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On 13 December 1994, Fred West was charged with 12 murders. He and Rose appeared together in court. In the dock, Fred tried to comfort Rose, but she pulled back from him, telling the police that he made her sick. Fred found the rejection devastating. He wrote to her, saying: ‘We will always be in love… You will always be Mrs West, all over the world. That is important to me and to you.’ She did not respond.

Just before noon on New Year’s Day at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, 54-year-old Fred West hanged himself with strips of bedsheet. He had picked his moment well. The guards were at lunch and he had clearly planned his suicide so that he would not be discovered and resuscitated.

This left Rose alone to face ten counts of murder. Clearly she could not have been involved in the murder of Rena and Anne McFall as they had been killed before she knew Fred. Her trial opened on 3 October 1995. However, there was little direct evidence to link her to the murders. Instead the prosecution, led by Brian Leveson QC, aimed to construct a tight web of circumstantial evidence to prove Rose’s guilt.

A number of key witnesses – including Caroline Owens, Miss A and Anne-Marie – testified to Rose’s sadistic assaults on young women. The most damning evidence came from Anne-Marie, who fixed her stepmother with a withering stare as she described how she and Fred had embarked on a campaign of sexual abuse when she was eight.

Another witness, Caroline Raine, a former beauty queen, told the court of the night in 1972 when Fred and Rose abducted her when she was hitchhiking across Gloucestershire and sexually assaulted her. The prosecution suggested that this was a blueprint for how the Wests picked up their victims. In this case, Caroline Raine escaped with her life and the Wests were prosecuted and fined over the incident at the time. From then on, it was clear that Fred and Rose had made up their minds that future victims would not be allowed to live to tell the tale.

Fred’s confidante Janet Leach also gave crucial evidence. She testified that Fred had told her privately that Rose was involved in the murders – and that Rose had murdered Charmaine and Shirley Robinson by herself. However, he said that he made a deal with Rose to take all the blame himself. At the time, this confession, given in confidence, had put her under so much stress that she suffered a stroke. It was only after Fred’s suicide that she felt the bond of confidentiality had been lifted and she told the police what he had said to her. Giving testimony put her under enormous stress. She collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital, and the trial was adjourned for several days.

The defence, led by Richard Ferguson QC, maintained that evidence of sexual assault was not the same thing as evidence of murder. He made the case that Rose did not know that Fred was murdering the girls they had abused and burying them around the house.

Ferguson made the mistake of putting Rose on the witness stand. She did not impress the jury. The prosecution rattled her by making her angry. She appeared obstructive and defiant. The prosecution also managed to force her to confess how badly she had treated the children and she gave the general impression of being unscrupulous and dishonest.

The defence played taped interviews with Fred West, where he said that he had murdered his victims when Rose was out of the house. But it was not difficult for the prosecution to show that Fred was an inveterate liar, so everything he said was open to doubt.

In his closing speech, Leveson maintained Rose was the dominant force in the Wests’ murderous partnership. She was, he told the jury, the ‘strategist’.

‘The evidence that Rosemary West knew nothing is not worthy of belief,’ he said.

Ferguson, closing for the defence, maintained that the evidence for murder only pointed to Fred. There was no proof that Rose had known anything, let alone participated. The jury did not believe him. It quickly came to the unanimous verdict that Rosemary West was guilty of the murders of Charmaine West,