Women Who Kill: Profiles of Female Serial Killers

by Carol Anne Davis

  Eighteen-year-old Shirley had by now seen Rose lose her temper with the kids - and realised that she would make a fearsome enemy. She tried to keep out of Rose’s way yet still attempted to stay close to Fred. As 1978 progressed, she started to sleep on the floor of one of the other lodger’s rooms, not wanting to be left by herself when Rose was at home.

  Fred told various people that Rose was really enraged at the situation. He added that Shirley would have to go. Everyone thought he meant that she’d have to leave the West household - but he and Rose had really decided that Shirley would have to die.

  Shirley Robinson’s murder

  In May 1978 one of the other lodgers came home to find Rose in Shirley’s room, packing away her stuff. Rose said that Shirley had left to visit relatives abroad and that she wouldn’t be coming back.

  In truth they had killed her, most likely by strangulation. Either Rose or Fred also cut the eight month baby from her womb and buried it near to her. One of them scalped the body then Fred dismembered it as he always did.

  By now Rose was in charge of all the money - from rent, her prostitution and husband’s wages. This suggests that she played an increasingly dominant role in the relationship. But Fred was equally capable of dominating, insisting that she still sleep with his coloured friends. Sometimes when they argued he hit her - at times she looked frightened of him and one client remembers seeing her with a badly blackened eye. In late 1978 she gave birth to her first mixed race daughter and the following year she gave birth to a second mixed race girl.

  Alison Chambers death

  After the 1978 birth, the Wests started enjoying their sex life again, this time with Alison Chambers, a seventeen-year-old girl who was clearly vulnerable. Alison had been in care until the Wests invited her to stay. She had few friends and was a dreamer who was desperate to be liked.

  Fred and Rose always had to have their own way, and it’s likely that at some stage Alison protested that the sex was becoming too violent. Thereafter (in September 1979) they apparently stripped her and gagged her with a belt, fastening it around her skull and under her jaw. They also tied her up and abused her then killed her and buried her in the garden. They had promised her that they’d take her to live on their fictitious farm in the country, but instead put her in a premature grave.

  In the same year Rose’s sadistic father Bill Letts died - and the murder of girls being buried under the Cromwell Street house stopped abruptly. The only body to be buried after this date would be that of Heather, their daughter, eight years later. Fred and Bill had become friends and had at one stage run a cafe together. Some crime writers have wondered if they also went out driving together looking for girls.

  An increasingly vicious mother

  After her father’s funeral, Rose continued to treat her children intolerably. She had always been cruel to Anne Marie - Fred had raped the child for years in his van and in derelict farms - so the terrified teenager left home when she was just fifteen years old. Fred then turned his incestuous attentions on his fourteen-year-old daughter Heather and increasingly molested her.

  Rose just laughed at Heather’s attempts to ward him off or erroneously called her firstborn a lesbian. And the abuse wasn’t just verbal and emotional - Heather was frequently beaten by Rose and was so badly bruised that she refused to participate in school gym lessons, a fact that earned her school detentions again and again.

  Other than that she was seen as a bright child, but an increasingly withdrawn one who had few friends. (The Wests wouldn’t allow their children to bring schoolfriends home, and timed their journeys back from school to make sure that they didn’t speak to anyone at length or go to the authorities.)

  At home, Heather would rock herself back and forth for hours - just as Rose had done as an abused child - and she had terrible nightmares. She bit her nails so badly that her fingers bled.

  Yet despite Rose’s poor relationships with Heather, Stephen and to a lesser extent, Mae, she continued to produce yet more children. In the summer of 1982 she had another daughter, and yet another in the summer of 1983, both by Jamaican men.

  Heather is murdered

  Desperate to escape from the brooding atmosphere of Cromwell Street, Heather left school in May 1987 and applied for a job at a holiday camp. She thought the job was hers but later got a phone call telling her that she hadn’t been successful. Heather was disconsolate, crying for most of the night.

  In June she was strangled by either Fred or Rose - Rose had previously almost strangled Stephen into unconsciousness during an argument so may have done the same thing to Heather, this time going further. Her remains were naked when found, suggesting sexual abuse, but she hadn’t been gagged.

  The other children came home that night to be told that Heather had left. Rose had been crying. A few days later she went to see her brother and sister in law and said that Heather had left because she was a lesbian. She added that they must not mention Heather’s name ever again.

  At other times she told neighbours that Heather had been hitting the younger children so she’d got rid of her. On yet another occasion she pretended that Heather had phoned to say that she was well. Later the other children contacted a Missing Persons programme in the hope that their beloved sister could be traced but they got no response so suggested calling the police. At this stage Fred said that Heather was involved in illegal activities and that they’d get her arrested if they set the police on to her.

  The reality was very different. Fred had dug a hole in the back garden and buried his daughter, paving over her makeshift grave with a patio at a later date.

  It’s possible that Rose didn’t know that Fred had killed Heather - she would sound genuinely shocked when eventually told of her death by the police and refused to eat for the next three days whilst in custody. And she would cry whenever her name was mentioned in court.

  Another threesome

  After Heather’s death, Rose continued to work as a prostitute but by now she restricted her business hours to one day a week. However she was still keen on ongoing sexual satisfaction. Fred did some work for a new neighbour called Kathryn and when he heard that she was bisexual he invited her home to meet Rose.

  Kathryn found that Rose was sexually aggressive from the start, sitting close to her and making it clear that she wasn’t wearing any panties. After a few drinks, the three of them went to bed.

  The threesomes - or more often twosomes when Fred was at work - became a regular occurrence, but soon the sex became more violent. The couple allegedly showed her bondage masks and restrictive suits that were too small for them but which had clearly been worn. And she claimed Rose put a pillow over her face and whispered ‘What’s it like not being able to see?’ She also asked how Kathryn would feel if she was left tied up all day and just tormented occasionally - a chilling account of what they actually did to victims who wouldn’t be missed.

  After one of those sessions, Kathryn decided not to go back to the Wests and soon she moved away from the area. If she had protested during a bondage session they may well have increased their abuse and then snuffed out her life.

  That said, she had contacted the press and accepted their offer of eight thousand pounds before going to the police, so, as was pointed out in court, she had good reason to make the sex sound frightening even if it hadn’t been.

  A break for freedom

  By the late nineteen eighties even Rose seemed to have had enough of Fred and their home-based life. She wanted him to take her out more. After all, she was in her mid thirties yet had never had a social life. Fred was now fifty and had no time for anything other than work and voyeuristic sex. So she started going alone to a country and western bar and became friendly with the bar staff. She and Fred would argue about this and he would hit her. She hit him back.

  In the same period she rented a flat of her own to take her lovers to. Observers say that Fred went to pieces at this time. Unable to control his wife totally any more he tried to control other
aspects of his universe, cleaning compulsively and talking endlessly of seeing bodies in car crashes, crashes that were never mentioned on the news and that no one else knew anything about.

  It’s likely that these car crash fantasies gave him an excuse to talk about what a dismembered body looks like, as he was still obsessed with thoughts of corpses. He was also very curious about the insides of living women and would keep a diary of his daughters’ menstrual cycles and take many videos of Rose’s vulva up close.

  Rose, for her part, always seemed willing to pose pornographically for the camera. Either she enjoyed being the voyeuristic centre of attention or it was an easy way to please Fred. Sometimes she’d be tired after shopping, cooking and cleaning all day and wouldn’t want to have sex with his Jamaican friends, but he would nag her until she gave in, saying, in a throwback to the Dark Ages, that a good wife always did what her husband said.

  Kathryn had been thirty when she got involved with the Wests - but Fred hadn’t lost his desire for much younger girls. One day he abused a child, both raping and sodomising her in the house and videoing the entire abusive episode whilst Rose was out at the shops. The girl was screaming and other people in the house tried to intervene but he’d locked the door. The child remained traumatised by the rape and in the summer of 1992 she told a friend who told the police.

  A visit from the police

  The police visited Cromwell Street to search for the video of Fred raping the girl. He was at work but Rose answered the door and lashed out at one of the constables. She had always seen her home as her castle and resented any intrusion from the outside world.

  She was arrested for assaulting the officer and charged with that and with the neglect of two of her children. She warned the bewildered youngsters not to say anything (about being sexually, physically and emotionally abused by her and by various relatives) then she was taken away.

  The five youngest children were immediately taken into care. Stephen was asked if he’d been abused, but he denied it as he’d been brought up to see the police as the enemy. Anne Marie told the truth but later tried to retract her statement as she was afraid.

  With all of the young children out of the house and Fred on remand, Rose found Cromwell Street a lonely place. She went to the local pound and got two terrier-like dogs for company. But she beat them viciously for the least imagined misdemeanour, just as she’d done with her kids.

  Whilst Fred was in jail pending his court case for rape, the Wests became very romantic towards each other on the phone. They also wrote loving letters. In one of those letters Rose apparently said that if Fred was found guilty she’d do time with him. Meanwhile she got a part-time job as a cleaning lady to bring some more money into the house.

  When Stephen visited his father, Fred wept and said he’d done some terrible things whilst Stephen was in bed at night. He obviously thought that the murders would be discovered any day.

  But soon he was released to a halfway house that he only had to return to at night. It looked as if once again the Wests might get away with it. Rose - sometimes accompanied by her grown up children - would travel there to meet him outdoors during the day. Fred and Rose would fondle each other quite openly during these visits to the amusement of passers-by and the embarrassment of their children. In the end the couple bought a small tent and had sex there.

  But even sex couldn’t take their minds off the fear of imprisonment. Rose must have realised that the net was closing in - leastways, when the police offered to return her pornographic videos she told them to burn them. She explained to Fred that they’d cost her her children - like most toxic parents she was unable to see that it was her cruelty that had led them to be taken away.

  The case against her and Fred collapsed when the terrified young girl refused to testify. But all five of the younger children opted to stay in care - and Rose seemed surprised by this. People who have seen pictures of the youngsters whilst they were with her say they looked lost and very subdued. Chillingly, she decided to have another child and had her sterilisation reversed, but miscarried at age thirty-nine.

  Settled in their foster homes, the little Wests began to say that Heather was buried under the patio. Fred had often joked about this but the older children had been worried that it was true when they could find no trace of their sister. The children had been close, united as fellow victims of abuse.

  Fred was let out by the end of the year and immediately returned to Cromwell Street and went back to work. But he was clearly frightened of something. Rose was also nervous, and they would sit on the settee holding hands and doubtless wondering what life would be like if the corpses under their feet were ever found.

  Meanwhile, a social worker contacted the authorities about the allegations that Heather was buried under the Cromwell Street patio. The police made extensive inquiries and realised that Heather West, Charmaine West and Rena West had all disappeared. Fred had allegedly raped a young girl, so had he raped Heather and then murdered her? They decided to investigate…

  The search of Cromwell Street

  On 24th February 1994, Rose’s twenty-one-year old daughter Mae opened the door to find a police team there with a search warrant. It said they were there to search for Heather’s body. Rose dismissed the search as stupid - but when they started to dig up the garden looking for Heather she went into shock.

  She told her son to phone Fred, to get him home no matter what - but his mobile phone was out of range and eventually his employer had to telephone direct to the house he was working on. When the family did get hold of him and told him what was happening he said he’d be home in a few minutes. Instead he disappeared for several hours.

  It’s likely that he went somewhere to destroy vital evidence - later he’d tell Stephen that he’d previously dismembered some of the bodies at a disused farm-house so perhaps he returned there to hide certain clues. Most of the bodies found at the Cromwell Street address had many bones missing so he may have kept them as grisly trophies at a derelict place.

  Rose cried and cried and refused to go to the station to make a statement. She was so upset at the view of the police digging up the garden that the children drew the curtains on the increasingly eerie scene.

  Fred protects Rose

  When Fred at last arrived home he told police they were looking in the wrong place, presumably hoping they’d find Heather and not the other bodies. He wanted to keep Rose out of the picture and clearly saw himself receiving a light sentence as he just told his children he might be going away for a time.

  The day after the digging started, the searchers found Heather West’s body. They also found an extra femur, which showed that a second body was buried nearby. Police arrested the Wests and Fred was charged with his daughter’s murder and sent to jail.

  Fred told police again and again that Rose had nothing to do with Heather’s death or the disposal of her body. He said that Heather had been rude to him when Rose was out shopping and that he’d strangled her with his hands or with a pair of tights or with an electric flex. An impulsive strangling, however, doesn’t explain the body’s nakedness.

  Fred had already told friends that he’d gotten Rose so young that he’d been able to train her to do whatever he wanted. Did that include covering up violent deaths?

  Rose is questioned

  The police asked Rose why Heather, Charmaine and Charmaine’s mother, Rena, had all disappeared. Rose told the story about Rena coming back to fetch the child. She was then asked about Heather and said that she was glad that Heather had left as she was a lesbian. At another juncture she said that they’d fallen out because Heather was hitting the younger kids.

  When told that Heather was dead and asked how she felt, Rose appeared to be deeply shocked. For the first time it occurred to the police that she genuinely might not have known Fred had killed their daughter. She told the police that she ‘didn’t know nothing’ and said that if Fred had killed Heather then he wasn’t right in the head. It’s clear that from
this point onwards she decided to disassociate herself from Fred.

  She was questioned for two days then released pending further inquiries. The next day she left Cromwell Street forever and moved with Stephen and Mae to a safe house. Meanwhile the police were still digging up corpses from the grounds.

  The suicide attempt

  Rose must have known that imprisonment was near - and she either decided to end it all or to make herself look emotionally vulnerable in the hope of obtaining a lighter sentence. Whatever her motivation, she swallowed the contents of a bottle of painkilling tablets then staggered through to her grown-up children in the other room. They phoned an ambulance and she had her stomach pumped out.

  Later she was treated for depression. It’s quite common for female serial killers to be treated for depression after their arrest or imprisonment - though they are usually depressed about their own fate rather than retrospectively feeling guilty about the incredible suffering that they’ve caused.

  Throughout February and March the police discovered partial female skeletons in the Wests’ garden - namely those of Heather West, Shirley Robinson and her foetus, Shirley Hubbard, Alison Chambers, Lucy Partington, Theresa Siegenthaler, Juanita Mott, Carol Anne Cooper and Linda Gough.

  In April they turned their attention to the Wests’ previous flat at Midland Street and found little Charmaine’s skeleton there. Later that month they unearthed Rena’s remains from a field near Fred’s childhood home. In June of that year they found the skeleton of his former lover Anne McFall and that of her unborn child.