Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  Bill’s behaviour continued to be violent, but he had learned to conceal the worst excesses from neighbours. Only once did the façade crack at Benbow Street, when he attacked one of the elder girls, hitting her across the face and cutting her eye. The girl fled into the sanctuary of the Scobling flat, losing her shoes on the stairs.

  Rose attended Stoke Dameral School and regularly ran home in tears at the end of the day. She was naughty, often in bizarre ways – cutting up her bedsheets to make clothes for her dolls, for example, and driving her family to distraction with incessant, nonsensical lies. One of Rose’s school friends says she could see how easily Rose could be corrupted: ‘She was sort of vulnerable.’

  After the Letts had stayed in Benbow Street for two years, Bill became restless and the family moved again in search of work. He said he would do anything to make a living, and found a job in the kitchen of a children’s home near Stratford-upon-Avon. For a short while the family lived nearby in the village of Mickleton, but it proved unsuitable in the long term so Bill travelled into Cheltenham at weekends in the hope of finding something better. He finally secured a relatively well-paid electronics job with the large defence company, Smith’s Industries. When Rose was aged ten, the family packed up and moved again, leaving yet another school behind.

  The wire-ringed factory complex of Smith’s Industries dominates the village of Bishop’s Cleeve, five miles from the town of Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. Fred West’s home village of Much Marcle is just a few miles away across the River Severn in the neighbouring county of Herefordshire.

  Smith’s is a philanthropic company, and had built a housing estate for the workforce in the village. The Letts family moved into 96 Tobyfield Road, a red-brick semi-detached house on what is still known as ‘Smith’s Estate’. A large garden wrapped around the house in an L-shape, and a brick wall divided it from a triangular area of common grass in front. A sign fixed to the wall warned: NO BALL GAMES.

  Bill’s new job meant that he was better paid than at any other time in his life. When he started at Smith’s in the early 1960s, his wages plus overtime amounted to as much as £30 per week – meaning the family would not go hungry again. He was employed as an electronics engineer working on flight simulators, and gave the impression that it was top secret. Actually his tasks were quite mundane, low-grade electronics, but they demanded a high level of concentration. At the end of the working day, Bill was wound up tight like a spring. One wrong word from anybody in the family would make him uncoil violently.

  ‘When he used to get angry, he went out of control. He would pick up a knife to you, an axe. He would beat us children up and not care how far he went,’ says the eldest son, Andrew Letts. Bill seemed to take a delight in inventing new and unusual ways to torment his family: punching Andrew in the stomach and locking the boy in the coal shed, for example. Graham had his head battered against a wall. If any of the children returned home one minute later than their father had told them to be in, they would find the doors locked and would have to sleep outside, just as Bill’s father had made him do back in Northam. He regularly turned off the electricity, plunging the family into darkness, and also turned off the gas so that Daisy could not cook. After Glenys had brought her future husband, Jim Tyler, home to meet her parents, Bill told her that he considered the young man to be a ‘dirty Gypsy’ and she was made to scrub and wash everywhere in the house he had been.

  The family obtained a television set, but Bill would turn it off when the children had started to watch a programme they enjoyed. At other times, the children had to sit in silence while he watched his favourite western films. At ten o’clock the set was switched off and Bill went upstairs to bed. If any of the family were still up, they had to creep about in silence for fear of waking him. Before dawn each morning Bill woke his children and gave them a list of chores to do before he returned home; during winter evenings he selfishly surrounded himself with all the heaters while his children sat in the cold. Perhaps the most bizarre example of his behaviour was when he up-ended the dustbins simply so he could blame the mess on them.

  He could also be antagonistic towards other adults. One of Daisy’s sisters came to stay with them after the break-up of her marriage; she slept on the sofa in the living room until Bill took the door off its hinges, telling Daisy he did not want her sister becoming too comfortable. When his own father came to live briefly with the family, Bill ridiculed him in front of Rose and the children, hit the old man around the legs and angrily accused him of owing money.

  Rose attended Cleeve School, a short walk across the estate. It was not a happy time for her. Most of the other pupils had grown up together, and Rose was an outsider without the sort of friendly, engaging personality that would enable her to overcome this barrier. She was a loner, a tomboy and noticeably backward in lessons. Unfortunately for Rose, she had also become overweight, leading her to be mercilessly teased.

  She reacted by becoming aggressive. The girl who only a couple of years before had regularly run home from Stoke Dameral School in tears, now lashed out at her tormentors with surprising ferocity, attacking both boys and girls.

  By the age of thirteen, Rose had earned herself a fearsome reputation among the children of Bishop’s Cleeve as somebody not to upset. But she did not stop there; she seemed to take pleasure in her new, dominant personality. Her skinny kid brothers, Graham and Gordon, had their share of school problems as well, and when Rose heard about them being bullied, she strode across the estate to the homes of the boys who had fought with her brothers and hit them. ‘A swipe from Rose and nobody messed again,’ says Graham.

  Rose’s hold over her younger brothers strengthened when Daisy decided to take a part-time job carrying out domestic work. Their mother was still desperately unhappy at home – even resorting to legal action to try and keep Bill away from her, but she failed to win a court order when Bill brought up her psychiatric history. At least a job would get her out of the house during the day, she reasoned. She had resisted going out to work before, but by now all three older children had left home, and she felt that Rosemary could be trusted to watch Graham and Gordon for the few afternoon hours between the end of school and when she and Bill came home from work.

  Rose obediently promised to look after her brothers and get the housework done. But when her parents had left for work, the house degenerated into chaos, with the three children running wild and often not bothering to go to school at all. Rose passed all of her jobs on to Gordon and Graham, who did as she told them. When the work was done, the boys wandered around the village, stealing radios and other items. Bill called the police in when he found out, and it would not be long before Daisy saw her youngest sons in court.

  Rose became fascinated with sex as she entered puberty. She knew her father’s expressed attitude: outwardly at least, he was an absolute puritan, a prim man whom the children nicknamed ‘the Sunday School Teacher’ because of his moral lectures. Sex was absolutely taboo in the house, and if anything Bill considered too suggestive appeared on the television, he would immediately turn the set off.

  Daisy, too, was easily offended. As far as the marriage was concerned, it had been more or less chaste since the birth of Gordon in 1960. Bill had never been a particularly passionate husband, even when they were young. Daisy now slept downstairs most nights. ‘He got on more with older, motherly women. He was a very cold man,’ she says.

  Rose’s own sex education was extremely limited, and her mother never discussed the facts of life with her. Daisy did not explain pregnancy or contraception, or even what a period was, leaving Bill’s mother to talk to the older girls (because she was a nurse) and the older girls in turn to talk to Rose, which they did when she was aged about twelve.

  But Rose was curious about her body, and from the age of thirteen she was precociously sexual. When she was alone in the house with the boys, Rose indulged in exhibitionism, taking baths in the afternoon, leaving the door wide open, and parading naked around the house a
fterwards.

  The children had to share bedrooms because the house was small, and Graham and Rose shared a bed. Graham, who is three years younger than Rose, claims that she masturbated him when they were together. Rose climbed into bed with nothing on and cuddled up to her younger brother. Graham was confused, thinking at first that it was just ‘sisterly love’. The masturbation began when Rose was aged between thirteen and fourteen and Graham was ten, and would take place either early in the morning or late at night. It continued until she left home at fifteen. Graham was also suffering because of his parents’ relationship, and was grateful for any affection. ‘She knew I wasn’t going to say anything,’ he says.

  In January 1968, when Rose was fourteen years old, a young waitress disappeared in nearby Gloucester, causing great excitement. Mary Bastholm was fifteen, and was last seen standing at a bus stop in Bristol Road, Gloucester, carrying a Monopoly set. Mary had been on her way to visit her boyfriend. When she did not arrive the alarm was raised, but a search revealed only a few Monopoly pieces scattered in the snow. There had recently been two rapes in the area, and there was every reason to fear for her safety. A huge police operation was launched, involving more than three hundred officers, tracker dogs, a helicopter and a diving team, a member of which was a young officer named John Bennett. Twenty-six years later he would lead the investigation into the Gloucester murders.

  Andrew, who travelled on the same route as Mary, told the family about the police search and how detectives were stopping people on buses. The warning to be wary of ‘strange men’ was added to the list of lectures that the Sunday School Teacher delivered to Rose and the other children.

  Despite these admonishments to beware of strangers, Rose was eager to expand her sexual experience. She had tired of showing herself to her brothers, or touching Graham in bed at night, and the boys at school took little interest in her. Rose’s weird alternating personality, combined with her plumpness, was enough to deter them from asking her out. Neither did she attend local dances – Bill thought she was too young – so she had little opportunity to form normal teenage relationships.

  Older men were a different matter. In her childish way, Rose enjoyed the fantasy of pretending she was a grown woman, and was excited by the attention of adult men. When her parents were out of the house, she would wander around the village flirting with men she met on the bus or outside the chip shop, where she went to smoke cigarettes.

  Many years later, Rose told police investigating the Cromwell Street murders that she had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen, and that, a year later, she had been raped (although it is of course quite possible that she invented these stories to cover up what really happened between her and Fred). Rose claimed that she was first raped by a man who saw her at a Christmas party, not long after her fifteenth birthday. He had offered her a lift home, but instead took her up into the Cotswold hills behind Bishop’s Cleeve and assaulted her. ‘I felt threatened by this man,’ she later said. ‘I honestly felt he was going to kill me.’

  The abuse and misery at Tobyfield Road reached such a pitch that, in the early spring of 1969, Daisy decided she could no longer live with Bill. She collected fifteen-year-old Rose and her younger children and left home, going first to her daughter Glenys’ terrace house in Union Street, Cheltenham. Bill did not trouble to come after them.

  Glenys had recently married her car mechanic boyfriend Jim Tyler. They ran a small mobile snack bar together. Glenys usually looked after the snack bar while Jim was at work, but she was heavily pregnant with her first child and they needed another girl to stand in. Rose, aged fifteen and a half, was just about to leave school, and it was decided that she could help out for a while.

  Each morning Jim Tyler rose early, hitched his fourteen-foot Sprite Major caravan to the back of his car and towed it from Union Street to a gravel pit at the hamlet of Seven Springs on the Cirencester Road, just south of the city. Half the side of the caravan opened up to make a serving hatch; a sign in the road advertised REFRESHMENTS. Jim would then visit the cash-and-carry wholesale store to buy provisions before going to his mechanics job, leaving Rose in charge.

  Jim worked for the Volkswagen-Audi garage in Cheltenham, carrying out services and general repairs. After completing a job it was his habit to test-drive the vehicle he had been working on by taking it over to Seven Springs. In this way he could check on the snack bar and have a coffee break at the same time.

  The snack bar catered for lorry drivers and travelling salesmen. It was parked in a half-acre of land, and there were usually several cars and lorries around when he returned in the middle of the morning.

  ‘On more than four occasions that I can recall, I arrived there to find the shutters down, the caravan empty and Rose emerging from a cab or a lorry,’ says Jim. ‘One time some workmen were laying the natural-gas pipeline across the Cotswolds, and she emerged from their car on the pretence that they had just taken her down the shops because she had run out of sausages for the hot dogs.’ Rose’s clothes were dishevelled and it appeared to Jim that she had probably been having sex. ‘She was a hot-arsed little sod,’ he says.

  One night at Union Street Jim heard someone crying. He came downstairs to the living room, where Rose had been sleeping on a double bed. When he asked what was wrong, she sobbed that she wanted to go out with one of the men she had met at the snack bar, but the man was not interested in her. Jim, who was six years older than Rose, sat on the edge of the bed and put his arm round her, suggesting that she concentrate on boys her own age. Rose then slid her hand along the inside of her brother-in-law’s thigh. She said how lucky her sister was to be married to him, and that she wished she could change places with Glenys. ‘It could have gone a lot further, if I had allowed it to,’ says Jim Tyler. It was also at around this time that Rose’s association with another, much older man resulted in her being questioned by police. She had taken a job as a trainee seamstress, and met a thirty-year-old man with whom she began a sexual relationship. Rose later claimed that the police found out that she was under-age and took her into a local station for questioning, but no charges were brought against her lover and she soon stopped seeing him.

  In the summer of 1969, Daisy moved her family to lodgings at a chicken farm in the village of Toddington, north of Cheltenham. Daisy earned a pittance cleaning, and was allowed to live rent-free with her children in a tied cottage on the property. After a few weeks at the farm, Rose announced that she had decided to go back and live with her father at Tobyfield Road – an extraordinary decision as far as the other children were concerned. There was a special relationship between father and daughter that mystified the rest of the family, and it was understood that Rose was their father’s favourite. When Bill flew into one of his insane rages Rose would take his side, agreeing with his tirades. Brother Graham thinks it may have been her form of self-preservation: ‘It was like there was a bond between them,’ he says. But for Rose to choose Bill in preference to their mother was incomprehensible.

  There may have been a sexual aspect to the relationship between Rose and her father: it certainly seemed odd when Rose stood stark naked in front of him one day, and declared that she was going to have many children. There had already been rumours about Bill and young girls in Northam, and Jim Tyler believes that Bill showed an improper interest in his own daughters. ‘He used to cuddle and tease and roll them around when they were three or four,’ he says. ‘I didn’t like the way he did it. There was always something I didn’t trust.’

  It was at this time that Rose contacted Gloucester social services to report that her father was ‘being restrictive’. A social worker called at the Letts home and mediated between Rose and Bill Letts, but it is unclear exactly what the cause of the problem was.

  Years later, it was understood by members of the West family at 25 Cromwell Street that Rose had been sexually abused by her father.

  5

  THE SCOTTISH CONNECTION

  Each Saturday evening Fred Wes
t’s family put on their best clothes and ambled down the lane to the Wallwyn Arms public house in Much Marcle. They ordered tankards of beer from the landlord, Tony Davies, and went and sat in the corner of the bar, nodding hello to their neighbours when they came in, scraping their boots on the stone floor. Fred had been banished from Moorcourt Cottage since being charged with having sex with the thirteen-year-old girl. But after a year with his uncle and aunt at Daisy Cottage, his parents decided they wanted Fred home again. In the summer of 1962, before the harvest was brought in and the village lanes were filled with hay dust, Fred was reconciled with his parents and started to join them on these Saturday nights in the Wallwyn Arms. They sat together as a family and left together at the end of the evening, silent and united.

  Fred was living at Moorcourt Cottage and working as a building labourer when he was reunited with his old girlfriend, Rena Costello. She returned to Ledbury from Scotland in the late summer of 1962, and was serving as a waitress in a café known as the Milk Bar in Ledbury High Street. Fred had not been alone in her affections in the two years she had been away, as a new tattoo on her right forearm showed. It read: ‘Rena, John – True Love’ and was accompanied by a heart and two arrows.

  When she went back to Scotland in the autumn of 1960 Rena had moved to Glasgow, where she became one of the band of girls who walked the canyon-like streets around the Central Station. They were a pitiable sight, instantly recognisable as street prostitutes. They wore cheap, revealing clothes, no matter what the weather, and the white skin they displayed was often marked with sores. The girls smoked cigarettes as they dawdled along in the shadows of Glasgow’s granite office buildings, stopping every few yards to look flirtatiously into the windows of passing cars. It was a miserable, dangerous occupation which inevitably ended in arrest. Rena was picked up by Glasgow Central police on 19 November that year, and was warned for importuning. She was still only sixteen years old.