How I survived growing up in the House of Horrors - by Fred and Rose West's ... trends now

There aren’t many support groups for the children of serial killers. ‘There are a limited number of us about,’ Mae West observes wryly.

Mae is a pretty woman. Composed in demeanour, softly spoken, articulate, likeable and with a quiet line in ironic humour, she speaks powerfully on behalf of the tiny but forgotten minority to which she belongs.

You would never guess from her life today — a stable marriage, two children, a comfortable, modern home in a smart enclave of a historic English town — the depths of horror and depravity that scarred her childhood.

‘Sometimes I think when the criminals are sorted out, people overlook their families,’ she says. ‘I often see cases in the news and wonder: “What happened to the children?”

‘My mum is in prison for life. She’s been convicted of the murders of a child and nine young women — one of them my older sister, Heather — and, in a sense, she’s protected.

‘Sometimes I feel, “It’s all right for her.” She’s had counselling, she’s done a degree in English; every course she’s been offered she’s said “yes” to. She has a full life: hobbies, gym, sewing, cookery. She lives in a bubble.

‘But what about us, her children? There’s no place for us to be ourselves.

‘I worry about people knowing or discovering who I am. And I have all these anxieties about my son finding out about his grandparents.

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

‘And my son’s coming up to nine years old and . . .’ she sighs heavily, ‘all the old fears are surfacing again. My strategy is to leave it. I won’t tell him now. I want him to have a childhood that isn’t marred.

‘It’s always a problem being part of the West family. I know I can’t work with children, and it’s about self-protection as much as anything, because if something happened to a child in my care — if they fell and hurt themselves — I’d be blamed because of my background.

‘I thought about escaping my past once and going to Australia, but they wouldn’t let me into the country because of what my parents did. And to think they used to deport convicts there from Britain!’ She rolls her eyes and laughs bleakly.

‘Once, my husband applied to be a policeman. But he couldn’t get in, and I’m sure it’s because he’s married to me.

‘We feel stigmatised, of course we do. We were overlooked by the authorities while our parents abused us sexually and physically as kids, and now as adults they say, “You’re from an abusive family. We’ll have to keep an eye on you.” ’

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

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

A warren of a house from which Rose worked as a prostitute, 25 Cromwell Street had been sub-divided into rented bedsits by Fred. It became known as the House of Horrors after police excavations unearthed a series of dismembered female bodies in the basement and under the patio.

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

Over the course of the previous 14 years, Fred, it emerged, had committed at least a dozen more murders — the majority with Rose, his second wife.

The Cromwell Street victims — some teenagers; all female — were lodgers, nannies, students, hitch-hikers, runaways. They were subjected to brutal sexual assaults by Fred, and sometimes Rose as well. Some were mutilated; many were decapitated.

Rose and Fred had eight children during their marriage — of whom Mae, 46, is the eldest surviving daughter. None of them had an inkling that their home held such gory secrets until their parents were arrested and charged after the bodies had been exhumed.

Fred, it also came to light, had committed at least two further murders alone, while Rose was responsible for killing Fred’s stepdaughter Charmaine from his first marriage to Rena, who was also one of Fred’s early victims.

Fred admitted to this monstrous catalogue of crimes, claiming he’d acted alone. He committed suicide on January 1, 1995, in his cell at Birmingham Prison, where he was being held 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.

So profound was the public revulsion towards her, Rose West was dubbed the most evil woman who has ever lived.

How on earth did the West children, also victims of their parents’ sexual and/or physical abuse, cope with the appalling knowledge that their mother and father were guilty of such unspeakable crimes?

Mae addresses this question in a compelling new book, serialised in the Daily Mail. In it, she paints a graphic picture of life at Cromwell Street, which is all the more persuasive for its occasional flashes of normality.

She writes of her parents’ disgusting obsession with sex; of the sex toys and hardcore porn videos — many filmed by Fred and featuring Rose and her clients — that littered the house.

She recoils, still, from the memory of her parents’ grotesque lack of sexual inhibition. But she also recalls moments when the family felt like any other: the ‘superb’ iced cakes Rose baked for their birthdays; Christmas presents bought from the Argos catalogue; and camping holidays in which she and her sisters were briefly spared Fred’s lascivious attentions.

But Mae endured profound trauma. Raped by her Uncle John — Fred’s brother — at the age of five, she was later terrorised by her father, who groped and fondled her, believing it was his parental duty to ‘break in’ his daughters (take their virginity) when they reached puberty.

Her mother, complicit in these crimes, also beat her children indiscriminately and sadistically.

Mae’s half-sister Anne Marie — the surviving child of Fred’s first marriage — came in for particularly brutal treatment and was first raped by Fred at the age of eight, while Rose colluded in the assault. The abuse continued until Anne Marie fled the family home at 16. But while Mae never doubted her father had committed multiple murders, for a decade she believed Rose, while capable of violence, was innocent of the killings.

And for ten years she visited her mother in prison, pandering to her constant demands for money and clothes, accepting her belated displays of motherly affection as genuine remorse and listening sympathetically to her outpourings of righteous indignation.

Slowly, though, the truth dawned. Rose was ‘coercive, controlling’ — and guilty of the awful crimes she so vehemently denied.

‘I didn’t realise it at the time,’ says Mae now, ‘but Mum manipulated me. She started to hug me and hold my hand when I visited her. She’d never shown me any affection before. She

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