STEPHEN WRIGHT: What Happened To Fred And Rose West s Children

For some three decades, Barry West had tried to escape the ghosts of his childhood.

As a schoolboy, link palsu he had been given a new identity and moved to a different part of the country - a place of safety - to help him bury the nightmare of his upbringing.

But the odds were stacked against him. And when his body was discovered slumped over a table by a mental health support worker, it seemed almost inevitable. He'd suffered for years from post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and long-term drug addiction.

Death at the age of 40 would have been a release from the horrors he witnessed as a child at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the notorious address where his parents Fred and Rose West slaughtered nine girls and young women including Barry's older sister Heather.

His passing from an overdose in supported living accommodation was not a violent end like those of the poor souls who suffered at the hands of his parents.

But it marked yet another tragedy in one of Britain's most shocking homicide cases.

It is 30 years ago this month that the West murders first came to light. On Thursday, February 24, 1994, police turned up at Cromwell Street with a warrant to search the garden for Heather's body. Two days later, they unearthed a human bone.




The West family including all their children with Rose, far left, and Fred third from right

I reported on the case extensively for the Mail - from those early days as more and more bodies were being discovered, through to the trial of mother-of-eight Rose at Winchester Crown Court in the Autumn of 1995. Her co-killer Fred had taken his life in a Birmingham jail on New Year's Day that year, mistakenly believing his death would spare her prison.

I sat through every day of Rose's seven-week trial. She was convicted of ten murders and told she would die in jail. It was a case which, for me, redefined the meaning of the word 'evil'.

What the victims went through - how they were abused, tortured and raped before being killed and dismembered - was utterly terrifying.

Over the years, many books have been written about the West case and countless TV documentaries made. All have focused largely on the killers and those they slaughtered.

But there is another category of victim whose stories have not been reported so widely. These are the West children, brought up in the most depraved and dysfunctional family imaginable.

Before the discovery of Heather's butchered remains under the patio at Cromwell Street in February 1994 - the moment when the true horrors of the house started to unfold - the Wests' offspring suffered abhorrent sexual abuse, repeated physical beatings and shocking mental torment.




Barry West died in 2020 after years of depression and long-term drug addiction

It was not unusual for Fred to force them to watch video recordings of their prostitute mother (who worked under the name 'Mandy') having sex with customers upstairs. Three of her daughters were fathered by her customers.

Here was a home where, when Fred and Rose were not killing, life revolved around debauchery and sexual abuse. In evidence at Winchester that sent a chill down my spine, a witness recalled hearing a child scream 'stop it Daddy' from another room in the middle of the night.

How could anyone raised in such a warped environment not be affected by it? How do you cope with being a child of arguably Britain's most evil couple ever?

Make no mistake, each of the West children were victims. As was Anne Marie West, Fred's daughter from his marriage to his first wife Rena. Nobody who heard her harrowing testimony when she gave evidence against her stepmother Rose will ever forget it.

Fred, who murdered Rena in 1971, repeatedly raped Anne Marie from the age of eight and made her pregnant when she was 15. And though she fled Cromwell Street, avoiding the fate of her dead half-sister Heather, her suffering did not stop.

Now 59, Anne Marie once gave a tearful, heartbreaking account of life with Fred and Rose in a TV documentary interview but she has not spoken publicly about her ordeal for many years.




Anne Marie was Fred's daughter from his first marriage

Her stepbrother Barry also managed to escape the family home, albeit as a result of social services' intervention, but he was never able to shake off his appalling past. Now his harrowing story and those of some of his other siblings, who have tried desperately to rebuild their lives, can be told.

Barry John West, born at Gloucester Maternity Hospital on June 16, 1980, was named after Barry Island in South Wales where the family went on day trips. The Wests' second son was just 15 when his mother went on trial for serial murder.

He was one of five West children - the others being Tara, Louise, Rosemary Junior and Lucyanna - taken into care in August 1992 after police and social services became concerned about their welfare.

The authorities acted after one child, who was being repeatedly abused by Fred, showed a school friend the wounds to her body after one particularly brutal assault.

Fred was charged and Rose was subsequently accused in court of aiding and abetting rape and buggery of a daughter. But the trial collapsed the following year after their children, in a sign of the complicated relationship between the abused and their abusers, declined to give evidence against them.




Stephen, the eldest son, and sister Mae, who is now a mother of two

Nevertheless, those five children would never return to Fred's and Rose's care, and police stepped up inquiries into the fate of Heather, who had disappeared aged 16 in 1987. In time, this led to that search of the Cromwell Street garden and the discovery of her body.

As Fred confessed to more and more murders, police switched attention to the cellar, where further butchered human remains were found.

Fred and Rose had targeted not only their own children, but live-in nannies, teenagers in care enticed to Cromwell Street with the promise of a bed and companionship, and young women lured into the couple's car — wrongly feeling secure because of Rose's presence in the front passenger seat.

Some were kept alive for just hours, others for days during which, bound and gagged, they endured repeated sexual assaults before being murdered. Police found hooks drilled into rafters in the cellar, their use not hard to imagine. At least one victim had had plastic tubes stuffed into her nostrils through masking tape wrapped around her face.

By the time all this emerged, Barry had been given a new identity (which for legal reasons we are not disclosing) and moved to a new home well away from Gloucester.