Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  The abuse and misery suffered by the older children were so intense that Heather ran away from home; but she soon returned, finding the outside world even more hostile than Number 25. Steve was the next to try and escape. For three weeks he slept rough, sometimes staying with friends, until it dawned on him that his parents were not at all concerned that he had gone and would not be coming to look for him. He slunk home like a whipped dog, and was welcomed with another beating. ‘I got used to the beatings after a while. It was the fact that she laughed afterwards. She just laughed at me. It is the worst thing anybody could do,’ he says.

  More degradation was in store for the boy. Fred told Steve that he would soon have to have sex with his mother. Fred said to Rose, ‘When he’s seventeen he’ll be ready to sleep with you.’ Then he turned to his son, winked, and said, ‘You’ll be all right then!’ Steve looked in amazement at his parents, and saw that they were laughing.

  Heather was then studying for eight Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) examinations, and was expected to pass them all. She was such a good student that Denise Harrison would copy Heather’s homework on the bus to school in the morning. It was guaranteed that Heather would have completed her assignments; Heather knew she had to work hard because she had to find a good enough job to leave home by her sixteenth birthday.

  As her birthday approached, Fred’s attempts to rape her became more frequent and more insistent. Heather began to fear for her safety, believing that ‘something terrible’ was about to happen to her – just as Anna Marie had. Her sleep was broken by nightmares.

  At the same time, gossip about Rose’s eccentric sex life reached the pupils of Hucclecote Secondary School. The West children had been virtually brainwashed into keeping silent about what went on at home, but when Heather’s classmates asked her whether the stories about black babies were true, she unwisely confirmed that her mother did have coloured lovers. She let a few other details slip as well. Fred and Rose soon found out about the indiscretions and were not pleased, wondering what else Heather might now say. Fred was so concerned that he began to escort her to and from school.

  Anna Marie married Chris Davis in 1985, and they moved into a house on the White City estate in Gloucester. Heather confided in Chris one day, smoking nervously as she spoke. She did not explicitly say what was wrong, but talked about her home life in such a way that it was obvious there was a serious problem. She said she was thinking of running away, and had considered living rough in the Forest of Dean. She said she never wanted to see any other people. Chris told Anna Marie he was going to talk with Fred and Rose. ‘I said I’d had enough and was going to do something. She said, “For Christ’s sake don’t, because they’ll kill us both!”’ Heather also begged her half-sister to let her stay with them, but Anna Marie said it was pointless because Fred and Rose would only come and take her back.

  Heather sat her CSE examinations in the summer of 1986. In the last week of exams, a little less than a month before the official end of school, she finally broke her silence about what was happening to her at home. Her friend Denise Harrison was walking home through the Eastgate Shopping Centre one day, and as she approached Cromwell Street she saw Heather standing on the pavement, and noticed she was upset. When Denise asked what was wrong, Heather started crying. Denise assumed it was because Heather had spoken at school about Rose’s lovers, but Heather sobbed that it was worse than that: she said that her father came into her room at night. ‘She said he was having sex with her. I said, “Haven’t you told your mum?” and she said her mum didn’t believe her.’ Denise encouraged Heather to go back to school and tell the teachers; she had seen the marks on Heather’s body during PE. Heather confirmed that Fred had done it, adding that Rose thought she was a ‘little bitch’ and deserved her beatings.

  ‘I asked her whether she had told anyone, and she said she was too frightened,’ remembers Denise, who decided to tell her parents. But Ronalzo and Gloria Harrison were friends of the Wests, and Mrs Harrison told Denise that Fred would not do such a thing. Denise did not consider it her business to repeat at school what she had been told in confidence, so she let the matter drop. ‘We left school about three weeks after this, so I never saw her again,’ she says.

  Heather was in a very dangerous position when she left school: Fred and Rose were extremely concerned that she was on the verge of talking about what they had been doing to her. Heather knew she had to leave home as soon as possible, and began looking for a job that would take her away from Cromwell Street. But finding a good job was no easy matter, and Heather became even more dejected and withdrawn. Years later, Rose described her daughter during this time in these words: ‘When she left school she just sat in the chair. She didn’t want to know me anymore … She was a stubborn girl. She didn’t want to do her own washing, didn’t want to clear up muck.’

  Heather’s sixteenth birthday came and went that October, and still she had not found a job to escape to. Months went by, so she registered for unemployment benefit, and was seen at Gloucester’s Department of Social Security on 29 May 1987. She continued to write off for jobs, and by early summer was pinning her hopes on an application she had made to work at a holiday camp in Devon.

  One June evening Heather received a telephone call. A lady from the camp said that she was sorry, but her application had been unsuccessful. It was a crushing disappointment, reducing Heather to tears and making her cry all night, so loudly that she kept her brothers and sisters awake.

  It was raining hard the next morning when the West children trooped off to school. Heather had nowhere to go, so she stayed in bed; Fred could not work because of the weather so he also stayed indoors. When Heather came downstairs, wearing culottes and a blouse tied in the middle, she found she was alone in the house with Fred and Rose.

  An argument developed between them as they spent the day cooped up in that little house with the rain pelting down. It may have started with Fred trying to rape Heather, although it is just as likely that Rose turned on her ‘miserable’ daughter, upset after losing the holiday camp job, and picked a fight with her: she was no good; she should do what her father wanted. Rose later told a neighbour that there had been a ‘hell of a row’. It should also be remembered that Heather had grown up in the West home as a number of women had been murdered, one after another; if she had discovered any of her parents’ terrible secrets – and logic dictates that she must have learned something of them over a lifetime in close proximity with Fred and Rose – she would have been a particular threat to their well-being, and this may be another reason for what happened to her.

  It is also likely that Fred and Rose accused Heather of being a lesbian, which had become almost an obsession with them. They may have attempted to force her into having sex with them both, tying her hands with two lengths of rope, 22½ and 15½ inches long, which were later found by police. Orange, brown and green nylon fibres from a tufted carpet were later found to be trapped in the rope, suggesting that Heather had been held down on the floor as she was being tied up. Interestingly, there was no gag found: Heather’s terror alone was probably enough to keep her quiet. The fact that her remains were found without any clothing also suggests that she had been stripped naked before death, and that some sex act had been forced upon her.

  Whatever started ‘the row’, or assault on Heather, it soon spun madly out of control. Somebody put their hands around Heather’s throat. Fred later claimed that he did it, but it was an action more typical of Mrs West; it was always Rose who lost her temper. Father, mother and daughter were in the hallway. When the hands came away, Heather was dead.

  Whichever of the two actually strangled their first-born child, it was Fred’s job to dispose of her corpse. He cut her body into pieces with the same passion he had used to dismember Shirley Robinson, hacking at her with a cleaver, or, more likely, with a heavy serrated knife which had come with the Wests’ fridge/freezer, for the cutting up of frozen meat, until he chopped her left thigh clean in two.
He then held the corpse of his daughter face down, and cut through the back of her neck while her chin was pushed on to her chest, decapitating her. He removed her kneecaps and parts of her hands and feet, and may have tortured his child by ripping out her fingernails. (Fingernails – but not corresponding fingers – were later found in her grave.) Covered in her blood, Fred put the remains into black bin bags. He may have stored them overnight in a dustbin under the stairs on the ground floor of the house. He told the children when they came home from school that the dustbin was full of old plaster.

  Then the children noticed that Heather was gone. ‘Where’s Heather?’ asked Steve.

  ‘She’s left home,’ said Fred.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Steve and Mae together.

  ‘A girl picked her up in a Mini, and she’s gone to work at the holiday camp,’ their father replied, explaining that the lady from the camp had telephoned again while the children were out, and had given Heather the job after all. Fred said that he and Rose had given her some money to help her on her way. He seemed perfectly calm as he told this cold-blooded lie, just a couple of hours after he had finished hacking at her body. Fred was so calm, in fact, that he asked his son to help dig a hole in the garden: he said he was thinking of installing a fish pond.

  A couple of days later Steve noticed that the hole he had dug had been filled in – his father had apparently changed his mind. Steve believes he unwittingly helped bury his own sister.

  Over the following weeks several people asked where Heather had gone, and Fred and Rose gave a variety of conflicting reasons for her disappearance. Rose told one friend, Anne Knight, who had an office in Cromwell Street, that ‘There was a hell of a row here a couple of nights ago. We found out that she was going with a lesbian from Wales, and has gone to Wales with her.’ She told a neighbour named Margaretta Dix that she ‘didn’t care if Heather was alive or dead or if she ever saw her again’. Fred, on the other hand, told his friend Ronalzo Harrison that Heather had been assaulting the younger children, which had resulted in Rose giving her a good hiding, a few days after which she had left home. When Ronalzo said how concerned he was about Heather, Fred replied that they knew she was living somewhere in the nearby village of Brockworth, and that she would telephone them. He also seems to have forgotten the lesbian story, because he told Denise Harrison that Heather had run off with a boyfriend. The Wests were asked again and again about Heather over the following years; at one stage they even claimed to have reported her to police as a missing person, but this was yet another lie.

  Fred decided to pave the back garden. He acquired several dozen square slabs, half coloured a ruddy pink and the other half vanilla yellow. The slabs were molded so that the surface had the texture of slate. Fred called upon Rose, Mae and Steve to help with the work; when they were finished, a cheerful patio in nursery colours was laid out over the pit where Heather’s remains lay buried two feet deep near the fir trees.

  Flushed with the success of concealing another crime, Fred and Rose gathered the unsuspecting children together to celebrate their work with a barbecue supper.

  15

  BEHIND THE MASK

  In the summer of 1987, shortly after the death of Heather West, Fred decided to convert the cellar of 25 Cromwell Street into bedrooms for Rose’s younger children. The project gave him an excuse to properly entomb the five young women whose remains were buried there. He was concerned about the crimes being discovered. The first stage in the renovation was to resurface the floor, where the five graves dug between 1973 and 1975 formed a circle of scars clockwise around the edges of the cellar in order of the victims’ burial. Fred asked his son Steve and brother-in-law Graham Letts to help with the work, giving no clue as to his secret purpose.

  Rose’s younger brother, Graham, whom she had masturbated as a child in Bishop’s Cleeve, had grown into a slightly-built man who wore a moustache. He was a painter and decorator by trade, but had several minor criminal convictions to his name and had served more than one prison sentence. Graham, his wife Barbara and their two children were among the few relations with whom the Wests kept in contact.

  Before Graham and Steve set to work at Cromwell Street, Fred had ballasted the cellar with sand and gravel. Then a truck-load of ready-mixed concrete arrived and the three men laboured all day to spread the grey sludge before it set. Barbara Letts kept Rose company while they worked, and the children of the two families played together in the back garden, where Fred had recently built a large Wendy house. By late afternoon the cement had been levelled and was turning a pale grey as it hardened into an impervious slab.

  While the decoration of the cellar was carried out, Rose’s younger children were moved into the attic, where they slept in bunk-beds ‘like battery chickens’, as one visitor describes it. Fred put a felt underlay down in the cellar and then covered the floor with linoleum. He clad the walls with imitation pine boarding, the fluorescent strip lighting was improved and a set of permanent wooden steps were built leading up to the trap door. The front area was also filled in and the window blocked. There was a fluffy white carpet in the room above, so he covered the hatch with a piece of the carpet. ‘You could walk on it and not know it was there,’ said Ronalzo Harrison. Wallpaper was hung and pine beds were moved in. When the renovation was completed, Fred happily showed off the new bedrooms to visitors, who complimented his ‘beautiful work’.

  The rear section of the ground floor of the house was also turned over to the children, with its kitchen, lounge area, toilet and bathroom all clad in the same yellow pine boarding and lit with fluorescent strip lighting. The children had their own television, shower and easy chairs, and a snack bar with a speckled Formica surface. School drawings were pinned on the walls, and coloured felt pens, cartoon annuals and other toys were carelessly jumbled about.

  But appearances were deceptive at 25 Cromwell Street. Fred and Rose’s real purpose in improving the children’s area was to cordon off the bizarre adult world upstairs. The first- and second-floor rooms could only be accessed through a doorway at the bottom of the main stairs, which was kept locked after the renovations were finished. Rose wore the key around her neck on a string, and the children had strict instructions not to go upstairs even if the door was open. A set of wrought-iron gates had been installed outside the front door, which were also locked, to prevent the children straying from the property.

  Fred had made alterations to other bedrooms in the house so he could spy on whoever was in the room. One had a hole cut in the door, concealed behind a lucky horseshoe. A letterbox, of the type found in front doors, was fitted into the wall of another room.

  The first floor of the house was converted into a self-contained flat, where Rose entertained her customers. The room overlooking Cromwell Street became a garish lounge with a fully stocked bar. Bottles of gin, vodka and Malibu hung upside down, fitted with optical measures. A ‘Flowers Fine Ales’ ashtray, bar-mat and glasses were set out, just like in a public house.

  The lounge had one central window hung with net curtains; beside this was a large display cabinet filled with a library of up to two hundred video cassettes. These were all pornographic films; either home-made or bought. The former were filmed by Fred and Rose using their video camera – some were taken in the back of Fred’s work van while Rose had sex with other men; others were made by Rose on her own after setting the camera up on a tripod; and one showed Fred lying on a table while Rose urinated on him. Many were extended close-ups of Rose masturbating herself and being penetrated by real and artificial penises.

  The illegally-bought films featured most types of extreme sexual behaviour, including the abuse of children and animals, but the majority of the videos, home-made and commercial, were concerned with bondage: showing women being sexually abused while tied up, gagged or smothered. Some of these may well have featured the girls who had been murdered. In the commercial films, models were dressed in outlandish rubber suits which left only their eyes, mouths, breasts a
nd genitalia visible. Some wore gas-masks and others could breathe only through pipes or tubes like vacuum-cleaner hoses. One film showed an obviously distressed and naked girl being forced down into a cellar, where she was suspended from a ceiling beam and whipped by two men. Virtually all the bought films were poor-quality copies smuggled in from continental Europe.

  The decorations in the bar were designed to appeal to Rose’s predominantly West Indian customers: one wall was papered from floor to ceiling with a mural of a tropical island, and ornaments on the bar included African figurines. A sofa was pushed up under the window facing the television and video player, and an embroidered cushion on the sofa was incongruously decorated with a childish picture and the words MUM and DAD.

  Across the hall overlooking the back garden were Rose’s self-contained kitchen and bathroom, the former decorated in rose-patterned wallpaper. School photos of her children, still in their cardboard frames, were propped up on shelves. Fred had taken great care to tile the bathroom and finish it with pine fittings – including a toothbrush holder and shelf for shampoo bottles – as neatly conservative as any suburban home. But there were odd touches even here: Rose had stuck a number of nude photographs of herself around the mirror.

  Their video camera was an expensive model bought from a high street store on hire purchase, and was usually set up in the bedroom Rose used to entertain her clients, on the second floor of the house at the front, overlooking the street. A lace canopy hung from the four-poster bed, and spotlights fitted to the bed posts were angled down at the mattress.