My mum was a serial killer

Mae West, 46, is the daughter of two of the world’s worst serial killers. This is her story...

Reaching up, my mum Rose unscrewed the light bulb in our bedroom.

‘Why are you doing that?’ I asked.

‘Never you mind!’ she snapped.

She always made sure it was pitch black when she put me, my big sister, Heather, and little brother, Stephen, to bed.

It stopped us getting up. She did other cruel things too, like beating us for no reason.

In time, my sister Tara came along, followed by Louise, then two more sisters and a brother.

We had very few toys so we invented our own games.

When I was eight, we found a cupboard full of women’s clothes and shoes and used to play dress up. Mum didn’t seem to mind. ‘Waste not, want not,’ she said.

We also had an older half-sister, Anne Marie, who lived with us. She was Dad’s daughter from his first marriage to Rena and she always seemed unhappy.

Then there were the people who rented upstairs. ‘The bloody lodgers,’ Mum

and Dad called them.

They were mostly young women, and after they’d gone we’d have to scrub the room.

Dad wasn’t violent like Mum, but he was strange.

He made crude comments about people’s private parts and watched porn in the lounge room.

As Heather and I approached our teens, he even tried to grope us.

Then one day, I went swimming with Anne Marie and she told me she’d been sexually abused by Mum and Dad.

She said it had gone on for years and warned me they might try to do the same to me.

Horrified, Heather and I started sleeping fully clothed. But

then Heather changed. She’d sit on a chair rocking back and forth, hardly ever smiling.

‘Are you all right?’ I’d ask. ‘Yeah,’ she’d say.

When she turned 16, she lined up some work as a cleaner at a holiday camp, but the day before she set off, the job fell through.

Distraught, she cried all night. When I got home from school, she was gone.

‘The job at the holiday camp,’ Dad said, ‘it was back on.’

‘That’s great, isn’t it?’

I said, looking at Mum.

But she didn’t answer. Months, then years, passed with no word from Heather and Dad said she’d got mixed up with drugs.

When I was 20, Mum called to tell me Dad had been arrested for sexually