ROSEMARY WEST, sentenced to life imprisonment last November for murdering 10 young women and girls, including her own daughter, will today ask a British court for permission to appeal against her conviction.
Lawyers for West will tell the Court of Appeal in London that the 41-year-old former housewife had been tried by the media before she got to court, legal sources said.
Newspapers and television carried interviews with many of the witnesses in the case, ensuring that West was the most reviled woman in Britain before her trial started.
She had no chance of a fair trial, her lawyers claim.
West received a life sentence for each of the murders. Her victims were mostly lonely young women she and her husband, Fred, lured to their home in Gloucester for sadistic sex sessions that became killings.
The couple also killed their 16-year-old daughter, Heather, and Fred's daughter, Charmaine, when she was just eight.
Fred West was charged with 12 murders but hanged himself in his prison cell before he could be tried.
Throughout the trial, Rose West protested her innocence, insisting, that Fred had murdered alone.
But many witnesses told the court that Rose West had been an active participant in the brutal sexual rituals the couple's victims endured before death. Many of the bodies buried beneath the West's home were found with gags, masks and bindings beside them.
Several witnesses, including
Rose West's stepdaughter who testified that she had been sexually abused since the age of eight, sold their stories to the press for large sums of money.
When the jury retired to consider its verdict, the 10 murders fell into two categories.
The deaths of Charmaine, Heather and Shirley Robinson, who had been pregnant with Fred's child when she died at 18, were not linked to any sexual motive.
The other seven women had died during or after sex attacks.
After convicting West on the first three counts, the jurors asked the judge whether they could convict her on the other seven on the basis of the "similar fact" evidence which showed she took part in the type of sadistic sex that resulted in the other murders. The judge agreed they could.
West's lawyers say they should not have done this and that this is another ground for appeal.
Britain's Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, and two other judges are expected to decide by the end of next week whether West has grounds to appeal her sentences.