Tenant tells of joking about bodies with House of Horrors monster
BY MARTIN FRICKER A FORMER tenant of Fred West joked with him that he “must have dead bodies down there” after watching him repeatedly go into his cellar.
Gill Brett, who lived at the infamous House of Horrors with the killer and his wife Rose, saw him carrying a “roll of carpet” down to the basement.
She has spoken out for the first time about what she witnessed inside the murder den in Cromwell Street, Gloucester.
Labourer West killed at least 12 young women, 10 with his second wife Rose, between 1967 and 1987.
Gill, who experts say was “lucky” to escape harm, lodged with the twisted couple in 1978 when she was 17.
She told the upcoming Unheard: The Fred and Rose West Tapes podcast of the bizarre goings-on inside their home.
They included the moment she joked to Fred that it looked like he was carrying a body out of his van.
She said: “He was moving something out of the van, carpet rolled up on his shoulder, coming out of the van going down the cellar.
“I said, ‘Bloody hell Fred, it’s a wonder you don’t have dead bodies down there. It was a joke. We never questioned why he was to and from the van and up and down the cellar.”
The victims’ bodies were typically buried in the cellar or garden.
At least eight of the murders involved the Wests’ sexual gratification and included rape, torture and mutilation.
Gill, 41, said the couple had an “open marriage” with Rose often having sex with two men. She added: “Sometimes there was two guys, screams, little yells, a bit of banging about.
“You could not imagine what we know to have happened now. I just thought, ‘Live and let live.’”
Brett said she only felt physically threatened once, when Fred’s brother John came to visit.
She said: “He pressed himself against me. He said, ‘What are we going to do with this one then, Fred?’ When I got out to my room I was shaking.”
John killed himself while on trial accused of raping two girls.
Fred West lived in Glasgow in the early 60s after marrying pregnant prostitute Rena Costello – who he later murdered.
He and Rose were arrested in 1994 and he admitted killing his daughter Heather. Police found her remains and two other women in the garden and six in his cellar.
Fred killed himself, aged 53, while awaiting trial for 12 counts of murder.
Rose, now 65, was convicted of 10 counts of murder in 1995.