True West: Daughter approves of drama
PLAYING Fred West in an upcoming ITV drama titled Appropriate Adult gave the actor Dominic West nightmares.
“I was having pretty horrible dreams during the shoot,” he said recently. “I only did it for three weeks and it was a pretty intense, very dark three weeks. It was grim.”
Imagine then being the daughter of Fred West, daughter of a real life Cronus, devourer of his own children. Imagine being the one who got away. Mae West is the second eldest child of Fred and Rose West. Now almost 40, she had changed her identity — her name, and, thanks to cosmetic surgery, her face — and lives in another part of the country far from Gloucester, where she is bringing up two children of her own. She has not spoken publicly for 17 years, but having seen the ITV drama, she gave an interview to a British newspaper.
Unlike her older half-sister, Fred West’s daughter Anne Marie Davis, who said the ITV drama made her “feel physically sick”, Mae approves of the film, saying that Dominic West’s portrayal is “eerily true to life.” It does not deal with the horrors of the case, but focuses on the relationship between Fred West and a junior social worker, Janet Leach, who was assigned to be present as an “appropriate adult” during West’s police interviews, between his arrest in 1994 and his suicide a year later.
It was to Ms Leach that West confessed further murders, and more bodies buried in shallow graves, but he killed himself in 1995 before divulging any further information. Neil McKay, who wrote the drama, spent time with Janet Leach, who is played by Emily Watson, as well as with Mae West and several of West’s children.
Mae West, as she was then known, left home in her teens, planning her escape with her older sister, Heather. Heather didn’t make it — she was murdered by her father, and buried at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. Heather was one of 12 young women raped, tortured and killed by the couple, before her father hung himself in prison in 1995. Rose West remains in jail for the murder of 10 young women.
Mae got out physically intact at 16. At 18, she had created a new life away from her insane parents, until a phone call from her mother changed everything. The police were digging up the garden of Cromwell Street. The West children — Rose gave birth to eight, five fathered by Fred West and three from Afro-Caribbean clients she’d had while working as a prostitute in the family home — had been making jokes about Heather being buried under the patio.
The police finally decided to investigate properly, having known Fred West for years as a petty criminal and sex offender. Fred West took all the blame for the murders, insisting to police that his wife was not involved. Rose West has since remained silent about any further victims.
Mae spoke publicly after the trial about her experiences growing up with the Wests as parents. Then, using the money from the newspaper interview, she disappeared. Despite her new life, she has never managed to lose the fear that one day someone will discover who she really is. It makes for constant anxiety. She feels that she has not dealt with the horror, yet cannot be open about it either, because she has to protect her privacy and her own children.
“Not talking doesn’t make it go away,” she said recently. “I don’t think people realise how a mum and dad really are really important in your life. You can’t just say, ‘They’re not there any more. They never existed. I’ve just appeared on this Earth with no parents.’ No one knew what it was like for us, living with those sorts of parents. I’m not sure, do people care or not?”
Like many survivors of serious abuse, Mae West carries misplaced guilt. Given her childhood — the physical savagery of her mother, the low-IQ murderous sadism of her father, the absence of any sexual boundaries, the neglect and pain, blithely unnoticed for years by teachers, neighbours, social services, or the police — Mae appears to be something of a miracle. Her children — a 16-year-old and a toddler — are doing well, although she lives in constant fear that something bad may happen to them. She is in a long term stable relationship. She works. Yet unsurprisingly, peace of mind eludes her.
“You worry all the time. You’re never really at peace. You’ll do something nice and then beat yourself up afterwards for hours, because that’s what we do. We’re people that try and plod along. As long as I think I’m plodding, I’m happy.”
She doesn’t understand her parents, and is grateful for the fact, because she says that if she did understand how their minds worked, she would be like them. And she is nothing like them, she says. They were sick people, abused and abusing.
Her mother was more overtly disturbed, she says, an obvious oddity whom people did not warm to, prone to extreme violence without provocation, sexually un-boundaried and alcohol-dependent.
Abused by her own father as a matter of course — incestuous paedophilic abuse was rampant in both Fred and Rose West’s families of origin — Rose did not view her many children as human beings, but as dolls with which to play very sick games, culminating in several instances with murder. “I just don’t know why Mum bothered having us,” Mae West says now. “Why would you just subject more and more children to that? I just don’t get it.”
Her father, she says, was laid back and jolly, even as he was molesting them. On the outside he seemed like a nice guy, she says. “Jovial. You’d think he was charming, you really would.” However, like Rose West, he did not view his daughters as people, as humans. Females were for sexual use only. The only purpose of a woman — that is, any female over the age of 16 — was to make babies. He didn’t know why his daughters wanted to go to school, or learn to drive, and he actively discouraged them from both.
“Women don’t drive, they just have babies,” he would tell his daughters. He had no interest in his children — while he wasn’t violent towards them, unlike their mother, he was not clear even on their names. He wished to impregnate his daughters once they had turned 16.
What is astonishing is how this large chaotic family functioned in a small semi-rural community without any outside authorities picking up on the dysfunction, abuse and neglect. Those children would have shown all the signs of deep trauma. But clearly back then, outside agencies were not very skilled in intervention. Even when a sex client of her mother’s reported the family to social services, nothing happened; the children sat silently as a social worker interviewed them. They had been conditioned not to speak to anyone outside the family.
Astonishingly, Mae remained loyal to her mother even when Rose was in prison. Only when she confronted her with a letter outlining how she felt, did Rose cut her daughter out of her life.
In recent years she has become a bit of a campaigner for the truth. “We have to accept that good and bad happens. There are many people who don’t want to know that there are evil people in the world, that bad things happen.”
- Appropriate Adult airs at 9pm, ITV1, September 4 & 11.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
