Killer Couples (23 page)

Always quick tempered, now she rarely bothered to stem the rage that bubbled up inside her whenever the children were around. The kids - some of them Fred’s, often fathered from among Rose’s West Indian clients – quickly learned to do their chores and keep out of the way. Most of all they learned to keep quiet about the stream of young women who seemed to come
through the door of the Cromwell Street house and leave suddenly, their belongings still scattered about for Rose to pick through. And they kept quiet about the screaming in the night and the beatings they endured – and quiet about the rape too.

Fred and Rose thought children needed to be ‘broken in’ to the world of sex by their parents. Your children, they believed, belonged to you just as surely as anything else. When Anna Marie was just 8 years old, her stepmother led her down to the soundproofed cellar in Cromwell Street. There, she found Fred waiting for her. On the floor were some cloths, a Pyrex bowl containing a vibrator and some tape.

‘It’s a dad’s duty to help his daughter, so that when she gets married she can satisfy her husband,’ Fred explained to the terrified child.

As Rose removed her stepdaughter’s clothes, she echoed her husband’s words: ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl to have parents who care enough to do this for you?’

Anna Marie was then brutally raped by both her parents, her cries unheeded in that cheerless cell. Later, they would make a fuss over her, rubbing kindness like salt into the very wounds they themselves had made, until the little girl didn’t know whether to feel frightened or grateful, loved or abused.

This was Anna Marie’s initiation into the nightmare world of Rose and Fred, but it was to be far from a one-off experience. In years to come she’d be raped numerous times, forced to join in group sex, held down while other visiting men assaulted her and made to work as a prostitute, just like her stepmother.

Over the years, others of the West children would also become all too familiar with that torture chamber in the cellar, where a child could be tied to a metal frame, her mouth stuffed with a gag, her screams dying in her own throat, knowing that no one would come to help her.

When it came to her turn, Heather, the eldest of Rose and Fred’s natural children, refused to believe that what was happening in their house was normal. Instead, she fought back and resisted when Fred tried to ‘break her in’ and she got her sister Mae to stand guard while she showered. Rose was furious. ‘She’s a lesbian, definitely!’ she sneered to Fred, eyeing up her 15-year-old daughter’s defiant scowl.

In truth, Heather’s rebellious stance masked her increasing desperation. She dreamed of leaving Cromwell Street behind, of living in a home where she wasn’t beaten for being a few minutes late from school and didn’t have to lie awake in the dark, terrified someone would enter her room uninvited or be forced to press her hands to her ears to block out the screams that echoed up the stairs.

One day, soon after her 16th birthday, Heather too disappeared, just as Charmaine had done, all those years before.

‘Oh, she’s gone,’ Fred told the other children when they came home from school and asked about their sister.

‘She got a job in a holiday camp in Devon. Someone came and picked her up in a mini.’

But there was no job and no mini – and there was no hopeful new future, no excited young girl waving from the car window. Instead, Heather had been strangled, either by Fred or
Rose, who were angered by her ‘smirking’, by her refusal to be moulded and treated as a possession to be used and re-used at will. Fred persuaded his oldest son, Stephen, to help dig the hole in the garden in which he buried his daughter, telling him that it was intended to be a fishpond. It would never have crossed his mind that something like that could permanently traumatise a boy.

Again, Fred dismembered the body before burial, chopping it into pieces and, as usual, keeping some bones back as a trophy. By this stage, he’d become quite an expert because Heather was far from the first victim to be buried in the soil of 25 Cromwell Street.

Over the years, a succession of young women had come to the house, but they never left. Some had come willingly, drawn in by the image the Wests projected of being a normal, loving couple.

‘Come round for a girlie chat,’ Rose would offer, her bland features arranged into an expression of sympathy. And so they would come: girls who were running away from care homes, girls in trouble with their parents, girls whose hard edges frayed away to nothing at the first sign of warmth and kindness, girls who wouldn’t be missed when they were gone. Others were quite simply snatched off the streets by Fred and Rose, from late-night bus shelters or dimly lit corners where ‘nice’ girls shouldn’t be after dark.

And what horrors awaited them in Fred and Rose’s DIY dungeon? What abuses did they have to endure as slaves of a couple who, increasingly, were unable to separate sex from pain, gratification from humiliation? Some were kept just hours,
others days… Some were made to wear masks, one with just space for a tube to be threaded into one nostril so that the girl could breathe. Some were suspended from a beam in the ceiling, others videotaped as they writhed in silent agony, with their mouths sealed shut by gags.

Two escaped. One, Caroline Owens, managed to flee after just one night. She tried to tell police what she had gone through, but in the end the Wests were accused only of assault and made to pay a derisory fine.

‘I’ll kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester!’ Fred had threatened Caroline after raping her. She got the feeling that many girls were already there, forgotten women without names who’d vanished into a black hole on a seedy urban street.

The other girl, an underage teenager from a care home, couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone what had happened to her, but instead wrapped her fear and trauma around her like a strait-jacket – damaging, restricting, suffocating.

Of course, the Wests made some mistakes. One of the girls they snatched off the street, Lucy Partington, was from a
well-off
, close-knit family, who scoured the countryside looking for her and made sure her photograph stayed in the newspapers, on the local news and pinned to lampposts. Lucy’s uncle was the novelist Kingsley Amis, and her cousin was Martin Amis, also a novelist, who would later write about the effect Lucy’s disappearance had on him in his autobiography
Experience
.

But with nothing to link Lucy to the Wests, and no clues as to
what happened, the photos gradually faded, and headlines featured new mysteries, new disappearances. And somehow, in their squalid semi-detached, Fred and Rose continued to murder, and carried on raping their own children and burying bodies under their own cellar and back yard.

The end, when it arrived, came in the words of the TS Eliot poem, not with a bang, but a whimper. A 13-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by the Wests cracked and told a school-friend about the abuse. That friend went to the police. The policewoman assigned to the case, Hazel Savage, remembered the name Fred West from decades before when she’d come into contact with his then estranged wife, Rena Costello. She recalled the things Rena had told her about Fred’s depraved sexual appetite and his violence.

Police arrived to search the house, taking away nearly 100 extremely hardcore pornographic videos, many of them homemade. Fred and Rose were arrested and the five youngest children taken into care.

‘They don’t have nothing on me,’ Rose told everyone when she was released on bail on 27 February 1994. But slowly, the net was tightening on the West’s house of hell. Hazel Savage went to interview Anna Marie, by now a mother herself and living on her own with her two daughters. From her she got the full story of a childhood lived in fear and in pain, of the parents who used her like a living sex toy and handed her round to their friends to share.

‘Find Charmaine for me,’ Anna Marie begged her, ‘I’ve been looking for her for years.’

Interviewing Anna Marie’s ex-husband who’d known the Wests well, Hazel Savage got a different message. ‘Find Heather,’ Chris Davies told the policewoman. ‘She’s who you should be looking for.’

But both Charmaine and Heather seemed to have disappeared into thin air, carried by the wind like the litter that blew along Cromwell Street. Gone, gone, gone.

Quizzed about what happened to Heather, Fred and Rose gave a succession of contradictory stories: she’d gone off to the holiday camp, she’d vanished while Rose was out shopping, she was making a fortune working as a prostitute and a drug dealer…

The Wests’ sexual assault case collapsed on 7 June 1993 when the key witness, a 13-year-old girl who was never named, failed to turn up for the trial. Rose and Fred went home and their collection of pornographic videos, largely unwatched, was destroyed by the police. But while the couple celebrated, reassured once again that they were beyond the reach of the law, Hazel Savage couldn’t bring herself to close the file. In her head she could hear Rena’s voice echoing down the years. When she closed her eyes, she saw the young Anna Marie, betrayed and brutalised by the very people who were supposed to love her best.

Meanwhile reports were coming to her of things the young West children were saying while in Care. Social services were worried, in particular, by a long-running family joke among the
children – that you didn’t want to get on the wrong side of Fred or you’d end up under the patio, like Heather.

Could Fred and Rose really have had anything to do with the mysterious disappearance of their own daughter? The idea was unthinkable, unimaginable. Yet so much about the Wests appeared to be beyond a normal person’s comprehension.

Hazel Savage began to press for a warrant to dig up the garden at 25 Cromwell Street. ‘What if you’re wrong?’ she was asked, again and again. ‘It’s a lot of money to spend on some kind of children’s sick joke.’ But something told her she wasn’t wrong. The bleakly paved strip of garden at the back of the Wests’ house held dark secrets, Hazel was sure. Someone had to unearth them; someone had to stop Fred, with his creepy smile and roughened workman’s hands… Someone had to stop Rose – with her little-girl socks and her collection of sex toys that looked like torture implements.

On Thursday, 24 February 1994, a police van pulled up outside 25 Cromwell Street. Rose was alone in the house with her son Stephen.

‘What’s going on? What are you doing?’ she screeched, as police officers barged through to the back garden and started to pull up the paving stones while a mechanical digger manoeuvred into position. It was bitterly cold and the men’s breath hung like mist in the dank air of the claustrophobic, narrow yard.

‘You’re going to make fools of yourselves,’ Stephen told the police.

‘That’s up to us,’ came the terse reply.

Rose was furious at the damage being done to her property. She played the affronted innocent householder to perfection. ‘There’s nothing you’ll stop at, is there, hey?’ Rose, with her big glasses magnifying her wide self-righteous eyes, her plump fingers jabbing angry holes in the air. Outraged, self-pitying.

When he returned, Fred accused the police of harassment. It wasn’t fair. Why were they picking on him? Why couldn’t he and his wife be left alone?

That the couple put on such a good show of being the injured party was not surprising. The Wests actually believed that what they’d been doing all these years – the rapes, the incest and the murders – was their business, just as
their
children were
their
possessions. No one else had the right to intervene.

But by the next day, with the noise of the digger ringing through the cheerless house, Fred realised the police were not going to pack up and go away. Sooner or later, they’d find Heather’s remains – the question was, how many others would they discover in the process? He decided it was time to confess.

‘I’ve done something really bad,’ he told his son coyly. Standing at the back door of the house, he pointed out to police the spot where he’d buried Heather six years before.

‘There’s no need to dig anywhere else now, is there?’ he told them.

But when police began to dig the unforgiving soil of 25 Cromwell Street, they came across bones belonging to two separate skeletons and they quickly realised that if Heather was
indeed buried in the back garden of her own family home, she was not alone.

Fred now owned up to the killing of two more women, who were buried in the garden. Then, realising the search had spread to other areas of the house, he told police about other bodies buried under the cellar floor and the bathroom floor. He hadn’t meant to murder anyone, he said, they were all situations that had got out of control. As for the rapes, well, they never happened. The women had been willing sex partners until something had gone too far. Rose, he insisted, had had nothing to do with any of the deaths.

After two weeks of searching, the remains of nine bodies had been found at 25 Cromwell Street, and the eyes of the world were fixed greedily on the tall, narrow house, where young girls’ screams had gone unheard, and their bones had lain for years, decades even, largely unmissed and forgotten in the damp, dark earth.

But that wasn’t the end. The bodies of Rena Costello and Anna McFall were soon discovered in the green rolling fields of rural Gloucester and the remains of little Charmaine unearthed from under the cellar of 25 Midland Road. A succession of yellowing bones, each one telling a different story, bearing witness to its own private horror…

Still Rose insisted she knew nothing, that she’d seen nothing of the young girls who came in the night and never left, of the bodies dismembered in the bath; that she’d heard nothing of the screams that rang out in the night, spoken nothing of the mysterious disappearances of her daughter and stepdaughter.

No one believed her.

Rose West was charged with ten counts of murder, Fred with twelve. The likelihood is there are many more bones buried, perhaps like Fred said, under the paving stones of Gloucester, many more victims unmarked and not mourned.

In prison awaiting trial, Rose turned on her husband. She was a victim too, she snivelled. That man had taken everything from her – her youth, her innocence, her daughter, and now her freedom.