would take care of her. Caroline was very attractive, and Fred and Rose both tried to seduce her. She found them repellent, but when she said she was leaving, they stripped her and raped her. Fred threatened that if she told anyone about it: ‘I’ll keep you in the cellar and let my black friends have you. And when we’re finished we’ll kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester.’

Caroline believed him. Terrified, she kept silent. But she could not hide her bruises from her mother, who wrung the truth from her and called the police.

The matter came to court in January 1973, but West was able to convince the magistrate that Caroline had consented to sex. Despite West’s long criminal record, the magistrate did not believe that the Wests were capable of violence and they got off with a small fine. By this time Fred was 31. Rose was 19 and pregnant for the third time.

The Wests still needed a nanny and seamstress Lynda Gough moved into 25 Cromwell Street to take care of the children. Soon after, they murdered her. Then Fred buried her dismembered body under the floor of the garage. Again he removed her fingers and toes, although this time her kneecaps were missing too. When Lynda’s family asked what had happened to her, they were told she had moved on. The police were not called and there were no repercussions. Soon after, in August 1973, the West’s first son, Stephen, was born.

Having got away with so much, the Wests began killing just for the fun of it. In November 1973, they abducted 15-year-old schoolgirl Carol Ann Cooper and took her back to Cromwell Street where they amused themselves with her sexually. After about a week, they got tired of her and killed her, either suffocating or strangling her. Then her body was dismembered and buried under the house.

The following month, 21-year-old university student Lucy Partington went home to Gotherington near Cheltenham for the Christmas holidays. She was the cousin of novelist Martin Amis. On 27 December, she went to visit a disabled friend. She left to catch a bus home shortly after 10 p.m. and was waiting at a bus stop on the outskirts of Cheltenham when the Wests offered her a lift. It is almost certain that she would not have got into the car if Rose had not been there. The Wests took her back to Cromwell Street where they raped and tortured her for about a week, then murdered her, dismembered her body and buried it under the house.

Fred cut himself while dismembering Lucy’s corpse and went to the hospital to have the wound stitched on 3 January 1974. By then Lucy – like Carol Ann Cooper – had been reported missing, but there was nothing to connect either of the girls to the Wests. Their bodies were concealed in Fred’s home improvement scheme. This involved enlarging the cellar and turning the garage into an extension to the main house. The only thing remotely suspicious about this was that Fred’s home improvements were done at strange hours of the night. However, West did attract police attention. To pay for his home improvements – and the concrete he covered the corpses with – he committed a series of thefts and fenced stolen goods.

Three more young women – 15-year-old schoolgirl Shirley Hubbard, 19-year-old Juanita Mott from Newent in Gloucestershire and 21-year-old Swiss hitch-hiker Therese Siegenthaler – ended up under the cellar floor at 25 Gloucester Street. They had been tortured and dismembered. The Wests had subjected them to extreme bondage, using plastic covered washing lines and ropes to suspend them from one of the beams in the cellar, and gagging them with tights, nylon socks and a brassiere. In 1976, the Wests enticed a young woman from a home for wayward girls back to Cromwell Street where she was taken to a room where two naked girls were being held prisoner. She was forced to watch while the two girls were tortured. Then she was raped by Fred and sexually assaulted by Rose. Later dLLaturing the court case, she gave evidence as ‘Miss A’.

It is likely that one of the girls was Anne-Marie, Fred’s daughter who was the regular target of the couple’s sexual sadism. But Fred not only raped and tortured his own daughter, he brought home other men to have sex with her.

By 1977, Fred had extensively remodelled the house. Upstairs he had constructed extra bedrooms so they could take in lodgers. One of them was 18-year-old Shirley Robinson. A former prostitute with bisexual inclinations, she had sex with both Rose and Fred.

Rose fell pregnant by one of her West Indian clients and gave birth to Tara in December 1977. At the time Shirley was also pregnant, carrying Fred’s child. Rose was unhappy about this. She feared that Shirley would displace her in Fred’s affections. So she had to go. In July 1977, Shirley Robinson was murdered. By this time, the cellar was full, so Shirley and her unborn child were buried in the back garden at 25 Cromwell Street.

In November 1978, Rose gave birth to another daughter. She was Fred’s child and they named her Louise. There were now six children in the household and, from an early age, they were aware of what was going on. They knew that Rose was a prostitute and that Anne-Marie was being sexually abused by her father. Anne-Marie eventually fell pregnant by Fred, but it was an ectopic pregnancy which took place in the fallopian tube rather than the womb itself and the foetus had to be aborted. She then moved out to live with her boyfriend, so Fred turned his sexual attentions on Heather and Mae. Heather tried to resist and was beaten.

Not even the loss of Rose’s father, who died of a lung ailment in May 1979, put the Wests out of their stride. Several months later, they abducted a troubled 17-year-old from Swansea named Alison Chambers, raped and tortured her, then murdered her and buried her in the back garden.

In June 1980, Rose gave birth to Fred’s second son, Barry. In April 1982, Rose had Rosemary Junior, who was not Fred’s child. Then in July 1983, Rose had yet another daughter, Lucyanna. Like Tara and Rosemary Junior, she was mixed race. It is thought that the Wests kept on carrying out sexual abductions throughout this period. But as they did not bury any of the victims at 25 Cromwell Street and refused to confess to any murders during the early 1980s, we cannot be sure.