The One That Got Away - My Life Living with Fred and Rose West. Caroline Roberts
For my daughter Kelly for giving me the will to live.
CONTENTS
Title Page
INTRODUCTION
1 TWO FACED
2 WEARING MY ‘HAPPY FACE’
3 THE CURSE OF BEING ATTRACTIVE
4 JAILBAIT
5 25 CROMWELL STREET
6 THE BETRAYAL
7 THE ACCUSED
8 THE JINX
9 CARNIVAL QUEEN
10 TEASE
11 A NEW LIFE
12 ROCK ’N’ ROLL
13 MY LOVEABLE ROGUE
14 ‘MARJORIE PROOPS’ AND ‘CLAIRE RAYNER’
15 A TRAUMATIC FLASHBACK
16 AMONGST THE MADDING CROWD
17 RETURN OF THE WESTS
18 MEDIA FRENZY
19 SPOKEN WORDS COULD NOT SAY
20 ‘I WAS FRED WEST’S SEX SLAVE’
21 WAGGING TONGUES HAVE EMPTY HEADS
22 DEATH OF A MATRIARCH
23 LIFE GOES ON
24 THE TRIAL
25 LIVING VICTIMS
26 THE VERDICT
27 AFTERSHOCK
28 THE DUCHESS OF YORK
29 EPISTEMOLOGICAL MESSAGES
30 LESSONS LEARNED
EPILOGUE
Copyright
DEEP DOWN, WE all invest great hope in our families. We look to family and home to provide us with support, to help us grow, to give us love. We rely on the members of our family in a thousand ways. But what happens when a child doesn’t have all that to fall back on, when the child feels let down by those closest to him or her?
I spent much of my childhood fighting against members of my family. Told from a young age that I was just a little bitch, I grew up believing it and acted accordingly. My introduction to another family – the Wests – very nearly cost me my life. I escaped from them once, only to be recaptured again and to be subjected to the most terrifying ordeal of my life. I was lucky: I managed to escape a second time. Too many others didn’t.
My life went on, but the spectre of my horrendous experiences at 25 Cromwell Road continued to haunt me. Coupled with my unhappy early years, during which I also suffered sexual abuse at the hands of strangers, I started to believe that my life was jinxed – just when I had a run of good luck, everything would come crashing down around me.
I tried to push that dark period of my life into the background for more than twenty years. But in 1994 it came screaming back on to the front page of every newspaper in the land with the arrest of Fred and Rose West. I was forced to relive my nightmare once again – this time in a court of law – and in doing so I discovered how the Wests had destroyed the lives of some of their own children.
But some good can come from even the most traumatic circumstances. To my surprise and joy, confronting the past has given me the strength to really begin to understand myself for the first time. To accept responsibility for the hurt I’ve brought to others and stop blaming myself for the hurt I haven’t caused. To move on.
I was a lost girl for many, many years. Now I’ve found myself. This is how it happened.
ON 15 OCTOBER 1928, Elizabeth Mills, my mum, was born. She was the youngest of five illegitimate children, all by different men; she never knew who her father was. Mum’s mother, Lily Ann Mills, placed all but her first-born daughter Kathleen into various children’s homes near Stratford-upon-Avon. Kath escaped the homes by virtue of being raised by Nanny Mills. Although my mum knew who her three older brothers were, she didn’t have anything much to do with them, and when they reached the age of fifteen, they left the homes and joined the army.
After Mum left the home, she went into service for a while, then became pregnant and gave birth to a little boy, Christopher. Embarrassed by her little sister’s carrying on, Kath, who was respectably married and had started a family of her own, turned her back on Mum for a few years.
Sadly, Christopher was a ‘blue baby’ – he had a hole in the heart and only lived for a year. Mum was unable to care for him properly as she needed to work to support herself and her baby, so she reluctantly gave him up to foster parents, whom we came to know as Ron and Nanny Munroe. They were a strict but kindly couple who fostered many children during their lifetime. Mum was allowed to visit Christopher whenever she liked and looked upon Ron and Nanny as her family.
In those days, Betty, as my mum was called, moved to Gloucester to work as a barmaid at the Black Dog pub. Whilst working in the pub, she met, and eventually married, Albert Raine whose name we took on, although he was not our father (‘we’ being myself and my brother Phillip, who was eighteen months older than me).
Albert was a sailor and allegedly a homosexual, so Mum informed us many years later. Our biological father, according to Mum, was an Irish roadman called Michael Mahoney whom she had started an affair with during her marriage to Albert.
Until I came along, Albert had believed Phillip, who was conceived during Mum’s marriage to Albert, to be his son. I, though, looked so much like my father Michael that I couldn’t be passed off as Albert’s child, so he divorced my mum.
Mum told me she had never really loved Albert but she desperately wanted a child and to be in a position to raise it herself, and with Albert’s support she could do it. The sexual side of their relationship was practically non-existent but she still managed to conceive and in April 1953 she gave birth to Phillip.
Phillip was fair skinned with ginger hair and freckles and he had the same pale blue eyes of Mum. He was a good baby and never any trouble to Mum or Albert. Albert would babysit while Mum worked a couple of evenings and Sunday lunchtimes at Black Dog pub.
Outwardly they were the perfect family, but in reality, the marriage was a sham.
Albert spent all the time with his old mates from the RoyalNavy, while Mum looked forward to, and enjoyed the banter and sense of humour of the ‘Paddies’, a gang of Irish roadmen who drank at the pub till all hours. They were a scruffy bunch in their work clothes during the week, but on the weekends they would put on their suits, shirts and tie’s and the smell of tar was replaced by the smell of Brylcreem and Imperial Leather. Albert was content to play happy families believing Phillip was his son, that is, until I came along.
I was born on a wet windy Wednesday morning at Gloucester Royal Hospital in October 1955.
Mum would tell anyone who would listen, ‘Caroline was such a beautiful baby with her mop of jet black hair and her big rosy cheeks. She had the most beautiful green eyes, framed by long black curly eyelashes. She was just so beautiful. When I took her back to the maternity ward that morning all the other mums