Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  One night Fred disappeared from the Belted Will Inn without settling his £7 bill, leaving a suitcase of clothes behind – and, more significantly, neglecting to collect his pay. He travelled back to Gloucester and was never seen in the area again. It seems he had been picking up women in his usual way when something had gone wrong, forcing him to flee.

  Back in Gloucester, Fred and Rose continued to look for victims, and they devised a sophisticated new method of finding them. A children’s home known as Jordan’s Brook House was situated in nearby Upton Lane. It cared for delinquent girls, most of whom had already been expelled from other homes. They were vulnerable adolescents, often from deeply troubled families, and easily corrupted by people like the Wests.

  Jordan’s Brook House had been built in 1970 as an ‘Approved School’. Girls were admitted when they were fifteen and a half years old, and part of the institution’s function was to introduce them to training and eventually full employment.

  It was a strict institution, with an average of twenty-four girls sharing nineteen bedrooms. The girls were graded weekly on their behaviour, and these grades were pinned up for display each Friday tea-time. The amount of freedom the girls were allowed was determined by these grades. There were also curfews, mail was opened, and any boyfriends had to be vetted by the staff. This tough regime often caused the frustrated delinquents to run away. A favourite trick was to set off the fire alarm, as this automatically triggered the opening of secure doors and windows allowing the girls to flee across the fields. The police were immediately contacted, and, usually within a few hours, all were brought back to the home hungry, penniless and tired out.

  Fred began to cruise past Jordan’s Brook in the Ford Transit van that had now become his main means of transport, offering a lift to girls he saw. The Wests did not snatch these teenagers off the street and rape them; they had thought of a more subtle, less dangerous approach. They tried to forge friendships with the girls, and invited them back to Cromwell Street for orange squash and biscuits. Rose would listen sympathetically to their problems and, at first, nothing happened to frighten or alarm them.

  The girls went back to Jordan’s Brook and described the fun they had enjoyed at Cromwell Street. They told their friends what nice people the Wests were, that the woman had been in care herself and really understood them. Soon news of the sympathetic couple, and their cosy home, spread throughout Jordan’s Brook and other institutions in the area, and many young girls drifted towards the narrow little house by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. One such girl was a teenager who, to protect her identity, can only be referred to as Miss A.*

  Like so many of Fred and Rose’s victims, Miss A’s childhood had not been a happy one. Her parents were divorced and she had been sexually abused by both her father and her brother. At the age of thirteen she was placed in a Gloucester children’s home named Russet House, and it was here that she heard about 25 Cromwell Street from an older teenager who gave her cigarettes. One day they visited the house together, absconding from the home – or, as Miss A describes it, ‘running away through the windows’, as this was literally and spiritually what they did when they left without authority. Rose gave them orange drinks and listened as they narrated their troubles. ‘She was nice and pleasant, understanding and caring. She said I could come and cry on her shoulder any time,’ said Miss A.

  By the summer of 1976, Miss A had moved to Jordan’s Brook House, where she was given a senior ‘trustworthiness’ grade which meant she could leave the home for extended periods. Also, once every three weeks, usually on a Friday, she was granted a paid visit home to her mother in Tewkesbury. On her way to the bus station Miss A fell into the habit of dropping into Cromwell Street to see Rose.

  She could not help but notice that the house was full of children. There were so many children, in fact, that Miss A assumed that some were in care, just like herself. This is odd, because only four children should have been living at the house at this time: Anna Marie, who was twelve in July that year; Heather, five; Mae, who was four in June; and three-year-old Stephen (Fred’s other son had gone back to Scotland). But Miss A may be correct in thinking there were more.

  There is evidence that the Wests were working as foster parents. It is extraordinary that this could have been allowed to happen, as both Fred and Rose had a serious criminal conviction for assaulting a teenage girl. Yet Rose’s younger brother, Graham Letts, remembers his sister looking after at least two foster children. ‘She took in a boy and a girl, but she didn’t have them very long. I think they were brother and sister. They came together and then they went back to the foster home,’ he says.

  Miss A ran away from Jordan’s Brook House, and went to Cromwell Street because Rose had always been so understanding. She had even received a fifteenth birthday card from the Wests. ‘We built up a trust,’ she says. When she first called at the house, there was no reply, so she went and waited in The Park, returning at 11 P.M. This time Rose came to the door. She was only wearing underwear, but invited the teenager in. Miss A told Rose about all her problems and Rose put her arm around the child to console her – after all, she had been in care herself when she was fifteen. But now Rose was a hardened 23-year-old woman, and she used her experience to manipulate and betray Miss A’s trust. ‘Rose had her arm about me. She started kissing me and my neck and touched my breasts. It was sexual and I pushed her away,’ says Miss A. She spent the night at the house and later returned to Jordan’s Brook, too embarrassed to tell anybody what had happened.

  It was six weeks before Miss A was trusted to be given another visit home. When she did, she again went to Cromwell Street. Rose was wearing a see-through blouse, and this time they slept together in the lounge. When Miss A got up to go to the toilet, Rose followed and called out to Fred. Miss A heard the Wests talking together outside the bathroom door. When she came out, Rose pushed her into a room where she was startled to see two naked girls, one on the floor and the other on the bed. Fred was also in the room, wearing a pair of shorts and a shirt. One of the naked girls was blonde with brightly painted toenails. She appeared to be aged about fourteen. The other was dark and slightly older. Rose came up to Miss A and said that it was ‘all right to touch and feel affection’. Miss A recognised the same manipulative language that had been used to her years before, when she had been molested previously. Rose then undid Miss A’s dress, saying they were ‘all girls together’. Miss A felt utterly helpless, as if she were pinned to the wall of a fairground ride – terrified but unable to bring it to a stop.

  Miss A watched as Rose performed a strip-tease to arouse Fred. Rose then lay on the bed with one of the naked girls, who was struggling to get away. Rose repeated her coaxing line: ‘It’s natural to touch.’ Fred peeled off a piece of brown masking tape and bound the child’s wrists, being careful to leave her fingers free. Rose turned the girl on to her stomach as Fred taped her ankles in such a way as to splay her legs apart until she was in pain. Looking around the room, Miss A saw a cat-o’-nine-tails whip (which Fred had made himself) on the wall and strange pictures of animals and people (Fred was fascinated by the idea of sex between women and animals, and it was one of his more outlandish fantasies to watch Rose having intercourse with a bull).

  Fred and Rose began to kiss. Rose was holding a vibrator, a white candle six inches long and a tube of ointment. She said to Fred, ‘Are you enjoying this now?’ and buggered the girl with the vibrator so that she screamed. Rose removed Fred’s shirt and underpants as he bent down to kiss the girl’s anus. He then penetrated the child while Rose fondled his buttocks – Miss A could see the look of pain on the girl’s face. She looked like she was in ‘outer space’. When Fred ejaculated, Rose asked him, ‘Did you enjoy that?’ She then ripped the masking tape from the child, hurting her. ‘She had a look of hate on her face,’ said Miss A, describing Rose’s maniacal expression. The victim of this assault began to suck her hair for comfort.

  Miss A found herself naked, with Rose caressing h
er and saying, ‘Enjoy! It’s all right.’ She was rigid with fear, and Rose said, ‘I like stiff ones!’ Miss A sat on the bed with her hands covering her breasts, feeling ashamed and knowing that she was next. Rose wound masking tape around Miss A’s wrists, binding them together. ‘The other girl looked terrified and really sad,’ she said. Rose became aggressive and pushed Miss A back on to the bed, where the teenager buried her head in the sheets, counting as Rose wrapped the tape around her ankles five times. She heard a buzzing sound and felt a plastic vibrator moving near her vagina. Rose asked, ‘Is that nice, Fred?’

  Miss A felt a smooth female hand with long scratchy nails inside her vagina and her nipples being twisted painfully hard. Rose said, ‘This is fun! It’s great!’ Miss A was then buggered either with a candle or a perfume spray; afterwards Fred had intercourse with her. He was telling Rose how close he was to climaxing and Rose encouraged him to ejaculate over Miss A’s back. When he was finished, Rose produced a tiny pair of silver scissors which she used to snip away the masking tape, cutting the child’s thumb as she did so. Then Miss A went to the bathroom, where she used the bundle of tape to wipe herself. She noticed that she was bleeding. She put her dress back on, but left her shoes and walked barefoot from the house and away from Cromwell Street, crying.

  It was now four in the afternoon, and she continued on her journey to her mother’s home in Tewkesbury, where she was told off for being late. She felt defiled, but was unable to tell anybody about her ordeal because ‘if you were in care, you were bad’ – so she hid in her bedroom and rocked back and forth with her knees drawn up under her chin for comfort.

  Six weeks later Miss A was again due for a paid home visit. Before she left Jordan’s Brook House, she went to the groundsman’s shed and took a Castrol oil can filled with petrol. She carried the can into the centre of Gloucester, and says she fully intended to burn 25 Cromwell Street to the ground. But when she reached the front door of the tall narrow building, the strength of will to carry out the plan deserted her, and she left the oil can behind a shop.

  ‘All this occurred without my consent,’ she says of her ordeal at the house. ‘They comforted [me] and then they used me. I couldn’t trust anybody following this.’

  One of the little girls that Miss A had seen in the house may well have been Anna Marie, who was twelve but looked older. As Anna Marie had progressed through puberty, she had suffered increasingly severe abuse. She had started to menstruate between the ages of nine and ten, but was denied sanitary towels or tampons by her father. ‘Dad said my period blood should flow freely.’

  Rose took pornographic photographs of Anna Marie with a Polaroid camera. She also hit her, saying that nobody must ever see the marks that she made. If the bruises were too bad, Anna Marie was kept away from school. The indignities were endless and bizarre: one day Anna Marie was thrust into a bath of almost boiling water, scalding her. Afterwards Rose massaged baby oil into Anna Marie’s breasts, scratching with her fingernails until the child bled. On another occasion the West children were instructed to daub Anna Marie’s naked body with finger paints. Rose painted the words ‘black hole’ on her buttocks, with an arrow pointing down. Rose took a photograph and made the child stay in this humiliating position until Fred came home. The woman who instigated these sadistic acts even demanded to be called ‘mother’. ‘I called her Rose until Dad smacked me,’ says Anna Marie.

  Rose had become very aggressive, quite different to the doe-eyed teenager Fred had first met. She flew into irrational rages from which nobody, not even Fred, was safe. But she reserved much of her anger for Anna Marie, resenting her because she was not her natural child. Rose beat Anna Marie with a stick, and on one occasion, stabbed her in the arm for being ‘a naughty girl’. Anna Marie was locked in the cellar for hours on end and made to do housework until three in the morning, only ever being allowed upstairs to clean.

  The ingenuity Fred and Rose employed in their sexual sadism was extraordinary. Fred made a type of chastity belt for his daughter, consisting of a cup with a battery-powered vibrator inside. This was strapped around Anna Marie’s waist before she was made to walk around the house wearing it, purely for Rose’s amusement. When Fred came home from work, Rose gleefully described the humiliation Anna Marie had endured during the day. At school, Anna Marie became a problem child, a bully, and was eventually expelled. But she knew better than to talk to her teachers about what went on at home.

  Anna Marie wanted to attend discos, but her father told her she needed ‘a man not a boy’. She was aged about twelve when Rose first made her have sex with her West Indian customers. This happened in the bedroom at the front of the house, known as ‘Mum and Dad’s Room’, which had a plaque on the wall with Rose’s name on it. Beneath this plaque was a spy-hole for Fred to look through. A wooden plug was fitted in the door, painted the same green to disguise it, and when it was removed Fred had a clear view of everything Rose was doing (although he had to kneel down to take his pleasure, because the hole was so low). There was a red lightbulb in the living room which was operated from ‘Mum and Dad’s Room’: if it was on, the other children knew not to go in.

  Some of the men were workmates of Fred’s. At first he stood in the doorway and watched as his daughter had sex with them. Rose was also there in the room. ‘Rose said I would be able to please my husband [when she was older]. I was a lucky girl,’ she says. Anna Marie was only thankful that she was not being beaten. One day a man brought Anna Marie a gift of chocolates, but Rose took even this little pleasure away from her and ate them all. Rose started taking Anna Marie out to a local nightclub called Tracy’s, where they would drink Malibu and Coke and pick up men together.

  Anna Marie still doted on her father, grateful that he rarely hit her. ‘I’m talking about a dad I love,’ she says. She even felt love for Rose.

  Fred was working as a jobbing builder on house conversions and often took Anna Marie with him when he went out. He had put a piece of carpet down in the back of his van, and whenever he felt aroused, would stop the van and cuddle his daughter. ‘He was always ready for sex,’ she says. He did not even bother to get undressed, but simply loosened his trousers. Sometimes they had sex in the empty houses where he was working, sometimes in woods. She learned, in her childish way, that if a purple light came up on the dashboard – because Fred had switched the engine off but kept the ignition on to work the heater – then she was about to be raped. When her father forced his tongue into her mouth, she had to struggle to resist a natural urge to bite it off. He later bribed her not to tell Rose, giving her money to buy sweets.

  One summer evening, Rose announced that they were taking Anna Marie to a pub. Rose helped her dress and put on makeup, ‘like an older sister’, but the real purpose was to disguise her youth. She wore a dress because Rose hated her to wear trousers. ‘She said she wanted the air to get to me.’ When they were ready, Fred took them out into the countryside and dropped them at a small pub.

  Rose bought a succession of bottles of barley wine. Anna Marie said she did not want any more, but Rose insisted in a ‘nice, but subtly domineering way’. Soon Anna Marie was quite drunk. Rose was flirting with a group of men, but something went wrong and they had to leave in a hurry. It is likely that the men discovered the truth about Anna Marie’s age and relationship to Rose, possibly because of something Anna Marie said.

  Rose kept looking behind her as they walked away. They were quickly picked up by Fred, who had been waiting in the van. When they were inside Rose turned on Anna Marie ‘like an animal’, tearing the child’s clothes off with such violence that she cut her. Rose said that if Anna Marie thought they could be friends, then she was mistaken; she could not have a joke with her. ‘I was held down by Rose as Dad raped me. He’d done it before so I knew what to expect,’ she said.

  As she lay there, Anna Marie recalled wondering who was looking after her half-brothers and half-sisters.

  ‘I was only a child and I did not understand,’ she said.


  * Miss A’s identity is protected by a court order.

  13

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  Twenty-five Cromwell Street had been divided into two distinct sections by 1977. The upstairs floors had been fully converted into bedsitters, complete with self-contained cooking and bathroom facilities. The West family lived on the ground floor, which had been enlarged by an extension built where the garage had been.

  The lodgers were mostly unskilled, single women who worked in local shops and factories. Up to seven of them lived at the house at one time. They became friendly with one another, holding parties in their rooms, going out as a group and inviting boyfriends back to the house. None stayed for long and there was always a new girl around. One of these was a plain young woman named Shirley Robinson.

  Shirley had been born in the county of Rutland, the daughter of RAF Corporal Royal Baden Robinson, known as Roy, and his partner, Christa Carling. They lived near RAF Cottesmore in Lincolnshire. Christa left home when Shirley was three, taking the child with her, but it did not work out and Shirley went back to live with her father, then based in Wolverhampton. Shirley soon fell into delinquency, and by the age of thirteen was selling herself as a prostitute. By the age of fifteen she was living in a children’s home in Bristol; in 1977, she was transferred into the care of Gloucester social services. Her social worker described her as ‘extremely withdrawn and sullen’ and noted that Shirley had lesbian girlfriends much older than herself.

  She was working as a prostitute in the Gloucester area when she met Rose. Shirley, then aged eighteen, came to live at 25 Cromwell Street, taking a tiny room on the first floor at the back of the house. She found both men and women attractive and was entirely open about being bisexual. Fred and Rose were excited by this, and a ménage à trois developed between them.

  Fred and Rose were experimenting with the concept of a completely open relationship. Rose went out at nights on her own to pubs, sometimes returning home in the morning with presents of alcohol and boxes of chocolates, sometimes staying away for several days. She even came close to leaving Fred, taking a flat in Stroud Road where she entertained various boyfriends, but Fred found out about this and put a stop to it. ‘My father wasn’t very pleased,’ recalled Anna Marie.