It’s been 30 years since serial killer Fred West hanged himself in his jail cell. But Fred could have been dead long before…..if his son’s plot had gone to planned
Fred West’s evil brother: How John robbed his victims of justice too
Fred and Rose West were a match made in Hell – and the parents no child would ever want.
Their home in 25 Cromwell Street became the country’s most notorious address when, in 1994, a tip off to police finally unearthed their decades of abuse, unbelievable cruelty and mass murder. For, there weren’t just secrets behind the walls of the modest three-storey home. There were bodies. Lots of them.
Police found the dismembered human remains of nine young women – five in the cellar, where the West children slept, another underneath what later became a bathroom and three were found in the garden. All were missing fingers and toes. Whether they’d been cut off before or after they were killed.
But the murdered women weren’t the Wests only victims. Their 16-year-old daughter Heather, was the first found by police – buried under the patio, her only crime had been to want to leave home. The Wests also unleashed a different kind of cruelty on their other children, subjecting them to daily beatings and abuse. And now, in a previously-unpublished interview one of them confesses they actually tried to kill Fred, years before he finally managed to do it himself.
In his last interview made two years before his death aged 40, Fred and Rose’s son Barry opened up about life growing up in Cromwell Street and recalled the day he had finally had enough. So he grabbed what he could – a screwdriver from his dad’s toolbox – and made his move…..
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“My dad was a monster,” Barry says. “My mum was completely sick in the head. She beat me way more than my dad did, and enjoyed it, absolutely enjoyed it. I’ve got massive scars on the back of my head from the amount of times she split my head open. She broke my arm, all sorta stuff. She had intense enjoyment in beating the s**t out of me…
“[Dad] was such a disgusting man, he was vile,” Barry said, in an interview now published in new book The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation, which is being serialised in the Mirror. Barry claimed his father would touch Rose in a personal area and then hold his hand out for the the children to smell.
Even when the siblings tried to make the best of things, their efforts were rebuked. Barry claimed they once clubbed together to buy Fred 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.
Many of the children claimed they were often beaten, made to sleep in the cellar, where they were locked in at night, and said they were used a “sexual playthings” for their parents. 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. The children were allegedly shown porn featuring their own mother and Barry claimed he was made to sleep with some of his mum’s prostitution clients when he was aged just “eight or nine” – with his parents’ knowledge.
He added: “You never saw a weakness in my dad. you never saw him cry, you never saw him waiver,” Barry admitted to the book’s author, TV producer and former Mirror journalist Howard Sounes.
Finally one day, three years before Fred and Rose’s arrest, and just when he was starting secondary school, Barry snapped. “I tried stabbing him when I was eleven with a screwdriver”, he admitted. But Fred’s reaction was shocking. “He just laughed at me.”
Barry went on to suffer a long battle of psychological issues throughout his life and had at times used drugs. He died alone in 2020, in what was ruled “death by misadventure” at the inquest. His tragic end came two years after he had given what would turn out to be his final exclusive interview to Howard, which was published for the first time this weekend. “Why didn’t we run away?,” Barry poignantly had asked Howard. “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.”
Most of the children claimed they were unaware of the murders in Cromwell Street – although one later claimed to have heard screams and seeing fresh cement laid in the cellar. Yet even so, the children knew there was an unwritten rule: you do not break the West Code of Silence.
It was 1987 when one of the older girls Heather had wanted to leave home. The children remember her crying herself to sleep when a job she had lined up at a holiday camp fell through at the last minute. Aged just 16, she had been so desperate to leave. The next day she did disappear. Fred and Rose told the children she had decided to cut ties and move away. In reality they had fought and murdered her.
It however became a family ‘joke’, that she had never left at all. That she was actually 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.”
The family ‘joke’ would be the Wests’ undoing, when it reached the ears of the police. They were already looking at the couple after a series of other reports and failed prosecutions. But when they moved in with the diggers and discovered Heather’s remains in the garden, their years of depravity were up.
Howard, the senior producer on the recent Netflix hit Fred And Rose West: A British Horror Story, was one of the first to report on the case, while working at The Mirror. He became a leading expert on the case and it’s been part of his life for three decades.
Rose’s trial began in October in October 1 995, and the court heard abundant evidence of her committing serious sexual and physical assaults against children. A month later she was found guilty of 10 counts of murder between 1971 and 1987 – the murders of the Cromwell Street bodies plus her eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine, who was found at a former address.
Fred took the other way out, hanging himself in his cell on January 1, 1995, after writing Rose one final love letter. He robbed the families of a trial but had admitted to all the murders plus those of his first wife Rena Costello, 26, and his heavily-pregnant mistress Anne McFall, 18.
She later became only the second woman – after Moors’ murderer Myra Hindley – to be handed a Whole Life Order, meaning she’ll never be freed. To this day she protests her innocence. Meanwhile many of her children, like her son Barry, received a life sentence of their own – never recovering from the trauma the Wests inflicted….
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