WINCHESTER, England (Oct 10, 1995 - 11:01 EDT) - Suspected serial killer Rosemary West was a prostitute who cruised the streets of England with her husband Fred for virgins and runaway girls, a former friend said on Tuesday.
Elizabeth Agius also told the court trying the housewife and mother of eight for 10 murders that Fred, showing off his new home's cellar, said "I could make this my torture room."
The bodies of nine girls and women were unearthed last year from 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Five were entombed in a circle under the cellar, later turned into a children's nursery.
Agius met the couple in 1971, just before they moved to Cromwell Street. The house they then occupied yielded up the 10th body, said to be Fred's eight-year-old stepdaughter, Charmaine.
"They were a really close couple, the kind of people who wouldn't hide anything from each other," she told the court in the ancient English capital of Winchester near the south coast.
Fred, charged with the same 10 murders and two more, was found hanged in prison on New Year's Day leaving Rose, 41 and 12 years his junior, to face justice alone. She denies murder.
"Fred said he went out riding for young girls but it was better if he took Rose with him because it was easier to pick them up if another woman was in the car," Agius said.
"He liked 15-year-olds because they were more likely to be virgins and he could get more money for them.
"They had the opportunity to go and live with them and go on the pill if they wanted. Fred told me once he preferred young runaways because they had nowhere to go," she said.
The victims whose dismembered and decapitated bodies were found at Cromwell Street were aged from 15 to 21.
Runaways, hitchhikers and lodgers at the house were among them -- as was Rose West's firstborn, Heather who died aged 16 in 1987.
But Agius, accused by the defence of being a liar who made the story up to try and cash in by selling it to the tabloid Sun newspaper, said she had never seen any young girls herself and had dismissed it all as fantasy when she was told in 1971.
She said she had rejected Rose's requests for a three-in-a- bed session along with Fred, or with Fred's overtures aimed at bondage.
Agius, who lives abroad with her husband, said Fred had approved of his wife's sleeping with other men for money -- something Rose had admitted to doing -- and had listened in or watched through a bedroom peephole.
She became nervous and confused under cross-examination and denied she had told a different story to police officers. She had gone to the Sun, she said, only to ask for advice on how to contact the police and not to seek payment.
"It's still hard to believe what they did because they were such a nice couple," Agius said.
Rose's correspondence with Fred while he was in jail for dishonesty in 1971 -- at just the time when, prosecutors say, Rose killed Charmaine -- showed how devoted to each other the teenage mother and burly builder were.
Their letters were steeped in romantic terms -- "darling," "all my love," "your ever worshipping husband" -- but in one, Rose struck what seemed, when read out in the grave courtroom, a darker tone.
"I'd better not write too much unless I put my foot in it, ha ha," she wrote, days after indicating it was time for Charmaine to go and saying: "From now on, I'm going to let God guide me."
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