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Fred and Rosemary West
Cromwell Street is a narrow road of Victorian houses, within a few hundred yards of the main railway station in central Gloucester. It is not a 'good' area - police are often called there to intervene in domestic disputes and brawls. However, to their neighbours, the Wests who lived in number 25 seemed a perfectly normal couple living in a three-storey, semi-detached house, situated at the endof a terrace, that was usually crammed with children and teenage lodgers.
Fred West was a swarthy, slightly simian-looking man with longsideburns, piercing blue eyes and a gap between his front teeth. He seemed to spend most of his spare time dressed in overalls, adding various extensions to his house. His wife, Rosemary, 12years her husband's junior, was plump, bespectacled and plain. To her friends she was known as Rose.
A few neighbours may have remarked upon the unusual number of male callers, many of them black, and the fact that three of Rose's daughter were of mixed race, but then, since most of the surrounding houses were full of bed-sits, no one was curious enough to pay them much attention.
In the early afternoon of Thursday 24th February 1994, a day of cold, grey drizzle, a squad car containing four policeman pulled up in front of 25 Cromwell Street. When Rose West answered the door, one of the policemen produced a warrant and told her that they intended to dig up her back garden. She went pale, as if about to faint, and then became hysterical. 'Get Fred!', she shouted over her shoulder to her son Stephen. She then began to accuse the policemen of harassment.
Frederick West was eventually reached at a house in Stroud, where he was treating timbers in the roof. When told that the police were going to dig up the garden at Cromwell Street, he promised to come home immediately. The journey should have take him half an hour but, three hours later, he had still not arrived.
Meanwhile, the police had torn down the fence at the end of the garden and had begun to dig. It had stopped raining, but it was now freezing cold; by four o'clock, darkness was beginning to fall.
The diggers switched on arc lamps plugged into the Wests' electricity supply. But by the time Fred West arrived home, shortly before six o'clock, the searchers had left, leaving a policeman to guard the back garden. Rose West had calmed down, but looked as if she was in shock.
Fred West, with the unworried look of an apparently innocent man, announced that he was going to the police station to make a statement. By the time he arrived there, he was in an aggressive mood. He had spent most of the previous year in custody on a charge of rape, but had been acquitted for lack of evidence. Now he accused the police of having a grudge against him.
He was told that they were looking for evidence concerning his daughter, Heather, who had not been seen since June 1987. West immediately declared, unprompted, that he had not murdered Heather - that, in fact, she had visited him recently when he was in jail in Birmingham - and he repeated this statement to a reporter from a local newspaper.
Meanwhile, back at Cromwell Street, Rose was being interviewed by two police officers in the first-floor room that served as a bar. They also wanted to known what had become of Heather. Rose claimed not to know - she said she had been out shopping on the day Heather went missing, and that by the time she returned, Heather had left.
She was reminded that, at an interview two years earlier, she had claimed that she had given Heather £600 to help her start a new life, and asked which bank account she had drawn it from. Again she became abusive. 'I can't fucking remember... What do you think I am, a bloody computer?' But she declared that Heather was difficult and obstinate child, and that they had never been on close terms.
By the time Fred returned home, the interviewers had left. Two of the West children, 20 year old Stephen and 21 year old Mae, were keeping their mother company. From the window they could see the light at the bottom of the garden where a policeman was guarding the hole and reading a book; the night was icy cold. The only thing that seemed to worry Fred was whether the police would discover that he had bypassed his electricity meter so that he would get a free supply.
At first light, the diggers returned. As Stephen was about to leave for work, Fred suddenly said, 'Look son, look after your Mum and Mae. I'm going away for a bit.' Stephen asked why. 'I've done something really bad. Go to the papers and make as much money as you can.'
Fred stared out the window at the diggers and, when he turned towards Stephen again, his face was contorted with fury. Stephen said later: 'His eyes bore straight through me.' Whatever reflections had occurred to Fred West had brought on one of his fits of rage.
Later that morning the Wests received another unwelcome visitor, Hazel Savage, a Detective Constable, accompanied by more policemen. Savage had been investigating the Wests since 1992, searching for evidence of child abuse. Both Fred and Rose detested her intervention that they were now under siege, but Fred, generally inclined to be conciliatory with authority, was polite.
When the policewoman asked Rose how she could get in touch with her mother, Rose flew into a rage and Fred had to lead her out of the room.
When he came back, he told police he was willing to go with them. It was at this point that Hazel Savage told him that he was being charged with the murder of his daughter Heather. As West left the house - photographed by a crowd of reporters - he was bellowing: 'I didn't kill my daughter.' Neighbours came out to see what all the shouting was about.
In the police car all the fight seemed to go out of him. Suddenly he turned to Hazel Savage and made the confession that she had been waiting to hear for a long time: an admission that he had murdered Heather and buried her in the garden. He added that the police were digging in the wrong place.
Later that afternoon, Fred West dictated a confession to the effect that he had killed his daughter, dismembered her body with a saw-edged knife he used for frozen food, and buried it in the garden under the patio. He had not intended to kill her, he said, but Heather had been sneering at him, so he decided 'to take that smirk off her face' and grabbed her by the neck.
Back at Cromwell Street, Rose West was sitting on the settee, sobbing. Stephen was trying to comfort her while his girlfriend Andrea made her tea. They were interrupted by two policemen, one of whom told Rose West that she was being arrested on suspicion of the murder of her daughter. When she was escorted out of the house a few minutes later, she seemed stunned and left without saying goodbye.
Stephen, Andrea and his sister Mae sat in the now-silent home, watching the digging at the bottom of the garden from high kitchen stools, drinking cups of tea and eating potato crisps. To them it all seemed oddly unreal.
In the past, Stephen and Mae had sometimes wondered if their father had anything to do with Heather's disappearance, but now the idea seemed totally absurd. When the diggers found a tiny bone - which turned out to be a chicken bone - Mae began to laugh and jumped about making clucking noises.
Later that evening, they received a phone call from their father's solicitor, Howard Ogden, asking them to come to the police station where Fred was being held. There they were conducted into an interview room. Moments later, Ogden walked into the room with Janet Leach, who had been assigned to Fred West as his 'appropriate adult' - a volunteer who is offered to mentally vulnerable people in custody to advise and assist them and to protect the police from accusations of oppressive behaviour.
Ogden told Stephen and Mae: 'I'm sorry to tell you that your father has admitted to killing your sister Heather.' Both were stunned. Stephen, who was standing up, slid down the wall and sat on the floor, crying. Andrea cuddled him in her arms.
Mae was the first to recover. She declared that her father must have made it up. Ogden shook his head. 'He's gone back to Cromwell Street with the police to show them where he buried the body.'
That night, the police continued to dig by floodlight, and Stephen and Mae were unable to sleep. By the following morning, the diggers had still found nothing. It was the same throughout the rest of that cold day. But, at last, Stephen and Mae were beginning to believe that their sister's body lay in the garden, a few feet below the surface. How would West have known this, unless he had dug that deep?
Now they were no longer able to look out of the window; the curtains had been drawn as protection from the press photographers all around the house. Outside, the police were digging up the garden where West claimed to have buried Heather, at a spot between a row of fir trees and the Seventh Day Adventists' church next door.
It began to rain and the police donned yellow waterproofs. West's instructions had been poor and it was not until late that afternoon, after they had dug another hole, that a sickening smell of decaying flesh suddenly told them that they had found what they were looking for.
When only 19, Frederick West was forced to leave home for make a 13 year old girl pregnant. No one in the family would speak to him, but West remained unabashed. Questioned by a social worker, he replied, 'Doesn't everybody do it?' His total lack of remorse shocked his interviewer, but anyone who knew his family background would not have been surprised by the tone of indifference in his answer.
West was descended from a line of countrymen on both sides. His father, Walter West, met a 16 year old Daisy Hill, a maidservant from Much Marcle in Herefordshire, in 1939, a few months after his first wife had died from a bee sting. They married in January 1940, and Walter became a cowman. Their first child, Frederick Walter Stephen West, was born on 29th September 1941.
Frederick was not particularly bright, and his school record was undistinguishable; he never learned to write properly, or to spell. But that did not really matter: with his father's income yielding a meagre £6 a week, Fred and the other children were expected to help out, by chopping wood and picking hops and strawberries.
Fred grew up in Much Marcle with his six younger brothers and sisters - Gwen, Kitty, Doug, Daisy, David and John. It was a remote country village, and the Wests, isolated from the outside world, were forced to spend a lot of time together.
The West household was dominated by an intense sexuality. Walter West was a man of powerful sexual appetites, who often said to his daughters, 'I made you, I can do what I like with you' - and by all accounts he did. (Many years later, Mae West's boyfriend reported that her father, Fred, had said these very same words at 25 Cromwell Street as he pulled a bath towel from Mae.)
Daisy West appears to have taken part in these activities as well. Perhaps in retaliation for her husband's transgressions, she is alleged to have seduced Fred - who was a classic 'mother's boy' - when he was just 12. But even at that age, Fred may not have been a virgin.
With his mother thinking he could do no wrong and his father sexually abusing his own children, it is not surprising that Fred developed symptoms of a psychopathic personality - such as compulsive thieving and lying - for he lived permanently in a fantasy world in which there were no guidelines to distinguish right from wrong.
Fred also had a gift for telling stories. But these had little contact with reality; he invented his stories as he went along and would embellish his role with outrageous descriptions of his achievements. He genuinely believed that what passed through his head at any given moment was the truth, whether it was based on fact or not.
In part, these tales compensated for the utter mundaneness of his life and, on the surface, appeared to be the harmless ramblings of an overactive mind. Fantasy, after all, can be a fruitful playground for a child's developing imagination.
But extreme fantasy in an adolescent approaching manhood is something else. By his mid-to-late teens, West's fantasies were becoming increasingly sexual and dangerous, for he viewed girls as objects of pleasure to be enjoyed as he saw fit, irrespective of whether they liked him or not. Around this time, he started molesting young girls.
Rosemary Pauline Letts was born on 29th November 1953 in Northam, Devon. Both her parents had mental problems: while carrying Rose, her mother - had received electroconvulsive therapy for depression. Her father, Bill Letts, was diagnosed as a schizophrenic with paranoid tendencies. His profound sense of insecurity, fuelled by a total lack of self-esteem, never allowed him to admit that he might be wrong.
He was an autocratic father, expecting his family to obey his every word, and he would beat the children for the slightest transgression. However, his wife received the harshest treatment, possibly because he resented the attention that she gave to the children.
Somehow, Rose managed to escape the beatings. She was so passive that her siblings used to call her 'Dozy Rosie'. But whereas the atmosphere of violence and mental torture deeply affected the rest of the family, Rose appeared unperturbed; she dealt silently with her father's rages, never arguing or answering back.
Bill Letts violence finally tore the family apart. One day in 1968, Daisy and the others fled from their current home in Bishop's Cleeve and moved to a farmhouse. Rose stayed behind - she never explained why - but relatives thought it was because she was having an incestuous relationship with her father. Local people believed that Letts was sexually attracted to children in general.
Rose appeared to accept her father's sexual attentions as normal. She may have been pliable because sexual intimacy with him was preferable to the alternative - mental and physical abuse.
Though backward at school, Rose was not weak-minded and had an 'animal' cunning that gave her a remarkable inner resilience.
For all her apparent acquiescence, Rose learned from her father how to deal with outwardly dominant men. When the pressure was greatest, it was Rose who held her nerve and the men who buckled. After Rose left her father for Fred, he could not handle the desertion and reacted like a jilted lover.
Likewise, Fred was unable to cope with the stresses of the trial without Rose beside him - once separated from her, he hanged himself when he realised that she had repudiated him.
By the age of 15, Rose had lived with an older man, and had, according to her brother, serviced a number of lorry drivers at a roadside snack bar. The signs that her sexuality was already starting to overwhelm her were already there.
Fred West experienced his first brush with the police at the age of 19, when he was charged with having unlawful sex with a 13 year old girl. For technical reasons, the case was dropped, and West walked free. This was the first of several narrow escapes from the law that marked him as a very lucky man.
As a result of the scandal, West was banished to live with an uncle and aunt. In the late summer of 1962, he met up again with an ex-girlfriend, Catherine (Rena) Costello, a Scottish teenager and erstwhile prostitute with dyed blonde hair, who was working as a waitress in nearby Ledbury. Rena and Fred had met two years earlier at a village dance, when she had come down from Glasgow to stay with relatives near Much Marcle. The couple had quickly established a sexual relationship that ended when Rena returned to Scotland a few months later.
This time Rena was pregnant as a result of an affair with a bus driver, but this did not seem to deter West from becoming her lover again. A few weeks later, they were married. West was 21 and his bride 18.
In search of a fresh start, the newlyweds moved to Coatbridge - Rena's hometown - in the industrial belt of central Scotland, and later on to Glasgow, where West found a job as an ice cream vendor. But the marriage soon began to founder. Apart from primitive living conditions, Rena had to contend with West's unpredictable mood swings, which could shift from vulgar jollity to volcanic rage in a matter of seconds, without the slightest provocation. Worse still was West's sexual appetite. He would demand sex from Rena at all hours of the night and day.
When she consented, his love making would be rough and brief, his concern focused on self-gratification. But what alarmed Rena most was that, increasingly, West could only find true satisfaction in sadistic sex. On the many occasions she refused to indulge his more violent sexual fantasies - bondage was a particular favourite - he would beat her anyway.
West was either unable or unwilling - probably a mixture of both - to contain his rapacious sexual impulses within the marriage and was soon having a string of affairs with young girls, often picking them up in his ice cream van and taking them to a garden allotment he had hired, where he would have sex with them in the shed.
In the thick of all this domestic turbulence, Rena gave birth to Charmaine on 22nd March 1963 and 16 months later, on 22nd July 1964, to another daughter - this time by West - whom they named Anna-Marie. (She later changed her name to Anne Marie.)
When he killed a boy in a road accident in early 1965, West decided it was time for the family to move back south. He had never settled down in Scotland and there had been long intervals when he simply disappeared, his restless nature getting the better of him.
Two local teenage girls, friends of Rena, decided to join them, persuaded by West that they would find a better life in rural Herefordshire. One of the girls, Isa McNeill, helped out as an occasional nanny for the children, the other, Anne McFall, a lifelong friend of Isa, was infatuated with West.
West went on ahead to find a job and somewhere for his extended family to live. He soon wrote back to say that he had found a house large enough for all of them. What they discovered on their arrival was that the 'large house' was nothing more than a small caravan at the Willows caravan site near the village of Kempley, 20 kilometres (12 miles) from Gloucester. West had spun yet another of his wild fantasies. It was a sign - albeit a small one - of just how easily he could lose his grip on reality.
Not surprisingly, life at the caravan site did not produce the sea=change fortunes that West promised back in Glasgow. Apart from the cramped conditions inside, Rena and the girls were kept as virtual prisoners. Isa and Anne were allowed to walk the children within the caravan park, but not outside it. For work, they were restricted to the odd babysitting job in other caravans, for which they were paid in food and cigarettes. They could not even afford the bus fare to Gloucester to look for proper employment.
Rena was more or less confined to the caravan itself. She had to be there whenever Fred returned for a break from the butcher's shop where he worked, which - since it was nearby - was often. Soon, however, West was pressing her to turn to prostitution again. On the surface this appeared to be a remarkable about-face for a man who had, only a year previously, beaten his wife brutally for taking a lover in retaliation for his many affairs. But what it revealed was West's underlying need to control the actions of the women in his life to the point where they would submit to his every whim. Rena could only have sex with another man if West gave his approval.
The idea of his wife having sex with other men also excited West. It enabled him to fantasise about Rena being satisfied in a way that aroused him fully. In time, this tendency to sex by proxy would develop into full-blown voyeurism.
To make matters worse, West's sudden mood swings were becoming increasingly volatile and his violent outbursts more frequent. Usually Rena bore the brunt of his fury, but Charmaine, his stepdaughter, who was growing into an iron-willed and fearless child, was also physically and - a girl at the caravan park was later to claim - sexually abused. When the pressure became too much, Rena would leave, only to return soon after on account of the children, who West was keeping.
On several occasions when Rena was absent, West put the children into temporary care. With hindsight, it is very tempting to blame the authorities for failing to identify Charmaine and Anne Marie as vulnerable children. Charmaine especially should have qualified under recently enacted legislation, which was intended to offer greater protection for fostered or adopted children, and West's family history should have been on the records of the Gloucestershire Children's Department. However, the families with whom the two little girls were fostered reported that they always seemed happy to see their father when he came to visit them.
In the spring of 1966, West's ill-treatment of Rena drove her to leave him and return to Glasgow with Isa. The plan had been to take the children with them while West was at work, and arrangements were made for Rena's former lover, John McLachlan, to drive from Scotland and collect them.
However, Anne, whose feelings for West were as strong as ever, could not resist alerting him to what was about to happen. West made sure he was at the site when McLachlan arrived and, in the screaming quarrel that followed, West grabbed hold of the children and refused to part with them. McLachlan eventually drove off with Isa and a distraught Rena, leaving Anne to have West to herself. It was the last time Isa saw her friend.
Sometime late in 1966, Anne became pregnant by West. By the middle of the following summer she had vanished, last seen on the Timerlands caravan site in Brockworth where she had been living alone for a while. When questioned by a child-care officer, West claimed that she had returned to Glasgow. Ironically, friends and relatives assumed from her silence that she had decided to make a new life for herself in England. She was never reported missing.
It was not clear why West killed Anne. It was one of the last murders he discussed with the police, by which time his mental state had deteriorated to such an extent that little of what he said made sense. It appeared from letters sent by Anne to her mother in Glasgow that she wanted to marry him.
But West was more concerned with Rena, who was still reappearing intermittently to be with the children, and may have decided that another baby to support was more than he could handle.
Although he took the police to the field where Anne was buried, West consistently denied having anything to do with her death. There was even a suggestion that Rena, who knew about the affair and was deeply upset by it, may have been involved. However, when Anne's remains - along with the skeleton of her unborn child - were recovered form her crude grave on 7th June 1994, the pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight, was in no doubt. The decapitation, dismemberment and mutilation of the body were consistent with the way West disposed of his later victims.
In September 1967, Rena returned to live with West, and the couple moved to the Lakeside caravan site at Bishop's Cleeve, near Cheltenham, where West found a job in a flour mill factory. But the marriage remained deeply troubled.
Reports as to what happened to Rena thereafter are extremely confused. West was officially charged with murdering her at some point between 1st January 1969 and 10 April 1994 - the date her remains where found in the field next to where Anne McFall was buried.
Of all attempts to establish when Rena died, probably the most plausible account is that she perished in August 1972 when she visited West at Midland Road to reclaim Charmaine: West murdered Rena to prevent her from discovering that Charmaine had already been killed.
However, when Rena's remains were excavated, a short length of metal tub was found among them, suggesting that, like some of his other victims, the tube had been inserted up her nose while she was gagged; she had then been subjected to a sexual assault. West may have killed Rena for convenience, but it also seemed that the experience gave him satisfaction.
Sometime in early 1969, West met a 15 year old girl called Rosemary Letts at a bus stop in Cheltenham. She was on her way back to Bishop's Cleeve, where she lived with her schizophrenic father. West was captivated by Rose. She was physically mature with a voluptuous figure, yet she behaved and dressed younger than her years. To crown it all, her attitude to sex was similar to his. In short, she was West's fantasy incarnate: a partner who, unlike Rena was willing to explore the peaks of sexual experience to the limit.
Rose was undoubtedly flattered by the attention that West - a man 12 years her senior - lavished on her. But despite this, and the powerful sexual chemistry between them, it was the children that first drew her to him. Caring for children had been the only activity that truly animated Rose, and initially she was more than happy to look after Charmaine and Anne Marie. It also offered her the only means of escaping her family.
Rose's parents were shocked by her choice of partner. They had heard rumours about West using Rose for prostitution and used every device at their disposal, including the social services to take their daughter into care, to keep her away from him. But when, by the end of November, Rose turned 16, the authorities no longer had control over her and she moved into West's caravan.
Just under a year later, on 17th October 1970, Rose gave birth to Heather, her first child with West. By now, they had moved with Charmaine and Anne Marie to 25 Midland Road in Gloucester. In November 1970, West was convicted on several charges of petty theft and dishonesty and sent to prison, leaving Rose, just 17, to look after two children and a newborn baby.
Charmaine was now increasingly vocal about wanting to live with Rena, her natural mother. As witnesses at Rose's trial were to testify, Charmaine and Rose disliked each other, and there were uncorroborated stories that Rose used to beat her. According to Anne Marie, Charmaine particularly irritated Rose because she refused to cry after her beatings.
Sometime in 1971, Charmaine vanished. A school photograph taken of her at the beginning of June proves that she was still alive then, but an ex-neighbour, Mrs Shirley Giles, who had brought her daughter round to visit Charmaine while - she maintained - West was still in prison, was told by Rose that Charmaine had already been taken away by Rena.
When Charmaine's remains were found in 1994, the forensic evidence revealed that the body bore all the signs of West's workmanship. Indeed, West confessed to murdering Charmaine and Rena on the same day, although he probably said this to protect Rose. The police believe that it was Rose who killed Charmaine - probably by accident - in a fit of blind rage. Stephen West later confided that his mother used to loose her temper with the children on an almost daily basis and that violent beatings were commonplace.
Rose West had gone out shopping, leaving her husband at home with five of their children, four girls and a boy, whose ages ranged from nine to 16. The children were watching television when West asked one of the girls to make him a cup of tea.
He then asked a 14 year old girl (to be referred to as Miss X, as her identity has since been changed) to bring some bottles up to the bar on the first floor and, as she obeyed, he followed her into the room and locked the door. Soon after that, the girl could be heard screaming: 'No, don't.' Eventually, one of the children went upstairs and knocked on the door, saying 'Your tea's ready, Dad.' A few minutes later, West came down, scowling.
Another child asked if she could go upstairs to see the girl. West replied brusquely: 'She's busy.' But the child took the first opportunity to slip upstairs. She found Miss X crying and writing in pain repeating: 'He hurt me, he hurt me.' She described how Fred West had raped her and how, at one point, he had grabbed her round the throat and squeezed until she thought she was going to die.
As soon as Rose came home, Miss X told her mother what had happened. Rose shrugged. 'Oh well, you were asking for it.' She was not the kind of mother to take the side of a child against her husband.
During the next few days, West raped the girl three more times, explaining that it might cause medical problems if he did not 'finish the job properly'. He even recorded one of the rapes with a video camera.
A few days later, the victim told a school friend what had happened, and the friend told her parents, who rang the police anonymously.
It was not the first time that the Gloucester police had heard rumours of child abuse in the West household, but they had never been able to accumulate strong enough evidence. They had also had occasion to question Fred about theft, so they decided to call at his home on the pretext of investigating stolen goods.
Early in the morning of 6th August 1992, they made a thorough search and found an extraordinary assortment of sex aids, including whips, dildos, rubber suits, chains, handcuffs, 99 pornographic videos - several showing Rose West having sex with other men - and a huge collection of hard-porn magazines. The police took these away. But they did not find what they were hoping for - the video showing the rape of Miss X.
Early the next morning the police came again, this time with social workers to take the children into care. When Rose became angry and abusive and pushed a policewoman down the stairs, the police grabbed her and twisted her arm behind her back; she was then arrested.
When Rose came home alone, she was quiet and subdued. With the younger children in care, she seemed oddly disoriented. The big house at Cromwell Street seemed empty and cold. Mar and Stephen, who had been living away from home, decided to move in with her. A few days later, she came into the living room looking dazed and collapsed on the settee, mumbling incoherently. In her bedroom, Stephen found an empty box of aspirin tablets. He sent for an ambulance and Rose was taken to hospital to have her stomach pumped out. When she came home she seemed old and frail.
Miss X had made a full statement to a solicitor. Mae accompanied her mother when she went to see him, and as she listened, Mae realised that it could just as easily have been her own name on the bottom of the statement. Her father had often said to his daughters: 'I made you - I can do what I like with you.' When they were fairly young, he had told them that he intended to deflower them as soon as they were old enough.
Throughout her teens, Mae had succeeded in avoiding rape. But she had stopped wearing a skirt since her father was unable to resist putting his hand up it and, even then, West would raise her blouse and fondle her. He used to say 'Every girl should let their dad touch them.'
If he called one of his daughters into a room, they would always try to take a brother or sister along with them to avoid being alone with him. Before they took a shower or undressed for bed, Mae and her elder sister Heather would wait for their father to go out, or else stand guard for one another. However, West had drilled holes in the wall of their bedroom so that he could watch them undress.
Detective Constable Hazel Savage had first seen Fred West 26 years earlier, in 1966; he had appeared in court as a witness when his first wife Rena was charged with burglary. Hazel Savage had also been sent to Scotland to collect Rena, and recalled that the girl had told her that her husband was a sexual pervert who was probably insane.
Now DC Savage went to call on Fred's eldest daughter, Anne Marie, a married woman with two children who was now separated from her husband. And when she told Anne Marie what Miss X had said in her statement, and the Fred West was denying the whole thing, Anne Marie came to a difficult decision - to tell for the first time what had happened to her. DC Savage took her back to the police station, and there, fortified by endless cups of tea and cigarettes, Anne Marie told the whole story.
As a child, Anne Marie had adored her father; she called herself 'daddy's girl' and often said that she would marry him when she grew up. She disliked her stepmother because Rose was bad tempered and often beat the children. One early summer evening in 1973, when Anne Marie was eight, Fred and Rose led her down to the basement, undressed her, and sexually abused her. West explained: 'All fathers have to do it. It will help you get a husband and you'll be able to have children.'
When, a few weeks later, Anne Marie turned nine, West began having sexual intercourse with her. It continued frequently until she was 15, when her father made her pregnant and she ran away from home. She later had a miscarriage.
Anne Marie now promised Hazel Savage that she would repeat all her testimony in court when her father came to trial.
The evidence against Fred West seemed watertight; with detailed signed statements from two of the children, it should have been impossible for him to escape conviction.
Yet, strangely enough, Miss X was unwilling to press charges. When Mae went to see her, she told her that she was hoping to be allowed home. Stephen went even further in trying to protect his father - he made a statement that he (Stephen) had committed the rape, but the police had no doubt that he was lying.
The truth was that, although 25 Cromwell Street had never been an ideal home for the West children, it was all they had - it represented all their security. Suddenly placed in care and forbidden to see their mother, they felt lonely and insecure - they even sneaked back to visit.
Aware of the unhappiness of her stepbrothers and sisters, Anne Marie began to feel that perhaps she ought to change her story. Besides, she was afraid for her own two children - she knew how vindictive Rose could be. This was why she finally decided to give way and withdrew her statement. About two months afterwards, she told Hazel Savage that it was all invention. Hazel Savage said: 'Look at me and tell me it isn't true.' Anne Marie turned her head away and said, 'I made it all up.'
Hazel Savage warned her that she could be charged with wasting police time. But she had no real intention of making Anne Marie's life more difficult. She was still hoping for her cooperation in bringing the Wests to justice.
Fred and Rose West were apart for nearly a year, during which time West was held in a bail hostel in Birmingham. The case finally came to court on 17th July 1993, when they stood side by side in the dock - Fred charged with raping Miss X, and Rose with inciting him to have sex with her. The case lasted only a few minutes. Since the victim refused to testify, Fred and Rose West were able to walk out of the court.
Hazel Savage had become more convinced than ever that Fred West was responsible for the disappearance of Heather. She was told how one of the younger children, now in the care of foster parents, had remarked that their father had threatened them that if they talked about any of the things that went on in the house, they would end up under the patio like their sister Heather. The children had assumed that their father was joking. So did Stephan and Mae, to whom their father had made the same comment, roaring with laughter. Yet all the police efforts to trace Heather had been unsuccessful.
Now Hazel Savage tried hard to convince her superiors to dig up the garden. They were dubious. If they found nothing, the Wests could claim harassment. But Savage's persistence finally paid off. On Wednesday 23rd February 1994, the Gloucester police applied for a search warrant to search 25 Cromwell Street for the remains of Heather West.
The search for the remains of West's victims officially began on 23rd February 1994 - a year after the social services had first become suspicious that Heather West might be buried under the patio of 25 Cromwell Street.
The excavations began in the back garden and, within days, the police had recovered the remains of three young women.
With the discovery of these three bodies, the search moved to the house itself. Several days later, the police had unearthed six more bodies - five in the basement and one under the bathroom.
On 10th April the police applied for search warrants to excavate Fingerpost and Letterbox fields in Kempley, 25km (15 miles) west of Gloucester. The remains of Rena Costello were found quickly, but the search for Anne McFall proved much more difficult.
In the meantime, the police had begun to search the ground floor flat and cellar at 25 Midland Road and, on 5th May, the remains of Charmaine West were formally identified.
On 7th June, the search team at Fingerpost Field finally discovered the bones of Anne McFall.
Although the police suspected that there were other bodies, they did not know where to look and, months after the search at Cromwell Street had begun.
Professor Bernard Knight, the pathologist who had been called in by the police, found himself looking down into a hole from which the smell of rotting flesh was emanating. A policeman leaned over it, holding his breath, and picked up an object covered in mud. Knight identified it as a human thigh bone. Further probing among the decaying mass revealed more human bones, a skull, some brown human hair, teeth and fingernails. Even at this stage, it was evident that the body had been decapitated and chopped up.
The bones were taken to the police station, where Professor Knight washed them and then painstakingly reassembled the skeleton like a jigsaw puzzle. Strangely enough, the kneecaps and some of the fingers and toes were missing. Dental records were used to identify Heather West.
But now Knight became aware of a puzzling anomaly. He had one thigh bone (femur) too many. The extra one had been the bone found earlier. Clearly, there was more than one body. This, the police suspected, was why Fred had decided to confess so unexpectedly. He had hoped that, once they found Heather's body, the police would stop digging - and he was prepared to take the blame for his daughter's death, claiming that it had been manslaughter.
When Rose was told that there seemed to be more than one victim, she exclaimed: 'Oh this is too much!' She had already set about establishing her defence: that Fred often sent her out to work as a prostitute at night, and told her not to come back until the early hours of the morning. This, she maintained, was clearly because he wished to do something unobserved.
Back at the Gloucester police headquarters, just a short distance from Cromwell Street, Fred West was told that police had found a bone from a second body. He admitted immediately that there were two more bodies buried at Cromwell Street. One was a former tenant named Shirley Robinson, whom West described as a lesbian - although he also admitted that she was pregnant with his child. The other he could only identify as 'Shirley's mate' - wrongly as it turned out.
On Sunday 27th February 1994, three days after the digging began, Fred West was charged with murdering his daughter Heather. The following day, with more input from West, the diggers found another body in the garden, near the bathroom wall. The dismembered body was later identified as 16 year old Alison Chambers, a regular visitor to Cromwell Street, who had run away from home in August 1979. A leather belt had been looped under her jaw and tightened around the top of her head, probably to prevent her from screaming.
Several hours later, the police found more human remains buried several yards from the other body. They proved to be those of Shirley Robinson. Near her dismembered body was the skeleton of a foetus. Having uncovered three bodies in the garden, Detective Chief Superintendent John Bennett, the officer in charge of the investigation, decided to start digging inside the house.
When Fred West was told of this, he suddenly decided to make a full confession. In a handwritten note, he admitted to nine more killings (significantly adding the word 'approx'), bringing the total to a dozen. These included Anne McFall, his first wife Rena and her daughter Charmaine.
There were five more bodies buried under the basement floor, he explained, and one under the ground floor bathroom.
The only distress Fred showed was at the thought of the house being damaged. This, apparently, is why he decided to cooperate with the police and show them where the bodies were buried. To avoid the gathering swarm of journalists outside 25 Cromwell Street, West was smuggled back into the house disguised as a member of the police search team.
The basement had been used, since the mid-70s, as a playroom and bedrooms for the younger children and had to be entered through a trap door. There, police began to break up the concrete floor with pneumatic drills. During the course of the following week they found five more bodies under the basement floor, and another under the floor of the bathroom that West had added to the house.
The identification of the basement victims - through dental records and photographs of missing girls - was the most difficult part of the investigation. Sometimes West could remember their names, sometimes not. But when the six skeletons were finally identified, it made the police aware that this case was more complex than they previously thought. Only two of the victims were lodgers or visitors to 25 Cromwell Street; the remaining four were strangers.
The first basement body proved to be that of Therese Siegenthaler, a 21 year old Swiss student who had vanished on 15th April 1974, while hitchhiking to Ireland via North Wales. West had presumably offered her a lift somewhere along the way.
The next body was that of 15 year old Shirley Hubbard, a shop assistant from Worcester, who had vanished after leaving work in November 1974. She almost certainly did not need a lift, and therefore must have been abducted. The three other basement victims were Lucy Partington, Juanita Mott and Carole Ann Cooper. The body of Lynda Gough was found under the bathroom floor.
The picture that was beginning to emerge was horrific. Assuming that Rose was lying, the most likely explanation was that the couple had gone out hunting for victims who could be subjected to rape and torture. Fred and Rose then murdered them and dismembered the corpses. If this was indeed the scenario, it was the worst case of serial murder in British criminal history - worse even than the Moors Murders of the early 1960s.
When the police looked into the West's past, they discovered some alarming clues to their violent nature. In January 1973, Fred and Rose had been jointly charged with abducting and sexually assaulting a 17 year old girl, Caroline Owens, who had been their nanny. In fact, according to the evidence she gave in court, Caroline had left Cromwell Street in November 1972 because she disliked Fred and his constant lecherous talk. Caroline also felt that Rose West - only two years her senior - was showing too much interest in her sexually.
Four weeks later, on 6th December 1972, Caroline went to Tewkesbury to meet her boyfriend and was later offered a lift home by Fred and Rose. As soon as Caroline got into the car, Rose tried to kiss her on the mouth and to fondle her breasts. When Caroline pushed her away, Fred stopped the car and punched her until she was unconscious.
In her statement to the police, Caroline claimed that when she came round, her hands were tied behind her back and Fred was putting tape over her mouth. At Cromwell Street Fred dragged her upstairs, 'laughing and mauling' her. Caroline was then given some tea to drink which was drugged. She was stripped, gagged with cotton wool and subjected to a prolonged sexual assault by both Fred and Rose. When the Wests finally stopped and fell asleep, Caroline tried to escape out of the window, but her hands were tied and she could not open it. In the early morning, someone came to the door and Caroline did her best to make a noise. Rose was furious and held a pillow over her head. When Fred returned, he told Caroline that he would keep her in the cellar for his friends to use, then bury her under the paving stones of Gloucester - a chilling indication of his future actions.
When Rose went off to see the children, Fred took advantage of her absence and raped Caroline. Rose came back and both the Wests asked Caroline to return again as nanny. Seeing her opportunity to escape, she quickly agreed. She even vacuumed the room to indicate that she considered herself to be a member of the family. She was then made to take three baths in an attempt to wash the gum from the masking tape off her skin and hair. Eventually, Fred dropped off his wife and Caroline at a launderette. After a few minutes, Caroline walked out and was given a lift by a friend to her home in nearby Cinderford.
Caroline claimed that she felt too ashamed to tell her mother how the Wests had assaulted her, feeling that she was somehow to blame. But when she got up the next morning, her mother saw the bruises and rang the police. Fred and Rose were arrested and charged with assault.
When the Wests appeared in court, on 12th January 1973, they were charged only on counts of indecent assault causing actual bodily harm, rape charges having been dropped because Caroline could not face the ordeal of giving evidence in court. The Wests agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charges. It seems the magistrate felt that, since and man and his wife had been involved, the case could not be too serious. Fred and Rose West were fined £50 each and allowed to walk free. Caroline Owens was devastated and made a failed suicide attempt.
Fred said that Caroline had been kidnapped because Rose wanted to have sex with her. He later admitted that the abduction would have probably ended in Caroline's murder, because he would have 'gone too far'. Instead, she had been allowed to go free. Now, having yet again narrowly escaped being charged with rape, Fred perhaps decided that any future victims of their sex attacks would have to be permanently silenced.
Three months later, in April 1973, Fred and Rose committed what was probably their first joint murder. One of their male lodgers had met 19 year old Lynda Gough in a cafe and brought her back to Cromwell Street, where they had sex. Lynda also had sex with other lodgers - Rose's lovers.
In early April 1973, she was collected from her home by a woman who took her out for the evening. Two weeks later, on 19th April 1973, she left home, leaving a note saying that she had found herself a flat.
Knowing how headstrong her daughter was, Lynda's mother June waited a few days before trying to track her daughter down. But when she made enquiries at the department store where Lynda worked as a seamstress, she learned that her daughter had not been there since she left home.
Two weeks later, June Gough finally found her way to Cromwell Street. The woman who came to the door - Rose West - was the same one who had called for Lynda to take her out. Mrs Gough noticed that Rose was wearing Lynda's slippers and cardigan. She also saw some of Lynda's clothes hanging on the washing line. When Mrs Gough asked about Lynda, Rose explained that her daughter had left the clothes behind because she had gone to Weston-super-Mare to look for work. June Gough never heard from her daughter again.
Whereas Caroline Owens had been gagged to keep her silent, Lynda may well have been intended to die. Sticky tape had been wrapped tightly around her head to form a mask, to make her look like a mummy and satisfy the Wests' enthusiasm for bondage. The police made another discovery. Some of the exposed wooden beams supporting the basement ceiling had holes in them. In one of his confessions to the police, West admitted that these were made by him for suspending bodies.
According to one of his neighbours at Midland Road, Liz Agius, West had shown her round the basement, which was partitioned into separate rooms, shortly after the family moved to 25 Cromwell Street in September 1972. She claims that he revealed his plans to restore the dilapidated building, adding that: 'I could soundproof it [the basement] and use it as my torture chamber'.
Whether this account has any basis in fact is immaterial, because, b the summer of 1973, West had begun to use the basement to abuse his daughter, Anne Marie.
From their investigations, the police and forensic experts concluded that all the victims found buried in the basement were murdered and dismembered there, and possibly suspended over the holes that had been prepared for their burial. The contrast between this macabre 'torture chamber' and the rooms upstairs could not have been more stark. Fred spent the thousands of pounds that came from Rose's prostitution on improving the rest of the house.
In particular, the upper two floors of the house became a shrine to the West's sex lives. Fred built a door at the bottom of the stairs and Rose carried the key around her neck so that the children could not interfere. There was a separate doorbell that Rose's clients rang before being entertained in her private room with its bar and garish murals.
Every conceivable form of sexual pleasure was catered for - especially bondage. One cupboard contained bondage suits and whips, and many rooms had spyholes and intercoms so that Fred could watch and listen to his wife having sex. He also made numerous videos of Rose with other men, and added them to his collection of hardcore porn. It was against this backdrop of frequent and increasingly violent sex that Fred and Rose carried out a string of murders.
On the face of it, the Wests came across as simple, amiable people, fond of children and helpful to anyone in need. There were no outer manifestations of their depravity because they were able to live much of their lives as a 'normal' couple. It was only when they crossed over into the realm of sexual fantasy that the masks came off to reveal their core personalities.
The Wests' symptoms began in childhood; for both, the lack of moral guidelines at home was not counter-balanced by any restraining influence from school or peer groups. Both Fred and Rose left school early, and neither had many friends outside their family circles.
Rose's movements were restricted by her domineering father. Worst of all, their parents could not have given them a more distorted view of intimate relationships, forcing incest upon them and condoning under-age sex.
Fred's early sexual development was an exploration of self-gratification. He never learned to see other people as individuals with feelings and desires of their own. Feelings, as far as he could identify them, were something he experience, but he couldn't grasp the idea that someone else's might be as valid as his own.
It was contact with women that West's self-centeredness was most extreme. For him, women were there to be exploited as sex objects and, with a sexual appetite that kept him in an almost permanent state of desire, he expected girls to be available virtually on demand.
West discovered early that the kind of sex that turned him on involved a strong measure of control and violence.
Possibly there was a profound resentment towards his mother for awakening his sexuality in the way she did, which he then projected onto other women. Or perhaps his first sexual experience involved an element of dominance or coercion - or both - making the 'pleasure with pain' connection in Fred's mind. But it soon became apparent to him that there was an ever-growing disparity between his violent sexual fantasies and the reality that the girls prepared to have sex with him offered.
As far as the police are aware, Anne McFall was West's first victim, but it could easily have happened earlier. It seems that the motive for Anne's death was convenience. No one can be sure. But the cord found tied to Anne's wrists suggests that in the act of killing - and possibly of dismembering and burying the body as well - West became sexually aroused. The process may have excited such a powerful feeling in him - and a feeling of power, too - that he wanted to savour it again.
The turning point in West's life came when he met Rose. Already sexually experienced, but the time they abducted Caroline Owens four years later she had blossomed into a sexual sadist in her own right.
There are two explanations as to why this may have happened. Either she was corrupted by West into becoming his fantasy partner, or her sadism took root in her childhood and was waiting for the right circumstances in which to flourish.
At the outset it seems that Rose was acquiescent, allowing West, with his need to be in control, to take the lead. She was certainly open-minded and did not recoil from the experiences.
Gradually, however, Rose started to take the initiative and their deviant pastimes began to take over their lives. Rose's appetite for sex grew rapidly to the point where she needed more than her husband to satisfy her. She had a procession of lovers, which only served to arouse her husband still further; it also satisfied him, by building up his fantasies. He eagerly procured lovers for her, viewing their sessions through peepholes.
By now, West had already introduced Rose to his passion - sadistic sex. Rose in turn had discovered that she too enjoyed taking the dominant role and inflicting pain. This created a problem: they needed victims. They must have discussed their fantasies of raping and torturing young girls at length, and planned the best way to abduct and imprison them in detail.
West had an image of the type of girl he wanted and where to look for her - on the streets late at night. The abductions were probably carried out with Rose in the car - a seemingly normal couple would have appeared harmless to their victims. If the victim behaved passively, they knew she was terrified, and her fear would act like an aphrodisiac. If she resisted, they revelled in the knowledge that they would humiliate and torture her into pleading for her life, then kill her anyway. For Rose this may well have echoed the domination she experienced at the hands of her father - she knew no other sort of relationship.
As it slowly dawned on Fred West that he had no hope of ever being freed from jail, he became increasingly depressed. Rose had also been in prison since 21st April 1994, but when they had been brought together in the dock on 30th June to be charged jointly with nine murders, Rose had refused to look at him and shrank away when he tried to touch her. Leaked press reports declared that she now hated Fred, and they were probably true 0 she regarded him as her downfall. She continued to insist that she was completely innocent.
At 11.30am on New Years Day, the warders left Fred West alone in his cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, to eat his lunch. Using the needle and thread he had been given for his job of sewing buttons on prison shirts, he stitched into a rope strips of the green blanket from his bed, and hanged himself from a bar on the ventilation shaft above the door. When found, less than an hour later, he failed to respond to any attempts at resuscitation.
Five weeks later, on 6th February 1995, Rose West's committal proceedings took place; charged with ten murders - that of Charmaine having being added to the other nine - her defence was that she had not even been aware of the murders in her house. Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, had often declared that the evidence against her was flimsy and entirely circumstantial, and now, with Fred's suicide, it seemed possible that he was correct. There seemed to be no proof whatsoever that Rose West had been present at any of the murders.
On the other hand, there was evidence that she had, together with her husband, subjected unwilling girls to various forms of sadistic sexual assault of a kind that - the prosecution were to claim - had led to the murders. (Two of her lovers had also been charged with raping Anne Marie, though these charges were later dropped.) It also seemed unlikely that West had acted alone in kidnapping victims such as Therese Siegenthaler and Lucy Partington and then killing them.
Finally, on 3rd October 1995, the trial of Rose West opened at Winchester Crown Court before Mr Justice Mantell. The prosecution was led by Brian Leveson QC, and the defence by Richard Ferguson QC.
For the defence, Richard Ferguson began by arguing that cases involving sexual assault, like that of Caroline Owens, should not be heard at the trial, since they were not relevant to the ten murders with which Rose West was charged. This was a crucial point for, if the judge agreed, the prosecution would have to try to prove the murders without any supporting evidence. They must have felt a deep relief when Mr Justice Mantell ruled that the sexual assaults were relevant, since - he argued - if one of Bluebeard's wives had escaped, her evidence would certainly have been admissible. In a sense, that decision was the most important of the case.
The Crown had to show that Rose was either one of the attackers or that she collaborated with Fred in crimes the ultimate end of which was murder.
In his opening speech for the prosecution, Brian Leveson made his central argument clear: that although no one had actually seen Rose West commit murder, there was enough evidence to suggest that she and her husband were 'in it together' or, at the very least, that 'she must have known'. He set out to demonstrate that the defendant's character and behaviour on other occasions not only revealed her to be capable of inflicting harm, but actually indicated her involvement in the murders.
Shirley Ann Giles - a neighbour from the Midland Road days whose daughter, Tracy, had been friends with Charmaine - told how Tracy had gone into Rose West's kitchen to borrow milk and seen Charmaine standing on a chair with her hands tied behind her, while Rose was about to hit her with a wooden spoon.
Another more crucial, piece of evidence came from the same witness: Mrs Giles and Tracy moved away from Gloucester in 1971, but returned for a visit. However, Charmaine was no longer there. On this visit, Mrs Giles saw a wooden caravan made by Fred in prison, which he had given to Rose when she had visited him there. Mrs Giles wrote to Fred in prison, asking him if he would make a similar one for her.
If this sequence of events is correct, Charmaine disappeared while Fred was in prison, so he could not have participated in her murder. However, under cross examination, Mrs Giles confessed tot he possibility f getting her dates confused.
Another former neighbour from Midland Road, Liz Agius, had come from Malta to give evidence. She told the court how she had become friendly with the Wests at Midland Road and how Rose West was soon inviting her to 'three in a bed' sex sessions - which she declined. She said that the Wests, for whom she baby-sat, told her that they drove around at night time looking for young run-away girls whom they could lure into prostitution.
The next witness was Caroline Owens, the Wests' former nanny, who recounted her ordeal at the hands of Fred and Rose and added how, afterwards, Fred began crying and apologizing for what he had done, and said: 'It was all her idea.' Caroline Owens' testimony suggested that Rose was the prime mover in the kidnap and rape, and Fred later experienced pangs of conscience about it.
Later, a witness who was introduced as 'Miss A' described her own rape at the hands of the Wests. A victim of incest, she had been brought up in a children's home and, at the age of 13, had been taken to 25 Cromwell Street by a friend. Rose West had treated her like a sister. But one night in the summer of 1977, she had been taken by Rose West into a bedroom where Fred West was dressed only in underpants, and where there were also two naked teenage girls, one black and one white. She then watched while the white girl (whom Anne Marie later thought might have been herself) was tied down to the bed and raped by West. After this, Miss A was undressed by Rose and also raped by Fred.
Miss A was so angry, that two weeks later, she returned to Cromwell Street with a can of petrol and a box of matches, intending to set light to the house through the letterbox. But she was unable to go through with this act of arson. When she told the story in court 17 years later, she had been married and divorced twice, been in a home for battered wives and had attempted suicide.
Anne Marie West told her story of being raped by her father at the age of eight. Later, when she was a teenager, she accompanied him on decorating jobs, and he would have sex with her in his van or in empty flats.
Fred took care that his wife should not find out, except on two occasions. Once, Rose watched and made sarcastic comments. 'I kept thinking, what have I done? I haven't done anything wrong,' said Anne Marie in court. She also told how she was forced to have sex with male visitors to the house. More damningly for Rose, Anne Marie confirmed that Charmaine vanished while Fred was still in prison.
On the evening after her evidence, Anne Marie took an overdose and was take to hospital. She recovered sufficiently to return to court two days later.
Roughly seven weeks into the trial, on 19th October 1995, the jury - by unanimous request - were taken by bus to 25 Cromwell Street so that they could see the 'House of Horrors' for themselves. They toured the house in silence, seeing the marked spots where the victims' bodies had been found. What may have struck the jurors most was how small the house actually was, and how difficult it would be for someone living there not to have known what was going on.
The case for the defence began on Monday 30th October, Richard Ferguson QC, defending Rose West, pointed out that it was a fact that Fred West had murdered and disposed of the bodies without assistance, adding that: 'She [Rose] neither knew of nor participated in any of the murders, nor did anything to hide or conceal those murders.'
But as it became clear that the tide of opinion was beginning to turn against the defendant, Ferguson decided on putting Rose herself in the dock.
The defendant cried as she tried to convince the jury that she was the victim of a violent and brutal bully who kept her totally under his thumb. In an obvious attempt to gain the sympathy of the jury, she also described how she had been raped twice before she met Fred, and how he had then seduced her.
But, by the time Rose's testimony was finished, it was obvious that it had had the opposite effect from the one the defence had intended. She had claimed that she and Fred had lived seperate lives at Cromwell Street, but the jury had already heard from numerous witnesses who had visited or lodged there that this was entirely untrue.
The prosecution also countered that Rose was tough and resourceful - not the sort of woman to be forced by her husband into prostitution.
When Janet Leach, Fred's 'appropriate adult', stated that West had told her that he was lying to save his wife, the case for the defence appeared to be in ruins. Later, however, Leach's evidence was undermined, and the entire trial was put at risk, when she admitted to lying on oath about whether or not she had negotiated a fee for her story with a national newspaper.
The judge's summing up began on Thursday 16th November. He warned the jury that they needed to keep cool heads and set aside all prejudice. But he pointed out that, if two people take part in murder, then both are equally guilty, no matter which of them actually killed the victim. He also reaffirmed that the lack of direct evidence was not an obstacle to a guilty verdict.
Members of the jury deliberated overnight on Monday 20th November and, when they returned the next day, he foreman announced that they had found Rose West guilty of three murders - those of Charmaine and Heather West and, of Shirley Robinson. The following day they were back again, to announce that they had found Rose West guilty of the other seven murders. Rose West's face was expressionless as Mr Justice Mantell said: 'If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released. Take her down.'
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
First loves...First kisses...
My first look at my newborn son...
When I am cold and dead...
All these memories will be gone...
Like tears in rain...
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