HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, so last week obviously people said Henry Zebrowski doesn't have a full encyclopedic knowledge of all the various different regional accents of the UK, England, Dublin.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think they said it like that. They were like, 'Your accent sucks!' is what they were saying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes, yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Well one person did kindly say like, (British accent) 'I don't think Henry quite grasps the West accent.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I don't. But this is how I figured it out.
MARCUS PARKS
(British accent) He's struggling with it quite a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is how I figured it out and tell me if I'm incorrect because I did find sections of Fred West's diary. So one thing I want to read to see if this sounds like it, right, it sounds like it, right. "I look up to the roof at the back of the cafe and there was Bill, he hates taking over him by the bathroom window. I said what you're doing up there? He said shh, he came down to me, he said I pick up two young girl in Brixton and how we're coming to Gloucester and they stay the night and they're having a bath and this is the best way to see him.'
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
You sound like you're from fucking Minnesota.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't fucking... I tried! We're gonna learn though, aren't we?
BEN KISSEL
You sound like the world's worst linguistic teacher and I think you're gonna be fired. Welcome to Last Podcast on the Left everyone. Ben hanging out with Marcus and Henry. Of course Henry teaching all of us about accents through the disgusting words of Fred West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't worry, there's gonna be a lot more of it but it does feel like it has sort of the same vibe. There's something about the country English accent and the activity of watching two plump girls in a well, like stuck in a well with and their butts hanging out.
BEN KISSEL
Not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're just sitting there with a weird unlit long kind of like a cigarette but it's more just a bunch of leaves in your mouth. Just going, 'Aye. Er. Aye.' And that's it.
BEN KISSEL
That's very scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's the entire experience.
BEN KISSEL
Put the butter on the sourdough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone, welcome to Fred and Rose West Part Two.
MARCUS PARKS
He's not saying put the lotion on the skin, he's saying put the butter on the sourdough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Put the butter on the sourdough.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, that was like a five degree joke. Good work, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
You're welcome. I know him.
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to Plumpy's Hostage Academy. You gotta have a catchphrase if you really want to have them hostage. Put the butter on the sourdough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly hey Jeb, next time eat lunch before class.
BEN KISSEL
Aw dang it.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left Fred and Rose West they'd just tied the knot a few months after Rose turned 18. This is when Fred was in his mid to late 20s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like Dane Cook!
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Afterward they moved out of their starter home into another building owned by Polish immigrant Frank Zygmunt, the infamous 25 Cromwell Street.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there's never been a man more proud of his sex dungeon than Fred West.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Fred and Rose's previous apartment had been just fine for burying a body out in the yard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure. So were most.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because Fred's stepdaughter Charmaine had been buried out there after Rosemary killed this young child in a fit of rage. 25 Cromwell Street however afforded a slew of new opportunities for the burgeoning psychopathic couple, from extensive body storage to a space for a proper torture and kill room. And a proper torture and kill room by the way honestly does not often exist out outside of horror movies.
BEN KISSEL
That's what makes this all so much scarier is 25 Cromwell Street sounds like it could be the place of Wallace and Gromit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it is.
BEN KISSEL
It sounds like it should be where everyone has crumpets for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do.
BEN KISSEL
But it was not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were Wallace and Gromit's neighbors.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is completely real. And what Marcus said too about a dungeon, like an actual sex dunction, you're right, it is mostly art designed. Now they have that, you see that cute show, that Netflix show that's like, (British accent) 'I design your sex room.' Have you seen that thing?
BEN KISSEL
No, I haven't seen that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where it's all about your sex room.
BEN KISSEL
A whole sex room?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're supposed to be like, (British accent) 'It's a wee cheeky.'
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then the whole thing is is that none of them have pictures of fucking Woody and Buzz before they were Woody and Buzz crudely painted on the walls by the victims.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's a sex dungeon. And that's where this woman will never put in the proper detail to properly, properly make you scared to go down to a place.
BEN KISSEL
XXX Toy Story.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the house at 25 Cromwell... Ugh fucking Christ.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I'm not gonna go into this ain't Toy Story XXX.
BEN KISSEL
No it's not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is not. It is not Toy Story.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the house at 25 Cromwell had three floors, an attic, and most importantly a cellar. The cellar was accessible and usable only by Fred and Rose West and as soon as the couple moved in with Fred's surviving child Anna Marie and Rose's first child with Fred, Heather, the Wests began plans to expand their cellar into a nefarious dungeon of pain and death.
BEN KISSEL
If you cannot go as we've talked about many times into certain sections of somebody's home, that means you're a serial killer unless it's Guy Fieri in which case he has to hide his chicken recipes under lock and key in a random garage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause they're proprietary. Yeah, they're worth their weight in gold.
BEN KISSEL
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah well maybe he should let out that fucking recipe to some of the Guy Fieri pop ups that are coming up around the country because that is the single worst meal I've ever had in my entire life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Besides the crimes of Fred and Rose West, Chicken Guy is like the second worst thing I ran into this year.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unfortunately I don't want to sandwich a chicken review into this episode.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it is not great.
MARCUS PARKS
Well according to one young woman who got snared in the web of the Wests but survived, Fred gave her a tour of the cellar before it was outfitted as a torture room in which Fred very explicitly said that he was going to turn it into a torture room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But Fred's superpower if he has one is he does have the ability... Because again let me just, maybe it's the country thing. I sent Marcus a clip of country British humor and it's all being like, (British accent) 'And I watched as she popped over, she was bent over the freezer there and I saw a couple of her shorties popping out of the inside, I had to give her a portion. I would give her a bit of a portion.'
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He kind of did have an ability to say things that he was doing but because he had a little horrible like jack o'lantern glint in his eye-
MARCUS PARKS
It's a smirk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a smirk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He'd be like, (British accent) 'Yeah okay, we're gonna turn into a torture room.' And they're all like, (British accent) 'Fred, you're crazy.'
BEN KISSEL
Well that's ridiculous. No one would ever do that in real life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the cellar itself was divided into separate rooms featuring white walls that had long since disintegrated away or mostly disintegrated away to show the longstanding brick underneath. And above one could see the floorboards of the first floor apartment and hear the steps of people walking free. But what's almost unbelievable about 25 Cromwell Street is that Fred and Rose weren't the only ones living in the building.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had upstairs neighbors.
BEN KISSEL
No kidding.
MARCUS PARKS
While the Wests had the first floor and the cellar, the second and third floors were rented out to tenants the entire time that the Wests were doing what they were doing, both in the cellar and in their own apartment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say after fucking 13 years living in New York, you learn to not hear.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of earmuffs going on without a doubt, some Vince Vaughn activity happening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just don't hear it. You just go like la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. Because then you also know how much they hear coming from your apartment.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we all have to exist-
BEN KISSEL
Oh the grunts alone just from the bathroom. Was there shiplap down there?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly if only because that's how you fix all that up. You go there, you have a couple of track closets. Marcus doesn't know shiplap.
BEN KISSEL
Oh. You don't know what shiplap is?
MARCUS PARKS
I've never heard of shiplap in my life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's cause he doesn't know, he doesn't know, he doesn't know. It's called old wood that you resell to white people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah! Shiplap!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And what they do is they look at it and they're like oh look, it's all degraded and old and vintage. Shiplap.
MARCUS PARKS
Why are you people fucking always talking to me and always making fun of me for going to the fucking dump? You guys are putting up old wood in your houses, calling it shiplap, giving it a fancy ass name and I'm the dirtbag for grubbing around the fucking dump.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, it's like aioli most of the time is just a chef's come.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why it's thinner.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something?
MARCUS PARKS
Well before Fred and Rose even moved into 25 Cromwell Street and this is concerning what they did in the apartment, Rose West had been doing sex work for at least a couple of years but after moving they got a bigger space in which to stretch out and Rose began taking clients at home full time. This was actually something that Fred fully encouraged because he particularly liked watching Rose get railed by all manner of men in what came to be known as mum and dad's room.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wonder if he thought that he was being sneaky cause I do think in many ways he did think that he was this genius but he just kind of slid past a lot of bullshit because he did have that little twinkle in his eye. But just the idea of, I mean obviously I guess at this point you're having sex with Rose West in a basement, she looks like a Minion.
MARCUS PARKS
No, you're not in a basement, you're upstairs, you're in the apartment, you're in the bedroom. You're in Fred and Rose West's bedroom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so much better. But then you hear the (creak) of the little holes and you just see him going like, (British accent) 'All right then. Yeah, give it to her, give it to her.'
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you think that's it like, (British accent) 'He's giving her the portion.' And you think that he's just fucking it up. He's obviously not sneaky.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There's some Porky's-like activity going on here. But Rose West and Fred being a cuckold is really the least of our worries.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's the healthiest part of this story I think.
MARCUS PARKS
Well calling Fred a cuckold is simplifying things a bit, let's get into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's an entrepreneur.
MARCUS PARKS
Innovator. This fuck space had a plaque in the wall bearing Rose's name but beneath the plaque was a spy hole that Fred could use to watch. It was so low to the ground that he had to kneel down. And concerning this part of Fred's paraphilia, voyeurism was certainly at the forefront but there was an element of cuckery. Specifically Fred would sometimes take the used condom left behind by Rose's clients and slather himself with the spent semen contained therein. Again, the filthiest people alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what they say? They're like when will they make the Netflix show?
BEN KISSEL
Yes. When is it gonna happen?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can wait to see who plays Fred West.
BEN KISSEL
It'll somebody British. Actually they need to give this role to an American.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know who I'm seeing? Chris Pine as Fred West.
BEN KISSEL
You know who I can see for some reason? Ben Savage.
MARCUS PARKS
There was already Fred West, Fred West was already played by a guy.
BEN KISSEL
Who?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, he had a bunch of movies.
MARCUS PARKS
There was a movie, it was a series called Appropriate Adult. I think Dominic West is the guy, the guy that was in The Wire, the main character in The Wire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, perfectly.
MARCUS PARKS
The guy that played McNulty, he played Fred West.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Caused a bit of a ruffle in Britain.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Because again it's making them sexy and interesting when they were just the epitome of like... In my mind it's like what you based the trolls folktales on are them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. As far as the kids went, Fred installed a red light bulb in the living room, connected to a switch in mum and dad's room and that light would be turned on when Rose was quote unquote "entertaining" so as to keep the kids out. As far as extracurricular sex went though, Rose was bisexual so she and Fred engaged in a number of threesomes, although threesome might be a stretch since Fred of course always ejaculated within seconds no matter what.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man.
BEN KISSEL
Hey man, that counts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's right, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Come on now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also he's easy at least.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Regardless though, these girls who were runaways, hitchhikers, and other marginalized... What do you mean easy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's easy, he's fast. He's real fast.
MARCUS PARKS
Regardless though these girls who were runaways, hitchhikers, and other marginalized members of society, they got picked up from various locations around Gloucester. Glow-ster?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Glaw-ster.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Around Gloucester. I'll definitely get a little email about that one. Gloucester.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Get 'em by the shorties, give 'em a portion!
BEN KISSEL
I don't like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Give 'em a little portion.
BEN KISSEL
I don't wanna have a portion.
MARCUS PARKS
But Fred didn't just do a solo snatch and grab. Instead Rose came along riding in the front seat, enticing the girls into thinking that the situation wasn't highly dangerous. But while they didn't immediately start putting the girls, they picked up into the ground upon moving to 25 Cromwell Street, they did decide to test it out prior to making it a kill room and they did so with one of their own children. And this here is gold star territory for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
After bringing Fred's 8 year old daughter Anna Marie down to the cellar, Rosemary held her down and laughed maniacally as Fred raped his own daughter. He then removed the remains of her hymen and collected it in a Pyrex bowl for reasons beyond understanding.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm glad you don't understand.
MARCUS PARKS
But seeing how there were so many body parts missing from his murder victims and considering his behavior during this disgustingly evil act, it's speculated that Fred West may have also been a cannibal.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I completely believe that he was a cannibal.
BEN KISSEL
Right. At this point it doesn't surprise me I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
But not too long after the collection of the broken hymen, days at most, Fred brought home a long metal bar bent into a U shape and fitted with handles which he had commissioned as a custom made piece at the factory where he was then working as a machinist. After taking it down to the basement and installing this metal bar, Rose and Fred strapped Anna Marie into the frame and Fred and Rose took turns abusing her over the course of an entire day, Fred using himself on his lunch break and Rosemary using a large vibrator the rest of the time. Hours later once Anna Marie thought it was all over, Rose drew her a bath but to add just that little extra touch of sadism, Rose had poured salt into the water before Anna Marie had climbed in, which burned all the small and large wounds she'd suffered at the hands of her father and stepmother. And right around the time that these horrific acts were committed by both Fred and Rose, Rose gave birth again to another baby girl. And trust me, we're gonna lose track of just how many children Fred and Rose had, when they had them, and who the actual father was.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now these are just slices of what happened in that home. We're gonna talk about it a little bit, about the extensive abuse of the entire family. But it just goes without saying it's kind of beyond the pale.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's something that you can't imagine, it's the reason why this story is very difficult to cover. Unless you read the books.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the books are difficult to read because it is hundreds of pages. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I truncated that experience greatly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That experience goes on for pages and pages and pages.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And so it's important to know while we we wanted to cover it for detail's sake so that you know the extent of what happened in that home, but just know that it happened again and again and again. Our goal is to try to make you... We want you to know that it happened but we don't need to drag you through every single minute of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But part of the reason why keeping track of which kid was born when and to whom, it was that the house at 25 Cromwell Street very quickly turned into a sexual free for all that never slowed down despite the fact that it was being quickly filled with children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It got worse.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The tenants they'd brought in to live upstairs were mostly young men at this point and Rose was having sex with most of them out in the open, often wearing little more than a dressing gown to entice the overly horny young men into railing her day and night so Fred could watch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, you have to be super horny, you have to be crazy horny to look at Rose West and be like yeah, excellent.
MARCUS PARKS
But the thing is the picture that we have of Rose West that everyone thinks of, that's Rose West 25 years after the time that we're talking about.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I looked at the old pictures of her too. She looks like fucking Ringo Starr.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know, folks. You heard it here first, Marcus thinks that Rose West is a real 10.
MARCUS PARKS
I did not. I do not.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no.
BEN KISSEL
That's unbelievable. I didn't have that on my 2022 bingo card.
MARCUS PARKS
This coming from Randy Kraft's number one fan? Randy Kraft's number one fan is gonna fucking come to me about this shit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got 'em on both sides of me.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And everyone gets mad at me for liking LRH and all he ever did was generate millions of dollars of income for Tom Cruise.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just putting shit into context, I'm making sure everything here is accurate, sir.
BEN KISSEL
That's what we do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what we do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we're driving Acuras here down the highway.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no.
BEN KISSEL
Oh we're driving Acuras?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are we the Acura of podcasts?
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, no! I can't do that, I can't have a spoiler.
MARCUS PARKS
But since there was so much railing happening in the house, the West had to hire another live- in nanny, a 17 year old named Caroline Owens who worked for the West family for £3 a week. Eventually she grew to despise Fred as most people did. She was mostly creeped out by the way conversations always turned either sex or Fred's proficiency at medical procedures, specifically abortions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not a fun topic of conversation. But I guess yeah, it's not good.
BEN KISSEL
I mean not all the time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, not all the time. Once a week at most. Yeah, if you're talking about more than once a week, it's beyond the pale.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after a few weeks living in the West home, Caroline Owens wisely decided to leave. But Rose was a little miffed because she hadn't yet had a chance to have sex with her. So Fred and Rose formulated a plan to kidnap and rape Caroline together but Fred did make it very clear that the affair might end in murder, which was just fine with Rose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just having these open conversations.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Natalie and I have a hard time discussing what we want for dinner. You know what I mean? We really get into logjams talking about being like well you want Mexican? I don't know, I kinda feel like I want Japanese. I can't imagine bringing up the idea of like okay, we're gonna co-sexually assault this woman. But hey, I just want to warn you, we might have to murder her at the end of it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then her sitting there like, (British accent) 'Let me think, oh is that bad or is it wrong? You know, you're right, you're right, Fred.'
BEN KISSEL
Well maybe sometimes you should cook for your wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do. I do cook for her.
BEN KISSEL
Be nice if you did that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do cook for my wife.
MARCUS PARKS
Well on December 6, 1972 Fred and Rose West followed Caroline in their car and rudely confronted her on the street after she visited her boyfriend. After getting into the backseat of the car and denying Rose's advances, Caroline was punched repeatedly by Fred until she blacked out. When she woke up, she was bound and still in the car but Fred was wrapping a roll of brown tape around her head while Rose again laughed and held her down. That's going to be a common theme, Rose laughs through all of these, every single one. She finds all of this very funny, very pleasurable, very enjoyable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She loves it, she loves it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of all of the people and then we'll cover a little bit later, Myra Hindley same thing, loved it.
MARCUS PARKS
They then took Caroline back to 25 Cromwell Street and sat her on the couch where Fred cut the tape off with a knife slicing her face in the process. After they both raped her, Fred and Rose West went to bed, leaving Caroline gagged with cotton balls and tied up in probably mum and dad's room. She was there for two days until finally Fred came to her with tears in his eyes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This happens more than once.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does this thing where he goes through all the stuff and he's a demon and then he comes in there and then he does this weird other fucked up-
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's another form of abuse just being like, he starts crying and he's like, (British accent) 'I'm out of control and I don't know how it ended up like this.'
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this time he said that it had all been Rose's idea. He claimed that this was just what she was like when she was pregnant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, my mom was super into boiled potatoes.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, I know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the only thing she could eat.
BEN KISSEL
Some gals like pickles and ice cream and I guess Rose had a different fascination.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're right, Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
By this point Fred had a good idea of what Rose was like when she was pregnant because this was I think Rose's third child with Fred? I think it's maybe when she was pregnant with her son Stephen, although I could be wrong. Eventually there was fucking eight so it's hard to keep track of who was born when.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Incredibly Fred asked Caroline if she still wanted to be their nanny and because she didn't want to die, she agreed. She spent the day cleaning the house and caring for the children until the whole gaggle went to the laundromat. But as Fred was parking the car, Caroline escaped, ran home, and told her mother what happened. Soon detectives were knocking on the door at 25 Cromwell Street. And when Rose was asked if the allegations made by Caroline Owens were true, Rose said quote:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) "Don't be fucking daft. What do you think I am?"
BEN KISSEL
Well it seems like you're a psychopath.
MARCUS PARKS
But after a cursory glance at Fred's car, detectives found a button from Caroline's coat, a roll of brown tape, and a large collection of pornographic photos. In the car mind you. It's for driving around.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. I have a little Texas Chainsaw Massacre toy play with sometimes at red lights.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sometimes I read.
BEN KISSEL
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we've talked about this before, that's a problem.
BEN KISSEL
That's dangerous, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't do it as much.
MARCUS PARKS
You read at the stoplight though, you don't do it while you're while you're driving, right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sure.
BEN KISSEL
No, if he read while driving it would interfere with the road rage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the problem is the reading sometimes will set it off. I go ugh I'm sick of learning!
MARCUS PARKS
And so Fred and Rose were arrested together for the first time. Now both of them eventually admitted to just physical assault, although Rose soft pedaled and tried to mitigate her participation by saying that she was supposed to have been seeing a psychiatrist for her quote unquote "lesbian tendencies" and believed she had stopped, that's why she lost her mind.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
But when it came time to get a full statement from Caroline Owens that would have cinched the rape charges, Caroline was reluctant to relive the experience and Fred and Rose West both agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of assault. The magistrate somehow bought it, saying that Fred West was, and this is a direct quote, "a docile sort who did not look capable of violence".
BEN KISSEL
Well they got it wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Literally the whole time because he does the thing, he's like, (British accent) 'Oh yeah, of course we're a bit of an odd sort, we give a little nudge nudge, know what I mean? Know what I mean? Give a little grip grip, a little snip snip.' You know what I mean? He just talks like that and they're all like, (British accent) 'That's what my buddy says, that's what my buddy does.'
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) 'He says the same thing, he's always in with a bit of an elbow rub and a big tug and a bit of a snip.' And that's all they do.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When they say all those fun little rabbit words like they all live in a toadstool castle.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They then don't understand that's covering up years of abuse.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, a lot of stuff. Seems like they didn't really do a proper character assessment.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah right.
MARCUS PARKS
And since the magistrate decided that Fred's criminal history which was all theft at this point, he decided it had no relevance to the current case. He also decided that Rose, no criminal history at this point, also pregnant. So he said hey £25 and you're free.
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
That's what they did. They paid a £25 fine and then they went home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unbelievable.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually did hear some research, I got some really great emails about ECT and being pregnant and it's kind of all over the place. Many emails were like well there's no documented process but it can't be great, it can't be awesome. But there is one study that said that there was no effect but it was only supposed to be done for emergency purposes when somebody is literally suicidal and you're pregnant. And so it's like yeah sure, I could lightly fry the baby for a couple of seconds instead of you killing yourself and the baby. But you know, it ain't good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. There's one study that says that there's no effect but multiple studies that say it ain't good. I mean there's a couple of stories that say climate change ain't real, doesn't mean that it's fucking true.
BEN KISSEL
That's exactly why I'm here and I think we should really get into climate change.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh great.
BEN KISSEL
Let's start talking about that, that's great. That's fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is honestly the one way that the subject of an episode becomes less pleasant.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. It'd be great. Sea levels are rising, folks.
MARCUS PARKS
Let me get my graphs, come on. Who wants to sign up for my newsletter, my email chain?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I'll send you some graphs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll send some graphs.
BEN KISSEL
I don't want to be electrocuted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Now obtaining their freedom so easily taught Fred and Rose a couple of lessons. One, they learned that it was possible to do absolutely horrific things together and get away with it even if they got pinched. But more importantly they realized that it was best to not risk leaving anyone alive. Furthermore it was best to choose victims nobody would miss, although they would break that last guideline time and again to no consequence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again we learned the biggest thing is that they need confessions. The criminal justice system works the same way over there as it does over here where they are desperate for confessions and no body, no crime. It is very difficult to get somebody for murder if you don't first find the body, it is very difficult.
BEN KISSEL
More wigs though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Way more wigs.
BEN KISSEL
They do have more wigs.
MARCUS PARKS
More wigs. Now because they got even the tiniest bit more careful, Fred and Rose wouldn't come close to a police investigation for another nine years.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And nine women would end up dead and buried at 25 Cromwell as a result. If however Fred and Rose killed at least an average of one woman a year from the time they got married until the time they were arrested as is suggested by the bodies found buried at their home and considering how they sometimes clustered kills, it's thought that the true number of victims is upwards of 30.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. I absolutely can see that. Again we talked about on the show quite a bit with some of these guys where some over exaggerate, Henry Lucas overexaggerated.
BEN KISSEL
Pee Wee Gaskins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pee Wee over exaggerated. Where I think especially as you get into Fred's confessions later on, they were so cagey.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did not wanna talk. This was their true private life and they viewed it as... Essentially the investigation, they viewed it as an invasion of their privacy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh well god forbid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, god forbid.
MARCUS PARKS
Well like John Wayne Gacy, Fred and Rose eventually ran out of room to bury bodies at 25 Cromwell Street. But unlike Gacy, they almost certainly found another place to bury those bodies at locations that still have yet to be found.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or they smashed up the bones even harder. I also think that the one thing that was really interesting was in the excavation of the property, the bodies were buried extremely deep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he was in construction, so he had used construction I guess tools to basically dig a fucking 15-20 foot trench underneath his home. And so it was layered.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they only got what they could get.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So he's better than Gacy when it comes to having his home become a morgue or cemetery.
MARCUS PARKS
Unlicensed graveyard.
BEN KISSEL
Unlicensed graveyard, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unlicensed graveyard, yeah. I think it's more about discipline.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
But as far as Fred and Rose's first victim together went, her name was Lynda Gough and she was a 20 year old who agreed to help babysit after Caroline left. Now in this I can't help but wonder why anyone would ever agree to even walk inside the West home more than once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because if you listen to all the witness people who talk about it in all the documentaries I watched, it was like, (British accent) 'Oh it's a lovely home and people know you can tell it was a lovely family home.'
BEN KISSEL
I mean you don't really expect the home that you're walking into to be a murder shack with a sex dungeon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean you don't, I do. I'm always looking.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My eyeballs are fucking peeled, dude.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to that point, Gloucester is barely a city. Even now the population is less than 30,000 people and even in a town five times that size I'd imagine rumors of what went on with Caroline Owens would have been enough to make people stay away.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) All we want to do is a bit of a tug tug, a bit of a snip snip and he just wanted to rub. And you know what I mean? You know what I mean? Rub the elbows, this is what he does!'
BEN KISSEL
And I do have to push back a little bit. I grew up in a town of 23,000 and we had a Walmart and we had a Target and we had an Applebee's and we had a Fazoli's. You tell me that's not a fucking city?
MARCUS PARKS
I said barely a city.
BEN KISSEL
You telling me that? You're telling me I didn't grow up in the fucking city?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, look at that accent. Whoa, who are you? Mr. 8th Avenue.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. I grew up at some of the more controversial streets. Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Controversial streets in Stevens Point, Wisconsin?
BEN KISSEL
Passive Aggressive Lane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, that's very Wisconsin.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the other hand this was a time of deep recession in England which made it nearly impossible for especially young people to find work. They were desperate. And even those that found work were sometimes limited to only three days a week as a measure to save on electricity. Therefore there was a fair amount of desperation and boredom, a sort of fuck it attitude. And that hopelessness that burrowed deep into the souls of the English youth was almost certainly sensed by two predators like Fred and Rose West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cue. (singing) London calling to the faraway towns-
BEN KISSEL
Wow, so talented. Oh hold on, let me take my underwear off and throw them at you. Oh there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's every time you talk about something where it's brown buildings made out of bricks, right, brown bricks.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I always remember the first time we went to Manchester and someone in London was like, (British accent) 'Enjoy the bricks!'
BEN KISSEL
Well they're made of human bones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
BEN KISSEL
And Edinburgh as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But why is it always that one song from The Clash?
MARCUS PARKS
Because it's got a good clarion call and and it sounds good over old footage of people walking quickly through London.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It really does.
MARCUS PARKS
You play it really fast and you have a couple of punks and they're talking really fast to each other. One of them goes blah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Blah, blah, blah! All right! Then you got a guy going, (British accent) 'Oh I can't believe it!' And you've got the lawyer, he's got the wig on and the queen comes out there and she fucking queefs or whatever, fuck it. Fuck her, man.
BEN KISSEL
Well you really got that dead woman. You got her again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't wait to be in the UK, I can't wait to be over there. We're really going to learn again boots on the ground.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Don't worry, here in October if you're listening right now, we're going to be in a few cities. Get tickets if you haven't got tickets yet!
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
As it was, Fred and Rose were able to ensnare dozens of desperate people, some of whom weren't missed by anyone and some who didn't have a person who cared enough to keep searching. Case in point was Lynda Gough. Lynda disappeared on April 19, 1973 with the only trace being a vague note left with her mother that said not to worry because she'd gotten a flat and she'd come see her mother sometime in the future. In reality that note was probably written by Rose West.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rose West weirdly, what I'm kind of also discovering too is that within it Rose West ended up kind of becoming the brains of the operation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fred West was the muscle and she kind of directed stuff in a way that I didn't really think about before. She did a lot of these things where she'd be like, (British accent) 'We've got to cover it up.' And she would do notes and do calls like fake being the people and shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
As we'll get into later, Fred West was described by some as Rose's minion that did her bidding and did it happily.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Banana.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I remember that deleted scene from The Rise of Gru.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Lynda had actually been taken down to the cellar and using BDSM magazines as inspiration, Fred and Rose wrapped her head completely in brown packing tape, giving her only a tiny tube to breathe through. It's unknown exactly how she died but she either expired during the sexual torture or was killed after the Wests were done, all because they didn't want to risk another situation like Caroline Owens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would imagine that most of them were kept, their heads were covered in tape, that was like their MO, right. And then a lot of sometimes the way Fred West talked about it, he's just like, (British accent) 'You'd be surprised how easy to just strangle someone. You can get right in there.' Because he said that because his hands were so strong because he could pull a lug nut off a thing without a spanner, that he was able to do that, that it was easy for him to do it.
BEN KISSEL
That's surprising. That's where we breathe from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He didn't grab her ankle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Her feet, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's like yeah, that's how you would do that. Wow, these people are gross.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good call. Another good call from Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you. I got a lot of hot takes today.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as far as the body went, Fred cut the legs off at the hip and dissected the hands, feet, and knees so he could keep his trophies. The rest was then buried under the garage in a rectangular concrete hole called an inspection pit used to work underneath cars. Rose meanwhile rifled through Lynda's possessions, keeping what she liked and burning the rest. Three weeks later though, Lynda's mother showed up at 25 Cromwell Street looking for her daughter. Incredibly Rose answered the door wearing Lynda's slippers and several articles of Lynda's clothing were hanging from the washing line outside.
BEN KISSEL
God.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, she had one of those necklaces on that just says LYNDA you get from Macy's.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
When all this was pointed out to Rose, Rose said oh yes, Lynda had been living there but she was kicked out for beating the children and she'd left all this behind. This story was taken as truth by Lynda's mother who never reported her as a missing person and never organized any sort of search for her daughter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I mean at least put a... I don't know. I feel like I'd fight a little bit more.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel like yeah, I guess. Or you're just like, (British accent) 'Yep, sounds like Lynda! Yep.'
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I first saw it when I found out she wanted to be a nanny and I was like all you ever do is hit every child within four feet of you. So I don't really know what you want to do that.'
BEN KISSEL
Right. I'd rather be a Minnie.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile Fred worked at all hours of the night on expanding and customizing the torture dungeon. He made it bigger by digging past the foundations so he could stand without hunching and he installed a new floor. More importantly though, he installed strong sturdy hooks into the wooden beams which they used to dangle the young women they kidnapped for the sadistic and deadly sexual games.
BEN KISSEL
Fucking Hellraiser.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah! But as far as where Fred dismembered these young women, his son Stephen West would maintain that his father didn't just use the cellar, there was also a terrifying derelict farmhouse outside of Cheltenham. Chel-ten-hum?
BEN KISSEL
Nailed it. Perfect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just know we don't know. Listen our dear British listener, listen. We don't know all of the little towns, how they pronounce it. We're trying. We're working hard. But I think it looks like Chel- in-tum.
MARCUS PARKS
Cheltenham. Cheltenham.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what? If America wasn't so famous I'd like to see those motherfuckers look at Albuquerque and pronounce it correctly.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say the truth is is that every town in Texas is also said different than it is written.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh so we're gonna bring up Miami again, we're going to bring up Miami again!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the same shit!
BEN KISSEL
Let's move on, let's move on.
MARCUS PARKS
Well there at this farmhouse, Fred could take his time and the remains were transported to and from this farmhouse in fiberglass tanks stolen from Fred's place of work. It's also likely that murders outside of Rose's participation occurred here as well which would put the number even higher than 30. But the young women killed by Fred and Rose weren't just runaways or hitchhikers, or at least the ones we know of weren't always runaways or hitchhikers. Both Carol Ann Cooper and Lucy Partington, the next two victims, Lucy Partington by the way was killed after seven days of torture.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
Both of them were reported missing by their families but there was nothing tying them to Fred and Rose. But the only thing that could have brought any suspicion was when Fred showed up at hospital, as the British say, with a cut on his right hand, most likely sustained while dismembering Lucy Partington.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because they had a very similar MO that you would say to about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady where it's like they would drive around and they would have Rose in the car and it really never change and they'd scoop them up.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They would see somebody on the side of the road because hitchhiking was very common.
MARCUS PARKS
At bus stops mostly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And it was common especially at this time period. And the fact that a lot of people knew each other.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, having the woman in the car made Fred West seem a lot less dangerous.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because yeah, he's saying a bunch of fucked up stuff but this woman seems to stand it. But you don't know that she's the fucking true evil other half of it and brings you in. So that's kind of where they pick it up. Then it really kind of expands from there.
MARCUS PARKS
Now eventually the Wests realized that their own home was actually the best trap at their disposal when it came to just sex. So they stopped accepting male tenants and only allowed young women and girls in the upstairs apartments. These tenants however, both male and female, later said they heard a lot of mayhem coming from downstairs and sometimes they smelled odd odors. But of course nothing was reported officially or investigated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because a lot of times that just sounds like a British chef in the kitchen.
BEN KISSEL
Could be a little Ratatouille type stuff. Improv troupe moved down there, who knows?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean think about the people who lived above 656.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah what they must've thought.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When Murderfist was actively just destroying that whole place.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, I can only imagine that when we were shooting Toeless Joe in there, how much screaming did I do? Just screaming and screaming.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Smashed up the whole kitchen and just screaming all hours of the night, smoking inside and screaming all sorts of sex noises. Yeah, I can't even imagine.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of different kinds of sounds there. And beans. Were there beans? I feel like Toeless Joe, wasn't he covered in beans?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no. Overalls.
MARCUS PARKS
It was shaving cream.
BEN KISSEL
Shaving cream.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But it was the essence of beans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that's just what Marcus brings.
BEN KISSEL
The essence of beans.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah I bring a bean flavor to everything I do.
BEN KISSEL
You really do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because beans are always known for their flavor.
BEN KISSEL
I love a good bean!
MARCUS PARKS
Give me some Heinz beans, there's a lot of flavor in some Heinz beans. I'm gonna eat so many fucking Heinz beans when I'm in fucking England.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I already know.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm gonna eat beans for breakfast every fucking day and it's gonna be so fucking good.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god. You're making this story more disgusting. This story with the English breakfast backdrop is even more disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
I like it cause it's soft.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Soft bacon. It's all that, it's like bacon that has the same texture as spaghetti.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Hard bacon makes my teeth hurt.
BEN KISSEL
It's supposed to be a little hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh guys, this is all British.
BEN KISSEL
I know, it's ridiculous.
MARCUS PARKS
Now some murder victims were known to the Wests but many were picked up from the side of the road, sometimes once a year, sometimes in clusters. One of these girls was Thérèse Siegenthaler from Switzerland whom Fred nicknamed Tulip because he thought she was Dutch.
BEN KISSEL
Does that make sense anyway?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. I think we're going there too. Apparently they do, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Thérèse was picked up while hitchhiking from London to Wales and was buried in a square grave in the cellar. Again, the Wests were never suspected because Thérèse's family in Switzerland hadn't even known that she left London. Each time however Fred and Rose got more extreme, they escalated as serial killers always do. About seven months after Siegenthaler, Fred and Rose picked up Shirley Hubbard from a bus stop and forced her down into the cellar. There they wrapped tape around her head 12 times to create a brown mask that stopped just beneath the eyes. To breathe they ran a small plastic tube three inches into her nasal cavity and extended the tube a foot outside of the mask to make it as hard as possible to breathe. The tube was only about an eighth of an inch in diameter.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again, what's weird is I can almost see it... I mean what's weird, Jesus Christ. But Fred West in his way, he's like, (British accent) 'Just so she can breathe.' And meanwhile it's probably what killed her.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh no, they are doing that specifically to make breathing as hard as possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're not doing it as a favor, they're doing it because they know it's going to be difficult and they're taking it to the absolute edge of how can torture her the most while still keeping her alive.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But after she died of presumably asphyxiation, Fred cut off her head with the mask still on and the tube still attached. He beheaded every single person he killed. Her body was then buried in the part of the cellar adorned with pictures of Marilyn Monroe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Again she was reported missing but no leads were found.
BEN KISSEL
This is why it's weird to be famous. It's like when your song is used by a fascist or like Marilyn Monroe didn't take those pictures being like well I hope I'm in a cellar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, she didn't know.
BEN KISSEL
She was like I'm really artistic, I hope people respect my work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just always especially like someone highly innocuous, to use a UK reference it's like the chef Jamie Oliver.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you know who that is, it's somebody in the background like, (British accent) 'We love, we absolutely love him in this house. Oh Jamie, some of your healthy meals have really helped us keep our energy up for all the torture.'
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely and Jamie Oliver helped a lot of kids as well. School lunches, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, kudos to him for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, school lunches. But while many young girls were taken from the side of the road, Fred and Rose would occasionally take a tenant. Juanita Mott had been living as a tenant at 25 Cromwell Street for about two years, partly because the rates were always cheap at the West home.
BEN KISSEL
I wonder why?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
What a stunner.
MARCUS PARKS
Most rooms rented for only £7 a week as advertised in the local newspaper, The Gloucester Citizen. Most tenants however came by word of mouth and Juanita had actually visited the house a few times before moving in. She disappeared down into the cellar on April 12, 1974, hung from a 7 ft noose suspended around the ceiling beams while tied up in complicated bondage knots. She was likely killed by a blow to the back of the head with a ball peen hammer and her body was buried in the cellar between the staircase and the second alcove.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And here comes the weird thing that Fred West kind of also threads throughout his confessions which is like, (British accent) 'Well she asked for it. She asked for it, she wanted it done.'
BEN KISSEL
No I don't think she did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, that she wanted to die, right.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The idea that they asked to die.
BEN KISSEL
Cause she was being tortured so much?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And they were like yeah, probably. But you started the process.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Fred West's whole thing was that he never set out to kill anyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, he was like, (British accent) 'Extreme pleasure got out of control.'
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. And then it just accidentally happened. Someone was like why did you murder these girls? He was like whoa, you're making it sound like I went out to murder someone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No I dined in.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was DiGiorno.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Now it was a risky move to kill a tenant but Juanita's family never reported her disappearance. Had they done so it would have given police ample reason to investigate because Juanita's legal address was 25 Cromwell Street. Otherwise the only reasons police had to investigate the house was for Fred's constant petty thefts or the parties thrown by tenants in which copious amounts of British weed was smoked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus, it's pronounced 'wheed', all right?
BEN KISSEL
British wheed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's British wheed.
BEN KISSEL
Man that must have been some shwaggy shwag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dog.
MARCUS PARKS
The shwaggiest of shwag.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It literally must have been just clumps of dirt.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
But these parties, this is actually the most likely reason why tenants kept coming because Fred and Rose knew just like other serial killers like Dean Corll knew that a party house is the perfect trap for young folk. Do not go to the party house that is owned by older people. Do not go to the party house that's owned by people in their 20s, that's owned by people in their 30s, definitely not owned by people in their 40s. I'm telling you kids this as a PSA, do not go to the party house owned by the older person. Do not go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do not go. Do not go.
MARCUS PARKS
Never go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There should only be children in that house and you should at the end of it probably be close to setting it on fire. There should be nobody there taking care of it if you are partying it as a child.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Case in point, Fred and Rose began targeting a children's home for delinquent and expelled kids called Jordan's Brook House that was located nearby. Fred and Rose started grooming residents, inviting them over for tea and biscuits. They also made sure to tell the kids to tell their friends about how nice Fred and Rose were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel like if I've got these two fucking evil, they're gross looking, they're gross. I know he's like vaguely charming, they keep saying that he's vaguely charming but still.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just the idea of these two weird older people being like, (British accent) 'You go tell your friends, tell your friends we're nice, we're fun. We're fun, right.'
BEN KISSEL
That's why they preyed on people who needed... They probably liked the attention from the adults and they needed some comfort.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And who doesn't want a tea and a biscuit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm fine with that.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm big on the hard tea biscuit.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
I just love biscuits. Yeah. And the British biscuits and American biscuits. I love biscuits.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Those are cookies.
MARCUS PARKS
No, there's a difference between cookies and biscuits.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, that's what I'm saying. There is a difference between cookies and biscuits.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah there is but they interchange them sometimes though.
MARCUS PARKS
No, not always.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah well many times I've been offered a biscuit and it was a cookie.
MARCUS PARKS
You think that it's a cookie, it seems like a cookie but it's a biscuit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A biscuit is a hard bite, it's got a snap to it.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well eventually Fred and Rose snared a 15 year old girl known only as Miss A who ran away from Jordan's Brook House and moved into 25 Cromwell Street in the summer of 1976. And here we've got another mercifully brief gold star. Once she was moved in, Miss A was involved in a horrific orgy involving two of the West children who reportedly sucked on Rose's hair while Rose again laughed maniacally throughout.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That sounds like the stories that the witches told, right, and the afflicted told of the activity that they would see, that kind of maniacal, like many people all laughing and and cavorting with the devil.
BEN KISSEL
So now you're pro Salem Witch Trials.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I'm just saying that Rose-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it sounds like you're coming on the side of the afflicted.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that very interesting?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No!
BEN KISSEL
Wow!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah it's the satanic panic thing where there's actual real shit that's provable and it's like you know this actually sounds a lot like what they're saying is happening in the McMartin preschool.
BEN KISSEL
Oh Henry's going full Warnke! He's going full Warnke!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know what I mean where it's like that idea of Rose West, she just sounds like a modern day version of a child's story witch.
MARCUS PARKS
She's truly a monster, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's just always filled with this maniacal joy, whatever it is that she's doing.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean that is a one in a billion person, Rose West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That is not by any means a widespread person.
BEN KISSEL
I mean we're not trying to romance her here. You're one in a billion, Rose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They broke the mold when they made you, Rose.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah! Oh my.
MARCUS PARKS
Well concerning Rose, one of the most shocking facts about the Fred and Rose West saga is that the West children actually remembered Fred West more fondly because in their words he wasn't as insanely violent as their mother nor as unpredictable. That's how they described Rose West, insanely violent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and Fred was the stable one.
BEN KISSEL
That's probably not good for a relationship.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And like I said earlier, Stephen West said on the podcast series based on Howard Sounes' book that Rose was actually the instigator, particularly in the realm of torture. Fred West was more of again a minion than a driving force. Now Miss A was actually allowed to leave 25 Cromwell after this nightmare and reportedly Miss A returned six weeks later with a full can of gasoline with the full intent of burning the house down. But when she showed up she thought better and returned to the children's home, only to later testify against Rose West.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man. This is a rare time where I say she should have committed an act of arson.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
It's a rare moment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think more things could be set on fire.
BEN KISSEL
I mean in this case set the whole damn thing on fire.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it might be tempting to say burn it down but Miss A probably decided against burning down the house because she would have taken far more people than just Fred and Rose West.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, everything's right on top of each other.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
There's seven young women living in the rooms in the top two floors that were completely cut off from the Wests.
BEN KISSEL
Well just give them a heads up. Just be like about to burn it down! You're gonna want to exit!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I couldn't help but notice you're putting a bunch of gasoline on my apartment.
BEN KISSEL
About to burn it down, you're just gonna want to get on out of here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay good, thank you for the warning then.
BEN KISSEL
No problem.
MARCUS PARKS
And also there's five or six children living in the West's apartment itself.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
There's gonna be a lot of people taken along. Few people stayed at the West house for any period of time but at least once a tenant would not only settle into the lifestyle but would engage in a relationship with Fred and Rose at her own peril. In this case we have a young woman named Shirley Robinson. Shirley Robinson was a sex worker known to Rose and she ended up in a throuple at 25 Cromwell with Fred and Rose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
BEN KISSEL
It's not a throuple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not a throuple. Just saying throuple, cause now throuple is cute.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, throuple.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know like throuples all Tiktok people having sex and letting their wife have sex and then have to act like it's fun and they're high fiving each other, you know?
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. A throuple sounds like it would be fun if you have like, what do you call those grasshoppers?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Taika Waititi. Taika Waititi and the other woman that he's with and he has another supermodel, that's a throuple.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, I was thinking grasshoppers. Remember the grasshopper, the candy with the chocolate and the peanuts and the caramel?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, this is all about him not having had food before the show.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean throuples, yeah, throuples are fine. If you want to be in the throuple. I mean I've never seen a throuple in which one person didn't eventually get kicked out and have their fucking heart broken into a million pieces but if you want to try the throuple, go right on ahead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying the Wests and somebody else is just ugh. It's not like the bitch in apartment 4B or whatever that apartment is, that show was, remember?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean by accounts this was a consensual relationship. I mean Shirley Robinson was in it with the Wests. Eventually both Shirley and Rose got pregnant at the same time, both by clients, and Rose hoped she and Shirley would raise these illegitimate children together. But strangely during this pregnancy in particular, Rose refused to ever wear underwear. She'd often be seen sitting on the back steps of her house with her legs wide open, airing out her crotch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They broke the mold when they made you, Rose!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Broke the mold!
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
However things soon went south with Shirley Robinson for reasons unknown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. Wow. What could have happened?
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. We can infer some of the reasons perhaps.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it's speculated that Rose grew jealous or she just got tired of the situation. Who knows? Either way after Rose gave birth to her child, a girl named Tara, she and Fred decided that Shirley no longer needed to be around. She was due to give birth in June of 1978 but after seeing her doctor in May, Shirley was murdered by the Wests, eight months pregnant, most likely by simple strangulation rather than extended torture. With this one though it is suspected that Rose committed the murder and disposed of the body herself because the dismemberment was far messier than any of the others. From what I can tell it seems like Fred told her you made the mess, you clean it up.
BEN KISSEL
You know how couples fight like that, like that Everybody Loves Raymond episode where it's not about the suitcase, okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It never is.
BEN KISSEL
Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It never is.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In his little autobiography that he wrote in jail, one thing that he does is he doesn't say anything about any murder or none of the crimes but he talks about the loves of his life and the ones he wished that he could be with forever. And one was Shirley. And so there is a little bit of that.
BEN KISSEL
So Rose was jealous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was just like, (British accent) 'She was one. She was one. If I could write 1000 poems, I'd write at least one about Shirley.'
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) And one I'd write about crisps and another I'd write about tape.
BEN KISSEL
Tape and crisps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I'd write about concrete.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, kinda write about what you know I guess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Anything else?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Rape.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I hate that poem. No one likes it.
BEN KISSEL
No one does like it, Fred. No.
MARCUS PARKS
See instead of carefully carving away the flesh and disarticulating the limbs, the thighs were hacked off with a heavy ax by nine blows before the bone finally broke, which is a far cry from the meticulous work that had been done on most of the bodies. Trophies however were still taken, although this time Fred and/or Rose also scalped the hair, either before or after decapitation.
BEN KISSEL
Where did they put all this shit? Well not shit, where did they put these human parts?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
Nobody fucking knows.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that they just went out to that farm area.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe just dumped it somewhere?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that's where they had it cause Fred West brings up that place again and again and again. And I feel like they went there a lot or he did.
MARCUS PARKS
He did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think he went to go-
BEN KISSEL
Hanging out in a room full of severed bones and skin?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just was very romantically obsessed with these ideas because he also talks about in the confessions, he's like, (British accent) 'I close my eyes and the ghosts, they come to me. They come and ask me when we gonna see you, Fred? When we gonna see you?' And so he goes and he says that he speaks to all the ghosts.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay. Like Maniac.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I think the fact that the scalping was the only time that this was ever done to any of the corpses, I think it points towards Rose doing it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because I think it seems like that's Rose's thing because it cannot be stressed enough that Rose was also a serial killer. She's also experimenting. She's doing the same shit that every other serial killer does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yup.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But concerning the eight month old baby, it was dismembered as well and Fred again took trophies. Didn't matter who it was, if there was a dead body around, Fred's taking the fingers and Fred's taking the toes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But after this murder, arguably the most distasteful, the magic of the act sort of lost its edge for a little while.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead Rose focused on sex work, putting ads and magazines saying shit like this:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) "Sexy housewife needs it deep and hard from VWA, very well endowed male, while husband watches."
BEN KISSEL
Oh man, I'm just not that well endowed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I bet she'd take you.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well to herd clients in mum and dad's room, Fred installed a doorbell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, mum and dad's room is always awful.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just again, they're bad.
BEN KISSEL
They're bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're bad.
BEN KISSEL
They are bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are just bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Fred installed a doorbell for Rose's clients labeled 'Mandy' which was Rose's professional name. When it rang, Rose dropped everything to attend to the clients, sometimes leaving food burning on the stove. Fred and Rose also had another child, number six, mostly because Fred said that quote unquote "potting Rose helped her from getting topsy."
BEN KISSEL
Potting Rose helped her from getting topsy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He literally filled her with child because we are watching the inner mechanism of the murder group fall apart. We are seeing him look at Rose and I think after she scalped a corpse-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like oh shit, Rose is getting a little out of hand.
BEN KISSEL
This is the breaking point?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's starting to separate where I think especially cause she's put the driving force on I want to get back hardcore into sex work because again insinuating you're not enough. And what do we do with people that don't start to fit in with our lifestyle after a while? We fucking kill them and we dismember them when we put them in the backyard.
BEN KISSEL
It's a strange ad for a local paper, I'm sure there's mostly editorials about jaywalking and how it has to be banned. And then all of a sudden Rose West is just like I'll take it deep and hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually feel like it was way more DIY.
MARCUS PARKS
What do you mean DIY? Like they tacked up flyers on fucking telephone posts?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does kind of feel like it's got a sort of feel... Maybe I'm wrong, sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com if you know anything about this time period and sex work at the time. But I feel like it was a little bit more accepted and it was way more people going into people's homes, it was like that. Being like, (British accent) 'Well that's what they want to do. It's a nice home.'
BEN KISSEL
Well sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) It's a lovely home.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think that that sex work was super accepted in small town England in the 1970s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All they're doing is fucking each other's aunts.
BEN KISSEL
Well they do enjoy that, obviously it's a matriarchy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I imagine the ad, it was probably in like a Flesh World type of magazine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But this time of relative peace was disturbed when Bill Letts, Rose's father, died of mesothelioma. Take that, motherfuckers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, he said it!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! Did he get it at Camp Lejeune?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said it!
BEN KISSEL
No! Mesothelioma!
MARCUS PARKS
If you have been stationed in or around Camp Lejeune, please call.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get outta there! Go! The water's poison!
BEN KISSEL
You might have mesothelioma! Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
A few months later, as it often goes with serial killers in a stressful life event, Fred and Rose returned to murder albeit for the last known time with a sexual motive. The victim this time was another girl lured from Jordan's Brook House named Alison Chambers. She again worked briefly as a nanny before being killed, dismembered, and buried in the garden. Now she was reported missing but because she wrote her mother a letter saying she was off to live with a family to look after their children, she failed to name the Wests. So the police determined that Alison Chambers was most likely fine, just unreachable.
BEN KISSEL
She's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's fine.
BEN KISSEL
See how easy that is to be a detective? She's fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) All right well she's got feet, she ran away. All right? Get away from me. Hold my stick.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Look at the hat, I'm a cop.
BEN KISSEL
Can we please go get a meat pie now?
MARCUS PARKS
By 1980 there were six kids living at 25 Cromwell and a new baby replaced Anna Marie after she finally left at the age of 15 due to years of abuse. And by the way if you're curious, again, those years of abuse are detailed to an insane degree in the book 'Fred and Rose'. But when Anna Marie left, Heather, Rose's first child, she became the eldest in the house and she began to bear the brunt of both Rose's beatings And Fred's sexual abuse, something that Fred called a father's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes because he learned that again directly from his father.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's right, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that he was sleeping with his own mother, we know that he probably impregnated his 13 year old sister.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's viewed this again, that's just country living.
BEN KISSEL
It's really not. It's really not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he brought it to the city!
BEN KISSEL
Look at that.
MARCUS PARKS
And concerning that so-called right, one of the kids that were fathered by a customer of Rose's, Tara that was not Fred's daughter, she said that Fred only abused his natural children because he looked at them as his property. As such, in one case when Anna Marie briefly visited with a boyfriend, he heard a protracted 20 minute screaming fit in the middle of the night which Fred and Rose explained away as Heather having a nightmare. Of course it's just them torturing Heather down in the cellar.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now soon after, Anna Marie was unfortunately forced to move back into 25 Cromwell although she made her boyfriend promise that he would never leave her alone with her parents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I'd be the boyfriend being like do I really got to get in the middle of this fucking shit? We need to move to Hollywood or something. We gotta get the hell out of here.
BEN KISSEL
You don't just date the person, you date their family too.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The family, you're right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Anna Marie moved back in to help raise another child, Rosemary Jr, who had again been born as a consequence of Rose's sex work. A year later another sex work baby was born, number three out of eight I think. I think it was the third one in a row. And after that Rose got even more violent even more frequently.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How do you do so much after being pregnant for a decade?
MARCUS PARKS
She likes it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah I guess that's what it is.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People just like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's a lifestyle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah it is, it is a lifestyle.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. She punched her children, stabbed them with knives, slammed their fingers in doors, choked them, tied their hands with wire, made them drink mixtures of salt and vinegar, and beat them with the buckle of a belt. And that's for starters. Anna Marie of course moved out when she again reached her limit. Meanwhile as Howard Sounes speculates and we wholeheartedly agree, Fred and Rose were almost undoubtedly abducting and murdering girls throughout the '80s, although there is no proof they did so outside of Fred's talk about the possibility of as many as 30 victims after his capture.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. There's just nowhere else to bury them at 25 Cromwell Street.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they just outsourced it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think they went to the farm and they just slowly started to leave them various places and I think that the dismembering just got way more articulate.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Heather West, the eldest of Fred and Rose's children together, she was trying as hard as she could to escape 25 Cromwell. She begged her sister Anne Marie to let her come live at her place, she also applied to work at a summer camp just so she could escape the house for at least a few months. But her sister probably rightfully pegged that Fred and Rose would just come snatch her back if she tried running and her application at the summer camp was tragically denied.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God. God, just one job interview. Oh god.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Soon after Heather West disappeared like so many girls before and became the last girl killed by Fred and Rose West. Now for some reason Fred and Rose had become obsessed with the possibility that their daughter Heather was a lesbian and some speculate that perhaps it was this obsession that led to Heather West's death. Howard Sounes speculated that Fred and Rose tried quote unquote "curing her" by tying her up and raping her and at one point, one of the two of them strangled her to death. Now Fred did say that he was the one who did it but it's more likely that it was Rose because Rose's temper was now beyond imagination.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because she'd also go into these games and then truly get jealous of her own husband in the moment and then freak out and kill the person in front of him. But he's just all wrapped up in it and looking at her, knowing that at some point it's gonna come down to me and you.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It might.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It might.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe. Another clue as to which one did it is in the dismemberment. Like the body of Shirley Robinson, the corpse of Heather West was hacked to pieces in a manner that we could call inexpert. This again suggests that Rose both committed the murder and dismembered the body. But before the corpse was buried, it was left in black garbage bags under the stairs until they could figure out a place to bury her at home. This does actually point towards the possibility that maybe Fred and Rose did take an extended break in the '80s because otherwise she would have been just buried along with all the others.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless the new spot was also full.
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe. It also might have been that since Heather West was their own child, they might have buried her close by in a sort of perverted extension of the possession Fred felt towards his children.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's exactly what I think happened. Because Fred West, we'll talk about later on that he would say that they would after burying her, he would come out and he said he was obsessed with this idea. He'd go, (British accent) 'Heather wake up. Heather come to your father.' Like he would go and yell at the grave and say like wake up.
BEN KISSEL
Right. I wish she would.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think he did it. I don't think he did that necessarily.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think that is that because then he'd use her as an example to the rest of the children.
BEN KISSEL
Could have been cool if she woke up and then killed him from the grave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it'd be a great movie.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah it would be cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And when the rest of the children came home from school to find Heather missing, they were flatly told that Heather had gotten the job at the summer camp after all. Fred then asked Stephen to help him dig a hole in the garden for a new fishpond which was, unbeknownst to Stephen, his sister's grave. The hole was then paved over with pink and yellow square slabs and a patio was built over Heather West's buried body. Now after Heather's murder, Fred West decided to move his younger children into the cellar permanently.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no, that's not good.
MARCUS PARKS
Covering the floors with linoleum to permanently entomb the five young women buried beneath the house. And eventually the West kids would cover the walls of the cellar in childish graffiti, bizarre murals of cowboys, and crudely drawn cartoon hearts all scrawled on the remaining white stucco that hadn't crumbled off the exposed brick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's what I was talking about with the idea of like Buzz and Woody drawn on it because as you look at the police pictures afterwards, I feel like that is... I mean obviously it's all deeply disturbing but that was one of the things that's the worst because it does look like the basement in a child daycare.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it's all painted up with kids drawings and shit.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean it doesn't look like a... No child daycare looks like that. It's awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, of course. I had this guy in the neighborhood named Danny, I used to go down there for six weeks at a time and I'd go down to the basement and he'd chain me up, he said trying to make me taller.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I think you're trauma dumping.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No! No!
BEN KISSEL
We'll talk about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the thing is that I would make him laugh so hard he'd let me go.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that fantastic?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then I'd always go back because again I gotta get that laugh.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, put the butter on the sourdough.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I'm sure Fred and Rose got a kick of just how evil this move was but the practical reason was to just get the kids out of the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well see Fred And Rose wanted to transform the entire upstairs area into a brothel while the lower section where the kids lived in the former torture and kill cellar was sectioned off with an iron gate to keep the kids isolated and held captive when they weren't at school. Now for the next five years it's unknown how many young women Fred and Rose killed if any, seeing as how they converted their torture and kill room into holding cells for their six remaining children. Really all that's known is that Fred would threaten the kids often and loudly that they would be killed and buried under the porch like Heather if they didn't behave.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) 'One over and two to the left.' He'd go and he'd look at the panels on the ground and that's where they would say that she was buried in the backyard. You know what's kind of funny is that my mom used to say that she was like I'll get ready and I'll make another one just like you.
BEN KISSEL
No, why would she wanna make one just like you if she wanted to get rid of you in the first place?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it was more saying no one would miss me. But again it was a funny bit at the time.
MARCUS PARKS
That is funny.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's kinda funny but I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
How many little Polish, redheaded, squealing boys were there running around Queens at the time?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, there's not really that many of them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I killed each one because honestly I didn't need the competition.
BEN KISSEL
No you didn't, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was me showing them.
BEN KISSEL
Survival of the fattest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm in charge of this ginger yard.
BEN KISSEL
Right, absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right? I'm the big fish.
BEN KISSEL
Indeed. No doubt about that.
MARCUS PARKS
But while we don't know if they murdered anyone in those five years, they certainly never stopped abusing young girls. And in 1992 one of the girls that Fred and Rose had groomed and raped talked to a friend about what she'd suffered. Thankfully the person assigned to the case was Detective Hazel Savage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is again with Last Podcast a lot of times we try to be pretty honest about how cops do their jobs and how they don't do their jobs. But this detective actually dug in.
BEN KISSEL
Hazel Savage.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually did her job.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, isn't that great how we have to differentiate? Wow! There was a cop that did their job! Holy shit, dude!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because this story literally already has several decades of police not doing anything.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's the thing here. It's a real Jodie Foster situation. Silence of the Lambs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, she was a woman who-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, she got into it. I just remember her climbing the rope.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, indeed. That was the beginning of the movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Detective Savage was one of the first women to become a detective in England and she was highly regarded by damn near everyone as a super cop. Additionally she'd already had a brief run-in with Fred West way back in 1966 when Fred's first wife Rena had run back to Scotland after a string of petty thefts in England.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Detective Savage was the person who had found and arrested Rena. But Rena soon told Savage all about Fred West's violent tendencies and sexual deviance to the extent that Detective Savage remembered it nearly 30 years later. Sure enough when Savage looked into Fred's criminal history, she found the 1973 assault that we talked about at the beginning of this episode. And so after serving a search warrant for 25 Cromwell Street for child abuse and pornography possession in which a vast collection of pornography, both homemade and professional, plus a treasure trove of sex toys was confiscated, Fred and Rose were arrested for the rape of the girl who had reported them. This was 21 years after their first arrest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
21 years.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
There was 21 years between their first arrest and their second arrest.
BEN KISSEL
For some reason I feel like they were really offended when they took the pornography because he was just like I read Easy Rider for the articles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Easy Rider is not a pornographic magazine. Easy Rider, no, you're thinking more like-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nugget.
MARCUS PARKS
Hustler and Nugget, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, Easy Rider. It was the gals on the bikes. Easy Rider.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but that's not really...
MARCUS PARKS
They weren't naked though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nugget is where you see an old woman just sitting on a toilet.
BEN KISSEL
I know but Easy Rider was definitely pornographic, they weren't dressed like Secretary of State.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
It was definitely pornographic.
MARCUS PARKS
How many issues of Easy Rider have you read, Ben? Because I've read two.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. He just pulled your pornography card.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just went up to inspect you and I love to see the showdown of old vintage pornography and two men who it makes hard.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah well...
MARCUS PARKS
I actually have started quite the nice little Penthouse collection that I started at, what's the place in Pittsburgh? Eide's?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eide's, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's a great time to admit that. It's a perfect time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So if you are here, send your vintage pornography to PO Box 470, North Hollywood, California, 9160.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, absolutely. Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Unused pornography.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
I will only take it in mint or near mint collection.
BEN KISSEL
How are you gonna know?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He won't. He won't know. You know how he does?
BEN KISSEL
You're not gonna know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know how he knows? Taste test.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I licked every page. This one's particularly gross.
MARCUS PARKS
Give it the old sniff test.
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
Give it a sniff sniff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Give it a portion.
BEN KISSEL
No one wants a portion!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Is it wrong for me to want to have sex with my wife? And they say well it's fine if you wanna have sex with the wife but are you banned from the Tesco?
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
70s Penthouses are fantastic.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
But meanwhile-
BEN KISSEL
It's not the hill to die on, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not a hill to die on. I have a fucking Penthouse that's got an interview with John Hinckley, it's amazing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a hill to masturbate on.
BEN KISSEL
Yes it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Meanwhile, Detective Savage had a hunch that there was far more going on at 25 Cromwell Street outside of the rape of one girl. So starting with Anna Marie, Savage began interviewing everyone who had any sort of contact with Fred and Rose West. Now of course Anna Marie talked about everything that was done to her but she also mentioned her half sister Charmaine and her mother Rena, both of whom had been missing for decades. This is 1992, they've been missing since the late '60s.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Anna Marie's boyfriend added that Heather would probably know more than anyone but no one had seen Heather in five years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But meanwhile every other police officer is like, (British accent) 'Everybody runs away.'
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh. It seems like it, yeah. Easy excuses.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) Everybody just runs. You'd be surprised how many 15 year old girls are absolute experts at hiding their personality.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And fading away as ghosts in the mists, no trace.
BEN KISSEL
No indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot of parallels between this story and the Dean Corll story.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very, very similar.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, there's the party house angle.
BEN KISSEL
Less candy.
MARCUS PARKS
Kids are very transient in these days so it's like ah, they'll turn up eventually, not putting in any effort and then boom, all of a sudden 35 kids are missing.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And actually Kissel, there is quite a bit of candy.
BEN KISSEL
Is there candy?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I was reading through it, Fred West did have a notorious sweet tooth and that was how they ate. They would eat like children, they would eat candy and whatever was garbage. But yeah, he loved his candy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, Lucky Charms for dinner.
MARCUS PARKS
And so Savage looked into a possible paper trail for Heather West and noticed that there had been no income or tax records since she quote unquote "left home" and no records of state or health benefits, all of which was nearly impossible if she was still alive. Now Rose's story was that she gave Heather £600 to leave home because she didn't want her daughter's quote unquote "lesbian ways" influencing her other children. But without hard evidence, Rose was only charged with child abuse. She was granted bail while Fred, who was also charged with child abuse, he remained in prison. Rose subsequently attempted suicide by pill overdose but after Stephen saved her, she got a job as a janitor, continued doing sex work, and filled her days watching Snow White, Looney Tunes, or the Robin Williams movie Hook over and over again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now that's a good plug for Hook. (British accent) There you are, Peter.
BEN KISSEL
Again as an artist, you just never know who's watching your work.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because also imagining all the lost boys, that's gotta kinda be fun.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All you do is kill children, right.
BEN KISSEL
I mean you're not supposed to empathize with Hook. Captain Hook's bad but I think she probably liked him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually feel he's a complex man.
BEN KISSEL
He's not that complex.
MARCUS PARKS
But there were no little girls in Hook though, it was all lost boys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No there was that gal, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There was one little girl but she was only in the beginning and the end. And then Julia Roberts.
BEN KISSEL
That's Tinkerbell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But how'd those boys make more boys?
MARCUS PARKS
It's a mystery.
BEN KISSEL
No, Rufio, Rufio.
MARCUS PARKS
They were produced asexually through potting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that real?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
I mean we just don't know, do we?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess lost boys lay eggs.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they might.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or is it all just a collection of boys from other timelines?
BEN KISSEL
I think they're all dead.
MARCUS PARKS
I think they molt and then when they shed their skin, that becomes a new lost boy.
BEN KISSEL
There's no way that they're actually alive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sidestorieslpotl@gmail.com. Do the lost boys have a reproductive system? And I don't wanna hear any of your filthy pornography, I wanna hear from scientists.
BEN KISSEL
No, absolutely. But I think they're all already corpses and that's why they can imagine food and it appears.
MARCUS PARKS
You think that's a superpower corpses have?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he's just saying that they're in heaven.
BEN KISSEL
No, they're not in heaven.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever, they're in limbo.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now the Gloucester police were content with simply charging Fred and Rose West with child abuse despite the many disappearances surrounding them. And indeed the witness in the child abuse case dropped out at the last second once again, meaning both Fred and Rose were allowed to go home. But both social services and Detective Savage knew that there was far more to discover at 25 Cromwell, especially when the West children told them about Fred's frequent threats about the patio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is true, this is completely true.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How it began, how the whole thing started falling apart was that the kids were playing on the street and one of them I guess truly understanding that maybe if all the other brothers and sisters are missing and more continue to go missing and mom and dad are obviously a bit chaotic to say the least, that maybe this attention might turn to them. At one point they saw Bobby on the street and they went up to him and said, (British accent) 'Hey, what if our sister hasn't been around for a long time and our parents keep saying they buried her in the backyard?'
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is completely real.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the cops were like, (British accent) 'It sounds like a bit of a concern then.'
BEN KISSEL
That is a bit of a concern.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that fed in. It took literally finally one of the children being like, (British accent) 'We think we might be next.'
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they still were like, (British accent) 'Well you run home now, I'm just gonna go.' And you're like oh!
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I gotta go home?!
BEN KISSEL
You would think the detectives would want to solve this case.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now we're starting to get some heat.
BEN KISSEL
Come on.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it starting getting heat but that's the thing is that it's still a risk and it still costs money because one, it's on the word of a child and you never know. And so just before Detective Savage retired, she put everything she had into pushing a full search warrant to dig up the grounds at 25 cromwell, much to the resistance of the Gloucester police.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
See they were mostly concerned about the cost of digging up the patio because if they were wrong they'd have to compensate the Wests, they'd have to put it back.
BEN KISSEL
Got to replace it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Gotta replace the patio.
BEN KISSEL
Gotta replace that patio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's £50-£75 and a couple of cans of beans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very difficult.
BEN KISSEL
That's a lot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's whole months of work.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Or we could solve this what, eight murders? But whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(snoring)
BEN KISSEL
It'd be so expensive though. Also linoleum.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You know what that's going for these days?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh linoleum!
MARCUS PARKS
And Fred and Rose West, they believed they'd once again skirted justice even though their five youngest children were thankfully taken far away from the West home permanently after their arrest. As a result, Fred and Rose disgustingly tried starting another family after reversing Rose's tube tying procedure that Rose got after the birth of Lucyanna 10 years before in 1983. But in early 1994, one of the West children got much more talkative about what happened at 25 Cromwell and that gave Detective Savage that last little bit of leverage she needed to dig up the patio. Indeed even the Gloucester police admit that this would have never happened had it not been for Detective Savage's persistence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
You take her out of the picture, never would've gotten caught.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just there. Just there until someone passed.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god. Well yeah, I mean...
MARCUS PARKS
I mean until someone until a young girl ran screaming out of their home, they would not have been caught.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With shackles on and a picture of her next to Fred West with the newspaper in the background that says this is the day that did it and he headline says Fred West is guilty of rape. That's when you get it.
MARCUS PARKS
Now when police took custody of Fred West while they dug up the patio, they told him that they were investigating the disappearance of his daughter Heather to which Fred replied entirely unprompted that he definitely didn't murder her.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I definitely didn't murder her.
BEN KISSEL
Weird that you would bring that up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you brought it up.
BEN KISSEL
No, you brought it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You brought up how many murders I've done, I've done 12 of them. But I haven't though at the same time.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just thought about it a lot and have planned and have done it.
BEN KISSEL
Great, so you murdered 12 people?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You said it but false allegations!
MARCUS PARKS
Rose meanwhile got aggressive in the box, shouting and swearing, taking the who gives a shit approach by saying that hundreds of thousands of kids go flipping missing every year, so why should they hassle her about Heather?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
But even before Heather's body was found, Fred decided that there was no use in prolonging the inevitable. At 5PM on the second day of digging, Fred told police that they were digging in the wrong place, so beginning a long confession in which he took responsibility for everything in an attempt to save Rose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a really interesting documentary I watched called The Unseen Fred West Confessions that was only on the BBC and I found it. And it's very, very interesting to watch him escalate because it begins with just being like that's where you get the the I didn't understand, I was mad with Heather, (British accent) and you'd be surprised how fast you can strangle someone, you can be surprised. He did that talking about how strong his hands are.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he's just trying to not blame himself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then slowly but surely it would get worse and worse.
MARCUS PARKS
After the confession began, Fred chose an attorney named Howard Ogden who usually represented thieves and drunks, a sort of Saul Goodman type who advertised on the radio with this catchphrase:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) "If you've been nicked, call Oggy."
BEN KISSEL
Oh all right, fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Oggy, oggy, oggy!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oggy, oggy, oggy!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he also was the dude that Fred West, because this whole time he's like, (British accent) 'I don't believe for a second that Fred did it. But wouldn't you know, he did quite a bit.'
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
At the same time, Rose in her Q&A with a hilariously named officer called Terry Onions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very British.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
She did her level best to pretend like she didn't even know Heather was dead. She claimed that she didn't even know Fred was a murderer, again nonchalantly commenting on the state of affairs by saying she felt quote "like a bit of a cunt" for not knowing what was happening in her own house.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'd say that's fair.
BEN KISSEL
Don't we all? Don't we all sometimes? Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
While Fred was confessing and Rose was denying, police found Heather's remains in a slurry of quote "glutinous black matter", decomposed flesh and organs mixed with dirt. They'd also found someone else's thigh bone. And after that Fred gave away the locations of everybody entombed in the garden at 25 Cromwell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is where police senses of humor and British sense of humor meet because the way it was discovered is that they went in there like, (British accent) 'So what we've got, what we got there?' And he's just being like, (British accent) 'Well we've got two bodies unless one of them has got three legs!'
BEN KISSEL
Well now that's a practical joke there. What a good piece of humor there, Officer Fred Willard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they laughed and laughed and laughed.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, haha. Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually Fred also said that Rose was an accomplice, particularly in the kidnapping of Caroline Owens and the murder of Shirley Robinson, the pregnant woman. And with that, Fred and Rose West were both charged. Fucking finally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Damn.
MARCUS PARKS
After that people started telling the newspapers, as is par for the course, that they always knew there was something fishy about 25 Cromwell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're full of shit!
BEN KISSEL
Oh you did, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No they didn't!
MARCUS PARKS
(British accent) I knew there was always something fishy about old 25 Cromwell! I always knew.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe you could have said something a little earlier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh but then I'd have to talk.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
(British accent) In the late nights, there was always all this screaming. All the time a plague of flies coming up from the cellar. Always knew there was something fishy about old 25 Cromwell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one said anything.
BEN KISSEL
It's been going on for 20 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Fred meanwhile couldn't even remember how many bodies were buried there, guessing around nine which I think does indeed tell you that he killed far more than what were buried in the cellar and the garden.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he kept doing the thing, being like, (British accent) 'There might be one here. There might be, there might be...' And it's real vague.
BEN KISSEL
It's crazy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he'd wait to see what they found and then he'd be like, (British accent) 'Yeah, all right, yeah, there might be some more. There might be some more.' And then he'd wait to see what they found, be like, (British accent) 'There might be some over here.'
MARCUS PARKS
Fred also refused to explain why bones were missing from every single body and he claimed that he only cut off the heads to make sure they were dead. As far as Rose went, she flipped on Fred as fast as she could in an attempt to save herself.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What? She's not really trustworthy, huh?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't believe. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He said he knew when they sat because he was so excited to see her, they'd been separated and the whole time he's just been like, (British accent) 'Once I've seen my Rose, we're gonna get together.'
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if that's gonna happen, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then when he showed up, she turned away from him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It was at the hearing, that was the first time they saw each other after the trial and the last time they ever saw each other. But inbetween accusations, Rose spent her days in a police safe house wearing only a dressing gown while she watched cartoons or played her own version of Scrabble in which you could only play words that involved sex in some way.
BEN KISSEL
God, it's like Arkham.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it really is.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And she would do the same rocking back and forth, the same self soothing mechanism that she would do her whole life. And I did see some studies that say that it can be connected to developmental disabilities, that sort of rocking.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think that she was perfectly normal.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think so.
MARCUS PARKS
Now after both Fred and Rose West were charged with nine murders in addition to the two Fred had committed on his own, Fred spent his days in prison as a somewhat bipolar prisoner, alternating between crying jags and greeting the guards with a cheerful (British accent) allo guvna.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And he wrote his little journal.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. He had little books.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So that was his thing, he started going into the detail, well no details, the absolute opposite. But what he viewed as an explanation which was that he was a romantic that no one could understand and his whole life he was just searching for that perfect love. He also breaks down why he thought it was okay for his father-in-law to have sex with both of his daughters because he says-
MARCUS PARKS
And his wife.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And his wife, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Who was his daughter. (British accent) 'One night Bill asked me to take Glenys home with his van so on the way I said to her hey, do you have sex with other men? And she said oh yes. And I said with your dad, yes? Yes? Oh yes, she says. Well she says he pays well, right. And I said do you know he's having sex with Rose? And she said yes, he give her money to do it. So it was for money his daughter was doing it for.'
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's a hell of a memoir.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. And so she was around, Bill was there, obviously an accomplice, definitely was involved in a lot of crimes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But he also was a client of his own daughter.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's speculated that Bill Letts was involved in definitely some of the rapes, possibly some of the murders. Fred's brother was definitely involved in the rapes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Definitely involved.
MARCUS PARKS
He was actually charged with raping Anna Marie over 300 times.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he killed himself in prison. He hung himself in prison. And speaking of hanging yourself in prison, on New Year's Day 1995, Fred had his choice of meal as was tradition for British prisoners on the holiday. He had soup and pork chops.
BEN KISSEL
Fucking British, man. I can't. Maybe we shouldn't go. I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I like pork chops.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but just soup and pork chops?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Here's my question, have you ever had a fantastic pork chop?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I make pork chops quite often, it's one of my signature dishes. At home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At home but not in a restaurant.
BEN KISSEL
That's what you would beat Bobby Flay with? Your signature dish would be the pork chop?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, I got the recipe off of inspiredtastes.com. I could beat Bobby Flay with my pork chop.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right Bobby, I'll give you my favorite meal and see if you can best me. It's used condoms and Sprite.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow. Unbelievable. We must be going against Frank West today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These are chewy.
MARCUS PARKS
But soup and chops was actually Fred's last meal. After slorping it down, he tore the sheets of his bed into strips, fashioned a noose, stood on a chair, and kicked it out from underneath. Fittingly the fall did not break his neck so Fred West slowly strangled to death in his prison cell. His body was then cremated at Canley Crematorium miles away in Coventry because it was the only one that would accept Fred's body.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Rose was the only other one.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Rose West's lawyers weekly tried arguing that since Fred had taken all the blame for the crimes, Rose shouldn't have to stand trial. But stand trial she did, shockingly and ill advisedly taking the stand at her own insistence to narcissistically set the record straight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's a pain in the fucking ass.
BEN KISSEL
So the defense attorneys didn't put her on the stand on purpose because she was so charming?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they didn't think she would rock the room. When she does her tight 10, she's gonna crush it.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, she's walking out of here for sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there's a great snippet of a phone call that she made where she's denying anything that she's done. And one thing is she does the Canadian thing. You remember with Robert Pickton when they had the undercover cop talking to him and the way he thinks to talk like a criminal is to say fuck over and over again? She does the same thing where she'd be like, (British accent) 'Fuck Fred, I'd never, I can't believe, fuck that. Oh never, fuck him. You know what I have a right mind say fuck him. I think I disagree with Fred, I couldn't be farther from him.'
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
I could actually say that Rose probably used fuck pretty often in regular conversation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I don't think she was the most articulate woman that's ever lived. Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But on the stand she vastly overestimated her own charm. She called her dead daughter Heather a quote unquote "awkward baby", she joked about how Fred drank vitamin supplements to keep up his strength enough to keep her constantly pregnant, and she openly made fun of every victim. This of course was followed by a highly sarcastic and very British cross examination in which every claim of innocence was easily proved to be utter bullshit. Rose West was therefore found guilty of 10 murders and two rapes, ensuring lifelong imprisonment. Apparently in prison Rose West, who's still alive-
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
She is addicted to watching TV documentaries about her own crimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which there are many.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There are many.
MARCUS PARKS
And she's been heard joking about the huge goofy glasses she wore during her trial, reportedly she said she wouldn't be caught dead wearing them now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(British accent) I wouldn't be caught dead.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. No, that's embarrassing for you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Rose though still maintains her innocence and shows no remorse and her tragically dangerous horniness did not abate with imprisonment. According to reports, soon after her conviction she started a prison affair with Myra Hindley.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
MARCUS PARKS
One half of the Moors murderers who killed six children in the mid '60s.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness. So what do you guys talk about?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know but they said that they would sit every day for breakfast, they would meet, because Myra Hindley was famously very scary in jail, one of the only other women, I think she is the only other woman to get a life sentence in British crime history.
MARCUS PARKS
In England?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe. And she was a chainsmoker and you have all these prisoners talking about what it was like being in jail with her and she was like Myra Hindley was very scary.
BEN KISSEL
I believe it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then when Rose West showed up they were like she's just this dumpy grandma, they didn't understand. But the immediately started slapping clams and Rose West, her move in the shower was she'd just sit there, she would always shower, she'd shower three or four times a day and she'd never put any clothes and her big thing was to put on a big display of drying her back waiting for somebody to come and give it a lick.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, fantastically disgusting.
MARCUS PARKS
Well from what Hindley's former lawyer said, Rose West upon coming into prison, she was impressed by Hindley's quote unquote "thirst for knowledge" and prison guards liked to refer to them as the gruesome twosome.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. That's awesome. They got a cute nickname.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. It's almost like there's no justice in the world.
MARCUS PARKS
This relationship however ended soon after it began because West said that Hindley could be very manipulative. Other reports say that the relationship ended over a fight over which one was more famous because Rose's star was starting to overtake Myra's as the most notorious female serial killer in England's history.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man oh man, that is a disgusting story.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm glad that we are at the end of it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm prepared for the UK now, that's for certain.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't wait.
BEN KISSEL
I'm gonna be a little bit more aware of my surroundings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because you're definitely, they're looking for you.
BEN KISSEL
I know, put me in a basement.
MARCUS PARKS
Gotta get some of those beans.
BEN KISSEL
You'll get some of those beans, Marcus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is gonna be my first example of this, I've heard this Liz Truss is a bit cheeky as well.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know what that is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the new Prime Minister.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we're gonna have to learn these things now.
BEN KISSEL
No I don't want to learn any more about them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're gonna go over there, we're gonna learn different knowledge.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Different things that will help us talk and we're going to say stuff like Liz Truss? More like business. I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like in some way we're gonna have to figure out something to do with her name.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
They'll get rid of her, they get rid of people real quick over there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And please, I know it's very sweet but don't bring me cans of Heinz baked beans to the show, I can't carry them with me. They're too heavy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sounds like he's asking for cans of Heinz beans.
BEN KISSEL
It does sound like he's asking for it. But he is asking for Irn-Bru.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm not, they're too heavy, I'm still suffering from long COVID. I can't carry things.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Well interesting. So don't bring beans to the show.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unless they are in bags.
BEN KISSEL
Bagged beans. It's the can that really is a lot of the weight.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A Ziploc of loose beans.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus will gladly take that.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also it's going to be difficult truly traveling with pallets of Irn-Bru.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, it will be.
MARCUS PARKS
Irn-Bru. It's pronounced 'iron brew'. I don't know why you insist on calling it 'eern brew'.
BEN KISSEL
Ern brew.'
MARCUS PARKS
You know it's 'iron brew', you know that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know. I don't know.
BEN KISSEL
I actually think it's 'ern brew'.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not, it's 'iron brew'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've gotten several emails immediately that have already said that apparently there's a new formula to Irn-Bru and it is dissatisfactory.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, it's not as good.
MARCUS PARKS
People have been saying that for years now. It's not quite as good, they did change the formula, they put less sugar in it now. They've been saying it for years. I know it's not as good as the first-
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Because to make it healthier.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you American?
BEN KISSEL
Come on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you even American?
BEN KISSEL
Come on.
MARCUS PARKS
What do you mean am I American? I didn't do it.
BEN KISSEL
Well bring your own sugar packets.
MARCUS PARKS
I didn't fucking go to Scotland and tell them to change the goddamn Irn-Bru recipe. Apparently if you want the original Irn-Bru taste, you can drink the Irn-Bru energy drink, that tastes like original Irn-Bru.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh!
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's nice, it gives you a little pep in your step there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does. (gagging)
BEN KISSEL
That'll be fun to dance to all the fiddle music and have a good time with. All right everyone, well thank you so much for listening. And again, couples, huh? All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really perfect. Really good way to wrap up.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Next week we've got a bit of a UFO tale and then begins the true spooky time.
BEN KISSEL
Halloween!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because we're gonna be there, we're gonna be in the UK, we're gonna be following some spooky funky bullshit over there. I'm excited.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And honestly if you've got a good scary story, if you've got a good scary place for us to visit over there, I would love to go see some haunted homes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And not just your home.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But something that's like... Where can we go? I know that you got the Tower of London.
BEN KISSEL
You just said don't go to these kinds of places and then you're requesting people to tell you to go to those places.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying-
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna get murdered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not us.
BEN KISSEL
Why not?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, once we're there we're gonna be doing a special, what is it, UK Marcus side stories edition.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
So if you've got anything like a cool fucking story from paranormal British history that's not as well known, we already know Borley Rectory, we know all about that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Borley Rectory.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
But if you got something that's a little lesser known, send it on to us. We might talk about it on the show.
BEN KISSEL
No crimes have ever taken place in England. All right everyone. Well thank you all so much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know that unequivocally to be not true, we just covered it for three hours.
BEN KISSEL
I know, it's fully haunted. It's a scary place. All right everyone, thank you so much for listening. Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations everybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Check the floorboards.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna put that out there. If you're moving into a new place-
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Check the floorboards.
BEN KISSEL
What a nightmare. Do you get a refund?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
You don't?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no.
BEN KISSEL
I'd be real mad about a house that had a bunch of corpses in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As a matter of fact the government shows up, rips up all of your property and then it just leaves it. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh.
MARCUS PARKS
Unfair.
BEN KISSEL
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's true though. We were joking about that but then our contractor, we were like if you see a skeleton in there, tell us, it's great for our brand. And he's just like just so you know if I do see a skeleton in there, we're gonna have to call the police. I was just like whatever, man.