Rose West: The Making of a Monster (7 page)

He also began turning a blind eye to her breaking the rules at the dinner table, where she would play with her food while
her siblings had to finish all theirs. But what Rosie perhaps lacked in conventional intelligence, she was more than making
up for with intelligence of another kind. As her older brother was to say, ‘Rosie was very clever as a young child in learning
how to manipulate Dad.’ Her inability to do things ‘right’ and her childish ways would both charm and amuse Bill. ‘He felt
sorry for her,’ Andy explained, ‘and would let her off.’

Having realised his youngest daughter was vulnerable, he took her under his wing. But unbeknown to the family, there was another,
darker, side to Bill’s protective and softening attitude towards her. For it is here that Bill is believed to have begun secretly
grooming his little girl in his own sexual desires, and by satisfying his demands, Rosie soon learnt that her home life could
be happier than that of her siblings.

Thus, while Bill openly referred to Rosie as being ‘as thick as two short planks’ and laughed at her shortcomings, he was
in fact encouraging her in the role of Dozy Rosie so that he could exploit her. And at the same time that he was cultivating
Rosie, he was still torturing his wife and children. Not only did Rosie live with this on a daily basis, absorbing it as nothing
more than normal family behaviour, it is here she also learned another important lesson in life: that if her mother couldn’t
shield them
from their violent father, then older men such as her father could be her protector: that she could charm and ‘please’ them,
as she did Bill, to ensure her survival. It was a skewed way of thinking, but completely logical given her circumstances.
Although Bill never attempted to abuse Glenys in any way, Rose had become known in the family as ‘Daddy’s Girl’. Yet this
was a smokescreen, for if anyone was Bill’s favourite it was Glenys.

While children seek out the best way to survive, fathers who abuse tend to focus on their more vulnerable child or children.
Glenys was bright and feisty and therefore more of a risk to Bill in that she might raise the alarm about him outside the
family home, and was also more likely to be believed. In Rosie he had a child who was immature for her age, and who was already
regarded as ‘disturbed’ by at least one of her siblings. It was not, therefore, a difficult choice for Bill to make. But while
some fathers use fear and intimidation to groom their children, it is likely that Bill played the card of the loving father.
Geoffrey Wansell says in his book,
An Evil Love,
that the version of parental love Rosie received at her father’s knee was ‘distorted’, ‘perverted and brutal’ but, if this
was the case, the little girl didn’t know it – to her it would have been customary. Bill is also likely to have made Rosie
believe she was ‘special’, while their relationship, as Christopher Berry-Dee and Steven Morris suggest in
Born Killers,
gradually became ‘intimate until the point of inappropriateness until it became fully sexual’, although this was possibly
not for some years hence.

And as Bill continued to groom Rosie, she began to grow up discovering the power she had over older men, whom she would later
use to protect her. And, as she watched her father beat her siblings, in Bill she had a role model for Fred West; thus Rose
was a ‘Daddy’s Girl’ of a different sort.

Serial Killers and Favouritism

‘We were all frightened to death of me Dad. He were like a monster … we’d all sit there in fear,’ Carl Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire
Ripper’s younger brother, was to say, although it could easily have been Andy Letts talking about his father, Bill.
^*
However, in cases where a budding male serial killer is brought up by both parents, they often appear to be the mother’s
favourite as she tries to protect their ‘weak’ son from a bullying father.

Peter Sutcliffe was the oldest of six children who spent the first few days of his life in an incubator. A sensitive and sickly
boy who liked art and music, his father mocked him as being weak and a ‘Mummy’s boy’ – unlike his stronger younger brother
Mick. Bullied by his father, Sutcliffe not unnaturally clung to his mother’s skirts as a child. And like Daisy, while Kathleen
Sutcliffe did not have the means to leave her cruel husband, she did whatever she could to protect her eldest son from him.
Peter, in return, idolised his mother and called her ‘the angel’. He even changed his name to Coonan, his mother’s maiden
name in recent years. As he grew up, Sutcliffe came to believe there were only two types of women in the world: angels and
whores. While his wife was also an ‘angel’, other women met in pubs and on the street were ‘whores’, who he said he was on
a mission to kill. In overcompensating for a bullying father, Sutcliffe’s mother raised a narcissistic, cruel and self-serving
son.

Dr Harold Shipman, who killed hundreds of patients over several decades, was also his mother’s favourite. Called Fred within
the family, he was brought up in a council house in Nottingham. His father was a lorry driver and his mother, Vera, a housewife
with aspirations for her oldest boy, who was showing promise at school. Vera invested a great deal of time and effort
in her son during his formative years, instilling in him a belief that he was different to others, even his own siblings:
that he was superior to them. Vera had been illegitimate and bore the stigma of this at the time. She had also worked in menial
jobs and wanted better for her son – possibly so that she could bask in reflected glory. She told Harold he was destined for
greater things, a position in life such as a doctor, where people would look up to him. Just like Bertha Letts with her young
son Bill, Vera Shipman made sure her boy was always smartly turned out in formal attire, including a tie, wherever he went.
His style of dress and his haughty attitude made him unpopular with his peers at school. Harold also found college difficult,
particularly socially because he had no idea how to mix with people and was, for the most part, a loner. Although his mother
didn’t live to see her boy become a doctor, Shipman carried with him the supercilious, sneering attitude he’d developed as
a child, talking down to his patients and colleagues.

Myra Hindley had a bullying father who beat her mother, but from an early age she lived with her grandmother, Ellen Maybury,
in Manchester, who was said to be ‘devoted’ to her young granddaughter. In the US, Charlene Gallego, who killed a number of
young girls with her husband Gerald, was another ‘Daddy’s girl’. Charlene’s wealthy father doted on her, spoiling her with
presents and money and believing she could do no wrong. With Rose, the dynamic of being ‘Daddy’s girl’ meant she was protected
from physical violence by the dominant, violent parent – although this was in exchange for something equally abusive. Rosie’s
experiences were actually closest to those of another Mummy’s boy and eldest child: a one Frederick West. Or Freddie, as his
parents affectionately called him.

In this case, Freddie’s father, like Sutcliffe’s, was a bully and sexually aggressive. Walter West frequently boasted of his
sexual exploits to his son and forced himself on young girls in the fields in front of the boy. Walter had wanted a son, but
as soon as
Freddie began to grow up, he became jealous of him as his wife doted on the boy. As Fred’s younger brother Doug was to say,
Freddie was ‘Mammy’s blue-eyed boy’ who could do no wrong. She took her oldest son’s word over his younger siblings’ and her
husband’s, and stuck up for the boy even when she knew he was in the wrong. In return, Freddie worshipped his mother – just
as Sutcliffe had worshipped his beloved mother, who he called ‘the angel’, and Shipman, who had also, as a young teenager,
nursed his beloved mother until her death from cancer.

Although Rosie escaped her father’s beatings, Freddie did not get off these any more lightly from his parents, particularly
his mother, who would administer the beatings with a thick leather belt. Yet he was still her favourite and if anyone picked
on him, including the teachers at the village school, she would race after them and give them ‘what for’. Being Mrs West’s
‘favourite boy’, however, didn’t just mean protecting him, but something more sinister …

But there is another Mummy’s boy integral to this story: Rosie’s own father, Bill, who, unbeknown to Daisy and the family,
had a secret that he was keeping all to himself and which Rosie and the family would not find out about until twenty years
later, after his death …

I
RONICALLY, OR PERHAPS NOT,
Bill shared some similarities with the profile of male serial killers. Like the Yorkshire Ripper, he too had been a weak,
sickly child who was cosseted by his mother as she tried to protect him from a bullying and violent father. His father, William,
had not wanted him; but just as soon as he came to accept him, he lost interest again when Bill began developing a will of
his own (as Rose was to do with her own children).

William’s wife Bertha was a whist player and would make a point of going out two or three evenings a week to see friends and
play a few rounds, leaving William to look after his son. She hoped to get the two to bond. William, however, was cold towards
the boy, and Bertha would come home to find her small son alone and neglected. Later, when William bothered to speak to his
son at all, he never stopped telling the boy, ‘You were an accident, we didn’t want you.’

Just before Bill was due to start school, he contracted rheumatic fever, a disease that killed many children at the time.
The illness is characterised by a high temperature, painful joints and severe mood changes. There is also the possibility
that a long-term heart condition can develop from the scarring, creating problems later in life. Bertha was beside herself
as her son lay gravely ill but, using all her professional skills, nursed the boy back to health. Bill would, however, remain
a weak and sickly boy, and Bertha became overprotective towards him, mollycoddling him.

But while Bill became the focus of Bertha’s attention, the cracks in her marriage began to deepen. Rheumatic fever in the
1920s and 1930s was often associated with poverty and malnutrition. Yet the Letts’ home wasn’t an unskilled working-class
household, although money had been in short supply there for some years. The problem was William, who had taken building work
for a short while after his return from the Great War, but soon lost interest. Bertha had long since realised that if the
family were to have any income, it would have to be she that earned it. And while she worked and looked after the house and
their little boy, she transferred any remaining affection she had for William to Bill, indulging the child whenever she could.

As a former neighbour said, ‘Bill was spoilt … She [Bertha] took him to school and met him after, and always took his cap
off before he went in the classroom and combed his hair, and the same when he went home in the evening.’

Bertha wrapped up her frail son to protect him from the cold north Devon winters, and in the little spare time she had, she
knitted Bill long woollen stockings for his thin little legs. Because of Bill’s sickness, he started school long after his
peers in the village, but when he did finally attend Northam Primary, Bertha insisted he wear the long knitted stockings beneath
his short trousers. This made him a target for the other school-children who, like his own father, called Bill a ‘cissy’.
‘We all thought it was very queer,’ one of his friends, Ronnie Lloyd, was to say many years later. Bill hadn’t long been at
the school when the other children started to bully him. As soon as Bertha found out she was straight down the school, sorting
out the bullies herself (just as Freddie West’s mother would do years later).

The situation wasn’t helped by Bertha taking Bill to school and fetching him, even when he was 11, instead of letting him
walk the short distance by himself or with his classmates.
Consequently, young Bill didn’t possess the social skills to enable him to mix with other children at school, and he had no
friends outside it because his parents simply would not allow it. Instead, he was stuck at home in a sterile environment with
his morose father while Bertha was out doing her rounds.

William had narcissist personality traits – he was attention-seeking, envious, self-centred and lacked empathy. Having been
brought up with older sisters attending to his every whim, he now found himself playing second fiddle to his son and didn’t
like it. When he eventually turned his hand to paid work as a butler-cum-gigolo, it was as much about receiving attention
from women as it was about money or sex. His new ‘job’, however, only served to intensify the frosty silence in the house
between himself and Bertha, which Bill had to endure while growing up. Later, when Bill married Daisy, he’d wanted to avoid
the mistakes his parents had made, but he simply had no idea how to go about it.

As Bill grew into a teenager, the strange young man was not popular around the Northam area and had few friends. His strict
and controlling father set him a time by which he had to be home each evening. If he missed the deadline by even a minute,
his father would thrash him and lock him out, forcing Bill to sleep in the shed. It was the same behaviour Bill would later
inflict on his own children, as the bullied became the bully. Because of the toxic parenting he’d received, he would also
have harboured a lot of anger, which he would unleash unfairly on his wife and children.

Unlike his father, however, Bill was a hard worker, and Bertha encouraged her son to get a skill so that he would not have
to rely on unskilled, low-paid work. Bill found training and employment in an electrical shop in the nearby town of Bideford,
and then moved on to the Bristol Airport Company, where he worked as a radio engineer. It was around this time that it first
became apparent that all was not well with Bill, who
began to think his workmates were all ‘ganging up’ on him. He started to become aloof and distrustful of people and was always
on edge. His odd manner did nothing to endear him to his colleagues, and even less to the opposite sex, whose rejection of
him before Daisy only confirmed his bitter view of the world.