Daughter of serial killers Fred and Rose West reveals the awful secret she carries around with her everyday – and the letter her evil mother wrote to her from prison

The daughter of depraved serial killers Fred and Rose West has revealed the terrible secret she carries with her every day, as well as a chilling letter her angry mother wrote her from prison.

Mae West, 52, was subjected to despicable sexual and physical abuse by her parents during her childhood in the killer couple’s home.

She was also forced to sleep on rotting bodies that the couple had buried in the basement of their ‘horror house’ at 25 Cromwell Street.

The infamous couple were later convicted of the combined murders of twelve women in their Gloucester home between 1967 and 1987, including the death of Mae’s sister Heather.

And during the 30th anniversary of her parents’ arrest, Mae revealed she never told her son about her family’s infamous crimes.

She said The sun that her youngest son “knows nothing” about her past and “has no idea.”

Although her priority is to live a “normal, everyday life,” she admitted that it was becoming increasingly difficult to keep the truth hidden from him.

She told the publication: ‘He’s at an age now where he’s starting to ask questions. The only thing I told him is that my father is dead and that I don’t talk to my mother.

‘As far as I’m concerned, he never will. At least not from me.’

Fred and Rose’s murder spree finally came to an end on February 25, 1994, when police began digging at the house.

Fred West took his own life a year later at HMP Birmingham on New Year’s Day in 1995. Rose was given a life sentence for ten of the murders.

And while serving her sentence, Mae received a letter from her mother cutting all ties she revealed.

She explained, “My mother and I stopped talking sixteen years ago. We dropped out. It was her choice.

“She wrote me a letter basically saying, ‘It’s best if I leave it to you.’ In other words, she no longer wanted to see or communicate with me.

‘It made me question a lot of things at the time, like was I with her or not with her. It’s strange that someone is older and still alive, but you don’t see them anymore.’

Although Mae has built a new life for herself over the past 30 years, she often thinks about her sister, who was murdered, she says.

She said in her recent interview: ‘I get terribly sad when I think about Heather, how old she would be now, what kind of life she would have had. I love her so much.

‘Having parents like I had made me who I am. My challenge is to deal with the effect they have had on me, rather than who they are.”

In an interview with the Daily Mail in 2018, Mae opened up about her fear of people “finding out who she was.”

She said at the time: ‘I worry about people knowing or discovering who I am. And I’m afraid my son will find out about his grandparents.

‘My daughter is an adult now and she knows it and has dealt with it. She discovered her uncle’s credit card had the name West on it, put two and two together and Googled it. I wish she hadn’t found out like that.

‘And my son is almost nine years old and…’ . .’ she sighs heavily, ‘all the old fears come back to the surface. My strategy is to leave it. I won’t tell him now. I want him to have a childhood that is not marred.

“It’s always a problem being part of the West family. I know I can’t work with children, and it’s mostly about self-protection, because if something were to happen to a child in my care – if they fell and hurt themselves – I would be blamed because of my background.

‘I once thought about escaping my past and going to Australia, but they wouldn’t let me enter the country because of what my parents did. And to think that they were deporting convicts there from Great Britain!’

The crimes of Mae’s parents, Fred and Rosemary West, were so heinous that they left the world shocked and transfixed.

In 1994, police searched the family home on a rough Gloucester street, looking for the remains of the Wests’ eldest child, Heather.

25 Cromwell Street, a warren of a house where Rose worked as a prostitute, had been divided into rented bedrooms by Fred. It became known as the House of Horrors after police digs unearthed a series of dismembered female bodies in the basement and under the patio.

Among the remains were those of Heather, who had been strangled seven years earlier, in 1987, when she had tried to run away from home at the age of 16 to avoid Fred’s predatory sexual advances.

Over the previous years, it turned out, Fred had committed at least a dozen more murders – the majority with Rose, his second wife.

The Cromwell Street victims – some teenagers; all women – they were boarders, nannies, students, hitchhikers, runaways. They were subjected to brutal sexual attacks by Fred, and sometimes by Rose. Some were maimed; many were beheaded.

Rose and Fred had eight children during their marriage, of whom Mae is the eldest surviving daughter. None of them had any idea that their home harbored such bloody secrets until their parents were arrested and charged after the bodies were exhumed.

Fred, it also came to light, had committed at least two more murders on his own, while Rose was responsible for the murder of Fred’s stepdaughter Charmaine from his first marriage to Rena, who was also one of Fred’s first victims.

Fred admitted to this monstrous catalog of crimes and claimed he had acted alone. He committed suicide on January 1, 1995 in his cell at Birmingham prison, where he was on remand.

Rose has consistently professed her innocence, but the jury at her trial in November that year did not believe her. Convicted of ten murders, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with a later order from the Home Secretary that she should never be released.