BEAMING in front of the fake autumn foliage, hand rested lovingly on his wife’s shoulder, Fred and Rose West looked like any normal couple.
But lurking beneath their plastered-on smiles was a pure evil that continues to horrify the nation.
Thirty years ago, Fred and were arrested – bringing an end to a gruesome spree that lay undetected for decades.
But even as the pair sat in custody, no one was aware of the true horror buried beneath the garden and in the walls at 25 Cromwell Street.
Between them, Fred and Rose West raped, tortured and killed 12 women and girls between 1967 and 1987.
The killing spree came to light after the couple’s children discussed their sister Heather being “under the patio”;; with social workers.
At first the comments were dismissed as off-hand remarks but by February 1994, there was no trace of Heather and a warrant was obtained to search the family home in Gloucestershire.
Fred chillingly told officers his daughter was in the garden but they were searching in the wrong place.
He and Rose were arrested on suspicion of murder and began the grisly task of digging up the back garden.
Officers first found a femur, then the rest of Heather’s skeletal remains.
But the excavation led to the discovery of a second human bone that investigators confirmed did not belong to the couple’s eldest child.
Forced to confront evil itself, they spoke with Fred who admitted he had killed and buried 18-year-old lodger Shirley Robinson.
The killer then took police to the spot in the garden where he had also dumped the body of runaway 16-year-old Alison Chambers.
Police now had three bodies but with no evidence linking Rose, officers were forced to bail her back to the house of horrors.
Her husband meanwhile had already confessed to the three murders – with a fourth body now uncovered.
On March 4, 1994, Fred passed a handwritten note to Detective Superintendent Bennett that read: “I, Frederick West, authorise my solicitor, Howard Ogden, to advise Superintendent Bennett that I wish to admit to a further (approx) nine killings expressly Charmaine, Rena, Lynda Gough and others to be identified.”;;
It was clear police were dealing with a depraved maniac – but they hadn’t even scratched the surface of what really went on behind the doors of 25 Cromwell Street.
Fred and Rose Letts met in 1969 shortly after her 15th birthday but the match was doomed from the start after the teen’s parents forbade her from seeing the 27-year-old.
Despite their warnings, lovestruck Rose continued to meet up with Fred and they eventually moved in together.
She soon fell pregnant with Heather and helped look after Fred’s other two children from his previous , Charmaine and Anne Marie.
While her partner was serving time in jail for petty theft, Rose subjected the girls to mental and physical torture.
Charmaine bore the brunt of her stepmother’s brutal punishments and was murdered by Rose in June 1971 when she was just eight years old.
The youngster’s remains were stashed in the cellar – ready for Fred to bury in the garden upon his release from .
Charmaine’s mum, Catherine “Rena”;; West, was also killed shortly after, with her dismembered body placed in plastic bags and dumped in a field.
The twisted killers married the following year and Rose fell pregnant with their second child, Mae June West.
Obsessed with sex, the new mum began working as a prostitute from an upstairs room at 25 Cromwell Street – with Fred a willing voyeur to his wife’s encounters.
Three of Rose’s eight children were conceived by her clients, who had become test subjects in the killer’s sadistic sexual fantasies.
The vile couple sexually assaulted their kids in their torture chamber cellar as their depravity reached new heights.
Anne Marie was stripped, tied to a mattress, gagged and raped by Fred when she was just eight.
Afterwards, Rose told her: “Everybody does it to every girl. It’s a father’s job. Don’t worry and don’t saying anything to anybody”;;.
After Anne Marie ran away from home, Fred turned his sexual attentions towards Mae and Heather – threatening to “break them in”;;.
While Mae coped with the abuse by laughing it off, Heather turned to and became withdrawn.
She was murdered and dismembered after being subjected to years of vile abuse and torture at the hands of her parents.
As the couple’s bloodlust grew, they expanded their pool of victims by luring lodgers to stay at their house of horrors.
They also enticed young women into their car with Rose’s presence in the front seat used as a way to make them feel safe.
Once inside the home, they were bound, gagged, sexually assaulted and murdered.
The cellar became a second graveyard as Fred and Rose buried their mutilated bodies in every available corner of the room.
Lucy Partington, Juanita Mott and Shirley Hubbard were found within the bone-filled basement, while Therese Siegenthaler was hidden under concrete in front of a false fireplace.
Police also discovered the remains of lodger Lynda Gough, whose jaw was completely covered in tape to silence her screams, and Carol Ann Cooper.
The 15-year-old had been abducted from a bus stop, bound with surgical tape and suspended from wooden beams in the cellar before being strangled to death.
Fred and Rose’s sexual greed became their downfall when daughter Louise bravely confided in a friend that her father had raped her.
The startling admission led to the children being placed into foster care where one-by-one they began opening up on the gruesome goings on at 25 Cromwell Street.
They revealed how Fred would threaten them into silence by telling them they would be “buried under the patio”;; like Heather if they exposed him.
With a chilling cache of evidence, the couple were charged on June 30, 1994, and came face-to-face in court where Rose winced at her husband’s touch.
This rejection led to Fred taking his own life in prison in January 1995 while he was awaiting trial.
Rose denied the ten murders she was charged with but was unanimously convicted on all counts after a harrowing trial.
She is currently serving a whole life tariff in prison – meaning she will die behind bars.
25 Cromwell Street was demolished in 1996 – taking its dark secrets down with it.
But the ghosts of the past at the couple’s former den of depravity still haunt the nation – 30 years after the first bone was pulled from the earth in the back garden.
