Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  Richard Ferguson seemed to have altered his style of questioning for the start of the second day of Rose’s evidence. He became almost curt with her, trying to stop her long rambling replies and pressing her to address questions that ‘have to be answered’ when she broke down apparently in tears, as happened increasingly often. But again Rose showed herself to be unsympathetic witness: she made fun of Shirley Robinson, describing her as a ‘silly … flittering’ girl, and told an absurd story about Fred saying that Shirley’s baby was his only because he was covering up for a respectable businessman who was the real father. Asked again about the £600 she had allegedly given Heather, Rose announced that she could remember now: this money had come from her post office account, a story never heard before. Asked about Miss A, Rose first said she had never met the girl, but later told the court that Miss A had been about to marry at the time of the assault – evidence not heard by the jury, who must have wondered how Rose could have known such a detail about a girl she had apparently never met.

  Rose said her lesbian relationships had all been ‘one hundred per cent consensual’, a contrived phrase which she used repeatedly through the remainder of her evidence. Rose claimed that she derived no thrill from making people do things against their will. She spoke about herself and Kathryn Halliday playing records and talking about film stars – ‘things that girls do’ – as if they were innocent teenagers rather than two mature lesbians satisfying each other with dildos. She added that Halliday had agreed to everything. ‘You don’t come back if someone is hurting you,’ she said, revealing more than she possibly intended.

  Her evidence ended with her most dramatic, and bizarre, outburst of all. She informed the court that when she discovered Fred had confessed to killing Heather, she saw him in the guise of the devil. ‘I hated him. I didn’t see the man I had known all those years. He was just a walking figure of evil. I saw him – it might seem daft – but I saw him with horns and complete with a satanic grin. He never looked sorry for what he did or anything. He just used to grin, like it was some joke.’ She added that she was not a murderer, and, sobbing loudly, that she could never have lived with a murderer.

  Brian Leveson stood and began cross-examining Rose almost before she could stop crying. Starting quietly, he asked whether she had known nothing of the horrors committed between 1971 and 1994. ‘That’s right, sir,’ she replied, quickly recovering. With increasing sarcasm Leveson asked if she had known nothing of the bodies, and of the blood on her husband’s hands and clothes after he had cut them up. The questions, and denials, came thick and fast.

  Within a few minutes Rose had lost her composure, and she became angry when asked about the day she had told her parents there was nothing Fred would not do, even murder. ‘Right!’ exclaimed Rose, with ill-disguised belligerence. ‘I would like to answer that, sir … given the chance.’ Brian Leveson glanced up at the judge with theatrical resignation and invited her to go ahead. Rose launched into a long, rambling explanation, the net result of which was her agreeing with what had been put to her in the first place.

  The court was reminded of the love letter Rose had sent Fred, in which she had talked about how Charmaine liked to be ‘treated rough’:

  BRIAN LEVESON: You abused that girl, didn’t you?

  ROSE WEST: Not to the extent that you would like to think I have.

  BRIAN LEVESON: You tied her arms?

  ROSE WEST: No sir.

  BRIAN LEVESON: Tied her to the bed?

  ROSE WEST: No sir.

  BRIAN LEVESON: You beat her?

  ROSE WEST: No sir.

  BRIAN LEVESON: You killed her and kept the body for Fred to bury … and from that moment on you were tied together forever.

  Cross-examination continued for the rest of that day and all of the next. It was an unmitigated and self-inflicted disaster for Rose’s case.

  Whenever she was asked a difficult question she replied ‘I don’t remember’ or ‘I don’t recall.’ Each time she was about to tell a new version of events she preceded it by crying, as if she were taking time to gather her thoughts. She became angry and blamed everybody apart from herself for what had happened. Most of all, she blamed Fred. Peevishly she complained: ‘It’s all very well for someone to say I said this or did that, because I’m the one now in the spotlight. Fred West is dead and I’ve got to take responsibility for what he’s done.’ It was noted that she said ‘Fred West’ now, as if she had never known him, not ‘my husband’ or even ‘Fred’.

  Asked if she would like to see the masks of torture found with her victims, Rose shuddered and said, ‘I have seen enough of the horror, thank you.’ Brian Leveson suggested that she had been lying and was trying to put all the blame on Fred; they had contrived a story the night before Fred was arrested, talking it over for hours.

  Richard Ferguson’s brief re-examination succeeded in proving that Rose was incapable of getting even the date of birth of one of her children correct. As this was discussed, one of the court officials choked on something and took some water to clear her throat – the noise of a woman gasping for breath seemed to divert Rose’s attention. Like a bird eyeing a worm, she studied the woman closely.

  A few minutes later Rose left the witness box: after three days of answering questions, and having impressed many in the courtroom that she was a wholly untrustworthy and unpleasant woman who had told lies – both petty and great – from the very first to the very last.

  The next defence witnesses were a succession of women who claimed to have been attacked or frightened by men who might have been Fred West. By calling these witnesses the defence sought to establish that Fred was capable of abducting women on his own, and possibly killing them. The first of these witnesses, Janette Clarke, said a man had followed her in Gloucester in 1966, and had tried to abduct her on two occasions. This had been reported to the police. In 1994, when she had seen Fred West’s face on the television news after watching the Antiques Roadshow, she had been convinced it was her attacker.

  The next witness, known only as Mrs C, told how she had been given a lift by a builder in 1966. The man attacked her and then masturbated in front of her. She thought there was a ‘possibility’ that it had been Fred.

  Alison Clinton said she had been grabbed by a man in 1968, when she was aged thirteen, and that she thought he was Fred. There were other similar stories, but none of these women could be certain who their attacker was, and although most of them had informed the police at the time it was hard to identify any lack of diligence on their part because the descriptions of ‘Fred’ varied so wildly: one witness said he had ‘fair hair’, another that he had a beard, and a third that he had ‘staring brown eyes’. The evidence these women put forward was slight, and, as Justice Mantell pointed out, it had never been disputed that Fred probably attacked a great many women.

  On Friday 3 November the court heard the voice of Fred West: four out of a total of 145 tape recordings of police interviews with Fred would be played to the court as evidence in Rose’s defence. Again, this had been Rose’s decision. She wanted the jury to hear her husband say loud and clear that he had committed the murders and that she knew nothing about it. (Rose had carefully read transcripts of Fred’s interviews before making her decision.) She was warned that if some of the tapes were admitted in court the prosecution could call other evidence in rebuttal – evidence that might show Fred changing his story, and not always in Rose’s favour. But she would not be dissuaded.

  The first tape played had been recorded the day Fred was arrested for the murder of Heather. He was asked to say in his own words what had happened. Fred began, in this businesslike way: ‘Right! what happened was …’ and went on to tell a virtually unbroken, if largely imaginary, story of Heather’s murder that lasted many minutes.

  He quickly established that Rose had left the house to get some money for Heather, who wanted to leave home. His daughter was leaning against the spin-dryer in the tool room, and had told Fred that if he did not let he
r leave home, she would administer the hallucinogenic drug LSD to the younger children so they would ‘jump off the church roof and be dead on the floor’. Fred claimed to have been enraged by this: he grabbed Heather’s throat and held her until she turned blue. He tried to revive her, but failed. Her bowels opened involuntarily. He tried to force her corpse into a dustbin, but she did not fit. He then fetched a heavy, serrated knife bought from the frozen food shop Iceland, and set about dismembering her.

  ‘I cut her legs off with that and I’m not telling you I have lived that a million times doing that since then and then I cut her head off and then I put her in the bin and put the lid on and rolled it down to the bottom of the garden behind the Wendy house,’ he said. The casual voice on the tape was astonishing. The only emotion came momentarily after Fred said he had cut his daughter’s head off: he seemed almost to break down, but then recovered.

  Fred claimed he sent Rose out for the night to one of her ‘coloured blokes’, and used the time to dig Heather’s grave.

  The conversation then took a bizarrely banal turn as Fred started looking at photographs of the garden to help the police locate Heather’s grave. The relationship between him and Hazel Savage was so amiable that at one point she announced she was just popping out to ‘get [his] specs’, because Fred could not see clearly without them. When Fred had located the grave on the photographs, with the aid of his glasses, Hazel Savage asked, ‘And what’s going to be in this hole in the ground?’

  FRED WEST: Heather.

  HAZEL SAVAGE: In how many pieces?

  FRED WEST: Three.

  HAZEL SAVAGE: What?

  FRED WEST: Two legs and a head and a body.

  After a pause, Fred announced that he had cut up the body in the downstairs bath, above the grave of Lynda Gough. The court had earlier heard a forensic expert say that, if there had ever been bloodstains in the house, they would have worn away over the years and it was not surprising that none were found.

  He said he had loved Heather, but lost his temper when she said she was going to ‘do the little ones’.

  Rose was never far from Fred’s thoughts, and he wanted to make it quite clear that she had played no part in this. ‘The thing I’d like to stress … I mean, Rose knew nothing at all … [when] Rose finds out about this I’m finished.’ At another stage in the interview this exchange took place:

  HAZEL SAVAGE: Right, who else knows what you’ve told us?

  FRED WEST: Nobody … nobody at all. That is something I’ve had to live with for eight years. It’s not easy, I’ll tell you, because I loved Heather. That’s why I was trying to persuade her not to go – I mean, what happened … in that brief moment when she was laughing about going to kill the rest of the children with acid, I couldn’t believe it was Heather.

  The second tape had been recorded on 4 March 1994. Again, it was extraordinary how helpful and genial Fred was in interview, drawing diagrams for the police so they could find the victims in the cellar of the house he referred to as ‘our place’. At one stage he even flirted with Hazel Savage, saying that when he first met her in 1966 she had to be ‘about the beautifullest woman in Gloucestershire’, and indeed it was a charming, rather than leering, observation – although Hazel’s reply was curt: ‘All right, let’s stop the rubbish, Fred.’

  He was anxious to explain why he had killed the girls. ‘What ’appened, all these girls did exactly the same thing – it was made quite clear that I was married to Rose, and I don’t want nothing to do with them, nothing serious, it was just thank you ma’am and finished, and every one of ’em did exactly the same thing of these: “I love you, I’m pregnant, I’m gonna tell Rose, I want you to come and live with me” and that was the problem.’

  It was hard to image Lucy Partington, the cerebral medieval art student, begging Fred to marry her. But Fred even had an elaborate story to explain that girl’s demise, an account the prosecution later said bordered on the obscene. He said he knew her as ‘Juicy Lucy’ because of the amount of vaginal juices she produced when they had sex, and that they had a secret affair – secret because of her ‘other’ boyfriend (Lucy did not have a boyfriend at the time). She had apparently wanted to make the relationship more serious, and had found Fred’s home telephone number. Fred said he was furious. ‘I mean I always made it clear to these girls that there was no affair, it was just purely sex, end of story.’ They had an argument and he had grabbed her by the throat. Fred strangled her, drove her home and cut her up.

  In yet another interview he gave an even more unlikely account of how his ‘affair’ with Lucy had ended: he said that she had become pregnant and had come after Fred, saying ‘I have been bloody looking for you - I’m pregnant and want a thousand quid for an abortion.’

  Fred agreed to try and help the police identify the victims – whom he referred to as ‘the girls’ – partly because he said he had come to like the police officers and thought he owed it to them, and partly because the families of the victims deserved a decent funeral. But his help was limited. ‘As for these,’ he said, looking at a plan of the cellar with numbers marked over graves, ‘I ’ave no idea what their names are.’ He later claimed to have picked them up at night, and had thus never seen their faces clearly. Again he was anxious to exonerate Rose: ‘She knew nothing whatsoever about this.’

  He claimed to have murdered Charmaine the same night he killed Rena (although this cannot be true because he was in prison when Charmaine died), saying he had strangled her while she was asleep in the back of his car – apparently panicking after killing her mother – and had buried the child behind the back of 25 Midland Road. Asked if he would go and help the police find Charmaine’s grave, Fred breezily replied, ‘Oh yeah, no problem.’

  He was interviewed again the next day, and told detectives that two of the girls in the cellar at Cromwell Street were prostitutes he had picked up hitch-hiking. He knew them for what they were ‘by their looseness’. One had started fondling his penis as he was driving, so they stopped, and, in Fred’s words, ‘made love’ – but then she demanded £5 and said she would report him for rape unless he paid. ‘We had a right set-to, and the next minute I smacked her up against the window and she just dropped and, um, anyway, I strangled her, or held my hands around her neck anyway, and um, that was it. She just slid down.’

  He said he killed another girl for exactly the same reason. ‘She said that’ll be ten quid … I said, if you’d have said that in the first place I said I’d have told you to get lost and then she started shouting and said, you’re the sort of person who goes with slags … and I just lost my head with her. Because as soon as she said that, I thought of Rose and Rose is no slag as far as I was concerned.’

  All his victims ‘were prostitutes going to know what they’re doing’, said Fred – a slightly different story to them all being in love with him and wanting to marry him. He said he had attacked a Dutch girl, knocked her cold, taken her back to the house and strangled her in the cellar. The belongings of all these girls were put into black rubbish sacks and left out for the dustmen. He said they had permed hair and make-up half an inch thick. Conveniently, when he came to bury the girls Rose would be away on holiday or out at the Jamaica Club.

  In the final tape interview, DC Geoff Morgan was heard telling Fred that he had become upset in a previous interview when they asked about Rose’s involvement. They then asked him about bondage. ‘The bondage side of it was mine – Rose never had nothing to do with it,’ he said. Asked about Caroline Owens, he indicated that she had indeed almost died. ‘I think I would have went too far with it if Rose had been willing.’ He added that he had been ‘trying to get Rose involved with my sex life’. Fred also claimed that Caroline Owens had wanted to have intercourse with him the night they abducted her.

  POLICE: Are you saying she agreed to it?

  FRED WEST: Well, she didn’t do a lot about it, put it that way. I mean she could have screamed and the whole house would have heard her.

  POLI
CE: Women don’t always scream when they’re being raped – they’re terrified very often.

  FRED WEST: Rubbish!

  His attitudes both to rape and to murder were revealed further in this exchange with Hazel Savage:

  HAZEL SAVAGE: You find things like that very difficult to cope with, don’t you?

  FRED WEST: What?

  HAZEL SAVAGE: Allegations of rape.

  FRED WEST: Well, yeah, ’cos I never raped nobody.

  HAZEL SAVAGE: And yet you killed people.

  FRED WEST: Yeah, see you’ve even got the killing wrong. You’re trying to make out that I just went out and blatantly killed somebody.

  HAZEL SAVAGE: No I’m not … they went through hell actually.

  FRED WEST: No, nobody went through hell. Enjoyment turned to disaster.

  After the tapes had been played, Brian Leveson’s junior, Andrew Chubb, questioned the interviewing police detectives for the prosecution to establish that these excerpts had only been part of what Fred said, and that he also told many insane lies. In an interview almost directly after admitting to killing Heather and burying her in the garden, for example, Fred told police that Heather was in fact not under the patio but ‘in Bahrain working for a drugs cartel’. Fred had told the police ‘lie after lie’, for example that Shirley Robinson had sexually abused Anna Marie; that he had killed her because she was jealous of Rose having a ‘black babby’ and that she had called Rose ‘that bitch, that slag, that cow’. Fred told police that after this insult to his beloved wife he had ‘lost all sense’ and strangled his lover.

  He related a pornographic fantasy about the death of Lynda Gough, saying she had been tied up in the cellar, where they had been enjoying bondage sex together. ‘She had a massive bust on her. She was all roped – kept laughing her head off and making weird noises.’ Fred said she had been dangling over a hole in the cellar floor, supporting herself with her arms which were clasped around the beams. He had been smearing her with oil and ‘love potions’. Then he went to answer the door, and when he came back she had slipped and hanged herself.