4 days ago
'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.
