Inside Fred & Rose West’s sordid house of horrors where kids slept above dead bodies & were made to do the unthinkable

Published on July 26, 2025 at 09:26 AM

A FORGOTTEN interview with the son of evil serial killers Fred and Rose West has revealed the torture he suffered at the hands of his parents.

This includes sleeping above the bodies of their victims buried under the cellar.

Mugshots of Fred and Rose West.
Mugshots of evil killers Fred and Rose West, who were arrested in 1994
House slated for demolition in Gloucester.
The Wests’ ‘house of horrors’ in Cromwell Street, Gloucester
Basement of 25 Cromwell Street with graffiti and damaged walls.
The victims were found buried in the creepy cellar

The previously unpublished accounts of Barry West give a harrowing insight into what it was like growing up in Britain’s House of Horrors.

and between them committed at least 12 murders of girls and young women between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire.

In 1994 the couple were arrested and charged - with Fred taking his own life the following January in , while Rose was sentenced to 10 life terms with a whole life order.

Journalist and author Howard Sounes has shared his unearthed interview with Barry, two years before he died of an overdose in 2020, aged 40, for the first time.

“My dad was a solid monster,” Barry told Sounes, reports The Mirror .

“But she [Rose] was a complete psycho. That’s what people don’t know: My mum was, child abuse-wise, the main person.

“My mum was completely sick in the head. She beat me way more than my dad did, and enjoyed it, absolutely enjoyed it.”

The West children were made to sleep in the cellar of the family’s home in Cromwell Street, Gloucester, under which they buried many of their victims.

Sometimes they were strapped to their beds - and Rose wore a the cellar keys around her neck like a prison guard.

The evil mum would regularly snap and lash out - hitting and slapping, as well as stabbing and strangling her kids.

Her weapon of choice was often a novelty giant wooden spoon, which she’d wield like a baseball bat.

Barry told Sounes his nose is “on a slant” due to the amount of times Rose broke it, and has “massive scars” on the back of his head where he was struck over and over again.

He went on to describe the “intense enjoyment” his mum got out of “beating the s*** out of me”.

Barry recalls how one Day he hid some sprouts in a tissue on the back of a chair, and when Rose found them days later she forced him to eat the rotting vegetables.

He said she put her hand over his mouth and made him swallow his own sick.

Barry and his brothers were forced to grow their hair long and wore their sisters’ hand-me-downs to school - while their sisters were made to cut their hair short and wear boys’ shoes.

He said he and all his siblings had speech impediments growing up, a sign of child abuse.

Barry would get his “face punched in” at school every day, but was scared to go home.

He recalled how Fred would constantly talk about sex in front of his kids and about wanting to take his daughters’ virginity, as well as the family tradition of incest, and sex with animals.

Still image of Rose and Fred West from a documentary.
The Wests forced their kids to sleep in the cellar
Photo of Fred and Rosemary West.
Rose took joy in beating her children
Police excavating a garden.
Police digging up the garden at the property in Gloucester, where their victims were buried

Fred’s main ambition was to see Rose mounted by a bull.

Barry said he was forced into sexual situations with his mum aged eight or nine.

The kids were often forced to make phone bookings for “Mandy” - Rose’s prostitute alias, and Barry was even offered as an extra for clients.

A “giant man” became a regular who would rape Barry at the house.

He said the children were even made to watch homemade porn featuring their mum and she kept different underwear in labelled jars for each client.

There is a chance, according to some reports, that Fred was not Barry’s biological father at all, and he was the product of an incestuous relationship between Rose and her own dad Bill Letts.

He had allegedly abused her since she was a child, and regularly visited the Cromwell Street house, according to Rose’s notes from prison.

The Wests’ murder victims were usually attacked and killed, then often dismembered in the family bathroom.

Most of their children maintained they had no idea what was going on.

One child, who Sounes does not identify, however, claimed years later they were locked in a cupboard under the stairs and could hear shouting and screaming.

When they came out, fresh concrete had been poured in the cellar, they claimed.

Barry said the children didn’t run away because they considered their dad “like God” who would “find you”.

His older sister Heather vanished aged 16 in 1987 after saying she wanted to leave the house - before later being found dismembered under the patio.

It was a long-running family “joke” that Heather was buried in the garden which became a sick reality when diggers later moved in.

However, Barry recalled how he once tried to kill Fred with a screwdriver when he was 11, but his dad just laughed at him.

But they did get some revenge on Rose by banding together as she came at them with the wooden spoon.

It was when the police had begun into the Wests had begun and just before the children were put into care.

They piled on top of their mum and she hit them until she was “knackered” and then “broke down”, with Barry saying it was the first time they “saw weakness”.

Demolition of Fred and Rose West's former home.
The house was eventually demolished
Photo of Fred and Rosemary West in 1994.
Fred took his own life in prison prior to being sentenced and Rose continues to serve a whole life order
Collage of black and white photos of women and a child.
Ten of the West’s young victims

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