Among the terraced row houses of Cromwell Street, Gloucester, lived a murderer who had already killed at least three people before moving his family into number 25, a narrow three storey semi-detached that stood next to The Seventh Day Adventist Church, and was a stone’s throw away from bustling St Michael’s Square, where people came to do their shopping. Over the course of two decades, with the help of his wife, he would turn it into a place of misery and unspeakable suffering.

His name was Frederick Walter Stephen West. Of limited intellect, barely able to read and write in fact, he was a far cry from the evil genius one would expect to be involved in such activity.

Frederick Walter Stephen West.

But Fred West’s mental deficits were counterweighted by an innate ability to scent the air, as a predator, and know when a victim was near. He took his camouflage in the banal and the mask of a smiling jack-the-lad was the one he wore best. Harmless old Fred. Good with his hands, could build you anything you wanted, always eager to help out.

Nobody would have guessed that he was a demented, yet highly organized serial murderer, responsible for the horrific deaths of at least twelve young women, and probably many more.

West suffered from a confusing mess of paraphilias and deeply-entrenched perversions. In addition to an unhealthy preoccupation with urophilia or undinism (urination) and defecation in association with sexual activity, bestiality, sadomasochism and a plethora of other deviancies, he was obsessed with sexual bondage. It was something West was compelled to subject his victims to time and again.

As we will see with Harvey Glatman, having a captive woman bound, gagged, and at his complete mercy was paramount to West’s signature as a serial killer. Immobilising his victims served not only as a practical means of ensuring they could not escape, it also facilitated a secondary, more sinister objective for West. Bondage represented his supreme power over his victims.

Each and every one of West’s victims was tied up. It is something he had to do, was compelled to do, and would never not do.

West demeaned his victims by using articles of their own clothing to supplement their restraints. Sometimes they would have their eyes taped shut or obscured with cloth. This was vital to West’s psychopathology, as he revelled in reducing his victims to mere objects – his sexual playthings. They could not see what was coming, they could not cry out in pain and fear. Robbed of their ability to communicate, capable only of unintelligible, muffled grunts, their humanity was detracted from as he tortured and abused them. Objects.

This dehumanisation in the form of sensory deprivation was something the Australian backpacker killer, Ivan Milat, would also demonstrate with a number of his victims.

West always made the girls he killed suffer. Their anguished responses to his behaviour were essential affirmation of his total power over them; reduced to disposable items, parts. West saw his victims in much the same way he did inanimate objects, like the tools and materials of his trade as a builder. They had no value as people, they existed solely for him to use.

Sadistic, control-hungry killers escalate the nature of their crimes, constantly striving for the next sexual ‘high’ and as West’s murder series progressed, he became even more barbaric. He may have mutilated the girls while they were still conscious, and considering himself the expert – he had many times offered his services as a crude abortionist – he may also have performed bizarre sexual experiments upon them.

There is evidence, in the form of fine scrapings found on a number of his victims’ bones, to suggest cannibalism. Consuming the flesh of one’s victims, as we will later see, is along the spectrum of the level of ultimate control pursued by the serial killer and West, the unfettered experimenter, would have attempted whatever he felt would give him a sense of heightened power over them.

All of West’s victims’ bodies were taken apart by him. Dismemberment, like bondage, provided two central outlets. The first was practicality. But there was another reason; West enjoyed cutting his victims up. They were his to do with as he pleased. When he took them to pieces he was divorcing them yet further from what they had once been; a living, breathing, human being.

He is known to have removed body parts during the dismemberment phase. Bones were missing, and they were never recovered. The prevailing theory is that they were stashed somewhere, as West collected them. The whereabouts of this grim trove has not been established but it is likely to have been buried, in a location of deep significance for him, as with the remains of the girls he slaughtered.

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Fred West was born on 29 September 1941, in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle. His parents, Walter and Daisy, though poor, were able to support him, his three brothers and three sisters.

As a boy he worked in the fields alongside his father, who was soon teaching his son things other than how to chop wood and pick strawberries. Over time, he ingrained in young Fred an edict to which he would relate all his life: “Do what you want, just don’t get caught doing it.”

It started with animals. His dad showed him how, when a sheep’s legs were slipped down the front of his Wellington boots, it would have a tough time escaping him as he had sex with it. Fred became used to the idea of taking things by force and enjoyed the power he was able to wield over the defenceless animals.

Incest was not particularly uncommon in rural Herefordshire in those days. It is believed that West was sexually abused by his mother, possibly losing his virginity to her. It is unknown whether or not his father abused him directly: West always denied that.

At the age of seventeen, he had a motorcycle accident. He lay unconscious in a ditch for a time before being taken to the hospital.

Sexual psychopath West played the role of the simple man particularly well.

He received another serious blow to his skull when he attempted to grope a girl at the top of a fire escape. She lashed out at him; he lost his balance, and fell to the ground below, again left unconscious.

Following these head injuries, many would bear testament to a change in West’s personality. He became prone to dramatic mood swings and the generally jovial image he presented to the world was often marred by sudden, explosive temper tantrums.

In August 1967 he killed his first known victim, a girlfriend named Anne McFall, probably by strangulation, shortly before she was due to give birth to his child. As was his ritual, West dismembered her corpse and buried her along with her unborn foetus under cover of darkness in a field near Much Marcle. Twenty-seven years later, that unborn child’s tiny bones would finally be unearthed along with its mother’s. Having previously recovered the remains of more of West’s victim’s, it came as no surprise to investigators that a number of bones were absent and unaccounted for.

West later met Rosemary Letts, the seventeen-year-old girl who was to become his wife, and immediately recognised her as someone he could mould to his requirements, who would help satisfy his perverse sexual impulses. But he would always keep his secrets.

When she was a child, Rosemary’s father had routinely beaten his family, particularly his wife, but seemed to have a soft spot for “Rosie” as his youngest daughter was sometimes known – it later emerged that he had been having sex with her. As Fred West once nonchalantly described: “He was fucking Rose for years.”

Rosemary Letts grew up knowing what pleased men and allowing them to do with her as they wished usually earned her favourable treatment. Sex had become her staple diet and the promiscuous adolescent was something of a homing-beacon for an eagle-eyed predator like Fred West. The quintessential empty vessel for him to fill.

It was suggested at Rosemary West’s 1995 murder trial that she killed West’s step-daughter Charmaine, while he was in prison on a theft conviction, but this has not been conclusively proven. What is known is that upon West’s release, he set about dismembering the little girl’s body in much the same way he had Anne McFall’s and buried it beneath the kitchen floor of his home. He made sure he took some of her away with him as well, to add to his collection.

Around the same time, he murdered Charmaine’s mother, his estranged wife, Catherine, known as ‘Rena’, compulsively repeating each facet of his signature: Bondage, rape, strangulation, dismemberment, trophy-taking.

In December 1973, Seventeen-year-old Caroline Owens (now Raine), was offered a lift by the Wests. Once in the couple’s car she was punched in the mouth by Fred, then bound and gagged and driven back to Cromwell Street. Sexually assaulted by both of them, her genitals whipped with a belt buckle, she was later raped by Fred and threatened with death and interment beneath “the paving slabs of Gloucester”, where he went on to inform her that the corpses of many other murdered girls were buried. But, unusually for him, Caroline was allowed to go free.

Fred West had converted the home’s dank cellar into a bedroom for Mae and his son, Stephen, to sleep in. West also decided to soundproof the subterranean vault.

The first known murder victim to die in that cellar was nineteen-year-old Lynda Gough, who vanished in April, 1973. In November 1973, fifteen-year old Carol Ann Cooper, disappeared, as did twenty-one-year-old Lucy Partington, who was held captive beneath 25 Cromwell Street for up to a week, just after Christmas 1973. Seventy-two of Lucy’s bones were found to be missing when her body was recovered in March 1994.

All of the girls would have bones missing, and all were raped, tortured and killed, their bodies brutally taken to pieces by a man accustomed to such work, and buried in make-shift pits beneath his house.

Swiss student, Therese Siegenthaler, aged twenty-one, also had her life brutally ended in the basement at Cromwell Street, in April, 1974; fifteen-year-old Shirley Hubbard met a similar fate in November that same year; seventeen-year-old Juanita Mott in April 1975. It was as though the murderous anniversaries were being marked with further killings. Indeed this seems likely, given the level of importance a control-oriented killer like West would attach to his murders.

When the skeletal remains were eventually exhumed, all bore evidence of the bindings buried along with them. In some cases these were extensive, with skulls still wrapped in the tape that had gagged the girls before their deaths, and in the case of Shirley Hubbard, her skull was found to be completely encased in tape, with a couple of lengths of plastic tubing inserted in the nostrils, evidentally so the trussed victim, blind and unable to speak or hear properly, could still breathe as she was assaulted. Forensic evidence showed the dismembered bodies had decomposed where they lay, and as such had not been moved from another location after being reduced to bones – a theory later posited.

There appears to have been a three-year period of dormancy until the next known murder, that of Shirley Robinson. She was an eighteen-year-old former lodger of the Wests, who had become pregnant with Fred West’s child and was about a month away from giving birth. Not about to let this interfere with his marriage, the avid killing machine strangled and dismembered his lover. As the cellar floor was now concreted over, containing as it did, the corpses of five girls, Fred buried Shirley, along with her unborn child, in the back garden.

In September 1979, seventeen-year-old Alison Chambers was abused, killed and hidden in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street.

Fred West murdered yet another member of his own family in June 1987, this time strangling and decapitating his sixteen-year-old daughter Heather, then dismembering her in his usual way and placing her remains in a wheelie-bin for later burial, in his back garden.

In May 1992, West set in motion his own downfall by raping another of his daughters. The story reached a policeman and after some investigation he and his wife were arrested.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with victims of abuse, the child declined at trial to give evidence. But the police hadn’t forgotten the “family joke” they had heard during the 1992 investigation; that Heather West, missing now for six years, was “buried under the patio”. Despite their efforts, Detective Constable Hazel Savage and her team were unable to establish any trace of her, and a search warrant to excavate the back garden of 25 Cromwell Street was obtained.

On 25 February 1994, after confessing to murdering his daughter, Fred West was arrested and taken to Gloucester Police Station. There was no altrusitic purpose for the stark admission. Knowing that the police would find Heather’s remains, the devious West simply thought he could minimize the damage by directing them to the precise spot in which she was buried, and so deter them from further searches of his property.

However, that same day, police digging in a different location in the garden found a human femur bone, later confirmed as having belonged to Alison Chambers. Confronted with this, West abridged his confession by stating that the body in his garden was, “Shirley’s mate.”

Realising they were dealing with something more than a domestic murderer, an eminent criminal psychologist was consulted. His opinion was that West had killed more people, and that a thorough search of the property would be necessary. The decision was made to dig up the entire back garden, along with the cellar.

The game was up. After consulting with his solicitor, West confessed to murdering nine more people.

Predictably, the press went berserk with the story and the case was quickly and sensationally dubbed “The House of Horrors.”

25 Cromwell Street, after the police were finished with it.

Rose West was arrested in April 1994. It was apparent from the outset that Fred’s strategy had been to protect his wife from any blame for the killings. As time went by his personality disorder threatened to consume him and he recanted and re-confessed his crimes time and again. Much of what he said was nonsense; nauseating, self-serving justification for each murder he had committed, and was swiftly dismissed by his interrogators.

Charged with twelve counts of murder, on New Year’s Day 1995, in his cell at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, Fred West fashioned himself a noose from items of prison clothing, climbed onto a laundry sack and stepped off, hanging himself. By the time a guard found him he was already dead. Cheating justice and ensuring the world would never know the full truth of what he had done was the last act of control he could exert.

It was West’s “nice but dim” act that allowed him to keep secretly killing for so many years. Who would suspect him? And making the bodies ‘disappear’ concealed the fact that a serial murderer was at work. He ensured that what he really was and what he was doing remained invisible, making him such a prolific danger. He was a calculating and organized offender who knew what to do to control his victims and how to hide the evidence.

West is believed to have murdered many more young women and girls than those officially attributed to him. He may have been able to reduce the frequency of his homicidal trysts, as we now know the ‘Green River Killer’ did, but he would have been unable to refrain from killing entirely. A man committed to destroying young women, who had killed so prolifically throughout the seventies, would have been uanble to turn off his murderous impulses indefinitely.

In the early eighties, a period when West is not known to have killed anybody, a neighbour, then a young boy, recounted how he saw West emerge from his house late one night, covered in blood. Around the same time West was haunting a local video-rental store, insisting that he could obtain “snuff movies” for the proprieter to sell. This would be within such a killer’s remit. Retaining visual affirmation of his horrific misdeeds as a means of reliving the crime would be an attractive lure for somebody like West. It would not be out of character either for him to relish the secret knowledge that he could share details of his victims’ deaths with outsiders who would not realise the full implications of what they were seeing. Widening his reach, controlling the circumstances of others.

West mentioned a remote farmhouse where he said kidnapped girls were taken to be raped, killed and buried. The involvement of satanic “witch” covens was also something he rambled about, though none of this was substantiated.

Rosemary West was found guilty of ten murders at Winchester Crown Court on 21 November 1995. She is serving her life sentence in Holloway Prison, London.

Having always protested her innocence, she continues to appeal on the grounds that her conviction was based solely on circumstantial “similar fact” evidence, and effective guilt by association – her late husband having been a relentless, control-oriented serial killer who considered his victims his property and had therefore kept them close to him, beneath the house they once shared.