Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers (21 page)

Rose must have known that imprisonment was near - and she either decided to end it all or to make herself look emotionally vulnerable in the hope of obtaining a lighter sentence. Whatever her motivation, she swallowed the contents of a bottle of painkilling tablets then staggered through to her grown-up children in the other room. They phoned an ambulance and she had her stomach pumped out.

Later she was treated for depression. It’s quite common for female serial killers to be treated for depression after their arrest or imprisonment - though they are usually depressed about their own fate rather than retrospectively feeling guilty about the incredible suffering that they’ve caused.

Throughout February and March the police
discovered
partial female skeletons in the Wests’ garden - namely those of Heather West, Shirley Robinson and her foetus, Shirley Hubbard, Alison Chambers, Lucy Partington, Theresa Siegenthaler, Juanita Mott, Carol Anne Cooper and Linda Gough.

In April they turned their attention to the Wests’ previous flat at Midland Street and found little Charmaine’s skeleton there. Later that month they unearthed Rena’s remains from a field near Fred’s childhood home. In June of that year they found the skeleton of his former lover Anne McFall and that of her unborn child.

Rose was now charged with sadistically assaulting an eleven-year-old girl in Rose’s home in the seventies and of attacking a little boy. (The identities of child victims cannot be disclosed for legal reasons.) She was jointly charged with a man in his late sixties but the charges against him were dropped.

She was soon charged with Linda Gough’s murder - Linda’s mother had gone looking for the girl and found Rose wearing her slippers. Linda’s other clothes had been hanging on the washing line.

Later that year she was charged with a total of ten counts of murder; the girls buried in the garden and Charmaine. She wasn’t charged with Rena and Anne McFall’s deaths as their bodies were found far away from Cromwell Street so their murders were solely attributed to Fred.

Whilst awaiting trial Rose took to lying around watching children’s TV and eating confectionery so that by the time of the conviction she’d put on three stone in weight and looked expressionless and plain.

On 30th June 1994 Rose and Fred were charged together. He touched her shoulder as they stood in the dock but she shrank away from him. She continued to ignore him during the months when he was in prison, though he kept writing to his children asking after their mum.

On New Years day he wrote Rose a short love letter that said ‘All I have is my life. I will give it to you, my darling.’ Then he hanged himself in his cell.

When Rose was given the news she was put on
suicide
watch, but she didn’t shed a tear. Some people thought that she would now be freed as the case against her was circumstantial. There was no
fingerprint
or other forensic proof that she’d been involved in the victim’s deaths. Rose entered a not guilty plea to all
ten charges - and Mae delayed having Heather buried as she was sure her mother would want to attend the funeral when she was found not guilty and set free. But the legal system decided that Rose’s living victims should be allowed to tell of their ordeal in court, and that gave the trial enough substance to go ahead.

Rose’s trial opened on the 3rd October 1995 at Winchester Crown Court. It soon became clear that Rose could be a sadistic and callous woman. Caroline Owens relived her ordeal of being fondled, stripped, intimately probed and assaulted at Rose’s hands.

Rose’s horrific cruelty as a parent was also brought to light. One witness was her stepdaughter Anne Marie, who recalled the numerous times that Rose had hit her, beat her and mocked her. Rose had also helped various men assault Anne Marie when she was still a child.

Rose was now trying to present herself as a timid quietly spoken woman - but the court was allowed to hear her taped interviews with police in which she swore constantly, was loud and obstructive. She told police ‘what Fred says goes’ and tried to make out that she was totally under his thumb. The defence also tried to present Rose as a victim as indeed she had been -
until she became the aggressor who beat her children and possibly took young girls’ lives.

Rose insisted on taking the stand, though her legal advisers warned against it. She alternately laughed and made bad jokes, got angry and showed her true rage. She even criticised some of the deceased and came over as a generally objectionable human being - though, as crimewriter Brian Marriner says, we shouldn’t find people guilty of murder just because we find them unlikeable.

A voluntary prison worker took the stand and said that Fred had told her that Rose was involved in some of the murders and that Rose had killed Shirley Robinson, her pregnant rival. Other women who’d had sadomasochistic relationships with Rose testified that she’d become increasingly violent during the sex
sessions
, taking them beyond their limits and clearly
getting
off on their fear. Unfortunately these witnesses had all taken money from tabloid newspapers so may have had a vested interest in making their accounts sound more sinister than they might actually have been.

Rose’s mother, Daisy, said that Rose had been afraid of Fred. She said that Rose had been childlike for her age when she met up with him. Daisy didn’t even look at her daughter whilst giving evidence and admitted that she hadn’t seen her for seven years.

After a six week trial, the jury retired to consider its verdict. Over the next two days they returned several
times to announce they’d found Rose guilty of more of the killings until she was eventually found guilty on all ten counts of murder. The judge recommended that she should never be released.

Rose betrayed little emotion when the verdict was read out but wept afterwards downstairs.

Rose wasn’t the only family member whose life would be ruined by her brutal childhood. Her brother Graham became an alcoholic by his early teens, whilst another brother Gordon spent his adult life in mental hospitals and in prisons. And her older brother Andrew never forgot the terror that he’d suffered at his father’s hands.

Less is known about Joyce and Glenys who moved away from the home as early as possible. Patricia developed Alzheimer’s disease and was dying by the time of Rose’s trial.

Rose’s children also continue to suffer the legacy of abuse, just as she and her siblings did. Stephen’s marriage quickly broke up amidst rumours of domestic
violence. And Anne Marie - who lost her mother, Rena, and her sisters Charmaine and Heather to Rose and Fred’s violence - has tried to commit suicide, taking an overdose in 1995 when she heard of her father’s death and another one during Rose’s trial. In November 1999 she jumped into a freezing river to drown herself and was finally pulled from it unconscious and treated for hypothermia.

In prison Rose started to read voraciously, something she hadn’t often found time for before. She also applied to become a prison listener, a kind of jail Samaritan. But no one wanted to confide in this woman who had abused her own children so viciously, so the authorities turned down her request. She also ‘got’ religion, as most long term prisoners conveniently do, and became friends with an elderly nun.

In 1999 pornographic videos were found at the house of a known paedophile which apparently implicated Rose West. It’s doubtful that further charges will be brought against her because of all the extra costs that
this incurs. There’s little point, as the judge at her trial has already said that she should never be released.

11 Midnight at the lost and found

The chaotic life of Carol Mary Bundy

Carol was born on the 26th August 1942 to Charles and Gladys Peters. They already had a seven-year-old son, Gene, a child actor. Unfortunately he resented her arrival and they would never be close. Sadly, her
parents
weren’t close either. They had a negative mindset that saw the worst in everything and everyone.

Home was a succession of American states,
everywhere
from Louisiana to Los Angeles, as their father pursued his career in cinema management. Poor Gene was constantly being taken to new film production companies and to different schools. When Carol was three her mother gave birth to a third child, a daughter, Vicky. Ultimately both girls would be abused by their violent dad…

Carol was beautiful at birth, but, like most children of unhappy and disapproving households, she soon became clumsy and awkward. Her father was an
alcoholic
and a control freak. Her mother had been a starlet with tap dancing talent - but she now settled for a career in hairdressing and lived life secondhand by putting little Gene onto the stage. He would star in over a dozen movies and the toddler Carol would have a bit part in one of those films.

But there was little stardust back home. Gladys proved to be so violent a mother that her husband wouldn’t allow her to physically punish the children for fear of what she’d do to them. Gladys was afraid of her husband so she outwardly agreed to this command. Nevertheless, Carol’s younger sister Vicky would watch on one occasion when Gladys lashed Carol across the face again and again with a belt. Other beatings left them all with welts on their skin and she would occasionally draw blood. Charles also beat his children with implements and both parents were emotionally abusive to them. Young Carol gained weight, lost confidence and became a heavy, bumbling child.

Perhaps she could not bear to see the horror of her everyday life for by the age of nine she had a wandering eye and had to have special glasses with extra thick lenses. Her schoolmates laughed at her and she retreated into the world of books, reading science fiction tomes for hours in her room. There, she concentrated on the good times she’d had with her family and convinced herself that all was well in her harsh and
ungiving
world. It was a level of self deception that would dangerously continue throughout her adult life - for in the end her murderous fantasies would prove more vital to her than reality.

The maladroit child grew into an overweight and self conscious teenager. Carol had the type of thin brown hair that flops easily and her parents had it cut
in an unflattering short style. She also had thick glasses and difficulty in maintaining eye contact. Her slim and pretty mother continued to mock her. Carol was so distraught that she drank iodine at age twelve or thirteen in an attempt to kill herself.

Then one day when Carol was fourteen, her mother suddenly said she felt ill and took to her bed. Her husband took her to the doctor but she went into cardiac arrest and died. That same night Carol’s father said that he didn’t want to sleep alone. He then sexually abused her eleven-year-old sister, Vicky. (As an adult, Carol would go on to sexually abuse an eleven-year-old child.) Later he sexually abused Carol, introducing the crying bereaved teenager to oral sex.

The emotional damage continued, with him calling them names, pointing out Carol’s weight problem and her general physical awkwardness. Their brother Gene, by now twenty-one, had left home so escaped this
escalation
of abuse.

Within months of his wife’s death, Charles remarried, presenting Carol and Vicky with an instant stepmother. This wife, too, was soon at the mercy of his anger and depression - during a rage he even tried to kill her with his gun. They struggled and he only succeeded in shooting dead Carol’s cat.

At this stage Carol and Vicky were fostered for a few months and then delivered to their controlling grandmother in Michigan. Soon their father, in the throes of a
divorce, took them back to California and the insults started up again.

Fifteen year old Carol was by now exhibiting extremely disturbed behaviour, running naked through the streets in order to get attention or peering into other people’s bedrooms. She also became promiscuous, sleeping with any schoolboy who would have her because she was so desperate to be held and loved. Again, this pattern would continue into adulthood as she believed she had nothing to offer except casual sex.

She dropped out of school and her father suggested she get herself a beauty qualification that he would fund. Carol did, but soon got tired of the course. She had a creative mind and was good at writing fiction so would have been suited to more intellectual pursuits - but she had no sense of self worth and had been
desperate
to appease her controlling dad.

Despite her attempts to placate him, her father was never pleased with her and her misery continued. She dropped out of college and took up with a man in his mid fifties who had a drink problem. In a bid to escape her hate-filled home, seventeen-year-old Carol married him. Unfortunately he too wanted to exploit her and planned to become her pimp. Carol left him and moved
in with a writer, Richard, who was fifteen years her senior. At last she had met an intelligent and creative man who saw that she, too, had many talents. But she was too damaged to fully grasp this new chance.

She started various creative projects - including a book - but saw none of them through to the end. Two years passed in this way and then she was told that her father had killed himself. Carol was only nineteen but already completely brainwashed into the role of the doormat. She thought that his death was her fault, that she should have done more for him.