Fred West

• 1. Introduction

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  Fred West was at work in Stroud on the 24th of February 1994 when police arrived at his home, 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, with a search warrant. The officers were looking for one missing girl, the West family's eldest daughter, Heather. Fred's wife Rose read the warrant and turned pale. Then she shouted over her shoulder to her eldest son: "Get Fred!"

  Within two weeks, the garden and the cellar of that three-storey house had given up the remains of several young women. It would become known as the House of Horrors.

  How did a man raised in a Herefordshire farm worker's cottage come to bury victims beneath his own home? Why did courts, social workers and hospitals fail to stop him for more than two decades? And what did the children who grew up inside the house live through?

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• 2. A Herefordshire Boyhood

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  Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on the 29th of September 1941 at Bickerton Cottage in Much Marcle, Herefordshire. He was the first surviving child of Walter Stephen West, a farm worker, and Daisy Hannah Hill. The family was poor and close-knit. Walter was a strict disciplinarian, while Daisy was overprotective.

  In 1946 the Wests moved to Moorcourt Cottage, beside Moorcourt Farm on the edge of the village. Walter worked there as a milking herdsman and harvest hand. The cottage had no electricity and was heated by a log fire. By 1951 Daisy had borne eight children, and six of them had survived. Fred was her favourite. Other children saw him as a mother's boy, and he leaned on his brothers and sisters for company.

  Every West child had chores. The three girls picked hops and strawberries, and the three boys harvested wheat and hunted rabbits. Fred absorbed a strong work ethic, along with a lifelong habit of petty theft. Classmates remembered him as scruffy, lethargic and often in trouble. He was barely numerate and read at the level of a seven-year-old, though he showed a gift for woodwork and artwork. Later in life he told lurid stories about his own upbringing. His youngest brother, Douglas, dismissed them as fantasy.

  Fred left school with no qualifications in December 1956, at the age of 15. He started out as a labourer alongside his father at Moorcourt Farm and a neighbouring farm.

  By 1957 he and his brother John were regulars at a youth club in nearby Ledbury. His thick Herefordshire accent earned him the label of country bumpkin. He pestered girls aggressively and grabbed at them without warning. At 17 he crashed a motorcycle and suffered a fractured skull, a broken arm and a broken leg. He lay unconscious for seven days. Afterwards he feared hospitals and was prone to fits of rage. Two years later a girl he groped on the club's fire escape punched him, and he fell two floors, injuring his head again.

  In June 1961 Fred's 13-year-old sister Kitty told their mother that Fred had been raping her since the previous December. Arrested, Fred freely admitted to police that he had molested young girls since his early teens. He asked them: "Doesn't everybody do it?" His trial opened on the 9th of November at Herefordshire Assizes. Just before she was due to testify, Kitty changed her mind, and the case collapsed. His mother banished him, and he moved in with his aunt Violet and uncle Ernie at Daisy Cottage. By mid-1962 he had made peace with his parents, though not with most of the family.

  That collapsed case was the first of several in which a young witness's withdrawal let Fred West walk free.

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• 3. Glasgow and the Caravan

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  Catherine Bernadette Costello, known as Rena, first met Fred at a Much Marcle dance hall in 1960. She came from Coatbridge in Lanarkshire and went back to Scotland after a few months of dating him. They met again in September 1962, when Fred was 21. Rena was already pregnant by another man. She married Fred in Ledbury on the 17th of November, with his younger brother John as the only guest.

  Charmaine was born on the 22nd of March 1963. To explain the child's mixed ancestry, the couple told people that Rena had miscarried and that Charmaine was adopted. A second daughter, Anna Marie, was born in July 1964 at the family's home in Savoy Street, in the Bridgeton district of Glasgow. By then Fred was driving an ice cream van. The family nanny, Isa McNeill, remembered Rena as a considerate mother. Fred was harsh with the girls. He shut them in the bottom of a bunk bed fitted with bars and let them out only while he was at work.

  A young friend of McNeill's named Anne McFall was a frequent visitor to the flat. She was despondent over the death of her boyfriend in a workplace accident. Fred later admitted to numerous affairs. When Rena found out, she began her own affair with a man named John McLachlan. Fred once caught the pair in an embrace, punched Rena, and drew a knife that grazed McLachlan's abdomen. After McLachlan's second punch, Fred stopped fighting. Years later McLachlan said: "He couldn't tackle a man, but he wasn't so slow in attacking women."

  On the 4th of November 1965, Fred accidentally ran over and killed a small boy in Glasgow with his van. Police cleared him. He still feared reprisals from the locals who bought from him. In December he returned to Gloucester with Charmaine and Anna Marie and rented a caravan at the Timberland Caravan Park in Bishop's Cleeve. Rena followed in February 1966, bringing McNeill and McFall, who both hoped to find work in England. Fred took a job driving a lorry for a local abattoir.

  Within weeks he dominated all three women and was prone to violent mood swings. Rena begged McLachlan to rescue her. He planned to drive south in his Mini with McNeill's boyfriend, John Trotter. McFall was infatuated with Fred, who had promised to marry her, and she probably warned him. Fred appeared at the meeting time and clutched his daughters while McLachlan struck him. Rena, McNeill, McLachlan and Trotter left without the children, and Fred threatened to kill Rena if he ever saw her again.

  On the 11th of October, Rena stole some belongings from the caravan and went back to Glasgow. She was arrested, returned to Gloucester, and on the 29th of November was sentenced to three years' probation. McFall stayed on. Her letters home show she believed Fred could give her a better life than Scotland had, and she urged him to divorce his wife.

  In July 1967, McFall vanished. She was 18 and eight months pregnant with Fred's child. Nobody reported her missing. Her remains were found in June 1994 at the edge of a cornfield between Much Marcle and Kempley, her limbs carefully separated and many finger bones missing. Fred first denied killing her. After his arrest he told a visitor that he had stabbed her after an argument. Pieces of dressing gown cord were still wrapped around her wrists.

  Rena returned to Fred that August, then left again the next year, leaving the girls in his care. Whenever he had nobody to mind them, he placed them with Gloucestershire social services. In early 1969 he met someone who would mind them at a bus stop in Cheltenham.

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• 4. Rosemary Letts

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  Rosemary Letts had just turned 15 when a man began sitting beside her at a Cheltenham bus stop in early 1969. Fred was 27. She thought his unkempt appearance meant he was a tramp. Over several days his attention flattered her. Twice she turned down a date, but she let him walk her home. He told her that his wife had abandoned him and his two daughters, and that he wanted more children.

  Fred then learned that Rose worked in a bread shop. He persuaded a woman he did not know to walk in and hand Rose a gift from a "man outside". Minutes later he came in himself and asked her out that evening. She said yes. Within weeks she quit her job to become nanny to Charmaine and Anna Marie, whom she noticed were neglected. Fred agreed to hand her money each Friday so that her parents would think she still drew a salary.

  Rose's family was alarmed. Her mother, Daisy Letts, correctly decided that Fred was a pathological liar. Her father, Bill Letts, was a diagnosed schizophrenic who is believed to have molested his daughter. He threatened Fred directly and promised to call social services. The parents did go to Gloucestershire social services, and in August 1969 Rose was placed in a home for troubled teenagers in Cheltenham. On weekends at her parents' house she slipped away to see Fred. On her 16th birthday she left the home and returned to her parents, while Fred served a 30-day sentence for theft and unpaid fines. When he was released, she moved into his Cheltenham flat. He collected the two girls from social services.

  In February 1970 a police surgeon confirmed that Rose was pregnant. She was placed in care again and discharged on the 6th of March, on the understanding that she would end the pregnancy and go home. She chose Fred instead, and her father banned her from his house. The couple moved to a ground-floor flat on Midland Road in Gloucester. On the 17th of October 1970, Rose gave birth to a daughter, Heather Ann. Two months later Fred was jailed for stealing car tyres and a vehicle tax disc. He stayed in prison until the 24th of June 1971.

  Rose, just 17, looked after the three girls and told Charmaine and Anna Marie to call her their mother. Anna Marie later said that both were criticised and beaten constantly. Charmaine would not cry or show any sign of grief, and that infuriated Rose. Charmaine whispered to her sister the hope that her "mummy will come and save me". A friend, Tracey Giles, once walked in unannounced and saw Charmaine naked on a chair, gagged and bound with a leather belt, while Rose stood beside her holding a large wooden spoon. Charmaine was treated for a deep puncture wound to her left ankle at Gloucester Royal Hospital on the 28th of March 1971. Rose called it a household accident.

  Rose is believed to have killed Charmaine shortly before Fred's release. She took the three girls to visit him in prison on the 15th of June, and the killing is thought to have happened on or soon after that date. Dental evidence confirmed that Charmaine died while Fred was still locked up. Tracey's mother, Shirley Giles, later testified at Rose's trial that Rose had turned Tracey away with the words: "She's gone to live with her mother, and bloody good riddance!" Rose told Charmaine's school that the child had moved to London. When Fred came home, he told Anna Marie that her mother had collected Charmaine and returned to Scotland. Charmaine's body had been kept in the coal cellar until Fred's release, and he later buried it in the yard by the back door.

  Rena kept in touch with her children whenever she and Fred were apart. In the second half of August 1971 she called at Moorcourt Cottage, depressed and anxious about her daughters. Given the Midland Road address, she set out to confront Fred, probably to demand custody. Nobody saw her alive again. She is believed to have been strangled, possibly in the back seat of Fred's Ford Popular. Her body was dismembered, sealed in plastic bags and buried near a clump of trees called Yewtree Coppice, in Letterbox Field, about a mile from Much Marcle.

  Nobody filed a missing person report for Rena or Charmaine. Police would notice that gap only more than two decades later.

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• 5. Cromwell Street

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  On the 29th of January 1972, Fred and Rose married at Gloucester Register Office, where Fred described himself on the certificate as a bachelor. His brother John was best man, and nobody else was invited. A few months later, with Rose pregnant again, the couple moved to 25 Cromwell Street. It was a three-storey house rented from the council, and Fred later bought it for £7,000. To help meet the cost, he converted many of the upper rooms into bedsits. He fitted a cooker and a washbasin on the first-floor landing so that lodgers never needed to use the ground floor, where the family lived. Only the Wests could enter the garden.

  On the 1st of June 1972, Rose gave birth to a second daughter. The date prompted the name Mae June.

  Soon afterwards Rose began working as a prostitute from an upstairs room, advertising in a local contact magazine. The household called it Rose's Room. Fred, a longtime voyeur, cut hidden peepholes into it and installed a baby monitor to listen from elsewhere in the house. It had a private bar and a red light outside the door. Rose wore the only key around her neck, and clients were told to ring a separate doorbell. Much of her earnings went into home improvements. The couple also built up a large collection of restraining devices, magazines and photographs, and later videos.

  By 1977 Rose's father had come to tolerate the marriage and even to respect Fred. The two men opened a cafe called The Green Lantern, which soon went bankrupt. By 1983 Rose had given birth to eight children, at least three of them conceived with clients. Fred accepted them as his own. To the children whose skin was darker than their siblings', he claimed that his great-grandmother had been a black woman.

  From the age of seven, each West child was given daily chores and was rarely allowed out unless a parent was present. Breaking a rule meant a physical punishment, almost always from Rose, who took care never to mark the children's faces or hands. Heather ran away, and later so did her brother Stephen, born in 1973. Each returned after several weeks of sleeping rough or staying with friends and was beaten for it. Between 1972 and 1992, the children were taken to local casualty departments 31 times. The injuries were always put down to accidents, and nobody reported them to social services.

  Some moments stuck in the children's memories. When Stephen was mopping the kitchen floor and Rose stepped in his bowl of water, she hit him over the head with it and then kicked him. In August 1974 Rose chased Fred with a carving knife. He slammed a door, the blade stuck in the wood, and three of Rose's fingers slid down it and were almost severed. She wrapped her hand in a towel and told him: "Look what you done, fella. You've got to take me to the hospital now."

  The abuse of Anna Marie began in September 1972, when the Wests took eight-year-old Anna Marie into the cellar and Fred raped her while Rose encouraged him. Rose told her not to say anything to anybody, and both parents threatened her with beatings if she did. From the age of 13 she was forced to prostitute herself in the house, with clients told she was 16 and Rose always in the room to make sure she did not reveal her real age.

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• 6. The Cellar

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  Caroline Owens was 17 in October 1972 when the Wests picked her up as she hitchhiked along a country road from Tewkesbury towards Cinderford. They offered her a part-time job as nanny to their children, with a promise to drive her home each Tuesday. She moved into 25 Cromwell Street and shared a room with Anna Marie, whom she found "very withdrawn". Rose told her she worked as a masseuse. Fred talked about sex almost constantly, and when the Wests made open advances, Owens announced that she was leaving.

  The Wests knew she hitchhiked that road. On the 6th of December 1972, they offered her a lift and an apology. Rose climbed into the back seat with her. Fred stopped the car, called her a "bitch", punched her unconscious, and the couple bound and gagged her. At the house she was drugged and sexually assaulted for hours. The next morning Fred threatened to bury her under "the paving stones of Gloucester" and claimed to have killed hundreds of young girls. Then he and Rose calmly asked whether she would come back as nanny. She agreed and vacuumed the house to look convincing. That afternoon she escaped from a launderette. Her mother saw the welts and bruises and reported everything to police.

  At Gloucester Magistrates' Court on the 12th of January 1973, Owens could not face testifying. The serious charges were dropped. The Wests pleaded guilty to indecent assault and causing actual bodily harm, were fined £50 each, and walked free. When Owens heard, she attempted suicide.

  Three months later came the first murder known to investigators. Lynda Gough, 19, had met the Wests through a lodger and moved into Cromwell Street on the 19th of April 1973. Around the 20th, tenants were told that she had hit one of the children and been sent away. The same story was told to her mother. When her remains were found, her jaw was wrapped in surgical tape. She had probably been suspended from holes cut in the cellar's ceiling beams, which Fred later admitted he had devised for that purpose, and she died of strangulation or suffocation. She was buried in an inspection pit beneath the garage. Police concluded that every victim found in the cellar was killed and dismembered there.

  Carol Ann Cooper, 15, lived in the Pines Children's Home in Worcester. On the 10th of November 1973, after an evening at the cinema with her boyfriend, she vanished while waiting for a bus in Warndon. Five victims, aged between 15 and 21, were killed and buried in the cellar between November 1973 and April 1975. The evidence suggests that each suffered more than the last. The fifth was 18-year-old Juanita Mott, in April 1975. Fred then concreted the whole cellar floor and later turned the room into a bedroom for his oldest children.

  No further murders are known until May 1978, when 18-year-old lodger Shirley Robinson died. She had met Fred at The Green Lantern in April 1977 and moved in that month. She was heavily pregnant, and Rose, herself pregnant, had come to resent her. Fred killed her, with or without Rose's participation but certainly with her knowledge. She was buried in the garden, and her unborn baby had been removed. Rose then tried to claim maternity benefit in Robinson's name. Anyone asking after her was told that she had gone to live with her father in West Germany.

  The last murder with a clear sexual motive was on the 5th of August 1979. Alison Chambers, 16, had run away from a children's home to become the Wests' live-in nanny. Rose promised her she could live on a "peaceful farm" that the couple owned. She was buried in the garden near the bathroom wall. To calm her family, the Wests posted a letter she had written to her mother, written before her death, from a Northamptonshire post box.

  The final killing, in 1987, would be of the Wests' own eldest daughter.

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• 7. Heather

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  At Hucclecote Secondary School, Heather West was a studious and obedient pupil, yet she refused every order to change for sport or to shower afterwards. When she was finally forced to shower, classmates and staff saw welts and bruises in various stages of healing across her arms, legs and torso. She blamed fights with her siblings, but told one close friend that her parents had caused them.

  After Anna Marie ran away in 1979, Fred turned his attention to Heather and Mae. Anna Marie had left after a severe beating from Rose, only days after leaving hospital for an ectopic pregnancy. Fred was open about it and justified himself with the words: "I made you; I can do what I like with you." Heather, Mae and Stephen agreed that neither girl would ever be alone in a room with their father without one of the others present. Heather bit her nails until they bled, drank alcohol, and sat bouncing back and forth in chairs. She watched her father warily from the corner of her eye. Fred and Rose responded by suspecting that she was a lesbian. Fred also taunted her as "ugly" and a "bitch".

  By the mid-1980s, Heather was confiding in classmates about her home life. The father of one of them was a friend of the Wests, and word reached Fred and Rose. Fred began escorting her to and from school. After she left school in the summer of 1986, she applied for many jobs in the hope of escaping Cromwell Street. She pinned her hopes on a place as a chalet cleaner at a holiday camp in Torquay. On the 18th of June 1987, a letter told her she had not been chosen. She wept in front of Mae and Stephen, and Mae said she "cried all the way through the night".

  On the 19th of June, Heather seemed her usual miserable self as her siblings left for school. When they came home, they were told that she had left to take the Torquay job after all. Rose told a neighbour instead that the two had had a "hell of a row" and that Heather had run away. Later the story became that Heather had eloped with a lesbian lover. When Mae and Stephen suggested going to the police, Fred said a search would be unwise because Heather was involved in credit card fraud. More than once the Wests persuaded an acquaintance to fake a phone call from her.

  In the years that followed, Fred sometimes joked to the children that they would "end up under the patio like Heather" if they misbehaved or talked about home. With Rose's approval, he built a barbecue pit directly opposite her grave and placed a pine table over it. The children sat there at family gatherings in the garden.

  In May 1992, Fred raped his 13-year-old daughter Louise in a room on the first floor. When Rose came home and heard, she said: "Oh well. You were asking for it." Louise was raped three more times that summer, and Fred filmed one of the attacks. Weeks later Louise confided in a close friend. On the 4th of August, the friend's mother passed the news to police anonymously. Officers searched the house on the 6th of August 1992 on the pretext of looking for stolen property. They found 99 pornographic videos but missed the one showing the rape. The next day all the children were taken into foster care.

  Fred was charged with three counts of rape and one of buggery, and Rose with child cruelty and obstructing police. Asked about Heather, Fred insisted she was "alive and well" and working as a prostitute. Rose first claimed to know nothing, then said she had given her daughter £600 to leave. Remanded in Birmingham, Fred heard that Anna Marie had gone to police. She gave DC Hazel Savage a detailed statement. Her husband Chris Davis said Heather had once told him "they'll kill us both" when he offered to confront her parents. Savage found no record of Heather with the Inland Revenue or the Social Security department.

  On the 7th of June 1993, the case collapsed when Louise and Anna Marie declined to testify. Louise wanted to go back to her family. Anna Marie was moved by her younger siblings' misery and feared Rose's vindictiveness. Soon afterwards she told Savage that her mother Rena and half-sister Charmaine were also missing.

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• 8. The Excavation

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  In the early hours after the warrant was served, Fred told his son Stephen, who was about to leave for work: "Look son, look after mum and sell the house … I've done something really bad. I want you to go to the papers and make as much money as you can." The night before, the children had watched their parents talk in low voices, glancing at the garden from the kitchen window. When police returned, Fred asked to be arrested for Heather's murder and driven to Bearland police station to confess.

  At 11:15 that morning, Fred admitted killing Heather. He said he strangled her in a fit of rage, dismembered her in the ground-floor bathroom, and kept the remains in a dustbin until he could dig a grave. He insisted that Rose knew nothing. He added that officers had been digging in the wrong part of the garden and offered to show them the right place. His solicitor, Howard Ogden, and his appropriate adult, Janet Leach, told Mae and Stephen. Stephen slumped against a wall in tears, and Mae stammered that her father had not killed her sister.

  Police began digging where Fred pointed on the 26th of February. A little after 4 p.m., a thigh bone appeared in a section he had said they need not search. Beneath it lay a jumble of dismembered remains in the remnants of a bin bag, entwined with two lengths of rope. That evening the remains were identified from dental records as Heather's. Fred was charged with her murder. Asked why there was a third thigh bone, he admitted that two more sets of remains lay in the garden. He named one as Shirley Robinson. He described the other, wrongly, as "Shirley's mate". Both were recovered on the 28th of February, and he was charged with both murders two days later.

  The whole property was now to be searched, and Rose was moved to a safe house in Dursley. Fred underwent interviews lasting up to 16 hours a day. Officers pressed him about his first wife Rena and his stepdaughter Charmaine. On the 4th of March he passed a note through his solicitor to Superintendent John Bennett, who led the inquiry. It read: "I, Frederick West, authorise my solicitor, Howard Ogden, to advise Superintendent Bennett that I wish to admit a further (approx) nine killings, expressly Charmaine, Rena, Lynda Gough and others to be identified. F. West."

  Fred calmly explained that five more bodies lay in the cellar and a sixth beneath the ground-floor bathroom. He said most were hitchhikers or girls he had picked up at bus stops in the 1970s. Between the 5th and the 8th of March, police found six more bodies of young women at 25 Cromwell Street. Each had been mutilated and showed signs of extreme sexual abuse before death. One skull was wrapped in cloth, and an oval of adhesive tape 16 in around lay with the remains. Beside another body was a large serrated knife.

  Fred never stood trial. On the 1st of January 1995, he asphyxiated himself while on remand at HM Prison Birmingham. By then he and Rose were jointly charged with nine murders, and he faced three more alone. In November 1995, Rose was convicted of ten murders and sentenced to ten life terms with a whole life order. In all, the Wests are known to have committed at least twelve murders between 1967 and 1987.

  Anna Marie later told her own story in an autobiography titled Out of the Shadows.

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