Killer Couples (24 page)

Fred, who’d never shed a tear for his victims, now wept for himself and for the loss of a love that was, to his warped mind, pure and noble. He wrote letters full of longing and adoration to his ‘Rosie’ and sent messages of love via their children, who, despite everything, continued to visit.

But Rose never replied. In court appearances, she refused to look at her husband and shrank from his touch. Fred’s heart crumbled to pieces until he could no longer see a way forward. He might, perhaps, have coped knowing that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. After all, he had his memories, sick and monstrous as they were. But he couldn’t handle the loss of Rose. With her by his side, his basest thoughts had seemed normal, and with her encouragement, his desires had become realised, his fantasies made possible. Rose had been the fairground mirror in which his darkest, most twisted thoughts had been reflected back to him as somehow healthy. She had not only recognised the evil inside him, she had released it, welcomed it and made it part of their family life.

With her, he’d been the hero of his own love story. Without her, who was he? A grinning, puffed-up little man, whose depravities
masked a deep-seated sexual inadequacy; a weak, cowardly man who exercised power only over those unable to stand up for themselves, who inflicted pain on those unable to fight back…

Just minutes after writing these words to his beloved Rose on New Year’s Day 1995, Fred West was hanging from a makeshift noose, taking his untold secrets of other burial grounds, other victims to his grave. Rose was on her own.

In October 1995, ten months after her husband’s death, Rose West was found guilty of ten charges of murder after a trial in which the survivors, among them Caroline Owen and Anna Marie Davies, spoke for the dead with a dignity and a bravery that caught in the throat of all who were present. Yet Rose continued to deny any involvement, even in the face of mounting evidence of her cruelty, sadism and ungovernable temper.

Rose West is currently serving ten life sentences for murder and is unlikely ever to be released. She has never shown any interest in where her partner of more than half a century was cremated, nor what became of his ashes.

In the end, the story of Fred and Rose West is an inverted, macabre love story, starring the couple no one ever really looked at twice: the mousy, nondescript pair who got their kids to school on time and spent their money on home improvements. Ultimately, it wasn’t guilt for the untold number of women he’d
murdered that killed Fred, nor remorse for the killing of two of his own children, nor the sadistic abuse of their siblings; it wasn’t an attack of conscience or the slow dawning realisation of the enormity of the crimes he’d committed… No, what robbed him of the will to live was the withdrawal of love. United, Fred and Rose had been responsible for some of the most depraved murders in criminal history. They had presided over a household of torture chambers and terror, where children’s screams pierced the night air and young women lost both their innocence and their lives. Together they enjoyed family barbecues on the patio below which their own daughter lay buried and dismembered, her bones mingling with those of all the others for whom life had become such a living nightmare that death, when it came, was a welcome release.

Separated from the woman he loved, Fred West was nothing – a man-child left floundering in a world he could no longer recognise. Alone, he was still capable of murder and rape, but it was Rose who validated his urges, who made them seem normal, natural even, and who egged him on to ever more extreme displays of sadism and brutality, joining wholeheartedly in the torture, the sexual assaults, the killings…

…All in the name of love.

During my research into the particular dynamics of couples who kill, I was helped by numerous sources. The following books also provided valuable insight: