Fred and Rose West’s daughter Mae reveals terror of being raped when she was five

FRED and Rose West's daughter Mae West has opened up about the horror she experienced with the UK's most infamous serial killers as her parents.

Forced to sleep on rotting bodies in a cellar, raped by her uncle aged five and forced to watch hardcore porn of her own mother - Mae's childhood sounds like something out of a horror film.

Her parents were two of Britain's most notorious serial killers, Fred and Rose West, who brutally tortured and murdered 12 people, including two of their own children.

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The catalogue of abuse that Mae suffered still haunts her. A new ITV documentary fronted by Trevor McDonald due to look back at her parents' heinous crimes was cancelled at the last minute.

Now, over two decades since the world learned the truth about the Wests’ sadistic reign of terror, Mae, 46, a mother to two children herself, has written a book, Love As Always, Mum, where she recounts the terrible story of how she survived her childhood.

Strangled, molested and forced to listen to her mother having sex with punters

Mae’s childhood, along with her seven siblings, was spent being violently beaten by Rose - who never read her a bedtime story, kissed her goodnight or showed any love.

Her father said it was his parental duty to "break in" - and take the virginity of some of his daughters as soon as they reached puberty.

Fred would repeatedly molest them, so the girls took to sleeping fully-clothed and guarding the bathroom for each other.

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Her sister, Heather, was 16 when her parents murdered her after she tried to escape - then buried her in the garden.

Mae escaped death but was made to work as a secretary for Rose - who was working as a prostitute, taking bookings from clients who she serviced in an upstairs room while her twisted father would film her and replay the hardcore porn to his children.

“We'd be disgusted by what we heard - horrible grunts and moans - but there was no escaping it. Dad just found our discomfort funny," Mae says.

She describes how she would sit in her bedroom trying to do her homework while men walked past and asked if she was “available.”

Sex toys littered the house and storage jars were kept on the mantelpiece containing the used condoms of Rose’s clients - three of Rose's eight children were fathered by her clients.

Despite the constant sexual abuse, Mae says Fred was the better parent.

"Extraordinary as it sounds, aside from the sexual abuse, in many ways he’d been quite kind and even funny," she says.

"He’d sometimes intervene when Mum punished us with an 'Ease off, Rose!' - she was the one who terrified us."

She recalls how Rose strangled Mae's brother Steve when he was aged six or seven until she "thought he would die" after he refused to get down from the kitchen counter, and knocked him out after throwing a dish at his head.

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She also attacked Mae with a knife and beat her sister Tara after she threw food on the floor from her high-chair.

If any of them cried as a result, it made Rose’s anger worse, so she learned to bottle up her pain.

"Because of that, even into my adult life, I’ve found it hard to cry," she says.

Mutilated bodies in the toy box 

For years, Mae, Heather and Steve - the oldest children - were locked in the cellar at night and used a bucket for the toilet.

When the children had finished their chores, they were locked in the basement and would play on the large chest in the corner.

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"I remember there was a chest down there, a sort of toy box, and we’d jump onto it and pretend it was a boat while we waited for Mum to come and let us out. There was always a disgusting smell that came with it, but we didn’t have the faintest idea what was the cause of it," Mae recalls.

"It is strange and chilling to think about that game now – now that I know there really were horrors under that floor- police found human remains hidden in the house's cellar and under paving slabs in the garden."

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Chillingly, Mae also reveals how she and her siblings found a cupboard full of women’s clothes and shoes that they used to dress up in.

"Only much later did I realise that they were the clothes of young women who had been murdered in the house which Mum and Dad had decided to keep."

Dad gagged and tortured women - but loved Bambi

Yet amidst all this misery, Mae describes moments of normality.

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Not only did she have a close bond with her siblings, Rose taught her to crochet and was a wonderful cook who would make traditional roast dinners, plum puddings and iced cakes for their birthdays.

She said Fred was always joking and singing silly songs and there would be caravan holidays to Shropshire and Snowdonia, day trips to safari parks and the Forest of Dean, as well as happy Christmases when they would all gather round to watch the Queen’s speech.

She also revealed how Fred couldn’t stand EastEnders as he found it "too violent and depressing" but his favourite film was Bambi.

“‘Breaks my heart, it does,’ he used to say. ‘Specially the bit where Bambi’s mother dies.’”

Mum planned the funeral of the daughter she murdered 

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The beginning of the end of Fred and Rose's killing spree came when her younger sister Louise confided in a friend what had been happening. 

The friend's mother contacted the police who began to investigate Heather's mysterious disappearance. 

Police began to search the house and found Heather's body, strangled seven years earlier, along with the dismembered corpses of eight young women. Aged between 15 to 21 - they were lodgers, nannies, students, hitch-hikers, runaways.

Fred confessed and led police to the body of his first wife Rena Costello, 27, near his childhood home in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, as well as the remains of her eight-year-old daughter Charmaine, who was found in the cellar of a former flat lived in by the Wests in Gloucestershire. She is believed to have been killed by Rose, now aged 64.

On December 13, 1994, West was charged on 12 counts of murder and taken into custody at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham.

But before he could be put on trial for the multiple murders, he hung himself on January 1, 1995 in his cell.

Rose West is serving life in prison.

I knew deep down she never loved us 

Mae visited her mother every month in HMP Durham prison for ten years, and describes how her mum wrote to her about her prison work making toys, drinking cups of tea and going to church on Sundays.

In another letter, Rose describes how she had been making funeral plans for Heather - Mae's sister who Rose herself had murdered.

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Mae, who is now married, has started to find a peace with her life but will forever be haunted by feelings of guilt that she survived when her beloved sister Heather didn’t.

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"The hardest part for me – and something that has taken me years to be able to admit to myself, let alone to anyone else – has not been coming to terms with the reality that she didn’t love and protect any of us as children, especially when we were young and at our most vulnerable," Mae says.

";I think I always knew that part deep down, even though I find myself clinging to the hope that I’m wrong even now."

Fred and Rose West: the Real Story with Trevor McDonald airs on Thursday 31st January at 9pm on ITV