Fred & Rose

by Howard Sounes

  At 12:15 P.M. the next day, Wednesday 22 November, the jury passed a note to Justice Mantell asking if the absence of any direct evidence was a hindrance to returning a guilty verdict in these seven counts. The judge said that it was not, so long as they accepted the Crown’s case. They further asked if they could consider the evidence of Caroline Owens and the other women in relation to the charges of murder. Justice Mantell said the answer was yes.

  The jury retired, but this time they were out for only thirty-five minutes. When they returned, Rose was told to stand. She then heard that the jury had unanimously decided on the seven counts, the seven girls whose remains had been found at Cromwell Street together with masks, binds and other evidence of torture. The foreman said that Rose was guilty of murdering them all.

  The sentencing was as damning as it was brief. Justice Mantell first ordered: ‘Stand up.’ He then intoned these words: ‘Rosemary Pauline West, on each of the ten counts of murder of which you have been unanimously convicted by the jury, the sentence is one of life imprisonment. If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released. Take her down.’

  Without a flicker of emotion having crossed her face, without any sign to the world she was saying goodbye to, Rose turned and was led away from view.

  EPILOGUE

  This book is entitled Fred & Rose because at its heart is a relationship between two people: their sadistic impulses; their pact of silence; and, above all, arising out of that pact, their obsessive love for one another.

  Fiction based on genuine statistics has helped create a stereotyped profile of the multiple murderer, or ‘serial killer’: a young man of lower-middle class, of above-average intelligence, who murders on his own, often under the influence of alcohol, young women, or young men, because he is sexually maladjusted. He is usually caught when the number of his victims begins to escalate. When he is depicted in film, the killer is often a salivating lunatic, a man one would expect to be arrested each time he ventured outside his door.

  But Fred and Rose were nothing like that. They were most obviously a married couple, man and wife acting together – and, in their own strange way, a happy couple, ‘ecstatically happy’ to quote Rose. They had a stable home where they had lived for many years and where they intended to stay, a mortgage which they worked hard to pay off and a large family. They were the people next door, who waved a cheery hello to neighbours as they walked down the street.

  This home was in the centre of an English city, just yards from a shopping centre and a police station, a street where hundreds of people passed by every week – hardly the domicile we would expect of a serial killer.

  Also contrary to the accepted profile, the Wests were both of below-average intelligence, did not act under the influence of alcohol, and, in Fred’s case at least, were well into middle age before their crimes were discovered (and apparently several years after they had last killed).

  It should also be pointed out that the very fact of Rose’s gender makes her crimes extremely rare, simply because such killers are almost exclusively male.

  To discover clues about how Fred and Rose evolved into this murderous couple – so different to what one might expect of such people – it is worth briefly re-examining their childhoods and the early years before they met.

  Ostensibly Fred’s upbringing in Herefordshire was a rural idyll. His parents were poorly educated and had little money, but they were not drunks, or vagrants, or even Gypsies, as has wrongly been supposed. Nor were Fred’s family in-bred, as has been somewhat unkindly assumed. They worked hard and appeared to be solid members of the community.

  But something was very wrong at Moorcourt Cottage. Fred’s father, Walter, was almost certainly a child-abuser, and I would suggest that Fred initially learned this behaviour from him. But more significant still was the fact of Walter’s unapologetic and open attitude to his behaviour, considering what he did to young girls to be both normal and right. Little wonder then that Fred grew up with the same lack of morality, having sex with underage girls, with or without their consent, from his teenage years. But that alone does not explain the genesis of a man who killed at least twelve women and children. Fred’s development into a murderer is much more complex.

  If Fred was abused by his own mother, that may have had something to do with his attitudes to sex, but this is only hearsay.

  Much has also been made of Fred’s lack of intelligence, and the relatively unsophisticated ‘backwoods’ way in which he was brought up. But there is no logical reason why Much Marcle is more likely to create a murderer than any other part of the United Kingdom. Abuse and violence are present everywhere in these islands.

  Apart from his father’s influence, I believe – while accepting that their stories may have been exaggerated over the years – that Fred was initially and profoundly affected by the two accidents he experienced in his teens: the motorcycle crash and the incident at the youth club. There is ample evidence that head injuries can affect behaviour – causing epilepsy, among other dysfunctions – and throughout his life Fred exhibited numerous symptoms of brain damage: blacking out, unpredictable outbursts of anger, and an apparent inability to tell reality from fantasy. When Fred told the police of his ‘friendship’ with Lulu, was he pretending to be mad, or boasting in the naïve belief he would be credible, or did Fred think he really had known the singer? The last answer is surely the correct one. For much of his life, and for much of each day of his life, Fred was profoundly deluded, or as his own family described it, ‘off in a world of his own’. That is not to excuse what he did, but maybe it helps explain.

  How this unpredictable, fantasising dullard became a killer is a leap of evolution that is hard to understand. The truth can only be extrapolated from the evidence of his early life: we know Fred’s relationships with women were all unsatisfactory and that he was an inadequate lover. In adult life he had sex in the same crude way as when he was a teenager – demanding immediate relief and expecting nothing in return apart from passivity (rape, in other words).

  When the girls were not willing, Fred became violent. If girls failed to concur with the increasingly bizarre sexual behaviour he needed to arouse himself, he became violent. When a girl rejected him, he became violent. If he felt humiliated, as with his wife Rena and her lover John McLachlan, he became violent. I would suggest that this violence was also partly a result of the brain damage he suffered as a young man, as well as being a reaction to his own inadequacy.

  What tipped violence into murder cannot be known for certain. Probably it first happened by accident: Fred may have lost his temper, had his hands around the throat of a girl who had angered him in one of these ways and then realised that she had died – turned blue, was urinating uncontrollably, just as years later he would graphically describe the death of his daughter Heather.

  I do not believe that the first of Fred’s victims was Anna McFall, even though she is the first that we know about for certain. Anna’s remains were dismembered and were found together with bindings, in much the same way as Fred’s later victims, and it seems unlikely that he would have carried out such extreme action the first time: it is behaviour too highly evolved. In Fred’s own description of the slaying of Heather, he told of the panic that sets in after murder. By 1994, when he spoke about this, he was a man recalling a distant memory of fear and excitement at death, but these emotions must have been very real for him at the start of his murderous career. He could not have paused long enough to play at operations (a bizarre trait that had developed from his attempted DIY termination of Rena’s baby years before).

  Fred must have killed before, probably first in Glasgow, where his relationships with women were the most complex and unstable in his entire life. There were many other girls in England too. Where those victims are, and who they are, we shall probably never know; other than that they almost certainly include Mary Bastholm, who disappeared the year after Anna McFall.

  The problems of Rose’s background are sadly
obvious: her father was a violent schizophrenic who terrorised his wife and children, and quite possibly sexually abused Rose; her mother Daisy suffered from severe depression, lived through her marriage in a state of extended despair, and had undergone a course of electric-shock therapy while pregnant with her youngest daughter.

  Rose herself was ‘slow’ from an early age, almost retarded, rocking herself relentlessly back and forth and exhibiting many other signs of disturbed behaviour, even as a small child. Statistics show that the children of the mentally ill stand an increased chance of similar illnesses, and it is interesting to note that, apart from Rose, her brothers Graham and Gordon have both led unstable lives involving petty crime and have suffered with depression. But Rose’s siblings are quick to point out that they did not become murderers. It must also be remembered that Rose was unique among the Letts children in that her father did not hit her.

  Members of her family have impressed upon me the fact that Rose was taught to know the ‘difference between right and wrong’ – a trite phrase perhaps (and certainly a lesson she forgot), but it is true that hers was an extremely disciplined home. Foul language and blatantly lewd behaviour were forbidden. The children were made to work and the house was run on almost military lines. Yet this prim home produced that rarest of criminals: a female multiple murderer, a woman who would kill her own daughter.

  How this dull child became the creature in the dock at Winchester Crown Court is due in part to her over-stimulated sexuality. From a very early age, Rose was sexually precocious, probably because she had been initially abused by her father. She experimented with her brother and then went on to dalliances with numerous older men. She claims to have been raped at least twice as a child. Therefore when she met Fred she was an impressionable girl who already put little value on herself or her body, a girl familiar with abuse and cruelty.

  The peculiarities of Fred and Rose’s characters combined to create something terrifying and unique. Steve West gives this insight into his parents: ‘I think there was something wrong with Mum from when she was young. Dad wasn’t quite right either, so there were two people who weren’t quite right who got together, and it was a lethal cocktail. They encouraged each other in what they did. If they had both married someone else I don’t think it would have happened to the extent it did – two wrong people brought together.’

  Steve West’s assessment makes sense: if Fred had not met Rose he would probably have committed impetuous violent assaults that would soon have landed him either in prison or in a mental hospital (with nobody to help him hide the evidence of these crimes). Without Fred, Rose may have become nothing more harmful than a prostitute. But Fred and Rose met, they fell in love and became a team, covering up for each other’s excesses for almost twenty-five years – and it is this, more than any other single factor, that allowed their deviant ideas to escalate into murder and ensured that these crimes went undetected for so long.

  When they first met, Fred was the dominant partner, a married man twelve years Rose’s senior. He charmed this simple girl, enticing her to his caravan so she could play with his children. But the balance of their relationship began to change early on as Rose asserted her own, intrinsically stronger personality. In a letter to Fred written shortly after they met, Rose pledges that she will love him forever. Fred could not fail to be attracted to such devotion from a pretty, barely pubescent girl: the physical type he found most appealing. When Bill Letts forced his daughter into a children’s home, hoping to end the relationship, he only succeeded in pushing his daughter towards the older man, her only ally in a hostile world.

  The seeds of Rose’s aggression had been sown during her childhood: she had become a bully to defend herself against pupils at school who mocked her. She then extended this aggression into a dominance over her younger brothers. When Rose was given care of Anna Marie, Charmaine and then her own baby, Heather, she found herself becoming aggressive again. She was ‘a child looking after children’, as her mother said, and soon found herself in squalid conditions that made this particularly stressful – her lover was in jail, she had little money and less experience as a mother. Two of the children in her care were not her own, and one, Charmaine, was old enough and spirited enough to defy her. Rose started to beat the children. She probably already knew that Fred was sexually abusing Charmaine (and Rose would not necessarily have recoiled from this: it was what her own father had probably done to her). It seems likely that Charmaine was killed by accident when Rose went too far in her chastisement, or when she simply flew into a rage. But even at this early stage there is the possibility of a sadistic element to her death, as indicated by her letter to Fred dated 4 May 1971: ‘Darling, about Char. I think she likes to be handled rough …’

  As significant as Charmaine’s death was the moment Rose told Fred about the crime, as she had to; it would have been impossible to conceal the body without his co-operation, and it would be Fred’s job to dispose of the body, establishing a pattern for their subsequent crimes. If Rose did not already know about Anna McFall and the others (like Mary Bastholm), Fred must have told her at this stage. They swapped secrets, and with the exchange of guilt found themselves joined in a conspiracy of silence, a bond stronger than any wedding vow. Furthermore, they could now justify this murder to each other, the murder of a little child – and whatever one thinks of Rose it is hard to believe this did not have some effect on her then. She was only a teenager.

  With the exchange of secrets, Fred and Rose were linked in two ways: by their interest in sex (Rose was amenable to any deviation Fred suggested), and by their agreement to view murder as an expediency. Anna McFall had threatened Fred’s security by having a child, so she had to go (the subtext being that, as far as Fred and Rose were concerned, she got what she deserved); Charmaine was ‘naughty’, and her naughtiness was a bad influence on the others, so Rose was not to blame when she lost her temper with the child and killed her. These crimes did not make Fred and Rose bad people in their own estimation. They still considered themselves to be a ‘family of love’.

  Rose was never charged with the murder of Rena West, but she must have known about it even if she was not actively involved. Rena’s death was another expediency – she was threatening the ‘now until forever love’ of Fred and Rose by asking after Charmaine. Fred decided that she had to be dealt with once and for all, and Rose probably had a say in this decision despite her later assertion that it was Fred’s ‘past life’ and therefore of no concern to her. On the contrary, it was of the utmost concern to the girl who thought of herself as Fred’s ‘ever worshipping wife’, because he was already married to Rena, her rival.

  Rose was sexually attracted to women, so the Wests had a shared motive for picking up girls for sex. That this would be aggressive, bondage sex was as much Rose’s taste as Fred’s. She took a particular pleasure in sadism (exactly as her father had).

  It was Rose’s idea to abduct and rape Caroline Owens, and she who derived the most enjoyment from the assault. Fred raped Caroline only when Rose was not looking, weeping afterwards and begging her not to tell Rose.

  The abduction and rape of Caroline Owens was a turning point in Fred and Rose’s lives because of their decision to let her go. The Wests had deluded themselves into thinking she might come back for more, but instead she went to the police. It was lucky for the Wests that the magistrates took such a lenient attitude, but it served as a warning that such good fortune might not be repeated. In future they would kill their victims – if only to ensure they did not go to the police.

  Most of the victims later found at Cromwell Street – being for the most part girls who would not take part in the Wests’ bizarre sex games willingly – were so viciously abused that their deaths were inevitable, and maybe their extreme abuse followed on from the Wests’ foreknowledge that they had no intention of letting them live. The use of the masks and tape was both to restrain the victims and to excite Fred and Rose, who abused with sadistic glee. Make no mista
ke: Fred and Rose were having fun. Raping, torturing and killing were an enjoyment, a leisure pursuit, and it is that attitude which puts them alongside the likes of Myra Hindley, Ian Brady and Charles Manson in the black museum of those who, as Richard Ferguson said at the trial, have opted out of the human race.

  Whether it was Fred or Rose who finally snuffed the life out of these girls is irrelevant morally and in law: both were party to the tormenting and torturing which led to death, and therefore both are equally guilty of murder.

  Fred never offered a wholly convincing explanation for why the bodies were cut up, only suggesting that he did it to save space and, in discussion with his appropriate adult, Janet Leach, that he had removed the fingers to foil identification. But the dismemberment of these young women went far beyond those practical reasons. Fred took pleasure in playing with corpses and cutting them up. It gave him complete power over women he could not hope to know or satisfy in any normal way. Rose may have been involved in the disposal of the victims, but probably only to a limited extent – maybe helping with the practical problems of getting rid of clothes, washing away bloodstains and helping Fred with the physical lifting and carrying.

  It is also possible that the abuse of these young women included the removal of parts of the body in life (the absence of fingers, fingernails, toes, and, in one case, hair, would suggest torture rather than simple dismemberment after death). It is a level of bestiality hard to comprehend, and it occurred to members of the investigation team that parts of the bodies had been eaten. People capable of such horrors are capable of cannibalism, too, and studies of other multiple murderers would suggest that this is not unlikely.