Frederick Walter Stephen West was born at Much Marcle in Herefordshire on September 29, 1941, into a farm labouring family. He had convictions for theft and for sexual offences against children from his twenties, and in 1962 married Rena Costello. His daughter's nanny, Anne McFall, disappeared in 1967, pregnant by him. Rena disappeared in 1971. Both were later found buried in fields near Much Marcle.
He met Rosemary Letts in 1969, when she was fifteen and he was twenty-eight, and they moved together to Gloucester with his daughters. Charmaine, Rena's daughter, disappeared in 1971 while Fred was in prison, which is one of the reasons Rose was later convicted. In 1972 they took the lease of 25 Cromwell Street, a tall terraced house with cellars and lodgers.
Over the following seven years at least nine young women and girls were killed there: lodgers, a nanny, girls waiting at bus stops, and in 1987 their own daughter Heather, sixteen. They were held, tied, gagged with tape, raped and dismembered, and buried under the cellar floor, under the patio and in the bathroom. Fred did the building work. The West children grew up being told that if they misbehaved they would end up under the patio like Heather, which the family treated as a joke.
Those named in the record are Charmaine West, eight; Catherine Bernadette West, known as Rena, twenty-seven; Lynda Carole Gough, nineteen; Carol Ann Cooper, fifteen; Lucy Katherine Partington, twenty-one; Theresa Siegenthaler, twenty-one; Shirley Hubbard, fifteen; Juanita Marion Mott, eighteen; Shirley Ann Robinson, eighteen; Alison Chambers, seventeen; and Heather West, sixteen.
The police came in February 1994 on a warrant relating to the missing Heather, after years of social services contact and a collapsed rape prosecution in 1992. The excavation ran for weeks and was on the news every night. Fred was charged with twelve murders and confessed and retracted repeatedly. On January 1, 1995, he hanged himself in his cell at Winson Green in Birmingham with strips of bedsheet, before any trial. The house was demolished in 1996 and the rubble crushed, and the site is a landscaped walkway.