Two police officers att he door: We’ve come to dig up the garden to search for Heather’s body
LOOkInG back, the one positive thing to have come out of my childhood was my friendship with Heather. We consoled each other when we were beaten — and because we had very few toys, we invented our own games
In the basement, we’d jump from one cushion to another, imagining that the floor was a sea full of sharks. It’s so chilling to think about that now, given that there really were horrors under that floor.
In the garden, we made perfume from rose petals and tried to make pots from the clay-rich soil. We little knew that we were digging the earth that was soon to be Heather’s grave.
As Heather and I reached our midteens, our older sister Anne Marie — Dad’s daughter by his first wife — came to visit. One day, I told her how we had to keep dodging Dad’s sexual advances. ‘You might not be able to do it for ever,’ she said. And she went on to tell me that Dad had raped and sexually abused her with Mum’s help.
I simply couldn’t believe my mother would do such a thing. It was all too horrible. In any case, I knew Anne Marie disliked Rose, so I tried to convince myself she was saying these things out of spite.
As for Dad, his harassment of Heather and me grew steadily worse. Mum would just laugh and call him a filthy pig.
Both Heather and I had decided to leave home at 16. But as her birthday approached, Dad began to focus his horrible attentions on her — and if she showed any sign of distress, he’d become nasty and threatening.
Heather retreated into herself. She hardly ever laughed or smiled and often used to sit silently in a chair, just rocking back and forth.
In the summer of 1987, when she finally turned 16, she lined up a job as a cleaner at a holiday camp in Torquay. She brightened up then, knowing she’d be leaving home.
Then, the day before she was meant to set off, the job fell through. I went to find her. She was in bed, very upset, and didn’t want to talk.
The next day, I went to school as usual, but when I got home there was no sign of her.
‘Your sister’s gone,’ Dad told us casually. ‘Gone where?’ we asked. ‘The job at the holiday camp. She had a call to say it was back on. So she went.’
‘Well, that’s great, isn’t it?’ I said, looking at Mum. But she didn’t answer. It was obvious she didn’t want to talk about it.
I was sorry I hadn’t had chance to say goodbye, but I was pleased for her that everything had worked out; I had no reason to think I’d never see her again.
In the weeks that followed, I expected Heather to write to me, but no letter came. I spoke to Dad about it. ‘She’s probably a bit busy, what with starting a new job and all. I expect she’ll be in touch before long.’
A few days later, the phone rang at around 10pm. There was a drunken female voice at the other end of the line and I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
It didn’t sound like Heather to me, but Mum grabbed the phone and said: ‘Hello. Who’s this? . . . Heather . . . how are you?’
There was a pause and then Mum seemed to get angry: ‘Don’t speak to me like that!’
Dad grabbed the receiver. ‘Come on, Heather. Don’t speak to your mother like that. Show a bit of respect. She brought you up, didn’t she? She don’t deserve that.’ When he put the phone down, he turned to us and said: ‘Well, at least we know she’s all right now, don’t we?’
Weeks and months passed. Still no letter. Something began to feel very wrong. Had Heather actually rowed with Mum and Dad and run away?
Without telling them, Steve and I went out looking for her in the streets of Gloucester. We even called at the Salvation Army office to report her as missing. Dad continued to claim that Heather was occasionally in touch with him, but I grew increasingly worried.
I couldn’t believe Heather would simply abandon us.
So Steve and I wrote to Cilla Black, who was doing a show which reunited family members. We heard nothing back. We contacted another show called Missing, which tried to locate people, but had no reply from them either. Eventually, we told Dad that we were going to the police to report her as missing.
A dark look crossed his face. ‘You better not do that. You could get her into real trouble. You definitely don’t want to go bringing the police into this.’ So we left it. And as time passed, my sister’s name was mentioned less and less.
The irony of Heather’s disappearance was that it drew Mum and me closer. I felt sorry for her: all I could see was a mother who was very upset at the way her daughter had left home.
Mum’s behaviour changed: she never hit me again. As for Dad, he still occasionally tried to grope me, but he was nothing like as persistent as before. Then I turned 16, and it was my turn to get a job, at a local property firm, and move out of Cromwell Street. Before leaving, I warned my younger sister Louise to watch out for Dad.
She was a quiet, thoughtful, rather shy girl, not yet in her teens, and said she knew what I meant. Sadly, we’d both underestimated the danger. OnE day in August 1992 when I was 20, Mum rang to tell me that the police had just raided our home. She seemed very upset. She said Dad had been taken to the police station and was being questioned about raping and sexually abusing Louise. I was shocked and horrified. Louise was still only 13 so I’d imagined she’d be safe, at least for a little while longer.
What upset Mum most was that all the other younger children had been taken into care. ‘They think I’m involved, too, Mae! They’re saying I helped him to do it!’ she wailed.
I couldn’t bring myself to imagine that she’d helped him rape her own daughter. So I sat with my mother as she poured her heart out, trying to console her. ‘Thank God I’ve still got you, Mae,’ she kept saying.
Dad was on remand in Birmingham, but he was allowed to make phone calls. One night, before I passed the phone to Mum, he told me: ‘She’s got no one else now, Mae. I’m trusting you to take care of her.’
He was giving me the responsibility to hold the family together. And so I moved back into Cromwell Street.
In June 1993, my parents were tried at Gloucester Crown Court. Dad was charged with three counts of rape, and one of buggery and cruelty to a child. Mum was charged with cruelty and inciting him to have sex with a 13-year-old.
They pleaded not guilty. The trial collapsed when Louise refused to testify, but the authorities insisted on taking her and four of the other children into care. She was the only person who could have told me the truth, but I wasn’t allowed to have any contact with her.
All I heard was my parents’ side of the story, which was that the charges had been trumped up, based on children’s gossip and the fact that the two of them had a large collection of pornography and sex toys.
‘I told you there was nothing in it,’ said Mum.
‘Yeah, we can all get back to normal now,’ said Dad.
At first, they were furious at losing the kids. But after a while, Dad said: ‘We’ll just have to forget we ever had them and that’s that!’ To my surprise, Mum said she felt the same, that if she couldn’t be in control of her children she didn’t want them. They immediately set about clearing out the children’s rooms and threw their clothes and belongings away.
I was amazed at how quickly they were prepared to write off five of their own children.
With their marriage now rekindled, Mum and Dad took the bizarre decision to set about creating a new family. Mum had opted to be sterilised after the birth of her last baby but now decided to have an operation to reverse it.
Before long she was pregnant, but a few weeks later she was rushed into hospital with severe abdominal pain. She was treated, but it turned out there was no baby after all.
Mum came home, subdued and depressed. I tried to tell her that it was for the best but that only made her angry.
I got the strong impression that, once she was feeling better, she and Dad were going to try for more babies. In the event they didn’t get the chance. EIGHT months later, on February 24, 1994, I opened the door to find two policemen standing there. ‘Is Rosemary West at home? Can we come in?’
When Mum came down in her dressing gown, they told us they had a warrant to search our garden for Heather’s body. I was expecting Mum to go mad, but she just sat down, stared at her feet and said nothing.
Soon afterwards, my brother Steve arrived. Like me, he was in total sickening shock — especially as we’d once joked about Heather being under the patio after seeing a soap episode with a similar plot.
Without being entirely serious about it, we’d decided to set a trap for Mum and Dad. We played them videos of episodes from Prime Suspect and Brookside that featured bodies buried under a patio. Then we watched for their reactions, but nothing about their behaviour suggested they were uncomfortable.
But this was real life. And we were convinced the police would find nothing. So, apparently, was Mum, who cursed them for ‘wasting everyone’s time’.
Both she and Dad were taken in for questioning. not long afterwards, the police took Steve and me into Gloucester police station to meet Dad’s solicitor, Howard Ogden.
He looked very grave. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid your father has admitted murdering Heather.
‘He said he strangled her and buried her in the back garden. He has agreed to go back to the house to show them where she’s buried.’
Adapted from Love As Always, Mum XXX by Mae West, published by Seven dials on thursday at £16.99. © Mae West 2018. to order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid until September 8), visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640. p&p is free on orders over £15.
We asked Cilla Black to look for missing sister