Lucy was waiting for the last bus home after spending the afternoon at a good friend's house. It was Christmas and the 21-year-old student had returned to the city a few days ago to see her family. Suddenly, a car stopped next to her and a very kind couple invited her to get in to take her to her destination. It was too cold and, furthermore, it was too late, they told her to convince her.
The young woman accepted without knowing that the intentions of those strangers were most perverse. Lucy's body was found dismembered and found in the West couple's basement twenty years later. The authors were Fred and Rosemary, the owners of the well-known Gloucester House of Horrors, a place where for two decades the most vile crimes and rapes known were perpetrated. Including those of their own daughters.
Frederick Walter Stephen West was born on September 29, 1941 in the small English town of Much Marcle, where his working-class family was dedicated to farming and had a history of incest as a common and normalized practice among its members. Furthermore, it seems that his mother also abused him and, in turn, one of his sisters.
Those incestuous practices continued until Fred left home. In fact, before becoming independent, the father recommended that he do the same with his own daughters. Of course, he also urged him to be discreet and to hide it. That situation led Fred to develop a series of sexual paraphilias where pornography, violence and sadism were the main ingredients.
At the age of 21 he married Catherine Costello, known as Rena in the world of prostitution, with whom he had a daughter, Anne Marie, and with whom he adopted Charmaine Carol, daughter of Rena's first marriage. However, the couple, who lived in Coatbridge, separated shortly after the humiliation, humiliation and beatings suffered at the hands of Fred.
During that time, Fred met another young woman, Anne McFall, with whom he had a romantic affair, but she became pregnant. The new situation made the ice cream man extremely angry, who did not want more children, and he decided to kill her. To dispose of the body he buried her remains in a meadow near Much Marcle. Meanwhile, the couple's daughters were sent to shelters.
In 1968, the murderer met the one who would become an accomplice and part of all his crimes, Rosemary Letts, a 15-year-old prostitute. The minor shared with Fred her interest in pornography, extreme sexual practices and perversions of all kinds.
After moving in together in October 1970, Fred and Rosemary became parents to their first daughter, Heather. But the girl, since her birth, suffered physical abuse from her parents. One of the witnesses to those beatings was Charmaine, Fred's adopted daughter, who was spending time with them.
The girl's reaction to that horror led her father to make a decision: kill her to prevent her from spilling her tongue. Once the crime was committed, he buried her in the same place where he had deposited Anne McFall, her first victim, some time before. Weeks later, her ex-wife Rena came looking for Heather Anne, worried that she had not heard from the girl. Fred also killed her and buried her next to her little girl.
Two years later, the Wests had their second daughter named Mae and, from there, seven more children arrived, several of them the product of the sexual relations maintained by Rosemary with her clients while she was a prostitute. Given the new family situation, they moved to number 25 Cromwell Street, the so-called House of Horrors.
On the second floor they built Rose's Room, a room where the woman practiced prostitution and which had a peephole so that Fred wouldn't miss any details of what was happening inside. As for the children, they were always under the care of a nanny, neighbors, and girls who were convinced to join their sexual practices.
One of them was Caroline Roberts, 17, who was drugged and raped, but was able to escape. When the teenager reported the facts, the judge only sentenced the couple to pay a €50 fine under the premise that “we would not do them any good by sending them to jail.” That only increased her feeling of impunity.
The next victim was Anne Marie, the eldest daughter from Fred's first marriage, who at the age of eight began to be systematically raped by her father with the help of Rosemary. She even got pregnant, but she lost the baby.
Furthermore, all the children were forced to watch both pornographic videos and photographs (some starring their mother) and educated under the premise that the world was hostile and that “only your family will protect you.”
On the other hand, during the following years, the Wests rented rooms in the house to help pay the mortgage, so many young girls with few resources, who had run away from home and had no one, ended up there.
Many of them never came out and ended up buried in the garden after being raped and mutilated. Those who had better luck never reported it. Of the nine disappearances in the area, two of them occurred after assaulting the girls in the middle of the street.
In 1987, Fred determined to kill his eldest daughter Heather. The girl was beginning to cause problems and was beginning to be a hindrance to continuing with her aberrant practices. One day, he took her down to the basement, where they had built a torture room, and after tying and gagging her, he raped her in front of Rosemary. Later, the young woman was murdered and buried in the garden.
In August 1992, Anne Marie, suffocated by the abuse, decided to tell a friend who, after confessing it to her mother, reported it to the authorities. Investigators arrested the couple and accused Fred of rape and child cruelty, while Rosemary of complicity in the crimes.
During the investigation, police discovered that one of the daughters, Heather, was missing, and that her siblings reported that their father had told them she was “in the basement.” That made the agents suspicious, who requested a court order to search the property. During the inspection they found human remains in the garden, including those of Heather and nine other women.
Fred confessed to the crimes, although he denied that his wife was involved. The murderer decided to put all the crimes behind him. However, the evidence also pointed to Rosemary. When the case came to light, public opinion exploded against the police, because for twenty years no one was able to link the disappearances in Gloucester or investigate them.
But not only that, no one who was in contact with the West children was alarmed to see them malnourished, dirty and in deplorable conditions, they did not even pay attention to the bruises they had on their bodies or gave greater importance to the comments they made. about sexual relations at home. How was it possible?
On January 1, 1995, the ice cream man decided to take his own life by hanging himself in his cell, where he was awaiting trial for twelve murders: Fred had made a rope from pieces of a sheet. He knew that the prison law would be implacable with him. For her part, Rosemary West was sentenced to life in prison for nine murders.
A year later and, faced with the avalanche of curious people who made a pilgrimage to the Gloucester House of Horrors to see with their own eyes the place of the aberrations, and even take some souvenirs, the city council decided to demolish it and reduce it to ashes.
From that moment on, the house of infamy became a public path, a passage between streets, where the only thing that remains is the worst of the memories of the black British chronicle.
