Fred and Rose West

The victims

Frederick West, born in Much Marcle, Herefordshire, in 1941, and Rosemary West, born Rosemary Letts in Barnstaple, Devon, in 1953, married in Gloucester in January 1972. Over the following years the couple killed young women and girls, including members of their own family. Rose West was ultimately convicted of ten murders. The victims named in her case were Charmaine West, Fred's eight-year-old stepdaughter; Lynda Gough, 19; Carol Ann Cooper, 15; Lucy Partington, 21; Therese Siegenthaler, 21; Shirley Hubbard, 15; Juanita Mott, 18; Shirley Anne Robinson, 18, who was pregnant with Fred's child; Alison Chambers; and the couple's own daughter Heather, who was 16. Reports differ on Alison Chambers' age, giving it as either 16 or 17, and on whether Carol Ann Cooper's first name was spelled Carol or Carole.

Fred West was also accused, alone, of killing two women from before his marriage to Rose: his first wife, Catherine Costello, aged 26, and Anne McFall, 18, who was pregnant when she died. Because he died before any trial, those allegations were never tested in court.

What happened

Most of the killings took place in the 1970s. Charmaine disappeared in 1971 while the family lived on Midland Road in Gloucester. After the Wests moved to 25 Cromwell Street, a terraced house in the city centre, a series of young women vanished between 1973 and 1979, and their remains were hidden beneath the cellar, the bathroom and the garden. Heather West, the couple's eldest child together, is believed to have been the last victim; she was killed in June 1987. Her parents told others she had simply left home, and she was never reported missing to police.

The 1994 investigation

Nearly seven years after Heather vanished, on 25 February 1994, Fred and Rose West were arrested at Cromwell Street on suspicion of her murder. Her remains were found in the garden the following day. Over the next weeks officers recovered the remains of eight more young women from the garden, basement, cellar and bathroom areas of the house. The search of Cromwell Street lasted 55 days and ended on 28 April 1994.

Investigators then widened the inquiry to places linked to Fred West's earlier life. Catherine Costello's remains were found in April 1994 in a field at Kempley, Charmaine's at the former Midland Road home in May, and Anne McFall's in another Kempley field in June after a search of 56 days. Fred West was eventually charged with twelve murders, and Rose West was jointly charged with ten of them, her final charge, for Charmaine, coming in January 1995.

Death in custody and Rose West's trial

Fred West never faced a jury. On 1 January 1995 he was found hanged in his remand cell at Winson Green prison in Birmingham, aged 53. His wife stood trial alone at Winchester Crown Court from 3 October 1995 before Mr Justice Mantell. On 22 November 1995 the jury found her guilty of all ten murders, and she received ten life sentences, with the judge expressing the hope that she would never be freed. The Court of Appeal refused her appeal against conviction in 1996.

In July 1997 the then Home Secretary, Jack Straw, set a whole life tariff, following the recommendations of the trial judge and the Lord Chief Justice. It was the Home Secretary, not the trial court, who made that final decision, and it meant Rose West would never be eligible for parole. She remains in prison serving that whole life term.

The search for Mary Bastholm

Fred West has long been suspected, though never charged, in the disappearance of Mary Bastholm, a 15-year-old waitress last seen at a Gloucester bus stop on 6 January 1968. She had worked at a cafe on Southgate Street, then called the Pop-In. In May 2021, after a television documentary team reported finding voids and what looked like blue material beneath the building, now the Clean Plate cafe, Gloucestershire police excavated its basement. On 27 May 2021 they announced that no human remains or significant items had been found. Accounts differ over whether Fred West was a regular customer there or had done building work at the premises. Detectives noted that he had repeatedly misled investigators, and Mary's family said they still hoped she would one day be found.

Later developments and legacy

The house at 25 Cromwell Street was later demolished and replaced with a walkway, partly out of respect for the victims and partly to discourage people from visiting the site. Public interest has not faded: thirty years after the arrests, regional media revisited the case, and in May 2025 Netflix released a three-part series, Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story, directed by Dan Dewsbury and built around recently uncovered police interview recordings.

The case remains one of the most notorious in modern British criminal history. It showed how a teenage girl could vanish for years without her parents ever reporting her missing, and how remains could lie undiscovered in an ordinary city-centre house for two decades. It also made Rose West one of the few prisoners in England and Wales serving a whole life term, a rare sentence that rules out any prospect of parole.