Rose West: Born Evil?

"Rosemary Pauline West,

on each of the ten counts of murder,

the sentence is one of life imprisonment."

-Throughout her trial, Rose West maintained she was innocent.

It turned out that she was just 17

when she began the most sadistic killing spree

Britain has ever witnessed.

-She wanted to hurt women as much as she could.

-The more macabre nature of this torture

got progressively worse,

with one killing following another.

-But how did this local housewife become one

of the most depraved killers in history?

Could Rose's childhood have transformed her into a killer?

-Rose was definitely in charge in the West household.

There was no denying that.

-We'll speak to the people who knew her best...

-You could hear the screams and the shouts

and it was awful to hear.

-...and discover a history of mental illness...

-She went into a little bubble of her own.

...brutal therapies...

The seizures would be violent.

She would've not found solace in the outside world.

-...and uncover generations of abuse.

-He'd actually been grooming her from quite a young age.

-There's no doubt that he altered his daughter Rose.

-Was Rose West raised to become a killer

or was she born evil?

1970 marks a new bohemian era for Great Britain.

As glam rock topped the charts, the Brits adopted

this new, free-spirited, permissive lifestyle.

And, for 16-year-old Rosemary Letts,

life couldn't be better.

She's moved in with her new lover,

29-year-old Fred;

his stepdaughter, Charmaine;

and daughter, Anne Marie.

And, nine months later, the couple introduce

baby Heather to the world.

-Rose is living in a kind of fairy-tale dream, at this point.

She's got this little family

and she has this older chap who's going to take care of her.

So things were looking quite bright, at this point.

And then, Fred goes to prison

and her world comes crashing down.

Rose learnt the hard way

that the man of her dreams was a petty thief.

Fred was a kleptomaniac.

If anything wasn't actually nailed down, he would take it

and so he was often in and out of prison.

-Fred was sentenced to ten months in jail,

leaving Rose all alone

to raise baby Heather, Anne Marie, and Charmaine.

-She was actually living in squalor

with three small children, unable to cope.

This wasn't the life that Rose had dreamed of.

This wasn't what she'd bargained for.

This fairy tale wasn't working out.

-Just as Rose was learning a lot about Fred's past,

he would learn about hers.

Years after the young girl

went missing, her remains were uncovered,

buried under a kitchen floor.

In the summer of 1971,

17-year-old Rose murders her first victim --

eight-year-old Charmaine.

In Gloucester's Midland Road,

she did not get on with her stepmother.

-She told Rose, "You're not my mother.

You can't do this.

You can't say that to me,"

and Rose would lash out.

She just picked up anything that was to hand

and would hit, jab, do whatever.

And then, she would tie her to the bed and whip her.

-After one brutal outburst, Rose kills Charmaine.

Rosemary West has spent

her first night behind prison bars.

Rosemary West has been charged with ten counts of murder.

She remains in custody,

where she denies all involvement.

-Today, Rosemary West's solicitor told

how she's in severe shock.

-In her cell at Pucklechurch Remand Centre,

Rosemary West's reaction was simple --

"I'm innocent," she told her lawyer.

Okay.

I think that Rose

was constructed of her life experiences.

She had a reality that she hadn't been able to confront

since her childhood,

the childhood that was stolen from her.

-To understand how Rose crossed the line

from motherhood to murder,

we must go back to a time before she was even born.

Rosemary Pauline Letts grew up in beautiful North Devon.

Her father, Bill Letts, was in the Navy

and was often away for months on end,

leaving her mother, Daisy, at home to raise the children.

-My name is Gill and I grew up, as a child,

next door to the Letts family.

They lived in a semi-detached

and we were right next to them, really, you know?

It was fantastic growing up in Northam.

All the men, they all had jobs,

and the women were just housewives,

bringing up the children, all very house-proud.

Lovely, brand-new houses, nice gardens.

A wonderful place to grow up in.

It seemed like summer was forever.

Maybe you remember the good times.

-During the early 1950s, Britain was kind of optimistic.

It was coming out of a war.

It had managed to get a National Health Service

and various other things, however,

there was a great deal of poverty

and you had an awful lot of ex-servicemen

coming into the community,

ill-fitted to settle into normal life.

Whilst pregnant with Rose,

Daisy was suffering from severe prenatal depression,

so Bill had to leave the Navy

and struggled with the domestic duties

when settling into civilian life.

-Bill Letts could best be described

as brutal, violent, impossible to like.

He bullied, intimidated, and, indeed, in the end,

terrified his wife, Daisy.

-You could hear the screams and the shouts and banging

and it was awful to hear.

Everybody talked about it on the estate.

Daisy's teeth would chatter, she would be so frightened,

and the neighbors would say that she

would come round crying and ask for help.

I think, on one occasion,

my mother did bring social services,

but nothing was ever done about it.

As the pregnancy progressed,

Daisy sank into a deeper depression

and sought professional help.

-The depression is so severe that it's recommended

that she consider ECT, convulsive therapy.

Very dramatic therapy, indeed,

involving electrodes attached to the skull,

you know, so-called shock therapy.

-Electroconvulsive therapy was something

that was kind of first used in the '40s and in the '50s,

but it was very crude.

The point about ECT is it has to produce a seizure.

Basically, the level of seizure, in Daisy's day,

was that where they'd break teeth,

they would bite through their tongues,

they would break bones.

There was so much amnesia following it,

they wouldn't know which side of the bus stop to stand at.

It was kind of like a crude weapon

that should only ever be used in very severe depression.

So Rose would've felt some of the effects of the ECT

and the seizures that were caused

and they would be violent.

-And it was only, I think, the day before Rose was born

that she had her last lot of ECT.

I recall the day she came home with her shaven head,

carrying baby Rose,

and I remember going to my mum, saying,

"God, what's happened to Mrs. Letts?

She's got no hair!"

-In my view, it could very well be argued that

Rose's neurological development

will have been retarded, to some degree,

by the ECT procedures that her mother underwent.

To have ECT late in the gestation period,

this often is the more sophisticated parts

of the brain development, the inhibitory parts,

the parts that give us a conscience,

that give us empathy,

that stop us, basically, from doing heinous acts.

-Rosemary Pauline Letts was born on the 29th of November 1953.

Rose was a very pretty baby,

lovely hair and lovely olive skin.

But baby Rose was remembered

for more than her striking features.

-I remember seeing little Rose sitting

in her pram in the garden.

You never heard much from her and she used to do

all this rocking back and forwards

and, you know, she'd be sat there and, you know...

I don't know what that was all about.

It was a strange thing for a kid to do, really,

wasn't it?

Rose engaged in stereotypies,

basically moving her head, rocking her head.

These things will generate endorphins in the body.

They will soothe the person.

The rocking that you see in Rose

would often be seen in children that have been abused,

where they're getting comfort from this repeated movement.

She would've not found solace in the outside world

and she would turn in on this kind of behavior