Rose West
Rosemary Pauline West is an English serial killer who collaborated with her husband, Fred West, in the torture and murder of at least ten young women between 1973 and 1987; she also murdered her eight-year-old stepdaughter, Charmaine, in 1971. The majority of these murders took place at the West residence at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester.
Rose is currently an inmate at New Hall Prison in Flockton, West Yorkshire, after being convicted in 1995 and sentenced to ten life terms with a whole life order. Fred committed suicide in prison that same year while awaiting trial, following the couple's arrest in 1994.
Early life
Rose West was born Rosemary Pauline Letts in Northam, Devon, to William Andrew "Bill" Letts and Daisy Gwendoline Fuller after a difficult pregnancy. She was the fifth of seven children born into a poor family. Rose's mother suffered from clinical depression and was given electroconvulsive therapy both during and immediately after her pregnancy; some have argued that this treatment may have caused prenatal developmental injuries to her daughter.Rose grew up into a moody teenager, prone to daydreaming and performing poorly at school. After her parents separated she initially lived with her mother and attended Cleeve School for six months, then moved in with her father in Bishop's Cleeve, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Rose's father, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, was prone to extreme violence and sexually abused Rose and her oldest sister, Patricia.
At the onset of puberty, Rose, reportedly fascinated by her developing body, would deliberately parade naked or semi-naked around the house in the presence of her younger brother, Graham. On numerous occasions, at the age of 13, she would creep into nine-year-old Graham's bed at nightfall and molest him and her youngest brother, Gordon.
Meeting Fred West
Rose first encountered Fred West at a Cheltenham bus stop in early 1969, shortly after Rose had turned 15 and when Fred was aged 27. She was initially repulsed by Fred's unkempt appearance, but quickly became flattered by the attention he continued to lavish on her over the following days as he invariably sat alongside her at the same bus stop. Rose twice refused to go on a date with Fred but allowed him to accompany her home.Having discovered Rose worked in a nearby bread shop, Fred persuaded an unknown woman to enter the premises and present her with a gift accompanied by the explanation that a "man outside" had asked her to present this gift to her. Minutes later, Fred entered the premises and asked Rose to accompany him on a date that evening, an offer she accepted. Shortly thereafter, Rose began a relationship with Fred, becoming a frequent visitor at the caravan park where he lived with the two children from his first marriage to Catherine "Rena" Costello, daughter Anne Marie and stepdaughter Charmaine. Rose became a willing childminder to Fred's daughters, who she noted were neglected and whom she initially treated with care and affection. On several occasions in the early days of their courtship, Rose insisted she and Fred take the girls on excursions to gather wildflowers.
Within weeks of her first encounter with Fred, Rose left her job at the bread shop to become a full-time nanny to his children; this decision was made with the agreement that Fred would provide her with sufficient money to give to her parents on Fridays to convince them she was still obtaining a salary at the bread shop. Several months later, Rose introduced Fred to her family, who were aghast at their daughter's choice of partner. Rose's mother was unimpressed with Fred's boastful and arrogant behaviour, and correctly concluded he was a pathological liar. Her father vehemently disapproved of the relationship, threatening Fred directly and promising to call social services if he continued to associate with his daughter.
Relationship
Rose's parents forbade their daughter from continuing to date Fred, but she defied their wishes, prompting them to visit Gloucestershire's social services agency to explain that their 15-year-old daughter was having a sexual relationship with an older man and that they had heard rumours that she had begun to engage in prostitution at Fred's caravan. In response, Rose was placed in a home for troubled teenagers in Cheltenham in August 1969, and only permitted to leave under controlled conditions. When allowed to return home to visit her parents at weekends, Rose almost invariably took the opportunity to visit Fred.On her 16th birthday, Rose left the home for troubled teenagers to return to her parents while Fred was serving a thirty-day sentence for theft and unpaid fines. Upon his release, Rose left her parents' home to move into the Cheltenham flat he then lived in. Shortly thereafter, Fred collected Charmaine and Anne Marie from social services. Rose's father made one final effort to prevent his daughter from seeing Fred, and Rose was examined by a police surgeon in February 1970, who confirmed she was pregnant. In response, Rose was again placed into care but was discharged on 6 March on the understanding she would terminate her pregnancy and return to her family. Instead, Rose opted to live with Fred, resulting in her father forbidding his daughter from ever again setting foot in his household.
Three months later Fred and Rose vacated the Cheltenham flat and moved to the ground-floor flat of a two-storey house at 25 Midland Road in Gloucester. On 17 October 1970 Rose gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Heather Ann. Two months later Fred was imprisoned for the theft of car tyres and a vehicle tax disc. He remained imprisoned until 24 June 1971. As he served this six-and-a-half-month sentence, Rose, having just turned 17, looked after the three girls, with Charmaine and Anne Marie being told to refer to Rose as their mother.
According to Anne Marie, she and Charmaine were frequently subjected to extensive physical and emotional abuse throughout the time they lived under Rose's care at Midland Road. Although Anne Marie was generally submissive and prone to display emotion in response to the abuse, Charmaine repeatedly infuriated Rose by her stoic refusal to either cry or display any sign of grief or servitude, no matter how severely she was treated. Despite the years of neglect and abuse, Charmaine's spirit had not been broken and she talked wistfully to Anne Marie of the belief she held that her "mummy will come and save me." Anne Marie later recollected her sister repeatedly antagonised Rose by making statements such as, "My real mummy wouldn't swear or shout at us" in response to Rose's scathing language.
A childhood friend of Charmaine's named Tracey Giles, who had lived in the upper flat at Midland Road, would later recollect an incident in which she had entered the Wests' flat unannounced only to see Charmaine, naked and standing on a chair, gagged and with her hands bound behind her back with a belt, as Rose stood alongside the child with a large wooden spoon in her hand. According to Giles, Charmaine had been "calm and unconcerned", while Anne Marie had been standing by the door with a blank expression on her face.
Hospital records later revealed that Charmaine had received treatment for a severe puncture wound to her left ankle in the casualty unit of the Gloucester Royal Hospital on 28 March 1971. This incident was explained by Rose as having resulted from a household accident.
Murder of Charmaine West
Rose is believed to have murdered Charmaine shortly before Fred's prison release date of 24 June 1971. She is known to have taken Charmaine, Anne Marie and Heather to visit Fred on 15 June; it is believed Charmaine was killed on or very shortly after this date. As well as forensic odontology confirming that Charmaine had died while Fred was still incarcerated, further testimony from Tracey Giles' mother, Shirley, corroborated the fact that Charmaine had died before Fred's release. In her later testimony at Rose's trial, Shirley stated that her two daughters had been playmates of Charmaine and Anne Marie when her family lived at Midland Road in 1971. Shirley further stated that after her family had vacated the upper flat in April 1971, she had brought Tracey to visit Charmaine on one day in June, only for Tracey to be told by Rose: "She's gone to live with her mother, and bloody good riddance!"As with the Giles family, Rose explained Charmaine's disappearance to others who enquired about her whereabouts by claiming that Fred's first wife, Catherine "Rena" West, had taken her eldest daughter to live with her in Bristol. She informed staff at Charmaine's primary school that the child had moved with her mother to London. When Fred was released from prison on 24 June, he allayed Anne Marie's concerns for her sister's whereabouts by claiming Rena had collected Charmaine and returned to her native Scotland. In her autobiography, Out of the Shadows, Anne Mariewho was fully white while Charmaine was of part-Asian ethnicityrecollects that when she asked why her mother had collected Charmaine but not her, Fred callously replied: "She wouldn't want you, love. You're the wrong colour."
Charmaine's body was initially stowed in the coal cellar of Midland Road until Fred was released from prison. He later buried her naked body in the yard close to the back door of the flat, and he remained adamant he had not dismembered her. A subsequent post-mortem suggested the body had been severed at the hip; this damage may have been caused by building work Fred conducted at the property in 1976. Several bonesparticularly patellae, finger, wrist, toe and ankle boneswere missing from Charmaine's skeleton, leading to the speculation the missing parts had been retained as keepsakes. This would prove to be a distinctive finding in all the autopsies of the Wests' victims when they were exhumed in 1994.