The Observer from London, Greater London, England • 62

if TTN SUNDAY 26 NOVEMBER .1 995 tHeKeview THE OBSERVER'S POLITICAL, CULTURAL AND LITERARY WEEKLY Rose West lived out her chilling fantasies in the role of a bizarre child-mother, offering her victims tea, sympathy and moral guidance Rose OS. lies irxmmMmW Mm Nicci Gerhard By no longer nave to listen, day after day, to accounts of depravity, anguish and terrifying collaboration. But although finished, the West trial is not over in the way that bad dreams end when morning comes, or panic subsides as the credits roll on ahorrorfilm. For 31 days, we glimpsed acts of great obscenity and made out shadowy figures who in life had been alone and who at their terrible deaths were subjected to sexual torthrp and drawn-out degradations. Gagged so thickly that their heads were obliterated and bound so tightly that their limbs could not thrash, they were at their slow end rumea mo nvine Frederick and Rosemary WeU.

i ine wests tornrrea ana muraereaL' their own childrenand other ir-rf 'I JpflF' IS as the lodgers and the children and all the flotsam and jetsam of the Seventies who passed though 25 Cromwell Street. As blind as the house is now, with its sightless windows and bricked-up door. as Richard Ferguson for the defence said of Rose West in his opening speech and as Brian Levesori jeered in his closing one, didn't hear, didn't conceal, didn't Much of the prosecution case was about people not noticing the numerous signs, people not looking. Witness after witness took the stand and did not look at Rosemary West. Her neighbour didn't look at her; her lodgers didn't look ather, me policeman didn't look jcepx ner neaa oimeaiironfc roe whoseeviderice of sexual torture so horrified the court, didn't look.

But Anne Marie Davis Fred West's first daughter and Rose's stepdaughter, repeatedly gazed at her stepmother a docile, yearning, sorrowful gaze that contained no anger and capsized all who saw it. In the presence of this plump, sweet survivor, the court was silent as a chiirch. Anne Marie Davis was a girl', though Daddy raped her, got her pregnant and kicked her in the face with steel-capped boots. She called her younger self an obedient crybaby. She was hungry for love.

Rosemary West used a vibrator upon her bound and gagged eight-year-old stepdaughter before Frederick West had sexual intercourse with her. The couple whispered endearments and encouragement to the little girl as they fingered and tore her. They '1 i vW" wwm court semtinised this woman, try-. ing to discover in her face some sign of who she actually was. Under her buckled, dark hair fwhich grew longer and less crimped as the weeks passed) and behind her glasses, her large and flesbyfaee worked continuously.

'She's easy to draw a court artist said to me, with her bumpy nose and mumjjy cheeksi' She chewed and licked and bubbled her lips; she blinked and fidgeted and sometimes she ever so slightly rocked to andfeo. If you looked at her, she would try to stare you out When she heard the verdict her face didn't move, but it changed, as a landscape becomes heavy when light moves off it Levesons wnen ner momer, ness box: withherprim and puckered indu th; her real and symbolic deafness, her self-righteous literalness (Rosie was a good Anne Marie gazed at her tepmother -a docile, yearning, sorrowful gaze. In the presence of this sweet survivor the court was silent as a church mother, she 'kept the children's hairs nice'), Mrs Letts seemed a dutiful excuse for a mother. But Rosemary West stared at her hungrily, with the aggrieved weepi-ness of an adolescent who feels misunderstood. Daisy Letts did not look back.

In that non-. exchange, the years were stripped away. Rosemary was a babyish 15 when she met Fred, and 17 when she had a baby and found herself in charge of three tiny girls 'it was like a child looking after children', said her mother) Photographs of her at this time show her as skinny, pale, blank-eyed. She was pretty, a child bride and a teenage murderess." The notion of Rosemary West as childish, malleable and credulous fits the stereotype of a certain kind of female criminal. It won't do.

She was babyish but, like self- pity, babyishness and cruelty go together. The defence's claim was thatshetoo was oneofherhus- band's primary victims, as blind towhatwasgoingoninherhouse as a young girl: West recalled pie children. There has never been a case like it At the centre of the trial was a family house, a black hole that sucked up so many futures. At the centre of th house was a woman iiQlovedbies and adored her hTJsbaaidywno loved getting nant, wfiowas a shoulder to cry oh for girlsin distress and who stood in the dock and never grieved for them. Has there ever been a woman like her? She is the worst murderess this country has known.

Take her said the judge. The Wests regarded their victims as objects of their own murderous pleasures. But there was an electrifying moment in court when afteF a bleak procession of the Bone man, Blood man and Tooth man, a screen was erected and the face of Charmaine, dead for a quarter of a century, beamed at us, several times larger than life. She vas eight years old, and was grinning at the. camera fit to split her cheeks.

She was brown- eyed, gap-toothed and merry, and then the forensic orthodon- tist placed an acetate overlay of her skull on her face. The skull grinned in grotesque imitation of Charrnaine's say-cheese smile. So we were brought face to face, not just with horror and mirthless comedy, de Sade in Middle Eng- land, but with real people who were killed and then pushed under the ground in a horrible jumble of bones. Through the prosecution's case, Rosemary West sat in the dock in her black jacket and high- collared white shirt and stared at the witnesses, fixing them with her heavy gaze. They rarely looked back, but everyone else in taught her to be grateful (they to it for protection, adore it.

If you were 'helping her). After they had embed sharp spikes into the abused her small body, they object, me baby chimp will con-stroked her, gave her a salty bath tinue to hug and love and need its and loneliness downward-pointing arrow onto Anne Marie's lower body, and added the words 'Black Hole'. In recalling her own childhood sexual abuse, abandonment, loneliness Rosemary West presented herself in a strikingly sim-: iiar way to; her surviving victims. She said of her teenage rape that 'she had no one to turn to'; that she hadfallenfor Fred because he had promised her the world, and she wanted to be loved. ('I'd loved my mum very much -1 still do -and she had left me and I don't khowwhy I just wanted spme-onevto love me'.) She'd loved Chrmairie, but thought it was right she.should Uve wiui her 'natural' mother; she'd loved Anne Me wanted to protect her; she'd loved her firstborn, Heather.

She said she liked sex, with women because it was more 'friendly'. She said that all her eight children even the three "who were not fathered by Fred but by me 'coloured gentlemen' swho tame to her special room and' were watched by Fred thtpugh the peephole were -love-children'. When Heather Continued oh page 2 Portrait of the murderess the witness stand). The other West children were sexually abused. The cellar at 25 Cromwell Street was not just an abattoir, it was a child brothel.

Some years ago, an experiment was carried out on baby chim-panzeeSi It was shown that if you remove the chimp mother and replace her with a soft object, the baby will cling to that object, turn mothCT-subsu'tute. Itwill kill itself clinging to its mother figure. Anne Marie Davis never complained because she didri'tknowthat she was being abused. She remained grateful for her parents' acts of affection. After she had run away at the age of 15, she still sent them Mother's Day and Father's Day cards.

The gaze that she turned upon Rosemary West in the dock was full of sadness and love. After she had finished giving evidence for the prosecution, she tried to kilfherself. A child loves its. mother, Rosemary West displayed what, to me, seemed her only genuine a childhood of sexual abuse daughter that what she Was doing was for her own good (isn't that what mothers all over the world say to their daughters as they force medicine down them and make them do their homework?) 'Love', 'protect' and 'help' were the three most common words in her litany of self-justification. In prison, Rosemary West knitted garments for her grandchildren and prayed.

When men are angry and disturbed, they tend to turn their aggression outwards, in explicit acts of violence. Women usually turn their anger against theiri-; serves; thdhjc Mttnchhausen's syndrome, sel mutilation. Or, as Dr Cleo van Velserij, a forensic psychologist at the Maudsley Hospital who spe-, cialises in sexuial perversions, told me: when in 'my confusion I sought clinical (explanations, they turn- ft against products bf ehfoV; 0dyV which can include' 'their own children. Ripserhaiy West had a special rage formefemale parts of hervictims' -bbdies. She scratched and tore ait their nipples and attacked their Once, she painted a grief when her mother gave evidence against her.

She became a mother very young, herself because she had always adored babies, Perhaps, as she said, she fell for Fred because he had two young daughters in need of mothering. She was always falling pregnant (there were not just eight children, but miscarriages as well). When she wasn't pregnant, she turned into what Fred WestcaUed 'a raving queer; when she had a child inside her she was more peaceful. The orgy of killing between November 1973 and April 1975 (Carol Cooper, Lucy Partington, Therese Siegehthaler; Shirley Hubbard, Juanita Mptt) coincided with her childless time, before her daughter Tara was conceived. I do not think this was a spooky The victims of het, sexual cruelty spoke of Rosemary West as a 'big-sister-cumoung-T mum'.

After she had deUriousy; abused them, she treated theh with a sickening! cups of Jea, talks'. Her language to her vtiCtipis was the language of maternal authority: she told her step to soothe her raw vagina, arid 'were so kind, so kind'. For seven years, Anne Marie was sexually abused, both by her parents and by 'clients' and friends who came to 25 Cromwell Street. Her father even made instruments of torture (sexual sadism has diminishing returns: the Wests' behaviour became increasingly baroque), One of these metal instruments was fitted with a vibrator and strapped to hen she had to walk around wearing it. Brown-eved, moody Heather was for years raped and beaten before she was, at 16, murdered by her mother (T loved Rose whimpered from FAYWELDON asks her hairdresser about men's and women's reactions to Princess Diana, page 3 SIMON HEFFER, on Major's fifth anniversan, still dreams that the Tories will dump him.

Essay, page 4 BOOKS OF THE YEAR Writers from Nadine Gordimer to Nick Hornby select the literary hits of 1995, page 7 DREAM GIFTS The six best genre books of all time -from thrillers to cookery, gardening to erotica, page 8 SEX, SUN AND SANGRIA In Skegness? In November? Bella Bathurst joins a Club 18-30 reunion, page 1 1 JANET STREET-PORTER on Internet porn and the murder of the Yorkshiremoors, page 11 CINEMA Philip Ffench reviews the new Bond and pays tribute to Louis Malle, pages 14-15 THEATRE Young British playwrights are thinking small, argues Michael Coveney, page IB 'Two young women from dysfunctional families dominated the week' -ALLISON PEARSON on Anne Marie Davis and Diana. Plus today's TV listings, page Id SUE ARNOLD on the radio, page 1 7 1X1 lAlKJ MUSIC BY HENRY PURCELL WORDS BY DON TAYLOR AND THOMAS D'URFEY. A BRAND NEW PRODUCTION STARRING PAUL SCOF1ELD AND ROY HUDD. DON QUIXOTE. THE SUNDAY PLAY ON RADIO 3.TONIGHT AT 7.30PM..