EVIDENCE of Rosemary West's promiscuous sex with lodgers young women should not have been used to help convict her of 10 murders, the Court of Appeal was told yesterday.
Mr Richard Ferguson QC, representing West, who was not in court, said that just because she had joined her husband, Fred, in binding and taping their victims for enforced sex sessions did not mean he could not have killed them on his own.
Four "living victims" who had given evidence at the Winchester Crown Court trial last year that Fred and Rosemary West (41), acted together at the Cromwell Street, Gloucester, house, did not prove that Rosemary knew anything about the murders.
"Photographs of vibrators and dildos and posters of naked girls taken from the house, together with evidence of lesbianism and her indiscriminate sex with lodgers should not have been ruled admissible," said Mr Ferguson.
Mr Ferguson said there was evidence during the trial that Fred West had begun a series of rapes, assaults and abductions of young women from 1960, when he had not met his future wife who was six years old at the time.
"That suggestion, that Fred West on the evidence could well have been the sole perpetrator of the 10 murders is the hook upon which the defence hang their objections," said Mr Ferguson.
He said the 10 murders for which Rosemary West was convicted and jailed for the rest of her life "could have been done by Frederick West on his own without any knowing participation" by his wife.
Mr Ferguson said his application for leave to appeal arose out of the convictions on November 21st last year of three counts of murder, including those of Heather West (16), Rosemary West's daughter, and her stepdaughter, Charmaine (8).
"Other than the sheer horror of the discovery of the remains of the victims in this case, the most striking feature was the dearth of evidence to connect Rosemary West to these crimes," he said.
The evidence on the first three counts on which verdicts were returned was "tenuous". "Further, it is our submission that the evidence on the remaining seven counts was virtually non existent. Fred West, who was found hanged in his cell on New Year's Day 1995, would have stood trial on 12 murder counts, he said.
He said the appeal rested on three arguments media coverage both before and during the trial maligned Rosemary West and deprived her of a fair hearing; material evidence was inadmissible and prejudicial to the extent that it had a "catastrophic" affect on their deliberations; and the dearth of properly admissible evidence necessitated both a rigorous control over the admission of evidence and a clarity and certainty of direction by the judge on how to appraise it.