Cromwell Street serial killer Rose West was offered forgiveness by the family of one of girls she abused, murdered and butchered – but her response was heartbreaking
The sister of one of Rose West’s Cromwell Street victims wrote to the serial killer to offer her forgiveness – only to receive a chilling and callous reply.
Rose, 71, is currently serving her 30th year behind bars after the dismembered remains of nine young women were discovered in her and Fred West’s notorious House of Horrors. Yet when the sister of her 21-year-old Lucy Partington sent her an emotional letter, in a bid to help the family move on from the tragedy, Rose did something so cold, it was almost inexplicable: She reported the grieving sister to the prison authorities.
It is one reason why author, TV Producer and former Mirror Journalist Howard Sounes is adamant Rose will never be fully reformed.
“Lucy’s sister Marian wanted to forgive Rose as a way to live with the horror,” says Howard, who has been the leading expert of the case for three decades and spoken extensively to the victims’ families. “So she wrote to Rose saying, ‘I am Lucy’s sister. Please know that I do not feel any hostility towards you, just a sadness, a deep sadness that all this has happened’ …”
She was expecting some kind of reply. Instead Marian, now 77, received an ice cold response from the prison staff.
It read: “Mrs West has received your letter and asked me to relay a message on her behalf, and asks that you please cease all correspondence. She does not wish to receive any further letters from you. Any further letters will be kept in security.”
Howard adds: “There is a heartlessness to this note that speaks volumes about Rose West’s mentality. She’s a coward and emotionally-crippled.
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“It seems that Rose actually went to the staff and complained.” Howard is quick to point out the underlying absurdity of her complaint. “She’s effectively saying: ‘This woman’s writing to me about her sister, who, by the way, I killed and raped and tortured. But I don’t want to talk about that. So please tell her if she writes again, it’s going to go in the bin’!”. In reality, Rose still maintains her innocence, but with 10 murder convictions, the cruelty of her heavy-handy response was irrefutable. “It was cold,” says Howard. “And that’s the sort of woman she is. She’s a thoroughly nasty piece of work.”
Lucy’s case was heartbreaking. The cousin of late author Martin Amis, Lucy was studying Medieval English at Exeter University and had returned to her architect mother’s home in Gretton, outside of Cheltenham, for Christmas. On December 27 she left a friend’s house in Gloucester at 10.15pm – and was never seen again.
Marian later told Howard she believed Lucy had been waiting at the bus stop, when – as per their suspected modus operandi – Fred and Rose pulled up in their unassuming grey Ford Poplar, and offered her a ride home. It was sleeting that night and the streetlights were off because of a miners’ strike.
“Fred and Rose’s son Steve was a baby at this time and it is unlikely that he would have been left at home,” muses Howard, who coined the term “House of Horrors” and covered the 1994 murder investigation and Rose’s 1995 trial for The Mirror. “The offer of a lift from a young family with a babe in arms may have seemed safe.”
It was not. Lucy’s remains were found 21 years later during the excavation of the cellar at the infamous 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. She had been decapitated and dismembered. Parcel tape, still with a lock of her hair and a hair pin attached, was next to her skull, suggesting it had been used to gag her. There were also braided cords among the rubble, but all her belongings and clothes had been disposed of prior to her burial.
Chillingly, there was also a bread knife in the grave. Howard has now gained access access to more than 100 hours of police interviews with Fred West which he used for his recent Netflix hit Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story and his new book The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation which was released this week and serialised in the Mirror.
During the police interviews, Fred admits he had dropped a knife in Lucy’s grave while disposing of her remains. Hospital records show West went to A&E with a fresh knife cut to his hand in the early hours of January 3. If he buried the bodies soon after death, this could suggest Lucy had been kept alive in the cellar for up to six days, since her disappearance. “It’s an aspect of the case that is seldom discussed because it is so chilling,” says Howard.
In an extra evil twist for the family, the police tapes also reveal Fred West trying to claim he was having an affair with “juicy Lucy”.
It was quickly dismissed. Marian later told Howard: “There were many details that shocked me profoundly. One of them was the detail about Lucy being gagged, and realising that she couldn’t use her voice… She had just become flesh and bones for the gratification of others.”
Despite the gruesome details, Marian still went on to make the grand gesture of telling Rose she wanted to forgive her. She posted the letter in 2008 after spending four years writing it, in a bid to help the family move on.
Now 77 and an author, Marian is a firm believer in restorative justice and has worked on forgiveness programmes at HMP Bristol. Yet she has not yet had the opportunity to get closure herself. In 2022, promoting her memoir If You Sit Very Still, she explained she is still working towards her goal of forgiving Rose. She stressed she had been moved after hearing during the November 1995 trial about Rose’s difficult childhood.
“Since then my work has been about connecting with Rosemary West’s humanity and refusing to go down the far easier and more predictable path of demonising her,” she wrote when releasing her own book. “I take every opportunity to talk about her as a human being. Some people have asked whether I feel I’m betraying Lucy by doing this and I say, ‘No, absolutely the opposite: I feel I’m honouring Lucy by lining myself up for forgiveness’.”
Rose meanwhile is currently serving her time at the women’s only HMP New Hall in West Yorkshire. She was handed a whole life order for the murder of the nine Cromwell Street victims plus that of her eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine whose body was found at their previous address.
That means she will never be eligible for parole and will die behind bars. Insiders claim she spends most of her days alone in her cell, knitting and watching nature documentaries.
It’s also said she now finds it difficult to walk and has been spurned by her inmates, who are aware of her real identity. “She was 15 when she met Fred. He was 27. He’d been married. He’d already killed somebody,” says Howard. “[But] People should have no sympathy for Rose West. Over the course of their long marriage, she became an aggressive, dangerous woman. She took to it like a duck to water.
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The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation, By Howard Sounes (Blink Publishing) is released on July 31. You can pre-order a copy here