The Role of Credibility and Believability in the Trial of Rosemary West

Abstract

Just after midday on 1 January 1995, officers at Winson Green Prison in Birmingham found Frederick Walter Stephen West dead in his cell. He had killed himself by hanging. Fred, as he was always referred to, had been charged with 11 murders and was being held before appearing at Winchester Crown Court. He had already admitted the killings, albeit with frustrating changes of focus and detail, during various interviews with the police after his arrest in February 1994. The case had quickly attracted extensive national and international media coverage, not only because of the number of victims, determined to have died over an extended period of time between 1967 and 1987, but also because most of them had been sexually assaulted before being murdered. Most of the remains were buried under the patio or cellar at Fred’s home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester (soon to be christened by the press as the ‘Gloucester House of Horrors’). It had also emerged that his wife, Rosemary West (hereafter Rose) had a history of promiscuity, bisexual relations and a documented case of sexual assault on a young woman carried out with Fred in 1972. Particularly shocking was the record of serious physical abuse of Fred and Rose’s eight children and repeated serious sexual abuse against their daughters.