The Chilling Story Behind Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story

Time​ Magazine

14-05-2025

F red & Rose West: A British Horror Story focuses on the dark true story of two married serial killers who abused, raped, and murdered several young women and girls, including their own children, in the Gloucester area between 1967 and 1987.
Fred and Rose West were arrested in 1994, after police got a search warrant to excavate their property. Fred West, who was charged with 12 counts of murder, killed himself in prison in 1995 before he could stand trial. Rose West is currently serving a life sentence after being convicted on 10 murder charges.
The documentary series, out on Netflix, features interviews with Fred West's lawyer, law enforcement involved, and journalists who covered the case, which shocked the nation in the '90s. Over three episodes, recently discovered recordings of Fred's interviews with police make an already grisly story even more lurid. Here are some of the most shocking details.
Discovering Fred and Rose West's appalling child abuse
Fred and Rose West had 10 children, and the documentary starts with police discovering the remains of their daughter Heather West at their home. Heather had been missing since 1987, and in the years after she disappeared, her parents' stories about her whereabouts constantly changed. In February 1994, her remains were found beneath the patio of the rear garden of the West's home. Fred West was arrested and admitted he had killed Heather in interviews with Gloucester police.
'I never intended to hurt Heather at all. All I wanted to do was persuade her to stay at home,' he says in a recording shared in the series.
The forceful way he killed Heather suggests otherwise. West dismembered his daughter with a bread knife and he describes taking a piece of electric flex and tying it around her neck to make sure she was dead.
John Fitzgerald, a government advisor for child protection who was involved with the West's case, says in the documentary that the children of Fred and Rose West endured 'appalling abuse' from their parents. Police recordings reveal their daughter Mae saying that Fred sexually abused her and Heather on a daily basis. When police asked for Fred West's reaction to the allegations, he said 'no comment.'
The documentary features archival footage of their eldest son Stephen West saying, 'We felt a lot happier to be at school where we felt safe. It was a better place to be than to be at home.'
Stephen said Rose would often lose her temper. 'Once she started hitting us, I felt she found it hard to stop.'
Stephen said a girlfriend encouraged him to speak up at one point, but that he and the rest of the children were afraid that if they told the truth about what was going on at home, they would be split up by child protection authorities.
When police began investigating the Wests over reports of child abuse, several of their children said the running joke in the family was that if they misbehaved, they would end up under the patio like Heather.
'These murders would never have come to light if it wasn't for the children of the Wests saying they had a sister under the patio,' Fitzgerald says in the documentary. 'They were brave enough to speak up.'
Experts on the case suggest that there may also be more victims that are unknown. In one recording shared in the series, West says, 'I have not and still not told you the whole truth.'
What recently discovered police recordings reveal
Fred West, who pursued Rose in 1969 when he was 27 and she was 15, said he called the shots in their marriage. 'I trained Rose to what I wanted. That is why our marriage worked out so well…she just blended into my way of living,' West says in a police recording.
At Fred's urging, Rose began engaging in sex work at their home. Liz Agius, a former neighbor, says in the doc that Rose asked her once how she felt about her being a prostitute, and Agius told her that it was none of her business. Agius said Rose told her that Fred bugged the bedroom so that he could listen in from the room next door.
'I had to go out with this bloke I didn't like and climb into his bed and make love all night and come home in the morning,' Rose can be heard saying in a recording. 'I am almost completely brainwashed.'
Beginning in 1967, Fred abducted, raped, and killed at least 12 young women, and Rose was convicted of 10 murders that date back to the early 1970s. Caroline Owens, a former nanny for the West family in 1972, describes in the series how Fred invited her to join a 'sex circle' between him and Rose. One day, she remembers blacking out and waking up to find herself blindfolded, with her hands tied behind her back and a gag in her mouth on a mattress on the floor. 'That's when the sexual assault started,' Owens says. She thought Fred West was going to kill her, but managed to escape.
Fred West called her story 'absolute rubbish' in an interview with police.
Another woman, Shirley Robinson, had an affair with Fred West and found out that she was carrying his child. When she threatened to tell Rose, who was in the hospital recovering after giving birth herself, Fred killed her. He explains it plainly in a police recording: 'I just smacked her straight in the jaw, and she went straight on the floor…And then I went and got a piece of flex and tied it 'round her neck.'
The documentary also reveals the story of Alison Chambers, who had run away from home. In the series, her sister Dezra Chambers reads a May 26, 1979, letter her mother received from Alison saying that she was living with the Wests and looking after their children. A few months later, she went missing, and her remains were found at the Wests' residence.
How the horrific story of Fred and Rose West is felt today
The documentary ends with a judge sentencing Rose to life in prison. Archival news coverage from the time describe the Wests as one of the most notorious serial killers in Britain's history.
The series does not center the West's living children, because they are not on speaking terms with each other today.
As the eldest Stephen told the Mail Online, 'I don't speak to my siblings and there are no large happy family get-togethers,' he said. 'Too much has gone on. It's probably too painful for us.'
Philip Davis, the husband of Stephen's older sister Anne-Marie Davis, concurred, explaining to the Mail Online 'Every few years the case is back in the media, like now with this new documentary, and the public gets interested again but it's the children who live with the pain of what happened on a daily basis.'
In the series, it's the relatives of the West's victims who get the last word. Belinda Mott, whose sister Juanita Mott's remains were found in the Wests' cellar, is seen visiting her sister's tombstone. 'This is why I say to my children, every single time I say good night or goodbye, I always say 'I love you' because you never know when [it's] the last time,' she says.
Dezra Chambers says that talking about her sister Alison was cathartic. She had gotten so used to compartmentalizing the crime, she says, 'so I've never really worked through it."
"This, what I'm doing now, I think it's for Alison, mostly for Alison, but also for me so that I can have a bit of closure," she says. "Because I don't have that at the moment.'