Rosemary was noticeably different from the other Letts’ children. In her cot, she developed the habit of rocking violently. As she grew older, she rocked only her head – but for hours on end as if she was in a trance. The family soon realised that she was a bit slow. They called her ‘Dozy Rosie’. However, with big brown eyes and a clear complexion, she was a pretty child. This appealed to her father and, by doing everything he asked without question, she became the apple of his eye and escaped the beatings he meted out to her siblings. In return, she endured repeated sexual abuse from him.
Bill Letts’s father, Walter, was also a paedophile who may have abused his granddaughter, too. This pattern of abuse was handed down a generation. Once, when Bill Letts visited the Wests’ house, Anne-Marie came downstairs complaining that ‘grampy’ was trying to get into bed with her. Rosemary ordered her to go back upstairs and get on with it.
Things did not go well for Rosemary at school. With no appreciable intellectual gifts, she struggled academically. As she grew older, she developed a tendency towards chubbiness and was teased relentlessly. In response, she lashed out.
As an adolescent, Rose became precocious sexually. After taking a bath, she would walk around the house naked. Her father forbade her to go out with boys her own age. Not that many were interested. Both her reputation as an ill-tempered, sullen, aggressive loner and her chubbiness put the local boys off. Instead, she concentrated on the older men in the village.
After 15-year-old Mary Bastholm disappeared in January 1968, most girls in the Gloucester area were on their guard. But Rosemary’s growing interest in sex meant that she would not stay at home and, on one occasion, one of the older men she was dating raped her.
At the beginning of 1969, Daisy Letts left and moved in temporarily with her older daughter, Glenys, and her husband, Jim Tyler. Freed from her father’s strictures, the 15-year-old Rose spent all her time going out. Her brother-in-law said that Rose carried on with numerous older men and that she had even tried to seduce him. After a few months, to everyone’s surprise, Daisy moved back to Bill, taking Rose with her. It was then that Rose met 28-year-old Fred West.
West wanted her to be his sex slave – a role that she had been trained for by her father. She was prepared to do anything to satisfy his perverted desires. However compliant she may have been, though, Rosemary Letts was not the only woman in West’s life at the time. He was always on the lookout for young women he could take home for the night. One evening, he persuaded a young couple to come back to the caravan. There, West again boasted about his abilities as an abortionist, suggesting his services if they ever got into trouble. He showed them a hideous corkscrew device he said he used and a pack of Polaroid pictures of the vaginas of girls he said he had operated on.
Whatever Bill Letts’s shortcomings as a parent, he tried to keep his underage daughter away from West. When Bill discovered that Rose was having sex with West, he reported him to the Social Services. This proved ineffective, so Bill turned up at West’s caravan and threatened him. The relationship was halted briefly when West went to prison for theft and failure to pay fines. But Rose was already pregnant with West’s child. At 16, she left her father’s house and moved into a flat West had rented to take care of Rena’s two daughters.
In 1970, Rose gave birth to the ill-fated Heather. With Fred in jail, no money and three children to take care of, the teenage Rose found it hard to cope. Her temper flared constantly. She particularly resented having to rear another woman’s children and treated Charmaine and Anne-Marie abominably.
In the summer of 1971, eight-year-old Charmaine went missing. Rose told her sister Anne-Marie that their mother Rena had come to get her. There is no doubt that Rose killed her. In The Corpse Garden, Colin Wilson thinks that Rose ‘simply lost her temper, and went further than usual in beating or throttling her. She was, as Anne-Marie said, a woman entirely without self-control; when she lost her temper, she became a kind of maniac.’
At Rose West’s trial, the prosecution claimed that she had killed Charmaine in a fit of anger and dumped the body in the coal cellar until Fred returned from prison to dispose of the corpse. He buried the body under the kitchen floor. The flat had no garden. When the body was found, the fingers and toes were missing, just as Anna McFall’s had been.
In August 1971, Rena came to look for her daughter. Unable to get any sense out of Fred or Rose, Rena visited Fred’s father, Walter, hoping he could shed some light on what had happened to Charmaine, intimating that she might go to the police. ‘My father and Rena were close,’ West said. ‘Whether the old man was having an affair with her I don’t know.’
Fred West maintained that Rena went voluntarily to a romantic spot in Letterbox Field in a car belonging to the pimp that he used to collect clients for Rosemary. After they made love against an oak tree, West said, they had a row, which ended with him kicking her to death. He happened to have a 21⁄2 ft-long Jamaican sabre knife with him to cut her up, along with a pickaxe and spade to bury her not far from Ann McFall. Like Ann, Rena was buried naked and a number of bones were missing, including those of her fingers and toes.
Fred and Rosemary maintained for almost a quarter of a century that Rena and Charmaine had gone off to Scotland together to start a new life. But after he was arrested, West insisted that Rosemary had murdered Rena in the flat at Midland Road and that the pimp had cut her up. The dismembered body, he said, had been left in plastic bags in a garage. After he found it, he helped them to bury her.
However it had actually happened, Fred and Rose were now bound together by murder. Later, when Rose’s father came to take her away, West said, ‘Come on, Rosie, you know what we’ve got between us.’
This upset Rose, Bill Letts noted. Afterwards, Rosemary told her parents why she could not leave, saying, ‘You don’t know him. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do – even murder.’
In the 1960s, a large number of West Indian immigrants had come to Gloucester. They were largely single men and Rose invited many of them over to the flat for sex – both for fun and to earn a little extra money. Fred encouraged this. He was a voyeur and enjoyed watching her have sex through a peephole. He later rigged up a speaker system so that he could hear Rosemary’s groans while he was watching TV. Even the children could not disturb him while this was going on. Although oversexed, Fred would only join in if the sex involved bondage, sadism, lesbianism or vibrators. He also took suggestive pictures of Rose, using them in advertisements in magazines for ‘swingers’ and other publications where he advertised her services as a prostitute.
Fred and Rose began employing their neighbour, 19-year-old Elizabeth Agius, as a babysitter. On more than one occasion, when the Wests returned home, Elizabeth asked them where they had been. They said they had been cruising around looking for young girls, preferably virgins. Fred explained that he had taken Rose along, so then they would not be afraid to get into the car with him. Elizabeth thought they were joking. Rosemary admitted that she was a prostitute and invited Elizabeth to go to bed with her and Fred, while Fred propositioned her with an eye to bondage. She refused both offers. But later, according to a police statement, she was drugged and came to be naked in bed with Fred and Rosemary.
In January 1972, Fred and Rose married at Gloucester Register Office. And in June, they had another daughter whom they named Mae. They decided they needed a bigger house to raise their growing family and accommodate Rose’s prostitution business. One of Rosemary’s clients lent them the deposit and they moved into 25 Cromwell Street; it had a garage and a spacious cellar. Frank as ever, Fred told Elizabeth Agius that he planned to convert the cellar into a room where Rose could entertain her clients, or he would soundproof it and turn it into his ‘torture chamber’. And this was what he did.
Its first inmate was his own eight-year-old daughter, Anne-Marie. He told her that he and Rose were such caring parents that they were going to teach her how to satisfy her husband when she got married. They stripped and gagged her. He
r hands were tied behind her back and Rose held her down while Fred raped her. This hurt her so much that Anne-Marie could not go to school for several days. She was warned not to tell anyone, otherwise she would be beaten. The rapes continued. On one occasion, she was strapped down so her father could rape her quickly during his lunch hour.
Fred and Rose continued cruising the vicinity, looking for young girls. At the end of 1972, they picked up 17-year-old Caroline Raine, who was hitch-hiking. They hired her as a live-in nanny, promising her family that they would take care of her. Caroline was very attractive, and Fred and Rose both tried to seduce her. She found them repellent and, after six weeks, quit. A few days later, they spotted her hitch-hiking again and offered her a lift. In the back of the car, Rosemary started molesting her. When she objected, Fred knocked her unconscious.
He drove them back to Cromwell Street where they stripped her, tied her up, tortured and raped her. Fred threatened that if she told anyone about it, ‘I’ll keep you in the cellar and let my black friends have you. And when we’re finished, we’ll kill you and bury you under the paving stones of Gloucester. There are hundreds of girls buried under there.’
Under duress, Caroline agreed to stay on with them. Fred then untied her and let her have a bath. Later, when she went to the launderette with Rosemary, she seized the chance to make a run for it. It was not until the following evening that she plucked up the courage to tell her mother what had happened, and this lady then called the police.
The Wests were arrested. They agreed to plead guilty to indecent assault and actual bodily harm if the charge of rape was dropped. When the matter came to court in January 1973, West was able to convince the magistrate that Caroline had consented to sex. Despite West’s long criminal record, they got off with a small fine. By this time, Fred was 31; Rose was 19 and pregnant for the third time. Again, when he was finally caught after the bodies had been found in the back garden, Fred blamed Rosemary for the assault on Caroline Raine.
The Wests began to take in lodgers. One of them had a girlfriend, 19-year-old Lynda Gough, whom Rosemary seduced. Lynda then wanted to move in, so the Wests took her on as a nanny. Fred West claimed that she was into black magic and bizarre sex, and willingly entered into bondage sessions in the basement. But then she found herself locked in the cellar, being tortured and abused for days on end, before she was finally killed. Her fingers and toes were almost certainly cut off while she was still alive and conscious. Bound, gagged and blindfolded, she could not protest. Her hands and wrists were severed shortly after. Her kneecaps, breastbone and seven ribs were also removed.
West maintained that she had been strangled accidentally when he went to answer the front door in the middle of a bondage session. Nevertheless, he had sex with her lifeless body. Then he cut her up and buried her dismembered body under the floor of the garage at the back of the house. Rosemary took her clothes, washed them and wore them.
When Lynda’s family asked what had happened to her, they were told she had moved on … but they noted at the time that Rosemary was wearing something that belonged to their daughter. The other lodgers were told that Lynda had been fired for hitting one of the children. The police were not called and there were no repercussions. Soon after, in August 1973, the West’s first son, Stephen, was born.
Having got away with so much, the Wests began killing just for the fun of it. In November 1973, the dismembered body of 15-year-old schoolgirl Carol Ann ‘Caz’ Cooper was buried under the floor of the cellar in Cromwell Street. It is not known who picked her up or how she died – although it was probably in one of the Wests’ torture sessions where the victim was suspended from a beam in the basement. When the body was discovered, the head was bound with surgical tape, so she could neither see nor hear. Fifty of her bones were missing, including most of the bones of the wrists and thirty-five of the bones of the fingers and toes.
The following month, 21-year-old university student Lucy Partington arrived at her mother’s house in Gretton near Cheltenham where she was to spend the Christmas holidays. She was the cousin of novelist Martin Amis. On 27 December, she went to visit a disabled friend. She left to catch a bus shortly after 10.00pm and was last seen at a bus stop on the outskirts of Cheltenham.
West claimed that he had known Lucy for some months before she disappeared and they made love in Cheltenham’s Pittville Park nearby. She fell pregnant and was going to tell Rosemary, so he strangled her in his van. This was an unlikely tale as Lucy was studying in Exeter and spent little time in Gloucester, so this was one of several implausible stories he’d tell about her.
The most likely scenario is that Rosemary was in the car with Fred when they offered Lucy a lift. It is almost certain that she would not have got into the car if Rose had not been there. The Wests took her back to Cromwell Street where they raped and tortured her for about a week, then murdered her, dismembered her body and buried it under the house.
Fred cut himself while dismembering Lucy’s corpse and went to the hospital to have the wound stitched on 3 January 1974. By then, Lucy – like Carol Ann Cooper – had been reported missing, but there was nothing to connect either of the girls to the Wests. Their bodies were concealed in Fred’s home improvement scheme. This involved enlarging the cellar and turning the garage into an extension of the main house. The only thing remotely suspicious about this was that Fred’s home improvements were done at strange hours of the night. However, West did attract police attention. To pay for his home improvements – and the concrete he covered the corpses with – he committed a series of thefts and fenced stolen goods.
Three more young women – 15-year-old schoolgirl Shirley Hubbard, 19-year-old Juanita Mott from Newent in Gloucestershire and 21-year-old Swiss hitch-hiker Therese Siegenthaler – also ended up under the cellar floor at 25 Cromwell Street. They had been tortured and dis-membered. The Wests had subjected them to extreme bondage, using plastic washing lines and ropes to suspend them from one of the beams in the cellar, and gagging them with tights, nylon socks and a bra. Shirley’s head had been completely encased in tape with a plastic tube up her nose to allow her to breathe. Juanita had been gagged with a bra, two pairs of tights and two of Rose West’s long, white nylon socks. Then she had been trussed up with plastic-covered washing line. This looped around her wrists and ankles, her arms and thighs, and her head, so that she was completely immobilised. A 7ft length of rope with a slipknot at the end to form a noose was also found with her body. This was thought to have been used to suspend the terrified girl from one of the overhead beams.
In the spring of 1977, Rosemary enticed a young woman from a local home for wayward girls back to Cromwell Street. Being underage, the court called her Miss A. At Number 25, she was fondled by Rosemary before being taken to a bedroom where two naked underage girls were being held prisoner. Miss A was then stripped as well. Once Rosemary was naked, Fred trussed one of the girls up with parcel tape and Rosemary abused her with a vibrator.
‘Are you enjoying this, Fred?’ said Rosemary. ‘Is it turning you on?’
West then raped the girl.
Rosemary then bound Miss A with tape and abused her with what felt like a candle, while Fred masturbated. He then raped her. Afterwards, she was freed and went to the bathroom with her dress. She put it on and fled the house barefoot, but was too ashamed to tell anyone what had happened at the time.
It is likely that one of the girls held in the bedroom was Anne-Marie, Fred’s daughter, who was the regular target of the couple’s sexual sadism. But Fred West not only raped and tortured his own daughter, he brought home other men to have sex with her.
Fred had extensively remodelled the house. Upstairs, he had constructed extra bedrooms for the lodgers. One of them was 18-year-old Shirley Robinson. A former prostitute with bisexual inclinations, she had sex with both Rose and Fred.
Rose fell pregnant by one of her West Indian clients and gave birth to Tara in December 1977. At the time, Shirley was also pregnant, carrying Fred�
��s child. Rose was unhappy about this; she feared that Shirley would displace her in Fred’s affections. So she had to go. In July 1978, Shirley Robinson was strangled. By this time, the cellar was full, so Shirley and her unborn child became the first to be buried in the back garden at 25 Cromwell Street.
In November 1978, Rose gave birth to another daughter. She was Fred’s child and they named her Louise. There were now six children in the household and, from an early age, they were aware of what was going on. They knew that Rose was a prostitute and that Anne-Marie was being sexually abused by her father. Anne-Marie eventually fell pregnant by Fred, but it was an ectopic pregnancy and had to be aborted. She then moved out to live with her boyfriend, so Fred turned his sexual attentions towards Heather. Heather tried to resist and was beaten.
Not even the loss of Rose’s father in May 1979 disturbed the Wests’ gruesome activities. Several months later, a troubled 16-year-old from Swansea named Alison Chambers began to visit. Twenty-five Cromwell Street appeared to be a haven away from the children’s home that she loathed. Other girls from the children’s home also visited and the Wests encouraged them to make extra money as part-time prostitutes. One recalled being tied to a slab in a satanic ritual where she was raped by Fred West as eight men looked on.
Alison Chambers soon featured in both the Wests’ sex lives. On 4 August 1979, she decided to run away from the children’s home. It was clear that she intended to live in Cromwell Street although her friends were to tell the staff that she had run away to Wales. She was supposed to meet her friends the next day to collect some clothes she had left behind. She did not turn up and the following day the police were informed. However, in September, her mother received a letter from her saying she was living with a ‘very homely family’ and looking after their five children. This was enough to persuade the social services that she was not a missing person. The letter betrayed no sense of danger. Nothing is known of what happened to Alison until her thighbone was unearthed from under the patio at 25 Cromwell Street years later.
Bodies in the Back Garden--True Stories of Brutal Murders Close to Home Page 3
