Killer Couples Documentary - Fred & Rose West： The Couple That Killed 12 Kids

Killer Couples Documentary - Fred & Rose West： The Couple That Killed 12 Kids

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Speaker 2: 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester has become one of the

most infamous addresses in Britain. For 20 years, Fred and

Rose West quenched their appetite for sex and murder inside

this house of unimaginable horror. When police began investigating the

disappearance of their daughter, it led them right to the

West front door. Detectives were only just beginning to unearth

the murderous history of Fred and Rose West.

Speaker 5: It was on a scale that was really unprecedented.

Speaker 6: Children are their things to play with. They are disposable.

They're things there to be used and abused.

Speaker 7: I've never for one moment doubted that Frederick West was

a truly evil man. But he found in Rose the

perfect sorcerer's apprentice.

Speaker 2: This is the story of how Fred and Rose West

became two of the world's most evil killers. Fred and

Rose West are one of the most notorious couples in

British history. For two decades, they sexually abused, tortured and

murdered nine women, including their own daughter, in their house

of horrors, and between them were responsible for another three

victims buried around Gloucestershire. When the news broke in February 1994,

the media were only scratching the surface of the couple's

terrifying life behind the closed door of 25 Cromwell Street.

Speaker 8: Five days and nights into their excavation and forensic teams

have now unearthed three sets of human remains, all buried

in separate places five feet under the garden patio of

this Gloucester home.

Speaker 1: It's horrible to think that there are, you know, dead

bodies in a garden just down the road. It's just

thoroughly disgusting. I mean, it's horrifying to think. Totally shocking,

especially around, you know, in Gloucester. I mean, you wouldn't

expect this to happen.

Speaker 2: But Fred and Rose's horrifying story began many years before.

In 1969, 28-year-old Fred West was married to his wife, Rena,

with a young family of his own. But he had

his eye on a 15-year-old girl named Rosemary Letts. Rose

and her family had recently moved to the Gloucestershire area,

whereas Fred was born and raised in the local village

of Muchmarkle.

Speaker 6: Well, Fred was the eldest boy in the family, and

he was very much the target for quite a lot

of abuse at the hands of his mother. So his

mother sexually abused him, essentially, and he lost his virginity

to her. And the family was a very self-contained one.

Rose's childhood was similar to Fred's in many ways, in

that it was completely dysfunctional and antisocial and abnormal. So

she was abused by her father. who started raping her

from a very young age. So what she took to

be normal, what she took to be acceptable in terms

of behavior within a family really was anything but.

Speaker 2: Fred pursued Rose. He was used to getting what he wanted.

When the couple met, there was instant attraction.

Speaker 9: Rose lived in the same village that Fred had a caravan.

They met at the bus station in Cheltenham. She said

that he could charm the birds off the trees, even

though his appearance was shabby. He had not very clean teeth.

Speaker 6: Well, these were two incredibly damaged people. They'd both come

from abnormal families. And I think when they met, what

they saw in each other was something familiar. So they

both would have realized that the childhoods that they had

were far from normal. But with one another, they felt

that familiarity.

Speaker 7: Maybe it was something that Rose gave off implicitly. but

something in Fred connected with what had happened to Rose

and the way she was and the way she'd been

treated by her father.

Speaker 4: And it was like a union of two souls.

Speaker 6: I think it was the perfect storm. The chances of

these two people meeting was, it must have been a

million to one, but unfortunately they did.

Speaker 2: By 1970, just a year after meeting, they were living

together in Gloucester with Fred's stepdaughter, Charmaine. His wife, Rena,

was nowhere to be seen. Rose was pregnant with the

couple's first daughter, Heather.

Speaker 6: I think in the early days, perhaps the more dominant

partner was Fred. He was older, he was more experienced,

he'd seen more than Rose had. You know, she'd come

from this incredibly contained family. But I think as their

relationship developed... she started to find her feet and find

her confidence, and I don't think that Fred ever really

trusted her.

Speaker 7: For Rose and Fred, it was all about sex from

the very, very beginning. Fred was the originator, but he

found the perfect sorcerer's apprentice, the perfect partner, someone who

shared his lust and someone who understood him and wanted

to perform for him.

Speaker 6: I think we have a lot of trouble making sense

of Fred and Rose's relationship and the reason for that

is because we are people with emotions and normal feelings

and ideas of what acceptable and unacceptable boundaries are around relationships.

So I don't think I'd describe their relationship as a

loving one.

Speaker 2: Fred and Rose's traumatic childhoods had a lasting effect on

the couple and their twisted approach to family life together.

Speaker 7: It's always a very complicated question to answer how many children.

Speaker 4: Fred and Rose actually had.

Speaker 7: Because if you count Fred's daughter Charmaine, along with Fred

and Rose's eight, it's nine.

Speaker 4: But then you've got to add Rose's three mixed-race children,

all of whom were fathered not by Fred.

Speaker 7: All I would say is that all of them were

deeply hurt, almost ruined by the parents themselves.

Speaker 6: I think Rose's early experiences within the family of being

abused by her father wrote the script for what would

later play out. So what she took to be normal,

what she took as boundaries and rules, really weren't going

to work in the wider world. So what she was

learning about in those early years would set her up

to be somebody who didn't quite fit in.

Speaker 7: And it was, to some extent, what Fred then adopted as.

Speaker 4: a family habit. It was, if you like, a West tradition.

Speaker 7: I don't mean to say that that wasn't disgraceful, but

it is nevertheless part of the family history and helps,

helps to explain something of West's behaviour.

Speaker 2: Two decades later, it's 1992 and Gloucestershire police are searching

for Heather West. In 1987, aged just 16, Fred and

Rosie's eldest child vanish from the family home. Fred had

claimed Heather had run away, but she was never reported

as missing. But after receiving allegations of child abuse at

25 Cromwell Street, detectives began to look into Heather's whereabouts.

Chief Constable Tony Butler was in charge of Gloucestershire Police.

Speaker 5: One of the children told a friend at school about

what was happening to her. That friend talked to a

patrolling police officer, in fact, about what her friend had

told her, and it was a result of what the police...

The police officer then took that back and it initiated

a child protection process which led to the evidence being gathered.

Speaker 2: Five of the West's children were placed into care and

the police began their investigations. They were interviewed about the

darker side of their lives at 25 Cromwell Street.

Speaker 7: What it brought to light was a family joke. And

the family joke was a simple one. You'd better watch

out because if you don't shut up and stop causing

your dad or your mum any trouble, you'll end up

like Heather, two down and three across in the patio.

Fred had laid a patio behind Cornwall Street, it was

in squares, which was rather like a crossword. The family

joke was that he buried Heather at two down and

three across.

Speaker 5: This issue, this Heather's under the patio, continued to be raised.

And so we started to take this point seriously. We

knew Heather had disappeared, had left the home, So we

tried to trace her, and despite a massive amount of

inquiry to try and find out, she just literally disappeared

off the face of the earth.

Speaker 2: In February 1994, the police decided to find out if

the family joke was more serious than the children realised.

Armed with a warrant, they began to dig under the

patio of 25 Cromwell Street.

Speaker 5: When they arrived with the warrant, Fred and Rose were

at the house and they went into the back garden

and the officers started digging the garden.

Speaker 2: Sensing the end was nigh, Fred asked to be interviewed

by police.

Speaker 5: Fred asked the officer if they could go down to

the police station and so they left. Fred said that

he admitted that Heather's remains were in the garden but

the police were looking in the wrong place. And later

that day, he returned with the officers and he indicated

where where he thought Heather was buried. The following day,

officers digging in that area recovered a femur, and that

was taken for examination by the forensic pathologist, who confirmed

it was human remains, and that turned out to be

one of Heather's remains.

Speaker 2: Rose was being questioned at Cheltenham Police Station when the

news reached her and her solicitor, Leo Goatley.

Speaker 10: When Rose was told that Heather's remains had been found,

she gasped loudly and was very distraught. How do you

interpret that? Was that a mother's shock and distress, Or

was it a murderer's distress at being found out? At

that time, I believe that she was shocked and distressed

and that she didn't know the extent of Fred's activities. And,

of course, at that stage, it wasn't about serial killing,

it was about Heather. But, of course, the thing unravelled

pretty quickly with the excavation.

Speaker 2: The police found more than they'd bargained for under the

patio at 25 Cromwell Street.

Speaker 4: When they found.

Speaker 7: remains they found not just two legs or two thigh

bones but three the interrogating detective said to west well

unless heather had three legs there's another body oh yes

fred says without drawing breath or hesitating that must be

the other girl that would be shirley.

Speaker 2: The police were about to unearth all the secrets that

Fred and Rose West had been hiding at 25 Cromwell

Street for over two decades. Secrets that would shock the

entire nation. Fred told the investigating officers the other body

was of his former lover, Shirley Robinson. Shirley hadn't been

seen since 1978. When she disappeared, she was heavily pregnant

with Fred's child. West also admitted that police would find

a third body in the garden who he claimed was

a friend of Shirley's. Throughout the questioning, he insisted on

one thing, that his wife Rose knew nothing about any

of the bodies.

Speaker 6: I think when Fred was protesting Rose's innocence and taking

the blame completely upon himself, I think, yes, at that point,

the power had changed in their relationship from him being

the dominant one in the early years to her really

putting the strings in those later years. And I think

he really didn't trust her at this point in time.

He was really quite afraid of what she might do.

So I think that that was definitely something that had

flipped in this relationship.

Speaker 10: Well, I found him quite a creepy bloke. He would

always be trying to endear himself to people in a

rather smarmy way, a little kind of, giggle, making light

of things but he was very unconvincing doing that and

he would very quickly realise if you weren't impressed by

him and then he would withdraw and I would sense

there was this other side to him that would scowl

and be probably quite nasty whatever his sort of murky

machinations within his mind were once he realised he was

probably better able to actually charm women than blokes It's

possible that with a little smile and some sort of

soft talk he was able to persuade some young women

that he was safe to be around.

Speaker 2: To make things more complicated, Fred's story kept changing. He

alternated between admitting and denying the killings and told detectives

that all the deaths were accidental. He wanted to get

charged with manslaughter and not murder. It would be a

hard job for pathologists to prove otherwise.

Speaker 3: It's very difficult when somebody's been buried for years... to

look at them in detail as a pathologist. You haven't

got the skin, you haven't got the muscles, you haven't

got the organs, the things that you'd see injury or

disease in, so you really have to comment on what

may not be there. It makes a pathologist's job a

lot harder.

Speaker 2: Finding the cause of death was difficult, and so was

identifying the third victim buried under the patio. There were

approximately 10,000 missing women recorded at the time. By using

dental records, experts identified the third victim as Alison Chambers,

who was just 16 when she went missing in 1979,

meaning she cannot have been a friend of Shirley Robinson,

as Fred suggested. Marks found on her body proved beyond

doubt she'd been tortured.

Speaker 3: Someone's behavior is more in the realm of psychology than pathology,

but quite clearly, there's potentially the aspect of torture there

of sexual violence, and when a pathologist sees findings like that,

we're looking away from manslaughter and more into some sort

of act of cruelty.

Speaker 2: This proved that West hadn't accidentally killed these young women.

He'd tortured, sexually assaulted, and intentionally murdered them. But was

Fred doing this without Rose knowing? The police weren't convinced.

Speaker 5: The most important thing, of course, was that these bodies

were recovered in the house that she shared with Fred.

And it would appear inconceivable that she wouldn't have had

knowledge of this.

Speaker 4: The house itself was very, very small.

Speaker 7: It would have been inconceivable that you could have kept

a young woman or women in that house without every

occupant knowing that something was going on. No matter how

much tape you would have put over their mouths, no

matter how much they'd been concealed in the cellar, you

would know.

Speaker 4: It would have been impossible not to know.

Speaker 2: The police began to look into missing persons' files to

try and find any more potential victims. But with about 10,000

missing women in the country, it was a seemingly endless search.

Speaker 5: Throughout that time, we were trying to trace people from

children's homes to make sure they were safe. We were

dealing with forensic materials, I mean, massive amounts of forensic material, searching.

It was on a scale that was really unprecedented.

Speaker 2: Two of the missing people stood out. Lucy Partington, a

21-year-old student last seen at a bus stop in Gloucester

in 1973, and Linda Goff, a 19-year-old who went missing

in the same year. Her last known address, 25 Cromwell Street.

Speaker 4: Fred and Rose adopted a sort of modus operandi.

Speaker 7: They would identify young women on the run if you

like run away from home run away from a children's

home run away from their parents they were vulnerable they

would offer them a home and time after time Fred

would pick up with Rose often at bus stops young

women who looked a little lost.

Speaker 6: So they would always choose people who would be in

that position of vulnerability And the fact that they were

a couple, I think, was quite helpful to them in

luring victims in because the women that they targeted would

be more likely to trust a couple. So when they

would pick somebody up who was hitchhiking, that played to

that idea of, well, there's a woman there, so I'm

going to be safe.

Speaker 9: Rose already knew the language of grooming.

Speaker 4: She was quite used to it.

Speaker 9: And when you hear the victims talk about how she

spoke to them in this sort of quite soft, pleasing voice,

you knew that, again, that was something she had learned.

Speaker 2: Linda Goff was never officially reported as missing, but her

family searched for her at the time of her disappearance.

Speaker 5: Linda Goff's mother, she'd been round to the house, knocked

on the door, and had been answered by Rose West.

And she asked where Linda was, and she was told

that she'd gone away, I think, to Western Supermare. She

was struck by the fact that there was Rose standing

there with her Linda slippers, wearing Linda's slippers, and she

also noticed on the clothesline there were articles of Linda's clothing.

Speaker 2: Linda's mother believed Rose when she said her daughter had

moved on from Cromwell Street, but as the press coverage

began to reflect the sheer enormity of the unfolding story,

other women who'd encountered the West came forward. the police

got a break when Caroline Roberts contacted them to offer

her help in the investigation. She'd seen the investigation on

the news and revealed to police she'd been sexually assaulted

by both Fred and Rose in 1972. She'd known them

for a while after they picked her up while she

was hitchhiking and even worked for them as a nanny

for a short time. It was one horrifying incident that

caused her to lodge a complaint against them.

Speaker 5: They invited her back to the house, and when she

got to the house, having been assaulted in the car

by Fred and Rose, she got back to the house,

and she was then bound and subjected to some rather

aggressive sexual activity.

Speaker 4: She managed to escape.

Speaker 5: Subsequently and reported it to her mom, who then told

the police. Both Fred and Rose were arrested for rape

and other serious sexual offenses.

Speaker 2: At the time, she was scared to face them at

a trial and ashamed at what had happened. The West

were charged with indecent exposure instead of rape. They were

fined £ 100. But with the information Caroline gave to the police,

they could link Rose to the crimes and bodies at

Cromwell Street.

Speaker 5: So we had that evidence that there was an aggressive

sexual nature to her personality. The details of sexual activity

that had taken place had evidence a number of similarities,

particularly talking about bindings and gags and so on, that

were very similar, if not identical, to the material that

was recovered in association with the victims when they were discovered.

Speaker 3: This case was much more about the accounts of people

and what the survivors were saying than what the pathology

can tell you. There are things that They could say

that the bodies were no longer able to speak to

and that was a bigger element of this case than

maybe the physical findings by the pathologist.

Speaker 2: On March 4th, 1994, police moved their search inside the house.

They had a feeling that down in the dark cellar,

they may uncover even more bodies. On the same day,

when news reached Fred West at Gloucester Police Station, he

made a stunning admission in a handwritten note given to detectives.

It read... I, Frederick West, authorise my solicitor, Howard Ogden,

to advise Superintendent Bennett that I wish to admit to

a further, a prox, nine killings. Expressly, Charmaine, Rena, Linda

Goff and others to be identified. Signed, F.

Speaker 11: West.

Speaker 4: Can you imagine the scene? It almost defies belief.

Speaker 7: They weren't sitting across the table from a monster, a

huge man with bare hands and able to kill a

little insignificant chap. who nevertheless confesses to nine murders. It's

at that point the police realise, I think probably for

the first time, that they are dealing with someone truly evil.

Speaker 5: Fred was again taken back to the house and he

indicated where some of the bodies had been buried, particularly

the area of the cellar. And so what happened then

was that we undertook a methodical search of the whole property.

Fred maintained a position that Rose was not involved in

these cases. You know, that's the inference that he was

trying to keep her out of it.

Speaker 9: Fred took the rap for it. They had an agreement

that she would stand by him and visit him and

he'd hoped to be out in so many years. But

the minute Rose heard that he'd actually admitted to the

murders and she dropped him, he was gone. And she

never spoke to him again. She absolutely refused to have

any contact with him.

Speaker 2: On March the 5th, 1994, the world's media had descended

upon the home of Fred and Rose West in Gloucester.

Police had exhumed three bodies from their back garden, their

daughter Heather, Fred's pregnant lover Shirley Robinson, and missing teenager

Alison Chambers. Now detectives were moving their search inside the

property and began excavating the cellar at 25 Cromwell Street.

Speaker 5: We started the excavations in the cellar. It was a

difficult place to do excavations, and we had to be

very careful about recovering the bodies. And on the first day,

we did find two sets of human remains. One turned

out to be Theresa Siegenhaler, and the second remains were

Shirley Hubbard. It was clear to pathologists that much had

been done to try and hide the identity of all

the murdered girls.

Speaker 3: With Fred and Rose's victims, one of their hallmarks, as

it were, was that the fingers and toes were removed.

I think we can hypothesise that there may be different

reasons for that simple cruelty would be one, but obviously

most people know that fingerprints are a very good way

to identify somebody, so removing them, particularly in the 60s, 70s, 80s,

before DNA technology.

Speaker 4: Was really recognised... would.

Speaker 3: Be a way to limit the chances of that person

being identified.

Speaker 5: And that was one of our difficulties when we were

doing the investigation, trying to identify the human remains, and

in particular Teresa's remains, because there was no evidence she'd

been anywhere near Gloucestershire. But we were able, in liaison

with the Metropolitan Police and the missing persons, to come

down to sort of a short list of people that

it could be. and then through using forensic techniques, we

were able to be satisfied that we had identified her remains.

Speaker 2: As the cellar excavation continued, officers escorted Fred to a

field near his home at Muchmarkle. He told them if

they dug there, they'd find the body of his first wife, Rena,

not seen since 1971, a year after Fred and Rose

had moved in together. Rena and Fred had been married

for nine years, but she was never reported missing.

Speaker 4: So he was taken out.

Speaker 5: To the fields, and he pointed out, in one field,

fairly close to a hedge line, where he said that

he'd buried Rina Costello.

Speaker 2: There were now six victims, and back in the cellar

at Cromwell Street, even more bodies were being exhumed. Juanita Marta,

former lodger at the house, missing since 1975, and Carol Cooper,

last seen walking home from the cinema in 1973. plus

two familiar names the police had been looking out for,

Lucy Partington and buried under the family bathroom, Linda Goff.

Speaker 5: This was a tragedy for these young women.

Speaker 4: I mean, all.

Speaker 5: Murders are tragic for the victims and their families, but

it was the scale of this, I think, that took

the media's attention. I mean, it's almost incomprehensible that two

people could abduct young women or lure them to their

house and subsequently, you know, sexually abuse them and then

kill them. I mean, it is on a scale that's

almost incomprehensible.

Speaker 2: By the 8th of March 1994, less than two weeks

after beginning their search at Cromwell Street, police had found

ten victims. Most of them had been buried two decades

ago when Fred and Rose were at their most prolific.

Speaker 6: Aside from the sexual element to the murders, they were becoming,

I'd say, maybe closer in a way, but I don't

know whether closer is the best word to use to

describe that. I think they were becoming more cut off

from the rest of the world. This was something that

only the two of them understood. It was something that

we refer to as a folly, a duh, a madness

shared by two. So I think it was kind of

cementing their relationship.

Speaker 4: They were to him no more than sexual implements. a

kind of doll, if you like.

Speaker 7: I know it's a horrifying thought, but they had no

more humanity for him than that. He was a man

capable of absolutely no conscience and absolutely no remorse. And

everything he did was with Rose's help. And the thought

of having some young woman hung up in the cellar, literally,

by her hands, and a hook for Fred and Rose to.

Speaker 4: Abuse when they wanted to over a period of days.

Almost devised belief. It is that horrifying.

Speaker 2: Nine bodies had been exhumed from Cromwell Street and one more,

that of Rena West, Fred's first wife, in a field

near Much Markle. But Fred wasn't finished.

Speaker 4: Although he didn't admit to.

Speaker 2: Killing her, he told police he had a feeling that

Rena's friend, Anne McFall, might be buried in a neighbouring field.

She's believed to be Fred's first victim, killed in 1967

when she was six months pregnant.

Speaker 7: As he did with all his killings, he dismembered the

bodies before he buried them.

Speaker 4: So he didn't bury them in a skeleton.

Speaker 7: He buried them in a tube, if you like, in

which the body was compressed, the torso, head separated, arms

and legs separated and shoved into a smaller hole. It

made the search for those bodies a very complicated affair.

Speaker 5: The problem with Anne McFall's body was that the whole

land had been re-landscaped, and so there was this topsoil

that had been put on there. Now, when you're looking

for human remains, you can't just bring a big digger

in and.

Speaker 4: Shove it all out.

Speaker 5: You are literally doing it by spadefuls and sieving every spadeful.

Speaker 4: And we actually excavated.

Speaker 5: A hole the size of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. We

were almost giving up hope that we were going to

find the body, and we set a deadline for ourselves

that if we didn't find them by date X... Then

we were stopped, but fortunately, a couple of days before

that deadline came in, we found some bones and then

subsequently recovered the body.

Speaker 2: During the two months of digging for Ann McFall's remains,

the police had arrested and charged Rose West with murder.

For each victim, she claimed, I'm innocent. The police's evidence

was circumstantial, and defense lawyers felt there wasn't enough to

connect her to the murders.

Speaker 10: Rose West said, I had nothing to do with this.

And the Crown are saying, well, we've got a statement

from so-and-so who says that you were involved in an

abduction and sexual abuse. Well, to a point you say, well,

so what? What's that got to do with murder? Fred

had said in his interviews, he fully admitted them and

said Rose had nothing to do with them. So the

first point is to say, well, what is the strength

of the case against Rose? She's denying it. Where's the

proof that she was involved?

Speaker 2: While police continued their search at Cromwell Street, they also

turned their attention to a second address, 25 Midland Road,

Fred and Rose's first home together in Gloucester. Investigators believe

that somewhere in the house or garden, they might find

the body of Charmaine West, Fred's stepdaughter from his marriage

to Rena. An extensive investigation search began.

Speaker 5: At the time of Charmaine's death, she was living at

25 Midland Road, a house that subsequently Fred and Rose

had left. But we went to the house and, again,

excavating under the floor of the kitchen, we found Charmaine's body.

Speaker 2: Charmaine hadn't been seen since she was 8 years old

in 1971 and hadn't been reported as missing. In the

same year, Fred was in jail for 9 months for

motoring offences and stealing fence panels from his then-employer. The

police were convinced they'd finally got a breakthrough. They were

confident Charmaine must have been murdered by Rose while Fred

was serving time.

Speaker 9: Rose was jealous of Charmaine. Charmaine was a very bright

little girl and I think Rose could see that she

was getting the upper hand of her and she didn't

like it. The younger sister knew to keep quiet was

best not to antagonize Rose. And Charmaine was quite a

feisty little girl.

Speaker 10: So there were slight differences in the modus operandi, you know,

certainly with the others, You can imagine Fred going about

his work with a sort of builder's precision and routine,

you know, severing the limbs and the head, digging a

hole in the ground and placing them in it. Charmaine

was different. Nevertheless, Fred was charged with Charmaine, even though

there were, from the outset, issues about whether Fred was

present or whether he was in prison. So there was

always that slightly nebulous issue about how old Saiti Charmaine

was and the dates when she died.

Speaker 2: With the high-profile trials imminent, the police had to somehow

prove that Rose West was just as guilty as her

husband Fred. But before they got a chance, there was

a major setback in their case. In December 1994, ten

months after police had begun to search 25 Cromwell Street

for Heather West, the bodies of 12 young women had

been unearthed across Gloucester. Fred West was thought to be

responsible for all of the deaths and police were desperately

trying to find some evidence to prove that his wife

Rose was implicit in ten of the murders. Both had

been arrested, charged and were awaiting trial, but on January

1st 1995, Fred West took his secrets to the grave.

Speaker 5: Fred was in custody at Winston Green Prison in Birmingham

and on the 1st of January 1995 he was found

dead in his cell. He died from hanging and it

was subsequently determined that he committed suicide.

Speaker 7: Fred West was always a cunning man. He planned his

suicide as carefully as he concealed his bodies. He groomed

the prison officers, into thinking that he was an absolutely safe,

harmless little man who could do no wrong and was

very happy to collaborate with anything they wanted. Indeed, he volunteered.

He said, I'll mend shirts. Don't worry, give me something

to do. Be a pastime for me while I'm waiting

for my trial. Painstakingly, over a period of weeks, he

stitched together a rope, partly from bits of the blanket

on his bed, partly from pieces of shirt, very carefully,

because he had decided that he was not going to

trial and that he was not ever going to confess

the true extent of what his crimes amounted to.

Speaker 10: There was a total loss of control by Fred over Rose,

I've no doubt about that. She made it abundantly clear

she wanted absolutely nothing else to do with him and

she blanked him in the dock. Independent of his relationship

with Rose, he lacked empathy with people. People were objects

to be used and abused. The fact of the matter

was he knew the game was up. He'd made the admissions,

the remains had been found, the terrible story of those

victims unfolded.

Speaker 12: For those who knew the West family, this is just

another macabre twist in a story that first came to

light 10 months ago. In the words of one neighbor,

if Frederick West really did kill himself, then it seems

almost appropriate that a man accused of taking so many

people's lives should end up taking his own.

Speaker 2: Fred's suicide was a huge problem for the police. It

put the entire case in jeopardy.

Speaker 5: With the death of Fred, we were concerned that the

press might feel, well, the case against Fred is now finished,

and therefore we can disclose information because the case is closed.

That would have been a disaster for us because it

would have then compromised the trial of Rose West.

Speaker 2: The police were desperate. While Fred had confessed to 11

of the killings, Rose had always claimed her innocence. Without

any solid evidence, there was a real chance that Rose

West was going to get away with murder.

Speaker 10: I think it's the Crown that need to... review their

case and decide where they want to take it from here.

Speaker 4: I would hope.

Speaker 10: That they will drop the case. I thought it was

possible the case might have been dropped. There were a

lot of eminent observers suggesting that would be the case.

The DPP had a different view, though. In fact, the

case got worse against Rose. They added on the murder

of Charmaine, which prior had been a sole charge in

relation to Fred. I thought that was very curious. Rose

thought the case was going to go away as well,

but it didn't.

Speaker 2: Prosecutors needed proof that Rose alone was responsible for the

death of her stepdaughter, Charmaine. They turned to forensic odontologist

Professor David Whittaker.

Speaker 11: The police brilliantly discovered, I don't know how, that a

certain newspaper, national newspaper, had acquired a set of negatives,

and they were large professional negatives, and they showed incredible

detail in some of the baby teeth, the deciduous teeth

of Charmaine, which I was then able to match exactly

using our facial superimposition technology and showed, A, that they

matched exactly in terms of tilt and position and grooving,

and little rough edges were a perfect match. But the

position of the teeth had moved, so if we could

calculate that movement and assess it, of being able to determine,

within reasonable accuracy, the time elapsed between the photograph being taken,

which the police had a date for, was written on

the negatives and the time of death. And if that

fitted into the slot where Fred West was in jail,

then clearly Mrs West had a lot of questions to answer.

Speaker 2: On 3rd October 1995, the world's press flocked to Winchester

Crown Court to report on one of the most sensational

trials of modern times.

Speaker 7: Rose's trial attracted Worldwide attention, as you would expect. It's

very rare for a woman to go on trial, let

alone for ten murders. I attended it from the first

day to the last. It was an extraordinary event.

Speaker 2: As the trial began, Rose West pleaded not guilty to

all ten counts of murder, the nine girls found buried

at Cromwell Street and Charmaine. But the evidence against her

was irrefutable.

Speaker 11: So in court, in front of Rosemary West... I had

all the technology available to reproduce the imaging of Charmaine.

Dreadful thing to have to do in court, but the

judge and the prosecution insisted. So Mrs West actually saw

this imaging developing in front of her. And I think

it was about the only time she looked a little

bit upset.

Speaker 4: She marched.

Speaker 7: Into the witness box like a very angry traffic warden.

Plain shoes, weighty woman, angry demeanour. This is all an outrage.

Speaker 4: It was all Fred. I had nothing to do with it.

I knew nothing.

Speaker 7: It was completely inconceivable I could have done this. I

couldn't have killed my own daughter.

Speaker 4: A tissue of lies.

Speaker 9: We think of Rose West as this woman in the

courtroom in her 40s, great big glasses that she wore,

quite a frumpy housewife, looking. Those murders had happened a.

Speaker 4: Long time before then.

Speaker 9: She was actually very young when she committed the murder.

She was in fact a teenage serial killer because she'd

committed three murders before she was 20 and most of

the murders were over by the time she was 26.

Speaker 2: The evidence provided by Professor Whittaker convinced the jury that

Rosemary West was guilty of all ten murders.

Speaker 5: He was able to say, and the jury accepted this,

that it that he could pinpoint within a few days

of when the child had been killed. And we had

evidence that Fred was in jail during that time. So

Fred could not have killed Charmaine at that time because

he physically wasn't around, he was in jail.

Speaker 10: I didn't think the trial had gone well for Rose

and the jury took quite a long time. It wasn't

a five-minute decision. It was many hours. They thought about

everything very carefully. They came back and it was pretty

well unanimous on everything. I mean, she was totally defeated.

Speaker 7: When the first guilty verdicts came back, Rose did not flicker.

Not a sign of emotion. She just simply stood there.

There was no histrionics, no shouting, no screaming. There was

no sign of any emotion at all, really. And I

was left with the overwhelming feeling that one had been

in the presence of someone who had lost contact with humanity.

Speaker 2: Sentencing her, the judge, Mr Justice Mantell, recommended that Rose

West should never be released. she was immediately returned to

Holloway Prison.

Speaker 10: Rose has never confessed to me. Whether she's made any

kind of confession to anybody else, I don't know, but.

Speaker 4: She certainly hasn't to me.

Speaker 10: I would say that tacitly, she, at various stages, gave

the impression to me, with hindsight, that she knew that,

you know, under the floor in Cromwell Street, there were

a lot of secrets. That's slightly different to saying... that

she murdered people. But then the nature of the case,

it was circumstantial.

Speaker 8: 300 miles from Gloucester, Rosemary West en route to the

prison that will be home for a lifetime.

Speaker 2: Today, Rose West is serving life imprisonment at Lone Newton

Prison in Durham. In 1996, a year after 25 Cromwell

Street had given up its grisly secrets, it was demolished.

In its place is now a public walkway, but nothing

can erase the painful memories of Fred and Rose West

and their house of horrors.

Speaker 5: This certainly was a unique case in my experience, and

I was involved as a detective investigating murders right back

in the 1960s, and this is on a scale that's

completely different. And I think in terms of its complexity,

I think, again, it probably stands out as unique in

criminal history. They were all young women who had their

lives in front of them and it was cut short

for just brutal and selfish self-gratification of Fred and Rose.

Speaker 7: I've never for one moment doubted that Frederick West was

a truly evil man. I think he was born and bred.

I think he only ever thought of himself. He was

a psychopath and a sociopath. No concern for society, no

concern for anybody but himself. But he found in Rose

the perfect sorcerer's apprentice.

Speaker 6: Many of us reflect on serial killer couples and say, well,

if they had never met one another, would they have

gone on to kill? We know that Fred had already

committed one murder before he met Rose. So I think

he would have killed again. When we look at Rose,

I think she would have certainly gone on to harm

other people, whether that was emotionally, financially, a non-physical kind

of harm. But I think having Fred in her life

opened up the door to a different kind of harm,

a different kind of abuse.

Speaker 7: I've never been in any doubt that Fred and Rose

committed far more than 12 murders. I've always believed there

are other victims and they were buried in other places

or concealed in other places. But to be fair to

Gloucester Police, they can't dig up Gloucestershire in the effort

to find more victims.

Speaker 2: Speculation about other possible victims of Fred and Rose West

will always remain. Theirs is a case whose shockwaves continue

to reverberate around the world even today. The sheer depravity

and the unimaginable terror of their victims is why we

should remember them, not Fred and Rose and their house

of horror.