Howard Sounes - Fred And Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of Horrors

Howard Sounes was born in Welling, Kent, in 1965. He has worked as a journalist for newspapers in Britain and abroad, and is currently on the staff of the Daily Mirror.

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 978-1-405-51217-6

Copyright 1995 by Howard Sounes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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In memory of

Betty and Ray Sounes

and Reginald Davis

The GloucestershireHereford and Worcester border. See overleaf for detailed maps of the boxed areas.

The area around Much Marcle, where Fred West grew up, and where he buried the remains of Rena Costello and Anna McFall.

Simplified street map of Gloucester, showing Midland Road and Cromwell Street, where the Wests spent their twenty-four years in the city.

I N THE LAST days of February 1994, articles began appearing in Gloucesters evening newspaper about human remains being uncovered under the garden of a house in the city. The address of the house was 25 Cromwell Street. The bones for that is all the remains were after several years in the ground had been tentatively identified by police as those of one of the daughters of the household, a girl named Heather West. She had not been seen alive since 1987, when she was aged sixteen. Her father, Fred West, a 52-year-old jobbing builder, and her mother, Rose, a 40-year-old prostitute, were arrested and questioned about the discovery. Rose was released after a few hours, but Fred was charged with Heathers murder.

It was an interesting case a man who had apparently killed his teenage daughter and hidden her under the patio but it was by no means unique. Murders within families, generically known to the police as domestic killings, are relatively commonplace. For this reason, and the fundamental fact that Fred West had been charged severely limiting what could properly be reported the investigation at first received little coverage in the national media. The Daily Mirror, for example, printed just two short paragraphs on the morning of 1 March, under the headline DAD FACES DEATH CASE.

This situation changed slightly a few days later, when it emerged that the police had discovered the remains of two more young women at Cromwell Street. The story was given more space and prominence in the press, even reaching the front pages under the headline GARDEN OF EVIL, but was still overshadowed by other news.

I was employed at the time as a staff reporter for the Sunday Mirror newspaper in London. Just after lunch on Saturday 5 March I took an unexpected telephone call from a police source in Gloucestershire, a person whom I am bound by a confidence not to identify. I was told that, over the last few hours, there had been sensational developments in the Garden of Evil case developments of which the press were unaware, partly because the police officers attached to the inquiry team had been sworn to secrecy.

Fred West had committed an astonishing number of murders, far more than had previously been suspected. The remains of young women were buried not only in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street, as had been supposed, but also in the cellar of the house; under the bathroom floor; under the extension of a second property nearby; and in fields on the outskirts of the village where Fred West was born. The police calculated there were at least nine more victims to be found, making with the remains of the three already discovered a possible total of twelve. An experimental radar device used over the previous twenty-four hours had indicated at least five graves in the cellar alone. While I listened to this incredible information on the telephone, trying to note every detail of what had happened, police officers were using pneumatic drills to break up the concrete floor.

I was told that the dead were probably all young women. The likely victims included lodgers, hitch-hikers, and girls snatched from bus stops. Fred West was talking freely about these girls, and from the casual way in which he discussed their fates, detectives believed he had almost certainly killed many more.

Even in those first few moments it was clear this was to number among the most extraordinary murder cases in British criminal history.

I worked on the story with the Sunday Mirrors crime reporter, Chris House, who was able to corroborate what I had been told. Pondering the introduction to our article, which would appear on the front page, we cast about for a new name for the investigation, a phrase more appropriate than Garden of Evil. We came up with HOUSE OF HORRORS. In retrospect it may not have been the most original idea, but it is the name that has stuck and has been widely used since. It first appeared in connection with the Wests on page one of the Sunday Mirror that weekend; following on from the headline was a lengthy article breaking the story of the macabre contents of 25 Cromwell Street, and the existence of the other graves, thereby revealing the true scale of the case.

The remains of several more young women were indeed recovered from inside 25 Cromwell Street over the following days, and enormous media interest came to focus on that plain semi-detached house. Journalists arrived in Gloucester from all over the country, and the world, eager to discover everything about the West family. There had not been such a newsworthy British murder story since 1983, when civil servant Dennis Nilsen was found to have killed fifteen young men. In many ways, the West case was more comparable to that of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who had murdered a number of children in the late 1960s.

The following weekend I wrote a second article, this time reporting that the human remains found at the house had been cut into pieces and that there was evidence of sexual torture. A week later I identified the exact location in the fields near Fred Wests childhood home where the police were soon to dig for more victims. The front page of the 27 March issue of the Sunday Mirror reported that the remains already recovered were not complete: many bones were missing, especially from the feet and hands. This would later prove to be a most unsettling mystery.

It became apparent that such mayhem could not be the work of Fred West alone, although he was the only person to be charged at this stage. It seemed likely that Rose had been as much involved in the murders as her husband, and that it was her appetite for sadistic lesbian sex which had been the motivation for most of the killings.

On 10 April 1994 I reported that arrests would be made regarding sex abuse at Cromwell Street, and on 21 April Rose West was brought before magistrates, charged with raping a young girl. It was this that first put her behind bars. On 24 April, I reported that she was being closely questioned about the murders of her daughter Heather and another young girl. The next day, Rose was charged with murder for the first time. On 1 May I wrote that she would now be charged with murdering all nine women found at Cromwell Street, and as the weeks went by, this also happened.