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Rosemary Pauline West (given name Letts; born 29 November 1953) is an English serial killer who collaborated with her husband, Fred West, in the torture murder of at least ten young women between 1973 and 1987; BBC Article with detail of the 12 accusations. Retrieval Date: 25 October 2017. 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.
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."As criminologist Carter Woodrow discovered, Bill Letts was a paranoid schizophrenic who bullied and beat his wife into depression and tormented and abused Rose and his other six children."
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 (born 1957). 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.
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 RV 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 Child neglect 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.
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 abortion 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. (Speculation remains that Heather may have been incest by Rose's own father.) 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 abuse 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.
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 Marie reflects on how Charmaine who was fully white while Anne Marie was of part-British Asians ethnicity 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 dismemberment her. A subsequent autopsy 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.
Several months later, with Rose pregnant with her second child, the couple moved from Midland Road to an address nearby: 25 Cromwell Street. Initially the three-storey home, located close to Gloucester city centre, was rented from the council; Fred eventually purchased the property for £7,000 () under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme. To facilitate the purchase, many of the upper-floor rooms were initially converted into to supplement the household income. To maintain a degree of privacy for his own family, Fred installed a cooker and a washbasin on the first-floor landing in order that their lodgers need not enter the ground floor where his family lived. Only Fred and his family were permitted access to the back garden of the property.
On 1 June, Rose gave birth to a second daughter. The date of her birth led the Wests to name the child Mae June.
To many of these women, it became apparent Rose and her husband (who regularly participated in with his wife and her lovers) took a particular pleasure from taking women beyond their sexual limitstypically via sessions involving bondage. The Wests openly admitted to taking a particular pleasure from any form of sex involving a strong measure of dominance, violence and pain. To cater to these sexual fetishism, they amassed a large collection of bondage and restraining devices, magazines and photographs, later expanding this collection to include videos depicting bestiality and graphic sexual abuse of children.
Rose controlled the family's finances and Fred gave her his pay packets. The room Rose used for prostitution was known throughout the household as "Mandy's Room" (Mandy being the working name Rose used when she was with her clients) and had several hidden peepholes allowing Freda longtime watch her activities. Fred also installed a baby monitor in the room, allowing him to listen from elsewhere in the house. The room included a private bar, and a red light outside the door warned when Rose was not to be disturbed. Rose carried the sole key to this room around her neck, and Fred installed a separate doorbell to the household which her clients were instructed to ring whenever they visited. Much of the money earned from Rose's prostitution was spent on home improvements.
By 1977, Rose's father Bill had come to tolerate his daughter's marriage, and to develop a grudging respect for Fred. Together, he and Fred opened a café they named The Green Lantern, which was soon insolvent. "Euan Ferguson on the Legacy of Fred West", The Guardian, 15 February 2004 By 1983, Rose had given birth to eight children, at least three of whom had been conceived by clients. Fred willingly accepted these children as his own and falsely informed them the reason their skin was darker than that of their siblings was because his great-grandmother was a black woman.
First Heather, and then her younger brother Stephen (born 1973), ran away from home; they returned to Cromwell Street after several weeks of alternately sleeping rough or staying with friends; they were each beaten upon their return. Between 1972 and 1992 the West children were admitted to the casualty units of local hospitals thirty-one times; the injuries were explained as accidents and never reported to social services.
On one occasion, as Stephen was mopping the kitchen floor with a cloth, Rose accidentally stepped into the bowl of water he had been using. In response, Rose hit the boy over the head with the bowl, then repeatedly kicked him in the head and chest as she shouted: "You did that on purpose, you little swine!" On another occasion Rose became furious about a missing kitchen utensil, then grabbed a knife she had been using to cut a slab of meat, repeatedly inflicting abrasions to Mae June's chest until her rib cage was covered with light knife wounds. All the while Mae screamed, "No, Mum! No, Mum!" as Heather and Stephen stood by, sobbing helplessly.
Even Fred was a sporadic victim of his wife's violence. On one occasion in August 1974 Rose pursued Fred with a carving knife in her hand; Fred was able to slam shut the door of the room into which he had run as Rose lunged at him with the knife, resulting in the knife embedding itself in the door and three of Rose's fingers slipping down the blade, almost severing them from her hand. In response, Rose calmly wrapped her hand in a towel and said: "Look what you done, fella. You've got to take me to the hospital now."
Rose occasionally sexually abused Anne Marie herself, and later took extreme gratification in degrading her with acts such as binding her to various items of furniture before encouraging Fred to rape her, or forcing her to perform household chores while wearing sexual devices and a mini-skirt. Fred and Rose forced Anne Marie into prostitution from the age of 13, telling clients she was aged 16. Rose was always present in the room when these acts occurred to ensure the girl did not reveal her true age. On one occasion when Anne Marie was aged 13 or 14, Rose took her to a local public house, insisting she drink several glasses of barley wine. Several hours later, Fred arrived at the pub to collect Rose and Anne Marie. Once they had left the premises, Anne Marie was bundled into her father's van and beaten by Rose, who asked her: "Do you think you could be my friend?" before she was sexually abused by her father and stepmother.
Rose, who had begun to engage in prostitution by this time, explained to Owens that she worked as a massage when the younger woman enquired about the steady stream of men visiting her. When Owens herself became the recipient of the Wests' overt sexual advances, she announced her intentions to leave Cromwell Street and return home.
Knowing Owens' habits of hitchhiking along the A40 between Cinderford and Tewkesbury, the Wests formulated a plan to kidnapping her for their shared gratification. Fred later admitted that the specific intent of this abduction was the rape and likely murder of Owens, but that his initial incentive was to determine whether his wife would be willing to at least assist him in an abduction. On 6 December 1972, the couple lured Owens into their vehicle with an apology for their previous conduct and the offer of a lift home. Initially, Owens believed the Wests had been sincere in their apologies and obliged, believing she had simply mistaken their earlier intentions. Rose joined her in the back seat, with the explanation she wanted a "girls' chat" as Fred drove.
Shortly thereafter, Rose began to fondling Owens, as Fred questioned whether she had had sex with her boyfriend that evening. When Owens began to protest, Fred stopped the car, referred to Owens as a "bitch" and punched her into unconsciousness before he and Rose bound and gagged her with a scarf and duct tape. In her subsequent statement to police, Owens stated that, at Cromwell Street, she was given a drugged cup of tea to drink before being again gagged and subjected to a prolonged sexual assault from the Wests. When Owens screamed, Rose smothered her with a pillow, further restrained her about the neck and performed cunnilingus on her. Realising the gravity of her situation, Owens ceased resisting their sexual assaults.
The following morning, having noted Owens' screaming when one of his children had knocked on the door of the room in which she was restrained, Fred threatened that he and his wife would keep her locked in the cellar and allow his "black friends" to abuse her, and that when they had finished he would bury her body beneath "the paving stones of Gloucester." Fred then claimed he had killed hundreds of young girls, adding that Owens had primarily been brought to the house for "Rose's pleasure." He and Rose then calmly asked Owens whether she would consider returning to work as their nanny. Seeing her escape avenue, Owens agreed and vacuumed the house to indicate her belief in becoming an extended member of the family. Later that day, Owens escaped from a launderette she and Rose had entered and returned home. Although initially too ashamed to divulge what had happened, when her mother noted the welts, bruises and exposed subcutaneous tissues on her daughter's body, Owens burst into tears and confided her ordeal.
Owens' mother immediately reported her daughter's story to police, and the Wests were arrested and charged with assault, indecent assault, actual bodily harm and rape. The case was tried at Gloucester Magistrates Court on 12 January 1973, but by this date Owens had decided she could not face the ordeal of giving testimony. All charges pertaining to her ordeal were dropped, and the Wests agreed to plead guilty to the reduced charges of indecent assault and causing actual bodily harm; each was fined £50 (equivalent to £619 in 2024) and the couple were allowed to walk free. When Owens heard this news, she attempted suicide.
After police had found human remains and apparent signs of torture at 25 Cromwell Street, Rose, along with Fred, was arrested in February 1994. During her trial Rose denied murdering any of the victims and insisted that her husband had committed the criminal acts alone. She also claimed to have tried to stop one of the sexual assaults her husband had committed. Rose continued to profess ignorance of her husband's activities, but the circumstantial evidence that mounted against the couple was considered sufficient to prosecution her for ten murders: those of the young women whose bodies were found at Cromwell Street and of Charmaine West. Fred was charged with two further murders committed before his association with Rose.
After his arrest in February 1994, Fred confided to his appropriate adult, Janet Leach, that Rose had murdered Shirley Robinson and had assisted in her dismemberment, personally removing Robinson's foetus from the womb in the process. Found under the patio at Cromwell Street was the body of the Wests' daughter, Heather, who had been murdered in June 1987 after being abused by her parents all her life. It is said that Heather had begun to tell her friends about her abuse. Barry, her younger brother, would later describe watching, as a seven-year-old, his mother kick Heather repeatedly about the head until she was no longer moving. The Wests had told friends and concerned parties that Heather left home to work at a Devonshire holiday village and on one occasion fabricated a phone call, supposedly from Heather, to allay her siblings' suspicions about her disappearance. Fred would even taunt his children when they misbehaved by jokingly stating, "If you don't behave, you'll end up under the patio like Heather." Fred & Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of Horrors pp. 224–225 This was the last known murder that the pair committed.
While on remand at HM Prison Birmingham, Fred killed himself by hanging on 1 January 1995.
Prosecution witnesses included Cromwell Street lodgers, victims' relatives, Rose's mother, Daisy, and sister, Glenys, and surviving victims including Kathryn Halliday (a former lover of Fred and Rose), Owens, Anne Marie and a "Miss A" (who had been sexually assaulted at age 14 by Fred and Rose in 1977 and who described Rose as the more aggressive perpetrator of the two). Neighbours described Charmaine's 1971 disappearance while Fred was imprisoned and Rose's casual indifference to Heather's disappearance. Rose's counsel, Dick Ferguson, tried to discredit prosecution witnesses as either having financially exploited their connection to the case or being motivated by grudges. Owens, though admitting to receiving £20,000 for her story, described her extreme Survivor guilt: "I only want to get justice for the girls who didn't make it. I feel like it was my fault."
Against the advice of her counsel, Rose herself testified; her affect sometimes morose and tearful, sometimes upbeat and humorous. She wept while describing herself as a victim of child sexual abuse who naively married a violent and domineering man but joked about issues such as her "always being pregnant" and laughed while describing one victim's "grandfather glasses". Rose also claimed never to have met six of the victims buried at Cromwell Street and to recall very little of her assault on Owens. When shown photographs of the victims buried in the cellar and of victim Alison Chambers, and asked by Leveson whether she recognised any of their faces, Rose's face turned bright red and she repeatedly stuttered as she replied, "No, sir."
When questioned about life at Cromwell Street, Rose claimed she and Fred had lived separate lives, which was inconsistent with the earlier testimony of witnesses who had visited or lodged at their address. In reference to her relationship with her eldest child, Rose admitted her relations with Heather were strained before claiming to the court that her daughter was a lesbianism who had physically and psychologically abused her siblings. Despite these allegations, Rose stated she had loved her daughter and had no knowledge of her murder. Further questioned about the contradictory explanations she and Fred had given about Heather's disappearance, Rose claimed these discrepancies had stemmed from telephone conversations she had had with Heather after she had left home.
The defence next called a succession of women who claimed to have been attacked or assaulted between 1966 and 1975 by a lone male whose physical description matched that of Fred. These seven women each testified they had recognised their attacker as Fred when his photograph was publicised in 1994. The intention of this testimony was to illustrate to the jury that Fred was capable of abducting, assaulting or attempting to attack women without Rose, which the prosecution had never disputed. The physical recollections of several of these women varied greatly.
The final witness to testify at Rose's trial was Janet Leach, Fred's appointed appropriate adult, whom the prosecution had called to testify on 7 November in rebuttal of the tape recordings of Fred's confession, which had been played to the court on 3 November, in which he had stressed Rose had "known nothing at all" about the murders. Leach testified that through her role Fred had gradually begun to view her as a and had confided in her that on the evening prior to his 25 February arrest he and Rose had formed a pact whereby he would take full responsibility for all the murders, many of which he had described to her as being "some of Rose's mistakes". Fred had further divulged that Rose had indeed murdered Charmaine while he had been incarcerated and had also murdered Robinson. He had also confided that Rose had participated in the mutilation and dismemberment of Robinson, having personally removed her child from her womb after her death. In reference to the remaining eight murders for which Rose had been charged, Leach testified that Fred had confided she had "played a major part" in these murders.
Upon cross-examination, Leach did concede to Ferguson she had earlier perjury about having sold her story to a national newspaper for £100,000, although she was adamant about the sincerity of her testimony. While delivering this testimony, Leach collapsed and the trial was adjourned for six days. She returned to complete her cross-examination on 13 November.
It was reported in May 1995 that Rose and Myra Hindleywho were both incarcerated in HM Prison Durham at the time (Rose was on remand)had formed a "friendship". Hindley denied the claims as "nonsense". Rose acknowledged that they knew each other from being on the same wing but denied further speculation that the two were "having an affair".
Both of Rose's oldest biological children and her stepdaughter, Anna Marie, initially visited her in prison on a regular basis, although by 2006 she had ceased contact with them after Mae began asking questions about her culpability in the murders. Rose justified her decision with the explanation: "I was never a parent then and could never be now."
In 2019 Rose was transferred to HM Prison New Hall in West Yorkshire. It was reported the transfer had taken place after serial killer Joanna Dennehy, who had just been transferred to Low Newton, had threatened to kill Rose, although official sources stated that the reports were untrue.
On several occasions Fred made cryptic hints he had murdered several other girls but refused to divulge any further information. To Leach, Fred claimed there were up to twenty further victims he and Rose had murdered, "not in one place but spread around", and that he intended to reveal the location of one body per year to investigators.
The following is the number of victims attributed or partly attributed to Rose West:
One theory which may explain the sudden lull in the frequency of their murders is the fact that by the mid-1970s, the Wests had begun a practice of befriending teenage girls from nearby care homes, many of whom they sexually abused, with others encouraged to engage in prostitution within their home. The Wests established acquaintances—including several of their lodgers—willing to participate in their shared fetishes, which may have satiated the couple to a degree.
Owens, Anna Marie and several other survivors of sexual assaults at the Wests' hands each testified at Rose's trial that she had been by far the more calculating, aggressive and controlling of the two. Owens stated that, at one stage in her ordeal, Fred had said that they had abducted Owens primarily for Rose's gratification. It is possible Rose's increasing family size, plus the fact she and her husband had, by the mid-1970s, begun seeking avenues to exploit girls from care homes in addition to acquiring contacts—willing or unwilling—to submit to their fetishes, may have led the couple to decide that these avenues of control and domination were sufficient for their satisfaction.
The remains of Charmaine and Rena were cremated in Kettering. At the insistence of Anna Marie West, mother and daughter shared the same coffin, and no roses were to be brought to the service by any mourners.
After the 1994 arrest of their parents, the four youngest West children (born between 1978 and 1983) were given new identities to protect them from the notoriety of their family; each child remained in foster care. Two weeks after Anna Marie delivered her testimony against her stepmother in 1995, she attempted suicide. She again attempted suicide in 1999 by throwing herself from a bridge into the River Severn.
When asked at trial why she had not spoken against the ongoing physical, emotional, and sexual abuse she had endured for seven years before running away from home when she was aged 15, Anna Marie emphasised that, as a child and adolescent, she had not known any other normality, adding, "My were all I had."
Fred's younger brother, John, hanged himself in the garage of his Gloucester home in November 1996. At the time of his suicide, he had been awaiting the jury verdict in his trial for the alleged multiple rapes of his niece, Anna Marie, and another underage girl at Cromwell Street in the 1970s. The Wests' son Stephen is also known to have made a suicide attempt by hanging in 2002. In 2004 he was jailed for nine months for having unlawful sex with a 14-year-old girl on multiple occasions. Another of the West children, Barry, took his own life via a suspected drug overdose in October 2020 at the age of 40. For several years prior to his death, he is known to have battled a drug addiction and Psychiatry problems as a result of the abuse he had endured and witnessed, including the murder of his sister Heather, as a child.
The Wests' house in Cromwell Street was demolished in October 1996, with every piece of debris destroyed to discourage potential souvenir hunters. It had been referred to in the press as the "House of Horrors." The site was later redeveloped into a public pathway.
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