Fred West's daughter reveals how she unwittingly played fancy dress with the clothes of his victims

Mae and Stephen jokingly tested their parents by playing them videos of TV programmes featuring bodies buried under patios

Fred and Rose West in 1994, the year they were arrested for the murders of over 10 women (PA)

Fred West’s daughter has revealed how she and her sister played “dress up” with women’s clothes they found in a cupboard, not realising they had once belonged to the victims of their serial killer father.

Mae West said she was about eight when she and her older sister Heather found the clothes and began dressing up in them.

About seven years later, in 1987 when she was 16, Heather was in turn killed by Fred and Rose West and buried in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the home that would become known as “the House of Horrors”.

West got his unwitting son Stephen to dig the hole for Heather’s grave by lying about it being for a fishpond, and later put paving slabs over it as part of a patio extension.

In a book being serialised by the Daily Mail, Mae West has now also revealed how she and Stephen had once joked about Heather being buried under the patio, after seeing an episode of the soap Brookside featuring such a storyline – without realising that TV fiction was mirroring reality.

Mae and Stephen even jokingly tested their mother and father by watching for their reactions as they played them videos of TV programmes featuring bodies buried under patios.

In her book Love As Always, Mum XXX, Mae West writes: “Without being entirely serious about it, we’d decided to set a trap for Mum and Dad. We played them videos of episodes from Prime Suspect and Brookside that featured bodies buried under a patio.

“Then we watched for their reactions, but nothing about their behaviour suggested they were uncomfortable.”

Previous reports have suggested that Fred and Rose would “joke” to their surviving children that they would “end up under the patio like Heather” if they misbehaved.

Mae West has previously recalled how the family used to have birthday meals on the patio, without realising what lay underneath it.

In her 1995 book Inside 25 Cromwell Street, co-written with her brother Stephen, she said: “The younger kids used to love them ... we used to be out in the garden with the music on and laughing. It was like dancing on her grave.”

Writing of her early childhood in her new book, Mae tells how she never suspected her father of killing at least 12 women, some of them lodgers at 25 Cromwell Street.

She says: “One day, when I was about eight, we discovered a cupboard full of women’s clothes and shoes. Heather and I used to dress up in them, and Mum didn’t seem to mind.

“Only much later did I realise that they were the clothes of young women who’d been murdered in the house.”

“Looking back,” she adds, “The one positive thing to have come out of my childhood was my friendship with Heather.”

After Rose and Fred West murdered Heather, Mae came home from school to be told by her father that Heather had got a job at a Torquay holiday camp and had gone there to work.

As she and Stephen became increasingly bemused by Heather’s failure to get in touch with them, they wrote to the Cilla Black TV show Surprise Surprise in the hope the programme makers would help reunite them with their sister.

“I couldn’t believe Heather would simply abandon us,” says Mae. “So Steve and I wrote to Cilla Black, who was doing a show which reunited family members.

“We heard nothing back. Eventually, we told Dad that we were going to the police to report her as missing.

“A dark look crossed his face. ‘You better not do that. You could get her into real trouble. You definitely don’t want to go bringing the police into this.’

“So we left it. And as time passed, my sister’s name was mentioned less and less.”

In her book, co-written with the screenwriter Neil McKay, Mae says that the children didn’t tell anyone in authority about their unusual home life because they were embarrassed and feared being put into care.

This is despite their childhoods being marred by violent beatings by Rose and the incestuous urges of Fred.

In 1995 Mae, the second of the eight children Rose and Fred had together, told the BBC: “Dad used to say a father should break his daughters in and the first-born child of a daughter should be her father’s. From 11 or 12, he used to touch us all the time. If we pushed him away, he would get angry or say we were lesbians.’’

In her new book, she has detailed how in her early teens she also had to act as something like a secretary to her mother, who was working as a prostitute.

“I had to answer the phone, taking calls from men wanting to book appointments,” she writes. “I found it very difficult and embarrassing, especially when some of them went into detail about what they wanted.”

Fred would eavesdrop on Rose’s encounters, and in 1995 Stephen West told the BBC: “Dad wanted mum to be with other men and women. Dad was quite happy for her to do it as long as she gained no enjoyment from it. If she seemed to enjoy it, they would have a massive argument.”

The children were also subjected to beatings, especially by Rose. On one occasion, thinking Stephen had stolen some pornographic magazines, she forced him to strip, tied him up and beat him for almost an hour with the buckle end of a belt.

In spite of this, Mae writes, there was sometimes a semblance of normality, with Rose baking fantastic sponge cakes for the children’s birthday.

Mae reveals that Fred professed to hate EastEnders, complaining that the BBC soap was too violent.

His favourite film, she writes, was Bambi:

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

Fred West killed himself on 1 January 1995 while in custody awaiting trial for the murder of 12 women.

Rose was sentenced to life in prison in November 1995 after a jury convicted her of 10 murders, including the killings of Heather, of her eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine West and Shirley Robinson, 18, a lodger who was pregnant by Fred.

Mae West has now accepted her mother’s guilt, but initially she did not believe Rose was guilty. In December 1995 she told The Independent of visiting her mother in prison once a month and writing to her nearly every day.

In the same interview Mae told The Independent: “She’s more like a normal mum, now … she’s locked up.”

The title of Mae’s book, Love As Always, Mum XXX, is taken from the sign-off on a prison letter written to her by Rose shortly after she began serving her life sentence.