Rose West

• 1. Introduction

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  In October 1996, workers pulled down 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester and destroyed every scrap of rubble so that nobody could keep a souvenir. The press had long called the three-storey house the House of Horrors. Rose West, born Rosemary Pauline Letts on the 29th of November 1953, shared that address with her husband Fred. She is an English serial killer, and she remains in prison today.

  The questions around her are as uncomfortable as the house was. How did a girl from a poor Devon family become the partner of a much older man, and then his accomplice? Why did a household full of children, lodgers and visitors draw no lasting intervention for so many years? And how does a court judge a woman whose husband dies before the trial begins, leaving her to face the jury alone?

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• 2. Devon To Cheltenham

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  Northam, in Devon, is where Rosemary Pauline Letts was born, the fifth of seven children in a poor family. Her parents were William Andrew Letts, known as Bill, and Daisy Gwendoline Fuller. The pregnancy was a hard one. Daisy suffered from clinical depression and received electroconvulsive therapy both during the pregnancy and straight after it. Some have argued that the treatment may have harmed her daughter before birth.

  School went badly for the girl who became known as Rose. She grew into a moody teenager who daydreamed and performed poorly in class. When her parents separated, she first stayed with her mother and attended Cleeve School for six months. Then she moved in with Bill in Bishop's Cleeve, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire. Bill had paranoid schizophrenia and was prone to extreme violence. He sexually abused Rose and her oldest sister, Patricia.

  Early in 1969, shortly after Rose turned 15, a 27-year-old man began appearing at her Cheltenham bus stop. His name was Fred West. She found his unkempt appearance off-putting at first. Yet he sat beside her day after day, and the attention slowly flattered her. Twice she refused a date. Even so, she let him walk her home.

  Fred then discovered that Rose worked in a nearby bread shop. He persuaded a woman he did not know to go inside and hand over a gift, explaining that a "man outside" had sent it. Minutes later Fred walked in and asked Rose out for that evening. She said yes.

  Soon she was visiting the caravan park where Fred lived with two girls. They were Anne Marie, his daughter, and Charmaine, his stepdaughter, both from his first marriage to Catherine Costello, known as Rena. Rose considered the girls neglected and cared for them willingly. Within weeks she quit the bread shop to become their full-time nanny. Fred agreed to give her money each Friday to pass to her parents, so they would believe her wages continued.

  Several months later, Rose introduced Fred to her family, who were aghast. Daisy disliked his boastful, arrogant manner and correctly judged him a pathological liar. Bill threatened Fred to his face and promised to call social services if he stayed near his daughter. In those early days, though, Rose still insisted on taking the girls out to gather wildflowers, a tenderness that would not last.

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• 3. Midland Road

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  In August 1969-15-year-old Rose was placed in a home for troubled teenagers in Cheltenham. Her parents had pushed for it. They told Gloucestershire's social services about her sexual relationship with an older man and about rumours that she was working as a prostitute at his caravan. Allowed home on weekends, she almost always used the visit to see Fred.

  Her 16th birthday brought a change. Rose left the home and went back to her parents while Fred served thirty days for theft and unpaid fines. After his release she moved into his Cheltenham flat, and soon afterwards Fred collected Charmaine and Anne Marie from social services. In February 1970 a police surgeon confirmed that she was pregnant. She was put into care again and discharged on the 6th of March, on the understanding that she would end the pregnancy and return to her family. Instead she chose Fred, and her father banned her from his house for good.

  Three months later the couple moved into the ground-floor flat at 25 Midland Road in Gloucester. Their first child, Heather Ann, was born on the 17th of October 1970. Two months after that, Fred went to prison for stealing car tyres and a vehicle tax disc, and he stayed there until the 24th of June 1971. Rose, who had just turned 17, was left in charge of three girls. Charmaine and Anne Marie were told to call her mother.

  Anne Marie later described years of physical and emotional abuse under Rose's care. She herself was submissive and showed her distress. Charmaine did not. Her stoic refusal to cry, however harshly she was treated, repeatedly enraged Rose. Anne Marie remembered her sister clinging to the belief that her "mummy will come and save me."

  Tracey Giles, a child who lived in the upper flat, once walked into the Wests' flat unannounced. She saw Charmaine naked on a chair, gagged, with her hands tied behind her back by a belt. Rose stood beside her holding a large wooden spoon. Tracey recalled Charmaine as calm and unconcerned. Hospital records add another detail. On the 28th of March 1971, Charmaine was treated at Gloucester Royal Hospital for a severe puncture wound to her left ankle, which Rose called a household accident.

  Rose is believed to have murdered Charmaine around the 20th of June 1971, shortly before Fred came home. She took the three girls to visit him in prison on the 15th of June, and Charmaine is thought to have died on or soon after that date. Forensic odontology confirmed that the child died while Fred was still locked up. Shirley Giles, Tracey's mother, testified at Rose's trial that she called at the flat one day in June. Rose told Tracey: "She's gone to live with her mother, and bloody good riddance!"

  The lies multiplied. Rose told some neighbours that Rena had taken Charmaine to live in Bristol, and she told the primary school the child had moved to London. When Fred was released, he told Anne Marie that Rena had collected Charmaine and gone back to Scotland. In truth the body lay in the coal cellar until Fred came home. He then buried it in the yard near the back door. Several small bones were missing, including kneecaps and bones of the fingers, wrists, toes and ankles. Investigators suspected they had been kept as keepsakes, and the same gap appeared in the autopsies of the victims exhumed in 1994.

  Rena, meanwhile, kept in sporadic contact with her daughters. In the latter half of August 1971 she visited Fred's family in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, to ask about her children. Fred's sister-in-law, Christine, remembered her as depressed and extremely anxious. Given the Midland Road address, Rena went to confront Fred, and she was never seen alive again. Her remains were later found buried near a cluster of trees known as Yewtree Coppice, at Letterbox Field.

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• 4. Cromwell Street

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  On the 29th of January 1972, Fred and Rose married at Gloucester Register Office. Fred falsely described himself as a bachelor on the certificate. No friends or relatives were invited.

  Some months after the wedding, with Rose pregnant again, the couple moved to 25 Cromwell Street, a three-storey house close to the centre of Gloucester. They first rented it from the council, and Fred eventually bought it for £7,000 under Margaret Thatcher's Right to Buy scheme. To raise income, many of the upper rooms became bedsits. Fred put a cooker and a washbasin on the first-floor landing so lodgers would never need to enter the ground floor, where the family lived. Only the family could use the back garden. On the 1st of June, Rose gave birth to a second daughter, named Mae June after the date.

  Soon afterwards, Rose began working as a prostitute from an upstairs room, advertising in a local contact magazine. Fred encouraged her to seek clients in Gloucester's West Indian community. The household called the room "Mandy's Room", after the working name Rose used. It had hidden peepholes through which Fred, a longtime voyeur, could watch. He also fitted a baby monitor so he could listen from elsewhere in the house. A red light outside the door signalled when Rose was not to be disturbed. She carried the only key around her neck, and clients rang a separate doorbell. Fred handed her his pay packets, and Rose controlled the family money. Much of her earnings went into home improvements.

  Women who encountered the couple said that Rose grew rougher whenever a partner showed pain or fear. The Wests openly admitted enjoying dominance, violence and pain. They collected restraints, magazines and photographs, and later videos, some of which depicted the abuse of children.

  By 1977, Bill Letts had come to tolerate the marriage and even to respect Fred a little. The two men opened a café named The Green Lantern, which was soon insolvent. By 1983 Rose had borne eight children, at least three of them conceived with clients. Fred accepted them as his own and falsely told them their darker skin came from a black great-grandmother.

  Each West child, on reaching seven, was given daily chores. They were seldom allowed out of the house unless Fred or Rose accompanied them, and breaking the rules brought severe punishment, almost always physical. The children feared both parents, but Rose delivered most of the beatings. She took care never to mark their faces or hands. Between 1972 and 1992, the children were taken to local casualty units thirty-one times. Every injury was explained as an accident, and none reached social services.

  Heather ran away, and later so did her brother Stephen, born in 1973. Both came back after weeks of sleeping rough or staying with friends, and both were beaten. Once, Rose stepped into the bowl of water Stephen was using to mop, then hit him with the bowl and kicked him in the head and chest. Another time, over a missing kitchen utensil, she covered Mae June's chest with knife grazes while the girl screamed "No, Mum!"

  In September 1972, the Wests took eight-year-old Anne Marie to the cellar and sexually assaulted her, with Rose encouraging it. Rose then told the child it was a father's job and warned her to tell nobody. Threats of beatings kept her silent. From the age of 13, the couple forced her into prostitution, with Rose always in the room to make sure clients believed she was 16. In 1980, doctors found that Anne Marie had an ectopic pregnancy and gonorrhoea.

  Even Fred was not safe. In August 1974 Rose chased him with a carving knife. He slammed a door and the blade stuck in it, and three of Rose's fingers slid down the edge, nearly severed. She wrapped her hand in a towel and said: "Look what you done, fella. You've got to take me to the hospital now."

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• 5. Caroline Owens

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  Caroline Owens was 17 when the Wests offered her a lift on a secluded country road in October 1972. She was hitchhiking from Tewkesbury to her home in Cinderford after visiting her boyfriend. Learning that she disliked her stepfather and wanted work, the couple offered her part-time work as a nanny. They promised to drive her home every Tuesday. She moved into 25 Cromwell Street and shared a room with Anne Marie, whom she noticed was "very withdrawn."

  Owens asked about the steady stream of men visiting the house. Rose told her she was a masseuse. When the Wests then made open sexual advances toward her, Owens announced she was leaving.

  The couple knew she hitchhiked along the A40 between Cinderford and Tewkesbury, and they planned to take her. Fred later admitted that the aim was to rape her and probably kill her. He said his first goal was to find out whether Rose would help with an abduction. On the 6th of December 1972, they offered Owens a lift home with an apology for their earlier behaviour. She accepted, believing she had misread them. Rose sat beside her in the back seat, saying she wanted a "girls' chat."

  Rose soon began to fondle her. When Owens protested, Fred stopped the car, called her a "bitch" and punched her unconscious. The pair bound and gagged her with a scarf and duct tape. At Cromwell Street, Owens later told police, she was given a drugged cup of tea and then assaulted for a long time. When she screamed, Rose smothered her with a pillow.

  The next morning, a child's knock on the door of her room prompted Fred to threaten her. He said he would bury her beneath "the paving stones of Gloucester." He claimed to have killed hundreds of young girls and said she had mainly been brought to the house for "Rose's pleasure." Then, calmly, the Wests asked whether she would return as their nanny. Seeing her only chance, Owens agreed and even vacuumed the house to look settled. Later that day she escaped from a launderette where she and Rose had stopped.

  Owens was at first too ashamed to speak. Her mother noticed the welts and bruises on her body, and Owens burst into tears and confided in her. Her mother went straight to the police. The Wests were arrested and charged with assault, indecent assault, actual bodily harm and rape.

  At Gloucester Magistrates Court on the 12th of January 1973, Owens had decided she could not face testifying. The serious charges were dropped. Fred and Rose pleaded guilty to indecent assault and causing actual bodily harm, and each was fined £50. They walked free. When Owens heard the outcome, she attempted suicide. More than two decades later, prosecutors at Rose's trial would argue that both Wests had learned from their mistake in letting her live.

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• 6. The Cromwell Street Victims

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  Lynda Gough, a 19-year-old lodger who shared sex partners with Rose, vanished around the 20th of April 1973. It was the first sexually motivated killing the Wests are known to have carried out together. Her mother came to Cromwell Street to ask where her daughter was and saw Rose wearing Lynda's clothes and slippers. She was told Lynda had left for work in Weston-super-Mare. Her remains lay in an inspection pit beneath the garage, which later became a bathroom.

  Carol Ann Cooper, aged 15, had been in care since her mother died in 1966. On the 10th of November 1973 her boyfriend last saw her boarding a bus in Warndon to visit her grandmother. Fred later called her "Scar Hand", after a recent firework burn. She was the last victim recovered from the cellar.

  Lucy Partington, 21, was an Exeter University student and a cousin of the novelist Martin Amis. She was taken from a bus stop on the A435 on the 27th of December 1973. On the 3rd of January, Fred checked into the casualty unit of Gloucester Royal Hospital with a serious cut to his right hand, which may have happened as he dismembered her body. Police found her in the cellar on the 6th of March 1994.

  Thérèse Siegenthaler, 21, studied sociology at Greenwich Community College. She was hitchhiking from South London to Holyhead on the 16th of April 1974 when the Wests took her. Fred mistook her Swiss accent for Dutch and called her "the Dutch girl" or "Tulip." Her family in Switzerland reported her missing to Scotland Yard when her messages abruptly stopped. Fred later hid her grave behind a false chimney breast he built.

  Shirley Hubbard, 15, was a foster child who was seized from a bus stop in Droitwich on the 15th of November 1974. She was travelling home from a date, having been on work experience in Worcester. Her dismembered remains lay in a part of the cellar the family called the "Marilyn Monroe area." Juanita Mott, 18, was a former lodger living with a family friend in Newent. She disappeared on the 12th of April 1975, believed taken as she hitchhiked along the B4215. In his confessions, Fred called her "the girl from Newent."

  After the run of killings between 1973 and 1975, the Wests are not known to have murdered anyone until 1978. One theory for the pause points to the mid-1970s. By then they were befriending teenage girls from nearby care homes, abusing many and steering others into prostitution at home. Lodgers willing to share their fetishes may also have satisfied them for a time.

  Shirley Robinson, 18, was another former lodger. On the 10th of May 1978 she vanished while eight months pregnant with Fred's child, due on the 11th of June. No sexual motive has been established. The prosecution argued that the pregnancy threatened the stability of the Wests' relationship. Fred had planned to sell the baby to a childless couple and had professional photographs taken with Robinson for that purpose.

  Alison Chambers, 16, had gone into foster care at 14 and repeatedly absconded from Jordan's Brook House. She met the Wests in mid-1979 and vanished on the 5th of August that year. Fred later told his solicitor that Chambers died because Rose became "too bloody vicious" with her. She was buried in the garden at Cromwell Street. It was the last murder in which police could establish a definite sexual motive.

  Then came an eight-year gap. On the 19th of June 1987, Heather West, aged 16, was murdered. She had told classmates about the abuse at home and was trying to leave, and the Wests seem to have seen that as a threat. Fred claimed he had not meant to kill her. Her younger brother Barry, then seven, later described watching his mother kick Heather repeatedly about the head until she stopped moving. The Wests told friends she had gone to work at a Devonshire holiday village, and they once faked a phone call from her to calm her siblings. Her body went into a hole in the garden. Fred had his son dig it, telling him it was for a fish pond.

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• 7. Arrest And Trial

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  On the 6th of August 1992, Fred was arrested after being accused of sexually assaulting his 13-year-old daughter three times, and Rose was arrested for child cruelty. The case collapsed on the 7th of June 1993, when the daughter refused to testify in court. All five of the Wests' younger children went to foster homes. Heather had not been seen since 1987, and her absence drew the police back to the family.

  In February 1994, officers found human remains and apparent signs of torture at 25 Cromwell Street, and both Wests were arrested. Heather's body lay under the patio. Fred used to taunt misbehaving children with the line: "If you don't behave, you'll end up under the patio like Heather." Rose denied murdering anyone and insisted her husband acted alone. She said she had even tried to stop one of his assaults. Circumstantial evidence was judged strong enough to prosecute her. On the 1st of January 1995, while on remand at HM Prison Birmingham, Fred hanged himself. Charmaine's murder was then added to the original nine charges against Rose.

  Her trial opened at Winchester Crown Court on the 3rd of October 1995, before Mr Justice Mantell and a jury. Early on, the judge allowed testimony about the sexual assault of three women by the Wests, accepting the prosecution's argument that it showed a pattern repeated in the murders. Prosecutor Brian Leveson called the couple sadistic and sex-obsessed. He described the bodies as "more terrible than words can express." He noted that Fred was in prison when Charmaine died. And he said the scarf tied in a bow around Siegenthaler's face showed a "feminine" touch.

  Prosecution witnesses included lodgers, victims' relatives, Rose's mother, Daisy, and her sister, Glenys. Survivors took the stand too, among them Kathryn Halliday, a former lover of the couple, as well as Owens and Anne Marie. A witness known as "Miss A" had been sexually assaulted at 14 in 1977. She called Rose the more aggressive of the two. Neighbours described Charmaine's disappearance in 1971 and Rose's casual indifference when Heather vanished.

  Rose's counsel, Dick Ferguson, tried to portray witnesses as profiteers or people with grudges. Owens admitted taking £20,000 for her story, but described crushing survivor's guilt: "I only want to get justice for the girls who didn't make it. I feel like it was my fault." Ferguson stressed that Fred had committed at least one very similar murder before meeting Rose. He argued that the case was largely circumstantial and that Rose did not know the extent of Fred's sadism. He asked the jury not to be swayed by her promiscuity and domineering manner.

  Against her counsel's advice, Rose testified. Her mood swung between morose, tearful and upbeat. She wept as she described herself as a victim of child sexual abuse who naively married a violent man. Yet she joked about "always being pregnant" and laughed over one victim's "grandfather glasses." She claimed never to have met six of the victims buried at Cromwell Street. Shown photographs of the cellar victims and of Alison Chambers, she turned bright red, stuttered, and answered, "No, sir." She said she and Fred had lived separate lives, which contradicted lodgers and visitors. Of Heather, she said she had loved her but claimed her daughter was a lesbian who abused her siblings.

  The defence then called seven women who said a lone man matching Fred's description had attacked them between 1966 and 1975. All said they recognised him when his photograph appeared in 1994. The point was that Fred could attack women without Rose, which the prosecution never disputed. Their recollections of his appearance varied widely.

  The final witness was Janet Leach, Fred's appointed appropriate adult. On the 3rd of November the court had heard tape recordings of Fred insisting that Rose "known nothing at all" about the murders. On the 7th of November the prosecution called Leach to rebut them. She said Fred had come to see her as a confidante. On the evening before his arrest on the 25th of February, she testified, he and Rose agreed that he would take the blame for everything, and he described many killings as "some of Rose's mistakes." He told her that Rose murdered Charmaine and Shirley Robinson and helped dismember Robinson. In the remaining eight murders, he said, Rose "played a major part."

  Under cross-examination, Leach admitted she had lied under oath about selling her story to a national newspaper for £100,000. She stood by her testimony, but she collapsed on the stand, and the trial was adjourned for six days. She returned on the 13th of November to finish. The judge's instructions to the jury afterwards would become a central complaint in Rose's appeal.

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• 8. Verdict And Aftermath

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  On the 21st and the 22nd of November 1995, the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all ten murders. The judge had told them that circumstantial evidence can be enough, and that when two people take part in a murder, the law holds both equally guilty. Mr Justice Mantell called her crimes "appalling and depraved" and sentenced her to life, adding that she should never be paroled. The Lord Chief Justice later set a minimum of twenty-five years. In July 1997, Home Secretary Jack Straw imposed a whole life tariff. She was the second woman in modern UK history to receive one, after Myra Hindley in 1990.

  In March 1996, Rose announced an appeal. She argued that press coverage had made witnesses unreliable and that no physical evidence tied her to the killings. She also said the judge's summing-up favoured the prosecution and that the similar fact evidence carried too much weight. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, rejected it, saying she had received a fair trial and efficient representation. Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, announced a further appeal in October 2000. In September 2001, she abandoned her appeals, saying she would never feel free even if released.

  Rose was first held at HM Prison Bronzefield in Middlesex as a Category A prisoner. She was later moved to HM Prison Low Newton in County Durham. In May 1995, reports said she and Myra Hindley had formed a friendship while both were at HM Prison Durham. Hindley dismissed that as "nonsense." Rose said only that they knew each other from the same wing. In 2019 she was transferred to HM Prison New Hall in West Yorkshire. Reports linked the move to a threat from the serial killer Joanna Dennehy, though official sources said those reports were untrue.

  For years her oldest biological children and her stepdaughter visited her. By 2006, she had cut off contact with them after Mae began asking questions about her part in the murders. Rose explained: "I was never a parent then and could never be now." As of May 2026, she is still at New Hall, still maintaining her innocence.

  The four youngest West children, born between 1978 and 1983, were given new identities and stayed in foster care. Two weeks after testifying against her stepmother in 1995, Anne Marie attempted suicide, and in 1999 she tried again by jumping from a bridge into the River Severn. Asked at trial why she had stayed silent through seven years of abuse, she said she had known no other normality: "My father and stepmother were all I had." Fred's younger brother, John, hanged himself in November 1996 while awaiting a jury's verdict on charges that he raped Anne Marie and another girl at Cromwell Street. Stephen attempted suicide in 2002 and was jailed for nine months in 2004 for unlawful sex with a 14-year-old girl. Barry died in October 2020, aged 40, of a suspected drug overdose, after years of addiction and psychiatric problems rooted in what he had endured and witnessed.

  Fred was cremated in Coventry on the 29th of March 1995. Just four of his children attended. The Reverend Robert Simpson read from Psalm 23 in a five-minute service without hymns. Fred's ashes are believed to have been scattered at Barry Island, a Welsh seaside resort he often visited. The remains of Charmaine and Rena were cremated in Kettering. At Anne Marie's insistence, mother and daughter shared a coffin, and mourners were asked to bring no roses.

  Police recorded more than 108 hours of interviews with Fred before his death. He hinted that there were more victims and told Leach there could be up to twenty. He said they lay "not in one place but spread around" and that he intended to reveal one location a year. His suicide ended that promise. Many investigators, authors and journalists who studied the case still believe there are victims whose bodies have never been found.

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