Fred & Rose Read online

  Rena was from Coatbridge, an industrial town a short drive from Glasgow in the district of Strathclyde. Her mother, Mary, left home when Rena was a young child, and Rena’s father, Edward, who worked in a scrap-iron yard, had to bring up his five daughters and their two orphaned cousins on his own. The family, who had little money, lived in Calder Street – a long, straight highway near the centre of the town. It is a grim area, dominated by a huge factory complex. Even the Church of Scotland near the Costello home is a monstrosity of dark stone, more depressing than inspiring. The men drank hard in the evenings and the streets glittered with broken glass after the pubs had closed.

  Rena was a delinquent, in trouble with the police from a very early age. Her first appearance at Coatbridge Juvenile Court was for theft, in May 1955, when she was only eleven. Rena was admonished and sent home, but she was back again the following year, also charged with theft. Rena made her third court appearance in 1957, and this time was given a two-year probationary sentence. When she was caught stealing yet again, in March 1958, the magistrates committed her to an approved school, but this served only to harden her character and make her even more reckless. When she reached the age of sixteen, Rena left home and moved to Glasgow, before travelling south to visit relations in England.

  Her life had already been something of an adventure in comparison to Fred’s, who had only travelled as far afield as Barry Island. He tried to impress Rena with exaggerated stories, including the colourful account of his recent motorcycle accident. He said that he had actually died after the smash, but had come back to life when his body was laid on the cold marble of the mortician’s slab.

  It was not Fred’s fantasies which won Rena over. They came together because she was one of the few girls Fred had met who was prepared to accept his crude ways – and, crucially, his demands for sex. Rena was so coarsened by life herself that she must have been grateful for any affection, even Fred’s. She agreed to sleep with him. The relationship became so intense that Rena tattooed Fred’s name on her left arm, using a sewing needle and black Indian ink.

  Probably because of her association with Fred, and the fact that she was staying out late at night, Rena had to leave her relations’ house where she had been lodging. She moved into the New Inn public house in Ledbury High Street, sharing with a Scottish girlfriend. The girls were only there a matter of weeks, and are remembered by landlady Eileen Phillips only because they stayed out late and damaged the furniture in their room by being careless with bottles of hair lacquer.

  By the autumn of 1960, Rena was struggling to find work and short of money. There had also been arguments with Fred, who was a jealous boy. She packed up and went home to Scotland.

  With Rena gone, Fred turned his attention to the younger girls he knew around Much Marcle. It was at around this time that he began to pester a thirteen-year-old girl from the village.* It was later claimed that he seduced the girl, and continued to have sex with her secretly for the next six months, culminating in a scandal the following year.

  He also continued to visit the Ledbury Youth Club a couple of nights each week. The club was held in a dilapidated former domestic science building in a part of the High Street known as the Southend. The building was on two levels, and both the ground-floor and first-floor rooms were used on club nights. An iron fire escape led from the first floor down into the yard. One evening, in the autumn of 1960, Fred made a grab for a girl who was standing near him on the fire escape steps, but instead of giggling or running away, as his victims invariably did, she turned and hit Fred. He lost his balance, toppled over the railing and fell headfirst on to the concrete below.

  Teenagers rushed out of the club to look at Fred’s stricken body. He lay perfectly still, and all efforts to revive him failed. He had fallen no more than ten feet, but had banged his head and was out cold, his blue eyes dilated, blood wetting his curly hair. An ambulance was called and he was taken to the cottage hospital in Ledbury. He was still unconscious when he was examined by the doctor, and was referred on to the main hospital in Hereford where he had been a patient just over a year before.

  Once again Daisy had to wait by her son’s bed and pray for his recovery. Once again his blue eyes lolled back in their sockets. This second period of unconsciousness, however, was not as long as the first, and he came round after twenty-four hours. But there were lasting effects: Fred became more short-tempered and irritable. His family began to wonder whether he had suffered brain damage.

  Now that Rena was gone, and Fred had sold his motorcycle, he had little to do on his weekends in Ledbury, but Brian Hill was still a faithful companion and one day the boys turned to petty theft for excitement. In the spring of 1961, they were sauntering through Tilley and Son, a stationery store near the Ledbury clock tower, when Fred saw a display of ladies cigarette cases. He hissed to Brian, ‘Christ, these are nice!’ and on the spur of the moment put the cigarette cases into his pocket. The boys managed to make it outside without being caught and, flushed with success, Fred also snatched a gold watch-strap from a display in Dudfield and Gaynan’s, one of the town’s jewellers.

  The boys slipped furtively along the High Street and turned into a toilet by the Plough public house. Fred said it would be safer if they hid what they had stolen until they were ready to go home. Brian, who was a year younger than his friend, agreed to do whatever Fred thought was best, so they stashed the cigarette cases and watch-strap on top of the cistern and then whiled away the hours until late afternoon.

  The shopkeepers had worked out that the thieves must be the two scruffy boys who had been loitering around the shops earlier in the day. They gave the police a description, and when Fred and Brian attempted to leave the town, they were stopped. Fred had the merchandise in his pockets.

  On a warm spring day in April 1961, Fred made his first-ever court appearance, standing alongside Brian Hill in the dock of Ledbury Magistrates Court. They were charged with stealing a rolled gold watch-strap, worth just over £2, and two cigarette cases. Brian and Fred pleaded guilty and were fined £4 each, plus costs. Outside the court Fred put on a brave show, grumbling about the size of the fine, which was more than he earned in a week. Brian Hill’s mother was infuriated by the whole affair, and by Fred’s devil-may-care attitude in particular. She told Brian that he was to have no more to do with his friend, whom she believed had led her son into trouble. The case earned Fred his first newspaper report: three paragraphs on page one of the Ledbury Reporter.

  The most significant event of Fred’s youth came two months later, in June 1961. Moorcourt Cottage was thrown into turmoil when Fred was suddenly dragged before local police on a shockingly serious charge. He was bluntly told that he had been accused of having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl – the relationship which had allegedly started the previous December. A doctor had examined the child and discovered she was pregnant. It was suggested that Fred had had sex with the girl four or possibly five times, and emphasised that she was a full six years younger than him.

  Far from being overwhelmed by the seriousness of the allegations, Fred was belligerent with the police, answering Detective Constable Baynham’s questions as though they were completely unimportant. What was more scandalous to Daisy, when she found out, was that the family knew the thirteen-year-old well; Fred had been trusted in her company. ‘She was disgusted,’ says Daisy’s sister-in-law Edna Hill.

  Police, teachers and social workers became involved in the affair that followed. When Fred was questioned about his attitudes to sex, it emerged that he had been molesting young girls from his early teens, and that he did not consider his actions to be unusual or shocking. In fact, he was sulky and petulant, put-out that he had to talk about it at all. Of course it was right that he touched little girls, he argued, adding truculently, ‘Well, doesn’t everyone do it?’

  The police charged him with having unlawful carnal knowledge of a child, and Fred was briefly kept in a cell while bail was arranged.

  It was his complacent
attitude to the charges that finally set him adrift from the normal world. After the accidents, the petty thieving and the grabbing at girls, he had now made it absolutely clear that he was not fit to live with civilised people. Daisy agreed that the boy could not spend another night under her roof. It was a turning point in his life, a rejection that Fred would remember with great bitterness. He was sent to live with his mother’s sister, Violet, and her husband Ernie at Daisy Cottage in Much Marcle. None of the family back at Moorcourt Cottage would speak to him. The young girl had her child aborted and Fred’s case was set down for trial in November.

  Fred quit farm work, further distancing himself from his family. His decision was partly due to his father, from whom he wanted to get away more than ever. But he would have had to leave the land anyway. Machinery was replacing manual workers, and the life that Walter had led was dying out. Many young men of Fred’s generation found they had to move away from the village. For Fred it would mean a lifetime of odd manual jobs, but he always returned to the first trade he took up – building. He started as a labourer, and then learned the rudiments of carpentry and bricklaying until he came to think of himself, rather grandly, as a fully-fledged builder. John worked alongside him for a while and then went off on his own to become a lorry driver. Building sites afforded Fred ample opportunities to steal. He was working on a housing estate outside the town of Newent, Gloucestershire, when he was arrested for stealing pieces of hardware from the site. When Fred appeared at Newent Magistrates Court he attempted to justify his actions by saying that other workmen took things, so why not he? Fred was fined £20.

  He was still getting himself in trouble with girls, and one former girlfriend (who cannot be named for legal reasons) claims she was raped twice by Fred at this time. He had wanted to marry the girl, who lived in Newent, and had even offered her an engagement ring. But she was only fourteen, five years younger than Fred, and Daisy West warned them not to have sex – she did not want the police coming to the house again. Despite this, the girl claims that Fred raped her on two occasions after she had turned fifteen, and that, curiously, he collapsed on to his back after the first assault as if he were experiencing some kind of attack.

  On 9 November 1961, shortly after his twentieth birthday, the scruffy labourer with piercing blue eyes appeared in court to face the most serious criminal charges of his young life. He stepped into the dock at Herefordshire Assizes, before Judge Justice Sachs, to be tried for the alleged sexual abuse of the thirteen-year-old girl. Despite Daisy’s disgust, Fred was still a member of the family and she agreed to be called as a defence witness.

  The other defence witness was the West family GP, Dr Brian Hardy. It was during the questioning of Dr Hardy by defence counsel that the possibility that Fred had suffered brain damage emerged for the first time. Doctor Hardy agreed with the defence that Fred had sustained head injuries through at least one motorcycle accident, and might be epileptic as a result.

  A severe head injury is one of the most common causes of epileptic fits, and the longer the period of unconsciousness following an accident, the more likely it is that the victim will develop fits. Depending on the area of the brain scarred by the injury, there may also be personality changes. Brain damage was an explanation for Fred’s behaviour that was seized upon by Daisy West. When it was her turn to speak, Daisy said that Fred took the blame for many misdemeanours which were not his fault – but her testimony proved unnecessary when, at the last minute, the child who had made the allegations refused to give evidence and the trial collapsed.

  Fred walked free from the court, but he was not welcome at home and it is probable that this rejection marked his character. ‘He thought he was the black sheep of the family,’ says his friend, Alf Macklin.

  At the age of twenty, Fred was a convicted thief and widely believed to be a child molester. His moods were volatile and he may well have suffered brain damage. Shunned even by his own family, he had already become an outcast of society.

  *This girl cannot be identified for legal reasons.

  3

  THE HELLER

  The girl who became infamous as Rose West was born in Devon in 1953, when Fred was twelve. To fully understand Rose, and her relationship with Fred, it is necessary to reach back several years before her birth to examine the lives of her mother and father. They were both unusual, deeply troubled people whose marriage was violent and profoundly unhappy.

  Rose’s father, William Andrew Letts, known as Bill, was born in 1921 and brought up in Northam, a small village near the town of Bideford on the North Devon coast. His mother, Bertha Letts, worked as a nurse at the Battle of the Somme and became a district nurse in Northam when the Great War ended. Bill’s father (also called Bill) was a shiftless, lazy man who dabbled in a variety of jobs.

  Northam was similar to Much Marcle, one hundred and twenty miles to the north-east, inasmuch as it is a small, quiet village cut off from the hurly-burly of the modern world. Northam is set upon a slight hill, on a lip of land which juts into the confluences of the rivers Torridge and Taw where their estuaries join the Bristol Channel. Laid out below the village is a rugged seaside park known as Northam Burrows, which ends in a sandy beach. The town of Bideford is within walking distance south of the village; Barnstaple is a few miles down-river to the east. The village was the scene of one great and violent historical event when, in the ninth century, a terrible battle was fought on the land where Northam now stands, between the men of Alfred the Great and an invading army led by Hubba, King of the Danes. By the time the enemy had been driven back into the sea, the Burrows were stained with the blood of eight hundred men.

  There are several small hotels around Northam, but it is not a picturesque seaside village and there is only a small tourist trade in the summer. The church and the buildings around the central square are constructed of gloomy stone. Bill Letts’ family lived in a terrace house in Castle Street, one of the narrow roads that lead off the square. This part of Northam is as dark as a Rhondda Valley mining village.

  The marriage of Bertha and Bill Letts was not a happy one. Neither wanted children, and they were initially disappointed when, despite their best intentions, Bertha became pregnant. They changed their view when Bill junior was born and came to dote on what would be their only child.

  Bill was sickly, but his lack of strength only made Bertha love him all the more. She idolised her son, and spent hours knitting warm clothes to keep illness at bay. Bill was struck down by rheumatic fever shortly before he was due to start at Northam’s Church of England Secondary School. He was kept at home for many months, and when he finally enrolled, his classmates were astonished to see that he was wearing girl’s woollen stockings under his shorts. The stockings, together with Bill having missed the start of school, made him the butt of classroom jokes. ‘We all thought it was very queer,’ says Ronnie Lloyd, who later became a friend.

  Bill was soon being bullied. When Bertha found out, she took it upon herself to go to the school and deal with his tormentors. He was also lonely at home. Bertha played cards in the evenings, leaving Bill with his father, but now the novelty of having a son had worn off, his father lost interest in Bill and often reminded him that he was only the result of an accident.

  After leaving school, Bill first worked in an electrical shop in Bideford and then for the Bristol Airport Company as a radio engineer. He was a reserved and distrustful teenager, prone to the notion that people were ‘ganging up’ against him. He experienced at least one unhappy romance, when a local girl he had been courting moved away from the village to marry another man, and the rejection added to his increasingly jaundiced view of the world. This was compounded when his father began to impose strict rules on Bill; for example, locking the front door against him if he were not home by ten at night.

  One of Bill’s few friends was a Jewish boy named Lionel Green, whose family were well-off people from London, where they owned a business in the East End. The Second World War had begun, and the
Greens moved into a large house in Bideford to escape the Blitz. Lionel had three sisters, and his parents employed a young girl to help look after them. One day Lionel introduced her to Bill.

  Daisy Gwendoline Fuller was three years his senior, but so unassuming that she appeared to be much younger than Bill. Daisy was from Chadwell Heath, Essex, a short train ride from East London. Her father was a professional soldier, a decorated veteran of several famous battles who brought up his nine children with Victorian-style discipline, giving them a ‘good hiding’ if they misbehaved.

  Daisy went into service after leaving school. During the late 1930s she worked at a public house in London’s Brick Lane, where she witnessed Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts march past the door. Life there had been hard, and poorly rewarded; she was used to being up at six in the morning and often did not get to bed again until midnight.

  After leaving the Brick Lane pub, Daisy was employed carrying out domestic work for the Green family, and was working for them when they decided to move to Devon.

  The young man she met was not particularly prepossessing. He was small and slightly built, with stiff manners; a prim youth who hated bad language and did not smoke or drink, preferring grapefruit juice to beer when he went out. But Daisy was prudish herself, and was pleased that Bill did not manhandle her or chase after other girls. He was somebody she thought would meet with her father’s approval.

  They married on 18 April 1942, at St Mary’s Church in Ilford, Essex, so that Daisy’s family could attend the ceremony. Afterwards they travelled back to Northam, and Daisy moved in with Bill’s parents in their tiny house on Castle Street. She was immediately struck by how obsessively neat and tidy the Letts were. It was also plain that Bill’s father had little interest in his son and was not looking forward to becoming a grandfather, but because of his own unhappy experiences as an only child, Bill vowed he would not make the same mistake with his marriage and told Daisy that he wanted a large family. They were still living with Bill’s parents when their first child, Patricia, was born in 1943. A second daughter, Joyce, arrived eighteen months later, shortly before Bill was called up to the services.