The big surprise with Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story isn’t that Netflix has chosen to delve into the horrific tale of 25 Cromwell Road, Gloucester, but that it has taken so long to do so.
Netflix is typically out front when it comes to big trends in entertainment. However, in the case of Cromwell Road, it is a latecomer, with this three-part series arriving at the tail end of a blizzard of Fred West content. The Internet Movie Database lists 14 documentaries and films about a subject also doing brisk business in the podcast world. Releasing another Fred West documentary in 2025 is the equivalent of a historian knocking on a publisher’s door and wondering if they’ve ever considered a book about Adolf Hitler? They might just be on to something.
There are only so many ways to tell the stomach-turning tale of the seemingly unremarkable builder and his unassuming wife. Of how they tortured, raped and murdered an unknown number of women over a two-decade period, including their 20-year-old daughter Heather, whom they would joke about being “under the patio”. To revisit it again and again is to risk ghoulishness and could lead to accusations of dining out on the suffering of strangers.
In other words, nobody needs another Fred West documentary. However, A British Horror Story is efficiently put together and arrives with the promise of “previously unseen police video and unheard audio recordings”. These largely consist of tapes of West bantering with his interrogators and talking about the murders as if they were the most normal thing in the world. Rarely has a monster sounded so banal and commonplace.
Netflix has also pledged to emphasise the suffering of the victims. Here, it is true to its word. “It was worse than you could ever imagine,” says the sister of Juanita Mott, recalling her feelings when discovering her sibling had been killed by West. “It was an explosion. Your life is never going to be the same because of what he did to her.”
Grainy recordings of West’s interviews with police are unsettling 31 years on. “You start to think how could anybody do that. How those kids must have suffered,” says an eyewitness to the questioning. “I started to imagine then what his poor victims had gone through,” adds Scott Canavan, a legal clerk who worked on the case.
Rosemary West remains behind bars, having been found guilty of murdering 10 women and girls. Fred West escaped justice, however, by killing himself in prison in 1995. But in A British Horror Story, we hear his voice from beyond the grave and what a chill it brings.
“Fred, you’ve got that awful smirk on your face again,” says one of his inquisitors as West dances around the truth about his terrible deeds. He responds by dissolving into giggles. It is the laughter of someone without a soul. For a heartbeat, the viewer has a sense of gazing into the void and of the void gazing back. There aren’t many such moments in A British Horror Story – it generally trundles along on true crime autopilot – but there are enough to remind audiences this was a real horror story with real victims.
