Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (17 page)

Rose was bullied throughout primary school and given the name Dozy Rosie. In truth she was seen as ‘sensible’ which is often the description given to abused children who don’t run about and have fun in a normal childhood way. She found it hard to talk to children her own age so settled for mothering much younger ones. She adored her two younger brothers - babies always brought out her maternal side.

But by age twelve she had realised that only the strong survive and had become the schoolyard aggressor. By now she was of a fairly big build so no one wanted to get on the wrong side of her. As she moved into puberty she became understandably interested in sex, but her strict religious mother and outwardly puritanical father refused to tell her or her siblings the facts of life.

By thirteen she was becoming sexually precocious and was masturbating her ten-year-old brother. Because the household was so poor and overcrowded they shared a bed. But it was more important for Rose to get
older
men on her side - after all, the older man in her life, her father, could kill her or her siblings at any moment. Older men had to be turned into allies at whatever price. She consequently began to display exhibitionist tendencies when middle aged men were around, an exhibitionism that would stay with her. And she would walk round the house naked in front of her brothers when her parents were at work.

In 1969, when Rose was fifteen, Daisy at last left Bill and took Rose and the younger kids to stay with relatives. It was a plan born out of desperation and one beating too many. Rose now helped out in the relative’s cafe - but spent more time sleeping with the truck drivers who came in for their meals. The few compliments they paid her were probably the kindest words she’d ever known and the casual sex was the closest she’d gotten to love.

But her relatives house was now crowded and the atmosphere wasn’t good. At this stage Rose did what she’d always done to make things temporarily better - she made sexual advances to a man, in this case to the married male relative that they were staying with. Some of their other relatives think that her mother caught them in bed together. Whatever happened, she was thrown out and went back to live with her increasingly strange dad. She would never forgive her mother for abandoning her and still talked about the emotional pain many years later. Her father’s moods sometimes drove the fifteen-year-old from the house and she was picked up on the streets by the police, suspected of soliciting.

Rose now briefly had two unsatisfactory low paid jobs, then went on to a third at a bread shop. Whilst waiting for the bus home from work one teatime she was chatted up by a man called Fred West. She was still fifteen and he was twelve years her senior. He was married but separated.

Rose didn’t like him at first as he was covered in grease - he drove a van and did building work on the side - but she was flattered by his attention. Eventually she agreed to a drink in a nearby pub. Prior to the date he sent a go-between into the bread shop to give her two presents from him, a lace dress and a fur coat.

Rose explained that she couldn’t take the gifts home - her puritanical father, Bill, would kill her if he knew
she’d been on a date as she’d never even had a proper boyfriend. (She kept denying to her relatives that she’d been having sex with truck drivers and other men she met casually.) Bill was still falling into rages or day long silences at home.

Fred then suggested that he could keep the coat and dress for her in his caravan. He took the impressionable teenager there and she met his daughters, Anne Marie aged five and Charmaine aged six. Both children had the same mother, Catherine Costello, known as Rena, but only Anne Marie had been fathered by Fred. Charmaine had been fathered by a Pakistani student and Rena had already been expecting her when she met the equally promiscuous Fred West.

Fred had taken both children from Rena as a way of hurting her, but wasn’t at all paternal. He often shouted at the children or rubbed them inappropriately on his lap. At other times he would take off for pastures new and put them both into foster care.

But for now both little girls were living with him in the caravan, looked after by whoever was available, often other caravan dwellers who pitied the neglected children. Some of their carers were girls Rose had been to school with. Fred used the children to lure young women into his life as untrained nannies and most of them ended up having sex with him.

Fred would weave tall tales about his numerous jobs in various parts of Scotland and England, his hotel
chain and his career at sea. It was the kind of talk that intelligent adults quickly see through as his anecdotes were all about his successes yet he was a grubby little man living in a tiny and dirty caravan. But young love-starved girls like Rose were intrigued and impressed.

Rose immediately made a fuss of the children and they responded as they’d had little attention in their lives. Fred, who had probably been planning this since setting eyes on the lonely, big-busted teenager, turned to her and suggested she’d make an ideal daytime babysitter. He’d pay her the same money that she was getting at the bread shop and she could tell her father that she was still working there.

So fifteen-year-old Rose now made her covert way to the caravan every morning; a child looking after children. At first it was fun playing at house, and she got to escape from the little girls in the evenings. Then her controlling father found out…

Determined to keep her from Fred (some
criminologists
believe that Bill had been having sex with his daughter since she turned thirteen) he put her in care. Whilst she was there she didn’t have a single visitor. During her three months in this home for troubled teenagers she sneaked out a few times to see Fred. She would write him a letter that said ‘we are two people, not two soft chairs to be sat on.’ And relatives would indeed watch her softness, her vulnerability, leach out of her over the years.

As soon as Rose left care at sixteen she went to Fred and got pregnant by him. It was her only means of ensuing that he’d have to stay in her life. After all, he’d been having sex with almost every young woman he encountered at work or who babysat for his children. She possibly thought it would also make her father accept him and accept that she was no longer a child. By now her parents were reconciled and the verbal and physical violence in the household had started up again.

But Bill Letts didn’t accept the news of his impending first grandchild - instead he said that Rose could only stay if she had an abortion, and booked her into an abortion clinic without her permission. Rose would tell her children many years later that at this stage her father also gave her the beating of her life. The teenager turned to her mother for support but Daisy was too angry to even talk to her. Rose was, as usual, emotionally alone.

Despite this ultimate cruel rejection, Rose felt happy as she left her parents house - freedom was hers at last, as was sudden adulthood. The crying child and abandoned teenager was about to become a stepmother of two and a birth mother of one. She would also start on the journey that would make her one of the most prolific and cruel female serial killers in British history…

Without a friend in the world, Rose now went to Fred and he rented them a single room in Cheltenham. The place was dirty as he kept all his oily tools there. There were also clothes and food scraps littering the floor. They were two semi-literate people living with two neglected children, so it was hardly
Romeo
and
Juliet
but romance-craving Rose convinced herself that it was perfect.

Her contentment increased when he found them a flat in Gloucester, at 25 Midland Road. That October she gave birth to their first daughter, Heather. The couple would tell each other that she was a child of love and Rose would promise to love Fred for as long as she lived.

Their physical love - at the start - was very good as Fred was into heavy sadomasochism and Rose was more than willing to flog him for his sexual pleasure. She also enjoyed being beaten - and would later ask her female lovers to treat her equally aggressively. Meanwhile, Fred imbued the relationship with a special quality that went beyond the sexual, saying that they could virtually read each others minds. (Something that Judith Neelley and her husband, profiled earlier, also believed.)

But he apparently didn’t read the signals that she hated being left alone with two school age children and
a tiny baby. He worked long hours, leaving her trapped with the children in the barely furnished and uncarpeted flat. Keen to get something for nothing (a trait he would show throughout his life) he soon stole some tyres and was traced and sent to prison for ten months, the sentence to run from October 1970 until the summer of 1971. Heather was just a few weeks old.

The teenage Rose was left with three kids, little money and no support. When her parents eventually visited, they could see she had recently been crying. Every time they called thereafter her eyes were red-rimmed and she lost an unhealthy amount of weight.

She started to beat Anne Marie and Charmaine for being slow to eat their cereal or for laughing and talking together, the very things her father had beaten her siblings for. She pulled their hair and hit them on their heads with whatever crockery was available. She even beat them for wetting the bed.

One of Charmaine’s friends rushed in to the house one day to find the little girl standing on a chair with her hands tied, whilst Rose stood behind her brandishing a wooden spoon. On other occasions Rose tied the children to the bed and went out for hours leaving them hungry and helpless. The children looked increasingly unloved and afraid. But, like all toxic parents, she was in denial about the damage that she was doing and wrote to Fred in prison that Charmaine liked ‘being treated rough.’

During one of her attacks on Charmaine - in May or June of 1971 - she went too far and murdered the child. Many people think that she strangled her, as, during a rage, she would choke one of her later children, Stephen, into semi-consciousness. When neighbours asked where Charmaine had gone, Rose told them that she’d gone back to her mother, Rena. The school
accepted
this explanation too. In truth, Rose had dumped the little body in the coal cellar and turned her full rage onto seven-year-old Anne Marie. It was still a few weeks until Fred was to be released from prison but Rose wrote him increasingly romantic notes and he responded in his poorly spelt and ungrammatical hand.

Bill Letts had at first visited the house with his wife Daisy but afterwards he would often visit on his own. It’s likely that at this juncture he began to have sex with Rose again.

Fred came out of prison and buried Charmaine’s body in the backyard after taking the corpse apart and inspecting the way the bones fit together. Knowing that Rose, too, was now a killer he may have told her about a murder he’d committed on his own in 1967 - namely that of Anne McFall, his nanny turned lover who was eight months pregnant with his child. He would tell other people that he loved Anne, so it’s possible he
killed her by accident during extreme bondage sex. Many couples indulge in exciting tying up games, but Fred also liked to restrict his partner’s breathing by using masks or tubes and bind and gag them so hard that they couldn’t move or verbally communicate. Suffocation could take place if their nostrils clogged.

Whatever he did to kill Anne McFall, her body would eventually be found almost three decades later, in 1994 in a field near Fred’s childhood home, with the wrists bound and the fingers and toes cut off, presumably post mortem. The near-term foetus had been cut from her body and was buried a few feet away.

Fred and Anne had been living in a caravan which doesn’t make an ideal dismemberment site - but Fred also had access to a lockable garage that his friends said had a horrible atmosphere. It’s likely that he carried her corpse there and cut it into pieces, something he’d done with animal carcasses when he worked in an abattoir. He would enjoy the comparatively unusual sexual thrill of dismembering female corpses throughout his life.

The police and many locals would also later suspect Fred of murdering Mary Bastholm, a waitress at a cafe he frequented. She disappeared from a bus stop in 1969 - and Fred (sometimes accompanied by Rose) would later abduct other women from bus stops. Her body has never been found.

After hearing his confession of killing Anne McFall and possibly Mary Bastholm, Rose might have told
Fred that she was sleeping with Bill Letts, her father. Leastways Fred would later tell the police that he’d seen Rose and her dad having enthusiastic sex. Rose would have figured Fred wouldn’t mind - after all, he had allegedly slept with his own mother and sister. And
his
father had allegedly slept with his own daughters, Fred’s sisters. Fred’s father would also tell him how to disable farm animals in order to have sex with them. Moreover, Fred loved the idea - and the actuality - of Rose sleeping with someone else as long as he could watch or could hear all the details afterwards.

Rose and Fred now had a special but terrible bond between them as they were both killers - and killers who had gotten away with it.

Fred’s sex life with Rose was based on consensual
sadomasochism
- but his earlier sexual experiences had been coercive and abusive. Many people believe that his mother took his virginity at age twelve. She was a huge woman who wore a belt around her waist with which she beat her other children - but Fred was her favourite so he escaped the worst of her wrath. He would later tell his own sons as they reached twelve years old that they were now old enough to have sex with their mum.

The twenty-year old Fred came home after working away and was soon having sex with his thirteen-year old sister. It’s rumoured that he was the cause of her underage pregnancy, but in court she refused to say. He also had sex with animals in the fields around his simple village home. A tethered sheep makes few demands for satisfaction so he got used to being an impatient and selfish lover - Fred always came within about a minute of having sex with a woman and seemed to prefer the tying up or voyeuristic side of things. He also liked to keep mementoes such as his lover’s lingerie.

When Fred wasn’t fashioning implements to use on Rose or making home improvements he was usually out of the house. He was an incredibly hard worker and was always doing overtime or doing up neighbours houses. He also walked the streets looking for dropped coins and went through rubbish dumps looking for clothes and toys that he could bring home. Rose was frequently left on her own with the crying baby Heather and equally tearful Anne Marie.