
Mae West didn’t have a typical childhood.
Her dad was a man named Fred West. He met her mum, Rosemary, at a bus stop in Cheltenham, a town in Gloucestershire, England.
He was 28 at the time, she was just 15.
According to The Sun, Fred was living in a caravan with his daughters, Charmaine and Anna Marie.
He aggressively pursued teenage Rosemary, until she moved into the caravan, and became a nanny to the two young girls.
Rosemary’s father, Bill, was a paranoid schizophrenic who repeatedly sexually abused his daughter, he then threatened Fred when she started a relationship with him.
The couple would later move into a flat in Gloucestershire and Rosemary would begin working as a sex worker.
In January 1972, the couple secretly married. They then moved to 25 Cromwell Street, an address which would later become known as the UK’s “House of Horrors”.
Rosemary would have eight children – five fathered by Fred and three fathered by men she met through sex work.
In 1987, Mae’s older sister, Heather, suddenly vanished. She was 17 at the time.
The Wests initially told the rest of the kids that Mae had left home to work at a holiday resort. When that didn’t work, they told them she had ran away with her lesbian lover.
Concerned for her sister’s safety, Mae told her father they should report her sister’s disappearance to the police.
“A dark look crossed his face. ‘You better not do that. You could get her into real trouble. You definitely don’t want to go bringing the police into this,’” Mae writes in her new book, Love As Always, Mum XXX.
Five years later, in 1992, Fred was accused of raping his 13-year-old daughter, and Rosemary was arrested for child cruelty.
Police began to look further into the West family, after the children told childcare workers they “didn’t want to end up under the patio like (their sister) Heather”.
After searching the house at 25 Cromwell Street, investigators found Heather’s body buried in the garden.