Sir Trevor looks to get the real story
Fred and Rose West: The Real Story with Trevor Mcdonald
STV, 9pm
IN 1994, police searched a family home in a rough street in Gloucester, looking for the remains of Fred and Rosemary West’s eldest child, Heather. What they found at 25 Cromwell Street was a warren of a house from which Rose worked as a prostitute and which had been sub-divided into rented bedsits by Fred. Eventually, police excavations unearthed a series of horrifying discoveries — dismembered female bodies in the basement and under the patio.
It became known as the “House of Horrors”.
Among the remains were those of Heather, strangled seven years earlier when, aged 16, she had tried to run away from home to avoid Fred’s predatory sexual advances.
Over the course of the previous 14 years, Fred, it emerged, had committed at least a dozen more murders — the majority with Rose, his second wife.
The Cromwell Street victims — all female — were lodgers, nannies, students, hitch-hikers, runaways.
They were subjected to brutal sexual assaults by Fred, and often Rose as well. Some were mutilated; many were decapitated.
Fred, it also came to light, had committed at least two further murders alone, while Rose was responsible for killing Fred’s stepdaughter Charmaine from his first marriage to Rena, who was also one of Fred’s early victims.
Rose and Fred had eight children during their marriage, but none of them had an inkling that their home held such gory secrets.
Fred admitted to this monstrous catalogue of crimes, claiming he’d acted alone. He committed suicide on New Year’s Day 1995, in his cell at Birmingham Prison, where he was being held on remand.
Rose has consistently professed her innocence, but the jury at her trial in November that year did not believe her. Convicted of 10 murders, she was sentenced to life imprisonment with a later order from the Home Secretary that she should never be released.
Fred and Rose West were virtually unique in British criminal history in that they loved and killed together as husband and wife, and the crimes of the Gloucester couple were so heinous that they appalled and transfixed the world.
“Coming back to this story 25 years later, it’s still as shocking as it ever was, if not more so”, says Sir Trevor Mcdonald, the host of this brand-new and powerful documentary about the Wests.
The film features exclusive interviews and insights, with contributors including former Cromwell Street lodger Jayne Hamer who describes hearing screams from the cellar.
We also hear from families of murder victims, including two sisters of one of the victims, Juanita Mott, in their first documentary interview.
Sir Trevor asks the key questions: how did these crimes go undetected for so long, and what role did Rose West play?