The man who answered the door appeared warm and reassuring—almost fatherly—which comforted the two teenage girls searching for somewhere to stay. “Come in, girlies,” he said with a smile. Nothing immediately seemed threatening. Children were living in the house, his wife was present, and there was also a young woman named Shirley, whom he introduced as his “lover”. Strange, perhaps, but it sounded like a joke.
A builder and general handyman, he was known locally for repairing homes and giving neighbours lifts in his car. To 17-year-old Kathleen Richards, he appeared dependable. She would later learn the devastating truth that danger can hide behind an ordinary, respectable image. The address was 25 Cromwell Street. The man was Fred West. Kathleen had just stepped into the home of one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers.
A year later, Kathleen escaped the house barefoot and still dressed in her pyjamas after being pressured to take part in one of Fred and Rose West’s grotesque “games”. It would be many years before she understood just how close she had come to never leaving. Shirley Robinson, the young woman Kathleen had seen in the kitchen, would not survive. She was murdered by the Wests while pregnant with Fred West’s child—making his description of her as his “lover” technically true, though “abuser” would have been far more accurate.
Kathleen remains troubled by the possibility that she may have seen West bury Shirley from an upstairs window. “I remember him digging after Shirley disappeared,” she recalls. “He said she’d gone to Germany. I didn’t question it. He was always doing DIY. My dad had been the same.”
Nearly half a century later, Kathleen’s experience is revisited in a new documentary that takes her back to 1977, the year she lived as a lodger in the Wests’ home. It makes for painful viewing. At times she trembles and struggles to process her own memories. For decades, she was unable to talk about what happened there.
Kathleen Richards was 17 when she entered 25 Cromwell Street, the home of serial killers Fred and Rose West
What Kathleen finds hardest to explain is not simply how frightening the Wests became, but how trustworthy they seemed at the beginning. “I genuinely trusted them,” she says. “They seemed respectable.” The extent of the crimes committed at Cromwell Street was not revealed until 1994, when 12 victims were connected to Fred West. Nine were discovered buried on the property as police spent months searching the cellar and areas beneath the floors. West died by suicide in prison in 1995 before facing trial, while Rose West was later convicted of ten murders.
Kathleen’s account helps explain how the couple were able to prey on vulnerable young women for so long. Fred and Rose West drew in people who were isolated, homeless or without reliable support. Kathleen, who had been born in Dublin, and her 18-year-old sister Deirdre had left home because Deirdre was pregnant. Kathleen had already endured sexual abuse, but when she tried to tell her mother, she was dismissed and told to go outside and play. The message stayed with her: girls who speak out may simply be ignored. “I thought, this is just what happens,” she says. “You don’t do anything. You forget it.”
That conditioning shaped her response when the apparently kind landlord began abusing her. “It’s only a game, girlie,” he would say as he pressed himself against her on the stairs. Kathleen was alarmed, but she did not scream. As the household’s disturbing sexual atmosphere became clearer, she felt bewildered more than terrified. She had barely had any experience of relationships and struggled to understand what was happening.
Over the following months, the behaviour escalated. Kathleen witnessed incidents she could not make sense of, including Rose watching pornography.
Eventually, Fred asked whether Kathleen wanted to watch with them. She tried to make herself invisible, pressing against the walls in the hope that he would leave her alone. One night, he attempted to force her to watch an explicit film with him and Rose. When Rose moved in to kiss her, Kathleen was still unable to comprehend what was taking place. “I didn’t know what she was doing. I thought she might bite me,” she says. Then she understood the threat. “I thought, ‘That’s it now. This isn’t a game. This is serious.’ I believed I was about to be raped.”
Twelve victims were linked to Fred West, with nine found buried at the property. He died by suicide in prison while awaiting trial in 1995, while Rose West was later convicted of ten murders
Kathleen may owe her life to the quick thinking that led her to ask for five minutes alone before escaping barefoot. Rather than going to the police, she ran to a bus stop where she expected her sister to arrive. The two women fled to their brother’s nearby home, and Kathleen tried to shut away the house and everything she had seen there. Fred West understood that vulnerable girls like Kathleen were unlikely to report what had happened.
In 1994, Kathleen was a mother of three when television reports showed police excavating the garden at 25 Cromwell Street. She immediately phoned her sister, who was watching the same coverage. Even then, neither could grasp the scale of the horror. “We kept thinking, ‘They couldn’t have done that. They weren’t that bad. There must be some mistake,’” Kathleen recalls. Learning what had happened to Shirley devastated her. “My sister and I had given her clothes for the baby,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘She never got to use those baby clothes.’”
Kathleen gave brief evidence during Rose West’s trial, telling the court how terrified she had been of her. “She scared the living daylights out of me,” she said. “I think she was the one in control.” Even after testifying, Kathleen largely kept her experiences private. It was not until last year, when she wrote a book, that she began speaking publicly in greater detail. “I carried the shame,” she says. “It took me years to understand that it was never mine to carry.”
The documentary also brings Kathleen together with another woman who briefly lived at Cromwell Street. Their emotional reunion, after 47 years apart, is among its most affecting moments. So too is their return to the site, where the Wests’ house has long been demolished.
As they reconnect, the women ask one another a haunting question: “Do you remember the smell?” Kathleen says the hallway at 25 Cromwell Street always carried the odour of damp. It faded slightly on the upper floors, but never disappeared from her memory. Even today, she sometimes turns to her husband and asks whether he can smell damp in the room. He cannot. “I think I’m always going to smell damp,” she says.
Surviving Fred And Rose West: Inside Cromwell Street, Tuesday at 9pm on U&W and streaming on U.