Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  The Detective Superintendent was spending the day at home with his family. He was feeling content with himself, having managed to catch up on his reading work, and was looking forward to a relaxing afternoon. The telephone call was a considerable surprise. John Bennett had feared that Fred might meet a violent end in prison, but not this. ‘We didn’t think he would top himself, but people thought it would be better if he was bumped off,’ he said. Ever mindful of the victims, John Bennett ordered his staff to get to Bearland and telephone all Fred’s relations and the families of all the victims. He said this had to be done before the press told them.

  Rose received the news in Pucklechurch Prison in an official telephone call from the Home Office. Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, left a family party and drove straight to see his client. When he arrived, Rose was smoking heavily, but was composed and had not shed any tears. She had made no secret of her expressed hatred for Fred in recent months, and had assumed the air of a victim, crocheting baby clothes for her new grandchildren and making toy teddy bears in the prison workshop. She had also struck up a friendship with a 73-year-old nun named Sister Mary Paul, who visited Rose regularly to hear how Mrs West had been betrayed by her ‘rascal husband’. On this fateful day, Sister Mary was at her station and came to Rose’s cell. She suggested that they pray together.

  Whatever Fred’s crimes, he was still a brother and father, and most of his relations were sorry for his death. Anna Marie said, ‘He was my dad and I loved him. No matter what people do you cannot turn away from your own parents.’ Hours later she was taken to hospital, where she was treated for an apparent overdose. Mae was driving to Oxford when she heard the news on the car radio; she turned onto a lay-by and cried. Steve, spending the day at the home of his parents-in-law, was so befuddled by tears that he could not make his fingers dial the correct number of the prison. Out at Much Marcle, Doug West shook his head in bewilderment, and said he could not believe Freddie had killed himself. He had gathered his thoughts by the morning, when he offered a considered apology to the families of Fred’s victims. ‘I would like to say how sorry I am to all those who have suffered as a result of what my brother did,’ he said.

  There was little sympathy from the families of the victims. Alison Chambers’ mother, Joan Owen, said that, although she thought of herself as a Christian and would have liked to have seen Fred stand trial, she was glad that he was dead.

  Fred’s death was front-page news in every national newspaper and led the television and radio bulletins. There was criticism in the press and from politicians of the prison service, and, ultimately, of the Home Secretary Michael Howard, for allowing Britain’s most notorious remand prisoner to take his own life and deprive the public, and the families of his victims, of a trial. Fred’s solicitors, Bobbetts Mackan, issued a statement describing their extreme surprise that such an event could have happened. Inquiries were launched by both West Midlands Police and the prison service. But the truth remains that if a prisoner is determined to take his own life, then there is little anybody can do to stop them.

  A week after Fred’s death it was revealed that Hazel Savage had been speaking with a literary agent about writing her memoirs, including her account of the murder case. The Sunday Express newspaper suggested that a figure of £1 million was being asked. The news came after similar stories about Fred’s former solicitor, Howard Ogden, and one of Mr Ogden’s clerks. An inquiry was launched by the Police Complaints Authority, and Hazel was moved off the case to other duties – a humiliation for the woman who had done so much to bring the whole affair into the open.

  Rose had been put on suicide watch in case she tried to follow Fred’s example, although she showed no signs of doing so. She was transferred to a special suite of rooms within the hospital wing of Pucklechurch Prison, where warders sat at her door watching her twenty-four hours a day. There was also concern that she was a target for other inmates, and additional security precautions were taken after threats were made. Rose’s meals were individually prepared and brought to her in sealed containers to prevent razor blades or ground glass being slipped into her food.

  Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, suggested that Rose could not stand trial after Fred’s death. He said the case had always been flimsy and press reports had now made a fair trial impossible. He also claimed that Fred had exonerated his wife in interviews with detectives. The Crown Prosecution Service considered these points and decided that a pre-trial committal hearing would be held to test the prosecution’s evidence. At the same time it was announced that Rose was additionally charged with the murder of her stepdaughter, Charmaine, bringing the total of murder charges against her to ten.

  The first of the funerals of Fred and Rose’s victims was held on 24 January, when Juanita Mott was buried. Family and friends gathered at St Oswald’s Church in Coney Hill, Gloucester, to sing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, and remember a girl nobody had seen in nearly twenty years.

  The committal hearing began the following Monday. A disused court-house at Dursley had been opened and decorated especially; over one hundred journalists arrived to cover the event. There were far too many reporters to fit into the courtroom, and most had to be content to sit in an annexe, where the proceedings were relayed through speakers. A few local people, mainly school children, lined up outside behind crowd barriers to jeer Rose’s arrival.

  The case would be heard by the country’s most senior magistrate, 63-year-old former naval officer Peter Badge, a distinguished white-haired gentleman who peered at Rose through half-moon spectacles. Rose stood alone in the dock, wearing her customary large-framed spectacles and a voluminous white blouse. Ten charges of murder and two of rape were read out (the only murders she was not charged with were those of Rena Costello and Anna McFall, crimes for which there was not enough evidence to prove she had been involved). She pleaded not guilty to all charges. It was announced that the Crown would not continue with the charge of assault against an eight-year-old boy. Rose murmured that she understood and smiled as she was given leave to sit.

  Rose’s defence team was represented by a petite junior barrister named Sasha Wass. (The leading defence counsel, Richard Ferguson QC, would only appear at any eventual trial.) Her case was that Rose ‘knew nothing of the victims, how they were killed and the bodies concealed’. The defence strategy was to try and have the proceedings stopped on the grounds of adverse publicity, an unreasonable delay in bringing the case to court, and insufficient evidence. Her legal argument continued for the rest of the day. As Rose’s van left the court at around 5 P.M., it was pelted with eggs; school children, grinning at their naughtiness, shouted: ‘Burn her!’

  At the start of the second day, Peter Badge announced that he was not prepared to stay the proceedings. He did not agree with the defence’s claims and signalled for the Crown’s evidence to be heard.

  The evidence against Rose was contained in over twenty-five lever-arch files and boxes of papers that were stacked chest-high in the gangways of the courtroom. The Crown’s prosecutor, Neil Butterfield QC, began by outlining the case against Rose, describing 25 Cromwell Street as ‘a charnel-house, a graveyard’ and the victims to have been the sexual playthings of Fred and Rose. He readily admitted that the prosecution had to rely upon circumstantial evidence, but said he was confident that it could prove that Rose had a strong, aberrant sexual appetite, and, with her husband, took pleasure from tying up and abusing young girls – and that this abuse ended in murder, either because of what they had done, or because they could not allow their victims to walk free.

  Mr Butterfield then handed over to his junior, Andrew Chubb, who set about reading out the dozens of witness statements that would form the committal evidence against Rose. This process took up the next few days. Rose dabbed at her eyes during the most powerful passages of evidence, as if she were crying, but her demure performance was undermined when, on the fifth day of the hearing, tape recordings of Rose’s police interviews were played to the court. In marked contr
ast to the homely, unprepossessing woman in the dock, the court listened to a belligerent, foul-mouthed creature who spoke about Charmaine, Heather and Anna Marie in crude language entirely without love. When Rose was taken down to her cell, she ranted and raved about the evidence against her, cursing everybody in sight for the mess she considered herself to be in.

  A rainstorm pounded the court-house roof on Monday morning as Neil Butterfield summed up for the prosecution. Sasha Wass for the defence said there was no evidence that Rose had murdered anybody. She said that Rose’s unusual sex life did not mean she was a killer: ‘The lesbian activities of Mrs West, and the hideous and yet unknown activities of Mr West, when the girls were killed and chopped up, are separate. There is no evidence at all that Mrs West was involved in that.’

  On Tuesday morning Peter Badge informed Rose that there was enough evidence for the case to go to court, and that he was committing her for trial. In a surprise move, she was also charged with two new rape offences on two young girls in the 1970s. These offences were committed jointly with Fred, it was alleged. She was also charged with two counts of indecent assault.* At the same time, joint charges of rape against her and two other Gloucester men were dropped.

  Rose left the dock, her face betraying no emotion.

  Shortly after the hearing, Rose was transferred from Pucklechurch to a maximum-security wing at Durham Prison, where it was felt she would be more secure. She became one of forty-eight prisoners of the gaol’s refurbished maximum-security H-block, and found herself alongside convicted terrorists and other hardened criminals. Soon after her arrival she was joined by Britain’s other most infamous female prisoner, the Moors murderess Myra Hindley, who had been moved to Durham after serving many years at Cookham Wood in Kent, where she had recently been refused parole. The women could not help meeting each other and struck up something of a friendship when they did, cooking together and watching television. They were particularly amused by the Australian series Prisoner: Cell Block H.

  Fred’s corpse remained refrigerated in the Birmingham city morgue, although the coroner was ready to release it. Fred had apparently held very particular ideas about his final resting place. He had told Anna Marie that, in the event of his death, he wanted to be buried in the family plot at St Bartholomew’s, Much Marcle; he hoped that she, too, would be buried next to him when her time came. Steve claimed that his father had asked for an arched marble headstone, inscribed ‘Dad’. Fred stressed that he wanted to be buried because he was terrified of the idea of cremation.

  In the end, Fred’s funeral was as wretched as his whole life had been. Anna Marie and Doug West were furious when they learned that undertakers employed by Steve and Mae had secretly removed Fred’s body from the morgue. The funeral took place two days later on Wednesday 29 March 1995, at Canley Crematorium near Coventry. Several other crematoria had refused to accept the body. Fred’s simple casket, made of pale wood, bore a plaque inscribed ‘F. W. West’. The only mourners were Steve, his wife Andrea, and sisters Mae and Tara. They were matched in number by representatives of the Sun newspaper, on hand to record the event for the next day’s edition.

  The hurried ceremony lasted just a few minutes. There were no hymns. The Reverend Robert Simpson read from the 23rd Psalm, and added, ‘We should have a quiet moment of reflection for the life of Fred West and pray for his family. We must also remember in our prayers everyone else who has suffered because of these tragic events.’

  Fred’s casket then rolled behind the screen and was consumed by the flames he had so feared. It is ironic that, on the very day Fred was cremated, Hazel Savage was officially charged by Gloucestershire police with discreditable conduct for trying to sell her memoirs of the case. The news would no doubt have given him satisfaction.

  Rose let it be known that she had taken no part in the arrangements for the funeral, and was not interested in the outcome. But as she sat in her cell in the echoing vastness of Durham Prison, with Myra Hindley a few doors away, it is hard to believe that she did not reflect on what the future held for her without Fred. She alone would now stand trial for their crimes; she alone would suffer the retribution. Perhaps that is what Fred intended for her when he wrote this apparent suicide note** which was later found in his cell:

  To Rose West, Steve and Mae,

  Well Rose it’s your birthday on 29 November 1994 and you will be 41 and still beautiful and still lovely and I love you. We will always be in love.

  The most wonderful thing in my life was when I met you … our love is special to us. So, love, keep your promises to me. You know what they are. Where we are put together for ever and ever is up to you. We loved Heather, both of us. I would love Charmaine to be with Heather and Rena.

  You will always be Mrs West, all over the world. That is important to me and to you.

  I haven’t got you a present. All I have is my life. I will give it to you, my darling. When you are ready, come to me. I will be waiting for you.

  Underneath was a drawing of a gravestone. Fred had written this inscription:

  In loving memory

  FRED WEST ROSE WEST

  Rest in peace where

  no shadow falls

  In perfect peace he

  waits for Rose, his wife

  *The girls involved in these charges cannot be named for legal reasons.

  **Corrections have been made to spelling and grammar.

  21

  BLUEBEARD’S WIFE

  The wait for justice was a long one: Rose had been in custody for sixteen months before she stepped into the dock for what the tabloid newspapers were heralding as the ‘trial of the century’.

  Much had happened since Fred had died on New Year’s Day. On a bright spring morning in April, Charmaine and her mother Rena were cremated at a small ceremony in the Northamptonshire town of Kettering, near the home of one of Rena’s sisters. The remains of mother and child were placed in the same casket, and Rena’s surviving daughter, Anna Marie, chose the song ‘Memories’ to be played at the service.

  A few days later, over the Easter weekend, vandals desecrated the graves of both Walter and Daisy West in the churchyard of St Bartholomew’s, Much Marcle. Doug West had recently paid for a new headstone for Walter and was distressed to find that both this, and Daisy’s older memorial, had been pulled up during the night. There had been bad feeling in the village in recent weeks, partly because of sightseers coming to stare at the graves and partly because of a rumour that Fred’s ashes were scattered there.

  Rose made a preliminary appearance at Winchester Crown Court in May. In a tremulous voice she pleaded not guilty to ten counts of murder, two counts of rape and the indecent assault of two young girls in the 1970s. The fourteen charges took a full five minutes to read out. The judge was Sir Charles Mantell, the 58-year-old presiding justice on the western circuit, a genial-looking, avuncular man who often appears slightly red in the face. He set the date for the trial as 3 October; the venue would be this same room, Winchester’s Number Three court. It had been chosen in preference to Gloucester, Bristol and London’s Old Bailey because, among other reasons, it was felt that Rose could not receive a fair hearing in Gloucester – while Winchester was sufficiently far away to draw a fresh jury but close enough for the large number of witnesses to be brought to and fro.

  Built in the 1970s, the court adjoins the ancient Great Hall of Winchester, where the infamous Judge Jeffreys had presided, Sir Walter Raleigh had been tried for treason and where the famous ‘Rounde Table of King Arthur’ hangs. The new building is a brutal concrete fortress specially designed to accommodate high security trials, including those of terrorists: the dock, for example, cannot be viewed from the public gallery.

  Queen’s Counsel Brian Leveson was the barrister who would prosecute the case. (He took over the job from Neil Butterfield, who had appeared for the Crown at the committal hearing but had subsequently been made a High Court judge.) Mr Leveson, a diminutive, balding man with formal manners, is a distinguis
hed QC whose most notable case prior to the West trial had been the prosecution of the entertainer Ken Dodd for alleged tax evasion (Dodd was acquitted).

  His opponent would be Richard Ferguson: a tall, eminent Ulsterman, former Unionist MP and Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association. The 60-year-old QC has a formidable reputation as a skilful cross-examiner and had famously, and successfully, represented the boxer Terry Marsh and the Birmingham Six.

  Both QCs would be expected to claim approximately £250,000 from public funds for their work, including payments for their juniors and daily ‘refresher fees’ while the case was being heard.

  As the legal teams prepared for trial, the West family continued to suffer its problems. In May, Rose’s sister-in-law Barbara Letts, who had been so close to Rose over the years, pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer who had gone to her Gloucester home to investigate a reported burglary. Barbara’s family was in chaos. One of the children was behaving in a disturbed way, and her husband Graham, Rose’s younger brother, had suffered a nervous breakdown. (One of Rose’s other brothers, Gordon, was suffering from depression and in trouble with the police. Later on he too would be admitted to hospital after a breakdown.) Barbara was given a one-year conditional discharge.

  In June, less than a year after his marriage, Fred and Rose’s son Steve parted from his wife, Andrea. She took the couple’s twin children and went to live in the Midlands.

  Towards the end of September Rose was transferred from Durham Prison to Winchester gaol, where she would be held for the duration of her trial. Her cell was a tiny cubicle, thirteen feet long by seven feet wide, sparsely furnished with a bed, chair, locker and combined washing and toilet fixture. It is within a suite of seven rooms intended to become a drug rehabilitation unit. Because Rose was a Category A prisoner, and could not associate with the gaol’s 505 other inmates, all these rooms were dedicated to her care alone. They included a shower room and an association area, where she was allowed to watch television and play cards with the two female warders assigned to watch her round the clock.