Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  The cruel mother

  Like her father before her, Rose was only kind to children whilst they were babies that had no strong personalities of their own. As soon as they began to walk and talk she would fly into her frequent rages, hitting the children because they dropped a fork or trampled a little mud into the carpet. She made them finish every meal even if they strongly disliked that particular foodstuff and clearly saw children as having absolutely no right to respect, choice or love.

  Once when they were talking to each other from their beds, she threw them outside in their nightwear and locked the door, leaving them frightened and frozen. Her children would frequently be seen at hospital Accident & Emergency departments, but, again, the authorities failed to intervene.

  The babysitter

  However, for a few weeks there was some happiness in Anne Marie’s life when Rose took on a live-in babysitter, Caroline Owens. Seventeen-year-old Caroline got on very well with Anne Marie and little Heather. Rose also had a new baby, born that May, who she called Mae. But Rose made it clear that she wanted to have a much more intimate relationship with the pretty babysitter. She kept coming into the bathroom when Caroline was having a bath and would talk to her whilst suggestively stroking her hair. Caroline’s own childhood had been unhappy so she welcomed Rose’s friendship, but she didn’t want to indulge in lesbian sex.

  Fred told the babysitter that Anne Marie wasn’t a virgin but when Caroline looked horrified he added that she’d broken her hymen in an accident on her bicycle. Meanwhile Rose’s advances intensified so Caroline left.

  But Rose wasn’t prepared to let this object of desire get away. She had power over her children and over the men who she met through contact ads - by now Fred had installed secret peepholes and recording equipment in the master bedroom and Rose would position her lovers so that Fred got the best possible view of her having sex with them. Most of these men were so impressed at her sexual skills that they became regular visitors. Now she wanted to exercise the same power over Caroline.

  She and Fred decided to kidnap the girl. They recalled the route she travelled to visit her boyfriend - and knew that she had no reason to fear violence from them.

  On 4th or 6th December 1972 the Wests drove along until they saw the unsuspecting teenager. They picked her up, but as soon as she got into their car she detected a strange atmosphere. Rose said that they should chat and quickly got into the back seat with her. Fred started driving and Rose began to touch Caroline’s breasts. She protested but Rose continued to assault her, stroking her legs and trying to kiss her on the lips. Caroline tried to fend the older teenager off - despite her life experience, Rose was still only nineteen - at which stage Fred turned around and punched Caroline, knocking her out. They then parked, taped her limbs together and drove her to Cromwell Street.

  She regained consciousness as they neared the Wests house, and found that Rose was still grinning strangely. They marched her into the house and up to their bedroom, where Fred beat her vaginally with a belt buckle, causing her intense pain. Both Wests extensively caressed her and Rose went down on her - until then, the teenage Caroline hadn’t even known about oral sex. Though they blindfolded her, she could feel Rose’s long nails entering her intimately.

  A long night of such abuses followed, during which she had sticky tape wrapped around her face - this would become one of the Wests’ trademarks in their later sexual murders. She could hear Rose laughing after she was gagged and bound. At one stage Rose went away for a few minutes and Fred raped her and then cried. He said that Rose had devised the plan to kidnap Caroline because she had especially strong lesbian desires when she was pregnant. (Rose must have been a month or so pregnant with Stephen at this time as he was born in August 1973.) As the sexual assaults continued, Caroline fully expected to die.

  Early the next morning she heard visitors arriving at the house and tried to make a noise to let them know that she was there. Enraged, Rose put a pillow over Caroline’s head and began to suffocate her. Fred was also very angry when he re-entered the room. By breakfast time, however, the couple seemed to have worn themselves into a post-orgasmic lull, and they began to speak to her normally, asking if she would become their live-in babysitter again.

  Acting for her life, Caroline said yes and they freed her from her bonds. She was allowed to clean herself up, then she helped Rose tidy the house and care for the children. When all of them left the house to go shopping, she said that she’d go back to her mother’s house and pack a bag.

  Instead, Caroline went to her mum’s house and bathed repeatedly. When her mother saw the injuries caused by Fred punching her and by the actions of ripping the brown tape off, she asked her daughter what had happened. Caroline told her and her mother contacted the police.

  Rose in court

  The police went round to Cromwell Street and were met with verbal abuse from Rose. She denied everything, but the police found one of Caroline’s buttons in the Wests’ car. They also found the sticky tape used to bind the terrified teenager. Fred should really have been charged with rape - but Caroline was too afraid to testify in court against him. Instead all parties settled for the more minor charge of assault.

  Rose and Fred answered this charge in January 1973. Their solicitor managed to play down the abduction till it sounded as if a consensual threesome had just gotten slightly out of hand. As a result, the couple were merely fined a total of one hundred pounds. Letting one of their victims go had clearly backfired against them. The sensible solution would have been to stop creating victims - but instead, Fred and Rose decided that their next sexual plaything would have to die.

  Rose would ultimately be found guilty of all of the murders that are listed below - but a very few writers and at least one of Rose’s children believe that she played no part in the deaths, that they were all committed by Fred West acting on his own.

  Linda’s murder

  Three months after Caroline’s abduction, in the spring of 1973, Linda Gough came to the Wests for support having had an argument with her parents. The nineteen-year-old seamstress had visited the house often in the past as she had had relationships with two of their lodgers. She had also babysat for the Wests.

  Now someone took Rose’s former babysitter to the cellar and bound her face with surgical and brown tape. What happened next will probably never fully be known, but it’s believed that all of the cases involved sexual torture. The Wests vaginally penetrated and sodomised many of their consensual sexual partners with large vibrators, so it’s likely they did the same thing to the young woman they eventually killed. Fred had also told one of his earlier potential sexual partners that she could burn or flog him or let him do the same to her…

  It’s likely that Linda was suspended from the ceiling whilst these abuses were taking place, as Fred had fashioned holes in the beams. When finally imprisoned, he told one of his sons that he hung his victims there.

  After Linda died, Fred completely dismembered her body and buried it below the house. It would remain there for the next twenty-one years and when it was finally unearthed by the authorities, some small bones would be missing. The tape that had been used to silence her was found still wrapped around the skull.

  Meanwhile, Linda’s parents began to search for her. Her mother went to Cromwell Street and Rose answered but said that she didn’t know a Linda Gough. But Mrs Gough pointed out that Rose was wearing Linda’s slippers - and that some of her daughter’s clothes were drying on Rose’s washing line. At this stage Rose admitted she’d remembered who Linda was, but said that she’d gone. Linda’s recent relationship with her parents had been awkward, so though they searched for her they didn’t assume the worst when she didn’t get in touch.

  Carol’s murder

  The Wests had gotten away with murder again - and for a few months their memories of abusing Linda presumably sustained them. Rose may also have been tired throughout the summer as she was increasingly pregnant with the son she’d ultimately name Steph
en. He was born in August 1973, and by November the couple were ready to kill again.

  In November a fifteen-year-old girl called Carol Anne Cooper was seen waiting for a bus that would take her to her grandmother’s house. Thereafter she vanished. She had been in care so was desperate for affection and probably accepted a lift from the smiling Wests.

  She, too, was bound and gagged and suspended from the cellar’s rafters. When her body was eventually found it had a deep mark in the skull, suggesting that she’d been stabbed through the head. This particular injury may have been post mortem as Fred liked to decapitate the dead women. He also enjoyed sawing off the thighs and would later hint to his son that he had sex with the corpses, the ultimate controlling sexual act.

  It seems that Fred liked to take care of the bodies after death - though he also enjoyed brutalising them whilst they were bound and gagged in the cellar. It’s not clear whether Rose took part in the dismemberments, but the way she acted after abducting Caroline Owens, and with even younger girls whom she lured to the house for juice and biscuits, makes it clear that she enjoyed forcing large objects into her victims to make them cry out. She also liked to scare her consensual female sexual partners, tying them tighter than they liked and partially restricting their breathing then gloating about her intensifying power.

  Lucy’s murder

  Carol’s murder didn’t seem to satisfy them for long. Leastways only a month elapsed before they abducted their next victim, Lucy Partington. She was a religious university student, the twenty-one-year old niece of the late writer Kingsley Amis. Lucy had visited a disabled friend on 27th December and was waiting at a dark bus stop to catch the bus home when Fred and Rose presumably drove past.

  It’s likely that they forced her into the car - she was an intelligent, cautious girl who wouldn’t have accepted a lift from strangers. Fred would later lie that she and he had earlier been lovers, but in truth she would have had nothing in common with this semi-literate man who was rarely clean.

  Lucy was taken to the Cromwell Street cellar, bound, and treated as badly as her predecessors. She may have been kept alive for up to a week as Fred attended casualty seven days later with a bad hand wound, probably received whilst cutting her body up. He also decapitated her corpse and buried it in the basement. Another young life had been cruelly stolen in exchange for a few days of depraved lust.

  But not every hunting trip was a success - so Rose and Fred decided that they would now only advertise for single female lodgers. If a girl was beholden to them for the roof over her head then it was harder for her to resist their requests for sex.

  The couple also took to loitering about outside orphanages, where Rose would engage the most needy girls in a motherly chat. Later she’d invite them round to play with the babies. Word soon got around that Cromwell Street was a good place to go for a nice afternoon out.

  But after a while Rose would start stroking the young girl’s hair and telling her that it was alright to touch. Many of these girls just froze, but some felt too scared to protest and allowed the paedophiliac acts to continue. On other occasions she’d answer the door wearing very little then make it clear that she had no panties on under her skirt.

  On one occasion Rose tied up two girls and buggered them both with a candle or a vibrator then Fred had intercourse with them. One of the girls might have been Fred’s daughter Anne Marie as both parents had been abusing her for several years. Rose regularly beat Anne Marie and locked her in the cellar. Rose also took pornographic photos of the child and let her be sexually abused by Rose’s own father, Bill Letts.

  Rose even made Anne Marie dress up and go out to pubs with her in the hope of attracting men to make up a foursome. By the time Anne Marie was thirteen she would be forced to have sex with several of Rose’s clients.

  After these abuses, the girls from the orphanage were in great pain and they often bled. (Anne Marie would have an ectopic pregnancy by her father when she was fifteen.) But they would also feel confused. After all, Rose had been so nice to them up till now. Had they sent her the wrong signals? These girls had been abandoned by their families and had sometimes been criticised or punished within the care system. They had little sense of self worth and tended to blame themselves for everything.

  Thankfully, some of the girls would find the courage to tell of their abuse at Rose’s hands when Rose finally ended up in court, though the fact that they had taken money from the tabloid press somewhat tarnished their testimony. For now, though, Fred and Rose weren’t finding these assaults on orphaned teenagers exciting enough, so another young female stranger had to die…

  Theresa’s murder

  In April 1974 Rose and/or Fred picked up a twenty one year old Swiss girl, Therese Siegenthaler. It’s possible that Fred had someone other than his wife already in the car with him as the police suspected at least one other man was involved in the murders. Theresa was studying in London, but they gave her a lift when she was hitchhiking between London and Wales. She had taken self defence classes in the past but was clearly no match for whoever overpowered her. Theresa was driven to Cromwell Street where someone wrapped a brown scarf tightly around her mouth and bound her limbs with rope. The inevitable abuses followed until finally Fred dismembered and decapitated her corpse and buried it in the cellar.

  Another death?

  Four months later Rose presented herself at the hospital with a very badly cut finger that required a hospital stay. She made up various stories about what had happened, which later made the authorities wonder if she was trying to conceal another murder. Then again, she’d lied often since childhood and may even have been covering up the fact that she’d attacked one of her children with a blade. Later the children would testify that she’d sometimes lunged at them with kitchen knives during a rage.

  It’s also possible that Fred cut her during an argument. The children would say that the atmosphere worsened when Fred came home at night, and then he would get angry if Rose didn’t want to prostitute herself for him. But apparently Rose also lunged at Fred with a knife on one occasion, and when he slammed the door the blade went into her hand.

  Shirley Hubbard’s murder

  Three months after this hospital stay, in November 1974, they encountered fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard. A witness had seen her getting on a bus, so presumably the Wests offered her a lift when she got off at her journey’s end.

  This teenager was more heavily bondaged than the other victims buried under the floorboards. It’s been said that the female serial killer often tries to kill an earlier representation of herself, as if trying to snuff out a painful memory. At fifteen, Rose had been rejected by both parents and soon made pregnant by Fred - so she possibly hated everything about this girl aged fifteen. And Shirley - who had been in care since her childhood - was beautiful and interested in clothes and makeup, whereas twenty-one-year old Rose wore old clothes and schoolgirl-like white socks and had heavy unstyled hair.

  The killer or killers bound the teenager’s face very heavily, leaving only a slender tube protruding from one nostril to allow her to breathe. They left her eyes uncovered so that she could see what was about to happen - and so that they could see her terror. They stripped her and assaulted her, then Fred dismembered her corpse. When her makeshift grave was finally discovered, many of the bones and part of the torso had gone.

  Juanita’s murder

  Five months later, in April 1975, one or both of the Wests picked up eighteen year old Juanita Mott as she hitchhiked to a friend’s house. Earlier Juanita had rented a bedsit from them and had babysat for their children so she had no reason to assume that they meant her harm.

  Her abductors now gagged her with a pair of long white socks and tights then bound her using several feet of plastic rope. When the body was eventually found it would be clear that the eighteen-year-old had been trussed up like a mummy. She too was suspended before the sexual torment took place. Juanita may have ultimately been killed by a hammer as her skull was in
dented when it was unearthed in the basement of Cromwell Street.

  A period of domesticity

  After this April 1975 death, life seemed to return to normal - or as near to normal as was possible for the Wests - for a couple of years. Fred decided to make extensive renovations to the house and this included turning the torture chamber into bedrooms for the children. Rose still entertained clients in the master bedroom upstairs. He also built an extension into the garden and made the lodger’s flats in the upper part of the house completely self contained.

  Rose continued to go out to pick up men, and during one of her trips she met and began talking to an eighteen-year-old girl called Shirley Robinson. Other accounts say that it was Fred who met Shirley first, chatting her up in a cafeteria. Shirley had had a very hard life and was working as a prostitute. Either Rose or Fred invited Shirley to come and stay with them and their children. She would ultimately become the second victim called Shirley that they would kill.

  Shirley moved into Cromwell Street in the late spring of 1977. At first they all got on well. Rose was newly pregnant, this time with one of her coloured lover’s babies, so appreciated the help that Shirley could give around the house. Shirley had had other lesbian relationships so it’s likely that at the start they made a sexual threesome, but over time Shirley started to have feelings for Fred. She assumed that Rose wouldn’t mind - after all, she was still having sex with Jamaican men.

  By the early autumn of that year, Shirley was expecting Fred West’s child. She was happy about the pregnancy - but Rose became jealous of the closeness between them. Her jealousy was compounded by the fact that Fred kept joking that Shirley would be his next wife.