A Jamaican woman jailed for being a drug mule was horrified when she realised who her friend in prison was.
Vanessa Frake, the former prison governor of HMP Wormwood Scrubs and HMP Holloway, shared her incredible insight of working 16 years in a high-security women's prison to Shaun Attwood on his True Crime podcast.
She worked with some of the notorious serial killers in history but, astonishingly, not all the lags knew who they were rubbing shoulders with. Vanessa explained how one inmate had been placed in segregation for her protection, after informing on people who had her smuggling drugs.
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At the same time, one of the country's worst ever serial killers – Rose West – was being housed in the same block as she awaited her trial at Winchester Crown Court.
She explained: "So I was in charge of the segregation at that time, and on an evening we used to get these these two out to sit in front of a on a sofa in front of a TV, watching whatever rubbish they wanted to watch for an hour. There were no such things then as TVs in cells.
"We did this like every night about 6:00pm. We used to get them out for an hour. If we had the staff, let them make a cup of tea, sit there. Rose would be knitting. We never found out what she was knitting because she just kept knitting and that was that."
But it didn't come to light that the woman had no idea who Rose was until she was being taken to her trial in Winchester Crown Court and the Jamaican woman was watching footage of her on the TV. The drug smuggler allegedly said: "That dreadful, dreadful woman, how can we let her live?"
Venessa said the reaction left her and the other guards stunned because the pair had formed a friendship in their time out of their cells together. She added: "Myself and another officer, like, looked at each other as if to say, what the f**k? And we were like, 'What are you talking about? You sat next to her, like literally every day for the last sort of 6 to 8 weeks. How can you suddenly…?"
That was the moment when the penny dropped. The woman's "jaw fell to the floor". "She could not believe that the woman that she'd struck up this very sort of bizarre friendship, who she'd sat next to every night, made each other cups of tea, was that Rose West," Vanessa explained.
West was jailed for life in 1995 and sentenced for murdering ten women and was imprisoned at HMP Low Newton in Durham. In 2019 she was reportedly moved to New Hall jail in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, after being threatened by another serial killer.
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