Fred and Rose West: Gruesome Love Story at 25 Cromwell

Fred West met Rosemary Letts at a bus stop in Cheltenham in early 1969. She was 15 and he was 27. Over the next eighteen years they tortured and killed young women in Gloucester and buried them under and behind their house at 25 Cromwell Street. Fred was charged with twelve murders, nine of them jointly with Rose. He killed himself on remand at HM Prison Birmingham, known then as Winson Green, on January 1, 1995. In November 1995 a jury at Winchester Crown Court convicted Rose of ten murders, including those of her daughter and stepdaughter. She is serving ten life sentences with a whole life order. The Independent’s crime correspondent wrote the day after the verdicts that Fred “probably killed more than 30 women”; that figure has never been proved.

Much Marcle

Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on September 29, 1941, at Bickerton Cottage in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, the first surviving child of a poor farm-working family, according to his Wikipedia biography. In June 1961 his 13-year-old sister told their mother that Fred had been raping her and had made her pregnant. He was arrested and told police he had been molesting young girls since his early teens, asking, “Doesn’t everybody do it?” He was tried at Herefordshire Assizes that November, but the case collapsed when his sister refused to testify. His mother turned him out, and he went to live with an aunt and uncle in the village.

Rena Costello and Anne McFall

In September 1962 he renewed a relationship with Catherine “Rena” Costello of Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, whom he had met at a Much Marcle dance hall in 1960. They married; she was pregnant by another man. Their household came to include Charmaine, Rena’s daughter, and Anne Marie, Fred’s daughter by Rena. Through a friend of Rena’s, the Wests met Anne McFall, then 16. By the summer of 1967, McFall, 18, was living in a caravan near Much Marcle and was eight months pregnant with Fred’s child. She disappeared in July 1967 and was never reported missing. Her dismembered remains were found on June 7, 1994, in Fingerpost Field, at the edge of a cornfield between Much Marcle and Kempley. Many finger and toe bones were missing, a pattern later found in every one of the Wests’ victims exhumed in 1994.

The Bus Stop and Midland Road

Rose turned him down twice before letting him walk her home. Rose Letts was born on November 29, 1953, in Northam, Devon, the fifth of seven children. Fred already had the two girls in his care, Charmaine and Anne Marie. Rose gave birth to their first child, Heather, in October 1970, in a flat on Midland Road, Gloucester. Two months later Fred was jailed for stealing car tyres and a tax disc. While he served the sentence, Rose, just 17, looked after the three girls. Anne Marie later described constant abuse.

Charmaine and Rena, 1971

Around June 20, 1971, shortly before Fred’s release from Leyhill Prison on June 24, Rose killed Charmaine, who was eight. The body was kept in the Midland Road cellar until Fred buried it in the back garden. It is the one murder Rose is known to have committed without him. Rena, who had kept sporadic contact with her children, came looking for them in August 1971, visiting Fred’s family in Much Marcle and then seeking out Fred. She was never seen again. Her dismembered body was found in 1994 near a cluster of trees known as Yewtree Coppice at Letterbox Field, near Much Marcle. Fred and Rose married at Gloucester Register Office on January 29, 1972; Fred described himself on the certificate as a bachelor.

Caroline Owens, 1972

In October 1972 the Wests picked up 17-year-old Caroline Owens as she hitchhiked home to Cinderford and hired her as a nanny. The Wests later sexually assaulted her, and her mother reported it to police. At Gloucester Magistrates’ Court on January 12, 1973, after Owens decided she could not face testifying, the sexual charges were dropped. The Wests pleaded guilty to indecent assault and causing actual bodily harm and were each fined £50. The Independent noted in 1995 that police “failed to connect a sexual assault by the Wests on Caroline Owens in 1972 with the disappearance of Lynda Gough a few months later.” Owens’s evidence, along with that of two other women who survived the Wests’ assaults, was later admitted at Rose’s trial.

25 Cromwell Street

From 1973 the killings were joint and sexual. Rose worked as a prostitute from an upstairs room; the house took lodgers. The victims found at Cromwell Street, with the dates the case histories give:

• Lynda Gough, 19, about April 20, 1973. A lodger. When her mother called at the house, Rose was wearing Lynda’s clothes and slippers.
• Carol Ann Cooper, 15, November 10, 1973. She had been living in care.
• Lucy Partington, 21, December 27, 1973. An Exeter University student, abducted from a bus stop on the A435.
• Thérèse Siegenthaler, 21, April 16, 1974. A Swiss student hitchhiking to Holyhead.
• Shirley Hubbard, 15, November 15, 1974. Her head had been taped over, with a rubber tube inserted for breathing.
• Juanita Mott, 18, April 12, 1975. A former lodger.
• Shirley Robinson, 18, May 10, 1978. A lodger, eight months pregnant with Fred’s child.
• Alison Chambers, 16, August 5, 1979. Her remains were found under the patio.
• Heather West, 16, June 19, 1987. Their daughter, who had told classmates about the abuse at home. Her parents told people she had gone to work at a holiday village.

The bodies were buried in the cellar, under the bathroom and in the garden. Siegenthaler’s grave was hidden behind a false chimney breast. The Independent reported that seven of the victims “had been stripped, tied up, gagged and kept alive for days while they were sexually abused.”

How It Came Apart

On August 6, 1992, Fred was arrested over the sexual assault of his 13-year-old daughter and Rose for child cruelty. The case collapsed on June 7, 1993, when the girl refused to testify, but the five younger children were taken into care. Heather’s absence since 1987 started the inquiry that followed. Detective Constable Hazel Savage learned that no missing person report had ever been filed for Rena, Charmaine or Heather. On February 23, 1994, Gloucestershire police obtained a warrant to search 25 Cromwell Street for Heather’s remains, and served it the next day. “Get Fred!” Rose shouted to her son Stephen. Fred was arrested on February 25 and confessed to killing Heather. On February 26 police found a human thigh bone in the garden. Over the following weeks they recovered the other remains from the house, and in June 1994 the bodies of Rena and Anne McFall near Much Marcle. Fred told his appropriate adult, Janet Leach, that he and Rose had agreed he would take the blame, that Rose had killed Charmaine and Shirley Robinson, and that many of the killings were “some of Rose’s mistakes.”

Winson Green

Fred and Rose were jointly charged with nine murders, and Fred alone with three more: Rena, Charmaine and Anne McFall. The Independent reported that Fred confessed to 11 of the 12. On January 1, 1995, before any trial, he asphyxiated himself in his cell at HM Prison Birmingham. He was 53.

Trial and Sentence

Rose pleaded not guilty to ten murders: the nine bodies from Cromwell Street and, added after Fred’s death, Charmaine. Her trial opened at Winchester Crown Court on October 3, 1995, before Mr Justice Mantell. The prosecution said she had been involved “up to her neck.” Her defence was that Fred had acted alone. Tapes of Fred’s police interviews, in which he said Rose had “known nothing at all,” were played on November 3; Janet Leach testified in rebuttal on November 7. The judge directed the jury that two people who take part in a murder are equally guilty, whichever of them did the killing.

On November 21, 1995, the jury of seven men and four women convicted her of murdering Heather, Charmaine and Shirley Robinson. The next day, after more than 12 hours of deliberation and two nights in a hotel, the jury asked whether the absence of direct evidence was an obstacle to guilty verdicts. The judge said it need not be, provided they drew the same inferences as the prosecution. At 12:52 p.m. the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on the other seven counts. The Independent reported that those convictions “depended entirely on the discovery of the remains at Cromwell Street and ‘similar fact’ evidence.” Someone in the public gallery shouted “hooray.”

“On each of the 10 counts of murder on which you have been unanimously convicted by the jury, the sentence is one of life imprisonment,” Mantell told her. “If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released.” Her solicitor, Leo Goatley, said she “continues to maintain her innocence” and would appeal. Joan Owen, mother of Alison Chambers, said: “I am grateful that everyone in the country and the world knows exactly what those people did.” The judge commended the police inquiry, which the Independent said cost £1.7 million, as “meticulous.” The paper reported that the police and social services had visited the family about 60 times over the years, and that the NSPCC said it “bitterly regretted” its handling of a referral.

Appeal and Whole Life Order

In March 1996 she announced an appeal, arguing among other things that press coverage had made witness testimony unreliable and that the similar fact evidence had been given undue weight. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, rejected it, holding that she had received a fair trial. In July 1997 the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, imposed a whole life tariff. She announced a new appeal in October 2000 and abandoned her appeals in September 2001.

Mary Bastholm

Mary Bastholm, 15, a waitress at the Pop-In Cafe in Southgate Street, Gloucester, where Fred was a regular, vanished in January 1968 on her way to catch a bus. The Guardian reported that Fred is said to have confessed her killing to his son Stephen but never admitted it to police. Her body was not found at Cromwell Street. In May 2021, after a television production company reported seeing blue material beneath the cafe, now The Clean Plate, Gloucestershire Police excavated six voids in its cellar. They found no human remains; the blue colouring was probably a pipe. “I am now confident that Mary is not buried in the cellar of the cafe,” Assistant Chief Constable Craig Holden said. Her family said her parents and two brothers had died “without ever knowing what happened to their loving daughter and sister.”

Cromwell Street After

The house at 25 Cromwell Street was demolished in October 1996 and the debris destroyed to deter souvenir hunters. The site became a public footpath.

Legal Status

Rose West was convicted at Winchester Crown Court on November 21 and 22, 1995, of ten murders and sentenced to ten terms of life imprisonment. A whole life tariff was imposed in July 1997, and she abandoned her appeals in 2001. She was held at Durham, then Bronzefield, moved to Low Newton in 2008 and to HM Prison New Hall in West Yorkshire in 2019, where she remains. Fred West was never tried; he died on remand on January 1, 1995, charged with twelve murders.

Frequently Asked Questions

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