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Daily Mirror
2 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Teen's face cocooned in tape so she could breathe but not scream before sick murder
*WARNING: GRAPHIC DETAILS* 30 years after Fred & Rose West, even the 'most seasoned detectives' are still haunted by the bizarre and twisted way they killed 15-year-old Shirley The remains of nine women were found in the Fred and Rose West's House of Horrors - each naked, missing body parts, and cut to pieces with a kitchen knife in the family bathtub. Some were buried with their hands and feet still bound. Others had gags and other sex act paraphernalia in their shallow graves. But all shared one tragic fact: They had suffered. Terribly. The nine victims of 25 Cromwell Street hadn't just been killed - they had been tortured, slaughtered and butchered. And today, 30 years on from Rose's conviction for 10 counts of murder and Fred's suicide, one find, in particular, still haunts even the most experienced of crime investigators. For detectives found one of the victims - later discovered to be 15-year-old Shirley Hubbard - had been kept alive, stripped and likely suspended from the cellar beam with her arms and legs outstretched.... all while her face was entirely cocooned. Her whole head had been covered in parcel tape, save for one small breathing tube inserted in her nostril. It would have been just enough to keep her alive for their sick sexual acts yet she would have been unable to either see or scream. "You can't understand the West case and understand how truly wicked Fred and Rose were until you understand what was actually done to these girls," says the leading expert, Howard Sounes. "This isn't Agatha Christie where girls get bumped over the head and they die. It's torture - sexual torture to death. Imagine the anguish of this girl, she can breathe but can't scream." Shirley's remains were found during the excavation of the cellar at Gloucester's 25 Cromwell Street following the police tip off and raid in 1994. The first body found had been that of Fred and Rose's own 16-year-old daughter Heather, who was in several pieces under the patio. She had disappeared in 1987, with the Wests telling their other children she had run away and cut contact. After police unearthed Heather's remains, they soon realised her murder was just the latest of many. The deaths at Cromwell Street dated back two decades to 1973. All the victims were vulnerable young women, either "lodgers or runaways". It's thought Fred and Rose often hunted the local bus stops looking for prey - and would lure girls with a promise of a safe ride home. Instead they became their "sexual playthings" - until they got bored. Howard Sounes covered the original story for the Mirror in 1994 and 1995 and went on to become a leading expert in the case, interviewing dozens of people connected to the case, and becoming the senior producer of this year's Netflix hit Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story. He recently gained access to more than 100 hours of police interview tapes from West's initial 1994 interrogations for his new book The Fred West Tapes, which is released this week and is being serialised in The Mirror. Of all the gruesome details of the Fred and Rose case he's heard and seen, it's the shocking crime scene photo of Shirley Hubbard's skull that remains one of the most horrifying. "I've seen the picture as the skull came out of the ground," he explains. "There was just a skull, hair and teeth left in a cocoon of parcel tape. Inserted into the parcel tape, up in to the nostril of this poor girl - or where the nose would have been - was a plastic tube. Like a home brewing tube." Fred actually admitted in the police interviews: "We had to keep them quiet so I wrapped them up in parcel tape", but he was less forthcoming about the details. According to Howard, however, the sight was enough to make "even the most seasoned detectives wince". "So he wrapped this poor girl's face in tape - which, by the way, he stole from work, because he was a habitual thief - and she was left naked, hands bound, feet bound, and probably hanging from the cellar beams," explains Howard. "Then this tube was inserted. So she can breathe and that prolongs the ordeal but she can't scream. And that's how she's found." No one can know how long the 15-year-old was kept alive. Once dead, she was decapitated and placed in a well in the floor under the fireplace, which was then covered in concrete. The Wests used the same technique for all five girls in the cellar. The youngest West children would later remember sleeping in that same cellar, which Fred also refers to as his "dungeon" on the interview tapes. They had to use a bucket for the toilet at night and empty it each morning. One child claimed they had been locked in the cupboard under the stairs one day when they heard screams before later seeing freshly-laid cement. It took weeks to identify Shirley using skull analysis. Experts painstakingly tried to recreate her likely facial features from the remaining bone structure and cross referenced them with missing girls from the time. Shirley had been born in Birmingham and was known as Shirley Lloyd, and Shirley Owen. Her parents split up when she was just two and she had ended up in care. But she had been trying to make the most of her life. She had changed her name to Hubbard was on school work experience placement at Debenhams in Worcester when she vanished on her way home on November 14, 1974. She was reported missing but police could find no trace - until their grisly find 20 years later. It is thought they lured her into their car while she was waiting at the bus stop. Shirley was the youngest for the victims found in Cromwell Street. (Fred's eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine was discovered under the floor of their previous address). While others may have escaped the exact same fate, almost all show signs of possible torture. Each set of dismembered remains was missing several body parts. "It was fingers and toes, but also large bones like kneecaps, sections of vertebrae," explains Howard. "There were dozens of body parts missing and no one really knows why. "The pathologist said you don't lose these body parts. They are being cut off. Yet we don't know if that's before or after death. Is he cutting them off as mementos? Or for torture? And where are they? Because there's dozens of missing bones and they have never been found." In another shocking case, it's believed the Wests may have kept one victim - 21-year-old Exeter University student Lucy Partington - alive for up to six days. She had disappeared on December 27 and on January 3 Fred went to A&E with a fresh knife cut to his hand. A knife was later discovered in Lucy's grave, suggesting he had accidentally dropped it in there after he cut himself. Given the timing of his hospital trip, police believe the Medieval English student may have been held hostage over the New Year holidays. "It's an aspect of the case that is seldom discussed because it is so chilling," says Howard. Lucy was from a middle-class family and had been to see her friend in Cheltenham the night she went missing. Lucy was "renowned for being sensible" according to friends. But her family later realised that she would likely have been waiting for a bus at a stop where the streetlights were out because of a miners' strike. It was also sleeting that night. So when the Wests pulled up in their grey Ford Popular with 'Vote Conservative' stickers on the back, they may have seemed respectable. Howard says in his new book: "Their son Steve West was a baby at this time and it is unlikely that he would have been left at home. The offer of a lift from a young family with a babe in arms may have seemed safe." It's a tactic the husband and wife are believed to have used multiple times. It's thought they then attacked their victims and took them to their "dungeon". Shirley Hubbard's makeshift cellar grave even had an extra grim nod to what was likely her fatal mistake. The fireplace in which she was buried had been covered with Marilyn Monroe wallpaper. It had the names of her films next to pictures from the movies. The words "Bus Stop" were positioned just above where her skull was found encased in concrete. Some of the other West victims had been closer to home - in fact they had rented one of their cut-price rooms on the top floor of their three-storey home. Fred and Rose had only been married less that year when they made their first kill - Lynda Gough, 18, a local fire officer's daughter and lodger, in April 1973. Another lodger was Shirley Anne Robinson, 18. She was missing two vertebrae, two ribs, 28 ankle bones and 42 of the 76 finger and toe bones. Nearby however were the remains of something else - her unborn child, believed to be Fred's and just a few weeks from full term. West was asked during the police interview about whether he derived pleasure from hurting his victims. While he had already confessed to multiple women dying at his home, he tried to maintain many of them were accidents. At one point he asked: "Are these people still alive when you remove [the body parts]?" To which he icily replies: "No comment on that." At another point in the interviews, he was asked the same question by another officer. Even though he admitted dismembering the bodies - in the family bathroom with a kitchen knife so as not to scratch the bath enamel - West seemed to find the suggestion he would deliberately torture someone as simply outrageous. "No, no. I couldn't hurt anybody like that," Fred told police. "I don't believe in suffering anyway. I mean, I couldn't torture anybody." He added: "Well, I mean ... If they were cut up, it was just their heads and legs. Nothing else took off." "That was Fred. He said these things in such a matter of fact manner," said Howard. "The Wests were never a normal couple. But they lived in a house, in the street, next to Marks and Spencer and a Seven-Day Adventist Church. Fred was that funny bloke who said hello to everyone. Rose was the slightly odd wife people avoided. But no one would ever have imagined they were mass murderers."
Daily Mirror
5 days ago
- Daily Mirror
'Girl, 13, said her brother made her pregnant - and thought it was normal'
Fred West was 19 when he got his own 13-year-old sister Kitty pregnant. Today schoolfriend Jean Korbi shares the most shocking part of the scandal: what they both said next KITTY West was just 13 when she confided in friends that she was pregnant. But it was not her boyfriend's. It was Fred's. Her brother Fred's. It was the same Fred West who would go on to become one half of the most notorious serial killer couple in recent history - a fiend who raped, killed and butchered young women for his own sexual kicks, then dismembered their bodies. But decade s before he and Rose West became infamous for their House of Horrors at 25 Cromwell Street, Fred was already heading down a very dark path...... Author, TV producer and former Mirror journalist Howard Sounes was first to cover the West murders for the Mirror in 1994 and went on to become a leading expert in the case. He recently conducted dozens of interviews and gained access to more than 100 hours of West's police interrogation recordings, for his new book, The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation. Here, in Day Two of our exclusive serialisation, he exposes the taboo family secrets that led to the making of the monster….. Adapted from The Fred West Tapes by Howard Sounes As a teenager Fred West was considered to be one of the 'handsomest' lads around. He was eyed as prime marriage material in a rural area where many girls aspired to marry young lest they be 'left on the shelf'. And yet, even from his earliest years there was a darkness within him. Foremost among his dark childhood secrets was the sad story of his sister Kitty, six years his junior. Their parents Walter and Daisy West were poor, semi-literate farm workers who lived by the seasons and could appear almost as ignorant as the beasts they tended. They lived in Herefordshire's village of Much Marcle, just half an hour by car from Gloucester, but a place lost in time with a sense of remoteness. There were eight children, two of whom died in infancy, leaving: Fred, John, Daisy, Doug, Kitty and Gwen. 'We were a very happy family ... Very close,' Fred told the police during the murder investigation in 1994, as revealed in the new transcripts. 'We all protected each other.' Few that knew them - like Kitty's schoolfriend Jean Korbi - would agree with that statement. In reality, Fred's mother wore a thick leather belt which she used to beat her children, a habit Rose West later adopted. His strict mum also banned girlfriends until he was 21, but his father offered different advice: 'Whatever you enjoy, do. And make sure you don't get caught doing it, you know?' Fred's daughter Mae later claimed: 'He [Dad] said it was a father's right to break his daughters in. According to him, that is what his father had done.' Speaking for the first time about her friend Kitty, Jean reveals the day she learned an awful secret. 'I'm pregnant,' Kitty, then 13, announced to a group of friends. They didn't know that Kitty had a boyfriend. 'Oh, it's not a boyfriend, me brother did it. Fred.' Fred, then 19, was eyed as quite the catch. 'He was one of the handsomest,' recalls Jean. 'He had a lovely smile, a nice wide smile, it lifted up his face. I had a schoolgirl crush on him..' But then she learned that same boy – that 'nice' boy – had made his younger sister pregnant. Jean thought the Wests a bit backward, but this was still a shock. 'I mean she [Kitty] was a bit Dolly Dimple,' says Jean. 'The whole family seemed a bit odd [but] I'd never heard of anything like incest, and then she proceeded to tell us how it was done, where it was done.' Kitty told them that she and Fred had sex in her bedroom, they did it 'lots of times'. She felt nervous at first. ''But Fred said because I'm his sister I wouldn't get pregnant'', Jean recalls her saying. Her friends suggested Kitty should have slapped Fred. 'She said, 'I wouldn't do that ... I quite like it', adds Jean. 'She seemed quite cool about it, 'It's normal, haven't you done it?' sort of thing.' Jean has never forgotten the conversation, adding: 'I remember it to this day, even where we were when she said it, because we were all in shock.' The story reached the local police, and in June 1961 a detective interviewed Kitty and West. 'Well, doesn't everyone do it?' West asked the officer. By the time West was brought before a judge, charged with incest, he pleaded not guilty, Kitty refused to testify and West walked free. The repercussions were significant. Kitty was expelled from school and had an abortion. She never got over it and died in 2006, haunted by her past. Also, Fred learned that he could commit a sexual offence and get away with it, even if the police became involved. Shortly after, he began dating a 14-year-old, who can't be named for legal reasons. Despite getting his own sister pregnant, he was still popular. '[ Fred ] was still liked,' says Jean. 'All the teenage girls, his age group, they were all drooling ... a lot of girls were after him.' When the new girlfriend turned 15, Fred pulled over while driving her home one day and attacked her. 'He pushed me on the bank and raped me,' the girl later told police. The girl felt numb. '[I] just didn't know what to say.' Not long after this Fred raped her for a second time, at a flat. But she didn't report the matter to the police until the murder investigation in 1994. Once more Fred escaped without repercussions. His 20s would only get darker still. He fell for Scottish teen Catherine 'Rena' Costello, already pregnant with another man's child, married her, went to Glasgow, left her to prostitute herself to help make ends meet - and got himself work driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van. In 1965 he was on his round when he ran over and killed three-year-old Harry Feeney. His family are still adamant that it was not an accident as police had believed at the time. But whether intentional or not, at just 24, Fred was now a killer, a rapist, and had almost fathered his sister's child. Two years later, his 18-year-old mistress Anne McFall, went missing while eight months pregnant. Her body - and the body of Fred's unborn baby - would not be found for 27 years. Once again it could have stopped there - but it didn't. It later emerged Fred confessed to his father. He told Walter he had buried Anne's body on the edge of the woods and even took him to the site. 'I couldn't go up there on me own at that time,' Fred later told his solicitor. "So he walked up there with me. He said, 'Look, son, I'm your father, I'm not going to turn you in. If you can live with it then I'll say nothing.'' Walter told his wife Daisy who then told his brother John: 'Freddy's killed the girl [Anne] and buried her in Kempley Woods!' No one however told the police. If they had, Anne McFall may have been his only victim. Instead, Fred remained at large. And then….he met Rose. Howard Sounes helped break the West story and coin the term 'House of Horrors' for the Mirror in 1994, becoming an expert on the story. He was also Senior Producer on the recent Netflix series, Fred & Rose West.
Daily Mirror
6 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Fred West's forgotten first victim, 3, he killed with ice cream van for 'thrill'
Police found nine butchered women at Fred and Rose West's House of Horrors. But Fred's first kill was actually a TODDLER. Today, the family break their 60-year silence..... IT'S been three decades since the victims of Fred and Rose West finally received some justice - three decades since West hanged himself in his jail cell and three decades since Rose was handed a whole life sentence. The serial killer murdered at least 12 people between 1967 and 1987 but incredibly that wasn't the first time he had had blood on his hands. West ran over and killed three-year-old Glaswegian Harry Feeney in an ice cream van, two years before his presumed first victim Anne McFall disappeared. The death was ruled an accident, but now speaking for the first time Harry's family are adamant it was deliberate. Author, TV producer and former Mirror journalist Howard Sounes was granted gained access to more than 100 hours of police interviews for his new book The Fred West Tapes:Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation. Here, in Day Two of our exclusive serialisation, he exposes the family secrets that led to the making of the monster….. Adapted from The Fred West Tapes by Howard Sounes: FRED West often lied in his police interviews. But some of his most colourful stories proved to be true. One of the most shocking was that of Harry Feeney. West was living in Glasgow with his first wife, Rena, when he got a job driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van, touring the estates. One of the areas he visited was Castlemilk where cheap new homes had been built since the slum clearances. He told police he befriended a three-year-old boy, a lad who regularly came to his van. But one day, when Fred was driving out of the cul-de-sac where the boy lived, he heard a dreadful sound. 'There was an almighty bang, and I stopped,' Fred told the police, as seen in these previously unseen in the newly-released 1994 interview transcripts. 'I was on top of his head, and it was his head that made the bang.' He looked under his van. 'I see that the child was lying underneath, under the back axle …' Fred continued. In the days after the incident on November 4, 1965, and again after police questioning in 1994, investigators decided Harry's death was most likely a tragic accident. But according to Harry's cousin Isabel Kirby - who was there that day - the boy's parents, labourer Peter Feeney and his wife Patsy, were convinced it was deliberate. Peter went to his grave believing Harry was Fred West's first victim. Isabel, now 72, recently told me the whole story for the first time. Young Harry had been playing with her brother Raymond, when West's ice cream van appeared. Seconds later there was panic. 'I saw people running, a lot of yelling and screaming,' says Isabel. 'It was wee Harry lying in the street.' Harry's family and friends maintained there had been no need for West to reverse - a reason they became convinced it was not an accident. 'He done it for the thrill of it,' says Isabel. 'He was just plain evil.' Fred was questioned at the time, and while he was never charged with a crime, he fled Glasgow and returned to his home village of Much Marcle, outside Gloucester. According to Isabel, who now lives in Canada, the family never forgot West's name. When Fred and Rose made national news in March 1994, Harry's father recognised him immediately. 'The first thing my Uncle Peter said was, 'That's the f**king bastard that done it to young Harry,'' says Isabel. 'He said, 'that f**king bastard murdered my boy'.' It was by no means West's first scandal. He was born in 1941 and grew up to become one of the 'most handsome', eligible, 'charming' and popular bachelors in his rural area. But even as a boy Frederick Walter Stephen West had an innate darkness within him. His parents Walter and Daisy West were poor, semi-literate farm workers who lived by the seasons and could appear almost as ignorant as the beasts they tended. There were eight children, two of whom died in infancy, leaving: Fred, John, Daisy, Doug, Kitty and Gwen. 'We were a very happy family ... Very close,' Fred told the police during the murder investigation in 1994, as revealed in the new transcripts. 'We all protected each other.' Few that knew them - like Kitty's schoolfriend Jean Korbi - would agree with that statement. In reality, Fred's mother wore a thick leather belt which she used to beat her children, a habit Rose West later adopted. His strict mum also banned girlfriends until he was 21, but his father offered different advice: 'Whatever you enjoy, do. And make sure you don't get caught doing it, you know?' Fred's daughter May later claimed: 'He [Dad] said it was a father's right to break his daughters in. According to him, that is what his father had done.' Speaking for the first time about her friend Kitty, Jean reveals the day she learned an awful secret. 'I'm pregnant,' Kitty, then 13, announced to a group of friends. They didn't know that Kitty had a boyfriend. 'Oh, it's not a boyfriend, me brother did it. Fred.' Fred, then 19, was eyed as prime marriage material in the rural area. 'He was one of the handsomest,' recalls Jean. 'He had a lovely smile, a nice wide smile, it lifted up his face. I had a schoolgirl crush on him.' But then she learned that same boy – that 'nice' boy – had made his younger sister pregnant. Jean thought the Wests a bit backward, but this was still a shock. 'I mean she [Kitty] was a bit Dolly Dimple,' says Jean. 'The whole family seemed a bit odd [but] I'd never heard of anything like incest, and then she proceeded to tell us how it was done, where it was done.' Kitty told them that she and Fred had sex in her bedroom, they did it 'lots of times'. She felt nervous at first. ''But Fred said because I'm his sister I wouldn't get pregnant'', Jean recalls her saying. Her friends suggested Kitty should have slapped Fred. 'She said, 'I wouldn't do that ... I quite like it', adds Jean. 'She seemed quite cool about it, 'It's normal, haven't you done it?' sort of thing.' Jean never forgot the conversation, adding: 'I remember it to this day, even where we were when she said it, because we were all in shock.' The story reached the local police, and in June 1961 a detective interviewed Kitty and West. 'Well, doesn't everyone do it?' West asked the officer. By the time West was brought before a judge, charged with incest, he pleaded not guilty, Kitty refused to testify and West walked free. The repercussions were significant. Kitty was expelled from school and had an abortion. She never got over it and died in 2006, haunted by her past. Also, Fred learned that he could commit a sexual offence and get away with it, even if the police became involved. Shortly after, he began dating a 14-year-old, who can't be named for legal reasons. Despite getting his own sister pregnant, he was still popular. '[Fred] was still liked,' says Jean. 'All the teenage girls, his age group, they were all drooling ... a lot of girls were after him.' When the new girlfriend turned 15, Fred pulled over while driving her home one day and attacked her. 'He pushed me on the bank and raped me,' the girl later told police. The girl felt numb. '[I] just didn't know what to say.' Not long after this Fred raped her for a second time, at a flat. But she didn't report the matter to the police until the murder investigation in 1994. Once more Fred escaped without repercussions. His 20s would only get darker still. He fell for Scottish teen Catherine 'Rena' Costello, already pregnant with another man's child, married her, went to Glasgow, left her to prostitute herself to help make ends meet - and got himself work driving a Mr Whippy ice cream van. When he killed young Harry Feeney, Fred was just 24. Whether intentional or not, he was now a killer, a rapist, and had almost fathered his sister's child. Two years later, his 18-year-old mistress Anne McFall, went missing while eight months pregnant. Her body - and the body of Fred's unborn baby - would not be found for 27 years. Once again it could have stopped there - but it didn't. It later emerged Fred confessed to his father. He told Walter he had buried Anne's body on the edge of the woods and even took him to the site. 'I couldn't go up there on me own at that time,' Fred later told his solicitor. "So he walked up there with me. He said, 'Look, son, I'm your father, I'm not going to turn you in. If you can live with it then I'll say nothing.'' Walter told his wife Daisy who then told his brother John: 'Freddy's killed the girl [Anne] and buried her in Kempley Woods!' No one however told the police. If they had, Anne McFall may have been his only victim. Instead, Fred remained at large. And then….he met Rose. Howard Sounes helped break the West story and coin the term 'House of Horrors' for the Mirror in 1994, becoming an expert on the story. He was also Senior Producer on the recent Netflix series, Fred & Rose West.
