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WINCHESTER, England (Oct 31, 1995 - 17:01 EST) - Suspected serial killer Rosemary West said on Tuesday she saw her husband Fred as the embodiment of evil, with horns and a devil's smile, after she knew he had killed their daughter, Heather.
"I hated him, I did not see the man I had known all those years, he was a walking figure of evil," she sobbed as she told an English court how she saw Fred after he confessed last year to the 10 murders with which she is jointly accused.
"I saw him with horns and with a satanic grin...he used to grin like it was all a joke or something."
West, 41, said after they were arrested last year, she only saw Fred in the court dock for remand hearings. She demanded a prison officer sit between them to keep him away from her.
Fred later apparently committed suicide in prison, leaving Rose to stand trial alone for killing Heather, stepdaughter Charmaine and eight women, most of whom the prosecution say died to satisfy the couple's depraved sexual appetite.
"I am not a murderer, sir, I could not take a life away from anyone...especially my daughter," West cried.
Testifying for her second day, the former housewife said she neither heard nor saw anything unusual at the family home in Gloucester, western England, whose foundations slowly filled up with dismembered corpses over almost two decades.
The notorious 25 Cromwell Street was kept clean and tidy by Mrs West but was far from an average family home. Lodgers came and went at will and West, who admits she brought men home for sex, said she gave little attention to anything but her children and her paying nighttime guests.
She bowed her head and cried as she said Fred had told her Heather, then 16, had left home with a woman one day in 1987.
But her usually soft-spoken voice grew hostile as prosecutor Brian Leveson aggressively cross-examined her.
He tried to destroy the picture painted by West and her defence team of a meek woman under the spell of a powerful husband, to whose will she bent for the sake of her children and home, but whose dark secrets she never shared.
"I feel such a fool, because he fooled all of us all these years. I just don't know how he managed to do it without being seen," she told the court in Winchester, southern England.
"I could never have lived with a murderer -- I would never have known when it was my turn."
Leveson said Rose was Fred's devoted partner in a relationship bonded by murder and a lust for sex.
West admitted having a key to the cellar, the burial site for five victims. She earlier said Fred denied her access.
She said holes in cellar beams, like those to which a girl was tied nude to in a sex video found at the house, were used by the children who made swings of string from them.
The ordinary-looking woman, with a mop of shiny black hair and large thick spectacles, said she loved children and denied killing Charmaine, who was eight when she vanished in 1971.
"I could never have killed a little girl," the mother of eight said, tensely biting her lips as her ordeal went on.
Mrs West denied sexually abusing a stepdaughter and said she got no kicks from sexual torture or bondage. Ropes, gags and masks were found with bodies of her alleged sex victims.
"There's no thrill in a relationship for me if it is not entirely consensual," she said.
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