MAE West recalls Christmas and birthdays being a special time as a child, one where her family finally felt normal as her mum baked ‘superb’ cakes adorned with sugary icing.
But once the special occasions were over, the darkness fell over Fred and Rose West's home as their eldest surviving daughter, Mae, reveals.
Since the serial killer couple were locked up in 1995, Mae, now 53, has tried to live a life that resembles some normality away from the sick killers she called mum and dad.
Rose West was sentenced to ten life sentences after helping her husband Fred West embark on a murder spree of at least 12 women in the 70s and 80s in Gloucester - two of the victims being their own children, Charmaine and Heather West.
While Rose has continuously protested her innocence, Fred West escaped justice when he killed himself while on remand.
Now 30 years on from being sent to HMP New Hall, The Sun revealed that Rose, 71, who changed her name to Jennifer Jones in 2020, is becoming increasingly isolated and frail. (You can read our exclusive on Rose West's grim prison life HERE)
A source told the Sun this week: “She’s in a disabled room now because she can barely walk."
“No one talks to her because everyone knows who she is and what she did, even if she has changed her name," they added.
Now, Rose is left entirely on her own after she cut her oldest daughter, Mae, out of her life for questioning her sick crimes, leading her to tell all about the woman she once called mum.
Mae grew up at 25 Cromwell Street and is the oldest surviving daughter of the pair, who had eight children between them.
And she has candidly revealed what it was really like growing up with serial killers as parents.
By the time she was born, the two had already murdered her half-sister Charmaine and her dad's previous wife, Catherine "Rena" West.
She was never read a bedtime story, or tucked in by her parents, toys were scarce in the home, so they often made up their own games - wearing their parents’ victims' clothes for fancy dress, which they found while locked in the cellar at night.
By the age of seven, Mae suffered from extreme sexual and physical abuse at their hands, with her own dad forcing her and her older sister Heather to watch pornographic content with him.
It was a future she was warned about by her older half-sister Anne Marie.
“One day, I went swimming with Anne Marie and she told me she’d been sexually abused by Mum and Dad," Mae, who lives in the West Country with her husband and two kids says.
It wasn't unusual for us kids to come across dildos, vibrators and other sex toys just lying around the house. It amused Dad.
Mae West
“She said it had gone on for years and warned me they might try to do the same to me,” she wrote in her 2018 book, Love As Always, Mum.
It was even reported that sick Fred hoped to impregnate the girls, telling his daughters: “I made you; I can do what I like with you.”
“Dad didn't make any secret of the fact he sometimes filmed [Rose] having sex” with random men while Fred hid in the wardrobe, Mae told the .
“I used to find it completely repulsive. We always knew about their interest in kinky sex. They never tried to hide it from us.
“They'd leave porn magazines lying around the house, along with bondage gear: masks, rubber suits, whips and the like.
“It wasn't unusual for us kids to come across dildos, vibrators and other sex toys just lying around the house. It amused Dad, more than anything, to see how we reacted.”
With Fred and Rose West exposing their children to sex at a young age, as a teenager, Mae was often asked to help Rose, who became a sex worker, book and schedule her clients who would come to the home, even when the kids were around.
Rose also abused her daughter, once dragging a knife along her ribcage.
She and her siblings lived in fear of their parents' threats that they would end up "under the patio" like their sister, Heather.
But Mae does recall there was the occasional respite from the torture they endured.
“We ate meals and watched TV together, celebrated birthdays and Christmas, and went on family holidays,” Mae wrote in her book.
“Mum used to bake superb cakes. We’d always have a fantastic iced sponge for our birthdays and an equally lovely fruit cake laced with booze at Christmas time. She always made a real effort for special occasions and Christmas Day was the one day we really did feel like any other family.”
Anna McFall
The nanny of Fred and Rena West’s children, McFall was believed to have been murdered in 1967.
She was pregnant when she died, with West believed to have been the father. Her body was found in June 1994 in a shallow grave.
Fred West denied murdering McFall but he is said to have confided to a visitor after his arrest that he stabbed her following an argument.
This happened before Rose West met him.
Charmaine West
With Fred in prison for the theft of car tyres and a vehicle tax disc, Rose was left to look after Charmaine and Anne Marie.
The former just eight-years-old, was Fred West’s stepdaughter from his previous marriage.
A neighbour Tracey is said to have found Charmaine tied to a wooden chair with her hands behind her back with Rose standing with a large wooden spoon.
Rose claimed she’d been taken by her mother, but her skeleton was found at the Midland Road property, hidden and missing bones.
Rena West
Fred's first wife Rena is believed to have been murdered by strangulation.
Rose was not charged for this murder.
Lynda Gough
Lynda Gough was the first sexually motivated killing conducted by the Wests.
She moved into Cromwell Street in April 1973, having had affairs with several lodgers. The Wests later claimed she’d been asked to leave after hitting one of their children.
Strangulation and suffocation were the likely causes of death.
Carol Ann Cooper
Cooper was murdered in November 1973, aged just 15.
On the night of November 9, she was allowed to spend the night at her grandmother’s house before a doctor’s appointment the next morning.
She attended the appointment and then met her boyfriend, before somehow ending up on Cromwell Street.
Her body was found more than twenty years later.
Lucy Partington
A 21-year-old medieval English student at Exeter University, Lucy returned home for Christmas in December 1973.
She left a friend’s house in a rush to get the last bus from Cheltenham to Gretton on 27 December, with it believed she was abducted from this bus stop.
She was found more twenty years later, her dismembered body in the cellar of Cromwell Street.
Therese Siegenthaler
A 21-year-old Swiss sociology student at Woolwich Polytechnic.
She had planned to hitch-hike to Ireland in Easter 1974. Her family reported her missing having not heard from her for some time.
Prosecution believe she was abducted before being killed, with Fred West later building a fake chimney over her grave.
Shirley Hubbard
Just 15 at the time of her death, Hubbard is believed to have been abducted by the Wests.
Her body was found following an excavation in the concrete and plastic membrane of the cellar floor.
Juanita Mott
In the summer of 1974, Mott moved into 25 Cromwell Street but later went missing when she was living in Newent.
Her body was found in March 1994, 19 years later, with West having concreted over the floor of the cellar.
Shirley Robinson
The first victim buried outside the house, Robinson had an affair with Fred West, and by autumn 1977, she was pregnant with his child.
It was initially claimed she had moved to Scotland but her body was later found.
When questioned, Rose West, herself pregnant with her daughter Tara at the time of the murder, claimed she did not remember her, which was described as “ludicrous” by the prosecution.
Alison Chambers
The last murder with a sexual motive established. She disappeared just before her 17th birthday, having been seen at 25 Cromwell Street throughout the summer.
Her body was buried underneath the patio.
Heather West
The first child born to Fred and Rose West, there is no evidence she was aware of the killings.
Sexually abused by her parents and having told friends, she suddenly went missing in 1987, with her mum claiming she had gone to Wales to be with a lesbian partner.
The couple would joke to their other children that they would “end up under the patio like Heather” if they misbehaved. This, and their changing stories, led to the search warrants for the property, and subsequently to their arrests.
Growing up, Mae and her siblings would often be locked in the cellar of their home at night with a bucket to use as a toilet.
Throughout this time, Fred and Rose invited lodgers, predominantly women, to stay in the home.
Many of these women were subjected to horrific torture and rape before eventually being killed and buried under the house.
They also enticed young women into their car with Rose's presence in the front seat used as a way to make them feel safe before taking them home to meet the same fate.
Mae recalls that there was a large toy box that was locked in the cellar that they would play on to keep them entertained, later she realised it was used to store the mutilated bodies of their victims.
"I remember there was a chest down there, a sort of toy box, and we’d jump onto it and pretend it was a boat while we waited for Mum to come and let us out. There was always a disgusting smell that came with it, but we didn’t have the faintest idea what was the cause of it," Mae recalls.
"It is strange and chilling to think about that game now – now that I know there really were horrors under that floor- police found human remains hidden in the house's cellar and under paving slabs in the garden."
The children also found a box of clothes down there which they used to play dress up, she later realised they were the clothes of the victims.
Despite the sexual abuse, Mae says Fred was often the nicer parent to be around.
While she and her sisters slept fully clothed and took turns guarding the bathroom for each other from Fred, she said it was her mum they truly feared.
She was the one who terrified us.
Mae Rose
"Extraordinary as it sounds, aside from the sexual abuse, in many ways he’d been quite kind and even funny," she says.
"He’d sometimes intervene when Mum punished us with an 'Ease off, Rose!' - she was the one who terrified us."
While many assume Rose was groomed by Fred, who was 12 years her senior, Mae said her mum "wore the trousers in their marriage".
Mae’s oldest sister Heather disappeared at the age of 17, a year after confessing to school staff and friends what was going on at home, but nothing was done to protect her.
The siblings were told she had taken a job in Torquay, which she had previously been rejected from.
In reality, Fred and Rose West had murdered their own daughter and buried her underneath the family home.
Fred would even ‘joke’ that, should the kids ever misbehave, they would “end up under the patio like Heather”.
But Fred and Rose West failed to keep their stories the same about where Heather had gone, which ultimately led to them being caught.
Their younger daughter, Louise, came forward to a friend about the sexual abuse Fred put her through, which spurred the friend's mum to call the police.
Police eventually caught up with the pair's sick actions thanks to their children telling people their sister was under the porch, and on February 25, 1994 began excavating the house.
They soon realised the joke of going "under the patio" was in fact a threat when they found a leg bone in the garden.
Further excavation work led police to nine more bodies found buried under the house - with two more victims found in a field in Kempley.
When Fred was questioned by police, he chillingly revealed there were at least 20 more victims that the couple had killed across the country.
Mae was 20 when the police came knocking and had moved out of the family home by this point, she said at first, she was too stunned to believe it was real.
Mae moved out of the family home in 1990 at the age of 18 after getting a job as a secretary and signed a mortgage with a partner.
Four years later, her parents were jailed for multiple murders.
She attempted to have contact with Rose while she was in prison, but says the relationship was cut off by her mum when Mae probed her on the murders.
Mae continued: “She claimed that Dad influenced and controlled her and that she’d made a pact to stay with him as long as he didn’t harm us kids.
“But it started to sound implausible. If that was the case, why didn’t she leave when Heather went ‘missing’? You wouldn’t just accept that your daughter had disappeared, would you? And why would Mum collude in the sexual abuse? When I started to think about it all, doubts crept in.”
It was after Mae quizzed Rose about Heather that Rose decided to cut off all contact with her daughter.
“And I watched her squirm. I thought, ‘She’s not going to give me an honest answer for all her promises. And she never has done. You never got straight answers.
"It makes it worse for the families of victims because she is the only one alive now who knows the truth — and yet she hasn’t told it."
While Mae has mostly remained out of the spotlight, she decided to share her story with her tell-all book in 2018.
She's also gone on to live a relatively normal life with a husband and has two adult children, and lives in the rural West country.
Despite their horrific childhood, Mae has been able to keep a relationship with her siblings.
They say that families are broken up by these things, but we’ve stuck together.
Mae West
“We’ve all coped in different ways,” she told the . “We’re very close. I talk to my sister Louise every day on the phone. There are very few people you can go to who share our background.
“Even in our own family, everyone has had a different experience, and as much as people try to, they can’t understand. They just don’t know what we’ve been through, do they?
“They say that families are broken up by these things, but we’ve stuck together. Actually, we’re very lucky.”
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