Posted by Fred West (1941-1995) and his wife Rose (born 1953) killed at least 12 girls and young women between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, England, including two daughters and Fred’s first wife. Most of the bodies were buried in the cellar and garden of their home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Fred died in prison in 1995 before trial, while Rose was convicted of ten murders and sentenced to life with no possibility of release.
Fred and Rose West were a British married couple and serial killers. Together they tortured and killed at least 12 girls and women, including two of their own daughters, in the house the papers called the “House of Horrors”.
Note: in this article I have chosen not to describe the abuse suffered by the couple’s children and by the youngest victims. Suffice it to say that it was extremely serious and went on for years, and that the testimony of the surviving children was crucial in bringing the Wests to justice.
Biography of Fred West
Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on September 29, 1941 in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, into a poor family of farm laborers. The family lived in a cottage with no electricity, heated by a log fire. His father was a strict disciplinarian and his mother overprotective: Fred was her favorite child.
At 17 he had a motorcycle accident in which he fractured his skull, an arm and a leg. He was unconscious for seven days and for months had to walk with braces. From then on he developed an extreme fear of hospitals and became prone to fits of rage. Two years later he suffered another head injury falling from a fire escape.
After these accidents his family noticed a change in his behavior, as in the cases of Nannie Doss, Raymond Martinez Fernandez or Charles Lawson.
First marriage
In September 1962 Fred met again Catherine “Rena” Costello, a Scottish girl from Coatbridge he had known a couple of years earlier, and in November he married her. Rena had a history of petty theft and was pregnant by another man, a bus driver of Asian descent. When the baby girl, Charmaine, was born on March 22, 1963, to explain her origins the couple told Fred’s parents that Rena had lost the baby and they had adopted a girl. In July 1964 their daughter Anna Marie was born.
The family lived in Glasgow, where Fred drove an ice cream van. On November 4, 1965 he accidentally ran over and killed a small boy with the van. Police cleared him, but fearing the reaction of the neighborhood he went back to Gloucester in December with the family, the nanny Isa McNeill and her friend Anne McFall.
Anne McFall, the first known victim
The marriage to Rena was stormy and she left several times. Anne McFall, who had lost her boyfriend in a workplace accident, fell in love with Fred, who had promised to marry her, and stayed on as the girls’ nanny.
In July 1967 Anne, 18 and eight months pregnant with Fred’s child, vanished. No one ever reported her missing. Her dismembered remains were found only in June 1994, buried at the edge of a cornfield between Much Marcle and Kempley.
Biography of Rosemary West
Rosemary Pauline Letts was born on November 29, 1953 in Northam, Devon. Her mother Daisy suffered from depression and underwent electroshock therapy during the pregnancy. Her father Bill was a tyrannical, violent man diagnosed with schizophrenia, who demanded absolute obedience from his wife and children and is believed to have abused his daughter.
Rose met Fred in early 1969, shortly after her fifteenth birthday, while waiting for the same bus in Cheltenham. He was 27. Her parents opposed the relationship in every way, even having her placed in care, but in 1970 Rose, pregnant, went to live with Fred and the two girls. The couple moved into a ground floor flat at 25 Midland Road, Gloucester, and married on January 29, 1972.
Married life and the first murders
On October 17, 1970 their first daughter, Heather Ann, was born. Two months later Fred was jailed for stealing car tires and remained in prison until June 24, 1971. Rose, who had just turned 17, was left alone with the three girls.
Anna Marie later said that she and Charmaine were constantly mistreated and beaten, and that Rose was much harder on Charmaine because the girl refused to cry, no matter what was done to her, and this enraged her.
On June 15, 1971 Rose took the three girls to visit Fred in prison. Charmaine is believed to have been killed by Rose in those days, before Fred’s release. She was 8. Fred later buried her body in the garden of the Midland Road flat.
To anyone who asked about the girl, Rose said her mother, Rena, had come back for her. But in August 1971 Rena really did go to Midland Road, probably to get her daughters back, and was never seen again: Fred is believed to have killed her to prevent anyone finding out what had happened to Charmaine. Her remains were found in 1994 in a field near Much Marcle.
The Caroline Owens case
In 1972 the family moved nearby, to 25 Cromwell Street, a three-storey house that Fred later bought from the council and where he rented rooms to lodgers. That same year their second daughter, Mae, was born, and Fred pushed his wife into prostitution at home.
In October 1972 the Wests gave a lift to a 17-year-old girl, Caroline Owens, who was hitchhiking home and did not get along with her stepfather. They offered her a job as their daughters’ nanny and she accepted. But the atmosphere in the house made her uneasy and, when the couple began making advances, she decided to leave.
In December Fred and Rose found her on the same road and offered her a lift again. In the car they attacked her, tied her up and gagged her, and once home they sexually assaulted her. Fred threatened to keep her prisoner, kill her and bury her beneath “the paving stones of Gloucester”, as he claimed he had done with hundreds of other girls.
Caroline reported them, but refused to testify in court. The sexual assault charges were dropped and the Wests pleaded guilty only to indecent assault and causing actual bodily harm: each was fined £50 and the couple walked free from court. Three months later the Wests killed their first victim at Cromwell Street.
The Cromwell Street murders
The first was Lynda Gough, 19, who visited the house regularly and moved in in April 1973. Soon after, the lodgers were told she had left. Between November 1973 and April 1975 more girls followed, abducted on the street or at bus stops, held captive, tortured and killed. Their bodies were dismembered and buried in the cellar:
- Carol Ann Cooper, 15, who lived in a children’s home in Worcester, vanished on November 10, 1973;
- Lucy Partington, 21, a University of Exeter student and cousin of novelist Martin Amis, vanished on December 27, 1973;
- Thérèse Siegenthaler, 21, a Swiss student and the only foreign victim, vanished on April 16, 1974;
- Shirley Hubbard, 15, vanished on November 15, 1974 on her way home;
- Juanita Mott, 18, vanished in April 1975.
After Juanita Mott’s murder, Fred concreted over the entire cellar floor and turned it into a bedroom for the older children. In May 1978 Shirley Robinson, 18, a lodger pregnant with Fred’s child, was killed, and on August 5, 1979 Alison Chambers, 16, who had run away from a children’s home to become the Wests’ nanny. Both were buried in the garden.
Heather
Over the years the West children grew up in an atmosphere of terror and violence. Anna Marie ran away from home in 1979. Heather, Fred and Rose’s eldest daughter, hoped to leave by getting a job as a chalet cleaner at a holiday camp in Torquay, but on June 18, 1987 she learned she had not been accepted and cried all night.
The next day, June 19, 1987, when her siblings came home from school, Heather was gone. Their parents said she had left to take a job. She was 16. Fred buried her in the garden, and he jokingly told the children that if they misbehaved they would “end up under the patio like Heather”.
The arrest
In 1992 the Wests were arrested over the abuse of one of their younger daughters, but the trial collapsed when the key witnesses refused to testify. During the investigation, however, Detective Constable Hazel Savage realized that nothing had been heard of Heather for years and kept looking for her. Anna Marie, meanwhile, decided to tell everything she had suffered as a child.
Thanks partly to that remark about the patio, the police obtained a warrant to dig in the Cromwell Street garden. On February 24, 1994 officers came to the door and Rose, turning pale, shouted to her son “Get Fred!”.
The next day the first human bones were found and Fred was arrested. He confessed to his daughter’s murder, retracted, then confessed again, insisting that Rose was innocent and he had acted alone. In the following days police found the remains of eight more girls in the garden and cellar, then Charmaine’s at Midland Road and finally those of Rena and Anne McFall in the fields.
Rose was arrested on April 20, 1994. On January 1, 1995 Fred took his own life in Birmingham prison, where he was awaiting trial. He was charged with 12 murders.
The trial of Rose West
Rose’s trial began on October 3, 1995 at Winchester Crown Court. She pleaded not guilty, but the accounts of former lodgers, victims’ relatives, Caroline Owens herself and Anna Marie convinced the jury. In November 1995 Rose West was convicted of ten murders, including those of Charmaine and Heather, and Mr Justice Mantell sentenced her to life, recommending she never be released. She was later given a whole life order.
To this day Rose maintains her innocence. Since 2019 she has been held at HM Prison New Hall, in Yorkshire. We will never know all the details of these crimes, nor will we know for sure whether the Wests killed other innocent victims.
The Cromwell Street house was demolished in October 1996 and every piece of rubble was destroyed, to discourage serial killer “souvenir hunters”. Today a footpath runs where it stood. DC Hazel Savage, whose tenacity solved the case, was awarded an MBE.
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