World's Most Evil Killers - Season 1, Episode 4 - Fred and Rose West - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Twenty-five 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 Wests' front door.
Detectives were only just beginning to unearth the murderous history of Fred and Rose West.
-It was on a scale that was really unprecedented. -Children are their things to play with.
They are disposable. They're things that are to be used and abused. -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. -This is the story of how Fred and Rose West
became two of the world's most evil killers. [ Dramatic music plays ] ♪♪ ♪♪ Fred and Rose West are one of the most notorious couples
in British history. For 2 decades, they sexually abused, tortured, and murdered 9 women,
including their own daughter, in their house of horrors. And, between them, were responsible
for another three victims buried around Gloucester. 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.
-Five days and nights into their excavation, and forensic teams have now unearthed
three sets of human remains, all buried in separate places 5 feet under the garden patio
of this Gloucester home. -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. -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 Gloucester area, whereas Fred was born and raised
in the local village of Much Marcle. -Well, Fred was the oldest 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 anti-social 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. -Fred pursued Rose.
He was used to getting what he wanted. When the couple met, there was instant attraction.
-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, well, very clean teeth. -Well, these were two incredibly damaged people.
They had 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. -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. And it was like a union of two souls.
-I think it was the perfect storm. You know, the chances of these two people meeting
was, you know, it must have been a million to one. But, unfortunately, they did.
-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. -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. -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.
-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.
-Fred and Rose's traumatic childhoods had a lasting effect on the couple and their twisted approach to family life together.
-It's always a very complicated question to answer how many children Fred and Rose actually had because
if you count Fred's daughter, Charmaine, along with Fred and Rose's eight, it's nine.
But then you've got to add Rose's three mixed-race children, all of whom were fathered not by Fred.
All I would say is that all of them were deeply hurt, almost ruined by the parents.
-I think Rose's earlier 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. -And it was, to some extent,
what Fred then adopted as a family habit. It was, if you like, a West tradition.
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 behavior. -Two decades later, it's 1992,
and Gloucester police are searching for Heather West. In 1987, aged just 16, Fred and Rose's eldest child vanished
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 Gloucester Police. -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, as 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. -Five of the West 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. -What it brought to light was a family joke, and the family joke was a simple one.
You better watch out because, if you don't shut up and stop causing your dad or your mom any trouble,
you'll end up like Heather, two down and three across in the patio. Fred had lain a patio behind Cromwell Street,
was in squares which were rather like a crossword. The family joke was that he buried
Heather at two down and three across. -And this issue, this "Heather is 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 massive amounts of inquiry to try and find her,
she just literally disappeared off the face of the Earth. -In February, 1994, the police decided to find out
if the family joke was more serious than the children realized. Armed with a warrant, they began to dig
under the patio of 25 Cromwell Street. -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.
-Sensing the end was nigh, Fred asked to be interviewed by police. -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 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.
-Rose was being questioned at Cheltenham police station when the news reached her and her solicitor, Leo Goatley.
-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 believed 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 unraveled pretty quickly with the excavation. -The police found more than they bargained
for under the patio at 25 Cromwell Street. -When they found 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."
"Ah, yes," Fred says, without drawing breath or hesitating, "That must be the other girl. That'll be Shirley."
-The police were about to unearth all the secrets that Fred and Rose West had been hiding
at 25 Cromwell Street for over 2 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. -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 pulling 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 was definitely something that had flipped in this relationship. -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 realize 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 realized, he was probably better able
to actually charm women than blokes. It's possible that, you know, 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.
-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. -It's very difficult when somebody has 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 the pathologist's job a lot harder. -Finding the cause of death was difficult,
and so was identifying the third victim buried under the patio. There was 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.
-Someone's behavior is more in the realm of psychology than pathology, but quite clearly there's potentially
the aspect of torture there, potentially of sexual violence. And when the pathologist sees findings like that,
we're looking away from manslaughter and more into some sort of act of cruelty. -This proves that West hadn't accidentally killed
these young women. He tortured, sexually assaulted. and intentionally murdered them.
But was Fred doing this without Rose knowing? The police weren't convinced. -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. -The house itself was very, very small.
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. It would have been impossible not to know. -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. -Throughout that time, we were trying to trace people
from children's homes and 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.
-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 Lynda Gough, a 19-year-old who went missing in the same year. Her last known address, 25 Cromwell Street.
-Fred and Rose adopted a sort of modus operandi. 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 out, with Rose,
often at bus stops, young women who looked a little lost. -So they would always chose 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 the idea of, "Well, there's a woman there, so I'm going to be safe."
-Rose already knew the language of grooming. She was quite used to it. And when you hear the victims talk about how she spoke to them
in this sort of quiet, soft, pleasing voice, you knew that, again, that was something she had learned.
-Lynda Gough was never officially reported as missing, but her family searched for her
at the time of her disappearance. -Lynda Gough's mother, she'd been round to the house,
knocked on the door, and it had been answered by Rose West. And she asked where Lynda was, and she was told
that she'd gone away, I think, to Weston-super-Mare. But she was struck by the fact that there was Rose,
standing there, with Lynda's slippers, wearing Lynda's slippers, and she also noticed, on the clothesline,
there were articles of Lynda's clothing. -Lynda'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 Wests 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. -They invited her back to the house. 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 subject
to some rather aggressive sexual activity. She managed to escape subsequently and reported it to her mum,
who then told the police. Both Fred and Rose were arrested for rape and serious sexual offenses.
-At the time, she was scared to face them at her trial and ashamed at what had happened.
The Wests were charged with indecent exposure instead of rape. They were fined 100 pounds.
But, with the information Caroline gave to the police, they could link Rose to the crimes and bodies at Cromwell Street.
-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 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.
-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.
-On March the 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, authorize my solicitor,
Howard Ogden, to advise Superintendent Bennett that I wish to admit to a further approx. nine killings,
expressly, Charmaine, Rena, Lynda Gough, and others to be identified," signed F. West.
-Can you imagine the scene? It almost defies belief. They weren't sitting across the table from a monster,
huge man with bear hands and able to kill at ease. Little insignificant chap who, nevertheless,
confesses to nine murders. It's at that point that police realize, I think probably for the first time,
that they are dealing with someone truly evil. -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. -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, then she dropped him. He was gone, and she never spoke to him again.
She absolutely refused to have any contact with him. -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.
-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 Therese Siegenthaler. 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.
-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 hypothesize 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 was really recognized,
would be a way to limit the chances of that person being identified. -And that was one of our difficulties
when we were doing the investigation, trying to identify the human remains and, in particular,
Therese's remains because there was no evidence she'd been anywhere near Gloucester.
But we were able to, in liaison with the Much Marcle 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. -As the cellar excavation continued,
officers escorted Fred to a field near his home at Much Marcle. 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 9 years, but she was never reported missing. -So he was taken out to the fields,
and he pointed out, in one field, fairly close to a hedge line, where he said that he'd buried Rena Costello.
-There were now six victims. And, back in the cellar at Cromwell Street, even more bodies were being exhumed --
Juanita Mott, a former lodger at the house, missing since 1975 and Carol Cooper,
last seen walking home from the cinema in 1973, plus two familiar names that police had been looking out for,
Lucy Partington and, buried under the family bathroom, Lynda Gough. -This was a tragedy for these young women.
I mean, all 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 the house and subsequently, you know, sexually abuse them and then kill them.
I mean, it is on a scale that's almost incomprehensible. -By the 8th of March, 1994,
less than 2 weeks after beginning their search at Cromwell Street, police had found 10 victims.
Most of them had been buried 2 decades ago when Fred and Rose were at their most prolific.
-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 folie à deux, a madness shared by two. So I think it was kind of cementing their relationship.
-They were, to him, no more than sexual implements, a kind of doll, if you like.
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 into a hook for Fred and Rose to abuse
when they wanted to over a period of days almost defies belief. It is that horrifying.
-Nine bodies had been exhumed from Cromwell Street, and one more, that of Rena West, Fred's first wife,
in a field near Much Marcle. But Fred wasn't finished. Although he didn't admit to killing her,
he told police he had a feeling that Rena's friend, Anne McFall, might be buried in a neighboring field.
She's believed to be Fred's first victim, killed in 1967 when she was 6 months pregnant.
-As he did with all his killings, he dismembered the bodies before he buried them.
So he didn't bury them in a skeleton. 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. -The problem with Anne McFall's body
was that the whole land had been relandscaped. 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 shove it all out.
You are, literally, doing it by spadefuls and sieving every spadeful. And we actually excavated a whole 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 it by date X, then we would stop.
But, fortunately, a couple of days before that deadline came in, we found some bones and then subsequently recovered the body.
-During the 2 months of digging for Anne 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. -Rose West said, "I had nothing to do with this,"
and the Crown was 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? -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 search began. -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.
-Charmaine had not been seen since she was 8 years old in 1971 and had not been reported as missing.
In the same year, Fred was in jail for 9 months for motoring offenses 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. -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. It was best not to antagonize Rose. And Charmaine was quite a feisty little girl.
-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, precisely, Charmaine was and the dates when she died. -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, 10 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 10 of the murders. Both had been arrested, charged, and were awaiting trial,
but on January the 1st 1995, Fred West took his secrets to the grave. -Fred was in custody at Winson 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. -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 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.
You know, pass time 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. -There was a total loss of control by Fred over Rose.
I have no doubt about that. She made it abundantly clear she wanted absolutely nothing else to do with him,
and she blanked him in the dark. Independent of his relationship with Rose, he lacked empathy with people.
You know, people are objects to be used and abused. The fact of the matter was, he knew the game was up.
He had made the admissions. The remains had been found. The terrible story of those victims unfolded.
-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." -Fred's suicide was a huge problem for the police.
It put the entire case in jeopardy. -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. -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. -I think it's the Crown that need to review that case
and decide where they want to take it from here. I would hope that they would 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, and 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. -Prosecutors needed proof that Rose alone was responsible for the death of her stepdaughter, Charmaine.
They turn to forensic odontologist Professor David Whittaker. -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 show,
A, that they matched exactly in terms of tilt and position and grooving and little rough edges that 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. It was written on the negative. And the time of death.
And if that fit into the slot where Fred West was in jail, then clearly Mrs. West had a lot of questions to answer.
-On the 3rd of October 1995, the world's press flocked to Winchester Crown Court
to report on one of the most sensational trials of modern times. -Rose's trial attracted worldwide attention,
as you would expect. It's very rare for a woman to go on trial, let alone for 10 murders.
I attended it from the first day to the last. It was an extraordinary event. -As the trial began, Rose West pleaded not guilty
to all 10 counts of murder, the nine girls found buried at Cromwell Street and Charmaine,
but the evidence against her was irrefutable. -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.
-She marched into the witness box like a very angry traffic warden -- plain shoes, weighty woman, angry demeanor.
"This is all an outrage. It was all Fred. I had nothing to do with it. I knew nothing.
It was completely inconceivable I could have done this. I couldn't have killed my own daughter."
A tissue of lies. -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 long time before then.
She actually was very young when she committed the murders. She was, in fact, a teenage serial killer
because she committed three murders before she was 20 and most of the murders were over by the time she was 26.
-The evidence provided by Professor Whittaker convinced the jury that Rosemary West was guilty of all 10 murders.
-He was able to say, and the jury accepted this, 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. -I didn't think the trial had gone well for Rose, and the jury took quite a long time.
It wasn't a 5-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.
-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.
-Sentencing her, the judge, Mr. Justice Mantell, recommended that Rose West should never be released.
She was immediately returned to Holloway Prison. -Rose has never confessed to me,
whether she's made any kind of confession to anybody else, I don't know, but she certainly hasn't to me.
-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.
-Three hundred miles from Gloucester, Rosemary West en route to the prison that will be home for a lifetime.
-Today, Rose West is serving life imprisonment at Low 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.
-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. They're just brutal and selfish, self-gratification of Fred and Rose.
-I have 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.
-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.
-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 out Gloucestershire
in the effort to find more victims. -Speculation about other possible victims of Fred and Rose West will always remain.
Theirs is a case whose shock waves 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. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Fred and Rose West assaulted, tortured and killed young women in their house of horrors, including their own daughter.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Fred and Rose West committed horrific murders at their home, leading to a shocking investigation and trial.

Key points

The Wests' House of Horrors. Fred and Rose West were responsible for the abuse and murder of multiple women, including their daughter.
Discovery of Remains. Police excavate the garden of 25 Cromwell Street, uncovering human remains.
Fred's Shocking Confession. Fred West admits to nine murders in a handwritten note, shocking investigators.
The Discovery of Remains. Detectives excavate the cellar at 25 Cromwell Street and discover two sets of human remains.
Fred's Suicide. Fred West commits suicide in prison, jeopardizing the case against Rose West.
Rose West's Trial. Rose West goes on trial for the murders, pleading not guilty despite overwhelming evidence.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Children are their things to play with.

Describing the Wests' twisted view of children.

0:33WatchJul 8, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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