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Heather West was 16-years-old when she was last seen in June 1987 & in the years after she vanished, her parents’ stories regarding her whereabouts continued to change. Heather was one of ten children of Fred & Rose West, some of which were theirs together, while others were from previous relationships. It wasn’t until 1994, seven years after their sister went missing, when the younger children mentioned their father’s flippant threat to social workers that if they misbehaved, they would end up under the patio just like Heather. The statement had basically become a sick family joke, but would soon expose an unimaginable darkness that was far deeper than authorities could have ever imagined. After an investigation began, their home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, England became known as the House of Horrors based on what was uncovered at this location.
This is the dark true story of two married serial killers who preyed on vulnerable young women & girls, often runaways & hitchhikers, some of which were their own children, that spanned the course of two decades between 1967 & 1987.
The true darkness was exposed when Fred learned that investigators were looking into his daughter’s whereabouts & had obtained a search warrant to excavate their yard. He suddenly confessed, without any emotion whatsoever, that he strangled his daughter, dismembered her with a bread knife & buried her remains. But after Fred pointed out the location of where they should dig, it wasn’t long before investigators began unearthing more & more human remains.
Their sick love affair began in early 1969, when Fred West was 27-years-old & he encountered a much younger Rosemary “Rose” Letts shortly after her 15th birthday. They first crossed paths while they were waiting for the same bus & initially, Rose was deeply put off by Fred’s unkempt appearance. However, as he continued to shower her with attention in the following days when they continued to see each other at the bus stop, she was eventually won over.
Despite the fact that Fred was nearly twice Rose’s age, he began stopping by the bread shop where Rose worked & when he asked her out for a date, she accepted. Being twelve years her senior, Fred was already married to a woman named Catherine “Rena” Costello, a woman who he said had left him one year earlier to care for their two daughters alone, Charmaine & Anne Marie.
Those familiar to the couple could clearly see that Fred was a very violent man & Rena was an abused woman. She often came around with black eyes or bruises on her body that were indicative of a violent relationship. When Fred first met Rena & the two got married, she was already pregnant with her first daughter, Charmaine, whose father wasn’t in the picture. Their second daughter, Anne Marie, was born in 1964 & one year later the family of four moved from Rena’s home city of Glasgow to be closer to Fred’s hometown of Gloucester.
Sadly, it was here in England when Fred allegedly began to sexually abuse Charmaine & became increasingly abusive & controlling of Rena, who eventually escaped, sadly leaving her young daughters behind.
Now in 1969, only a few weeks after meeting, Rose Letts agreed to leave her job at the bakery when Fred offered her to move in with him to work as a full-time nanny to his daughters, 6-year-old Charmaine & 5-year-old Anne Marie. When Rose moved in, they were initially living in a caravan until they moved into their home on Midland Road in Gloucester.
When Rena first left Fred, Charmaine & Anne Marie spent time in & out of social services until 1969 when Rose became their caregiver. Sadly, the violence & instability only continued upon her arrival & it wasn’t long before she was regularly beating the girls. This was behavior they had been accustomed to as they were often subjected to cruel treatment at the hands of Fred. He would cage them into bunk beds & only allow them to come out when he was at work.
The young girls were rarely allowed to leave the house to socialize & if they were unable to complete their list of daily chores, they would suffer punishment. Since Anne Marie was said to be more submissive, she received far less abuse at the hands of Rose than her older half sister.
Rose gave birth to her their first biological child together, Heather Ann, on October 17, 1970 & only two months later, Fred was imprisoned for theft in December 1970. While he remained in prison through June 1971, Rose was responsible for caring for Charmaine, Anne Marie & Heather. During this time, Charmaine suddenly vanished & had been last seen alive sometime in 1971 when Rose took the three girls to visit Fred in prison.
After her disappearance, Rose concocted a story that Rena came to collect her first-born daughter to live with her in Bristol. This was the story she told Anne Marie, Heather & other family members & friends, while she told the staff at Charmaine’s primary school that she’d gone to live with her mother in London.
When Anne Marie came home from school one day & found her sister missing, she had no choice but to believe what her stepmother was telling her since she knew better than to question Rose. Not only was Charmaine not with her mother as Rose claimed, but Rena herself would also go missing sometime that same year.
After she’d left Fred, Rena maintained sporadic contact with her daughters & in August 1971, she was given Fred’s address on Midland Road. She went missing after she went to his home to confront him, likely to demand custody of Charmaine & Anne Marie.
Authorities theorize that Rena was strangled to death in the back of Fred’s car. When her remains were eventually discovered on April 11, 1994, there was a small red boomerang & a piece of metal piping in her grave. Her body had been extensively dismembered & placed into plastic bags
Because Charmaine refused to accept Rose as her mother, she had often been at the receiving end of her physical & emotional abuse. She was once heard saying, My real mummy wouldn’t swear or shout at us. This was something that enraged Rose & a neighbor once said that they saw Charmaine standing naked on a chair, gagged with her hands bound as Rose stood next to her with a wooden spoon in hand.
Investigators believe that Rose, who was 17-years-old at the time, murdered her 8-year-old stepdaughter shortly before Fred’s prison release date of June 24, 1971. She was last seen alive when they all went to see Fred in prison on June 15, nine days earlier. Rose, who was a teenager herself, was alone & caring for three young children, likely murdered the innocent young girl in a fit of rage. It was later learned that Rose kept Charmaine’s remains in the coal cellar until Fred was released from prison & could bury her in their garden.
The exact circumstances of her murder will likely never be known, but after she was murdered & concealed, she was eventually dismembered by Fred, who then buried her under the kitchen floor. This sick act seemed to only bring the murderous couple closer together.
With Charmaine no longer at home to receive the brunt of the abuse, in 1972, when Anne Marie was 8-years-old, she was restrained & raped by her father while Rose stood by & encouraged the abuse, even helping by forcefully removing her clothing. After this first assault, Rose allegedly told her, I’m sorry. Everybody does it to every girl. It’s a father’s job. Don’t worry & don’t say anything to anybody.
This same year, when Rose was 18-years-old, she & Fred were officially married on January 29, 1972. A few months later, they settled into their new home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester, a location that had rows of terraced homes, a place that was later dubbed the House of Horrors by the media.
Just before celebrating their first anniversary, on January 12, 1973, Fred & Rose were convicted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm & indecent assault for kidnapping a girl that had been their nanny for a short period of time in late 1972, Caroline Owens. They picked her up when she was hitchhiking & took her back to their house to abuse her. After she managed to escape, she went to the police, but when the case went to court, she couldn’t face the ordeal of testifying so all charges were dropped. The couple agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges & were each fined £25.
Sadly, the sexual abuse of Anne Marie continued, something that Rose continued to encourage & assist with, binding her to the furniture. She also forced her to do chores while wearing a sexual device.
When Anne Marie was only 13-years-old, Fred & Rose forced her into sex work, something Rose was already doing out of their home. When men visited the house, she would tell them that she was 16. In 1979, when Anne Marie was 15, she ran away & escaped her horrific home.
Between 1970-1983 the couple had seven more children together in addition to Heather: Mae, Stephen, Tara, Louise, Barry, Rosemary Jr. & Lucyanna. Some of the children, specifically the younger ones, Tara, Louise, Rosemary & Lucyanna were likely fathered by men other than Fred as Rose continued to see clients in their home as a sex worker.
Sadly, like Anne Marie, Fred also sexually molested Heather, Mae & Louise on a number of occasions. Rose also continued to have violent outbursts that were directed at their children, some so brutal that they ended up at a local hospital to have their injuries treated.
In the midst of living in constant fear, there were also moments of normalcy where the family ate meals & watched TV together, celebrated birthdays & holidays, & went on family vacations. According to a memoir written by Mae West in 2018, she remembers the superb cupcakes her mother baked & the birthday cakes they enjoyed. On certain days, there were glimmers of feeling like any other family.
Sadly, these small moments of peace were very short-lived & quickly replaced by horror. With Rose by Fred’s side, they killed at least eight young women over a span of years, all of which were subjected to extreme sexual abuse & torture before their deaths. These teenage girls & young women had either been staying at their Cromwell Street home or travelling in the area & were targeted by the couple who would then bury their bodies around their property between 1973 & 1979.
Heather, the first born between Fred & Rose, tried her best to distance herself from the dysfunction, abuse & darkness of her parents. She dropped out of school & applied for jobs out of town, but in 1987, she was sadly not selected for a maid’s position at a resort in Torquay that would have allowed her to move away.
In June 1987, when Heather tried to stop her father’s abuse by confiding in a friend about what was going on at home, Fred & Rose murdered her & buried her in the back garden beneath their patio. She was last seen on June 19, 1987 & they went on to tell their other children that Heather left to work in southern England. Although they initially believed their parents, they started to doubt their story when their older sister failed to respond to any of their calls or letters. Heather was never reported missing.
In May 1992, after 13-year-old Louise was continuously raped by her father over the course of weeks, one of which Fred filmed, she worked up the courage to confide in a close friend about what her father had done. This friend told her mother, who anonymously informed the police.
Although a search of the home in August 1992 found objects of sexual paraphernalia & pornographic videos, they did not find the tape of Louise’s attack. Louise gave a full statement & described her father’s abuse, which started when she was eleven & that her mother had been aware.
Medical examinations revealed evidence of abuse & all of the children in the household were transitioned to foster care the following day. The West children told investigators that their mother had inflicted most of the physical abuse & that their father often threatened that if they told anyone, they would be buried under the patio like their sister, Heather.
These comments which were overheard by social workers which finally prompted an investigation which unveiled the true horrors of Fred & Rose West.
Upon hearing that her father was awaiting trial, Anne Marie, who’d escaped the abuse thirteen years earlier in 1979, came forward to detail the extensive physical, sexual & mental abuse she’d endured as a child at the hands of both her father & stepmother.
When Anne Marie & Louise declined to testify at the court case on June 7, 1993, the case against Rose & Fred collapsed. Anne Marie chose to withdraw her statement because of her younger sibling’s distress at the whole situation as well as her fear of Rose’s retaliation. She did bring attention to the fact that she had been unable to find her half sisters, Charmaine & Heather or her mother, Rena.
The Wests were acquitted of all charges, but all of their younger children remained in foster care with permitted supervised visitations to Cromwell Street. However, police continued to search for missing Heather, noting no records to prove that she was still alive. They also retraced Fred’s history & the fact that neither Charmaine nor Rena, who vanished in 1971, had a missing person report filed on either of them.
The investigators were convinced that Heather was deceased & reflected on Fred’s repeated statements to his children about her body being under the patio. Although it was disguised as a flippant joke, they questioned if it could be true.
On February 25, 1994, after police obtained a search warrant for their home & planned to excavate the yard, Fred, knowing he was going to be caught, admitted that he had killed his daughter. He confessed to strangling Heather in a fit of rage, dismembering her body with a heavy serrated knife on the ground floor bathroom & buring her remains. Heather’s remains were recovered the following day after she had been missing for nearly seven years.
When 52-year-old Fred was taken into custody, he was initially reluctant to talk & was assigned to a designated appropriate adult as he was barely literate & had learning difficulties. 38-year-old Janet Leach, a social worker & mother of five, would help him understand the legal process. Fred quickly connected to her & confessed to her that he killed his daughter even before he told the police. She was shocked at the matter-of-fact way he spoke of the murders as if he was talking about the weather.
After Fred was formally charged with his daughter’s murder, police questioned him about a third thigh bone that was found & he indicated it belonged to 18-year-old Shirley Robinson. She was a tenant at 25 Cromwell Street who became Fred’s lover. Fred indicated that she threatened to tell Rose that she was pregnant with his baby when he struck her in the jaw & then strangled her. When she was last seen in May 1978, she was 8 months pregnant & she & her unborn child were found buried in the garden at the West’s home.
While he spoke of Shirley, he accidentally told the investigators that her death made three until he quickly corrected himself & said, Sorry, that’s two, not three. From here, he very gradually began to confess to a total of twelve murders, but only after he was told by investigators that they were going to dig up the house itself, specifically mentioning the cellar. He helped investigators locate all twelve of their victims, although he would later recant his admissions of guilt. While he spoke with police, he tried to protect Rose, indicating that she had no idea about the murders, including Heather’s. When Rose learned of her husband’s confessions, she denied any involvement & began to distance herself from Fred.
Investigators learned that the top floor of 25 Cromwell Street had been used for tenants & when they spoke with a few of the ex-tenants, they described the house as a strange place where men were often coming & going. The tenants were young girls that often came from care homes or had been out backpacking.
In addition to murdering Charmaine & Heather, the ten other known victims were Ann McFall (18), Rena Costello (27), Lynda Gough (19), Carol Ann Cooper (15), Lucy Partington (21), Therese Seingenthaler (21), Shirly Hubbard (15), Juanita Mott (18), Shirley Robinson (18) & Alison Chambers (16).
Despite the fact that Fred indicated that Rose was innocent, investigators suspected otherwise since it would have been impossible to turn a blind eye to that extent & she was arrested on April 20, 1994. A detective was sent to speak with Caroline Owens, the couple’s nanny, who was picked up in their car, taken back to their home & sexually assaulted by the couple on December 6, 1972. They threatened to murder & bury her in the garden & Caroline’s case is how investigators imagine the other victims were taken from the street.
By May 6, the couple were jointly charged with five counts of murder, but on June 30, Fred was charged with twelve murders while Rose was charged with nine.
While he was held at HM Prison Birmingham in the months after his arrest, Fred became increasingly depressed, unable to cope with the fact that his wife had completely rejected him. On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1995, 53-year-old Fred was found to have asphyxiated himself in his jail cell with a rope he constructed from a blanket. His death was ruled a suicide. It’s likely he couldn’t stand the idea of facing his crimes & court paired with the fact that his wife was willing to let him take all of the responsibility & so easily rejected him after all their relationship had withstood. He took the coward’s way out to avoid facing justice for the horrible crimes he committed.
Fred admitted to being responsible for eleven victims, but he never admitted involvement in the murder of 18-year-old Ann McFall despite the fact that he showed investigators where she was buried. Ann is believed to have been Fred’s first victim. She was a nanny for Charmaine & Anne Marie during his first marriage to Rena. It’s speculated that she had an affair with him while Rena was away & fathered her child & she was also 6-7 months pregnant when she vanished. Her unborn baby was found when her remains were recovered on June 7, 1994 while Ann’s wrists were bound by a length of cord.
Investigators also believe he is linked to 15-year-old Mary Bastholm’s disappearance. She was working at a cafe in Gloucester when she vanished in 1968. Her remains have never been found & her case is unsolved.
Rose West went on to plead not guilty to ten charges of murder, her defense claiming that she was unaware of her husband’s actions & had been manipulated to stay quiet.
Rose’s trial lasted more than a month & in November 1995, the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts for all ten murders. She became the UK’s second woman in modern times to be given life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Nine of the twelve victims were recovered at 25 Cromwell Road in 1994, all uncovered during the investigation into the disappearance of Heather West. Charmaine West, Fred’s stepdaughter, was recovered on May 4, 1994 at 25 Midland Road, the home they shared before moving to Cromwell Street, while her mom, Rena Costello, as well as another victim, 18-year-old Ann McFall, were found buried in two fields near the village of Much Marcle, Fred’s childhood home.
All of the bodies had been stuffed into cramped holes, jumbled anatomically, were decapitated & missing many bones & no cause of death could be established. There were remnants of masks or bindings on the heads of seven victims. Some masks consisted of tape that hadn’t decomposed over the years, that had been wrapped around the victim’s skull.
The remains that were recovered proved that the victims had been brutally tortured before their murders. One grave involved a skull that had masking tape wrapped around & coming out of the nostrils were two little pipes that prevented the victim from breathing.
Beams in the cellar were found to have holes drilled into them, consistent with the victims being strung up while they were beaten, raped & tortured. The horrifying picture painted images of sadistic sexual abuse that resulted in the lives of these young victims ending.
In some of the police tapes, Fred denies that the deaths were intentional, indicating that the sex was just fun & somehow went wrong. He described it as enjoyment turned into disaster.
Some of these victims, who were as young as 15, were pitched up while hitchhiking or waiting at a bus stop, some were offered a room while they worked as a nanny for them. The twenty year killing spree began in 1967, two years before Fred met Rose, starting with Fred’s pregnant teenage mistress, Ann McFall. The spree ended with Heather’s murder in 1987.
In another interview, Fred referred to a student, 19-year-old Lynda Gough, as the first victim to be murdered for sexual satisfaction. She vanished in April 1973 & her parents reported her missing & likely died from strangulation & suffocation.
When Lynda’s mom went to Rose & Fred’s house looking for her, Rose told her that she had left, but her mom couldn’t help but notice that the woman was wearing her daughter’s slippers & her clothes were hanging on the line. Her remains were found in a former car inspection pit in a garage that had been converted into a bathroom at 25 Cromwell Street.
15-year-old Carole Ann Cooper, vanished in November 1973 when she was staying at The Pine Children’s Home. She’d been given permission to spend the weekend with her grandmother & she disappeared after she boarded a bus back to the home after a night out on November 10. Extensive searches were unable to track her down & her body was found in the cellar at 25 Cromwell Street. Detectives concluded that the Wests picked her up while she was hitchhiking.
21-year-old Lucy Partington was home for Christmas break from Exeter University & on December 27, 1973, she disappeared while she was waiting for a bus to her home in Gretton. Her mother reported her missing & a massive search ensued. Her remains were found beneath the floor at 25 Cromwell Street with a knife found in her grave.
21-year-old Therese Siegenthaler was a Swiss student attending college in London. She vanished at Easter in 1974 after she set out for a hitchhiking trip to Ireland to visit a friend who was a priest. She never made it & despite an investigation that spanned a number of years, she was never found. Her remains were located under the floor of the cellar at 25 Cromwell Street.
15-year-old Shirley Hubbard was the youngest of the victims found at Cromwell Street. After her parents separated when she was 2, she was taken into care. On November 14, 1974, when she was attending high school, she left work for home & never made it. She was reported missing, but never found until her remains were located in the floor of the cellar at Cromwell Street. Two narrow plastic tubes were found in her grave that were 16 & 17 inches long & had been inserted through the front of the mask that was on her head with the tubes bent upward to enter her nostrils. Her mouth was covered with brown tape & without the tubes in her nose, she wouldn’t have been able to breathe.
18-year-old Juanita Mott was traveling to Gloucester when she vanished the day before her friend’s wedding. Her disappearance was not reported to the police though her family contacted the Missing Persons Bureau & the media. Her remains were also found under the cellar at 25 Cromwell Street.
16-year-old Alison Chambers went to live at a children’s home in Gloucester after she ran away from home & was known to frequently visit 25 Cromwell Street to nanny the children until she eventually moved in. She vanished in August 1979 shortly before her 17th birthday & her disappearance was reported to the Missing Persons Bureau. Her remains were found in the garden at 25 Cromwell Street.
In 1996 25 Cromwell Street was demolished & the surviving West children have stuck together in the aftermath of their parent’s crimes. They think about the fact that their mother, although in prison, has gotten a degree in English, she’s had counseling, a life full of hobbies as she lives in a bubble. Meanwhile, they feel they have no place to be themselves. According to Mae West, her mother is now 71-years-old & remains imprisoned at HM Prison New Hall in West Yorkshire. She considers her a hypocrite who has only gotten more high & mighty in prison, trying to intervene in their lives.
In 2025 Netflix released the 3-episode documentary, Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story that features recently discovered police interview tapes with Fred that offer firsthand insight into their crimes.
Twelve young victims were subjected to unimaginable horrors before they were ultimately murdered & tossed into the dirt as if their lives hadn’t mattered. But their lives had mattered; they were daughters, sisters, students & they were loved & will forever be missed. Their families are left to forever grapple to imagine the horrors of their last moments.
References:
- ABC News: Fred & Rose West claimed the lives of 12 young women & girls. Thirty years on, some questions remain unanswered
- BBC: The 12 victims of Fred & Rosemary West
- Biography: The Horrors of Fred & Rose West started in their own family
- Cosmopolitan: Which of their children did Fred & Rose West murder?
- Cosmopolitan: A detailed list of Fred & Rose West’s children, including those who survived the House of Horrors
- Wikipedia: Fred West
- Wikipedia: Rose West
- The U.S. Sun: House of Horrors – How Fred West’s victims had missing fingers, heads taped & pipes up their noses so they could breathe during torture
- UPI: West dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief..
- Cosmopolitan: Everything we know about Janet Leach, Fred West’s appropriate adult & where she is today
- Netflix: Watch the Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story trailer
