Rose West: The Making of a Monster (30 page)

Falling In Love Again

Some months later, things came to a head when Rose’s landlord turned up at Cromwell Street looking for her. Fred answered
the door and was fuming when he found out about the flat, going straight round there and clearing it out. Rose’s latest bid
for freedom was over, but she was tired of Fred and his sex games and, in a bid to get back at him, stopped sleeping with
his friends. Things had not improved much between the couple when, a few weeks later, Fred’s role model and father died. Fred
hadn’t visited Walter while he was in hospital, which was probably because he was phobic about such places, but he was badly
affected by the death. While his relationship with his father had always been difficult, Walter had taught Fred all about
taking sex where and when he liked, and that it was a father’s right to ‘break in his daughters’. And Fred needed little reminding.

Fred wouldn’t touch his ‘daughters’ who had been fathered by his friends, so turned his attentions instead to another of his
girls, raping her anally and vaginally and videoing it, when Rose was out shopping. The young teenager was screaming for him
to stop, and when the other children in the house tried to intervene, Fred locked the door and replied wearily, ‘For fuck’s
sake.’ The young teenager had to take a week off school afterwards, and Fred asked her, ‘Are you bigger now?’ He raped her
again the following week in the Black Magic Bar; Rose was in the house this time, but she did not stop it. Instead, she followed
her distressed and bleeding daughter into the bathroom after the attack where she brusquely said, well what did she expect?
She’d been asking for it. Soon after, the young girl confided in a friend who told another friend and so on, until, like a
chain reaction, there was a knock on the door of 25 Cromwell Street.

A team of four policewomen and two detectives stood on the doorstep that warm Thursday morning in August 1992. They were brandishing
a search warrant to look for Fred’s film
of the rape of his daughter. Rose’s immediate reaction was as it had always been: she lashed out at the officers, hitting
one policewoman and wrestling another back down the stairs. She had to be physically restrained. The police took away almost
a hundred pornographic videos, as well as bull whips, rubber suits, rice flails, gimp masks, huge and various vibrators and
dildos, and harnesses. Although the police didn’t view the bulk of pornographic material they seized, they immediately found
photographs of two of the West children naked, and, as officers dragged Rose out to the police car, she screamed at the children,
‘Don’t you dare say anything!’ – only possibly with more expletives.

Rose was charged with inciting Fred to have sex with a 14-year-old girl, and with cruelty to a child. He was charged with
three counts of rape and one of buggery and held on remand. The five youngest children were taken into local authority care,
and Rose and Fred were banned from making contact with them. As Rose packed up her children’s clothes, for perhaps only the
second time in her life, she broke down in tears. In the end, however, the child sex abuse case collapsed when the witnesses
(three of the West children) felt unable to go through with it. Like many incest victims, they felt a confused loyalty towards
the very people who had committed the abuse and wanted the family to be together again – and so they said they had lied. Anna-Marie,
a witness herself, was also scared. She’d had two daughters herself since leaving home and, knowing what her parents were
capable of, feared they would come after her little girls if they got off.

While Rose was awaiting trial, she was bailed to Cromwell Street, from where she rang Anna-Marie, threatening her, ‘If you
think anything of me or your Dad … you’ll keep your mouth shut.’ She also tried to manipulate the situation by swallowing
a bottle of Anadin and was taken to Gloucester Royal to have her stomach pumped. Her plan worked, and with all three
witnesses no longer willing to testify and the videotape of the attack not found, Rose and Fred were simply told there was
‘no case to answer’. The serial killer couple whooped with joy at this, and hugged each other. They were free to go, although
the authorities had enough on them to keep their younger children: Tara, Louise, Barry, Rosemary and Lucyanna, in care.

For the ten months between August 1992 and June 1993, when Fred had been held on remand pending the case, Rose had found the
house empty without the children. And she’d even missed Fred. Putting their past grievances aside, the couple began romancing
each other and fell in love all over again. Rose rang Fred on the ‘nonce’s wing’, calling him ‘sweetheart’, and sent him love
letters with hearts drawn on and arrows through them, just as she had when he’d gone to prison in 1970, at the start of their
relationship.

During the long months that Fred was locked up this time, Rose obtained a cleaning job at the local art college to keep herself
going. She also ‘sprung’ two dogs from the local dogs’ home for company, Benji and Oscar, but mistreated the poor creatures,
just as she had her own children, and soon they would be rehomed by the RSPCA. Once more Rose cut an eccentric and solitary
figure as she wheeled an old pushchair across from her house, through the town’s main car park to the city centre shops, where
she became a familiar face. When she got back home, Rose would simply strip off and stuff her face with cream cakes while
watching children’s cartoons such as
Snow White
and
Road Runner,
screaming with laughter as Wile E. Coyote got battered. This wasn’t the kind of behaviour expected of someone awaiting trial
for child cruelty, or whose children had been taken into care.

Rose was not allowed to see Fred while he was on remand in prison, but when he was transferred to Carpenter House bail hostel
in Birmingham, she took the train up to see him two or three times a week. As long as Fred got back in time for roll
call, he could leave the hostel without being missed. Mae and Stephen sometimes went with Rose to visit their father, but
as soon as their parents clapped eyes on each other, they ripped off each other’s clothes and had sex in the bushes and on
the grass in full view of anyone passing, like a pair of unabashed, sex-mad teenagers. Stephen and Mae, on the other hand,
became the parents to their parents, buying Rose and Fred a little igloo tent from the Argos catalogue, so that they could
have unofficial ‘conjugal visits’ out of the public gaze.

On these visits, Fred would produce gifts for Rose: plastic Kinder egg toys, empty crisp packets and a child’s dummy – discarded
rubbish that he’d lovingly picked off the ground for her. And Rose kept these presents, ‘displaying them in her glass cabinet
at Cromwell Street as if they were priceless china’ as Howard Sounes was to say in
Fred & Rose.
The psychologist who interviewed Rose and Fred just before their child sex abuse case found them to be a ‘close and caring
couple’ who ‘discuss everything together’ and all their decisions are ‘jointly made’. But clearly Rose and her husband were
also insane delinquents locked in adult bodies.

After their reprieve, the middle-aged serial-killer sweethearts were reunited back at Cromwell Street that summer, where they
decided to start another family together. Since the case had become public knowledge, the couple had lost most of their friends
as well as their children. Rose was not on speaking terms with most of her family, and Fred had fallen out with his brother,
John, over money. So it was just the two of them again – Rosie and Freddie – as it had been at the start of their relationship,
over twenty years earlier. This state of affairs influenced their decision to have more children, and that summer, Rose went
into the Gloucester Royal to have her sterilisation reversed. And just before her fortieth birthday, as winter approached,
Rose found she was pregnant again. But the couple’s happiness would not last when, some weeks later,
Rose suffered a miscarriage. And, after that, things were about to get a whole lot worse.

While in care, one of Rose and Fred’s younger children had spoken to a social worker of the patio he’d helped his father build.
The other children also mentioned how their father had joked that he’d put them under the patio like their big sister, if
they misbehaved, guffawing as he saw the funny side of it. Mae and Stephen had long since worried about these boasts, and
had sat their parents down to watch episodes of
Brookside
and
Prime Suspect 2
on television, which had featured storylines about sex abuse and bodies hidden under the patio. They had observed their parents’
faces closely as they watched the programmes, but there had never been so much as a flicker of emotion from either of them.
However, as the social worker raised the alarm, a detective who had wanted to talk to Heather about the abuse of her siblings
before the case collapsed could find no trace of her.

D
C HAZEL SAVAGE HAD
run a check on Heather’s National Insurance number, but found she had neither signed on nor worked in the years since she’d
‘left home’. The detective also knew about Fred from his first wife Rena, whom she had escorted back from Scotland to face
charges of theft in Gloucester in 1967. As the two women chatted away, Rena had told DC Savage how her former friend Anna
McFall was now living with Fred and her children in his caravan near Cheltenham, and that Fred was violent and quite possibly
‘mad’. When the detective tried to find Rena in 1994, she found she too was missing – as were Anna McFall and Charmaine –
and DC Savage would not let it rest.

Rose was watching
Neighbours
in the living room at Cromwell Street at lunchtime as usual, when, on Thursday 24 February 1994, Hazel Savage arrived with
a search warrant and a team of officers. Those in blue boiler suits began lifting the patio slabs, while others searched the
house to look for evidence as to Heather’s whereabouts. Rose screamed at the police and poured scorn on the warrant, then
rang Fred’s work, yelling at his employer to send him home. Although Fred was only twelve miles away, it took him over three
hours to arrive back at the house, so it is likely he was hiding some evidence of their crimes, possibly at the deserted farm
building he sometimes
used. By late afternoon, as darkness fell, the back garden was lit up by industrial lamps and the diggers moved in.

When DS Terry Onions questioned Rose in the Black Magic Bar later that day about Heather’s whereabouts, he was taken aback
by her lack of concern for her missing daughter, ‘But come on,’ she said, ‘there’s hundreds and thousands of kids go flipping
missing.’ She told him there had been a row the night before she’d left home. She also made disparaging remarks about her
daughter being a lesbian (based on her refusing Fred’s advances), even though Rose herself was bisexual. Rose maintained she’d
given Heather £600 to start a new life with when she’d left that morning. When asked for details of the bank account she had
taken the money from, Rose was indignant. ‘I cannot fucking remember, it’s a bloody long time ago.’ Pushing her further on
this, she replied, ‘What do you think I am? A bloody computer?’

DS Terry Onions told Rose he did not believe her story and that he thought Heather was probably just a pile of dust and bones
by now, at which she scoffed, ‘Oh you’re lovely, aren’t ya?’ The only bone the police found that day was a chicken bone, which
caused Stephen West, who was staying at the house at the time, to flap his arms and cluck like a hen. Even though he was all
too familiar with the family joke about Heather being buried under the patio, it was just too bizarre and appalling to believe.
And Rose probably blocked the image our for the same reasons.

By the time Fred arrived home, the police had finished for the day and he took himself off to the police station. He stuck
closely to a familiar story: Heather, he said, had gone off in a red Mini with her girlfriend, when in fact it was Rose who
had gone on holiday with a lesbian lover in a red Mini almost twenty years earlier. Having nothing as yet on Fred, the police
allowed him to go home where he immediately unrigged the illegal wiring of his electric meter, out of sight of the policeman
sitting in the back garden on all-night watch. Rose washed up, while
keeping one eye on the policeman outside and whispering to her husband. The couple then took the dogs out for a walk, something
they never normally did together – then probably spent that night and the following morning together, as they usually did,
having sex. And at some stage during these activities, the couple struck a pact with each other …

DC Savage turned up early the next morning at Cromwell Street, asking for Daisy’s address as she wanted to interview her.
Rose became very upset by this; she’d had no contact with her mother for the past fifteen years, since Daisy had cut her off
when she’d had her first mixed-race child. Rose was said to have felt abandoned by her mother again, and probably feared the
police getting in touch with Daisy over Heather’s disappearance would only make things worse. Fred was sensitive to Rose’s
feelings and promised her he’d sort it out with the police. Telling Rose to go upstairs, he turned to Stephen. ‘Son, I will
be going away for a while. Look after your mum …’ Then, leaving the house with the police, he yelled at the top of his voice,
‘I didn’t kill her!’ creating pandemonium in his wake and bringing out the neighbours to watch the spectacle. Fred then got
into the police car where, turning to Detective Constable Savage, he quietly said, ‘I killed her.’

Fred was, however, at pains to stress that Rose was not involved and wasn’t even in the house at the time. He also said that
Heather’s death was an accident. He’d grabbed her by the throat to wipe the smile off her face, but ‘the next minute she’s
gone blue’, as he’d held her longer than he intended. As well as trying to protect Rose, Fred was also trying to manipulate
the police to only dig the area in the back garden where he told them to, so that Heather’s remains alone would be found.
That way he knew he would be looking at just one life sentence and could be out in twelve years, or perhaps even get a lighter
sentence for manslaughter – rather than he and Rose both attracting whole life sentences, which they would if they found
all the bodies. Rose is believed to have agreed to this and said she would stick by him – Rosie and Freddie forever – while
he served out the sentence.