Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  Fred and Rose’s former lover, Kathryn Halliday, became emotional when she exclaimed that the Wests had put children to sleep in the cellar, directly above where they had buried the remains of their victims. ‘I find that totally horrendous,’ she said angrily. ‘They put them there. They let little children sleep on them. They knew about it.’ Kathryn said she kept going back to the house, even after she had been abused by Rose, because she was like ‘a moth to the flame … He keeps going back until he singes his wings and can fly no more.’ Kathryn admitted selling her story to newspapers and television for more than £8,000. Mr Ferguson suggested that her account of Rose’s sadism was ‘complete rubbish’, but Kathryn was steadfast.

  The most dramatic evidence of the trial so far was the appearance of Rose’s stepdaughter Anna Marie in the witness box (now preferring to be known as Anne Marie). A heavy-set woman with dark hair, she was unmistakably Fred’s daughter, with his distinctive broad nose and blue eyes. She spoke in a trance-like voice, leaving long pauses between sentences and frequently breaking down. She referred to Rose as ‘Rosemary’ or ‘my stepmother’ in such a way that the phrase ‘wicked stepmother’ came to mind, and each time she described one of the sexual assaults she had suffered Anna Marie glared accusingly at the dock.

  Asked by Brian Leveson whether she could remember her first sexual experience, she replied in a whisper: ‘Yes … I was eight.’ There was absolute silence in the court as she went on to describe being raped by Fred and Rose, who told her that she should be ‘grateful’. Anna Marie said she wished she were dead. She also recalled her stepmother beating her with her fists, a saucepan and a belt; Fred and Rose had spoken about beating her ‘more on the torso than the face’ so the marks did not show. Anna Marie broke down many times during her evidence, and the court was palpably shocked.

  The following day, a beautiful bright autumn morning, the members of the jury were taken by coach to Gloucester to visit 25 Cromwell Street – something they had unanimously requested. The garden area of the house was covered over by a white marquee. Cromwell Street was blocked to cars, and elaborate arrangements were made so that the coach carrying the jury could be driven into a covered area behind the house without the press or public setting eyes on them. Rose also had the right to go, but declined, citing the excuse that it had been her family home for many years and the experience would be ‘unduly distressing’.

  Dressed in overalls and wearing hard hats, the judge and jury were led in through the back of the house and taken in silence through each room (silence, that is, apart from the clatter of several helicopters hired by the press to take aerial photographs). White tape marked out the locations of the human remains in the garden. Inside the dank, stripped house the feeling of how tiny the space was impressed itself upon everybody. There was no furniture, but many quirky features were still present: the jury saw a poster of a naked girl pinned up, and looked at the door to ‘Rose’s room’ complete with its spy-hole device through which Fred watched her having sex. In the cellar, together with the graves of five women and the beams where Fred claimed to have suspended the bodies of his victims from hooks, they saw cartoons and childish graffiti drawn by the younger West children. After forty minutes, they were driven away from the city, back across the Cotswolds and into Hampshire again – like emerging from a dungeon into fresh air.

  On Thursday night Anna Marie again tried to commit suicide (her last attempt had been at New Year, after her father’s death). She was taken to hospital, but was discharged later the following morning. When she eventually arrived back in the witness box, Anna Marie was cross-examined by Richard Ferguson, her evidence having been interrupted by the pre-planned visit to the house.

  The story of how she became pregnant by her father at fifteen was revealed. She remembered being beaten and stabbed by Rose, and how Fred had said her mother and stepdaughter were working as prostitutes in Scotland and that Rena had ‘all types of venereal diseases’. Anna Marie added that, despite the abuse she had suffered, ‘I did love my father. I would have done anything for both Rosemary and my father.’ Her agreement that she had accepted ‘blood money’ of £3,000 from a newspaper to tell her story detracted nothing from the power of her testimony.

  On Monday a tape recorder was set up and four small speakers were arranged on the court clerk’s desk. Recordings of several of Rose’s police interviews were to be played.

  The very first words the jury ever heard Rose speak (she had been utterly silent in court) formed a belligerent answer to a routine request from the police to state her name for the benefit of the tape. ‘You don’t know who I am?’ mocked Rose. The next forty-five minutes continued in the same shrewish, often foul-mouthed way. Apart from her constant cursing, Rose’s vocabulary was quirky – she frequently used malapropisms and curious words were repeated, like ‘tricky’, as in boys ‘got up to tricky things’. The nature of what she said was also bizarre: she claimed to know Heather was a lesbian partly because the child ‘knew exactly what kind of knickers the women teachers had on’.

  The second interview tape ended dramatically, with Rose being told that Fred had confessed to Heather’s murder. Her response was an almost unintelligible shriek – of horror or anger it was impossible to determine. In the dock, Rose clutched a tissue as if she were distressed.

  She had recovered sufficiently by the next interview, taped just hours after the last, to offer her alibi: Fred had often made her spend the night with coloured men so she could not know what he was doing. She said Fred was the dominant partner in the relationship and ‘what he says goes’. He made her sleep with other men even though she used to fight with him over it.

  On another matter, Rose persisted with the story of giving £600 to Fred for Heather to go away with, but was told that Fred had said it was only £100. When put under pressure like this, Rose’s memory failed her. It seemed that there was a great deal which she simply did not remember, but the fate that awaited her appeared to be sinking in. Towards the end of the interview, she said: ‘I ain’t got a lot to live for now, have I?’

  Despite her aggressive belligerence, in the next tape the jury learned something of Rose’s extraordinary alternating personality – the concerned mum and then the callous harpy. She was asked about Heather’s dentist (so the police could find dental records for identification of remains) and, like any mother, instantly remembered not only the name, but the full street address. Yet within the same interview she made harsh allegations about Heather, claiming that her daughter had hurt the other children, trapping their fingers in doors, giving them black eyes and making them drink obnoxious mixtures of ‘vinegar and salt and stuff’. In fact, what she was describing was the abuse her children said she meted out to them.

  In the tape Rose told the police that she was now certain she had spent the night with a coloured lover when Heather had vanished. Rose had to do what Fred told her: she claimed she had been hit when she was younger, and had once had her jaw twisted by Fred. Going with other men was something she was doing ‘for our marriage … He can be very persuasive, put it that way,’ she said. But when asked for the name and address of this boyfriend, she could only remember that he was ‘Jamaican … big chap, I think’, and in his fifties. His name escaped her; it was one of those ‘awkward’ names.

  When Rose was informed on tape that the police had actually found Heather’s bones, she was heard to wearily complain, ‘Why have we got to go through this again?’ She went on to repeat the lie that she had last seen Fred’s first wife, Rena, when she came to take Charmaine away (the prosecution had already gone to some trouble to prove that Fred was in prison when Charmaine was murdered).

  In his cross-examination, Richard Ferguson said that Rose had not eaten during these interviews and asked a police witness whether he thought she was in a fit condition to answer so many questions. But this meant little to those who had heard the shrill and very healthy-sounding voice on the tape, moaning about the daughter, Heather, who ‘gave us loads
of hassle’.

  The pathologist Professor Bernard Knight told the jury of how he had recovered the human remains at Cromwell Street. He described how many of the graves were ‘quagmires’ of mud and decomposed human organs, and listed the dismemberment and missing bones with scientific thoroughness, using the correct anatomical names. When asked to explain what a femur was, he reached down to a box by his side and produced a thighbone, brandishing it in the air for the jury to see.

  The jury later looked though books of photographs taken of the bones and the instruments of torture. One showed Professor Knight holding the skull of Shirley Hubbard, the masking tape and tube still in place around the brutal death’s-head. The mask was slack, he explained, because the flesh had rotted away. He told the court that to him Shirley Hubbard was simply ‘Number Five’ – the fifth victim he had excavated.

  He afforded the court a macabre chuckle when asked how difficult it would have been to remove a shoulder blade: ‘I could do it!’ he exclaimed with some passion. The professor also gave the theoretical explanations as to why so many bones could be missing, but discounted them all bar one: the bodies must have been mutilated, and this would have involved a substantial amount of mess.

  Dr David Whittaker, the oral biologist known to police as the ‘Tooth Fairy’, gave a demonstration of how he identified the remains using Facial Superimposition. The curtains in the courtroom were closed and a photograph of Charmaine as an eight-year-old child was projected on to a screen. The jury studied her grinning face: her lips were drawn back revealing little teeth, some of which had not yet fully broken through the gums. It had been taken in April 1971, just before she was murdered. Dr Whittaker then overlaid the photograph of the child’s skull as it had been when found at Midland Road in 1994 – broken and discoloured like a relic from an ancient tomb, now tinted blue to contrast with the other photo. He pointed out the exact fit of the empty eye-sockets and jaw-line, and where the court could see teeth previously shielded by gums now matured and unprotected in the most naked way. It was a highly dramatic demonstration, but Rose looked on without emotion, for all the world as if she were watching television back in Winchester prison.

  The final witness for the Crown was Detective Superintendent John Bennett. He looked extremely nervous as he stood in the witness box, holding his hands behind his back like a soldier on parade and staring straight ahead so his gaze rested somewhere above the heads of the jury. For months he had been thinking about this moment, wondering what he would be asked under cross-examination by the softly spoken but incisive Richard Ferguson.

  He was asked about Mary Bastholm, and replied that he had compared her case with that of Lucy Partington but there had never been enough evidence to charge Fred with involvement in her disappearance.

  John Bennett admitted that the police had launched a covert operation to bug Rose’s safe houses, but said this was entirely legal (and had actually proved fruitless, as Rose said nothing incriminating).

  The police had long awaited the mention of Hazel Savage and criticism of her plan to write her memoirs of the case. But even this mine was defused by the time John Bennett was led towards it by Richard Ferguson: he was merely obliged to confirm that a female officer on the inquiry team had been suspended from duties for ‘discreditable conduct’ – she was not even identified by name. After forty minutes in the box, John Bennett left with a spring in his step and it was not long before a relieved smile crept across his face.

  Brian Leveson stood and told the judge, ‘My Lord, that is the case for the Crown.’

  A great many testimonies for the prosecution had been powerful, convincing, even shocking, and of course the jury faced the undeniable fact of where the victims had been found: that before Rose West moved to 25 Cromwell Street there were no sets of remains buried there, and when she left – after over two decades in the house – there were nine.

  But it could not have been lost on Brian Leveson or his team that the evidence thus far had indeed, from a legal point of view, been no more than circumstantial – ‘nobody says “I saw Frederick stab” or “I saw Rosemary strangle”’ – and it seemed to some that Rose was still a long way from being found guilty.

  22

  ENDGAME

  Richard Ferguson rose to his feet on the morning of Monday 30 October, turned to his left, placed a clenched hand on the wooden rail behind him and looked straight at the jury sitting six feet away.

  Some of the evidence they had already heard had been harrowing, he said, ‘but I tell you now, as loudly and clearly as I can, that Rosemary West is not guilty’. The fact that she may be a lesbian did not mean she was a murderer, neither did having sex with her lodgers or being forced into prostitution. He suggested the jury might consider it as ‘plain as a pike staff’ that Fred West had committed all these murders on his own, and that Rose had known nothing of what went on. He said the normal assumptions that a wife is always aware of what her husband is doing did not apply in this case, because ‘Number 25 Cromwell Street was not your typical suburban household with 2.4 children … It was a refuge of the flotsam and jetsam of modern life,’ and Rose was as much a victim of her husband’s ‘evil’ ways as anybody else. As for the prosecution witnesses, he admitted he had dealt with Kathryn Halliday with contempt, and suggested that many may have embroidered their stories so they could sell them to the media at a higher price. He concluded by telling the jury that they would now hear from Rose West herself that she was innocent. By the time he sat down he had succeeded in sowing a seed of doubt in many minds.

  It had always been thought that Rose herself would not give evidence, because of the subsequent and potentially hazardous cross-examination by Brian Leveson, but she had insisted against advice that she should have a turn to speak.

  As the second hand on the large clock on the wall clicked together with the hour hand to twelve noon, Rose stood and walked out of the dock, across the court, climbed up behind the police seats and into the witness box. It was the first time the court had seen her full length, and it appeared she was wearing almost the uniform of a school girl – a long green skirt and flat black shoes, together with a white blouse and her customary black jacket.

  She began poorly, by incorrectly giving her age as forty-two instead of forty-one – a silly blunder, but indicative of what was to follow. She then addressed a series of questions about her childhood, sometimes answering with a half-smile and a chuckle in her throat, a characteristic she shared with her mother. It was her mother she seemed to want to talk about in these first few moments of her evidence, claiming that when Daisy had left her husband and taken the children to live with Rose’s sister Glenys and her former brother-in-law Jim Tyler, she had abandoned Rose, and this consequently had had a devastating effect upon the child. This is not a version of events that accords with the memory of other members of her family, however.

  She described her first meeting with Fred, and said her reaction to being chatted up by him was ‘Shock! Horror!’ – a curious, and seemingly contrived, answer. ‘He promised me the world. He promised me everything,’ she said. ‘Because I was so young I fell for his lies. He promised to care for me and love me and I fell for it.’ This was partly because she still felt vulnerable after being ‘abandoned’ by her mother, she claimed.

  Rose appeared to become emotional as she asserted her love for the children she was accused of abusing and killing. Asked about her feelings for Heather, she answered perhaps a little too emphatically: ‘I loved her very, very, very much.’ But the rancour still showed when, minutes later, she told the court how Heather had ‘been an awkward baby … I was inexperienced as a mother and she would sleep all day and be awake all night.’ Charmaine, too, was a problem: ‘misbehaving, not eating, running away and just generally disagreeing with everything I said or did’.

  After lunch Rose’s answers became longer, she seemed to pre-empt questions and give rehearsed answers. Worst of all, she made little jokes, about her always being pregnant, for ex
ample, about Fred drinking the vitamin supplement Sanatogen to keep his strength up, and she even made a derogatory comment about Lynda Gough’s appearance. She did not seem to realise that, as she sat chuckling about Lynda Gough’s ‘grandfather’ glasses, members of the jury were staring at her with apparent distaste.

  When she was questioned about the time she had come home from hospital and allegedly discovered Fred and their former neighbour Mrs Agius together, the half-smile faded from Rose’s face. She told of how she had barged into Elizabeth Agius’ house ‘very angry’, shouting and banging on doors – ‘I was getting louder and louder demanding either of them - I was angry.’ There was no doubting her.

  She also said that she and Fred had led separate lives, and that he often locked himself in the cellar with his DIY work.

  Rose spoke about being bisexual, saying she enjoyed sex with other women because it was ‘warmer … closer’. She said that Fred had manipulated her into trying to seduce Caroline Owens, and when she realised Caroline was not a willing partner Rose had stopped. Again she showed a flash of anger, when asked what she had said to Fred after the assault on Caroline. ‘I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing,’ she replied hotly. This did not seem to fit in with her earlier assertion that whatever Fred did, she had to accept.

  At the end of the day Rose was shown photographs of the dead girls and was asked, in turn, whether she had known them or had had anything to do with their deaths. ‘No sir,’ replied Rose, but her nose turned bright red, she bit her lip and stumbled over her words. When Justice Mantell called for the court to be adjourned, Rose almost staggered back to the dock, completely exhausted.