My father Fred West was a monster but mum Rose was the one who beat us with a wooden spoon

Fred and Rose West could hardly be considered anything but the worst of parents. Their 16 year old daughter Heather met a gruesome end , strangled and dismembered in the family bath with a kitchen knife to avoid damaging the enamel, before being buried under the patio.

The remains of West’s eight year old stepdaughter Charmaine were found beneath their previous residence, her body kneecapped and dissected. Two of West’s pregnant lovers were discovered in unofficial graves, both just weeks away from full term.

Rena, West’s ex-wife, was found in a nearby field, while a runaway was interred under what used to be a paddling pool. Another woman was buried under the bathroom floor, and five more were located in the cellar – where the youngest West children slept.

Those who managed to survive life at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester didn’t consider themselves much luckier. Howard Sounes, the author who first broke the West story as a Mirror reporter in 1994 and is now the leading expert on the case, recently gained access to over 100 hours of Fred West’s previously unheard police interviews.

In the first part of our serialisation of his new book ‘The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred and Rose West Murder Investigation’, he shares his chilling, previously unpublished interview with West’s son Barry, revealing the true horrors of growing up in Britain’s infamous House of Horrors…., reports the Mirror.

Just eight when she was raped

Anna-Marie West was a mere eight years old when she was first raped by her father and stepmother. From then on, sexual abuse became a horrifyingly regular occurrence. She was bound to metal torture devices constructed by her builder father, Fred West, who insisted that such treatment was entirely normal.

Some of the West children were subjected to sexual exploitation not only by Fred and Rose but also by others. On one occasion, a few of them were permitted to attend their parents’ party, only to be sexually assaulted by inebriated men, allegedly with their parents’ endorsement.

Incest was ingrained in Fred’s behaviour, and child abuse was as commonplace as meals at 25 Cromwell Street. Yet, it was often Rose, rather than their father, who instilled the greatest fear in the West children.

Mum Rose was a brutal murderer

Rose, both mother and stepmother, has consistently denied all accusations against her for three decades. However, in November 1995, she was convicted on ten counts of murder committed between 1971 and 1987. The trial revealed copious evidence of her perpetrating severe sexual and physical assaults on children.

She subsequently became only the second woman, following Myra Hindley, to receive a Whole Life Order, ensuring she will never be released. Many of her children, like her son Barry, were sentenced to a lifetime of their own – unable to recover from the trauma inflicted by the Wests.

Barry grappled with mental health issues and drug use. Tragically, he passed away two years after recounting to me the full extent of the horrors endured within the House of Horrors.

New harrowing details

It’s only now that I can reveal the harrowing details of an interview never before shared. “My dad was a solid monster,” Barry confided to me, “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.”

In their youth, the West children endured nights locked in the cellar, sometimes strapped to their beds, with Rose acting as their jailer, the keys to their prison hanging around her neck.

The merest provocation would trigger Rose’s violent outbursts, which went beyond mere hitting and slapping to include stabbing and strangling her own offspring. She even wielded a novelty giant wooden spoon as a weapon.

Barry endured and survived – other children did not

Barry recounted the physical toll: “My nose is on a slant because of the amount of times she broke it,” he said. “She would use [the spoon] as a baseball bat to beat us. I’ve got massive scars on the back of my head from the amount of times she split my head open with it. She broke my arm, all sorta stuff. She had intense enjoyment in beating the s**t out of me… “

These traumatic experiences formed Barry’s earliest memories. He revealed: “She was just as sick as him. Her moods didn’t change. She used to hit us even on Christmas Day. She used to smack you straight in the mouth.”

One Christmas, Barry committed the cardinal sin of disliking Mum’s brussel sprouts. “I put them in a tissue and then hid them in the back of a chair,” he confessed. The sprouts were later discovered by Rose, decomposing. “She put them on the table, and she made me eat them,” he recounted. “[Then] she put her hand over my mouth and made me swallow my own sick. That’s the sort of s**t I had growing up. I don’t remember any present opening.”

House of horrors: 25 Cromwell Street

Life at Cromwell Street was devoid of joy for the children. Rose insisted on sending her daughters to school with cropped hair, dressed in boys’ shoes for their durability. She forced them to wash their hair with dish soap instead of shampoo and forbade the use of deodorant, leading to mockery from their peers.

The West boys fared no better, attending school in their sisters’ cast-offs and sporting long hair. Many developed squints and speech impediments, often signs of child mistreatment.

“When we was young, we all had speech impediments,” Barry revealed, “I got my face punched in every day I went to school….[I was] scared to go to school, scared to go home.”

Nowhere was safe

Home was not a sanctuary for Barry; his father was there too. The children once pooled their money to buy a £12 Zippo lighter for Father’s Day, even having it engraved. “He threw it across the room,” Barry remembered. “That was the kind of man he was.” And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

West’s depraved behaviour was laid bare as he openly discussed sexual matters in front of his children, expressing a desire to take his daughters’ virginity and boasting about the family’s history of incest and bestiality. His twisted aspiration – a notion so deranged it beggars belief – was to witness Rose being copulated with by a bull.

“[Dad] was such a disgusting man, he was vile,” Barry confided. Fred harboured intentions to defile his own daughters, and Barry alleged that from the tender age of “eight or nine”, he was coerced into sexual acts with his mother.

Rose was also prostitute ‘Mandy’

The West children were often roped into managing phone appointments for ‘Mandy’, the pseudonym their mother used while engaging in prostitution. It wasn’t long before Barry himself became part of the sordid offerings to clients.

Barry recounted a chilling episode where Rose, clad in her nightgown, instructed him to accompany her to her bedroom. “She said, ‘There’s a man in here and I want you to do exactly what he tells you to do, no matter what’,” Barry remembered. “[I] was just confused. I didn’t know what she was talking about. I walk in and there was a giant man in front of me.”

A regular client proceeded to rape Barry, marking the beginning of a series of horrific abuses. This individual continued to frequent the house, both to abuse Barry and engage in sexual relations with Rose. The mother even had a peculiar system of organising lingerie for each regular client, storing them in individually labelled jars.

Sick fantasies came to life

Moreover, West demanded the preservation of all spent contraceptives, purportedly to “artificially inseminate” their offspring. Barry also disclosed the harrowing detail that they were forced to watch pornographic videos featuring their mother.

Within the family, there were whispers that Barry might not have been West’s son but rather the result of an incestuous liaison between Rose and her father, Bill Letts. It was alleged that Bill had subjected Rose to abuse since her childhood, and according to notes penned by West in prison, Bill was a frequent visitor at Cromwell Street.

West claimed that one of his daughters once descended the stairs, complaining: “Grampy [is] going to sleep with me.” West recounted that Rose’s chilling response was: “He is not going to eat you, he is only going to f**k you. You’ll probably love it.” (Rose has consistently denied any wrongdoing despite her convictions for murder).

Young women lured to their deaths

Amidst the violence and torment, young women were lured to the house where they fell victim to attacks and murder, often dismembered by West in the family bathroom. The remains were typically found missing fingers, toes, and other body parts, prompting one psychologist to propose a possible cannibalistic aspect to the gruesome acts.

The eldest surviving child, Anna-Marie, was nearing nine years old when Lynda Gough, aged 19, met her end in 1973, marking the first of the nine infamous Cromwell Street murders. Over the following six years, eight more women, including some lodgers, vanished without a trace.

The remains of West’s first wife Rena, his pregnant lover Anne McFall, and his stepdaughter Charmaine were interred at different locations.

‘Dad was like a god’

Many of the children insisted they were oblivious to the horrors unfolding around them. Yet, years on, one child (who shall remain unnamed) disclosed that there were instances when they were confined to a cupboard beneath the stairs, overhearing the tumult of shouts and screams. Upon emerging, they would notice freshly laid concrete in the cellar.

Barry, who later grappled with severe psychological issues, questioned me, “Why didn’t we all run away?” He reflected on the control their father wielded over them: “I suppose that’s the hold he had, the power. My dad was like God. You couldn’t beat him. You couldn’t run away. He would find you.”

Haunted by their ordeal, Barry even considered patricide as a means to escape their suffering. “I tried stabbing him when I was eleven with a screwdriver. He just laughed at me,” he recounted. In a twist of fate, the younger siblings did exact some measure of retribution on Rose. Barry alleged that just before they were taken into care amid the police probe, they collectively retaliated when Rose attacked them with a wooden spoon.

Kids fight back

“I remember all my sisters jumping on top [of her], and we all sort of stood up [to her] and she was tired,” he claimed. “She was knackered. She hit us until [she] couldn’t hit us anymore. And that’s when she broke down. And I saw the weakness of her, and she was crying her eyes out…”

Overall, the children were well aware that they must not misbehave or break the West family’s code of silence. Heather, Barry’s elder sister, served as a stark warning to them all. She disappeared at the age of 16 in 1987 after expressing a desire to leave home. The children were led to believe she had moved away and severed ties, but it turned into a grim family ‘joke’: cross Fred and Rose and you’d end up like Heather – buried under the patio, precisely three paving stones up and nine across.

The ‘joke’ was eventually on Fred and Rose

Barry later recounted: “That was what was going to happen to all of us when we got old enough. If we didn’t turn out like him, we was against him. And if we was against him, we would have to go in the garden – under the patio. He made us understand that.”

Once the police caught wind of this ‘joke’, the excavators arrived. With that, the Wests’ long history of depravity was unearthed, never to be concealed again…