The daughter of serial killers Fred and Rose West has revealed her evil mother ‘cut all ties’ with her in a chilling letter from behind bars.
Mae West was subject to vile sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her parents throughout 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 was put through, including murdering her elder sister Heather, the now-52-year-old was still in speaking terms with her mother more than a decade after Rose was locked up.
Fred and Rose were convicted of the the combined murders of 12 women at their home in Gloucester between 1967 and 1987, with Rose currently serving a whole-life tariff for her role in the crimes. Fred committed suicide behind bars in 1995.
Speaking on the 30th anniversary of her parents’ arrest Mae revealed her mother callously ‘wrote me a letter basically telling me ‘it’s best if I leave you to it”, essentially cutting off all contact with her eldest surviving daughter.
Fred and Rose West (pictured) tortured, raped and murdered at least 12 young women and girls, including members of their own family
Mae West (pictured) now 52, was subject to vile sexual and physical abuse at the hands of her parents throughout her childhood in the killer couple’s home (pictured in 1994)
And while serving her sentence, Mae received a letter from her mother severing all ties she revealed (Rose pictured in 1995)
Speaking to The Sun, Mae revealed that the move by her mother ‘made me question a lot of things’, but she is trying to focus on her own life and raising her own children.
She explained: ‘Me and my mother stopped speaking 16 years ago. We fell out. It was her choice.
‘She wrote me a letter basically telling me ‘It’s best if I leave you to it.’ In other words, she no longer wanted to see me or communicate with me.
‘It made me question a lot of things at the time, such as was I with her or not with her. It’s weird that someone is your parent and alive but you no longer see them.’
While Mae has spent the past 30 years building a new life for herself, she does often think about her sister who was murdered she said.
She said in her recent interview: ‘I do get terribly sad when I think about Heather, how old she’d be now, what kind of life she’d have had. I love her so much.
‘Having parents like I’ve had has made me like I am. My challenge is coping with the effect they have had on me, rather than who they are.’
In the meantime she is raising her two children, including her younger son who ‘knows nothing’ about her traumatic past.
Though her priority is to live a ‘normal, everyday life’, she admitted that it was getting harder to keep the truth from him.
She told the publication: ‘He’s at an age now where he’s starting to ask questions. All I’ve told him is my dad’s dead and I don’t speak to my mum.
‘As far as I’m concerned, he never will. Not from me, anyway.’
Fred and Rose’s killing spree was finally brought to an end on February 25, 1994, as police began excavation work at the home.
Fred West took his own life a year later in HMP Birmingham on New Year’s Day in 1995. Rose was handed a whole life tariff for ten of the murders.
Fred West took his own life in HMP Birmingham on New Year’s Day in 1995
Rosemary West pictured holding her daughter Mae West as a baby. Mae’s childhood would be blighted by horrific abuse at the hands of her parents
25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, where the family lived and carried out their crimes
The basement of their home where the bodies of many of the couple’s victims were stored
While Mae has spent the past 30 years building a new life for herself, she does often think about her sister who was murdered she said (Mae pictured in 1994)
She said in her recent interview: ‘I do get terribly sad when I think about Heather, how old she’d be now, what kind of life she’d 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 on her fears about people ‘discovering who she was’.
She said at the time: ‘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… 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 , 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!’
Fred West walking in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street, in which 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)
A warren of a house from which Rose worked as a prostitute, 25 Cromwell Street had been sub-divided into rented bedsits by Fred
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 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 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.