Fred & Rose: The Full Story of Fred and Rose West and the Gloucester House of Horrors

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The pathologist, Bernard Knight, is on my wavelength as an atheist who said, “The human race is pretty rotten. As much as I hate the crimes these two committed I feel bad for them, for what they had gone through before they did these horrible crimes. A horrifying account of the Gloucestor House of Horrors, brought to you by the journalist who broke the case. He has written one other true crime book, Heist: The True Story of the World's Biggest Cash Robbery.

So much so, that years after this encounter, I wrote a novel about trying to survive in a world of predators. Charting the couple’s lives from childhood to their arrest, the author doesn’t shy away from the horrific details of their crimes – details that some readers will find disturbing.There was at one point a friendly relationship with a neighbor woman who would watch their children while they went out looking to pick up young girls. Geoffrey Wansell paints a detailed and vivid picture of the life of Fred West , from his family and upbringing to the rape, torture and murder he devoted his life to. Fred was from a poor family of farm workers, close-knit and mutually protective; his father was a disciplinarian and his mother overprotective. On 17 October 1970, Rose gave birth to their first child: a daughter they named Heather Ann (speculation remains that Heather may have been sired by Rose's own father). This often makes for deeply disturbing reading and one criticism I would level at this is that this book often struggles to rise above cheap sensationalism and never quite manages to shake of its scuzzy tabloid feel.

Between 1972 and 1992, the West children were admitted to the Accident and Emergency department of local hospitals 31 times; the injuries were explained as accidents and never reported to social services.

In my opinion, this is the best account of the life and crimes of Fredrick West and the cruelty that went on in 25 Cromwell Street. To cater to these fetishes, they amassed a large collection of bondage and restraining devices, magazines and photographs—later expanding this collection to include videos depicting bestiality and graphic child sexual abuse. Fred grew up in a poverty-stricken home, scrounging for every penny and developed into a molester at a very young age. This, in spite of friends, family, lodgers, police, people from the child service, and of course, some would-be victims who got away! Probably because a)it was over wordy, so I skim read bits of it only to find I'd missed something and b)some of it was so sick and beyond comprehension that I had to read it twice for it to sink in.

In 1994, while working for the Sunday Mirror, he broke major stories in the West murder case, then covered the case up to and including Rosemary West's trial.Perhaps, being a serious journalist doesn't make it easy to switch to the more engrossing style needed in a true crime book.

Frederick Walter Stephen West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995) was an English serial killer, who committed at least twelve murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rose West. The author has obviously gone to a lot of trouble to use the main part of the book only to tell the known facts, leaving an analysis until the epilogue. Rose and Fred both were terrible liars but it seems no matter how far fetched an excuse they would give, nobody dug any further for years. They ran adult ads seeking partners and the number of willing participants is amazing and I am mystified as to why anyone feels the need to be beaten.He later buried her naked body in the yard close to the back door of the flat, and remained adamant he had not dismembered her. If people would have conacted child protective services or reported what they had seen to the police so many lives could have been saved. It's possible that some information was left out or that they simply didn't want to acknowledge the truth, but it's still difficult to understand. Her limbs had been carefully disarticulated, and many phalanges (finger bones) were missing from her body—likely to have been retained as keepsakes; her unborn child may also have been cut from her womb.