Serial killer Rose West’s daughter who grew up in house of horrors reveals her evil mother ‘cut all ties’ with her in chilling letter 16 years ago from prison
The daughter of serial killers Fred and Rose West has revealed her angry mother has ‘severed all ties’ with her in a chilling letter from behind bars.
Mae West was subjected to vile sexual and physical abuse by her parents during her childhood in their Gloucester home, including being forced to sleep on the rotting bodies the couple had buried in their basement.
Despite the horrors she endured, including the murder of her older sister Heather, the now 52-year-old woman still had contact with her mother more than a decade after Rose was incarcerated.
Fred and Rose were convicted of the combined murders of twelve women in their Gloucester home between 1967 and 1987, with Rose currently paying a life sentence for her role in the crimes. Fred committed suicide behind bars in 1995.
Speaking on the 30th anniversary of her parents’ arrest, Mae revealed that her mother ruthlessly “wrote a letter basically telling me ‘it’s best if I leave you to her fate,'” effectively cutting off all contact with her eldest surviving daughter broke off.
Fred and Rose West (pictured) tortured, raped and murdered at least twelve young women and girls, including members of their own families
Mae West (pictured), now 52, was subjected to despicable sexual and physical abuse by her parents during her childhood in the killer couple’s home (pictured in 1994)
And while serving her sentence, Mae received a letter from her mother cutting all ties she had revealed (Rose pictured in 1995)
Speak with The sunMae revealed that her mother’s move “made me question a lot of things,” but she is trying to focus on her own life and raising her own children.
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 thirty years, she often thought about her murdered sister.
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.”
Meanwhile, she raises her two children, including her youngest son who “knows nothing” about her traumatic past.
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.
Fred West took his own life at HMP Birmingham on New Year’s Day in 1995
Rosemary West imagined holding her daughter Mae West as a baby. Mae’s childhood would be destroyed by horrific abuse at the hands of her parents
25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, where the family lived and committed their crimes
The basement of their home where the bodies of many of the couple’s victims were stored
Although Mae has built a new life for herself over the past thirty years, she often thinks about her sister who was murdered, she said (Mae pictured in 1994).
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’ (Mae and Heather pictured as children)
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… all the old fears are coming 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!’
Fred West walks in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street, where he and his wife buried the bodies of their victims
Rose and Fred had eight children during their marriage – of whom Mae is the eldest surviving daughter (Fred at his daughter Anna’s wedding)
25 Cromwell Street, a warren of a house from which Rose worked as a prostitute, had been divided into rented bedrooms by Fred.
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.