Couples Who Kill

by Carol Anne Davis

  Incarcerated in Winson Green prison whilst awaiting trial, Fred kept begging his son Stephen to persuade Rose to write to him but she was adamant that the marriage was over. This contributed to the depression he already felt at having Cromwell Street torn apart in the search for bodies. Everything he held dear – his house and his ownership of Rose – had gone. Like most serial killers, Fred also feared being on the receiving end of violence and he was constantly on guard lest someone in the Birmingham prison beat him up. He wept when his son Stephen visited, admitting that he constantly had to watch his back. In his last telephone call to Anne Marie he murmured ‘Goodbye my angel.’ The call took place ten days before he died.

  As the winter began, Fred realised that he had nothing left to live for. He began to collect laundry ties from his prison job, weaving them through strips of his bedsheet and fashioning them into a long, strong noose. Then he waited till New Year’s Day, knowing that the prison would have a skeleton staff.

  When his prison wing was quiet, he wrote Rose a letter that said ‘All I have is my life. I will give it to you, my darling.’ Then he threaded the noose through the bars of his window, stood on the laundry basket to knot it into place, and kicked the basket away.

  When Rose was given the news of her husband’s death, she was put on suicide watch, but she remained emotionless. Her supporters now believed that she’d be freed. But the prosecution realised that her surviving victims could prove that she was a sadistic sexual predator in her own right, rather than the innocent wife of a murderer. Several of them agreed to testify so the trial went ahead.

  The trial

  The trial opened on 3rd October 1995 at Winchester Crown Court. Several of Rose’s female sexual partners took the stand and described how the initially-consensual sadomasochistic sex had soon become increasingly frightening. One woman had been shown breath-restricting rubber masks which had clearly been worn. A teenage girl told of being led upstairs by Rose then terrorised by her and Fred together. The abuse had included being sodomised with a candle or a dildo, something which had made her bleed.

  Caroline Owens described her kidnapping to the jury, recalling how Rose had held her still in the car whilst Fred gagged her with sticky tape. Rose had then pushed her onto the floor of the car. Later Rose kissed her, becoming angry when she pulled away. Fred had then told Rose to fetch the cotton wool – and Rose had stuffed it into Caroline’s mouth.

  When the teenager was undressed and tied up on the bed, Rose had fondled her all over, pinched her nipples and digitally penetrated her. Rose had also heard Fred threaten to keep Caroline in the cellar – and she hadn’t looked shocked. The following day Rose was the one who began to suffocate Caroline with a pillow when she screamed for help.

  Anne Marie also took the stand, recalling the numerous times that Rose had beaten her. Rose had also helped her own father, Bill Letts, Fred’s brother John and several of her clients sexually assault the helpless child.

  A voluntary prison worker testified that Fred had told her Rose was involved in several of the murders and that she’d killed Shirley Robinson and her unborn child.

  Rose then testified on her own behalf, suggesting that she was completely dominated by Fred – but her behaviour with her own children suggested otherwise. She had often tied them up and beaten them during the day when Fred was at work, then joined in his laughter when he came home and saw how cowed they were. And she could have remained in her lounge with the various teenage girls who saw her as a mother substitute – but instead she’d taken them upstairs to Fred and had non-consensual sadomasochistic sex with them. Rose now tried to reinvent herself as a shy, softly-spoken woman, but the jury were allowed to hear tapes of her shouting and cursing at the police.

  After a six-week trial, the jury retired to consider its verdict. Within two days they found her guilty of all ten counts of murder. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, a sentence she received without emotion, though she apparently wept afterwards downstairs.

  Obliterated

  In October 1996 Gloucester City Council demolished 25 Cromwell Street and landscaped the ground to create a path leading to the city centre. To prevent the public taking away parts of the house as ghoulish trophies, the debris was removed, crushed and incinerated.

  Para suicides

  Unsurprisingly, given their violent childhoods, Rose’s children have continued to suffer from depression and low self-esteem. Anne Marie took an overdose of pills during Rose’s trial and had to have her stomach pumped out. And in 1999 she jumped into a freezing river and tried to drown herself. One of her children has subsequently spent time in foster care.

  Stephen also became suicidal when his marriage broke up. He attempted to hang himself but the noose broke. His uncle John – one of Fred’s brothers – successfully hanged himself whilst awaiting the court’s verdict on whether he had sexually molested Anne Marie.

  Stephen continues to indulge in self-destructive behaviour and, on Friday 3rd December 2004, he was jailed for nine months at Worcester Crown Court after admitting several counts of underage sex with a fourteen-year-old girl.

  A return to religion

  After her imprisonment, Rose West returned to her childhood religion. Hearing of this, Caroline Roberts wrote and asked if she’d now consider confessing for the sake of the other victims’ families, but Rose didn’t reply.

  It’s taken many years, but Caroline has come to terms with her ordeal and is a lively, caring and strong woman who looks ten years younger than her actual age. She’s suffered numerous stresses (her hair fell out as Rose West’s trial approached) but has steadfastly rebuilt her life. She complements her work as a substance abuse worker with Reiki healing and is also a trained acupuncturist.

  As I prepared to leave her friendly home in April 2004, I asked her if she had any final thoughts about the Wests’ case. ‘Yes, what happened to the rest of the sex circle?’ she asks. It’s a telling point which remains uninvestigated.

  Rumours

  It’s not just the fate of the Wests’ sex circle which has continued to cause controversy. In January 2003 a Sunday newspaper claimed that Rose West was about to wed the bass player of a Seventies rock group, but both parties – who admitted to being good friends – denied that nuptial bliss was on the cards. (Some newspaper stories are pure invention: one newspaper headline trumpeted that singer Jonathan King had been badly beaten up in prison and now had two black eyes. But King, who had a music column in prison magazine Insider, was able to report that he hadn’t been attacked.)

  In 2004 an expert in witches’ covens said that the Wests’ murders were about human sacrifice and that they were probably supplying a powerful local cult with victims. He cited the fact that the bar in the Wests’ lounge was called The Black Magic Bar. But Rose preferred black lovers to white, which probably explained the reason for the moniker.

  The expert noted that all of the victims had fingers and toes missing and said that this linked in with an occult spell known as ‘the magic hand’. But another expert said that the spell involved cutting off the entire hand, not just individual digits, though such digits could be ground into powder and used in other spells.

  The reality is that we may never know what the Wests did with the missing digits, ribs and kneecaps. They may have eaten some of them – Dennis Neilson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Arthur Shawcross and Ed Gein are just a few of the world’s most notorious male cannibal killers. Female cannibals are more unusual, but there have been cases reported in Germany and Australia. Fred even ran a café for a while with Rose West’s father, so he could have cooked human flesh there.

  Satanic experts have also suggested that the Wests were working for powerful professional people – but would professionals have employed a nonstop talker like Fred West who endlessly drew attention to himself by offering to perform home abortions? People who are into such religions tend to read widely about their chosen craft, but Rose West admitted to her daughter Mae that she was enjoying reading romantic
sagas in prison as she’d never had time before.

  Fred West was even more poorly read than his wife. He struggled with writing, spelling, punctuation and grammar, as an extract from his prison diary shows. (He was writing about finding his child Anne Marie being sexually abused by Rose West’s father.) ‘I Wint up stair to him and said What going on anna Was With Me Bill said Rose said anna could sleep With Me, but anna playing up.’

  A life sentence

  Rose West is currently incarcerated in the high-security Durham Prison, but as it’s facing closure she will be recategorised and moved to another women’s prison. She still has supporters who – ignoring the fact that she sexually abused Anne Marie, beat all of her children, abducted Caroline Owens and brutalised teenage girls from the nearby orphanage – believe that she is not a sadistic sexual predator. The Home Secretary has said that she will never be released.

  14 SMALL SACRIFICES

  BRITISH COUPLES WHO KILL CHILDREN

  It’s comparatively rare for a couple to be found guilty of murdering children. The Moors Murderers and the Wests were, but they also murdered young adults so are profiled separately.

  At least one child a week dies in Britain at a parent’s hands: for example, over eighty children were murdered in 2001, most by a family member. But, though both parents may have offered violence to the child throughout its unhappy lifetime, it’s invariably only one parent who deals the fatal blow. So records show that it was a mother or father who killed.

  These cases attract minimal publicity. At best, a paragraph appears in the local paper along the lines of ‘a Birmingham man was arrested today for the suspicious death of an eighteen month girl.’ The public rarely hears of the catalogue of cruelty this father inflicted on his firstborn, so they can continue to believe in the sanctity of the family and convince themselves that the main risk is from stranger danger, which is actually comparatively rare. The mother’s part in her child’s death – everything from looking the other way to helping demonize the infant as the source of all of the couple’s problems – is likely to be minimised by a feminist interpretation which assumes that she’s suffering from postnatal depression or is afraid of the man.

  When it’s the mother who kills, a significant percentage of the public simply refuses to believe she’s guilty, and if she has a partner he’s often criticised for being insufficiently supportive. Modern society tends to scapegoat one of the couple for blame.

  But historically couples have occasionally killed children for profit and out of sadism, though sometimes one of the couple was not found guilty despite grossly failing to protect the children in their care.

  Margaret Waters & Sarah Ellis

  Margaret Waters, an educated middle class woman, became a widow at age twenty-nine, at which stage she opened a lodging house in Brixton. She took in her sister Sarah Ellis, seven years younger, who was separated from her husband. Together, as the 1860s progressed, they began to advertise for babies to adopt, usually asking for five pounds per child.

  The two women treated these infants abominably, leaving them lying in their own excrement for days at a time. They also gave them sleeping draughts. Police eventually raided the house and found it completely unsanitary. The seven babies in the house were so drugged and undernourished that they did not move or make a sound. Five older children were found locked in the yard, also in a poor state of health.

  Taken into the workhouse, the babies were found to have numerous health complaints. Some were so weak that they could not feed and one by one they began to die. Ironically it turned out that they were the favoured children as they were boarders whose parents might visit them – other adopted infants had simply disappeared.

  At the trial, it transpired that the infants would be brought down from the upstairs bedroom in the morning and left lying on the settee until the evening. Meanwhile Margaret Waters continued to advertise for more babies to adopt and admitted taking in at least forty in the past four years.

  As is often the case, she was tried for only one murder, where a father had handed his baby over to her and paid the required sum, only for Mrs Waters to disappear. When he tracked down his son he was desperately dehydrated, drugged, filthy and suffering from thrush and diarrhoea. He took his child from the household but the shrivelled infant couldn’t feed properly and soon died.

  When she took the stand, Margaret said that she took full responsibility for the children (though she denied that they’d been ill-treated) so her younger sister Sarah was acquitted of the murder. But Sarah was charged with obtaining money by deception though she was allowed to keep her own child.

  There was speculation as to how many children had been murdered. Forty had been taken in by the sisters, of whom five had died. The women claimed these deaths were natural causes. Another five had died in the workhouse. And the sisters’ maid said that another six had disappeared with nineteen others remaining unaccounted for. Incredibly, Margaret Waters blamed the parents, saying that if women didn’t have children out of wedlock then there would have been no need for baby farmers like herself.

  She continued to show no remorse for her incredible cruelty to her helpless charges and was executed at Horsemonger Jail on 11th October 1870.

  Anne Barry & Edwin Bailey

  Edwin Bailey allegedly had a relationship in the 1870s with an eighteen-year-old servant called Susan Jenkins. She duly gave birth to an illegitimate baby and obtained a court order requiring him to maintain the little girl. The baby was left with Susan’s mother as Susan had to work.

  Edwin, who owned a shop in Bristol, bitterly resented the five shillings a week he had to pay. He constantly complained about the situation to his housekeeper, a thirty-one-year-old charwoman called Anne Barry. He sent her to Susan’s house incognito to find out the real father of the child. Anne kept visiting the baby, saying that it reminded her of her own dead daughter. She seemed to grow fond of the infant and recommended special teething powders when the little girl was in pain. The grandmother replied that they couldn’t afford such powders, so naturally they were pleased when three packets arrived in the post, allegedly from a charity to whom they’d applied for aid.

  The next day Anne arrived at the baby’s house and it was clear that she had been crying. She explained that this would be her last visit as she was moving away. She urged the grandmother to give the infant one of the powders and the grandmother duly mixed a powder with water, breadcrumbs and sugar and fed it to the child.

  Susan then carried her baby out into the garden and immediately the infant began to scream. Her body went rigid and even her jaw locked. Ten minutes later she was dead.

  Poison wasn’t found in the infant’s corpse but rat poison was found in the two remaining powders. They hadn’t been sent by the charity.

  Edwin Bailey and Anne Barry were tried on 22nd and 23rd December 1873. The letter from the charity was found to be in Edwin Bailey’s handwriting. Anne claimed to know nothing about the murder, claiming she only visited the baby on her employer’s instructions to find out who the father was.

  Both were found guilty and executed together in Bristol on 12th January 1874.

  Jessie King & Thomas Pearson

  Jessie and her lover Thomas Pearson lived in an Edinburgh lodging house. Both used the surname of Macpherson and various other aliases. She was in her early twenties, had a low IQ and lied frequently. He was an overweight, bald labourer at least thirty years her senior, a stronger character than she, though equally shiftless. They were poor and often turned to drink.

  When their landlady was away on holiday they brought a baby to the house and the landlady’s daughter saw them with it. But when the landlady returned from her vacation, the infant had disappeared. Jessie said that she’d been given twenty-five pounds to adopt the child but had farmed it out to someone else for eighteen pounds in order to make a profit. She then added that if a young woman should call at the house, the landlady should say that Jessie wasn’t there. Worryingly, there were baby clo
thes in the house but Jessie explained this by saying that she was planning a pregnancy.

  On 28th October 1888, children opened an oilskin-wrapped parcel they found lying in an Edinburgh street and found it contained the corpse of a tiny baby. A cord around its neck suggested strangling was the cause of death. When the discovery was made public, Jessie King’s landlady went to the police.

  The police searched the lodgings and found another corpse in the basement, also wrapped in an oilskin. This baby was female and approximately six weeks old. She had been strangled and a cloth had been tied tightly over her mouth.

  It soon came to light that a third baby had died after being handed over to Jessie King. Someone had seen her giving the infant whisky. She now claimed that the baby had choked on the whisky and accidentally died.

  Jessie, now age twenty-seven, and her lover were tried at the Edinburgh High Court on 18th February 1889. It became clear that she’d looked after two of the babies for several weeks, perhaps only killing them when the adoption money ran out or when she tired of their crying. She said that she’d strangled one of the babies whilst Macpherson was out because she couldn’t afford its upkeep any more. She added unconvincingly that he knew nothing of the murder. She’d allegedly killed the second by accident whilst he was out working and she refused to make any statement about the third.