THERE aren’t many support groups for the children of serial killers. It’s unfortunate, but completely understandable, Mae West observes wryly. “There are a limited number of us,” she says. Mae is a pretty woman. Composed, softly spoken, articulate, likeable and with an ironic humour, she speaks powerfully on behalf of the tiny but forgotten minority to which she belongs.
You would never guess from her life today – a stable marriage, two children, a comfortable, modern home in a smart enclave of an historic English town – the depths of horror and depravity that scarred her childhood.
“Sometimes I think when the criminals are sorted out, people overlook their families,” she says. “I often see cases in the news and wonder: what happened to the children?”
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 at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England, looking for the remains of the Wests’ eldest child, Heather.
The warren of a house from which Rose worked as a prostitute, had been subdivided 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,
