CROWN V COLONY — The House of Horrors: How Fred and Rose West Turned a Gloucester Home Into a Graveyard

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, It's Tuesday, June thirtieth, and this is Daily Crime and Justice. I'm Garrett Fisher, and this is day two of Crown Versus Colony, our Independence Day week, putting the United Kingdom's worst on the stand. Yesterday we were in the fog of Victorian Whitechapel with a killer who was never caught and five women the world chose to forget. Today there's no fog and no mystery about who did it. Today we're in a quiet English city, in our own modern era, in a house you could walk past without a second glance. And what happened behind that ordinary front door is, in my honest opinion, about as dark as this show ever gets. So let me say this plainly before we start. This episode deals with the murder of women and children, with sexual violence, and with abuse inside a family. I'm going to handle it the way we always do here, which means I am not going to dwell on the worst details for shock value. The victims were people, not props. But if this is not a story you're in a place to hear today, that is completely okay. Step away, come back tomorrow.

1:15 No judgment from me. For everyone staying with me. Here we go. It started to unravel because of a joke. The West children, the one still living at twenty five Cromwell Street in Gloucester, had a grim little family saying if you misbehaved, if you stepped out of line, you'd end up buried under the patio like Heather. Heather was their older sister. She'd vanished in nineteen eighty seven when she was sixteen years old, and the family was told she'd run off to find work. The younger kids didn't really understand what they were saying. To them, it was just the thing you said. But a social worker heard it, and in nineteen ninety four the police came to that house with a warrant and they started to dig up the garden. They were looking for one missing teenager. What they found instead was a graveyard the house on Cromwell Street.

2:09 Fred West was a builder, a Gloucestershire man, all crude, charm and grubby hands and a relentless predatory appetite that he barely bothered to hide. Rose West born Rosemary Letts was much younger than him. She was just fifteen years old when they met together. Over two decades they became one of the most prolific killing partnerships in British history, and the house was the engine of it. Twenty five Cromwell Street was a three story place near the center of Gloucester. The West rented out the upper floors as cheap bedsits, which meant a steady stream of young people, lodgers, drifters came and went through that front door. The family lived downstairs. Fred was forever building, renovating, pouring concrete, digging.

2:55 Nobody thought twice about a builder digging in his own cellar. And underneath all that di why the bodies went down one by one, sometimes with a kneecap or a fingerbone kept back as a trophy. That detail is grim, I know, but it matters because years later it was that exact signature and the remains that let investigators link the victims to the same hands. Here's the part that I think gets lost. This wasn't random. There was a playbook for this. The West targeted young women who were vulnerable, runaways, hitchhikers, lodgers, girls who'd left home and whom nobody was reliably watching. Rose would sometimes sit in the passenger seat when they cruised for victims because a woman in the car made a frightened young hitchhiker feel safe enough to climb in.

3:40 That's not a detail, that's a strategy. That's two people who understood exactly which women's society wasn't keeping track of and went hunting in that gap on purpose. At least twelve victims were eventually identified, and the youngest two never had a chance to grow up at all. So let's do the part of this show that matters most. Let's say their names, every one of them. Ann McFall eighteen years old and pregnant, killed back in nineteen sixty seven before Rose was even on the scene. Catherine Costello known as Rena, twenty seven years old, Fred's first wife, Charmaine West eight years old, Fred's stepdaughter, a little girl who was killed while Fred was actually in prison, which is part of how we know Rose was no bystander in this story. Then come the young women drawn into the orbit of Cromwell Street through the early and mid nineteen seventies.

4:45 Linda Goff nineteen years old, a lodger. Carol Ane Cooper fifteen years old. Lucy Partington twenty one years old, a university student, intelligent and gentle and full of promise, who disappeared one cold night after visiting a friend. Teres Siegenthaler twenty one years old, a Swiss student traveling through. Shirley Hubbard fifteen years old, Juani de Mott eighteen years old, Shirley Robinson eighteen years old, who was a lodger in the house and was eight months pregnant with Fred's own child when they killed her. Alison Chambers sixteen years old, and then finally the murder that started the whole thing falling apart, Heather West sixteen years old, their own daughter, killed in nineteen eighty seven and buried under the patio.

5:32 Her younger siblings would later joke about never knowing they were standing on their sister's grave. Read those names and ages again in your head and notice something. Eight years old, fifteen, sixteen, eighteen. These were children and barely grown young women with entire lives in front of them. Lucy Partington should be a woman in her seventies right now, maybe a grandmother. Heather should be approaching her fifties. They got nothing, They got that house instead, And I want to stay with Lucy for a second because of what her family chose to do with the worst thing that can happen to a person. Lucy Partington was thoughtful, religious, the kind of young woman who wrote and read and cared about the world. Her sister Marian spent years afterward writing about Lucy, not as a true crime headline, but as a sister, a whole human being, and writing about the long, almost impossible work of trying to find some peace after that. That is the exact opposite of what we talked about yesterday with the Ripper. Yesterday, the killer became the brand and the women became scenery. The families of the West victims fought like hell to make sure their daughters stayed people. We should honor that by following their lead. The one who got away, And here's the thing that should make you furious, because it makes me furious. The system had the West years before most of these murders. In nineteen seventy two, a young woman named Caroline Owens, who'd worked as a nanny for the family, was lured into their car, sexually assaulted,

7:04 and held against her will by both Fred and Rose. She managed to escape with her life. She went to the police, and the West were actually prosecuted for it. You know what happened. They were fined. The case was treated as a minor sexual offense, the kind of thing you pay a penalty for and walk away from. Two people who had already begun killing, who had already buried children, were standing in front of the justice system, and the justice system find them and let them go home to that house to keep going for another fifteen years. I'm going to be honest with you. Caroline Owen survived something most people did not survive, and she did the brave thing, the right thing. She told and nobody connected the dots.

7:50 The system was paying attention for exactly one afternoon in a courtroom, and then it looked away. That is the whole tragedy of this case. In one moment, the war was right there, signed and filed, and it changed nothing, the reckoning. When the digging started in nineteen ninety four, the truth came out of the ground in pieces. Remains beneath the cellar floor, beneath the bathroom which had been built over an old inspection pit, under the garden. Nine bodies at Cromwell Street alone, and more elsewhere. Fred West was arrested and eventually charged with twelve murders in more than one hundred hours of police interviews. He talked, and he lied, and he shifted, sometimes claiming he'd acted entirely alone to protect Rose, sometimes hinting there were other girls, other graves that he never named. And then Fred West did the most cowardly thing a man in his position can do. On New Year's Day nineteen ninety five, while on remand awaiting trial, he hanged himself in his prison cell.

8:53 He never sat in a dock, he never faced a jury, He never had to look the families in the eye and answer for a single one of those young women. He just checked out and left his wife to face all of it alone. So Rose West went to trial by herself at Winchester Crown Court in the autumn of nineteen ninety five. She pleaded not guilty. Her defense was simple, Fred did everything, I knew nothing. I'm a victim too, But the evidence said otherwise. Charmaine had died while Fred was locked up, so someone else killed that eight year old. Survivors, including Caroline Owens, testified to Rose's own cruelty. After seven weeks, the jury convicted Rose West of ten murders. She was sentenced to life and a whole life order was later confirmed, meaning she will die in prison. Her appeal was refused.

9:44 When we come back, Rose West is still alive tonight, and after thirty years, she is still telling anyone who will listen the exact same thing. And there's a teenage girl who vanished in this same city, whose family is still waiting for an answer the ground has so far refused to give. Stay with me, Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. Before I get to Rose, here's something I find quietly powerful. Twenty five Cromwell Street does not exist anymore. After the trial, the authorities tore the house down, and they didn't just demolish it. They destroyed it completely, crushing every brick to rubble so that not one piece could ever be taken as a souvenir. The land was turned into a simple landscape walkway between two streets. You can walk right over it now and not know that was deliberate. They had watched what Whitechapel became, the tours and the trinkets, and they refused to let Cromwell Street turn into a shrine for the curious. There's a kind of wisdom in that some places don't deserve to be remembered the people do. Rose West is in her seventies now serving her life sentence in a women's prison in the north of England, and in three decades behind bars, she has never admitted a single thing, not one. She still maintains to this day that she is innocent, that she knew nothing that her dead husband did at all.

11:13 The families have had to live three decades with a convicted killer's flat denial as the last word on what happened to their daughters. And accountability, as I keep telling you on this show, doesn't have a legal department. It doesn't accept a not guilty plea from a woman a jury saw straight through. It doesn't let Fred West off the hook just because he found a rope before the trial could start. The verdict of an honest jury and the testimony of the people who survived these two that is the accountability. The denial is just noise. Do not let it be the loudest thing in the room. And there is one more name I want to leave you with, because she does not have a grave. Mary Bastolm, fifteen years old. She vanished in Gloucester back in nineteen sixty eight, waiting at a bus stop in the snow he'd worked at a cafe that Fred West was a regular customer of a cafe where he'd done building work down in the cellar for more than fifty years, her family has wondered if she was one of his. In twenty twenty one, police excavated that cafe cellar searching for her. After weeks of careful work, they found no human remains, nothing that brought her home. So Mary Bastholm is still out there, somewhere, still fifteen years old in every photo her family has still waiting, and she may not be the only one.

12:30 Police have always believed the true number of victims could be higher than the twelve week and name. So that's the weight of this one. Twelve we can name at least one more. The ground won't give back. Two killers and only one of them ever stood in a courtroom. Say their names anyway, Anne, Rena, Charmaine, Linda, Carol, Anne, Lucy Terrez, Shirley Hubbard, Juanita, Shirley Robinson, Alison, Heather, and Mary, wherever you are, somebody has to a few honest notes for the record. Fred West was charged with twelve murders but was never tried or convicted of any of them.

13:11 He died by suicide before his trial, so legally those remain charges. Rose West was convicted by a jury of ten murders in nineteen ninety five and has exhausted her appeals. She has always maintained her innocence, and we report her conviction as the finding of the court, not as something she has ever admitted. Investigators in many who've studied the case believe the couple killed more people than the twelve identified, but any further victims remain unproven. Exact dates and the precise ages of some victims very slightly across sources. Mary Bastholm has never been confirmed as a victim of the wests. She remains a missing person, and the twenty twenty one search of the cafe in Gloucester found no human remains.

13:53 We've named what we're confident of and flagged what we're not. That's Crown versus Colony. Day two Tomorrow. We stay in England and meet a man who looked like nobody at all, a mild, soft spoken civil servant who lived alone, who killed quiet, lonely men for company, and who kept the bodies in his own home until the smell, and the drains finally gave him away. Dennis Nilson, the man some called the British Jeffrey Dahmer tomorrow on Daily Crime and Justice. If this episode meant something to you, do me a favor and share it. Tell a friend we're doing the UK's worst all week and send them this. One word of mouth is genuinely how this show finds new ears and it costs you nothing. And if you're listening on Spotify, drop a comment down there today. Instead of telling me your theory, just tell me one of those names you'd never heard before tonight. Say it back to me. That's the whole point of doing this. Wherever else you listen on YouTube or anywhere else, a rating helps more people find us. I'm Garrett Fisher. This has been Daily Crime and Justice, an ordinary house, an ordinary street and twelve people who deserve to grow old. We said their names, will say them again. Do better