BEAMING in front of the fake autumn foliage, hand rested lovingly on his wife’s shoulder, Fred and Rose West looked like any normal couple.
But lurking beneath their plastered-on smiles was a pure evil that continues to horrify the nation.
Thirty years ago, Fred and Rose West were arrested – bringing an end to a gruesome crime spree that lay undetected for decades.
But even as the pair sat in custody, no one was aware of the true horror buried beneath the garden and in the walls at 25 Cromwell Street.
Between them, Fred and Rose West raped, tortured and killed 12 women and girls between 1967 and 1987.
The killing spree came to light after the couple’s children discussed their sister Heather being “under the patio” with social workers.
In February 1994, Heather disappeared, and suspicions grew strong despite initial comments being disregarded as casual remarks. Consequently, a warrant was secured to search the family residence in Gloucestershire.
Fred chillingly told officers his daughter was in the garden but they were searching in the wrong place.
He and Rose were arrested on suspicion of murder and police began the grisly task of digging up the back garden.
Officers first found a femur, then the rest of Heather’s skeletal remains.
But the excavation led to the discovery of a second human bone that investigators confirmed did not belong to the couple’s eldest child.
Forced to confront evil itself, they spoke with Fred who admitted he had killed and buried 18-year-old lodger Shirley Robinson.
The killer then took police to the spot in the garden where he had also dumped the body of runaway 16-year-old Alison Chambers.
Police now had three bodies but with no evidence linking Rose, officers were forced to bail her back to the house of horrors.
Her husband meanwhile had already confessed to the three murders – with a fourth body now uncovered.
By March 4th of the same year, Fred West handed a handwritten note to Detective Superintendent Bennett. The note stated his authorization for his solicitor, Howard Ogden, to inform Superintendent Bennett of his desire to confess to around nine more murders, including victims like Charmaine, Rena, Lynda Gough, and others awaiting identification.
The revelation indicated that the authorities were dealing with a deeply disturbed individual, revealing only a fraction of the horrifying truths that lay concealed within the confines of 25 Cromwell Street.
Killed by depravity – Fred and Rose West’s known victims
Anna McFall
The nanny of Fred and Rena West’s children, McFall was believed to have been murdered in 1967.
She was pregnant when she died, with West believed to have been the father. Her body was found in June 1994 in a shallow grave.
Fred West denied murdering McFall but he is said to have confided to a visitor after his arrest that he stabbed her following an argument.
This happened before Rose West met him.
Charmaine West
With Fred in prison for the theft of car tyres and a vehicle tax disc, Rose was left to look after Charmaine and Anne Marie.
The former just eight-years-old, was Fred West’s stepdaughter from his previous marriage.
A neighbour Tracey is said to have found Charmaine tied to a wooden chair with her hands behind her back with Rose standing with a large wooden spoon.
Rose claimed she’d been taken by her mother, but her skeleton was found at the Midland Road property, hidden and missing bones.
Rena West
Fred’s first wife Rena is believed to have been murdered by strangulation.
Rose was not charged for this murder.
Lynda Gough
Lynda Gough was the first sexually motivated killing conducted by the Wests.
She moved into Cromwell Street in April 1973, having had affairs with several lodgers. The Wests later claimed she’d been asked to leave after hitting one of their children.
Strangulation and suffocation were the likely causes of death.
Carol Ann Cooper
Cooper was murdered in November 1973, aged just 15.
On the night of November 9, she was allowed to spend the night at her grandmother’s house before a doctor’s appointment the next morning.
She attended the appointment and then met her boyfriend, before somehow ending up on Cromwell Street.
Her body was found more than twenty years later.
Lucy Partington
A 21-year-old medieval English student at Exeter University, Lucy returned home for Christmas in December 1973.
She left a friend’s house in a rush to get the last bus from Cheltenham to Gretton on 27 December, with it believed she was abducted from this bus stop.
She was found more twenty years later, her dismembered body in the cellar of Cromwell Street.
Therese Siegenthaler
A 21-year-old Swiss sociology student at Woolwich Polytechnic.
She had planned to hitch-hike to Ireland in Easter 1974. Her family reported her missing having not heard from her for some time.
Prosecution believe she was abducted before being killed, with Fred West later building a fake chimney over her grave.
Shirley Hubbard
Just 15 at the time of her death, Hubbard is believed to have been abducted by the Wests.
Her body was found following an excavation in the concrete and plastic membrane of the cellar floor.
Juanita Mott
In the summer of 1974, Mott moved into 25 Cromwell Street but later went missing when she was living in Newent.
Her body was found in March 1994, 19 years later, with West having concreted over the floor of the cellar.
Shirley Robinson
The first victim buried outside the house, Robinson had an affair with Fred West, and by autumn 1977, she was pregnant with his child.
It was initially claimed she had moved to Scotland but her body was later found.
When questioned, Rose West, herself pregnant with her daughter Tara at the time of the murder, claimed she did not remember her, which was described as “ludicrous” by the prosecution.
Alison Chambers
The last murder with a sexual motive established. She disappeared just before her 17th birthday, having been seen at 25 Cromwell Street throughout the summer.
Her body was buried underneath the patio.
Heather West
The first child born to Fred and Rose West, there is no evidence she was aware of the killings.
Sexually abused by her parents and having told friends, she suddenly went missing in 1987, with her mum claiming she had gone to Wales to be with a lesbian partner.
The couple would joke to their other children that they would “end up under the patio like Heather” if they misbehaved. This, and their changing stories, led to the search warrants for the property, and subsequently to their arrests.
Fred and Rose Letts met in 1969 shortly after her 15th birthday but the match was doomed from the start after the teen’s parents forbade her from seeing the 27-year-old.
Despite their warnings, lovestruck Rose continued to meet up with Fred and they eventually moved in together.
She soon fell pregnant with Heather and helped look after Fred’s other two children from his previous marriage, Charmaine and Anne Marie.
While her partner was serving time in jail for petty theft, Rose subjected the girls to mental and physical torture.
Charmaine bore the brunt of her stepmother’s brutal punishments and was murdered by Rose in June 1971 when she was just eight years old.
The youngster’s remains were stashed in the cellar – ready for Fred to bury in the garden upon his release from prison.
Charmaine’s mum, Catherine “Rena” West, was also killed shortly after, with her dismembered body placed in plastic bags and dumped in a field.
The twisted killers married the following year and Rose fell pregnant with their second child, Mae June West.
Obsessed with sex, the new mum began working as a prostitute from an upstairs room at 25 Cromwell Street – with Fred a willing voyeur to his wife’s encounters.
Three of Rose’s eight children were conceived by her clients, who had become test subjects in the killer’s sadistic sexual fantasies.
The vile couple sexually assaulted their kids in their torture chamber cellar as their depravity reached new heights.
Anne Marie was stripped, tied to a mattress, gagged and raped by Fred when she was just eight.
Afterwards, Rose told her: “Everybody does it to every girl. It’s a father’s job. Don’t worry and don’t saying anything to anybody”.
After Anne Marie ran away from home, Fred turned his sexual attentions towards Mae and Heather – threatening to “break them in”.
While Mae coped with the abuse by laughing it off, Heather turned to alcohol and became withdrawn.
She was murdered and dismembered after being subjected to years of vile abuse and torture at the hands of her parents.
As the couple’s bloodlust grew, they expanded their pool of victims by luring lodgers to stay at their house of horrors.
They also enticed young women into their car with Rose’s presence in the front seat used as a way to make them feel safe.
Once inside the home, they were bound, gagged, sexually assaulted and murdered.
The cellar became a second graveyard as Fred and Rose buried their mutilated bodies in every available corner of the room.
Lucy Partington, Juanita Mott and Shirley Hubbard were found within the bone-filled basement, while Therese Siegenthaler was hidden under concrete in front of a false fireplace.
Police also discovered the remains of lodger Lynda Gough, whose jaw was completely covered in tape to silence her screams, and Carol Ann Cooper.
The 15-year-old had been abducted from a bus stop, bound with surgical tape and suspended from wooden beams in the cellar before being strangled to death.
Fred and Rose’s sexual greed became their downfall when daughter Louise bravely confided in a friend that her father had raped her.
The startling admission led to the children being placed into foster care where one-by-one they began opening up on the gruesome goings on at 25 Cromwell Street.
They revealed how Fred would threaten them into silence by telling them they would be “buried under the patio” like Heather if they exposed him.
With a chilling cache of evidence, the couple were charged on June 30, 1994, and came face-to-face in court where Rose winced at her husband’s touch.
This rejection led to Fred taking his own life in prison in January 1995 while he was awaiting trial.
Rose denied the ten murders she was charged with but was unanimously convicted on all counts after a harrowing trial.
She is currently serving a whole life tariff in prison – meaning she will die behind bars.
25 Cromwell Street was demolished in 1996 – taking its dark secrets down with it.
But the ghosts of the past at the couple’s former den of depravity still haunt the nation – 30 years after the first bone was pulled from the earth in the back garden.
