LYING in her narrow bed, night after night, Jayne Hamer heard the screams of eight-year-old Heather West as she was raped in the cellar.
Just 17 herself, the teenager had been lodging with serial killers Fred and Rose West for 10 months and unwittingly babysat their children while they picked up girls to rape, torture and murder.
But in a new Channel 5 documentary, Rose West: Making a Monster, she reveals it was the vile abuse of their daughter that led to her fleeing the house of horrors.
“Something disturbed me and I couldn’t work out what it was,” she says.
“Then I realised it was in the cellar. I could hear Heather screaming ‘Stop it Daddy’.”
After a few nights Heather asked to speak to Jayne, who had become a trusted ally.
“It was shocking,” she says. “She told me Fred was ‘breaking his young daughter in as all good dads should do.’ Then she told me ‘get out of here while you can’. Thankfully she saved my life.”
Years later, Heather became the last of nine girls murdered by the evil couple between 1973 and 1987 and, like many of the victims, her remains were buried in the garden of the Gloucester home.
The shocking documentary, which airs tonight, examines the abusive childhood of Rose West and argues that her sick upbringing put her on the path to evil.
Rose was convicted of ten counts of murder, in 1992, and is currently serving a life sentence. Fred took his own life before the trial.
Raised by a violent father, who regularly beat his children and raped her from a young age, Rose was just 16 when she met Fred, then 28, on a bus.
Criminologist and author Dr Jane Carter Woodrow says the chance meeting with Fred – who also came from an abusive and incestuous background – was a tragic fluke.
“They both came from toxic households and very violent fathers, had both been sexually abused, and Rose was quite vulnerable,” she told the Sun.
“She had recently moved to the area so it’s unlucky that two people as extreme as that should meet. It was the perfect storm.”
The fifth of seven children, Rose Letts was given the worst start in life when she was born in North Devon, in 1953.
Mum Daisy, suffering from deep depression during pregnancy, was given Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) – electric shocks applied to the skull.
The treatment induced seizures so severe that patients broke teeth, bit through tongues and even broke bones.
Daisy’s final treatment was just days before Rose was born and criminal psychologist Dr David Holmes believes her neurological development “will have been retarded.”
“This (stage) is often the most sophisticated part of the brain development – the parts that give us a conscience, that give us empathy – that stop us from doing heinous acts.”
Dad Bill, who was forced to retire from the Navy because of his wife’s illness, had psychotic episodes and constantly beat his children and his wife.
Obsessed with cleanliness, he ran his home like a military bootcamp and made his children scrub the carpet with toothbrushes.
They were not allowed to play with others on the estate, and Daisy would be beaten for chatting to neighbours.
Neighbour Gill Job tells the programme: “You could hear the screams and the banging and shouting. It was awful to hear.”
At school, Rose was put in the corner wearing a dunce’s cap.
But Jane says she found a way to manipulate her father and escape beatings.
“She was nicknamed Dozy Rosie because was behind at school and behind her brothers and sisters,” she says.
“But her ways were quite winsome, and she made her father laugh so he let her off the beatings.
“But Bill began grooming her from a young age. Rosie was the vulnerable one who wasn’t going to say anything when he began to sexually abuse her.”
After puberty hit, Rose began to use violence to get her own way at school, lashing out at smaller children.
“She had always felt out of control but now she had control over others,” says Jane.
“She suddenly felt empowered. She got more and more aggressive and violent.”
Rose’s sickening childhood was matched by that of Fred, who grew up in rural Herefordshire with seven siblings and a volatile, abusive father.
He later claimed that his mum, Daisy, instigated sex with him at the age of 12.
He also claimed dad, Walter, introduced him to sex with animals, particularly sheep, and that he watched his dad abuse young girls.
When they met at a bus stop in Cheltenham, 16-year-old Rose had recently moved from North Devon to live with her dad, but had already gained a reputation for sleeping with older men.
Fred, 13 years her senior, sat next to her and they soon found they had a lot in common, not least their abusive background. Even when Fred revealed his love of bondage and sadomasochism, Rose wasn’t fazed.
“Any other girl would have run off,” says Jane. “But Rose didn’t, because it was a normal thing to her.”
At the time, Fred was already a killer – having murdered his 18-year-old mistress, Anna McFall, and their unborn baby three years before.
“Rose and Fred were the worst possible combination. Fred was obsessed with sex and death and would have continued to kill, I have no doubt,” says Jane.
“Rose had the potential to be violent but I don’t know if she would have become a serial killer if she hadn’t met him.”
Within months, the pair had moved into 25 Cromwell Road, Gloucester with Fred’s stepdaughter Charmaine and daughter Anne Marie.
But two months after the birth of their first child Heather, in 1970, Fred was jailed for petty theft, leaving 17-year-old Rose to look after three children – using the violent rule she learned from her father.
The girls were tied to the bed and whipped. On one occasion, a neighbour came into the house to see Charmaine standing on a chair, naked, with her arms tied with a belt, and Rose attacking her with a rolling pin.
Shortly before Fred’s release, in June 1971, Rose murdered Charmaine. Fred later buried her remains under the kitchen floor.
When his first wife Rena Costello began asking questions about her daughter, Fred strangled her and buried her in a nearby field
The couple went on to have daughters Mae June and Louise, with two sons, Stephen and Barry.
But they were becoming increasingly depraved, with Rose having sex with numerous men in the house, for money, while Fred watched through peepholes indoors and walls.
Fred often taped her sex sessions with clients – which included her own dad – and three more children, Tara, Rosemary Junior and Lucyanna, were fathered by other men.
Fred West’s biographer, Geoffrey Wansell, tells the documentary he is one of the few people who has seen the tapes of Rose performing “extraordinary sexual acts.”
“They’re absolutely revolting,” he says. “She was performing for Fred, inserting things into herself, showing used knickers she kept in jars on the mantelpiece, showing how enthusiastic it was.”
At eight, Anne Marie was taken to the cellar, forced to strip by Rose and then raped by her father and she grew up being sexually abused by both her parents. Mae was raped from the age of five.
Rose also forced the boys to watch violent porn, hitting them with a glass ashtray if they turned away.
Not satisfied with abusing their own kids, the couple picked up Caroline Owens, in 1972, drugged her, tied her up and subjected her to a prolonged sexual attack before she escaped.
Incredibly, the pair were convicted of sexual assault and were fined just £50.
Over the next few years, the pair murdered eight more vulnerable girls, often cruising around with babies in the car to offer them a job as a nanny.
Their final victim was daughter Heather, beaten and strangled at 16 in front of brother Barry, and buried under a fresh patio built in the garden.
The monstrous pair would even tell their other children to behave or they’d “end up under the patio like Heather.”
The couple were arrested in 1992 after 13-year-old daughter Louise told police she had been raped by her father.
Police searching the house uncovered he remains of mutilated female bodies in the garden and cellar of their Gloucestershire home.
Anna McFall
The nanny of Fred and his first wife Rena West’s children, McFall was believed to have been murdered in 1967.
She was pregnant when she died, with West believed to have been the father. Her body was found in June 1994 in a shallow grave.
Charmaine West
Fred West’s stepdaughter from his previous marriage, murdered at eight by Rose
Rena West
Rena is believed to have been murdered by strangulation.
Rose was not charged for this murder.
Lynda Gough
Lynda Gough was the first sexually motivated killing conducted by the Wests, after she moved into Cromwell Street in April 1973.
Strangulation and suffocation were the likely causes of death.
Carol Ann Cooper
Cooper was murdered in November 1973, aged just 15.
On the night of November 9, she was allowed to spend the night at her grandmother’s house before a doctor’s appointment the next morning.
She attended the appointment and then met her boyfriend, before somehow ending up on Cromwell Street.
Her body was found more than twenty years later.
Lucy Partington
A 21-year-old medieval English student at Exeter University, she returned home for Christmas in December 1973.
She left a friend’s house in a rush to get the last bus from Cheltenham to Gretton on 27 December, with it believed she was abducted from this bus stop.
She was found more twenty years later, her dismembered body in the cellar of Cromwell Street.
Therese Siegenthaler
A 21-year-old Swiss sociology student at Woolwich Polytechnic.
She had planned to hitch-hike to Ireland in Easter 1974. Her family reported her missing having not heard from her for some time.
Prosecution believe she was abducted before being killed, with Fred West later building a fake chimney over her grave.
Shirley Hubbard
Just 15 at the time of her death, Hubbard is believed to have been abducted by the Wests.
Her body was found following an excavation in the concrete and plastic membrane of the cellar floor.
Juanita Mott
In the summer of 1974, Mott moved into 25 Cromwell Street but later went missing when she was living in Newent.
Her body was found in March 1994, 19 years later, with West having concreted over the floor of the cellar.
Shirley Robinson
The first victim buried outside the house, Robinson had an affair with Fred West, and by autumn 1977, she was pregnant with West’s child.
It was initially claimed she had moved to Scotland but her body was later found.
Alison Chambers
The last murder with a sexual motive established. She disappeared just before her 17th birthday, having been seen at 25 Cromwell Street throughout the summer.
Her body was buried underneath the patio.
Heather West
Sexually abused by her parents, she suddenly went missing in 1987, with Rosemary claiming she had gone to Wales to be with a lesbian partner.
The couple would joke to their other children that they would “end up under the patio like Heather” if they misbehaved. This, and their changing stories, led to the search warrants for the property and later their arrests.
In 1995 Rose was convicted of 10 murders, while Fred, who admitted 12 murders, hanged himself while on remand.
He had confessed to killing up to 30 victims.
Although Rose has never admitted the crimes, the documentary hears that she became the dominant one in the relationship, and that she encouraged her husband to kidnap and murder for her own sexual pleasure.
“The women that gave evidence at her trial described worse treatment at her hands than at his,” says Jane.
“She learned violence and sexual violence from her father, then from Fred and in my opinion, she outdid him on that.
“He encouraged her to practice sadomasichism on the kids and she didn’t hold back. She was cold, callous and violent.
“These were very young girls and it was almost as if she’d had this rotten childhood so she was punishing them as a younger version of herself.”
Rose West: Making of a Monster airs on Channel 5 tonight at 9pm
