Fred and Rosemary West are the most violent couple ever

They say it's good when a husband and wife have a common hobby. But what if it's a hobby — murder and rape? Fred and Rosemary West are considered one of the most cruel and ruthless couples in history. They even abused their own children, not to mention dozens of other innocent victims.

Read more about Britain's most famous serial killers in our article. This story will give you goosebumps, we guarantee you!

Fred West was born into a family of farmers Walter and Daisy West in a small town Much Markle, Hertfordshire. His father and mother did not live too richly, they had to raise six children.

Fred never excelled in his studies and decided to drop out of school at the age of 15.

When Fred was 17, he had a motorcycle accident and was in a coma for a week. After that, he had to undergo several operations, but it was not possible to completely get rid of the consequences of the accident – as a result of what happened, one of his legs became shorter than the other. But the worst thing is that Fred began to have sudden outbursts of aggression.

Two years later, West fell down the fire escape and was unconscious for two days. His mental state has deteriorated greatly. At the age of 19, the guy was first arrested for harassing a 13-year-old girl.

After this incident, the family turned away from Fred, and his mother sent him to live with her sister Violet.

In 1962, 21-year-old Fred met his school friend Catherine Costello. The girl worked as a prostitute and was better known under the assumed name of Rena. It turned out that Catherine was pregnant by one of her clients, but Fred was not confused. An affair began between them. On November 17 of the same year, the girl married West and moved to live with him in a Scottish town Cotbridge.

In 1963, Costello gave birth to a girl named Charmaine Carol. West adopted her, and a year later he had a biological daughter, Ann Marie.

During the same period, Fred committed his first murder. While working as an ice cream truck driver, he hit a four-year-old boy.

After the tragedy, the West couple decided to leave the town. Together with a friend Costello Ann McFall and nanny Isa McNeil they moved to Gloucestershire. Here Fred got a job at a slaughterhouse, which only increased his craving for blood and violence. At that time, West began to get involved in sadomasochistic pornography. The man wanted to both dominate and obey, but his wife flatly refused to participate in something like this. Soon, together with McNeil, she ran away from him to Scotland. 

Ann McFall, who was madly in love with Fred, agreed to stay and take care of the girls. An affair ensued between them, the girl became pregnant and demanded that West divorce his wife, who continued to visit the children every few months.

West was not satisfied with this state of affairs, so he decided to "eliminate" Ann. Fred killed her when she was eight months pregnant. Before dismembering and burying the body, he cut off all the fingers and toes to make the body harder to identify.

Fred never managed to get his wife back – in 1967, Catherine Costello finally left him. But a year later, the man met a new love - British Rosemary Letts, who at that time was only 15 years old. Fred was 27 at the time, and he was still legally married to Costello. Despite this, less than a year after they met, young Rosemary moved to live with him, and a few months later the couple bought a two-storey house in Midland Road, Gloucester.

The Letts family was against this relationship, but they failed to dissuade their daughter. In Fred, Rose saw a kindred spirit – in childhood, they both experienced serious trauma. According to their testimony, given to the police later, Rosemary was molested by her own father, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and West was molested by his mother. As a child, the girl also entered into an intimate relationship with her own brother. In addition, by her 14th birthday, Rosemary had already been raped by two men.

West's father wasn't a "gift" either. According to Fred, he regularly engaged in incestuous relationships with his daughters, and taught the boy various atrocities from an early age.

In 1970, Rosemary gave birth to Fred's daughter, whom they named Heather Ann. In the same year, West was jailed for theft, but in 1971 he was released.

Upon returning home, a "surprise" awaited him – in a fit of rage, Rosemary killed her stepdaughter Charmaine Carol, because she "refused to cry." The daughters were regularly beaten, and the girl's refusal to cry, regardless of the severity of the blows inflicted on her, greatly angered Rosemary.

The man always disliked Charmaine, constantly beat her and raped her, so the news of her death did not upset him much. He even helped Rose get rid of the body. For everyone else, they came up with a legend that Charmaine was taken by her own mother. After a while, Catherine really came for her daughter, so Fred and Rose had to kill her too.

Since Fred was no longer burdened by his marriage to Catherine, he and Rosemary legitimized the relationship. Then the husband gave his wife an idea of how to "have fun and earn extra money." Fred offered her to become a prostitute and even promised to look for clients himself. Rose liked the idea. As a result, a "guest" room appeared in their house, in which the girl received men.

Fred made a small hole in the wall to observe everything that was happening, and hung a special lamp over the door outside – if it glowed red, the children understood that mom was "busy" and it was better not to go into the room now.

In 1972, Rosemary gave birth to Fred's second daughter, who was named Mae West. The couple decided to move into a bigger house. Now the building, located at 25 Cromwell Street, is often called the "House of Horrors". It was in this place that the most terrible and brutal crimes took place, and it all started with the hiring of a sixteen-year-old nanny Caroline Roberts, whom the couple picked up on the road one evening.

The girl confessed that she had run away from her stepfather, and Fred and Rose promised to take care of her. In return, Caroline had to take care of their children. The girl immediately sensed something was wrong when she saw crowds of men passing through Rose's room. But the couple explained that she works as a masseuse and receives clients at home.

Later, Caroline's suspicions about the inadequacy of the family only intensified. One day Fred said that if she suddenly got pregnant, he could easily give her an abortion. The man admitted that he had "done it more than once," and the girls were eventually "so grateful to him that they offered their sexual services as a reward."

When Rose and Fred offered Caroline to join their "sex circle", the girl got scared and ran away. But a few weeks later, the couple met her again on the same road. They apologized to Caroline and invited her for a cup of tea to make amends somehow.

Roberts believed in the sincerity of her former employers and agreed to visit them. After the promised cup of tea, Fred and Rose tied up the girl and brutally abused her. The couple promised that if she resisted, they would throw her into the basement and call some of Rose's clients so that they could have fun too.

Caroline quickly realized that it was dangerous to argue with this family, and allowed them to do whatever they wanted. Also, the girl allegedly agreed to work for them as a nanny again. Only after that Caroline was released. The unfortunate woman managed to escape and report the incident to the police, but the couple convinced the jury that it was not rape, but consensual sex. As a result, they got off with a fine of 50 pounds for indecent behavior.

In the first year of life in a new house , an eight - year - old Anne Marie became a sexual victim of her parents. Fred and Rose took the girl to the basement, where her father raped her, and her mother watched. After that, her parents wouldn't let her go to school for several days and threatened her with violence if she told her friends something. Subsequently, Fred and Rose will mock their own daughter more than once.

At that time, a nanny worked in their house Linda Guh. It is not known what kind of conflict occurred between her and the couple, but later she was also found dead. With fingers and toes cut off.

Rosemary, meanwhile, gave birth to Fred's first son, Stephen West. But the appearance of another child did not affect the couple's preferences in any way. Delighted with their success in the murders, Fred and Rose kidnap a 15-year-old girl, rape her and kill her. The corpse is buried near his house, in fact, like all previous bodies.

In the same year, the couple kidnap a young girl Lucy Partington from a bus stop. For a whole week they mock her, and then they do the same thing as with her predecessors. Between April 1974 and April 1975, three other girls suffered a similar fate.

In 1977, the West family equipped the second floor of the house for living rooms, which began to be rented to tenants. Among them was 18-year-old Shirley Robinson, who previously worked as a prostitute. The girl turned out to be bisexual and maintained an intimate relationship with both Rosemary and Fred at the same time. She even got pregnant from West, but his wife did not like it, and she asked her husband to eliminate her rival.

By the way, Rosemary was also pregnant during the same period. However, not from West, but from one of his clients. In total, during the years of marriage with Fred, the girl gave birth to seven children: three were from him, three more from clients, and one from her own father. Rose's dad often came to visit them and, with Fred's permission, had fun with his daughter.

Fred and Rose's children understood perfectly well what was going on in this creepy house. Later their daughter Mae West gave an interview in which she spoke frankly about her life in those years.

According to May, her father had a favorite cartoon - "Bambi". Fred West said that his heart literally breaks apart when the mother of a fawn dies.

However, both May and her sisters understood that their family was not like the others. But it was a shame to tell others about it. In addition, they were afraid of losing their only home, so they just tolerated everything that was happening.

The girls always slept in their clothes and guarded each other in the shower, because they knew that their father could approach them at any moment. As for strangers who are constantly in the house, their sisters practically did not see them, because enterprising Fred and Rose came up with a separate entrance for them.

But in the closets they constantly found someone else's clothes, which mom sometimes allowed them to play with. Only after the arrest of her parents and the publicity of the whole story, May realized that she was playing with the things of the murdered women.

Fred and Rose were arrested in 1993 after the police became aware of the rape of their daughter. The girl complained about her father to her school friend, and he, in turn, told her mother.

Unfortunately, then the rape case collapsed because the two main witnesses refused to testify at the trial. But a year later, the police received a search warrant for the West house in the case of the disappearance of Heather Ann. Then in the backyard of the couple managed to find not only Heather's body, but also the remains of many other people.

In 1994, a trial was held at which Fred was accused of 11 murders, and Rose of 10. Both received life sentences. In 1995, Fred West was found dead in his cell. Rosemary West is still serving her sentence.