Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Rose immediately made a fuss of the children and they responded as they’d had little attention in their lives. Fred, who had probably been planning this since setting eyes on the lonely, big-busted teenager, turned to her and suggested she’d make an ideal daytime babysitter. He’d pay her the same money that she was getting at the bread shop and she could tell her father that she was still working there.

  So fifteen-year-old Rose now made her covert way to the caravan every morning; a child looking after children. At first it was fun playing at house, and she got to escape from the little girls in the evenings. Then her controlling father found out…

  Determined to keep her from Fred (some criminologists believe that Bill had been having sex with his daughter since she turned thirteen) he put her in care. Whilst she was there she didn’t have a single visitor. During her three months in this home for troubled teenagers she sneaked out a few times to see Fred. She would write him a letter that said ‘we are two people, not two soft chairs to be sat on.’ And relatives would indeed watch her softness, her vulnerability, leach out of her over the years.

  A defiant pregnancy

  As soon as Rose left care at sixteen she went to Fred and got pregnant by him. It was her only means of ensuing that he’d have to stay in her life. After all, he’d been having sex with almost every young woman he encountered at work or who babysat for his children. She possibly thought it would also make her father accept him and accept that she was no longer a child. By now her parents were reconciled and the verbal and physical violence in the household had started up again.

  But Bill Letts didn’t accept the news of his impending first grandchild - instead he said that Rose could only stay if she had an abortion, and booked her into an abortion clinic without her permission. Rose would tell her children many years later that at this stage her father also gave her the beating of her life. The teenager turned to her mother for support but Daisy was too angry to even talk to her. Rose was, as usual, emotionally alone.

  Despite this ultimate cruel rejection, Rose felt happy as she left her parents house - freedom was hers at last, as was sudden adulthood. The crying child and abandoned teenager was about to become a stepmother of two and a birth mother of one. She would also start on the journey that would make her one of the most prolific and cruel female serial killers in British history…

  Rose moves in with Fred

  Without a friend in the world, Rose now went to Fred and he rented them a single room in Cheltenham. The place was dirty as he kept all his oily tools there. There were also clothes and food scraps littering the floor. They were two semi-literate people living with two neglected children, so it was hardly Romeo and Juliet but romance-craving Rose convinced herself that it was perfect.

  Her contentment increased when he found them a flat in Gloucester, at 25 Midland Road. That October she gave birth to their first daughter, Heather. The couple would tell each other that she was a child of love and Rose would promise to love Fred for as long as she lived.

  Their physical love - at the start - was very good as Fred was into heavy sadomasochism and Rose was more than willing to flog him for his sexual pleasure. She also enjoyed being beaten - and would later ask her female lovers to treat her equally aggressively. Meanwhile, Fred imbued the relationship with a special quality that went beyond the sexual, saying that they could virtually read each others minds. (Something that Judith Neelley and her husband, profiled earlier, also believed.)

  But he apparently didn’t read the signals that she hated being left alone with two school age children and a tiny baby. He worked long hours, leaving her trapped with the children in the barely furnished and uncarpeted flat. Keen to get something for nothing (a trait he would show throughout his life) he soon stole some tyres and was traced and sent to prison for ten months, the sentence to run from October 1970 until the summer of 1971. Heather was just a few weeks old.

  The teenage Rose was left with three kids, little money and no support. When her parents eventually visited, they could see she had recently been crying. Every time they called thereafter her eyes were red-rimmed and she lost an unhealthy amount of weight.

  She started to beat Anne Marie and Charmaine for being slow to eat their cereal or for laughing and talking together, the very things her father had beaten her siblings for. She pulled their hair and hit them on their heads with whatever crockery was available. She even beat them for wetting the bed.

  One of Charmaine’s friends rushed in to the house one day to find the little girl standing on a chair with her hands tied, whilst Rose stood behind her brandishing a wooden spoon. On other occasions Rose tied the children to the bed and went out for hours leaving them hungry and helpless. The children looked increasingly unloved and afraid. But, like all toxic parents, she was in denial about the damage that she was doing and wrote to Fred in prison that Charmaine liked ‘being treated rough.’

  Rose kills Charmaine

  During one of her attacks on Charmaine - in May or June of 1971 - she went too far and murdered the child. Many people think that she strangled her, as, during a rage, she would choke one of her later children, Stephen, into semi-consciousness. When neighbours asked where Charmaine had gone, Rose told them that she’d gone back to her mother, Rena. The school accepted this explanation too. In truth, Rose had dumped the little body in the coal cellar and turned her full rage onto seven-year-old Anne Marie. It was still a few weeks until Fred was to be released from prison but Rose wrote him increasingly romantic notes and he responded in his poorly spelt and ungrammatical hand.

  Bill Letts had at first visited the house with his wife Daisy but afterwards he would often visit on his own. It’s likely that at this juncture he began to have sex with Rose again.

  Fred came out of prison and buried Charmaine’s body in the backyard after taking the corpse apart and inspecting the way the bones fit together. Knowing that Rose, too, was now a killer he may have told her about a murder he’d committed on his own in 1967 - namely that of Anne McFall, his nanny turned lover who was eight months pregnant with his child. He would tell other people that he loved Anne, so it’s possible he killed her by accident during extreme bondage sex. Many couples indulge in exciting tying up games, but Fred also liked to restrict his partner’s breathing by using masks or tubes and bind and gag them so hard that they couldn’t move or verbally communicate. Suffocation could take place if their nostrils clogged.

  Whatever he did to kill Anne McFall, her body would eventually be found almost three decades later, in 1994 in a field near Fred’s childhood home, with the wrists bound and the fingers and toes cut off, presumably post mortem. The near-term foetus had been cut from her body and was buried a few feet away.

  Fred and Anne had been living in a caravan which doesn’t make an ideal dismemberment site - but Fred also had access to a lockable garage that his friends said had a horrible atmosphere. It’s likely that he carried her corpse there and cut it into pieces, something he’d done with animal carcasses when he worked in an abattoir. He would enjoy the comparatively unusual sexual thrill of dismembering female corpses throughout his life.

  The police and many locals would also later suspect Fred of murdering Mary Bastholm, a waitress at a cafe he frequented. She disappeared from a bus stop in 1969 - and Fred (sometimes accompanied by Rose) would later abduct other women from bus stops. Her body has never been found.

  After hearing his confession of killing Anne McFall and possibly Mary Bastholm, Rose might have told Fred that she was sleeping with Bill Letts, her father. Leastways Fred would later tell the police that he’d seen Rose and her dad having enthusiastic sex. Rose would have figured Fred wouldn’t mind - after all, he had allegedly slept with his own mother and sister. And his father had allegedly slept with his own daughters, Fred’s sisters. Fred’s father would also tell him how to disable farm animals in order to have sex with them. Moreover, Fred loved the idea - and the actuality - of Rose sleeping with someone else as long as he could watch or
could hear all the details afterwards.

  Rose and Fred now had a special but terrible bond between them as they were both killers - and killers who had gotten away with it.

  A far from ideal husband

  Fred’s sex life with Rose was based on consensual sadomasochism - but his earlier sexual experiences had been coercive and abusive. Many people believe that his mother took his virginity at age twelve. She was a huge woman who wore a belt around her waist with which she beat her other children - but Fred was her favourite so he escaped the worst of her wrath. He would later tell his own sons as they reached twelve years old that they were now old enough to have sex with their mum.

  The twenty-year old Fred came home after working away and was soon having sex with his thirteen-year old sister. It’s rumoured that he was the cause of her underage pregnancy, but in court she refused to say. He also had sex with animals in the fields around his simple village home. A tethered sheep makes few demands for satisfaction so he got used to being an impatient and selfish lover - Fred always came within about a minute of having sex with a woman and seemed to prefer the tying up or voyeuristic side of things. He also liked to keep mementoes such as his lover’s lingerie.

  When Fred wasn’t fashioning implements to use on Rose or making home improvements he was usually out of the house. He was an incredibly hard worker and was always doing overtime or doing up neighbours houses. He also walked the streets looking for dropped coins and went through rubbish dumps looking for clothes and toys that he could bring home. Rose was frequently left on her own with the crying baby Heather and equally tearful Anne Marie.

  The great escape

  After a few months of this Rose had had enough. She left, taking Heather, and went back to her parent’s house but her father said that she couldn’t stay permanently, that she had to remain in the marriage. After a few hours Fred turned up and said ‘Come on Rosie, you know what we’ve got between us’ - presumably a veiled reference to Charmaine’s murder and illegal burial. He also said that if she wasn’t back in a few minutes her place in the marital bed would be taken by someone else.

  Rose turned to her parents and said ‘You don’t know what he’s capable of - even murder,’ but they thought that she was just being melodramatic. Fred said that he’d wait for her in the van and after a few moments she walked towards it with the baby and climbed inside. It’s not clear what motivated her return the most - the fear that he would tell the authorities that she’d killed Charmaine or the fear that he would replace her, Rose, with another woman and that she’d never be loved by anyone else. Earlier she’d professed her amazement that he thought so much of her. After all, she’d been brought up to see herself as worthless, stupid and bad.

  Rosie does Gloucester

  Within months of Rose and Fred getting back together, he started to say that he wanted her to have sex with coloured men because they were genitally bigger than white men and could last longer. She could have as many coloured lovers as she wished in their Gloucester home and enjoy the resultant orgasms as long as he was allowed to watch.

  Fred wanted to know how far Rose could widen vaginally using different vibrators. He wanted to know how much semen another man produced. The wrongly-raised builder wanted to measure everything as if it was a building work project. He wanted to watch and hear rather than to directly participate.

  Till death us do part

  Despite his flaws, the teenage Rose continued to cohabit with him and asked him to become her husband, to give her increased stability. Fred might have wanted a wife that couldn’t testify against him. So they booked their wedding for 29th January 1972 at the local Registrars.

  Fred worked all morning then turned up at home just before the ceremony in his dirty working clothes. Rose was mortified that he wasn’t prepared to make the slightest effort. She had to beg him to get changed.

  It is telling that he conveniently forgot he was still married to Rena and put his marital status down as bachelor. Many writers made the assumption that he’d killed Rena by this stage, but it seems that he killed her later after she started trying to track down Charmaine. Pretending to be a bachelor meant nothing to Fred as - like most serial killers - he lied constantly.

  One of Fred’s brothers and a friend acted as witnesses and they all had a swift drink then went back to work. Rose asked for an alcoholic drink but Fred, who was virtually teetotal, snapped at her and bought her a soft drink. He was already intent on controlling her and would later get her to sign a slave contract saying that she would do whatever he desired.

  The move to Cromwell Street

  In the spring of that year Fred found the family a bigger house at 25 Cromwell Street, a few minutes walk from their existing flat in Gloucester. He worked all hours of the day and night to turn part of the house into cheap bedsits for students and other young people who wanted to tune in and drop out.

  Fred himself didn’t take drugs but he let it be known that he was liberal minded, that his lodgers could have a wild time. Rose also showed her liberal side, having sex with several of the male lodgers and, later, making passes at the female ones. Again, Fred made it abundantly clear that he didn’t mind. Whenever possible he would turn conversations with the lodgers round to sex or home-based abortions or to what bodies mutilated in car crashes looked like.

  Rose began to prefer females because they were softer and warmer, more giving. As long as Fred could watch or hear about it he was rapt.

  Life went on in a semblance of domesticity for a few months then Fred heard that Rena, his first wife, was back in the area, having formerly been living in Scotland. Worse, she was at Fred’s parents house and was asking to see her daughter, Charmaine.

  Fred was horrified. Rena probably wouldn’t care about his bigamous marital status - but if she found out that her child was dead she’d go to the police and he and Rose would go to jail.

  In August or September 1972 he consequently arranged to meet Rena at a quiet pub and got her very drunk. He probably walked or carried her to his car, pretending that Charmaine was waiting for her at his home.

  What happened next can never fully be known - most writers have speculated that he strangled her and dismembered her in the field where her body was ultimately found. But a length of piping was found in the grave, something that he could have used to let her breathe whilst the rest of her face was tightly masked to prevent her screams being heard. So he probably took her, semiconscious, to an abandoned outhouse and abused her before driving her body to its lonely burial plot.

  Anne Marie wouldn’t find out for many years that her mother, Rena, had died. Anne Marie hadn’t been quite as unhappy as Charmaine, because Fred was her natural father and he occasionally made a fuss of her. But all that was about to change…

  Anne Marie is raped

  During their first year at Cromwell Street, Fred spent a great deal of time doing building work in the cellar. One day, he and Rose started grinning strangely at eight-year old Anne Marie. Then they marched her down the stairs, saying that they were going to break her in, something that all good parents did.

  Anne Marie was uneasy, but, as always, she did what she was told. When they got to the cellar, Rose stripped her. The child started to cry, but Rose was impervious to her tears. She forced her down onto a mattress then sat on her face. Rose also scratched her stepchild’s chest until it bled.

  At a later date such scratches would be found on Anne Marie when her school took her swimming - and Heather would refuse to go swimming because the teachers would see her many bruises - but the authorities didn’t intervene.

  Fred now tied his daughter up and raped her, whilst a smiling Rose looked on. Rose then followed her usual tactic after any kind of abuse, by threatening the victim. She also kept Anne Marie off school for the rest of the week as she was bleeding internally and found it hard to walk.

  Some time after the rape, Rose tied the child to a metal frame that Fred had made and beat her then assaulted her sexually with a vib
rator. (Later she would make her son Stephen strip, then tie him up in the bathroom and beat him in an equally sexually-sadistic way.) Rose was by now placing photographs of herself in contact magazines, so had as many willing partners as she wanted. She was also having consensual sadomasochistic sex with a female neighbour, but she clearly found it more exciting to have an unwilling victim - and found an easy target in her helpless stepchild Anne Marie.

  The brood mare

  Over the years there would be more and more helpless children in Rose’s care because she gave birth almost annually. Fred would father Heather, Mae, Stephen and Barry by her. She would also have a miscarriage and possibly an early abortion. Later Rose would go on to have four children by her Jamaican lovers, children who Fred was proud of, though their dark skin made it absolutely clear that they weren’t genetically his.

  Sadly, despite his pride at their births, he would treat these children as badly as he treated the ones he had sired. Rose’s relationship with her own mother had been strained for many years but after she gave birth to half-caste children Daisy told her not to visit again and ignored the letters that Rose sent.

  Rose would later say that she had so many children because her husband refused to wear condoms and because the pill made her sick - but it’s more likely that she was repeating history and having as many children as her own mother had had. She would also recreate the hellish fear and tension of the household that she’d grown up in - only this time she’d be the one in charge.