HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now this is my favorite type of story. This is my favorite type of story we cover here on Last Podcast because this is just the perfect... If you're getting ready to listen to the episode, go get yourself a big plate of spaghetti.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh that's nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just really sit down. I think what's important is that take your shoes and your socks off so you smell your feet.
BEN KISSEL
Why wouldn't ya?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
while you're eating a big old bunch of lumps of sausage in there and you don't know what kind of sausage it is. Just a big old meal and then you eat it all up. And also it's really great because it's such a comfort blanket scenario.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. It's a true crime show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because people fall asleep to true crime.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I know they do. Which is actually kind of offensive. I get a lot of Dms being like I've fallen asleep to your show. And I was like oh we worked really hard on that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, it's comforting. It's comforting to them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's something about the smile of Fred West that is so comforting.
MARCUS PARKS
Ugh.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god. Indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's like a graveyard, a tiny one inside of a skull.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that beautiful? Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
Hey hey.
BEN KISSEL
And hanging out with Henry who apparently wants the smile of Fred West which you can get, you can go to janky doctor number seven down the street here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and you can find someone to fuck up your teeth for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Very, very easily. But I also think it's appropriate that I work out five days a week but I have the body of Rose West.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice? Today's episode, it's Fred and Rose West, a couple for the ages.
MARCUS PARKS
We covered Fred and Rose West many years ago in just a single episode in which we gave a brief overview of their crimes as well as a small peek into what their motivations might have been.
BEN KISSEL
It's disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
But now almost a decade after Henry was so unfairly accused of eating a burrito in a hotel closet during recording-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm innocent!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly it was really bad. When we recorded I remember it distinctly because it was in December, I was shooting Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell. I was in a horrible hotel in Atlanta, that was before we had any form of budget.
BEN KISSEL
How could it be horrible? It was an extended stay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thing is that they wanted you to extend it to the grave.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they want you to commit suicide in there.
BEN KISSEL
How long is a divorce proceeding? Extended stay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Extended stay. And I was not eating a burrito, I just had very bad wifi connection. But today I'm gonna eat a burrito during the episode.
BEN KISSEL
Well I think that would be great. A nice bean burrito for Fred and Rose West.
MARCUS PARKS
Well now we know far more about what Fred and Rose West did, why they did it, and how far back the culture of abuse went in their family histories. Furthermore we also know who else may have been involved in the 12 provable murders attached to the West name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes we do. So you're saying that abuse was their culture. I really feel that. This whole episode... Because the reason why we decided to jump in and do Fred and Rose West was because we wanted to get in the mood for the UK.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we're about to go to Europe and what we want to do is just remind ourselves why we go, why we go to perform, why do we celebrate the UK? You guys all just got done lining up for days to go look at the corpse of a dead woman.
BEN KISSEL
96 years fun. I've been slowly limiting the amount of salt I've been putting in my food, get my palate ready so when I when I hit Europe I'm gonna be like now that's a pretty tasty cabbage.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a reason why we die at a much higher rate of heart disease than they do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's true.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's because we have more fun.
BEN KISSEL
And we have more sugar.
MARCUS PARKS
Now for the uninitiated, Fred and Rose West we're a married couple living in a small English city called Gloucester.
BEN KISSEL
And this is what we're here to talk about. Marriage is between one man who's a sociopath and one woman who's a sociopath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love this.
BEN KISSEL
And I'm really sick of what's happening to our culture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marriage is supposed to be between two rapists.
MARCUS PARKS
Gloucester is located just a little over 100 miles West of London. And together Fred and Rose West, they committed up to 30 murders over the course of two decades, although Fred certainly committed quite a few on his own. 30 is just what they did or 30 supposed is just what they did together, 9 together provably.
BEN KISSEL
So what have you done with your wife this weekend?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just record a hit podcast.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now we may have already said it-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
But if I were to compare Fred and Rose West to anyone, the closest analog would be Raymond and Connie Marble from the John Waters film Pink Flamingos.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
Oh interesting. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Put simply Fred and Rose West were the real world variants of the filthiest people alive.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If any one of you have ever seen The League of Gentlemen in the UK-
BEN KISSEL
The Extraordinary League of Gentlemen.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no. That's an entirely different thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a sketch show called The League of Gentlemen, there's a couple of characters that are... It's perfect. They come from the small town of Royston Vasey, right. And their whole thing is they're obsessed with anybody who isn't local and if you're not local, they kill you. These guys are the type of country bumpkins, I think in America we get a lot of credit more so for our murderous country bumpkins.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh totally.
BEN KISSEL
I think we need to leave the bumpkins alone. The bumpkins aren't the murderers, the bumpkins protect the murderers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what we're gonna cover apparently, we're not alone in that.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
UK also has a history of small towns keeping it local.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, definitely. And the bumpkins from personal experience, the bumpkins do some pretty awful shit.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah? Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Someone needs to keep an eye on the bumpkins. There were a lot of bumpkins doing some bumpkin shit out in Rochester, Texas that shouldn't have been doing bumpkin shit.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Together Fred and Rose West built a torture dungeon in their home at the now infamous address of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. There they murdered young hitchhikers and runaways as a part of their regular sex life, involving strangers in their sadistic sexual games with all the regard one might show a cheap sex toy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You might say these guys, they're not very nice.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like it. And I'll tell you one thing, Marcus-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Norm MacDonald tribute.
MARCUS PARKS
You got any gum? You like the shrimp?
BEN KISSEL
You're killing him again, you're killing Norm again. He's rolling over in his grave. But I'm just gonna push back a little bit, Marcus. There is no such thing as a cheap sex toy. Have you been to a sex store?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Minimum 50 bucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah man, I'll give you a cheap sex toy. Table leg. Rub yourself against a chair, man. Anything is a sex toy. I got 10 of them right here. Zing-zing-zing boom-boom-boom. Honestly 12 if you count my elbows.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rubbing the clit.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after being killed, the victims were then meticulously dismembered then buried either on the grounds of 25 Cromwell Street or in fields near Fred's hometown. There are however still burial sites unknown to investigators. Strangers however weren't their only victims, nor was sex always the motivation. Fred And Rose West murdered family members, children, and babysitters, basically anyone who got in their way.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But whereas Charles Starkweather murdered people to end arguments and quickly got caught, Fred and Rose West were far more clever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The fact that we just did Charles Starkweather and now we're doing this series, the comparison is very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because while yes, they have the same official body count, they could not be more different.
MARCUS PARKS
Fred and Rose West have one more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, that's right. It's 12.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's 12 vs Starkweather got 11. Same as Starkweather!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Same as Starkweather!
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in comparison to our last series in which the culpability of Caril Ann Fugate was in question, the participation of Rose West in these horrific crimes is beyond reproach.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact one could argue that Rose actually made things worse because Fred, a textbook sadist, not only had someone giving him permission but someone to impress.
BEN KISSEL
Give my love to Rose, please won't you do that? She's gonna murder me, cut off my ears, and shove them up my asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I saw one expert put it in a good way too that I thought was interesting is that it was not even just him impressing Rose, it was them in competition with each other.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do believe of all of the killer couples we have ever covered, this is the only couple that very easily one could have killed the other at any point. Rose West, she is in the lap of the pilot. Her and the pilot, they're both pilots. They're joined dick to asshole, driving a plane together that is crashing into hell.
BEN KISSEL
My goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
But before we get into the why and how of England's most horrific crimes, let's acknowledge our source today. For this one we've got the seminal true crime biography 'Fred and Rose' by Howard Sounes who is actually one of the journalists who originally broke the story back in the mid '90s. This book was also adapted for a long form podcast series. Interestingly this is actually the second time that Sounes has been used as a source for this network, he also wrote a pretty solid biography of Lou Reed which we used on No Dogs in Space for our Velvet Underground series.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no kidding!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But did Fred and Rose West show up in the Lou Reed series?
BEN KISSEL
That would be interesting. Maybe they did listen to Velvet Underground when they were underground murdering all those people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like they listened to a lot of songs that were like weird band music. I got a little bit into British sort of pub review music.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where it's just like a fat guy with a mustache and a long skinny lady goes like (wailing) whoa and they do a tap dance in the middle of it and they sing covers of Elvis songs and shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh, that makes it scarier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really weird.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just Bay City Rollers. I guarantee it's basically rollers 100%.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Well I saw a big fat guy, it was called the number one cocktail act in the world. And it was just this dude and he does a three minute tap breakdown. He's like 55 years old.
BEN KISSEL
Joey Chlubbers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's really good.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Joey Chlubbers is fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I sent it to Jackie, I'll send it, let me see if I can find it.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay, send it later. I'll watch it later.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Well without further ado, let's get into the full story of Britain's most infamous couple, Fred and Rose West.
BEN KISSEL
I thought you were going to say Harry and Meghan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Fred West grew up in the rural Herefordshire village of Much Marcle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you saying it right?
BEN KISSEL
Much Marcle is just... Now you're gonna want to be Much Marcle during Fall or March. Cause Much Marcle in March is actually really, really nice. They have a great march in March is Much Marcle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna get the fucking shit beat out of us when we go to the UK, man. As soon as we start, every one of these small towns, because they all sound like this.
BEN KISSEL
You want to go to the flower festival in Much Marcle.
MARCUS PARKS
I think it might be 'Mooch Merckle'?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Much Marcle. I saw it.
MARCUS PARKS
Much Marcle?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Much Marcle, all right great. In Herefordshire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In Herefordshire.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Population 700 at the time of West's birth in 1941. West was fathered by two absolute ogres named Walter and Daisy and had a nightmarish childhood nestled in the deeply disturbing British countryside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't express enough how deeply disturbing the British countryside is.
MARCUS PARKS
Or was. Was back then.
BEN KISSEL
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was?
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is it?
MARCUS PARKS
It's okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We saw the whole royal family this fucking week, none of them are looking great.
BEN KISSEL
No, they look bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even Prince Harry who's the most genetically viable of all of them, he looks like a fucking... He looks like Bert.
MARCUS PARKS
What does that have-
BEN KISSEL
He's looking less Harry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he just looks like a ballpoint pen.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
What does that have to do with the British countryside though?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're all garbage.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's the royalty, you can imagine what their countryside, what the bumpkins look like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What the dregs look like!
BEN KISSEL
Does he only like women named after flowers? Was that all they would name their women after back in the day?
MARCUS PARKS
Daisy, Rose.
BEN KISSEL
Daffodil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's literally whatever they were squirted into in a field.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Fred's parents were hideous creatures inside and out. Simple, stupid, and ugly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Henry, I sent you had a picture of these people. How would you describe them?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You forget, you just forget because when we first did this series, I didn't really... I was distracted, it was before we really got up in the fucking guts of the material.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this time the whole family are demons.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They all look like squat... If Humpty Dumpty was a landlord.
BEN KISSEL
Oh very scary. Hey I'm just gonna need that money this month, okay?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, just like (wailing).
MARCUS PARKS
I would say his parents looked like if you separated Shrek into two different people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you took all of the feminine qualities of the male Shrek out and made it... Because Fred's mother is him with a wig on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. And his father is an ogre. Absolute fucking ogre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, very scary looking.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Fred was actually their second child but the first to survive because Daisy miscarried her first child when a policeman showed up at their door and since she'd never seen a policeman before, she got startled and lost the baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She literally went (screaming). What is that shining diamond on his chest?
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they were just like it's a badge, it's a badge.
BEN KISSEL
So that shook her so much she lost the baby.
MARCUS PARKS
Lost the baby, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But after Fred, five more children were produced and at least one child besides Fred was also a raving psychopath.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Say what you will about all of these bumpkins but they are fertile and they just pump and pump and fuck and suck. And I don't understand it how they even get the inspiration. I guess there's nothing going on all day.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they don't got a lot going on, got time on your hands.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you look at Fred West's mother, at one point are you like goddamn, I gotta put another baby in that.
BEN KISSEL
Well I think that it's more about the rubbing.
MARCUS PARKS
The rubbing?
BEN KISSEL
They just wanna rub.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it could be. But I think you're also kind of on point when you say they didn't have a lot to do, they're not very busy.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They've got to do something with their time.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
See it's been discovered in the years since Fred West was caught that John West, Fred's younger brother, was almost certainly involved in at least a few of the rapes and murders committed by Fred West. This is based on context clues after Fred admitted that there was quote unquote "another person" sometimes involved in the crimes besides Rose. But since neither John nor Fred West survived long after their arrests, no further tales were told so there aren't many more details. That however does not mean that there aren't plenty of details about their fucking disgusting upbringing. The eventual family of eight slept in three bedrooms, bathing in a tin tub on the porch, and shitting in a big bucket that got emptied into a sewage pit every morning. They didn't even have an outhouse, they had a bucket.
BEN KISSEL
We can't blame them for being poor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's not about that. This is more about the general atmosphere.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the atmosphere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It creates a personality like Fred West.
MARCUS PARKS
And they weren't that poor.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
They were country bumpkins sure, but it wasn't the Great Depression.
BEN KISSEL
I want to bathe in a big old tub like that though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's fine.
BEN KISSEL
With a little brush. And then you're just like am I drunk or am I just in a bathtub?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again you just circled all the way back around to insanely rich. Eventually you can do that when you're very, very, very rich. It just depends how you get there. It really was to be honest a lifestyle choice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes it was. Yeah. Fred said that one of his fondest memories of his mother was of her blasting away gigantic rats off of their porch with a shotgun.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was his favorite memory besides her sucking his dick.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness! All right.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as what Fred's childhood personality was like before things got truly gross, he was said to be a dull child, introverted and spoiled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I want milk!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, more milk?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then I think something else we'll get to because Rose West always said titties are not for babies, titties are for fucking.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
I mean that sounds like something you would say to be honest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know. Again, you just put that mop top wig on me, I am Rose West. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Fred was of course bullied by the other kids and beaten by his teachers as was the style of the time. But when his mother stood up for him, he came to be known as a mummy's boy.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, I was a mummy's boy growing up.
MARCUS PARKS
This reputation as a mummy's boy was actually more true than anyone knew. You were a mummy's boy because your mom took you out of school and took you to Piggly Wiggly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. I want to hear how he relates himself to this because maybe he is a mummy's boy.
MARCUS PARKS
At the age of 12 Daisy West began having sex with her eldest son.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Out in the open. Like it was just chill. He used to just go and apparently what she'd do was that he'd start sleeping in the bed and then she decided when he was old enough to have sex with.
BEN KISSEL
Speaking of coming full circle, when I was in Williamsburg when I lived here, I saw an eight year old breastfeeding on Metropolitan Avenue. So I do think that there is something in GOOP and Gwyneth Paltrow is like if he's 12, maybe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That might have just been a freaky ass little person.
BEN KISSEL
No, it was a child, it was a child and I think he probably got made fun of a lot for sucking his mom's tit in front of the school.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless all his other friends were like, 'Nice.'
BEN KISSEL
I mean his mom was cute but okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's complicated.
BEN KISSEL
It is complicated, isn't it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes.
BEN KISSEL
Anyway so he was getting molested by his mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he was getting molested by his mother.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the thing was again, it was accepted.
BEN KISSEL
But was it accepted?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah well let's get into that. Author Howard Sounes maintains that this wasn't an unusual for a small community like Much Marcle. For proof he cited a late '50s novel set in Gloucester called 'Cider with Rosie'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, just wait.
BEN KISSEL
Another flower name.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It seems from the synopsis to be a nostalgic look at the southWestern British countryside before motor cars and bicycles mucked up their isolated strangeness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This truly must be the inspiration for things like Royston Vasey where the whole point of it is this idyllic lifestyle where you go and you live in the dirt. Which is fine again, no problems with that again. I'm an urban person, I understand, I'm a city mouse so I'm allergic to dirt, I understand. But you go out there and then it's all about truly the joys of being barely educated and not knowing what's going on, being forced into manual labor at the age of 13, about how that's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And about how mummy and father intimate times are actually also considered to be a part of what families do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I would also argue that we're talking about the same sorts of stereotypes about the British countryside that many people make about the let's say Texas countryside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. As American. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Although I will say that I did know of at least two families in which sons had sex with mothers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Absolutely. But the rest of society at least had the good sense to be like, 'Hey now, this should be a shameful secret.'
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all should know this. But it's nice now that they're getting to know that and saving people and getting them out of these situations. But there it was kind of just being like that's how you raise them. That's how you raise them up.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean let's go through the cast of characters in the book.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Colorful British names. Crabby B. Albert the Devil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh he's cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Granny Trill. Spadge Hopkins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't let him anywhere near your fucking daughter or your farm animals.
BEN KISSEL
For some reason I feel like he would make a great omelet though.
MARCUS PARKS
Spadge?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, old Spadge.
MARCUS PARKS
And my favorite, Cabbage Stump Charlie.
BEN KISSEL
I like him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they called him a hard sort. His job was he thumps you. That was his job in town.
BEN KISSEL
On the head?
MARCUS PARKS
No, thumps you means he beats the shit outta you.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's just what he does.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
But amidst the pastoral scenes of Christmas carol singing and 5 feet of snow and meals consisting of berries and bread-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(mischievous laughter)
BEN KISSEL
Yay, berries and bread.
MARCUS PARKS
The author of 'Cider with Rosie' also wrote of murder, attempted gang rape, and the fact that incest quote "flourished when the roads were bad".
BEN KISSEL
God. Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
He said that the custom was neither seen as normal or abnormal. Let's call it barely frowned upon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Distasteful.
MARCUS PARKS
More of a tsk tsk.
BEN KISSEL
Seems fairly neutral.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They talk about going up there. They all talk about there was a guy that was made good, that he moved in New Zealand and then he came-
MARCUS PARKS
This is in 'Cider With Rosie'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is in 'Cider With Rosie'. And then he moved to New Zealand and then he came back and the sheer fact that he ever left, I'm just gonna call it Royston Vasey, the fact that he even left it, the town murdered him. And then when the police came to go and be like hey, where is this guy we're looking for? No one said anything. And the thing is that in the book they're all like, (British accent) 'And that's the simplicity of a town.'
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's a novel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the whole point was being like simpler times.
BEN KISSEL
Well he shouldn't have gone back. He should have stayed in New Zealand it sounds like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now to be fair, the author of 'Cider With Rosie', Laurie lee, he was writing more about cousins having sex with each other rather than mothers and sons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
MARCUS PARKS
But as the British say, in for a penny in for a pound.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're fucking your son.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they did talk about they do have that one thing where all the boys were fighting about who would get to sleep in mummy's bed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they basically would switch in the new oldest one into the bed.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Once the oldest one was able to go work it would stop sucking on mommy in the bed but then the next one would get in there all giddy and be like, (British accent) 'I get to sleep with mommy now.'
BEN KISSEL
All right, real lucky lady there.
MARCUS PARKS
At the end of the day these children were being molested.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Very much so. Now the West family never confirmed for sure that Fred had sex with his mother but Fred's father was open and proud about how many young girls he'd abused.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He told Fred that abusing children was natural, something that every man had the right to do and Fred internalized this claim completely. Even after he was caught sexually assaulting girls as a teenager, he was bewildered that anyone would care, maintaining that quote "everybody did it."
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is really wild because that was his comment was like I thought everybody did this.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's what I'm talking about with culture of abuse.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And it's really interesting too how every single one of the documentary start with like, (British accent) 'Fred West. He was a jovial sort everybody loved. Quick with the world and casual with the small and everybody loved him. But also an expert that molestation.' Jesus.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah I don't think everyone did love him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like he should flip it. I feel like it should be first that's he's an expert molester.
BEN KISSEL
Well you don't start with Jared Fogle could sell the fuck out of a sandwich. You start with pedophile Jared Fogle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Could sell the fuck out of a sandwich.
BEN KISSEL
Well that is true. He could I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by 15 Fred left school barely able to read a right above a 2nd grade level. And even though most in town considered him a crude and abusive bumpkin, others thought that this ghoul was one of the best looking boys in town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not true.
BEN KISSEL
He may have been.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, god.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
BEN KISSEL
It's an indictment on everybody else in the town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's like our credit is probably some of the best looking podcasters in the business.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
We've seen our people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And as it was, Fred West may have stayed a simple creep on the criminal level for the rest of his life like his father, never coming close to murder. But when he was 17 he was riding a motorcycle trying to intentionally ram it into a girl when he went flying over the handlebars and suffered a nice little head injury that resulted in a seven day coma.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that is also horrible. Not to... I'm just going to be a little jokey here, but if you're gonna run over someone, you gotta use a car.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah exactly.
BEN KISSEL
A motorcycle, you're actually very much at risk of also getting hurt. He's not a very smart person.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fred West has the same exact IQ as Forrest Gump. They said this.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
But he doesn't have a nice heart and Forrest never had sex with his beautiful mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No he didn't, no. But his mother really cared about Forrest's education.
BEN KISSEL
She did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Forrest had a great soul.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's immune to AIDS!
BEN KISSEL
Yes, I think so actually.
MARCUS PARKS
Now that head injury from the motorcycle incident, that might have been enough to put Fred West in the serial killer with a head injury hall of fame. But not too long after the motorcycle accident he fell from the second story of a building and landed headfirst, again losing consciousness.
BEN KISSEL
Did it no have walls? How did he fall?
MARCUS PARKS
He was he was trying to grab at a girl and she punched him and he fell backwards over a railing. They were on a fire escape, he fell backwards over a railing and boom, head first again.
BEN KISSEL
And also for anyone who watches Animal House, it's a fantastic comedy. But if you do those things in real life-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a crime. All of the things that happen in the film.
BEN KISSEL
It's a crime. And John Belushi gets punched in the head and then he falls over and has brain damage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And then we don't know what happens to Bluto after college.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He becomes a centerfold. No, it's in the end of the movie. He becomes a centerfold. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I forgot about that.
MARCUS PARKS
When Fred woke up, people said he was even more short tempered and irritable than he was before and the disconnect from humanity that sometimes results from head injuries when the brain is still developing, that became complete.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of funny because again several documentaries were like, (British accent) 'One of the most unfortunate circumstances of that motorcycle accident was it definitely was a detriment to Fred West's good looks.'
BEN KISSEL
Oh really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're like it shortened his nose, that's what they keep saying.and you're like he was never good looking!
MARCUS PARKS
He looked ghoulish from the time of birth. I sent Henry a picture of a baby photo. Evil. Now around the time that Fred got a double whammy to the frontal cortex, he met a 16 year old Scottish girl named Rena Costello at a dance in Much Marcle when Fred was around 18 years old. Rena was another late '50s juvenile delinquent. And after she was sent to the 1958 Scottish version of juvenile hall for petty theft, she escaped to England and met Fred West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now sort of like Caril Ann Fugate, Rena Costello was impressed by Fred West's horrible behavior. She believed his far-fetched tough guy stories like when he told her he came back from the dead after his motorcycle accident when the cold marble of the mortician's slab jolted him awake.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he kept saying that. He would do this a lot where he owned multiple businesses, that he was a millionaire and he could do all of this shit. And no he wasn't.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely didn't have any of that.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Taking him at his word, Rena went hard on the relationship immediately, tattooing Fred's name into her arm with a sewing needle and black India ink.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's a cool tattoo. Fred.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely. Fred was here. Everybody loves the whole world to know a man named Fred hate my ass.
MARCUS PARKS
But soon after Fred's second head injury, he and Rena's fighting got more frequent and she returned to Scotland for two years. Meanwhile Fred West, now 19, he began a sexual relationship with a 13 year old girl and had gotten arrested for quote "having unlawful carnal knowledge of a child" because of course she became pregnant.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hate the term unlawful carnal knowledge.
MARCUS PARKS
It's awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it really should be like... That's how we feel about like pizza. Like I have an unlawful carnal knowledge of the levels of burrito in Los Angeles.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's where I think it should be for, not just for molesting a child.
MARCUS PARKS
You can say the rape of a child.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You can just say that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you could just say that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But once it came time to testify, the girl decided against it and Fred walked free for the first of many times to come.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Limped free because he had a permanent limp.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right. Between the trial and the arrest though, Fred had rightfully gained a reputation in his village as a child molester, a petty thief, and a violent, volatile, brain damaged creep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) And I'll tell you the worst thing of all, they also said I was bad at pool!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that is bad. Anyway I'm opening up a new sandwich shop, I need a pitchman. You think you can do it, Fred?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I don't know, I'm actually pretty busy with molesting.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
In addition, the jobs you've been doing on farms around the countryside were all being replaced by automation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no.
BEN KISSEL
It is sad.
MARCUS PARKS
It's sad for the rest of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, it's true.
MARCUS PARKS
For the rest of them, yeah. It's the reason why my hometown, fucking Rochester is just completely fucking dead now. Automation.
BEN KISSEL
It's all rocks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But now there's so much opportunity for growth because it's all dead and everyone's left.
MARCUS PARKS
People are still there, they're trying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard.
BEN KISSEL
We had a call in on Open Lines on Sirius Radio, thanks for everyone who listens, from a gal in Lubbock, she said everything's going great.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Lubbock is different. Lubbock is 2.5 hours away and it's a town of 300,000 people. I'm talking about a town of 200 people in the middle of nowhere.
BEN KISSEL
That's right, I forgot.
MARCUS PARKS
That's where I'm actually from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a town of only a bowling league.
MARCUS PARKS
Somebody please fix it online. I'm not from Lubbock, Texas. I'm from Rochester, Texas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, hey. Hey whoa.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
Geography is important to us Texans, we know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that, we know that.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that. Don't even question it. It's honestly the same as the British. Because it's like the direct line from it. They're all like, (British accent) 'I know I'm from Derbyshire! Not from Rippershire. How dare you ever confuse my shire.'
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I'm from Flippin on Flippin!
MARCUS PARKS
We can have conversations about the difference between a west Texas accent and an east Texas accent later.
BEN KISSEL
I know, I watched No Country For Old Men once again and after you pointed out that the lady didn't have a good Texas accent, then I started to listen to it. But I still can't tell the difference.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just terrible, terrible Texas accent. But anyway after automation killed all the jobs in Fred's hometown, he moved to the town of Ledbury and did odd manual labor jobs and construction. This was the work he'd do for the rest of his life and the skills he learned would later be used to build a torture dungeon in his cellar with his wife Rosemary.
BEN KISSEL
And it's very bizarre, odd manual labor jobs. Go put that baseball cap on the mailbox. 15 minutes later, take it off.
MARCUS PARKS
That is odd. That is quite odd.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is really. Wow, that is great. That is fucking great.
BEN KISSEL
Walk in a circle for five minutes in the parking lot, put the baseball hat back on the mailbox. 15 minutes later, take it off.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't really understand why my daily labor has to be a series of riddles.
MARCUS PARKS
Well construction work also gave West more opportunities to steal which would garner him dozens of arrests over the years, Fred West was a definite kleptomaniac.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But despite all the horrific facts concerning what this 19 year old monster was up to, Rena Costello returned from Scotland when she turned 18, pregnant from an affair with a bus driver.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's because all the romance happens in Glasgow.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah man. And that bus driver moved to Springfield, Illinois and he became Otto. Get on in the car, boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Perfect.
BEN KISSEL
We don't know Otto's back story and I'd love to know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No and we don't know what state Springfield is in either. It's a perennial joke on the show.
BEN KISSEL
I believe it is Illinois.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they've never named it.
MARCUS PARKS
They've never named it.
BEN KISSEL
I know he hasn't named it.
MARCUS PARKS
They have a sea, they're near the sea which is weird because Illinois doesn't have any seas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
I don't give a fuck.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The lakes are actually quite big over there.
BEN KISSEL
That's why I like South Park better, I know where it is, it's in Colorado. They're not trying to lie.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when Fred discovered that the child was going to be born mixed race because the father was of Pakistani descent, he convinced Rena to not only abort the child but to allow Fred to perform the abortion himself out in the woods.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) All right, all right, all right, all right. I don't need to get some doctor in here, I can do it myself.
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna do it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the problem. I found some snippets of Fred West, you can't understand a single fucking word that he says.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One thing I heard him say is, (Australian accent) 'The one thing about me, I got work man's hands.' That's Australian. (British accent) 'I can whip a knuckle off a screw without a spanner because it wouldn't take very much for me to choke it down.'
BEN KISSEL
Well that's really impressive there, Fred. How did the abortion go?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whaddaya gonna do?
BEN KISSEL
Strange, kind of Italian.
MARCUS PARKS
I also thought it said out in Herefordshire they also have a saying that's like 'gert guttle'. Or something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I dunno.
MARCUS PARKS
What did I tell you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I dunno, you said a thing. We're just all different. We're just all different.
MARCUS PARKS
We're all different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, we're not better, we're just different.
BEN KISSEL
We're different. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. 'Gert lush'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I dunno what that means.
MARCUS PARKS
It means very good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
BEN KISSEL
Gert lush?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah when you like something you say 'gert lush.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna get chased down the street.
BEN KISSEL
I'm actually fine with it. Gert lush, gert lush. Gonna see that be my last words.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally, it's gonna mean something offensive. You said it wrong. We definitely are saying it incorrectly.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly. Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the plan for the homemade abortion was to do it amongst the trees while a friend of theirs acted as a lookout.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he was just looking in with a telescope from too far away.
MARCUS PARKS
I see. But while Fred was in the process, someone thankfully spotted them and called the cops before he really got into it. And so Fred agreed to raise the child once it was born and by November of 1962, Fred and Rena were married.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay.
BEN KISSEL
Because I can't imagine that she was gonna live if he went through with the abortion cause I can't imagine he really knew what he was doing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it might be a lie but Fred West did claim that he was an amateur abortion doctor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God.
BEN KISSEL
Some things you have to go pro at.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is an indie abortion doctor, please.
BEN KISSEL
Please.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the other hand, yeah, he might have been lying about that. But friends of his did see that he had the implements for it. He had an oxy-acetylene burner, he had a length of tubing with a corkscrew at the end of it.
BEN KISSEL
All right, I dunno.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Did you see Vera Drake?
MARCUS PARKS
Vera Drake? I never saw Vera Drake. Have you seen drake vera drake? I never saw vera drake
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Vera Drake, we used to play a drinking game in college, we played Vera Drake and it's all about a small town abortion woman, right, doing this thing. And we we played a drinking game that every time she says, 'All right, drop your knickers,' we would take a drink.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's rough, man.
MARCUS PARKS
It's really rough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He had all of the stuff. Again, if you got three microphones, you got yourself a podcast.
BEN KISSEL
I dunno.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you have all of the implements, if you go by all the stuff anybody can say you're an abortionist.
BEN KISSEL
When I was in 7th grade and Alonzo Mourning jersey and Charlotte Hornets shorts and I wore basketball shoes. I wasn't on the team. So I dunno.
MARCUS PARKS
That's so true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, there's a bar for entry there.
BEN KISSEL
It's just dress up. I think he may have just been dressing up.
MARCUS PARKS
Now right after Fred and Rena got married, Fred immediately began treating her as a sex object rather than a fellow human being, brutally and forcefully demanding sex at all times. However an important fact to remember about Fred West, always remember this, was that he was a chronic premature ejaculator.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Burn in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Burn it in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, good. Oh yeah, he was a bit of a Dillinger.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Every single time, Fred would be done in seconds which was only the smallest of mercies for the women subjected to his assaults. But even though life was bad for everyone involved, things only got worse when Rena gave birth in March of 1963 to a girl they called Charmaine. Now even though Fred was fine with having a reputation as a psychopath, he didn't want to be seen as having a mixed race child.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be embarrassing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right, that's the problem.
MARCUS PARKS
So he and Rena told neighbors that she'd miscarried and the mixed race baby had been adopted as a replacement.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Fred of course hated the child and left Rena for a new life in Glasgow, where Fred said he found his way into the Scottish underworld and worked as a pimp.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god, the Scottish underworld is all just between hairy knees under a kilt.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, indeed. Well I think Glasgow was a place he could fit right in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
They like to fight, they like to drink, they like to overall be horrible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love Glasgow. I love that city, man.
BEN KISSEL
Love it. Oh I'm not saying these are bad things.
MARCUS PARKS
Glas-go, yeah. If you say Glasg-ow, they'll string you up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah?
BEN KISSEL
Glasg-ow. What are you gonna do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They might kill you.
BEN KISSEL
They're not gonna kill me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll find out, we got 2 weeks!
MARCUS PARKS
John Kerry said Glasg-ow once and they never let him forget it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man. And that's why every time you see him, you gotta ask him why the long face?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he's got a long face, he's got a little horse head. Yeah you really got that guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Well years later Fred would maintain that he still had a quote unquote "Scottish connection." Same thing that Gacy would say, I know a guy. I know guys. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know a guy. Well because again it's all about wanting to appear big and tough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fred West has always been like this. It's also with the abortion angle, his thing about being obsessed with abortions, you'll see this come up time and time again. There's something about him that loves this clinical expression.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again because he's already come.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No matter what he's done, he's already come.
MARCUS PARKS
Always.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So everything's all clinical and looking at it, that's actually almost even worse too is that all of his crimes come after he's come.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
And he's kind of on a different sort of level because you see a lot of these other serial killers, it's very child-like what they do. With Fred West it's not. You're right, he looks at it from a clinical level.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like a DMV abortionist.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
But in reality instead of having Scottish connections in Glasgow, Fred drove a yellow Mr. Whippy ice cream truck.
BEN KISSEL
Oh cool.
MARCUS PARKS
But this did not mean that Fred's time in Glasgow was any less nefarious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I don't think that he just likes ice cream.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Fred became known as a man who would try to entice teenage girls into his ice cream van. It's unknown how often he was successful nor is it known how bad things got once a girl was in there.
BEN KISSEL
Regular sweet tooth, that's disgusting. I hate mixing the pleasures of life such as ice cream with horrible incidents of crime.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good. I think that's good.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like that.
MARCUS PARKS
What we do know is that Rena eventually joined Fred back in Scotland. She was soon pregnant again, albeit this time with Fred's child and gave birth to another girl named Anna Marie. But it's also in Glasgow where it is almost certain that Fred began his career as a serial killer. See Fred and Rena lived in a stretch of tenement buildings and each end of the street had garden plots where families could grow vegetables when times got tough. Fred however always kept one plot clear saying that he was keeping it for something special.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A carousel!
BEN KISSEL
A carousel?
MARCUS PARKS
As such, when Fred West was living in Glasgow, at least four young girls that we know of fitting Fred's victim type disappeared.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
If we look at Fred's later MO, it's suspected that he murdered girls in his ice cream van and dismembered them in his garden shed, then buried the corpses in his special garden plot.
BEN KISSEL
Dang!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would also say he probably just buried them because I also know when he picked up later on his skill of dismembering, he got quote unquote "good at it".
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's what I mean, that's why I think that he did dismember them because-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In a cruder fashion than he would do later on?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He's practicing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he'd done it four times by the time investigators got to see the actual first body, he'd already most likely done at least four times, maybe more. We have no idea.
BEN KISSEL
Yikes. And so all of that was with the soundtrack of the ice cream truck. Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know how many children have died hearing (hums Pop Goes the Weasel).
BEN KISSEL
That's what it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd put like seven dozen.
MARCUS PARKS
(hums Mr. Softee jingle)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(hums Mr. Softee jingle) Just death. Just dozens of deaths.
MARCUS PARKS
Now you might ask why nobody has gone and dug up the garden in the years since Fred's capture. But right after Fred West left Scotland, the entire area was bulldozed and today 13 lanes of traffic cover the area where the bodies may have been buried. Now while Fred was living in Glasgow he fathered two sons named Stephen and Gareth with two different women. They'll come back later. Rena meanwhile was also stepping out, sleeping with another bus driver named John McLaughlin.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you could say I have a type. I like them big, yellow, full of kids. You like bus drivers? Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually Fred and John McLaughlin got into an actual knife fight over Rena but after the fight ended in a draw-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What? Did they just declare a draw?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah buddy, just poke me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just stab me.
BEN KISSEL
Just poke me a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Fred slashed the other guy in the stomach. John McLaughlin punched Fred and they went all right, all right, all right!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm good, I'm good!
BEN KISSEL
All right, all right, all right!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Very Scottish.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But after that fight Rena left with the bus driver temporarily and covered the old India ink tattoo that said 'Fred' with one that said 'John'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh!
BEN KISSEL
That's a tight change, that's tough.
MARCUS PARKS
I would imagine it just said 'FROHN'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. This is for the ladies and the men out there, right, sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. If you got a name of somebody you've been fucking, right, or you dated for a long time or you married on your arm, would you not try to fuck somebody named like Sled? So you only have to like do like two of the words?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah or just try to find somebody with the same name. We see the breakup going on with Balboa. Rocky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sylvester Stallone.
BEN KISSEL
Balboa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was over the dog.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Oh was it over the dog?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We don't know.
BEN KISSEL
He replaced a picture of his wife on his arm with the picture of the dog.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that crazy? I was like dang. That's very serious.
MARCUS PARKS
That's intense.
BEN KISSEL
It is kinda, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Well eventually Rena returned to Fred but there was still two kids to take care of.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, what's happening with these kids?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, no one gives a fucking shit about the kids.
BEN KISSEL
Somebody needs to care a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what Fred would do over the years is when there wasn't a woman around to take care of the kids, he' just dump them into foster care.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. They were in and out of foster homes, they were in and out of orphanages. He'd basically call whatever the version of CPS was and be like come get them, I'm done with them. And then they'd come and scoop them and then he'd go and fight to get them back and then they'd be there. And then honestly a lot of times he just left them alone in the house, just let them just sit there and fend for themselves and literally live amongst trash, find their own food. They just were kind of left to be feral.
BEN KISSEL
Because there's four kids, right?
MARCUS PARKS
There's two at this point.
BEN KISSEL
Oh just two, okay.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean he's fathered three children, there are two in his household right now.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
One of them is not his and one of them is his.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's like we were saying, Henry talking about how filthy the house was, it's the filthiest people alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. They truly are.
MARCUS PARKS
It's the real version of that.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like a real modern family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
Well because there were two kids to take care of, Rena hired a live-in nanny named Isa McNeill. And from what Isa said, Fred made his two girls sleep in a bottom bunk which had slats that pinned them in like animals and they'd only be let out when he was at work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And he would do this later with his other kids once him and Rosemary were married.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Once they started their independent business.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, their independent business venture. Yes. Eventually Isa introduced Rena to a 16 year old runaway named Anne McFall and McFall moved in as well. This became a tactic for Fred West, gathering people on the outskirts of society into his home to use them as he pleased. And later Rose West would happily join in and in fact would act as bait. Now around the same time the Anne moved in, Fred ran over and killed a young boy while he was driving his Mr. Whippy.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is on the books! This is just one he just did on the side.
BEN KISSEL
On purpose?
MARCUS PARKS
No, no. I mean it was probably an accident, who knows? But it's on record.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Fred West.
MARCUS PARKS
Fred West provably ran over a little boy with his ice cream truck.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
But curiously, according to Howard Sounes, fatal accidents involving children and ice cream vans were fairly common in Glasgow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean it makes sense.
BEN KISSEL
I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS
Glas-go. As such, the death was... Yeah, I said Glasg-ow accidentally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It's just there you know why? Because we're used to saying Mos-cow, that's why.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't say Moscow a lot.
BEN KISSEL
I never say Moscow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually you know how Moscow is pronounced? Mosc-ov.
MARCUS PARKS
Ah, interesting. Well as such, since so many kids were getting run over by a fucking ice cream truck-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't it interesting?
BEN KISSEL
It isn't. It really isn't actually.
MARCUS PARKS
The death was ruled accidental and Fred wasn't charged. But since Fred was an obvious psychopath who had now killed a boy using the same ice cream truck he'd used to lure possible murder victims, he decided it was time to quit Scotland and returned to his home village of Much Marcle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I've lost my taste for popsicles.
BEN KISSEL
I guess so.
MARCUS PARKS
Rena soon followed with her two kids along with Isa McNeill and Anne McFall. And before long the entire unit moved to Gloucester where Fred would spend the rest of his natural life. But that first home, it was a caravan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Four adults, two small children living in the British equivalent of a mobile home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And I'm not talking about a trailer house, I'm talking about a mobile home.
BEN KISSEL
I've seen the new van life, I've seen little homes, dude.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But things were always tense and always filthy.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again it's more... How do you put it? Animalistic. Fred West was a true... That's like one of the first people as we talk about certain criminals, the way we describe them, is that he's like an animal.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is very base. That's what they always said, the word 'crude' comes up again and again and again because he's always a grabby guy, he'd honk your tits, he'd grab your butt, he'd always say disgusting things.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds Like George H. W. Bush.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, David Cop-a-feel.
MARCUS PARKS
Goddamnit. Will you ever let this go?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's him! He did it! He brought it up.
BEN KISSEL
He brought it up. He loved it, it was his favorite joke! The president.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's one of those things where he was always just disgusting and so everyone in his periphery just kind of ended up living like that because he was the head of the household.
MARCUS PARKS
He was a true beast, that's the best word to describe him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now once Fred arrived in Gloucester in 1966 he got a job at a slaughterhouse which we somewhat misinterpreted on our first run at this subject. Back then we quoted Colin Wilson who said that the slaughterhouse helped develop a morbid obsession with corpses, blood, and dismemberment in West's psyche. But in reality Fred West was a truck driver for the local abattoir. He collected the carcasses of dead animals from local farms and loaded all of the offal into 40 gallon drums.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh, god. It's even worse.
BEN KISSEL
Someone's gotta do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes of course. I'm not throwing shade on the job, it's more just it's that level of like, (British accent) 'You need somebody to scrape up your fucking corpses?'
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) That's what I fucking do all right.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe. It's just a job.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing that Fred had already most likely murdered at least four women.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
So it's likely that working with the dead was just all too comfortable for Fred West by 1966.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Rena continued seeing bus driver John McLaughlin long distance and she began forming plans to leave Fred and head back north with the kids and the nannies. But when Fred returned home from work unexpectedly to find everyone packing up, he threatened to kill every single one of them. As a result Rena and Isa escaped and left the children behind lest Fred do something permanent.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness. Also I did learn and I believe it to be true, wheelchair fella from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre-
MARCUS PARKS
Franklin?
BEN KISSEL
They say it is a sausage and it's human sausage, she bought it from the Sawyer's gas station.
MARCUS PARKS
Whoa!
BEN KISSEL
Yes because there's a picture from the side, it looks like a sausage. I got a DM from a fantastic, they said it's human sausage that they bought from the gas station.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something though? Anyway, it's a theory.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll go ahead and say that is something.
BEN KISSEL
It's cool, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is something.
BEN KISSEL
The whole time he's gnawing on someone's toe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly it sounds amazing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well even though Isa and Rena, even though they left and left the kids behind, Anne McFall decided to stay behind to take care of the children.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And that was a decision that would ultimately prove fatal to the 16 year old runaway. Now from what Isa later said, Anne was infatuated with Fred and she thought that he would provide a better life for her once everyone else was gone.
BEN KISSEL
Must've been something to this guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, there's nothing.
BEN KISSEL
There must've been. She was infatuated and not in the same that were infatuated by Chris Farley and John Candy.
MARCUS PARKS
It's again, it's the culture of abuse. Some people fall into that, they fall into that cycle of abuse equals love. And they get closer to the person because they think if they get closer to them-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They'll love me.
MARCUS PARKS
They'll love me and they won't hurt me. It's just a cycle.
BEN KISSEL
Gotcha.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's dealing with bullies forever. So that's the idea. He's a bully and you're trying to end your cycle of abuse, so you think that if you get in there, if you ingratiate yourself to the bully that it can help you but in the end you're just encouraging the behavior.
BEN KISSEL
It ain't gonna happen.
MARCUS PARKS
And indeed when Rena returned for the children, she found that Fred and anna were in a relationship. But of course this meant nothing to Fred West. It's thought that he committed at least eight sexual assaults between 1965-1967. And it's suspected that he may have murdered a 15 year old boy who was found naked and dead in a shed near some porno magazines that had drawings of nooses around the models necks.
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's so many things attached to him and he was always like this.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The only way he knew how to express himself to any woman, especially women, was fucking grabbing them. He'd just grab them.
BEN KISSEL
But he was killing men too? Boys too?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like he'll just kill anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's put it this way, he was very dangerous.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the reason why they think he may have killed the boy is because I think they worked at the slaughterhouse together and it wasn't too far away, the shed wasn't too far away. He was originally billed as a suicide but then once Fred West was caught and investigators started looking at like okay, let's look at what happened in every place this guy lived for his entire life. And they found-
BEN KISSEL
Just a bunch of corpses everywhere.
MARCUS PARKS
They just kept finding corpses everywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everywhere.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But the first known murder in Fred West's history came after Anne McFall got pregnant in the spring of 1967. Now Anne's pregnancy was in fact illegal because she was 17 and Fred was 26. And indeed a social worker was alerted and a report was filed but no follow up was made.
BEN KISSEL
Again man, I got a great sandwich shop. Now we are looking for a spokesperson that can really, we got a new sub, it's called tuna sub but it's not tuna.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My thing is though my whole weekend, I'd love to come in and sample it so I can pitch real quick.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd love if I could just come down and get some of these samples, if I could have these sandwiches, something like that. That'd be really, really good. But honestly most of the time I'm fucking chickens in a shed. So I kinda gotta do that, I gotta get that done first. That's my Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So Wednesday I could sneak by.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
And as far as no follow ups being made, this I definitely wouldn't say it's justified but I would say it's somewhat understandable because post WWII England was a fucking mess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
It was extremely poor, nobody knew what the fuck was going on, they were trying to rebuild an entire country. And a lot of people fell through the fucking cracks, a lot of people.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
But Anne McFall disappeared from the caravan park where she and Fred lived in July of 1967 for reasons that are still unclear to this day outside of armchair forensic psychology. Now we do know that Fred and Anne fought often because Fred refused to get divorced from Rena to marry Anne. Most likely though, Fred snapped and stabbed her to death. And considering how expertly the body was dismembered, it is almost certain that this was not Fred's first foray into butchery.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he had acquired a skill.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know if it also came from just being a country person because you guys, you have rendered deer, right, and cattle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they say that it's the same thing is that you kind of just cut the meat around the joint.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get down to the center of the joint and then you just pop it out.
MARCUS PARKS
Dislocate it, you pop it out.
BEN KISSEL
Hey Marcus, Marcus did all of that while openly weeping. Which really was sweet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he was the poet. That's how they knew.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They called me tenderhearted. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. He don't like to dismember the pig! Marcus don't dismember the pig with no smile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tell you what, we put a watermelon in the microwave for 15 minutes, Marcus have at it for a half an hour.
BEN KISSEL
He love it!
MARCUS PARKS
I will say this though, I did not enjoy killing anything but dismembering, I have absolutely no problem with it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loves it.
BEN KISSEL
Marcus likes it too much actually.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't necessarily love it but you give me a fucking basket of doves, yeah I'll rip the heads off all those, rip all the wings and the feathers off.
BEN KISSEL
It's great. It's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like a terrier.
BEN KISSEL
He's got a little corgi butt.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you gotta eat them cause you get that dove breast-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like that.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like it.
MARCUS PARKS
You put a fucking jalapeno up in there and you wrap it in bacon, put some cream cheese.
BEN KISSEL
It's supposed to be a harbinger of peace and it's supposed to let you know the war is done. And you're just penetrating it with a jalapeno.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, well technically those doves should have fought harder because actually warriors for peace should be stronger than those that want war.
BEN KISSEL
I agree with that. But again the dove didn't do anything wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no it didn't. Well going off of Fred's later MO, we can assume that Fred killed and dismembered Anne McFall in his caravan where he would be comfortable and undisturbed. As far as where the kids were, most likely in a foster home at this point.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
One of the many times they were in foster homes. Now when the body of Anne McFall was finally discovered in 1994 in a place called Fingerpost Field outside of Much Marcle, police found a fully dismembered and beheaded corpse.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Later Fred said that he dismembered the women he killed because once he dismembered them, he'd only have to dig a small hole instead of a coffin-sized grave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So he was working smart, not hard.
BEN KISSEL
I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
However the evidence tells a different story concerning his motivations in dismemberment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always find this interesting about, I like the term again, Katherine Ramsland, extreme offender, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That does serial murder, right. But it is interesting because there's always aspects with many of them that they're totally okay with talking about and they'll talk about the details of crimes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
BTK is a perfect example.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then there are certain things they just won't admit out loud.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is one of those that Fred just cannot admit that he took trophies.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or there's some form of cannibalism happening.
BEN KISSEL
Oh interesting. It's like Ken Bianchi, the only thing he's upset about is that he wet the bed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wet the bed, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's like yeah, you wet the bed. He's like no! You tell everyone I've murdered those women. You mention that I wet the bed, I'm embarrassed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that bizarre?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
As Fred would do time and again, he sliced off the fingers and toes and took them somewhere along with the ankle and wrist bones. Now Fred claimed that he removed the fingers and toes to make identification more difficult. But what's more likely is that fingers, toes, and later bizarrely enough kneecaps were Fred's favorite trophies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Maybe it's because you can play Yahtzee with all of them.
BEN KISSEL
What the hell is going on?
MARCUS PARKS
I know finger bones, you can make dice out of those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, rolling bones.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but kneecaps, I have no idea.
BEN KISSEL
Ashtray?
MARCUS PARKS
But for some reason all of them were missing their kneecaps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kneecaps sound like goth yarmulkes.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh kinda fun. So his trophies weren't jewelry.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they were body parts.
BEN KISSEL
They were body parts.
MARCUS PARKS
Straight up body parts, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Dang.
MARCUS PARKS
But lest ye forget, Anne McFall was also pregnant. West cut out the fetus most likely after Anne was killed. Didn't need to do that but he did it anyway.
BEN KISSEL
How Richard Chase of him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. However concerning Anne McFall, her disappearance was never even reported much less investigated.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
She was a runaway from a troubled home and when former West nanny Isa McNeill never heard from her again, she assumed McFall had found a new life in England somewhere, somehow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's so convenient for them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah because people always go from a trailer park, they always just disappear to England and become a movie star. Oh she just went out there.
BEN KISSEL
She found a new life, we don't look for her anymore because she found a new life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We don't even have to look for her.
BEN KISSEL
Turns out she's getting dressed by cartoon mice and she does have an evil stepmother but she's gonna find a prince.
MARCUS PARKS
Back then yeah, people were a lot more transient. People would disappear and you'd never hear from them again.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but I think they just ended up in graves.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
How many people actually went to Hollywood?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think the the actual statistic is 90% of people die within 10 miles of where they were born. So it is very like most times you don't leave, most of the time that's where you're dead.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
BEN KISSEL
Circle of life.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after Fred West murdered Anne McFall, Rena inexplicably moved back in, possibly because her affair with the bus driver ended and she had nowhere else to go. While Fred took the night shift at a flower and animal feed plant, Rena did sex work which Fred highly encouraged.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He loved it.
MARCUS PARKS
In fact Fred would show his peers and coworkers naked pictures of his wife as if to somehow impress them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's always weird, you still run into these guys.
MARCUS PARKS
You still do.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's at the bar. This happened to me recently sitting in a bar by myself where a guy's like, 'Hey look at this.' And it was just a picture of his fucking naked wife on there and it was just like what is happening?
BEN KISSEL
He's proud of her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know but you just met me!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I don't know, I would imagine knowing what we know about the seedier side of British life, some dudes are into it. Wink, wink, that's great, cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nudge nudge, know what I mean? Know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
You wanna bang her out? Because it's probably a cuck thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He probably wants to have sex with his wife.
MARCUS PARKS
He does but we'll get into that on episode two.
BEN KISSEL
Oh fantastic. Oh my god, tell me he's not an early ejaculating cuck. What a nightmare audience member he is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, again he is an entrepreneur.
MARCUS PARKS
Entrepreneur, yeah. And there's I think a difference between cock and voyeur because I think cuck you need to be in the room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah going, 'Get her, Rodney!' Where the other one is like-
BEN KISSEL
(shushing)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're peering through a hole in the wall.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Ooh like The Riddler in the beginning of The Batman.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Voyeur. Now around the time that Rena returned, Fred kidnapped a young woman named Mary Bastholm from a bus stop and killed her, although we don't know how or where.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
Fred admitted this one to his son Stephen after his arrest. But since Mary's body was not found in any of Fred's gravesites, we can assume there were more locations that he didn't give up to investigators.
BEN KISSEL
Do you think he straight up forgot because he just killed so many effing people?
MARCUS PARKS
Could be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely. Absolutely.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As it was around this time, Fred West met his second wife.
BEN KISSEL
How does he keep on getting fucking women? There's just so many!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(singing) At last my love has come along.
BEN KISSEL
All right, so this is the one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That would be his future partner in crime then known as Rosemary Letts. Now much like Much Marcle, the town where Rosemary was raised was small and isolated, a place called Northam. But like Fred West, Rosemary came from a background that we could describe politely as troubled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think that's the lightest way.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Rosemary was again putting it lightly royally fucked by circumstances beyond her control before she even came out of the womb.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
See Rosemary's mother who was coincidentally also named Daisy-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just don't understand.
BEN KISSEL
What the fuck is going on?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. They're all cartoon rabbits.
BEN KISSEL
But they're all horrible people and they're named after very nice things such as flowers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You should believe that because the local constable, Mr. Shits, was one of the nicest most decent men.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that weird? Cowpie.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Daisy, Rosemary's mom, she suffered from postpartum depression after her fourth child and was prescribed a healthy dose of early '50s electroconvulsive therapy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's not going to get the job done.
MARCUS PARKS
That's back when the doses were powerful enough to shatter teeth if you didn't put in the mouthguard.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Daisy got pregnant with Rosemary the doctors insisted that the treatments continued.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were like literally let's microwave it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Well they thought-
BEN KISSEL
With her in utero?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I'm gonna say this, right. You think she's crazy now? Wait til she's got a tadpole swimming up in her fucking guts.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's what they said is that she had postpartum depression but then when she got pregnant again and the depression didn't go away-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mid partum depression.
MARCUS PARKS
She had partum depression, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Whatever.
MARCUS PARKS
So they had to treat it. They gave her six electroconvulsive therapy sessions while she was pregnant with Rosemary.
BEN KISSEL
You know the doctors had to look at each other and been like you know we're doing this all wrong, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, just go with it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is the early '50s, man. This is like the fucking wild west of psychiatry treatments here.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is when they're doing all kinds of horrible shit. And so Daisy was subjected to extreme ECT right up until Rosemary was born to the point where Daisy came home from the birth with a head still shaved from treatments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay!
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
As a result, Rosemary's brain was fried and jostled in utero when the most complex parts of her brain were being developed, those that regulated empathy and conscience.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Does it go through the whole body or does it just go through the head? Isn't that why you have the sensors because then it just goes through your brain? Sidestorieslpotl@gmail. com. I'm not quite certain.
MARCUS PARKS
I would imagine it was probably, I don't know if her brain was fried.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Does it cycle through the whole body?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I don't know if her brain was actually fried but it was probably more just the extreme convulsions that came that probably fucked her up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's stressful. Yeah, it's not good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in another household Rosemary might have just grown up to be an unfortunate dullard at most. But the Letts household was one of monsters and Rosemary's psyche was scrambled even further. When Rosemary was just a baby for example, she'd rock back and forth so hard in her carriage that the brake had to be on at all times lest the carriage work its way across the room. This habit would continue well into her childhood to the point where she'd keep her siblings awake all night with her constant rocking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is seen a lot with kids that have suffered from trauma.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That it's such a common symptom that something's wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah it reminds me of the Russian orphanage footage, kids just rocking themselves to sleep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Brutal stuff, that.
MARCUS PARKS
Definite sign of abuse. Rose was also not there mentally. It's said that her large doll like eyes were constantly vacant which caused her siblings to call her Dozy Rosie. As such she spent most of her time alone accompanied only by her six pet hamsters.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's not alone!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) You'd be surprised how alone you could be with six hamsters.
BEN KISSEL
You can't be alone. Have fun with the hamsters. Talk to them. I mean that's like action figures for the time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) You know what I did is I put a bit of a Triscuit on my front flap and they went right in.
BEN KISSEL
I bet you they did, Rose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) They're always trying to bite and scratch, I try to calm them down.
BEN KISSEL
All right, let's leave the gerbils alone, all right?
MARCUS PARKS
But what scrambled Rosemary irrevocably was the behavior of her father, Bill Letts. Bill was diagnosed as a schizophrenic at an early age who suffered severe psychotic episodes. But that was a secret he kept from his family.
BEN KISSEL
How?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel like that's the thing, he didn't though. You know what I mean? Because he was abusing the whole family.
BEN KISSEL
How can you keep it? Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause it was there, they just didn't know that he was seeing them as devils.
BEN KISSEL
It's like when Joba Chamberlain used to go to The Pour House all the time, the pitcher for the New York Yankees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, being like make me a Long Island because then they don't know it's alcohol.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. People just think it's ice tea. No, no. Everyone is quite aware.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you reek of alcohol.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Bill Letts, he had an early 20th century diagnosis of schizophrenia.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
That was a catchall term.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Could have been bipolar, could have been extreme OCD. We have no idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Could be borderline, could be anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Anything.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But no matter the diagnosis, Bill Letts was still an incredibly cruel man. He would throw his children against walls, beat them with copper poles, and pour boiling water over their skin whenever they stepped outside of his exacting standards of absolute obedience and cleanliness.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because what's weird is that they had the pathological opposite of Fred West's growing up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh so they had to be super clean.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was clean to the point of madness. The children were not allowed to sleep, they were kept up cleaning, they were inspected every morning. It was very, very intense.
BEN KISSEL
Weird. Some Mommy Dearest stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That harsh treatment though would not extend to Rosemary. While every other Letts child lived in mortal fear of their father if they didn't do what they were told, Rosemary would whine until someone else did her chores. And Bill simply found that funny.
BEN KISSEL
It's a smart move. Was she the youngest?
MARCUS PARKS
No, no she wasn't. She was I think third or something, it was another one of those.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was different, Kissel. It wasn't good.
BEN KISSEL
It's a good thing to do. I didn't talk until I was 4.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so scary.
MARCUS PARKS
My dad didn't talk til he was 5.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Cause his brothers helped him out probably.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he didn't have any brothers. He had an older sister.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think it's help. That's bad.
BEN KISSEL
No it's cause you're the oldest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm the middle.
BEN KISSEL
Yes that's right, you are the middle. But Jackie I guarantee you unbeknownst to you, she had you working for her for years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She never shut up.
BEN KISSEL
Well all right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well most likely Bill spared Rosemary because it was rumored that he was in fact a pedophile.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? Yeah. Now you're frowning.
BEN KISSEL
Of course I'm frowning, this whole story is disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's UK!
BEN KISSEL
It's not the UK.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh I can't wait to go. Doctor Who is there!
BEN KISSEL
Doctor Who. Can we do the episode on Doctor Who next week?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, can I talk about why David Tennant is the superior Doctor Who?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow, this is gonna be a far more pleasant episode than anything we've said so far.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus Christ. That's the thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even though everyone suspected that Bill Let's was a paedo as they call it over there-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
He was still allowed to open a rock and roll youth club for local teenagers even though he hated kids.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like anybody who opens up a rock and roll youth club for teenagers is a pedophile. Right?
MARCUS PARKS
Well...
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yes. Why not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just want to make a room where kids go dance.
BEN KISSEL
How do you make money? They can't drink.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They don't have money.
BEN KISSEL
They have no money. I just feel like it's a predator's place. Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Cover charges, sodas.
BEN KISSEL
Kids have no money.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kids don't have any money.
MARCUS PARKS
But in England there were these places that were set up and they were fine.
BEN KISSEL
Sockhops?
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of kids went to these places. Not all of them, there were some that were definitely yes, real fucking bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. But also a lot of them were combos because again I just found the people we were looking for, it's Dukes and Lee, they're called the greatest cabaret duo who has ever graced the stage. And you got to take a look at these people.
BEN KISSEL
He looks just like Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Dukes and Lee, that definitely looks just like you. You know what that looks like? That's always the clip that punk documentaries play when they talk about the Sex Pistols, when they talk about-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What they were rebelling against.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, how awful British society was. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, they showed it in every fcuking Sex Pistols documentary, TV show, everything.
BEN KISSEL
Johnny Rotten is currently mourning the death of the queen.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a troll.
BEN KISSEL
So punk is lost and punk is now dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Johnny Rotten is a professional contrarian, he's gonna say whatever is gonna piss people off the most.
BEN KISSEL
No, I believe that he is a sad broken man who loves the queen because he realizes he's about to die as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said his favorite ninja turtle is Leonardo.
BEN KISSEL
Oh! (gagging)
MARCUS PARKS
I like Leonardo.
BEN KISSEL
Of course you like Leonardo.
MARCUS PARKS
He's the leader.
BEN KISSEL
He's not a leader, number one.
MARCUS PARKS
Nothing would fucking get done if he wasn't around. Michelangelo is just gonna go-
BEN KISSEL
Nothing would get done without the emotional capabilities of Raphael.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also Donatello was the Condoleezza Rice of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles because in a world of insanity he was the one person making sense.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Well I think Raphael spent a little bit too much time in that tub.
BEN KISSEL
I think that Raphael was deeply hurt because that fucking bitch wanted to have sex with a man, April O'Neil. We talked about this before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, many times.
BEN KISSEL
She wanted him. She would have sucked... If he wasn't a turtle?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is going too far. He's lost now.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that rock and roll room that Bill Letts opened, it was a combo. It was located in a room behind a pub overlooking a graveyard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
that's is cool. All right, all right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Bill, he had Bill Haley and the Comets tapes, he had Elvis Presley tapes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tapes.
MARCUS PARKS
Tapes, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't arrive, the tapes were played.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, tapes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And he'd just sit over there just glaring at the few teenagers who bothered to show up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which one of you child wants to come away?
BEN KISSEL
Man I like the music around here but do you think that guy is kinda weird over there, dude?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which one of you children want to come into my web of deceit?
BEN KISSEL
Why don't we just go buy the Elvis tapes and drink in my basement?
MARCUS PARKS
Bill was creepy and sour so the club soon closed down.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Right.
MARCUS PARKS
And they just started moving from town to town after that. In the years that followed, Bill Letts pulled knives and axes on his family for the slightest infractions, he'd shut off the power and the gas so the family would go cold and hungry.
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
He forced them to scrub the house constantly. He even got cruel on a micro level. If something came on TV that the kids wanted to watch, he turned it off just to spite them.
BEN KISSEL
I hate that shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Specifically because they wanted to see it.
BEN KISSEL
We all know those... I mean we didn't know any dads like that extreme but there was people who were just like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do remember when my niece was in the Peppa Pig area of her childhood, I remember when I'd go home to my parents house it was like the television always had to be on whatever the child wanted.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that was maddening. I don't think it needs to always be what the child wants.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, it doesn't always have to be but you shouldn't just turn it off if you're not gonna-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
If you want to watch Tool Time which is the show within Home Improvement which is obviously a great program-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure. Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Then you can watch it because you're the adult. But also just let her watch Peppa Pig.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes of course. But that's why you got them an iPad.
MARCUS PARKS
Glen Borland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. Disgusting.
BEN KISSEL
Glen Borland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh!
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile Rosemary was turning into a miniature sociopath. She had a reputation as a violent, lying bully who would become aggressive towards both boys and girls at the slightest provocation. And as it often happens with kids who were sexually abused, Rose became hypersexual as soon as she hit puberty. It became about the only thing she'd talk about and she was soon sexually abusing her own younger brothers by the time she was 13.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh. That's what her and Fred West had completely in common which was they were both-
BEN KISSEL
Pedophiles!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well Fred West was just obsessed with sex.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all he talked about. It's all he thought about, his whole life was centered around coming within the seconds he would come.
BEN KISSEL
He wasn't even doing it right. He was an early ejaculator.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because Kissel, it wasn't about it. It wasn't about the actual act.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was about power.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it wasn't. No, they were both horribly sexually abused as children and they both ended up perpetuating the cycle of abuse to extreme degrees.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The way Tiger Woods extended his father's golf game.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. In a sense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm really good with the analogies today.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you're really nailing it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm crushing it.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
By the time Rose was 15 she was likely already doing sex work, taking johns in the cabs of trucks from the mobile snack bar her sister ran with her boyfriend. But around the same time, Rose was waiting at a bus stop and got approached by Fred West.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it's quite possible that Fred West was planning to either rape and/or kill Rosemary that night because picking up girls from bus stops would be a future MO. And indeed Rosemary later said that she was put off by his appearance because again Fred had looked like a nightmarish gremlin since he was a baby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she's the only one in this story so far who has said that Fred is ugly.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody else kind of has been like, (British accent) 'There was something about him.' Every one of these experts was like, (British accent) 'There must have been something about him.'
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the only one who stayed with him forever was like, (British accent) 'I never loved him. I never once loved his looks.'
BEN KISSEL
There you go, match man in hell.
MARCUS PARKS
But instead of attacking, Fred began talking. He and Rose soon found they had a lot of superficial things in common like the fact they both had a mom named Daisy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, isn't that nice? Oh and you want to have sex with babies too? Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool!
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And Rose worked at a bakery.
BEN KISSEL
Oh and Fred he was with ice cream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He drove for a bakery.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Got so much in common.
BEN KISSEL
That's two things kind of in common.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They could both talk about what it's like to look at bread for hours.
BEN KISSEL
Wow! Well I'm happy it ended there, all the things they had in common.
MARCUS PARKS
What Fred like most about Rosemary was that she didn't flinch when he crudely and frequently talked about sex.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Hey what if I flood your downstairs with my house water? It's how he talked.
BEN KISSEL
That's not that bad.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's fucking awful. It's very disgusting. Yeah, their meeting was a sort of monstrous kismet. Two people who were both hypersexual and hyperviolent, although Rosemary's true evil wouldn't bloom for a couple of years yet.
BEN KISSEL
It almost seems like they're more like the Natural Born Killers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh way more.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like in terms of two people that both love the violence and rape as much as the other.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
This is a real 50/50 mix.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah, without a doubt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I obviously don't think that you should always be into the same habits as your partner because I do think that sometimes it's nice for everyone have their own thing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There are certain things that have to bring you together.
BEN KISSEL
Your wife just went to go light yourself on fire because she wanted to learn how to do that. If you want to do that, you would still be on fire because there's so much hair on you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tried Da Bomb from Hot Ones and that's how we mix it up. It ruined my night, I had to throw it out.
BEN KISSEL
Is it really that spicy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I watched Hellraiser, I thought it'd be really fun to try it while I was like oh, this is on brand. So I'll watch Hellraiser but I'll also experience hell.
BEN KISSEL
You don't have to be on brand, you're alone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fine, but this is how deep it goes because it's me.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And so I decided to pour it onto a chip to try it while I was watching Hellraiser and I literally had to shut off Hellraiser. I was in hell. It was awful.
BEN KISSEL
You became a cenobite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
The thing is that I really don't think that Rosemary would have been just fine if Fred had never come into the picture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. Of all of the couple of killers I think that she definitely would have killed.
BEN KISSEL
She would have found a way to do it herself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean even though Fred was 28 and Rosemary was 15 when they met, I think the proof for it is that Rosemary's first murder, it would involve Fred but it would have little if anything to do with his influence as a murderer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just helped.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after Fred and Rose started dating, she brought this man 12 years her senior back home to meet her parents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Hey come and look.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
It was awful.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh, weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Fred told them that he was a rich and successful man.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Owing to a number of Scottish investments that could not be checked up on like caravans, ice cream trucks, and even a hotel.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Okay, all right Freddy, it's nice to meet you. So tell me, you come here, so you're a millionaire right from another country.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) You're a Scottish millionaire which I've never met before. So then every Scottish millionaire, they're always having sex with a mentally disabled 15 year old?
BEN KISSEL
I guess in this case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Fred also explained away the scar on his nose from his teenage motorcycle accident-
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. By saying that he'd been chased by a woman in Scotland and had cartoonishly fallen into an open manhole.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that is funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it's extremely dangerous and really painful but it is funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It didn't happen.
BEN KISSEL
No I know it didn't but even if it did, it is scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well he said that's how she caught up to him and then she sliced open his face with a chain. She beat him with a chain. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Great. Also, womanhole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
Now not surprisingly Bill and Daisy Letts hated Fred West.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
And after he began encouraging Rose to engage in sex work in his mobile home while he watched, Bill and Daisy put her into a home for troubled teenagers.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
There they forgot her, never visiting or writing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just pushed her out, they were done with her.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They didn't want her there in the first place, they didn't want any of these kids. But it's all out of this kind of-
BEN KISSEL
Well they kept on having them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
The person who did write was Fred who was all too eager to continue their relationship when Rose turned 16 and could no longer be kept in a home. Soon after she became pregnant and that was that for Fred and Rose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it's like a Billy Joel song.
BEN KISSEL
Kind of. (singing) My life!
MARCUS PARKS
They eventually moved into a building in Gloucester at 25 Midland Road, leasing an apartment from a clueless Polish immigrant named Frank Zygmunt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How is he supposed to know?
BEN KISSEL
How was he supposed to know? I don't think we need... He's Polish, he's an immigrant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, we know.
BEN KISSEL
We get it. He was trusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
The Polish, they are trusting. They're a trusting people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No they're not.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're actually very, very suspicious.
BEN KISSEL
I know, they're deeply traumatized from all the years of being Polish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
There Fred and Rose lived with Fred's child Anna Marie and Rena's child Charmaine who had both been in and out of foster care these last few years because Fred had been in and out of jail for petty offenses.
BEN KISSEL
Right. These kids, I guess they still wouldn't be alive. I don't know but this isn't that long ago.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this is 1970.
BEN KISSEL
So they could be alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they're not.
BEN KISSEL
They're not.
MARCUS PARKS
Well one is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One is.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And one's probably in hiding.
MARCUS PARKS
No, one's dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, I mean the other one.
MARCUS PARKS
The other one had quite a few problems.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What? No!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I believe it.
MARCUS PARKS
Had quite a few problems.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's no nepotism? It doesn't help? They don't get a true crime podcast?
BEN KISSEL
Not in this case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause that's what they should do, they should start a podcast.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
She's not doing well. I think she's attempted suicide many times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, very bad. Very bad life.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
In October of 1970 Rose gave birth to her first of 8 children, Heather Ann, which should have been reported because Rose was under 18. But as it was with Fred's children who should have been flagged years before, the overwhelmed post-WWII British system failed as it would again and again in this case. Soon though Fred would return to prison for three months after stealing five tires from the tire shop where he was working.
BEN KISSEL
It's one more than you need.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly, seriously.
BEN KISSEL
Why not just steal four?
MARCUS PARKS
This left the highly volatile 17 year old Rosemary at home to look after three young children by herself.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS
Predictably things very quickly turned ugly.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's not the Adventures in Babysitting. This is real life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also she was the mother, she's not the babysitter, she's the mother but she also was an absolute budding psychopath.
BEN KISSEL
Child. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
One child who shared the building with Rosemary said that she saw Charmaine standing on a kitchen chair with her hands tied by a leather belt while Rose hit her with a wooden spoon. Other times the kids would show up in emergency rooms with obvious stab wounds that Rose would explain away.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus. Well at some point these doctors should have been like something seems to be wrong in that house. But all right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well as far as the condition of the flat went, there was hardly any furniture and the floors were bare save for dirty clothes and a big pile of used diapers.
BEN KISSEL
Oh God.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like Bela Lugosi's house.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's like The Visit.
MARCUS PARKS
Bela Lugosi's house was fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well at the end of his life.
MARCUS PARKS
He had the little dogs though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But yeah, it was awful. But then he was all on heroin.
BEN KISSEL
Well he was just probably incontinent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but he was on heroin.
BEN KISSEL
Was he?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I didn't know that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. You've never seen Ed Wood?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but I didn't know that it was accurate to Bela Lugosi.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very much so.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. But at the same time Fred kept a connection to Rose from prison by writing dirty letters. In one he wrote, quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"To my darling wife, Rose. Darling be at home Tuesday for your table will be coming so be at home all day until they come! It'll be the morning if they do come! Then come see me but don't come til they come, darling."
BEN KISSEL
I'll write a dirty letter, I just spilled some spaghetti sauce.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Funny stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Now something we often say about killer couples is that their specific mixture was what turned them into murderers. For example neither Karla Homolka nor Paul Bernardo were likely to be murderers had they never met.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I still think Paul Bernardo would have escalated a serial killing.
MARCUS PARKS
It's possible but not definite I would say of Paul Bernardo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
At the very least he's a serial rapist. For sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's not like he's playing handball.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Without a doubt, serial rapist.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the other side we know that Caril Ann Fugate would have never even come close to a murder had it not been for Charles Starkweather.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But what made Fred and Rose West so nefarious is that both committed murder without the influence of the other and both would have been murderers no matter what. Case in point, Rosemary committed her first murder while Fred was in prison. And to make matters worse the murder was that of a child.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is why the case is specifically, maybe it's bad to say interesting but it is that.
BEN KISSEL
It is interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because truly very rarely do you see the female of the couple in these types of scenarios be an aggressor as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that's why people joke about OJ and Casey Anthony finding love in Florida together because it seems like they could complete a circle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well I mean Karla Homolka was the aggressor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Real bad.
MARCUS PARKS
She was very much the aggressor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But Rose West began as the aggressor. She was coming into it as the aggressor.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Coming out.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
The day after Rosemary visited Fred in prison with Anna Marie and Charmaine in tow, Rosemary either stabbed or beat Charmaine to death.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
And she put the corpse in her building's cellar amongst the coal until Fred was released from prison. Upon that release, Rose told Fred that she'd killed Charmaine and Fred most likely told Rose about the murders that he'd committed, or at the very least he told her about one of the murders.
BEN KISSEL
So funny that you said that. That's so weird. I've actually been meaning to tell you something too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really wild.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause that's the thing is he kinda came home and she was like, (British accent) 'I know you came just back from prison and all that but I've made a bit of a mess in the cellar.' And then they go down there and he looks at it and he's like, (British accent) 'Dammit Rose. Well welcome to the family.' He's just so excited, they immediately were like oh my god, it was like a meet-cute. They both were into it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, just like somebody being like, 'Honey, I just have something to tell you. So I have a little bit of a bondage fetish.' And the guy just pulls out a mask. What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got a cork up my ass right now!
BEN KISSEL
Wow! This is much different than that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I mean with that they had a shared secret.
BEN KISSEL
Oh gosh.
MARCUS PARKS
It bonded them together in a matrimony of evil that would last another 15 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
BEN KISSEL
A shared secret can also just be like, I don't know, something a lot more fun than that. Like you like pineapple on your pizza.
MARCUS PARKS
Love pineapple on my pizza. And so does my wife.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Shared secret.
BEN KISSEL
Shared secrets.
MARCUS PARKS
Now almost nonchalantly, Fred buried Charmaine in the yard near the back door then concealed the remains further by later putting the foundation of an extension to the building on top of the grave. But even though Fred didn't completely dismember the body as he did all the others, he still took the fingers, toes, kneecaps, and parts of the wrists and ankles for his private collection, which to this day has never been found. And what's interesting about that is that yeah, we say they're trophies but he didn't kill that one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think that it also just could be habitual.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just a thing he started doing.
MARCUS PARKS
He might just like it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He might just like it.
BEN KISSEL
I mean what if they literally were turned into other things and they're just out in someone's living room right now?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very possible.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after the murder, Rose briefly left Fred and came back just in time for the return of Fred's actual wife Rena, who was coming back to Gloucester to see if she could finally take permanent hold of her two children. Now Rena immediately discovered that Charmaine was nowhere to be found and after a panic Fred agreed to take Rena to see her child.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Think about the euphemism of that.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of being like, (British accent) 'Oh you want to see Charmaine? I'll show you Charmaine. We'll go visit Charmaine right now.'
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh, that's not good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Instead Fred killed her in his car by inserting a length of chromium tubing down her throat.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
After killing her, Fred took the corpse back to 25 Midland Road and this is his wife, not only his wife but the mother of his child.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Dismembered the body, removing the legs at the hip and keeping the left kneecap along with 35 finger and toe bones. The remains were then stuffed in bags and buried at Fingerpost Field near the burial site of Anne McFall.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that was where he grew up. I was reading about this too and the reason why he'd go there is because again the simple country life, that's where no one was.
BEN KISSEL
It's idyllic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He'd go out there, no one knew it. And because he was from there he literally rolled in the muck of those hills, he just went back to the same places that he went to as a child.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they talked about this, even in his way he'd talk about it, it was like he'd go be visiting the memories of his parents as he's digging a grave to put these people in. Just being like, (British accent)' You know there's just no place like home.'
BEN KISSEL
No, there really isn't.
MARCUS PARKS
And just as it was with Anne McFall, nobody reported the disappearance of Rena Costello and suspicion wouldn't fall on Fred West for another 13 years.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Likewise because Rena was dead, nobody missed Charmaine and that murder went uninvestigated as well. But just a few months after Rose turned 18, she married Fred West and just a few months after that, Fred and Rose moved into 25 Cromwell Street, the so-called House of Horrors that would play host to some of the worst known murders in British history. And that's where we'll pick back up for the conclusion of the tale of Fred and Rose West. I'll go ahead and say right now that it's going to be gold star territory from beginning to end.
BEN KISSEL
That's disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would say next week get yourself a poncho because these episodes are going to only get worse.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're only doing one more but it only gets worse.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
And this has been pretty fucking awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's been really awful so far.
MARCUS PARKS
It's been one of the worst we've done in a long time.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the next one is kind of old school in a way.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why next week though, all of the new information to come out which is about Rose West and Myra Henley's lesbian relationship in jail is fascinating as well. So I can't wait.
BEN KISSEL
Fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fascinating.
BEN KISSEL
Fascinating. All right everyone, well thank you so much for listening. And we are excited to see you in Europe very, very soon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh we are coming to Europe.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you are going to see the sights we will show you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean they're gonna show us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also if you are interested in a VIP ticket to any one of those UK shows, you can buy it separately from your ticket.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you do want to come and stay for a Q&A afterwards, you can tag that on there, buy it, show up.
BEN KISSEL
It's a little convoluted the way the website works. So you got to go to like three different pages but it does exist, it is there. Just have your fingers do the walking.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Go show up because it's an hour more show, we have fun.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you get to hear straight from the horse's mouth.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you can ask us questions and stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
And you get a signed poster and a lanyard!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a lanyard!
BEN KISSEL
Cool. All right everyone, thanks so much for supporting all the shows here on the network. Anything else? I think that's basically it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No man. I want to say thank you to everybody who came out to see the Beacon show that we have just performed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, it was fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was very fun. I can't wait.
BEN KISSEL
Henry, you're new butthole bit is just superb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I tell you what, once the doctors assemble it all back together, I will be able to do it again reliably.
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone, hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wanna remind everybody that satanism says to not do anything towards children.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So these guys are not remotely satanic.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think anyone said that they were. They're British.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just see how many times people call them devils and stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A lot of times devils are just kind of misunderstood, lumpy, well-meaning demons that are stuck in kind of what's almost like a corporate substructure.
BEN KISSEL
That's Your Pretty Face Is Going To Hell which you're still plugging. Fantastic. Talk to you all soon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bye!