Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  POLICE: So she was strangled accidentally?

  FRED WEST: I never killed anyone outright.

  The most damning evidence of all was that, on 29 April 1994, after consulting with his lawyers, Fred had instructed that a note be handed to the police by his solicitor. It read: ‘I have still not told you the truth about this matter. The reason is that from the very first day of this inquiry my main concern has been to protect another person or persons.’ There was little doubt who that person was.

  Because the defence had convinced the judge to have Fred’s tapes entered as evidence – on ‘express instructions’ from Rose herself – the prosecution was allowed to call new witnesses in rebuttal; in other words, to disprove material arising from the tapes. This was to prove dramatic.

  The first witness was George Guest, a retired probation officer who had interviewed Fred at the time of the attack on Caroline Owens. The account he remembered Fred giving of the attack was quite different to the one heard in Fred’s tapes. Mr Guest remembered Fred saying Rose had taken a very active, if not a leading part in the abduction and sexual assault. Furthermore Fred had explained that Rose alternated between heterosexual behaviour and being ‘like a raging queer’, depending on whether she was pregnant or not.

  This was good evidence for the prosecution, but was superseded by what was to follow. The court first heard from a Detective Constable Steven Harris, who had interviewed Fred in May 1994 and recalled him saying that he was protecting somebody, but was not prepared to say who because he felt that his life, and the lives of his children, were in danger. Fred asserted that he was quite innocent: ‘I had nothing to do with these girls’ deaths at all. I have lied through the statements and at this moment I am not prepared to change that … I am not prepared to say who I am protecting in this case.’

  With the next witness the finger of accusation began to point more towards Rose. Dr James McMaster had been the medical officer at Winson Green in Birmingham when Fred was held at the gaol on remand. Warders became concerned about Fred when they heard he was making arrangements for his own funeral, and on 1 August 1994 Fred sat down with Dr McMaster to talk about his feelings. At the beginning of the interview Fred was agitated and depressed, especially about his solicitor Howard Ogden, whom he felt was not representing him correctly.

  The conversation turned to Fred’s interviews. Fred said he was innocent of the charges and had been telling the police lies to protect another person. He then said that Rose was responsible for restraining his daughters while they were raped, that she was running a brothel in the house and had tried to murder him with a knife. He said that Rose enjoyed cruelty and abusing the children and that she had been burying people in the cellar without his knowledge; he did not know the bodies were there and had only been told to pour the concrete. ‘He [Fred] claimed that he was protecting her [Rose], and was prepared to go to jail for life,’ said Dr McMaster, who considered Fred to be rational when he made these allegations.

  The prosecution then called Fred’s ‘appropriate adult’: Janet Leach, a 39-year-old voluntary worker who had been assigned to become Fred’s friend when he was taken into custody in 1994. She had sat in on eighty taped interviews and became a regular visitor and confidante of the prisoner, even receiving telephone calls from him at home.

  In a broad Midlands accent, she told the court that when she had first met Fred, on 25 February, she did not even know what he was charged with. She sat through the interviews, listening to Fred’s version of events, and then heard a quite different story in his cell when they were alone together (an extraordinary situation in itself, which was later picked up by the defence).

  She claimed Fred had said he was protecting Rose, and that the girls found at Cromwell Street had been ‘some of Rose’s mistakes’. Mrs Leach explained: ‘When he was arrested, he wanted to know whether Rose had been let out. That was important to him because they had made a pact that he would take the blame for everything.’ When Rose was released on bail, Fred told Janet that the pact was working. Later Rose was arrested again and this distressed Fred. ‘He was upset. He just said that the police were getting too close and that they would find out that Rose was involved.’

  Fred told Janet Leach that there had been other people involved as well, including Rose’s father; several coloured men; and somebody who (for legal reasons) can only be referred to as ‘another person’. Janet Leach wept in the witness box as she said, ‘I have got children growing up … and I needed to know that, if there was somebody else out there, that they had to be found.’

  She said that Fred had told her fingers had been removed from the victims to foil identification, and indicated that he and Rose had chopped the victims up together (contradicting his earlier claim that he had only poured the concrete). Fred said he was not very good at sex, that Rose was very demanding and that he would do ‘anything’ for her. Fred had spoken about his own sexual tastes, saying he liked to ‘break girls in’. He then changed his story yet again, claiming that the first he had known about the bodies in the cellar was when Rose telephoned to tell him the police were at the house in February 1994. ‘He said he had a long discussion with Rose and Rose told him what had happened and where the bodies were.’ Fred said he had suffered a black-out before he could return to the house.

  He also stated that he had been in custody when Charmaine was killed, as the prosecution had claimed, and that it was Rose who had killed and mutilated Shirley Robinson, including removing her unborn child.

  Under cross-examination Janet Leach said neither her nor any of the voluntary workers she knew who served as appropriate adults had ever encountered anything like this before. They were more used to dealing with juveniles. She had found the experience so disturbing that, at the recommendation of the police, she had been taken off the case and had then suffered a stroke.

  When Fred died without confessing to what he had told her, she felt angry and confused about what she should do. She had never told anybody what Fred had said because she considered that they had been speaking in confidence. Richard Ferguson asked if it had occurred to her that Fred was using her, and she replied, with disarming simplicity, ‘I suppose he was.’

  She adamantly denied having been paid money by any newspaper, or having spoken to journalists, or that there was any substance in a rumour about her relationship with Fred going further than it should.

  As the clock indicated it was time to break for lunch, Richard Ferguson informed the judge that he had not finished cross-examining the witness. Although much of what she remembered Fred saying clearly did not make sense (of course he had been involved in burying the bodies) many felt that Janet Leach’s evidence had been like a breath of fresh air: at last somebody had told the truth – that Fred and Rose were in it together and that Fred had covered up for her. Janet Leach had been a very convincing witness.

  The court was adjourned until 2:15 P.M., but minutes later Janet Leach turned deathly pale and suffered what later appeared to be another stroke, being unable to move or speak. An ambulance was called and she was taken to hospital. The court was adjourned for the rest of the day.

  When the court reconvened the next morning Janet Leach was still in hospital, unable to give evidence for perhaps several days. But Richard Ferguson had dramatic news for the judge: it appeared that Janet Leach had lied to the court about her dealings with the press. Information had been received overnight that, far from not speaking with journalists, she had been paid £12,500 by the publishing subsidiary of a large newspaper group to write a book. In light of this, Richard Ferguson felt it was very important that he had a chance to continue cross-examining.

  The hospital doctor was summoned to court, and it was agreed that the case could not proceed until the following week – and even then Mrs Leach would have to give evidence with a medical officer on standby, in case she became unwell. Considering that she was the last witness, the witness upon whom the whole case could turn, this long weekend could hardly have been lo
aded with more suspense.

  On Monday morning an ambulance brought Janet Leach back to court from the Royal Hampshire County Hospital, where she had spent the weekend. She entered the witness box in a wheelchair, with a doctor standing behind her to monitor her condition, and looked both extremely unwell and very anxious.

  Richard Ferguson skilfully cross-examined her, soon extracting her agreement that, contrary to what she had told the court the week before, she had struck a deal with a newspaper group – and a lucrative one at that. She had verbally agreed that the serialisation of her book would be sold to Mirror Group for £100,000. She had also told the police she would sign an affidavit regarding her conversation with Fred in the ‘worst case scenario’ of a possible acquittal of Rose, to make sure that she was convicted. All this represented a body-blow to the prosecution.

  It further emerged that Fred had written personal letters to Janet Leach, including one with the words ‘keep it up, kid’, but she denied any suggestion that she had become emotionally attached to Fred, as a police officer had said at the time, saying she had kept going to see him only because he was going to tell her more about the crimes.

  In re-examination there was a revelation which dwarfed the lies she had already told: Janet Leach told Brian Leveson that Fred had claimed there were at least twenty more victims. Some were buried on farmland, and one was Mary Bastholm, whom he said he had picked up at a bus stop. She said Fred had told her other people were involved in these killings also: among them Rose, her father Bill Letts, at least two coloured men and the ‘other person’. Fred said some of the girls had been killed outside Cromwell Street and brought back to the house by this ‘other person’, who had also apparently killed Anna McFall in collusion with Rena.

  Much of this information – assuming Fred had ever imparted it at all – was clearly fiction, and there were many reasons for Fred to concoct such stories: he may have been trying to make himself more appealing to Janet Leach by shifting the blame on to somebody else; he probably wanted to keep her intrigued so she would return and see him; and Fred was also known to invent stories for visitors who he thought were selling information to newspapers in an attempt to catch them out (in the final months of his life he became jealous of the money made in this way).

  But there may be a residual grain of truth to what Janet Leach claims Fred told her: a story that echoed what Fred told other visitors of a ‘farmhouse’ where victims, including Mary Bastholm, were buried. No doubt other men had been involved in the rape of girls alongside the Wests, but where the farm is and whether these men were actually participant in murder is another matter altogether. As Janet Leach said under cross-examination, Fred ‘just talked all the time’. Truth and fantasy were one to him.

  Despite this, it was the revelation of TWENTY MORE that made the headlines in the morning newspapers, not the fact that Janet Leach had lied in court.

  Brian Leveson’s closing speech for the prosecution included a detailed analysis of each part of the evidence. He spoke well, using slightly theatrical gestures – grimacing, and at one stage thumbing behind him at the dock when he said, ‘He [Fred West] is not on trial, she is.’

  He told the jury they had all travelled to a place that plumbed the depths of human depravity and there found a ‘tough and resourceful’ woman who was obsessed with sex – the perfect partner for Fred West – but, like the three brass monkeys, a woman who claimed to have seen no evil, heard no evil and spoken no evil, despite living in a house where women were raped, mutilated and buried.

  He said Fred’s death was the greatest gift he could have given Rose, because it meant he could not be cross-examined and (in all likelihood) proven in court to be both a liar and her accomplice. ‘Picture him in cross-examination,’ said Mr Leveson, and all eyes turned to the empty witness box, where the spectre of Fred West struggling gamely to deny Rose’s involvement was all too easy to imagine.

  He said there were common themes running though all the killings, and that those in the court who had seen the ‘terrible pictures’ of the exhibits, including Shirley Hubbard’s mask with the pipe still in place, would live with these images for a long time.

  The sky outside became overcast in mid-afternoon, heralding a storm that would soon drench the city. Suddenly the electric lights seemed to brighten the room and Mr Leveson concluded his speech in a sickly yellow glow: ‘Frederick and Rosemary West were perfect companions and they were in it together. On that basis, you can be sure these allegations are proved.’

  The next day was the turn of Richard Ferguson for the defence. His approach was broader, even poetic. Rather than detailing the flaws in the prosecution case, he simply asserted that there was not a shred of direct evidence that Rose had killed anyone. He conceded that as a woman and a mother Rose may have fallen below the standards required, and that, if she had abused children, she would have to be tried for these crimes in this world or the hereafter. He agreed that the jury may not have liked her, or believed some of what she had said in evidence, but maintained that this did not mean she was a killer.

  It was Fred who had committed these crimes, he said, and Fred had not killed himself to aid Rose’s case, not being the stuff of which martyrs are made. Fred had been a depraved and morally bankrupt man who had opted out of the human race. He had killed before he met Rose, and continued to kill, without her knowledge or help, during their marriage.

  Mr Ferguson finished with an inspired extended metaphor: Brian Leveson was a kind of mountain guide, leading the jury up a perilous path until they came to a gap, a void of no evidence. Mr Leveson had leapt across the gap to where the path continued on the other side and turned, beckoning the jury to follow, assuring them that it was quite safe. On the other side of this void, said Mr Ferguson, was a guilty verdict. But the void itself was a lacuna of hard evidence. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, looking at the jurors. ‘Don’t jump. Don’t jump.’

  Justice Mantell took no less than three days to sum up what he had already said was a remarkable case. He said the jury would have to consider carefully and individually each of the ten counts. They did not have to be certain that Rose had actually been responsible for snuffing out lives herself – she would be just as guilty if murder had resulted from a ‘joint plan’ with her husband to kill or inflict serious injury. The alternative, lesser verdict of manslaughter was open to them, he said, but they might think it was only a theoretical alternative, as there was a common thread through most of the killings. Unfortunately, they would have to spend time considering what was involved in killing and cutting up a human body. He then addressed the many other issues arising from the case with the same balanced, good sense, conceding that whatever he told the jury, and whatever had been seen or heard in court, only they could now decide on the verdicts that should be returned. Justice Mantell sent the jury out to consider their verdicts on Monday 20 November, forty-nine days after they had first been selected for the case.

  The jury deliberated for the remainder of that day and most of the next, carefully re-reading the transcripts of Rose’s interviews before they began their discussion about verdicts.

  The corridor outside Court Three became a waiting area for journalists and members of the legal teams, who paced back and forth expectantly. Jokes and predictions regarding the verdict were exchanged as the hours ticked by, and the air became thick with cigarette smoke. The court Tannoy system regularly intruded on this hum of conversation, and there would be a brief lull to hear which case was being called. Finally, just after 3 P.M. on Tuesday afternoon, the Tannoy voice requested that anybody having anything to do with the case of Rosemary West should return to court.

  The jury had selected as their foreman a man in his early middle age, wearing a grey business suit. After being asked by the court clerk whether they had reached a unanimous verdict on any of the counts, he replied that they had. Rose, who was dressed in the same schoolgirl-like outfit she had worn practically every day for the last eight weeks, was called to he
r feet. Her mouth was slightly open and she appeared to be breathing deeply, nervously – for this was the moment upon which the rest of her life would turn.

  The foreman was asked by the court clerk about the first count of murder, that of Rose’s stepdaughter Charmaine.

  ‘Do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty of murder?’

  ‘Guilty,’ replied the foreman, speaking so softly he was barely audible. There was a faint exclamation of relief, or anguish, from high up in the public gallery. Rose closed her eyes momentarily, as if trying to concentrate on what had just been said, and then opened them again.

  The clerk read through the next eight counts, but the jury had not reached verdicts on any of these as yet. She came to count number ten, the murder of Heather West, and the foreman announced that they had a verdict in this case.

  ‘Guilty,’ he said again.

  Justice Mantell sent the jury back to their room to continue their deliberations. Rose was taken down to her holding cell, where she collapsed in a spasm of tears and shock. But she did not have long to come to terms with what she had heard. At 4:30 P.M. the jury were called back. They had reached a third unanimous verdict, this time on the count of the murder of Shirley Robinson – again ‘guilty’.

  The foreman said he did not feel the jury could reach any more verdicts that evening, so court was adjourned for the day. Richard Ferguson went down into the cells where Rose was blubbing uncontrollably, her heavy shoulders heaving, her hands covering her eyes, the tears streaming down through her fingers.

  The evidence for Rose murdering Charmaine, Heather and Shirley had been different to the evidence concerning the other seven women. The first three had been killed because Fred and Rose needed them out of the way, not because of a sexual motive. Now that the jury had accepted Rose to be a liar and murderess, they had to decide whether they agreed with Brian Leveson’s ‘similar fact evidence’ – that the remaining seven had all died after being sexually abused in the way Caroline Owens, Miss A and Anna Marie had been.