110 Facts About Fred West

Frederick Walter Stephen West was an English serial killer, who committed at least twelve murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rose West.

Fred West is known to have committed at least two murders on his own; Rose is known to have murdered Fred West's stepdaughter, Charmaine.

Fred West fatally asphyxiated himself while detained on remand at HM Prison Birmingham on 1 January 1995, at which time he and Rose were jointly charged with nine murders, and he with three further murders.

Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on 29 September 1941, at Bickerton Cottage, Much Marcle, Herefordshire, the first surviving child of Walter Stephen West and Daisy Hannah Hill.

Fred West was from a poor family of farm workers, close-knit and mutually protective; his father was a disciplinarian and his mother overprotective.

In 1946 the family moved to Moorcourt Cottage, a semi-detached building adjacent to Moorcourt Farm, on the outskirts of Much Marcle, where Fred West's father worked as a milking herdsman and harvest hand.

Fred West was seen as a mother's boy and relied mostly on his siblings for companionship.

The Fred West children were expected to perform assigned chores and all six did seasonal work, the three girls picking hops and strawberries, the three boys harvesting wheat and hunting rabbits.

The necessity of working to earn a living and to survive instilled a strong work ethic in Fred West, who developed a lifelong habit of petty theft.

Fred West left school in December 1956 at the age of 15, first working as a labourer at Moorcourt Farm.

Fred West aggressively pestered women and girls, whom he objectified as sources of pleasure to be used as he saw fit, and would abruptly approach and fondle them.

At age 17, Fred West suffered a fractured skull, a broken arm, and a broken leg in a motorcycle accident.

Fred West was unconscious for seven days and walked with braces for several months; because of this incident, he developed an extreme fear of hospitals and became prone to fits of rage.

Two years later, Fred West suffered a further head injury when a girl he groped on a fire escape outside the Ledbury Youth Club punched him, sending him falling two floors.

Fred West became re-acquainted with Catherine Bernadette Costello in September 1962, when he was 21.

Fred West had first met Costello, who came from Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, at a Much Marcle dance hall in 1960, and dated her for several months before she returned to Scotland.

Rena's daughter, Charmaine, was born in March 1963; to explain the child's mixed ancestry, Rena and Fred West claimed that she had suffered a miscarriage and that Charmaine was adopted.

The family nanny, Isa McNeill, and neighbours of the Wests, recall Rena as a considerate mother "struggling to bring up two children"; Fred treated the children harshly.

Fred West kept the girls in the bottom of a bunk bed with bars fitted to the space between the bunks, effectively caging them; they were allowed out only when he was at work.

Fred West was a violent and sadistic bastard who enjoyed beating up women and kids.

Fred West later admitted to having engaged in numerous affairs in the early years of his marriage, and fathered one illegitimate child with a woman from the Gorbals.

On one occasion, Fred West discovered the pair in an embrace.

When punched by McLachlan a second time, Fred West stopped defending himself.

On each occasion it became apparent Fred West had beaten his wife, McLachlan extensively beat Fred West.

On 4 November 1965, Fred West accidentally ran over and killed a small boy in Glasgow with his van.

Fred West was cleared of any wrongdoing by police, but feared the hostile reaction and potential reprisals for the accident from the locals, whom he relied upon to make his living.

Shortly after the move south, Fred West found employment driving a lorry for a local abattoir.

Fred West was prone to violent mood swings, and Rena and McNeill typically bore the brunt of his fury; Fred physically attacked his stepdaughter more than once.

McFall had by this stage become infatuated with Fred West, who had promised to marry her.

Police were called and McLachlan, Trotter, McNeill, and Rena left, with Fred West threatening to kill Rena should he ever see her again.

Fred West was arrested the following month and returned to Gloucester to face trial.

Fred West testified at the hearing, admitting he and McFall were living together, but falsely claiming McFall intended to return to Scotland imminently.

Letters McFall posted to her family and McNeill in Glasgow between 1966 and 1967 indicate she believed a relationship with Fred West could offer her a better life than that she had experienced in Scotland, and she tried to persuade Fred West to divorce his wife in order that he could marry her.

Fred West was never reported missing, but her dismembered remains were found buried at the edge of a cornfield between Much Marcle and Kempley in June 1994.

Fred West initially denied he had killed McFall, but confided to one visitor following his arrest that he had stabbed her to death following an argument.

Fred West first encountered Rosemary Letts in early 1969, shortly after her 15th birthday.

Fred West extracted a degree of sympathy from her by claiming he and his two daughters had been abandoned by his wife, and that he wished for more children.

Minutes later, Fred West entered the premises and asked Rose to accompany him on a date that evening; an offer she accepted.

Shortly thereafter, Rose began a relationship with Fred West, becoming a frequent visitor at the Lake House Caravan Park and a willing childminder to Charmaine and Anna Marie, whom she noted were neglected and whom she initially treated with care and affection.

On several occasions in the early days of their courtship, Rose insisted she and Fred West take the girls on excursions to gather wildflowers.

Shortly thereafter, Fred West collected Charmaine and Anna Marie from social services.

Bill Letts made one final effort to prevent his daughter from seeing Fred West, and Rose was examined by a police surgeon in February 1970, who confirmed she was pregnant.

Two months later, Fred West was imprisoned for the theft of car tyres and a vehicle tax disc.

Giles was adamant Fred West was still in prison on this occasion.

Charmaine's body was initially stowed in the coal cellar of Midland Road until Fred West was released from prison.

Fred West later buried her naked body in the yard close to the back door of the flat, and remained adamant he had not dismembered her.

Fred West is known to have visited Moorcourt Cottage to enquire as to her children's whereabouts and welfare in the latter half of August 1971.

Fred West is believed to have been murdered by strangulation, possibly in the back seat of Fred's Ford Popular and likely while intoxicated.

The ceremony took place at Gloucester Register Office, with Fred West incorrectly describing himself upon the marriage certificate as a bachelor.

Fred West installed a baby monitor in the room, allowing him to listen from elsewhere in the house.

Together, he and Fred West opened a cafe they named The Green Lantern, which was insolvent.

Fred West willingly accepted these children as his own, and falsely informed them the reason their skin was darker than that of their siblings was because his great-grandmother was a black woman.

Between 1972 and 1992, the Fred West children were admitted to the Accident and Emergency department of local hospitals 31 times; the injuries were explained as accidents and never reported to social services.

Several hours later, Fred West arrived at the pub to collect Rose and Anna Marie.

When Owens began to protest, Fred West stopped the car, referred to Owens as a "bitch", and punched her into unconsciousness before he and Rose bound and gagged her with a scarf and duct tape.

At one stage, Fred West remarked that Owens' clitoris was unusual, then lashed her genitals with a leather belt.

Fred West then claimed he had killed hundreds of young girls, adding that Owens had primarily been brought to the house for "Rose's pleasure".

Fred West and Rose then calmly asked Owens whether she would consider returning to work as their nanny.

The victim was a 19-year-old named Lynda Gough, with whom Fred West and Rose became acquainted through a male lodger in early 1973.

Gough had likely been suspended from holes carved into the wooden beams supporting the ceiling of the cellar Fred West later admitted he had devised for the purpose of suspending his victims' bodies, and likely died of either strangulation or suffocation.

Fred West's dismembered body, missing five cervical vertebrae, the patellae and numerous finger bones, was buried in an inspection pit beneath the garage.

Fred West had been waiting for a bus in Warndon when she vanished, and was likely dragged into Fred's car, where her face was bound with surgical tape and her arms bound with braiding cloth before she was driven to Cromwell Street.

Fred West was heavily pregnant at the time of her murder.

Fred West's body was buried in the garden of 25 Cromwell Street.

Fred West's body was buried in the garden of Cromwell Street, close to the bathroom wall, and although Chambers was likely dismembered, her skeleton was not marked by striations as the earlier victims' bodies had been.

Fred West was so concerned by these revelations that he began to escort Heather to and from school.

When Mae and Stephen suggested they report Heather's disappearance to police, Fred West changed his story yet again, saying it would be unwise to initiate a search for Heather as she was involved in credit card fraud.

On more than one occasion, Fred West and Rose persuaded an unknown acquaintance to fake a phone call from Heather to her parents.

In May 1992, Fred West asked his 13-year-old daughter, Louise, to bring some bottles to a room on the first floor of their home.

The Fred West children divulged their mother had inflicted most of the physical abuse and that their father frequently said that if they told anyone about the goings-on in the household they would be "buried under the patio" like their sister Heather.

The Wests were questioned as to the whereabouts of their eldest daughter, and although Fred claimed Heather was "alive and well" and supporting herself via prostitution, Rose initially claimed to have no knowledge of Heather's whereabouts, or why she had left home.

DC Savage and her colleagues were convinced Heather was dead, and that Fred West's repeated statement to his children that her body lay beneath the family patio might be true.

Fred West had been working in Stroud at the time; upon hearing of the police's intentions, he assured Stephen he would be home immediately.

When Fred West arrived three hours later, he informed his family of his intention to voluntarily offer a witness statement to police regarding his daughter's whereabouts.

At 11:15 that morning, Fred West formally admitted to police he had indeed killed his daughter, albeit in an act of manslaughter.

Fred West confessed to strangling Heather in a fit of rage, then dismembering her body in the ground floor bathroom with a heavy serrated knife he normally used for cutting slabs of frozen meat.

Fred West's remains had been stored in a dustbin as he waited for an opportunity to dig her grave.

Fred West was insistent his wife had no knowledge of her daughter's murder, claiming he had committed this murder as Rose was preoccupied with one of her clients, adding the fact the search team had not yet unearthed Heather's remains was because they had been excavating the wrong section of his garden.

Fred West then volunteered to accompany police to the house to pinpoint the precise location of Heather's body.

The dismemberment, Fred West claimed, had made it easier to bury the remains in shallow, cubical graves, and he agreed to return to Cromwell Street to indicate precisely where he had buried each victim.

Each set of remains was missing numerous bones, particularly phalanges; when questioned, Fred West refused to divulge the whereabouts of the bones missing from each set of remains, or the reason for their absence.

Fred West was then transferred to Birmingham's HM Prison Birmingham, where a strict suicide watch called for his cell to be checked every 15 minutes.

Fred and Rose West were brought before a magistrates' court in Gloucester on 30 June 1994; he was charged with 12 murders and she with nine.

Fred West pleaded with Stephen and Anna Marie to convey to Rose that he loved her, but Rose never acknowledged these overtures.

Neighbours described Charmaine's 1971 disappearance while Fred West was imprisoned, and Rose's casual indifference to Heather's disappearance.

Ferguson emphasised that Fred West, before meeting Rose, had committed at least one murder strikingly similar to those at issue in the present trial, and that the prosecution's case was largely circumstantial.

Fred West contended that Rose was unaware of the extent of Fred's sadism, and urged the jury to not be prejudiced by her promiscuity and domineering manner.

Fred West claimed never to have met six of the victims buried at Cromwell Street, and to recall very little of her assault on Caroline Owens.

When questioned as to life at Cromwell Street, Rose claimed she and Fred West had lived separate lives, which was inconsistent with the earlier testimony of witnesses who had visited or lodged at their address.

The intention of this testimony was to illustrate to the jury that Fred West was capable of abducting, assaulting or attempting to attack women without Rose, which the prosecution had never disputed.

Fred West had further divulged that Rose had indeed murdered Charmaine while he had been incarcerated, and had murdered Shirley Robinson.

Fred West had confided that he had dismembered the victims, and Rose had participated in the mutilation and dismemberment of Shirley Robinson, having personally removed Robinson's unborn child from her womb after her death.

In reference to the remaining eight murders for which Rose was charged, Leach testified that Fred West had confided Rose had "played a major part" in these murders.

Fred and Rose West are known to have committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987; many investigators, authors, and journalists who have studied the case believe there are other victims whose bodies have never been found.

On several occasions, Fred West made cryptic hints he had murdered several other girls, but refused to divulge any further information beyond that he had murdered 15-year-old Mary Bastholm in 1968 and buried the body on farmland near Bishop's Cleeve.

Fred West claimed to have killed one victim while working on a construction project in Birmingham, and that other bodies had been buried in Scotland and Herefordshire.

Stephen Fred West, recounting an admission made while his father was on remand at HM Prison Birmingham, 1994.

Fred West claimed the reason many phalange bones had been missing from the victims' bodies was because the removal of their fingers and toes had been one of the forms of torture the victims had endured, with other torture methods including the extraction of their nails, acts of mutilation, and cigarettes being stubbed out on their bodies.

Police do not know of any further murders they committed before their 1994 arrest although Fred West confessed to murdering up to 30 people, indicating up to 18 other undiscovered victims.

Fred West's remarkably relaxed, emotionally sterile attitude towards all aspects of his crimes startled many members of the enquiry team.

Owens stated that, at one stage in her ordeal, Fred West said that they had abducted Owens primarily for Rose's gratification.

Fred West had rented a garden allotment adjacent to his house and which he frequently visited, although only a small section of this plot was ever cultivated.

Fred West's body was cremated in Coventry on 29 March 1995 in a funeral that was attended by just four of his children.

Fred West's ashes are believed to have been scattered at the Welsh seaside resort of Barry Island, a location he had regularly visited both as a child and as an adult with his family.

Two weeks after Anna Marie Fred West delivered her testimony against her stepmother in 1995, she attempted suicide.

Fred West again attempted suicide in 1999 by throwing herself from a bridge into the River Severn.

Stephen Fred West is known to have made a suicide attempt in 2002, by attempting to hang himself.

Fred West maintains her innocence in any of the murders.

Crick had further informed authorities Fred West had asked him to assist in finding pregnant girls to perform abortions upon.

Crick had believed the information he had provided to police was ignored as Fred West was a known police informant.