*WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS* 30 years after Fred & Rose West, even the ‘most seasoned detectives’ are still haunted by the bizarre and twisted way they killed 15-year-old Shirley
The remains of nine women were found in the Fred and Rose West’s House of Horrors – each naked, missing body parts, and cut to pieces with a kitchen knife in the family bathtub.
Some were buried with their hands and feet still bound. Others had gags and other sex act paraphernalia in their shallow graves. But all shared one tragic fact: They had suffered. Terribly. The nine victims of 25 Cromwell Street hadn’t just been killed – they had been tortured, slaughtered and butchered.
And today, 30 years on from Rose’s conviction for 10 counts of murder and Fred’s suicide, one find, in particular, still haunts even the most experienced of crime investigators.
For detectives found one of the victims – later discovered to be 15-year-old Shirley Hubbard – had been kept alive, stripped and likely suspended from the cellar beam with her arms and legs outstretched…. all while her face was entirely cocooned. Her whole head had been covered in parcel tape, save for one small breathing tube inserted in her nostril. It would have been just enough to keep her alive for their sick sexual acts yet she would have been unable to either see or scream.
“You can’t understand the West case and understand how truly wicked Fred and Rose were until you understand what was actually done to these girls,” says the leading expert, Howard Sounes. “This isn’t Agatha Christie where girls get bumped over the head and they die. It’s torture – sexual torture to death. Imagine the anguish of this girl, she can breathe but can’t scream.”
Shirley’s remains were found during the excavation of the cellar at Gloucester’s 25 Cromwell Street following the police tip off and raid in 1994. The first body found had been that of Fred and Rose’s own 16-year-old daughter Heather, who was in several pieces under the patio. She had disappeared in 1987, with the Wests telling their other children she had run away and cut contact.
READ MORE: ‘My serial killer dad Fred West was monster, but mum Rose did unthinkable to us kids’
After police unearthed Heather’s remains, they soon realised her murder was just the latest of many. The deaths at Cromwell Street dated back two decades to 1973. All the victims were vulnerable young women, either “lodgers or runaways”. It’s thought Fred and Rose often hunted the local bus stops looking for prey – and would lure girls with a promise of a safe ride home. Instead they became their “sexual playthings” – until they got bored.
Howard Sounes covered the original story for the Mirror in 1994 and 1995 and went on to become a leading expert in the case, interviewing dozens of people connected to the case, and becoming the senior producer of this year’s Netflix hit Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story. He recently gained access to more than 100 hours of police interview tapes from West’s initial 1994 interrogations for his new book The Fred West Tapes, which is released this week and is being serialised in The Mirror.
Of all the gruesome details of the Fred and Rose case he’s heard and seen, it’s the shocking crime scene photo of Shirley Hubbard’s skull that remains one of the most horrifying.
“I’ve seen the picture as the skull came out of the ground,” he explains. “There was just a skull, hair and teeth left in a cocoon of parcel tape. Inserted into the parcel tape, up in to the nostril of this poor girl – or where the nose would have been – was a plastic tube. Like a home brewing tube.”
Fred actually admitted in the police interviews: “We had to keep them quiet so I wrapped them up in parcel tape”, but he was less forthcoming about the details. According to Howard, however, the sight was enough to make “even the most seasoned detectives wince”.
“So he wrapped this poor girl’s face in tape – which, by the way, he stole from work, because he was a habitual thief – and she was left naked, hands bound, feet bound, and probably hanging from the cellar beams,” explains Howard. “Then this tube was inserted. So she can breathe and that prolongs the ordeal but she can’t scream. And that’s how she’s found.”
No one can know how long the 15-year-old was kept alive. Once dead, she was decapitated and placed in a well in the floor under the fireplace, which was then covered in concrete. The Wests used the same technique for all five girls in the cellar.
The youngest West children would later remember sleeping in that same cellar, which Fred also refers to as his “dungeon” on the interview tapes. They had to use a bucket for the toilet at night and empty it each morning. One child claimed they had been locked in the cupboard under the stairs one day when they heard screams before later seeing freshly-laid cement.
It took weeks to identify Shirley using skull analysis. Experts painstakingly tried to recreate her likely facial features from the remaining bone structure and cross referenced them with missing girls from the time. Shirley had been born in Birmingham and was known as Shirley Lloyd, and Shirley Owen. Her parents split up when she was just two and she had ended up in care. But she had been trying to make the most of her life. She had changed her name to Hubbard was on school work experience placement at Debenhams in Worcester when she vanished on her way home on November 14, 1974. She was reported missing but police could find no trace – until their grisly find 20 years later. It is thought they lured her into their car while she was waiting at the bus stop.
READ MORE: ‘In desperation I tried to kill dad with a screwdriver, his reaction was twisted’
Shirley was the youngest for the victims found in Cromwell Street. (Fred’s eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine was discovered under the floor of their previous address). While others may have escaped the exact same fate, almost all show signs of possible torture. Each set of dismembered remains was missing several body parts. “It was fingers and toes, but also large bones like kneecaps, sections of vertebrae,” explains Howard. “There were dozens of body parts missing and no one really knows why.
“The pathologist said you don’t lose these body parts. They are being cut off. Yet we don’t know if that’s before or after death. Is he cutting them off as mementos? Or for torture? And where are they? Because there’s dozens of missing bones and they have never been found.”
In another shocking case, it’s believed the Wests may have kept one victim – 21-year-old Exeter University student Lucy Partington – alive for up to six days. She had disappeared on December 27 and on January 3 Fred went to A&E with a fresh knife cut to his hand. A knife was later discovered in Lucy’s grave, suggesting he had accidentally dropped it in there after he cut himself. Given the timing of his hospital trip, police believe the Medieval English student may have been held hostage over the New Year holidays. “It’s an aspect of the case that is seldom discussed because it is so chilling,” says Howard.
Lucy was from a middle-class family and had been to see her friend in Cheltenham the night she went missing. Lucy was “renowned for being sensible” according to friends. But her family later realised that she would likely have been waiting for a bus at a stop where the streetlights were out because of a miners’ strike. It was also sleeting that night.
So when the Wests pulled up in their grey Ford Popular with ‘Vote Conservative’ stickers on the back, they may have seemed respectable. Howard says in his new book: “Their son Steve West was a baby at this time and it is unlikely that he would have been left at home. The offer of a lift from a young family with a babe in arms may have seemed safe.”
It’s a tactic the husband and wife are believed to have used multiple times. It’s thought they then attacked their victims and took them to their “dungeon”. Shirley Hubbard’s makeshift cellar grave even had an extra grim nod to what was likely her fatal mistake. The fireplace in which she was buried had been covered with Marilyn Monroe wallpaper. It had the names of her films next to pictures from the movies. The words “Bus Stop” were positioned just above where her skull was found encased in concrete.
Some of the other West victims had been closer to home – in fact they had rented one of their cut-price rooms on the top floor of their three-storey home. Fred and Rose had only been married less that year when they made their first kill – Lynda Gough, 18, a local fire officer’s daughter and lodger, in April 1973. Another lodger was Shirley Anne Robinson, 18. She was missing two vertebrae, two ribs, 28 ankle bones and 42 of the 76 finger and toe bones. Nearby however were the remains of something else – her unborn child, believed to be Fred’s and just a few weeks from full term.
West was asked during the police interview about whether he derived pleasure from hurting his victims. While he had already confessed to multiple women dying at his home, he tried to maintain many of them were accidents.
At one point he asked: “Are these people still alive when you remove [the body parts]?” To which he icily replies: “No comment on that.”
At another point in the interviews, he was asked the same question by another officer. Even though he admitted dismembering the bodies – in the family bathroom with a kitchen knife so as not to scratch the bath enamel – West seemed to find the suggestion he would deliberately torture someone as simply outrageous.
“No, no. I couldn’t hurt anybody like that,” Fred told police. “I don’t believe in suffering anyway. I mean, I couldn’t torture anybody.”
He added: “Well, I mean … If they were cut up, it was just their heads and legs. Nothing else took off.”
“That was Fred. He said these things in such a matter of fact manner,” said Howard. “The Wests were never a normal couple. But they lived in a house, in the street, next to Marks and Spencer and a Seven-Day Adventist Church. Fred was that funny bloke who said hello to everyone. Rose was the slightly odd wife people avoided. But no one would ever have imagined they were mass murderers.”
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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