Fred West’s Last Words to His Wife Rose Proved Their Motive in Killing a Dozen Women—Read His Chilling Statement Here
He and his wife were the most popular killers in Britain’s history. The murders of Fred and Rose West are being reexamined in Netflix‘s newest documentary Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story.
Fred and Rose met when she was 15 and he enticed her with his dangerous sex escapades. Over the course of their marriage, they targeted young, vulnerable women who frequented local children’s homes and took them into their house at 25 Cromwell St, where they physically and sexually tortured them. Among the victims are Shirley Hubbard, 15, Carol Ann Cooper, 15, Alison Chambers, 16, Shirley Robinson, 18, Juanita Mott, 18, Anne McFall, 18, Lynda Gough, 19, Theresa Siegnethaler, 21, Lucy Partington, 21, and even their 16-year-old daughter Heather.
The string of murders eventually found its end when Det Con Hazel Savage, who heard about a West “family joke”, where he children told to social workers, that the couple’s missing daughter was “under the patio.” A police investigation assumed, and Fred admitted to the twelve murders. He was charged with murder but never made it to trail.
How did Fred West die?
Fred West died by suicide before his trial. He was being held in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham.
One of the victim’s mothers Joan Owen, 52, told The Independent when the news broke: “This is the best news I’ve heard for a long time. After all the evil things he did, this must be the only good thing he ever did.”
Inmate Stephen Palmer said that Fred was “detested by all the other inmates. Every thug in the place was dying to get his hands on him. He walked passed his cell every day, and recounted, “The first time I plucked up courage to speak to him, I asked him how he was and he just looked up at me at with an icy grin and said, `Go away’. He smiled like a maniac, and then continued polishing his boots.”
West’s brother also died by suicide in the jail where he was. He partook in some of the crimes and raped some of the victims.
After his death, letters were found in his cell, including one that was addressed to Rose. Dated two weeks before his body was found, it read, “To Rose, as in life as in death. Our love will never die. Rose, I will live for ever in heaven. I will wait for you, darling, so please come to me . . . You know I love you only and you love me only . . . And you will become a widow. I love you darling.”
The officers who found his body described West as a very polite man and “happy-go-lucky.” The suicide had come like “a bolt out of the blue.” Meanwhile, his wife Rose is still serving a life sentence in prison.
