Rose West: The Making of a Monster (25 page)

‘Watch it, boy, just watch it look, or I’ll fucking have you,’ she told him. Fred carried on, laughing, as he then began to
poke her quite hard. Rose swung round, grabbed the carving knife and chased him upstairs with it. Just as she lunged at him
with the knife he ran into a bedroom and slammed the door in her face; the knife landed in the middle of the door instead
of his back, taking her fingers with it, which were literally hanging off her hand. ‘Right, fella,’ she told him without shedding
a tear, ‘you’ve got to take me to the hospital.’ She then wrapped her hand in a tea towel and Fred took her to A&E, where
a surgeon managed miraculously to sew her fingers back on, saving her hand. Strangely, she hadn’t even flinched at her own
pain, later sticking one of her knitting needles down the plaster cast when her fingers began to itch. She had simply learned
to ‘hold herself in’, as Daisy was to say of Rose as a child – so that whatever pain had been inflicted on her at that time,
it no longer touched her.

Not long after moving into Cromwell Street, Fred had begun turning the house into a fortress against the world, erecting
heavy iron gates that barred the way to the front door which had two bells on: one for Rose’s clients, the other for general
callers who were not made welcome unless invited. Ironically, although Rose had been desperate to leave home as a young girl,
the isolated world she and Fred had created here replicated elements of her own childhood home at Northam and Bishop’s Cleeve.
‘We don’t want to have anything to do with people outside,’ Fred told Anna-Marie, while Daisy Letts would shout at any callers
for her children to ‘go away!’ Rose would time Anna-Marie and the older girls on their way back from school to make sure they
didn’t stop to speak to anyone, and if they weren’t at the front door by 4.15 in the afternoon, they would be in trouble.
These were the same rules Bill had imposed on his children and his father on him. And then, of course, they all had to do
the housework.

However, unlike herself and her siblings, Rose’s children grew up imprisoned in an overtly, highly sexualised home. Fred would
return from work and put his hand straight up Rose’s skirt, sniff his fingers then put them under his children’s noses. ‘Here,
smell your mother!’ was his normal greeting to them, and Rose’s only complaint was that his hands were dirty. For some while
now, Rose had stopped wearing any knickers, and would sit with her legs open in front of the children and anyone else who
happened to be there. ‘I bet you wish you had something to fill this?’ she liked to goad Fred. And, if it was hot, Rose would
wear nothing more than an apron.

A few short months after Rose and Fred’s first attack on Anna-Marie, the little girl was being forced to have sex with her
father on a regular basis. This would happen when he took her out to help him on various jobs, raping her in the back of the
van between the cement bags and tools. Afterwards, he would buy her sweets and ask her not to tell Rose. Anna-Marie was only
too happy to keep it secret from her wicked stepmother, as it made her feel she had one over Rose. Although, in reality,
when Fred took Anna-Marie out in the van, Rose would have known full well what the little girl’s fate would be. And Rose was
also using the child to perform oral sex on herself wherever and whenever Rose wanted it.

Three months after Rose’s trip to the hospital, in November 1974, 15-year-old schoolgirl Shirley Hubbard went missing as she
got off a bus. Shirley was another beautiful but vulnerable young girl who had been fostered out at a young age. Shirley had
just begun work experience on a make-up counter at Debenham’s in Worcester on Saturdays, and on that fateful evening, she’d
met up with her boyfriend Daniel in town after work. Despite the cold, the young couple then spent the evening together, eating
chips and watching the boats go by on the river. At 9.30 that evening, Daniel saw Shirley off on the bus back to Droitwich,
arranging to meet her at the bus stop the following day – but Shirley never returned and was never seen again until her remains
were unearthed at Cromwell Street some twenty years later. Shirley had been buried in the ‘Marilyn’ area of the cellar, so-called
by the police as Fred had papered it over with pictures of Marilyn Monroe in different poses, embossed with film titles including,
disturbingly,
The Misfits
and
Bus Stop.

Shirley had no connection with the Wests, but had caught the same bus home that Carol Ann Cooper had exactly a year earlier,
from the centre of Worcester. This was obviously one of Rose and Fred’s favourite haunts as they went out looking for young
girls, and was what police call an ‘anniversary trip’. It is likely that they saw the teenager getting on the bus alone and
followed it, offering her a lift home when she got off it, just as they had done with Carol. Taking her back to the house,
this poor, slight 15-year-old was subjected to the worst bondage of all the victims before death mercifully came. Wrapping
layers of brown parcel tape around Shirley’s head until she was completely mummified up to her scalp, the terrified young
girl
could neither see nor cry out for help. Fred then inserted a narrow piece of tubing, like a drinking straw, through the mask
into one of Shirley’s nostrils to keep her alive for several days as they raped and tortured her for their own sexual gratification.
After death, Fred cut off the girl’s head from the front and dismembered her, burying her with various bones missing and still
in the hideous mask.

West later told the police that Shirley had died as a result of an accident; that he’d ‘trussed’ her up and tried to hang
her upside down for ‘kinky sex’, but it had failed and she’d died falling on the cellar floor. Fred had been sacked from Permali’s
by now, but was working at Wagon Works in Cheltenham where he told a co-worker that at first he and Rose had both had sex
with the girl, but when she’d refused to go on the game, they’d ‘sexually tortured her’. Rose, he said, had used ‘instruments
to penetrate the girl’, which was probably true as she had used them on Anna-Marie and would go on to rape others using excessively
large vibrators and dildos both anally and vaginally. He said he’d left the girl in Rose’s hands to go to work and, when he’d
got back, ‘she was in a bad way.’ Unsurprisingly, his workmate did not take him seriously, but it is highly likely this is
what happened to Shirley. ‘I think the cruelty bit in her was for women, she wanted to hurt women,’ Fred later claimed of
his wife.

After the young girl’s death and dismemberment, there would have been a vast amount of blood in the cellar once more. As some
of the lodgers sat tuned to
Kojak,
laughing at ‘Who loves ya baby’, and ‘Billy, Don’t Be a Hero’ blared out on another tenant’s record player that evening,
Rose unlocked the cellar door and silently made her way down the steps with a stiff brush and a bucket of water. Scrubbing
the murder scene clean, she then went back upstairs to celebrate her ‘coming of age’.

A
S ROSE TURNED
21 in the previous winter of 1974, the public was shocked by the murder of the nanny at the Belgravia home of Lord ‘Lucky’
Lucan, who then disappeared – while at the young woman’s ordinary-looking semi in Gloucester, the remains of five young women
lay silently interred.

Just four months had passed since the couple’s last murder, when 18-year-old Juanita Mott went missing from the area. Juanita’s
profile fitted that of most of the girls and young women murdered at Cromwell Street in that she was also vulnerable. Juanita
was known as Nita to her friends and had been in care at different times of her life. Her father, Ernie Mott, was a US serviceman
who had gone back to Texas when Nita reached her teens, and her mother, Mary, from Coney Hill, Gloucester, had since married
again.

Nita had twice been sent to Pucklechurch Remand Centre in Bristol to await sentence for stealing pension books and Giros (benefit
cheques). She had also been a regular at the Pop-In Café in Cheltenham, where earlier victim Caz Cooper sometimes met her
biker friends. Fred was also known to frequent the café, particularly at the time when 15-year-old Mary Bastholm, the waitress,
had disappeared from a bus stop some years earlier. Nita may have met West at the cafe, as the year before she vanished she’d
told friends she had met a man called Freddie
who she thought looked like a gypsy and who had bought her presents. However, after meeting one of the Wests’ lodgers at a
bottling plant in Cheltenham where she worked, she had also briefly lived at Cromwell Street, where she obtained her own bedsit.
But Nita had only been there a matter of weeks when she lost her job and had to move out – although Rose would not forget
her …

The young girl had moved on to stay with family friend Jennifer Frazer-Holland in nearby Newent. Some months later, on Saturday
12 April, Nita was expected to turn up to babysit Jennifer’s small children while she got married. On the Friday evening before,
Nita had hitchhiked from Newent to Gloucester for a night out, but was never seen again. While Nita was a troubled teen she
was, nonetheless, reliable, and her not turning up at Jennifer’s bungalow to babysit for her was said to be ‘totally out of
character’.

Fred had travelled the route from Newent to Gloucester numerous times, while Rose would have made a point of befriending the
young girl to find out things about her before she left Cromwell Street. Rose is also likely to have been attracted to the
pretty dark-haired young girl who looked like herself at that age, as did several of the couple’s victims. As Carol Anne Davis
writes in
Women Who Kill,
‘it’s been said that the female serial killer often tries to kill an early representation of herself, as if trying to snuff
out a painful memory.’ Rose had a lot to block out, and certainly exhibited a cruel contempt for these girls.

As the car slowed down beside Nita that early evening, she might have been pleased to see her former landlady roll down her
window and greet her with a warm smile, before offering her a lift back to her friend’s. Soon after, Nita would be bundled
into the cellar where she was gagged with a pair of knee-high white nylon socks – the schoolgirl type that were Rose’s trademark.
The psychopathic couple, who had made Shirley Hubbard’s gruesome head mask with just a straw poked
through into a nostril a few months earlier, were now set to raise the stakes again. Wrapping two pairs of tights and a bra
around Nita’s head and under her chin, she was then restrained in one of Fred’s home-made metal harnesses and trussed up multiple
times, like a mummy, with a long plastic washing line.

At some stage during her capture, Nita’s skull had been shattered, ‘as if a ball-ended hammer had been hit against the skin’,
the pathologist was to say. Almost a hundred bones were kept as the couple’s signature trophies, including the ribs and kneecaps,
as well as the usual fingers and toes. As to the missing kneecaps, Geoffrey Wansell suggests these were removed while the
young girl was still alive to ensure she remained the couple’s prisoner while they tortured her on a mattress in the cellar.
His theory appears to hold water as Rose’s own children later spoke of their mother hitting and kicking them on the kneecaps
to incapacitate them. And it is likely that Fred’s brother, John, and Bill Letts were invited to participate in this grisly
attack, as with the others that Fred spoke about near the end of his life. Nita’s fingernails had probably also been pulled
out while she was still alive and were found buried in a heap alongside her legs, trunk and decapitated head. Fred had taken
up the brick flooring to dig the burial chamber in an area where he normally fenced stolen goods for his criminal mates. But
with no more room in the cellar, and an offensive smell seeping through the ceiling to the upstairs, he decided to concrete
over the cellar floor. Rose’s brother Graham, who had no idea what lay beneath, came round to help him seal in the bodies
and to turn the area into a bedroom for the growing brood of West children.

The Murders Stop: 1975–8

Following the death of Nita in the spring of 1975, there were to be no more murders for another three years. This is highly
unusual for serial – or addictive – killers, who need to get their regular ‘fix’. It may simply be the case that the couple
carried on abducting and murdering young women away from the house, as Fred had done with Rena and Anna McFall; although,
that said, no other bodies have ever been found. It is perhaps more to do with the couple’s relationship problems at the time.
Fred had been suffering from black moods and depression for a while. He wanted to see plenty of boisterous action when he
spied on Rose entertaining her clients, but if she appeared to be enjoying herself too much, he became jealous and punched
her. Fred was also finding it hard to sleep and sat up in bed in his clothes until morning, or carried on working around the
clock. With the cellar full up, perhaps he was finding it hard to live with the guilt of his and Rose’s terrible crimes; he
was unable to eat at this time or, if he did, was physically sick. It is more likely, however, that Fred was finding it difficult
to cope as Rose began asserting her independence from him.

Fred was used to being in charge. ‘When Dad was home, that was it, he took over,’ Stephen was to say. ‘When Dad wasn’t there,
Mum was in control.’ Fred had been sending Rose out to pubs in the evening for some while to bring back men to sleep with.
At other times Rose would ring to say she was staying out with a man, and he would wait for her return in the morning to hear
all the details of the sex. But Rose was becoming tired of this way of life, and trying to impress Fred had lost its appeal;
besides, with Rena dead, Rose no longer needed to compete. But if she refused to go out, Fred kicked her and kept on at her,
‘You’re a bad wife!’ The more he complained, the more Rose comfort-ate and began piling on the pounds again. Going around
town, she looked frumpy and careworn but, as those who knew her remarked, she just didn’t care. However, all this was about
to change when she befriended a Girl Guide whom we will call Zena, and began to claw back the teenage years she’d lost out
on in being a young mum. Like any other ‘teenager’,
Rose put on her best togs – in her case her bobby socks and stilettos – and set off with Zena for the disco, where they would
innocently while away the evening sitting like wallflowers at the side of the hall, or dancing around their handbags together.
The next evening the mother of four would put the children to bed and service several callers to the house, or Fred would
send her out to pick up men to sleep with.