Rosemary West was convicted at Winchester on November 22, 1995 of ten murders committed at Cromwell Street in Gloucester and elsewhere between 1971 and 1987. She is serving a whole-life term at HMP New Hall and has never admitted any part in any of it.
She was born Rosemary Pauline Letts at Northam in Devon on November 29, 1953, into a household run by a violent father who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. She met Fred West at a bus stop in 1969, when she was fifteen. She moved in with him against her family's efforts to prevent it, had her first child at seventeen, and married him in 1972.
She was not a bystander, and the case turned on establishing that. The prosecution case, which the jury accepted, was that she took an active part in the abduction, imprisonment, rape and killing of young women at the house; that she worked as a prostitute there with Fred's arrangement and encouragement; and that she killed Charmaine, Fred's eight-year-old stepdaughter, in 1971 while Fred was in prison. That last count matters more than any other: it is the one murder he could not have committed.
Her own daughter Heather was killed in 1987, aged sixteen. The surviving children gave evidence, and their account of life in the house was the spine of the case against her.
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.
Fred West killed himself on remand on January 1, 1995. That removed two things at once: any possibility of him taking the blame for everything, and any possibility of him being called to give evidence. She was tried alone at Winchester from October 1995 on ten counts.
She was convicted on all ten. The trial judge said that if the term life meant anything she would never be released, and the Home Secretary imposed a whole-life tariff the following year. She dropped her appeal in 1996 and has said nothing since.
Ten convictions stand. What the case rests on is not physical evidence of her hand on any single killing but the pattern, the children's testimony, and the Charmaine count that fell outside Fred's opportunity.