Rosemary West was born Rosemary Pauline Letts on 29 November 1953 in Barnstaple, Devon, to a paranoid schizophrenic father, William Letts, and a profoundly challenged mother, Daisy, who was to undergo prolonged treatment for depression, and who found motherhood daunting. Described by her mother as ‘babyish’, Rosemary – often known as Rose – performed poorly at school and was repeatedly sexually abused by her father from an early age. Her parents split up when Rose was fourteen, but then reunited and moved to Bishop’s Cleeve, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. It was there, at the age of fifteen, that Rose first encountered the man who was to become her one and only husband, Frederick Walter Stephen West, who was twelve years her senior.
Starting out as a babysitter, she rapidly fell under the spell of the perpetually grimy, curly-haired, chattering West, a child of Much Marcle in Herefordshire, not far from Gloucester, and a man whose fascination with sex exceeded even Rosemary’s own. Within a matter of weeks of her sixteenth birthday in November 1969, she was pregnant with West’s child, and their daughter Heather was born in October 1970. By that time West had killed his first victim, babysitter Ann McFall, and buried her body in a field within sight of his birthplace in Herefordshire. It would remain there undiscovered until after his arrest for murder in March 1994. He may well also have killed fifteen-year-old Mary Bastholm, who disappeared from a bus stop in Gloucester in January 1968, never to be seen again, but West maintained a strict silence when that accusation was put to him by the police after his arrest.
Within two months of the birth of their first child together, Frederick West was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for dishonesty and theft, and was not officially released from an open prison near Gloucester until June 1971. At around that time, eight-year-old Charmaine, his first wife Rena Costello’s daughter by another man, went missing when in the care of Rosemary West. Not long afterwards Rena too disappeared – the bodies of mother and daughter remained undiscovered until May and June 1994.
By the time of Charmaine’s death in 1971, Rose West had progressed from being her husband’s apprentice to his willing accomplice. Early in January 1972 the couple married, just four months before the arrival of their second daughter, Mae, and in September they moved into 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. Here, their joint appetite for sexual abuse, torture and killing flowered still further in a condition described by psychologists as folie à deux, where the two partners in crime encourage each other into further and further atrocities. In the Wests’ case, their enthusiasm was also encouraged by Rose’s father, Bill Letts, who was still engaged in sexual relations with her, even after her marriage and the birth of her first two children.
Barely a month after arriving in Cromwell Street in late September 1972, the Wests engaged a young woman named Carol Raine, originally from the Forest of Dean not far from Gloucester, as a babysitter for their two daughters and Anne Marie, West’s daughter from his first marriage to Rena Costello. Uncomfortable with their uninhibited sexuality, Raine stayed with them for less than a month – but the couple abducted her just a few weeks later on 4 December 1972, beat her and indecently assaulted her in a way that was to become the prototype for their later sexual attacks.
The former babysitter reported the Wests to the police, who did not charge either West with rape, only with occasioning actual bodily harm and indecent assault; a fact that still infuriates her now more than forty years later. Almost sixty, and now called Caroline Roberts, she insisted in 2014 that had the police pursued the couple more aggressively over her case, ‘I am certain that it would have saved some of their victims.’ In fact, the Wests were fined a total of just £100 between them.
‘Fred was always really pervy with me,’ Roberts told the Daily Mirror, ‘talking about sex and such like, but I got on well with Rose. When she turned on me I remember feeling betrayed because the person who was helping Fred was someone I considered a friend.’ In a grim irony, during the course of the Wests’ joint attack on her, Frederick West threatened to bury her under the patio behind the house in Cromwell Street, where the bodies of three young women were eventually discovered in March 1994.
In the six years after the attack on Carol Raine, Frederick and Rosemary West killed no fewer than eight other young women, regularly keeping them as prisoners in the cellar of their house in Cromwell Street, often for several days, sexually abusing them relentlessly, torturing them in many cases, and then killing them and burying their bodies beneath the cellar’s concrete floor. They moved on to the patio in the garden outside when there was no more space left in the cellar.
The young women suffered dreadfully at the Wests’ hands, as anyone who sat through Rosemary West’s trial will bear witness. The fates of two of their victims haunt me to this day. Birmingham-born Shirley Hubbard was just fifteen when she encountered Frederick West for the first time. A troubled young woman, who had spent long periods in foster homes in the wake of her parents’ separation when she was two, Hubbard craved a father figure and had developed an appetite for older men. West realised this and played on it until, on 14 November 1974, he brought her back to Cromwell Street to meet Rose, whom he always portrayed as ‘just a loving Mum’.
There was no loving in what happened to Shirley Hubbard when she reached the cellar of Cromwell Street. She, like the other girls before her, was kept prisoner in that ‘dark damp cave’, but this time the Wests went a little further. They covered the fifteen-year-old’s head from chin to scalp in two-inch-wide parcel tape, wound overlapping around her skull eleven or twelve times, and with a loop under her chin. This terrible mask would have made it impossible for Hubbard to see or speak, and would have made it almost impossible to breathe. The Wests’ solution was to insert two U-shaped pieces of thin clear plastic tubing, each about eighteen inches long, into both of Hubbard’s nostrils through the tape. The tubing meant that they could keep her alive to use her as they wanted. The photographs of the mask – which survived Hubbard’s burial under the cellar floor – were some of the most horrifying exhibits at Rosemary West’s trial, for they somehow epitomised the utter lack of humanity in a woman who claimed to be ‘just an ordinary Mum’.
That same depraved indifference was only too clear thirteen years later when the Wests’ eldest daughter Heather disappeared from Cromwell Street, never to be seen again until her body was recovered from underneath the patio that covered the Wests’ garden. For a mother to assist in the murder of her own first-born child is as gross an act of barbarity as it is possible to imagine. The reason for Heather’s death was almost certainly her threatening to reveal to the authorities exactly what had been going on at Cromwell Street during her childhood, which included the Wests ‘breaking in’ their female children by sexually abusing them. Heather herself may well have been subjected to persistent attacks – her step-sister Anne Marie certainly was, as she was to explain in her evidence at Rosemary West’s trial.
Heather West’s death has a particular poignancy for me as it was the very first murder that I heard Frederick West describe in his audiotaped police interviews, every one of which I heard during my research for his biography. Soon after I started the project – and while Rosemary’s trial was proceeding – I was ushered into a solicitor’s office in central London and shown into a small room with no windows whatsoever. It was known as Room K. The only things in the cramped room were a table and chair in the centre, and on one side a large grey filing cabinet with double doors. I was presented with a cassette tape-recorder to listen to West’s police interviews and left alone.
When I opened the filing cabinet I di
scovered a small brown cardboard box, which I opened to discover that it contained Frederick West’s clothes – including the suit that he had worn during his Court appearances, his shirt, socks, underpants and shoes. It was a very macabre moment indeed.
Beside the cardboard box were a jumble of police tapes and more than twenty lever-arch files containing the printed versions of his and Rose’s interviews with the police. There was no definitive list, and certainly no catalogue, so I simply chose one at random, put it into the cassette player and pressed ‘Play’.
There, in that windowless room, I heard West’s sing-song voice, with its Herefordshire burr, describe in detail how he had killed his and Rose’s first-born child Heather, and then how he had chopped her body into pieces, disarticulating her legs at the hips, cutting off her head, and pushing the remaining torso into a plastic dustbin, as a prelude to burying her dismembered remains in his garden. All the time, he insisted, in a plaintive voice, that Rose had ‘been out shopping’ in the High Street and did not know what was going on. It was a lie he was to maintain for the rest of his life.
It was the lie that Rosemary West would hide behind at her trial. She never knew what was going on, she told the jury, did not have any responsibility for it, and could not imagine why anyone would think differently – even though one of the young women she was accused of killing was eighteen-year-old Shirley Robinson, murdered in the summer of 1978. Robinson was not only her husband’s lover but also hers, and had been eight-and-a-half months pregnant when she met her death at Cromwell Street, to be buried along with her unborn child under the patio in the garden.
The Wests were finally brought to justice by the diligence and tenacity of Detective Constable Hazel Savage, who began to investigate the disappearance of Heather West in the wake of Frederick West’s arrest and eventual charge for three rapes, and one of buggery against one of his surviving daughters, in August 1992. Yet just under a year later, when he faced trial, two of the witnesses refused to give evidence and the judge ordered that not guilty verdicts should be returned. A further eighteen months were to elapse before DC Savage initiated the excavation beneath the patio of 25 Cromwell Street in February 1994 and the first bodies were discovered.
Frederick West was eventually charged with twelve murders, including those of his first wife, Rena, their nanny Ann McFall, his stepdaughter Charmaine, aged eight, his daughter Heather, aged sixteen, and the other eight young women whose remains were found at Cromwell Street. Rosemary West was only charged with ten murders, excluding those of Rena and Ann McFall. But her husband was to escape justice completely when he committed suicide in his cell at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham shortly before 1p.m. on 1 January 1995.
Rosemary West was left to stand trial alone, and on 21 and 22 November 1995, the jury at Winchester Crown Court unanimously found her guilty on all ten counts of murder, accepting that she must have known what was going on under the roof of their cramped semi-detached house in Cromwell Street, and the fact that her attitude towards Carol Raine revealed her partnership with her husband.
In the late morning of Wednesday 22 November 1995, Mr Justice Mantell passed sentence on the woman who had become Britain’s most prolific female serial killer. Sitting in Court watching Rosemary West as she stood to hear her sentence there was an extraordinary hush as the judge spoke softly to her across the light-wood-panelled courtroom. Telling her that he was sentencing her to life imprisonment, he added a final sentence, ‘If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.’
Rosemary West left the dock as stony-faced as she had been since the beginning of her trial, although her legal team reported that she cried once she was out of sight. Her determination to see herself as a victim of her late husband’s evil actions, rather than his wicked apprentice, did not desert her, no more than it had done throughout their time together. She remained determined to present a controlled face to the world, and one which implied her innocence – no matter that the jury at her trial did not believe her for one moment.
Four months later, on Tuesday 19 March 1996, the Court of Appeal in London upheld the jury’s decision and refused Rosemary West the right to appeal against the verdict. I watched as the Lord Chief Justice of the day, Lord Taylor, told her – as she had come to Court in person, as was her legal right – ‘The applicant and Fred were in the habit of sexually and sadistically abusing young girls in the cellar of their house for their joint pleasure.’
Lord Taylor concluded, ‘The concept of all these murders and burials taking place at the applicant’s home and concurrently grave sexual abuse of other young girls being committed by both husband and wife together, without the latter being party to the killings is, in our view, clearly one the jury was entitled to reject. The evidence in its totality was overwhelming.’
It was to be the Lord Chief Justice himself who went on to recommend that Rosemary West should serve a minimum term of twenty-five years as part of her life sentence, but it was the new Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, in July 1997, who subjected her to a whole life term, making her only the second woman in British criminal history, after Myra Hindley, to be condemned to spend the rest of her life in prison.
Over the next four years West considered another appeal, this time to the European Court of Human Rights, as well as seeking a referral to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, but – like Mark Bridger before her – in the end she decided not to proceed. When I went to talk to Leo Goatley, her former solicitor, about it, he had already considered the possibility that she would decide not to proceed with either application. On 1 October 2001, Rosemary West did exactly that. In a statement – the only public statement she has ever made about the case (though many others have been attributed to her) – she apologised to her family and announced that she expected to spend the rest of her life in prison.
In her statement, West added that she hoped for ‘reconciliation’ with her family in future, but insisted that she was no longer ‘seeking release’ and acknowledged that she would never be able to have a ‘normal life’. But she also steadfastly maintained that she was innocent of the ten killings that she had been convicted of.
Five years later, Rosemary West effectively cut off all relations with her family, and especially her stepdaughter Anne Marie, her own daughter Mae, and her son Stephen. In a letter to Mae written from Bronzefield women’s prison near Ashford in Middlesex, she again apologised to each of them, saying that they had never had the chance to ‘clear the air so to speak’.
‘I was never a parent,’ she wrote, ‘and could never be now … Too much has happened and too much damage has been done. I truly do not have the skills to be a parent and although I am sad and ashamed of this, it is something that has to be accepted.’
Rosemary West has accustomed herself to the fact that she will never again be a free woman, acknowledging the lesson she learnt from Myra Hindley that her very notoriety would make it all but impossible for her ever to be granted parole. There can also be no doubt that her actions have deeply affected her children, with both Anne Marie and Stephen West allegedly attempting suicide.
Stephen also admitted seven counts of having sex with an underage girl of fourteen in 2004 at Worcester Crown Court. He was given a nine-month prison sentence and was acknowledged to be suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Meanwhile, West’s second daughter Mae asked in a newspaper interview, ‘I just don’t know why Mum bothered having us. Why would you just subject more and more children to that?’
Presently serving her whole life sentence in Low Newton high
-security prison in Durham, Rosemary West has made the best of her life behind bars, at a cost approaching £60,000 each year to the taxpayer. With her own cell, equipped with television, radio and CD player, as well as toilet facilities, she reportedly enjoys listening to The Archers on Radio Four, doing embroidery, cooking and shopping from catalogues. She also buys beauty products and reportedly earns £16 a week as an orderly, having been promoted from being a cleaner, which entails making tea for the prison officers. West is also alleged to have had a series of lesbian affairs during her twenty years in jail.
Apparently content with her life in prison, West has never displayed one moment’s contrition or regret for her crimes. Indeed, she still maintains her innocence, and by doing so she renders it all but impossible that any parole hearing in the future could consider her for release – as one of the principal criteria for allowing it is that the prisoner has repented and accepted his or her guilt. West has done the opposite.
Rosemary West has even rejected a letter of forgiveness from the sister of one of her victims, twenty-one-year old Essex University undergraduate Lucy Partington, who disappeared from a bus stop on 27 December 1973, never to be seen again until her remains were discovered under the cellar floor in Cromwell Street. Lucy’s sister Marian wrote to West in 2008 to say, ‘I do not feel any hostility towards you, just a sadness, a deep sadness, that all this has happened, and that your heart could not feel a truth that I wish you could know.’ A few weeks later Marian Partington received a response on behalf of West, pointedly refusing to accept her forgiveness and demanding that she ‘cease all correspondence’.
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