Rose West: The Making of a Monster (16 page)

‘You’re not going, Rose, are you?’ Auntie Eileen asked as Rosie set off that crisp winter morning.

Rosie just laughed, and tossed her long dark hair. ‘Yeah, I am!’ she said.

‘She looked so lovely on the day she left,’ her mother recalled at the time of the trial.

‘Come back and see us, Rosie!’ The boys waved to her from the front gate.

Rosie turned and smiled at them. ‘Promise!’ she called, not
sure her father would let her, then carried on her way, swinging her bag as she went, not a care in the world.

As the young girl left home, her mother watched after her and worried how she’d cope. Her daughter was pregnant and younger
in her ways than her 16 years would suggest – right down to the schoolgirl socks she wore with her high heels. But as Fred
was to say many years later, ‘Why her father wanted her to get rid of the baby and get her back home was ‘cause he’d lost
her, sort of thing, when she was with me.’

Bill’s incestuous relationship with his daughter was at an end; or so it seemed. While this ‘ordinary’ young girl who would
go on to commit serial murder of many other young girls was anything but ordinary.

Rosie knocked on Fred’s caravan at the Lakehouse site in Stoke Orchard which he had only recently moved back to. As he opened
the door to his beloved, he might have said, ‘Welcome home darlin’,’ with a grin on his face. That night, as the lovers lay
on their foldout bed, sharing a post-coital cigarette, Rosie told Fred of the plans she had for them. First they would get
the girls out of care – but a poky caravan was no place to bring up two children and a baby. She told Fred she wanted him
to find them a roomy flat or a house, a decent place away from the village where they could make a fresh start. Fred, ever
the bragger, probably promised to find her a ‘palace fit for a princess’ as he began house-hunting in Gloucester. Fred had
come to love the city since his parents had first taken him there to buy him a suit on his birthday. He liked the privacy
and anonymity it offered, in contrast to the claustrophobia he felt in communities such as Cleeve and Much Marcle – particularly
now that he and his young mistress were calling themselves Mr and Mrs West.

While Fred was looking for a place for them, the couple went back to the Parklands children’s home in Tewkesbury and took
Charmaine and Anna-Marie out of care again. The children’s
services had already warned Fred that the girls would be placed in care on a formal footing if he didn’t make permanent arrangements
for them, and with Rosie once more at his side, ‘I could get the girls back,’ as he was to say.

Rosie gave the caravan another scrub-up in preparation for the children’s arrival and possibly sat the rag dolls on the end
of their beds. The young girl was delighted: all she’d ever wanted was to be a housewife and mother, and now her dream had
come true. But the psychological foundations that had been laid in Rosie’s childhood would begin to wreak havoc when, by the
following year, the teenager would commit her first murder …

I
T HAD TAKEN FRED
until the early summer of 1970 to find a flat for his young family to live in. First he moved Rosie and the two little girls
into another caravan at the Sandhurst Lane site near Gloucester, then into a tiny flat at Midland Road in the city before
finally moving them into a larger flat at number 25, in the same street.

Midland Road was a rundown area of the city at the time housing mostly immigrant Jamaican and Polish families. The large house
with steps up to it had once boasted a splendid Victorian elegance, but was by now faded with a gloomy grey exterior. The
house overlooked a park at the front with a bowling green and tennis courts, while a main railway line ran at the back, causing
the windows to rattle when a train flew by. The Wests’ flat was on the ground floor and had a coal cellar below in the basement.
The flat was compact and dark and furnished with dilapidated curtains and carpets left by the owner, an elderly Polish man,
Frank Zygmunt.

Mr Zygmunt was buying up other rundown properties in the street as they became vacant, and asked Fred to help him do the houses
up after he finished work for the day at the Cotswolds Tyre Company. The flat was to be the little family’s fresh start and
permanent home for the next three years, and Fred revelled in the fact that no one knew them or their business here, unless
they told them. Even so, the new Mr and Mrs West must have looked a little odd to their neighbours – the older, scruffy man
with a strange way of speaking, his young, pregnant girlfriend, no more than a child herself, and their rainbow tots. Rosie
was actually only five months pregnant here, which means that either there had been some confusion with the dates, or that
Rosie had lost the first baby and was pregnant again.

The start of the new decade had ushered in the era of glam rock and bands like Gary Glitter and Sweet, along with platform
shoes, Lurex tops and kaftans. Edward Heath’s Tory government had won a surprise election in the UK, while in the States,
Charlie Manson and his ‘family’ were on trial for the most gruesome and cruel of ‘stranger’ murders. This included the frenetic
stabbing of eight-months pregnant Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski. As Rosie followed this on the news at night,
there was still little to indicate that, very soon, she too would go on to callously murder strangers with Fred.

At Midland Road, as the young lovers continued to enjoy their colourful sex life, Rosie carried on in her role as homemaker
and mother: cooking and cleaning and taking a pride in turning the girls out well. Like Daisy, appearances were important
to Rosie, and when the Polish lady next door complimented her on her domestic skills, the little housewife was cock-a-hoop.
But Fred’s girls were not little dolls to play with: at 6 and 7 they were at an age to know their own minds, which became
increasingly difficult for Rose to contend with.

While Anna-Marie was described as ‘timid’ and tried her best to please, Charmaine was bright and spirited and soon realised
she could get the better of her young stepmother. This wasn’t helped by Fred telling the little girls to call Rosie ‘Mum’,
particularly as Rena was still in the picture. As Anna-Marie recalled in her book,
Out of the Shadows,
while she was unhappy about it but reluctantly complied with her father’s wishes, Charmaine
flatly refused, reminding the older girl at every opportunity, ‘You’re not my mum! You can’t tell me what to do!’

Rose told the neighbour Mrs Giles, in the flat upstairs, and a mother of two young girls herself, that while she found Charmaine
difficult to cope with, she could manage Anna-Marie. Yet there were problems here too. The 6-year-old not unnaturally doted
on her father, who had been one of the few people in her short life to show her any affection, and she would delight in telling
Fred how she would marry him one day. Fred probably encouraged this, as he was grooming his youngest daughter for the abusive
relationship that was yet to come, while enjoying playing off Rosie against Anna-Marie. This would lead Rosie to become jealous
of the little girl, in the same way she was of the child’s mother. Added to this, Rosie was only 16, and left with all the
responsibility for the children. As Graham was to say, ‘Fred saw it as Rosie’s job “to look after the kids”’ while he went
out to work. The ‘fresh start’ the young girl had been planning wasn’t quite what she imagined.

With the children’s chaotic lifestyle and Fred’s abuse of Charmaine, the girls were exhibiting symptoms of disturbed behaviour:
from wetting the bed to being defiant and overly eager to please. This would have made it even more difficult for their stepmother
(disturbed herself) to care for them. And if Daisy worried that her childlike daughter had taken on more than she could cope
with, she would soon be proved right.

On Sunday 17 October 1970, 16-year-old Rosie felt the baby coming and was rushed into Gloucestershire Royal hospital where
she gave birth to a little girl. The baby’s doting parents named her Heather, and took her home to their spartan flat, where
Fred had got a cot ready for his new daughter, and a second-hand pram. It was a requirement of the children’s at-risk register
at the time that ‘very young parents’ were monitored. Rosie should, therefore, have been brought under the watchful eye of
Gloucester social services, but this does not appear to
have happened, even though Rose, and Fred’s two little girls, had only recently come out of care.

Charmaine and Anna-Marie were overjoyed as they peered into the pram to see their new sister for the first time. Baby Heather
had dark hair and looked the spit of Rose and the Letts side of the family. Yet, incredibly, of the three little girls now
in Rosie’s care, only one would survive murder at her hands.

At this point, however, Rosie was a proud new mum who, having no mod cons to assist her, boiled the nappies in a pan over
the stove to get them as white as possible. But from the moment Heather came home, she was a restless baby who constantly
cried. Rosie had to get up several times during the night to see to her and, as tied as she was, could not ask her parents
for help as she was still not on speaking terms with them. Fred was there even less of late as he had taken on a third job,
as a milkman. As soon as he came in from his day job, he’d go out to do a job on the side for Mr Zygmunt, sleep for a few
hours and then be up for his milk round at Model Dairies in the middle of the night – and not home again until the evening,
when the whole cycle started over again. While Fred was as addicted to work as he was sex, Rose was leading a solitary and
stressful existence that was about to get a whole lot worse.

Fred could never resist ‘thieving’ anything that he could get his grubby little hands on; it was a legitimate perk of the
job, as he saw it. He fraudulently ordered a set of tyres and a spare for his van from the tyre company where he worked, got
caught and was sacked. But every cloud had a silver lining with Fred, who was immediately offered a full-time job by his landlord,
Mr Zygmunt, who had increased his portfolio of properties and had more houses in need of repair. Fred had just started his
new job when, two weeks after Heather’s birth, he was hauled in front of the magistrate’s bench for the tyres and stealing
a tax disc, fined
£50
and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Fred already had a six-month suspended sentence for theft of fencing
panels from a building site he’d worked at in August 1969. The new sentence brought this one into effect and Fred was sent
down for a total of nine months.

What should have been the little family’s first Christmas together had come and gone with Fred warm and fed in the ‘local
nick’, while Rose sat alone in her schoolgirl socks in a cold, damp flat with the baby and two bewildered and resentful little
girls to care for. It was not any better than the Christmas before, when Rose had been locked in her room, and now she was
a prisoner in a flat with no adult company and no money to buy any food or presents with. On top of that, Fred was brought
back in front of Cheltenham Magistrates Court on New Year’s Eve and given an extra month for other pilfering offences. As
Rosie left the hearing that day in the freezing cold, revellers were beginning to fill the pubs and streets in preparation
for the New Year. But Rosie had little to celebrate. Putting the girls to bed that night and trying to settle the baby, she
sat alone with just the radio on for company as 1971 came in with an icy blast. And by the time the spring came, the 17-year-old
would kill.

At first Rosie had been able to visit Freddie regularly, as he was just a stone’s throw away in Gloucester jail. But on 27
January 1971, he was transferred to Leyhill open prison, some twenty miles away in the Gloucestershire countryside, where
he served out the rest of his sentence. Although Rose visited him there, it was more difficult with the children and using
public transport to get them all there. During these long, lonely months, as Rosie and Anna-Marie silently yearned for Fred,
Charmaine continued to refuse to do as her stepmother asked. Rose had no idea how to cope, while her model for parenting was
both warped and dangerous. Nonetheless, it was the only one she had, and she began using it: ‘erupting’ – as Anna-Marie called
it – as Rosie began unleashing terrible outbursts of anger on the children, as Bill had done. She also began to implement
her father’s regime by insisting the girls did all the housework
before and after they came home from school. And if the polishing or vacuum cleaning wasn’t up to scratch, woe betide them,
for Rosie, unchecked and unsupported, would lash out with anything that came to hand: from buckled belts through to kitchen
implements.

The problem was Rose was still emotionally a child, and like a child she was egocentric and lacking in any impulse control.
But once she’d begun lashing out at the children, it gave her a feeling of power, and this was dangerously heady. In a short
space of time, Rosie had turned from a naïve young girl who loved to play with smaller children into a tyrant who, with just
one look, could put the fear of God into the girls. This was the same ferocious look that Andy Letts had seen on his father’s
face. ‘I was terrified of him,’ Andy was to say of his childhood with Bill, ‘too scared to breathe.’ And just as Andy and
his siblings had not been allowed to have friends or to go out to play, so Rosie did not allow Fred’s girls to do so. There
was one exception, however: the little girl who lived in the flat upstairs, Tracy Giles. Rosie was on speaking terms with
Tracy’s mother, Shirley Giles, and allowed Charmaine to play with Tracy when she called for her. Tracy was the only friend
Charmaine would ever have, and the little girls became ‘best mates’.

One morning, when Tracy popped downstairs with a jug to borrow some milk for her mother, she was shocked to discover her little
friend ‘Char’ standing on a kitchen chair with her hands bound behind her back with a belt and ‘the lady with the long dark
hair’ about to beat her with a wooden spoon. Tracy rushed back upstairs in tears to tell her mother what had happened, and
would later give evidence at Rose’s trial. Despite the beatings, little Charmaine remained defiant and refused to cry, which
disconcerted Rose, as it meant she could not break the child and have full control over her. Anna-Marie, on the other hand,
was more like Rosie as a child, and did whatever she could to avoid annoying her stepmother. Even so, the little girl would
not be
immune from Rose’s outbursts. While Charmaine was washing her breakfast bowl deliberately slowly at the sink to antagonise
her stepmother, Rosie took her frustration out on Anna-Marie as she waited behind her sister to wash her own bowl. Grabbing
the dish from the 6-year-old, Rose brought it crashing down over her head. With blood pouring from the wound, Rose took Anna-Marie
to the Casualty department at Gloucestershire Royal, where she had stitches put in her head. Despite the nature of the injury
and Rose being a child in charge of two small children and a baby, no enquiries followed and Rosie was able to continue her
reign of terror.