Editor’s Note: This article contains disturbing information about sexual assault, murder, and child abuse. It may not be suitable for all audiences.
It’s been 31 years since Fred and Rose West were uncovered as some of the United Kingdom’s worst serial killers. All these years later, we’re still trying to make sense of their crimes and what motivated them.
The latest attempt to parse their wicked ways is Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story. The three-part docuseries, which debuted on Netflix earlier, details how the investigation unfolded through interviews with police, lawyers, and other experts involved in the case. Also lending their voices are one of the couple’s survivors, Caroline Owens, and their eldest son, Stephen West.
Fred’s criminal history dates back to the early 1960s when he was convicted of child molestation. Decades later, in 1994, he was charged with brutally assaulting and murdering 12 women and girls in Gloucester, England. Authorities then realized he had an accomplice in his wife, Rose, who was convicted in 10 of the murders and sentenced to life in prison in 1995.
Rose, now 71, remains imprisoned today and has always maintained her innocence. Her silence and Fred’s death before he could stand trial mean we might never know why they acted. What is clear is that their evil acts stemmed from very troubling circumstances within their own family.
When they met, Fred was around 28 and Rose was just 15
Before they were notorious partners-in-crime, Fred and Rose West met during a chance encounter in 1969. She was waiting at a bus stop in Cheltenham when Fred approached. Rose, then just 15 years old, was initially repulsed by Fred’s unkempt appearance. He was around 28, married with two children, but neither his family nor his and Rose’s 12-year age difference mattered to him. Rose appeared to be the latest in a string of teenagers Fred had a history of pursuing.
Fred continued to shower Rose with attention, and she grew more open to his advances. So when he showed up to the bread shop where she worked and asked her out on a date, she accepted. The two soon began an affair, and a few weeks later, Rose left her job to become the full-time nanny to Fred’s kids.
Rose’s parents initially weren’t aware of what was going on with their teenaged daughter, but when they met her new love interest, they were appalled. Rose’s mother pegged him as a pathological liar, and her father resorted to contacting social services and threatening Fred directly to no avail.
In late November 1969, Fred’s wife left him permanently after years of strife. By the end of the year, Rose had moved into the mobile home where Fred and his young kids were living. She was newly 16 and soon pregnant with the couple’s first child. After Rose turned 18, the couple married on January 29, 1972.
Over the years, their power dynamic seemingly shifted. Fred was no longer the older man grooming his young love interest into his childcare provider and ideal partner. According to their daughter Mae, Rose came to have the upper hand. Mae wrote in her 2018 memoir Love As Always, Mum XXX that she and her siblings believed Rose “wore the trousers in their marriage.”
The couple’s devotion toward each other never seemed to waver, at least until they got caught. But their role as parents was quite a different story.
Fred and Rose were abusive to their 10 children
Together, Fred and Rose raised 10 children. The eldest two, daughters Charmaine and Anne Marie, were born to Fred’s first wife in 1963 and 1964, respectively. Fred wasn’t Charmaine’s biological father but fully embraced her as if she was. Rose came into the girls’ lives when Charmaine was 6 and Anne Marie was 5.
Between 1970 and 1983, the couple welcomed the rest of their brood; Heather, Mae, and Stephen were followed by Tara, Louise, Barry, Rosemary Jr., and Lucyanna. Some of the children, particularly the younger ones, were likely fathered by men other than Fred given Rose’s experience as a sex worker. Fred was well aware of his wife’s trade—she saw clients at their home and he is believed to have listened in her encounters—but didn’t hesitate to consider all the children his own.
Fred’s acceptance as father of all 10 kids belied his predatory, incestuous interests that he regularly acted upon as his daughters matured. He sexually assaulted Anne Marie, Heather, Mae, and Louise on numerous occasions. Rose even participated in Fred’s brutal rape of Anne Marie, holding her stepdaughter down in the basement of their home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester.
For her part, Rose was known to have violent outbursts that she directed toward the children. Mae recalled in her memoir that their mother’s beatings often landed her and her siblings at the local hospital, where their injuries were treated.
The children lived in fear of their parents. Yet, amid all the atrocities, there were glimmers of normalcy. “We ate meals and watched TV together, celebrated birthdays and Christmas, and went on family holidays,” Mae wrote in her memoir. “Mum used to bake superb cakes. We’d always have a fantastic iced sponge for our birthdays and an equally lovely fruit cake laced with booze at Christmas time. She always made a real effort for special occasions and Christmas Day was the one day we really did feel like any other family.”
The tragic reality is that the West children were being raised by serial killers, and two of their victims were their own children.
Fred and Rose’s murder victims include two of their daughters
Rose’s violent tendencies turned deadly in June 1971. At the time, Fred was in prison for petty theft and driving charges, which left 17-year-old Rose to look after Fred’s daughters from his first marriage as well as the couple’s firstborn, then an infant. It’s thought that the pressure of caring for the three children while still a child herself triggered Rose, and she killed Charmaine in one of her rages. The girl was only 8 years old.
The exact circumstances of Charmaine’s murder will likely never be known, but authorities have pieced together what they believe happened next. Rose is thought to have hid the body for some time. Then when Fred was released from prison later that year, he dismembered her remains and buried her underneath the kitchen floor. Indeed, after he was arrested, Fred told police where to find Charmaine.
Instead of destroying the couple’s relationship, the heinous murder only seemed to bind them closer together. With Rose at his side, Fred began to target teenagers and young women who were lodgers at Cromwell Street or traveling in the Gloucester area. He sexually assaulted them before killing them and burying their bodies around the house. Between 1973 and 1979, the Wests had committed eight more murders. (Independently, Fred had also killed his first wife in 1971 and another former lover in 1967.)
Their final murder was, once again, one of their own. In June 1987, their daughter Heather attempted to stop her father’s abuse by telling a friend about what was happening at home. Fred and Rose responded by killing her and burying her remains in the back garden under the patio. They told their other children Heather had left for a job in southern England, according to Mae’s memoir, though the siblings grew suspicious when their sister never returned their calls or letters.
It became a family “joke” that Heather was under the patio. The West children’s occasional offhand comments about Heather’s whereabouts while in the care of social services in the early 1990s finally prompted the investigation that uncovered Fred and Rose’s gruesome murders. On February 26, 1994, nearly seven years after she went missing, Heather’s remains were found exactly where her siblings joked they’d be.
While in police custody, Fred was fairly cooperative with authorities. He eventually admitted to 11 murders and helped them locate all 12 West victims (later on, Fred would recant his admissions of guilt). In his discussions with police, Fred deflected blame away from his wife on more than one occasion by saying Rose had no knowledge of two murders, including Heather’s. When Rose heard of his confession, she denied any involvement and increasingly tried to distance herself from her husband.
On New Year’s Day 1995, authorities found Fred dead in his jail cell. His death, at age 53, was ruled a suicide. Perhaps, Fred couldn’t stand the thought of finally having to live up to his crimes in court. Or maybe, having being told of how Rose was perfectly willing to let him take the fall, he couldn’t bear the idea that Rose was rejecting him after all their relationship had already withstood.
Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or self-harming behaviors, call or text 988 to get help from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Adrienne directs the daily news operation and content production for Biography.com. She joined the staff in October 2022 and most recently worked as an editor for Popular Mechanics, Runner’s World, and Bicycling. Adrienne has served as editor-in-chief of two regional print magazines, and her work has won several awards, including the Best Explanatory Journalism award from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. Her current working theory is that people are the point of life, and she’s fascinated by everyone who (and every system that) creates our societal norms. When she’s not behind the news desk, find her hiking, working on her latest cocktail project, or eating mint chocolate chip ice cream.
