Few could make worse parents than Fred and Rose West. Their daughter Heather, 16, was strangled, dismembered in the family bath (with a kitchen knife so as not to scratch the enamel) and buried under the patio.
West’s eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine was discovered kneecapped and dissected under their previous home. And not one but two of West’s pregnant mistresses were found in unofficial graves, both just a few weeks shy of being full term.
West’s ex-wife Rena was in a nearby field, a runaway was buried under what had been a paddling pool. Another woman was under the bathroom floor and five more were in the cellar – where the youngest West children slept.
But those who survived life at Gloucester’s 25 Cromwell Street did not count themselves that much luckier. Author Howard Sounes helped break the West story as a Mirror reporter in 1994, and as the leading expert on the case recently gained access to more than 100 hours of Fred West’s unheard police interviews.
Now in Day One of our serialisation of his new book The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation, he shares his harrowing previously-unpublished interview with West’s son Barry, revealing what it was really like growing up in Britain’s House of Horrors…..
Anna-Marie West was just eight when her father and stepmum first raped her. Thereafter, rape became routine. She was strapped to metal torture contraptions that builder Fred West made at work – and told it was perfectly normal.
Some, but not all, of the West children were used for sexual pleasure not only by Fred and Rose. Once a few of them were allowed to go to their parents’ party – only, according to one child, to be molested by drunken men with their parents’ encouragement.
Incest was part of Fred’s DNA, and child abuse was as routine as mealtimes at 25 Cromwell Street. But, bizarrely, it wasn’t always their father who inspired the most fear amongst the West children. It was Rose.
The mum and stepmum has denied all allegations against her for 30 years. But in November 1995, she was found guilty of 10 counts of murder between 1971 and 1987. During the trial, the court heard abundant evidence of her committing serious sexual and physical assaults against children.
She later became only the second woman – after Myra Hindley – to be handed a Whole Life Order, meaning she’ll never be freed. Many of her children, like her son Barry, received a life sentence of their own – never recovering from the trauma the Wests inflicted.
He struggled with his mental health and had been used drugs. He sadly died two years after meeting me to describe the full horror of life inside the House of Horrors.
It is only now I can share that interview for the first time. “My dad was a solid monster,” Barry told me. “But she [Rose] was a complete psycho. That’s what people don’t know: My mum was, child abuse-wise, the main person. My mum was completely sick in the head. She beat me way more than my dad did, and enjoyed it, absolutely enjoyed it.”
When the West children were young they were made to sleep in the cellar, often locked in there at night, sometimes strapped to their beds. Rose was her children’s gaoler, wearing the keys to the cellar around her neck.
The slightest thing would set Rose off, and she would lash out violently: not just hitting and slapping but stabbing and strangling her children. She also hit them with a novelty giant wooden spoon.
“My nose is on a slant because of the amount of times she broke it,” Barry told me. “She would use [the spoon] as a baseball bat to beat us. I’ve got massive scars on the back of my head from the amount of times she split my head open with it. She broke my arm, all sorta stuff. She had intense enjoyment in beating the s**t out of me… ”
Sadly, these were Barry’s earliest memories. He said: “She was just as sick as him. Her moods didn’t change. She used to hit us even on Christmas Day. She used to smack you straight in the mouth.”
One Christmas, Barry made the mistake of not liking Mum’s brussel sprouts. “I put them in a tissue and then hid them in the back of a chair,” he said. Days later Rose found them, rotting away. “She put them on the table, and she made me eat them,” he added. “[Then] she put her hand over my mouth and made me swallow my own sick. That’s the sort of s**t I had growing up. I don’t remember any present opening.”
Childhood at Cromwell Street was simply joyless. Rose sent her girls to school with short hair, like boys, wearing boys’ shoes because they lasted longer. She made her daughters clean their hair with washing-up liquid rather than shampoo and she didn’t allow the purchase of deodorant, which the girls were teased about.
The West boys went to school in their sisters’ hand-me-downs, allowing their hair to grow long like girls. Many developed squints and speech defects, which can be indications of child abuse.
“When we was young, we all had speech impediments,” says Barry, “I got my face punched in every day I went to school….[I was] scared to go to school, scared to go home.”
It wasn’t just Rose waiting for him at home. It was also his father. The children once clubbed together to buy him a £12 Zippo lighter for Father’s Day. They even got it inscribed. “He threw it across the room,” Barry recalled. “That was the kind of man he was.” That wasn’t the half of it.
West spoke about sex constantly in front of the kids, about wanting to take his daughters’ virginity, about the family tradition of incest, even sex with animals. His stated ambition – the very idea is insane – was to see Rose mounted by a bull.
“[Dad] was such a disgusting man, he was vile,” Barry told me. Fred wanted to deflower his daughters, and Barry claimed he was forced into sexual situations with his mother at just “eight or nine”.
The children often had to take phone bookings for ‘Mandy’, their mum’s alias when she was working as a prostitute. Barry started being offered up to clients as an extra, as such.
According to him, one evening, Rose came downstairs in her nightdress and told Barry to follow her to her room. “She said, ‘There’s a man in here and I want you to do exactly what he tells you to do, no matter what’,” recalled Barry. “[I] was just confused. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I walk in and there was a giant man in front of me.”
The regular raped Barry. This was just the start. His abuser continued to visit the house to molest him and have sex with Rose. The mum had a dedicated pair of underwear for each regular, kept in separate labelled jars.
West also insisted she kept all used contraceptives in order to “artificially inseminate” their children. Barry claimed they were even made to watch homemade porn featuring their mother.
It was sometimes said within the family that Barry may not have been West’s child at all, but the product of the incestuous relationship between Rose and her father, Bill Letts. Bill had allegedly been abusing Rose since she was a girl and, according to notes made in prison by West, was a regular visitor to Cromwell Street.
West alleged one of his daughters once came downstairs complaining: “Grampy [is] going to sleep with me.” According to West, Rose said: “He is not going to eat you, he is only going to f**k you. You’ll probably love it.” (Rose routinely denies all wrongdoing even after her murder convictions).
Alongside the beatings and the abuse, young women were being brought to the house where they were attacked, murdered, often dismembered by West (in the family bathroom). All were found with fingers, toes and other body parts missing, leading one psychologist to suggest there could have been a cannibalistic element to the killings.
The eldest surviving child Anna-Marie was coming up for nine when 19-year-old Lynda Gough was killed in 1973, the first of the nine Cromwell Street murders. Eight more women, some of them lodgers, disappeared over the next six years.
The bodies of West’s first wife Rena, pregnant mistress Anne McFall and stepdaughter Charmaine were buried elsewhere.
Most of the children maintained they had no idea what was going on. Years later, however, one child (whom I won’t identify) claimed that there were days when they were locked in a cupboard under the stairs while they heard shouting and screaming. When they came out they saw fresh concrete had been poured in the cellar.
“Why didn’t we all run away?” Barry, who went on to suffer a long battle of psychological issues, asked me. “I suppose that’s the hold he had, the power. My dad was like God. You couldn’t beat him. You couldn’t run away. He would find you.”
Barry contemplated killing his father to end their misery. “I tried stabbing him when I was eleven with a screwdriver. He just laughed at me,” he claimed. The younger siblings did get some revenge on Rose, however. Just before they were taken into care during the police investigation, Barry claimed Rose came at them with the wooden spoon and they all joined forces to turn on her.
“I remember all my sisters jumping on top [of her], and we all sort of stood up [to her] and she was tired,” he claimed. “She was knackered. She hit us until [she] couldn’t hit us anymore. And that’s when she broke down. And I saw the weakness of her, and she was crying her eyes out…”
On the whole however, the children knew not to step out of line – or break the West code of silence. Barry’s older sister Heather was their warning. She vanished aged 16 in 1987 after saying she wanted to leave home. The children were told she’d moved away and cut contact, But it became a family ‘joke’: if you crossed Fred and Rose, you’d end up like Heather – under the patio, three paving stones up and nine across.
Barry later said: “That was what was going to happen to all of us when we got old enough. If we didn’t turn out like him, we was against him. And if we was against him, we would have to go in the garden – under the patio. He made us understand that.”
When that ‘joke’ reached the ears of police, the diggers moved in. And the Wests’ decades of debasement would stay buried no more….
The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation, By Howard Sounes (Blink Publishing) is released on July 31. You can pre-order a copy here
