Fred West Got His 13-Year-Old Sister Pregnant: Horrific Secret of Notorious Serial Killer Uncovered”

KITTY West was just 13 when she confided in friends that she was pregnant. But it was not her boyfriend’s. It was Fred’s. Her brother Fred’s.

It was the same Fred West who would go on to become one half of the most notorious serial killer couple in recent history – a fiend who raped, killed and butchered young women for his own sexual kicks, then dismembered their bodies.

But decades before he and Rose West became infamous for their House of Horrors at 25 Cromwell Street, Fred was already heading down a very dark path……

Author, TV producer and former Mirror journalist Howard Sounes was first to cover the West murders for the Mirror in 1994 and went on to become a leading expert in the case. He recently conducted dozens of interviews and gained access to more than 100 hours of West’s police interrogation recordings, for his new book, The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation. Here, in Day Two of our exclusive serialisation, he exposes the taboo family secrets that led to the making of the monster

ADVERTISEMENT

As a teenager Fred West was considered to be one of the ‘handsomest’ lads around. He was eyed as prime marriage material in a rural area where many girls aspired to marry young lest they be ‘left on the shelf’.

And yet, even from his earliest years there was a darkness within him. Foremost among his dark childhood secrets was the sad story of his sister Kitty, six years his junior.

Their parents Walter and Daisy West were poor, semi-literate farm workers who lived by the seasons and could appear almost as ignorant as the beasts they tended. They lived in Herefordshire’s village of Much Marcle, just half an hour by car from Gloucester, but a place lost in time with a sense of remoteness.

There were eight children, two of whom died in infancy, leaving: Fred, John, Daisy, Doug, Kitty and Gwen. “We were a very happy family … Very close,” Fred told the police during the murder investigation in 1994, as revealed in the new transcripts. “We all protected each other.”

Speaking for the first time about her friend Kitty, Jean reveals the day she learned an awful secret. “I’m pregnant,” Kitty, then 13, announced to a group of friends. They didn’t know that Kitty had a boyfriend. “Oh, it’s not a boyfriend, me brother did it. Fred.”

Fred, then 19, was eyed as quite the catch. “He was one of the handsomest,” recalls Jean. “He had a lovely smile, a nice wide smile, it lifted up his face. I had a schoolgirl crush on him..”

But then she learned that same boy – that ‘nice’ boy – had made his younger sister pregnant. Jean thought the Wests a bit backward, but this was still a shock. “I mean she [Kitty] was a bit Dolly Dimple,” says Jean. “The whole family seemed a bit odd [but] I’d never heard of anything like incest, and then she proceeded to tell us how it was done, where it was done.”

Kitty told them that she and Fred had sex in her bedroom, they did it “lots of times”. She felt nervous at first. “‘But Fred said because I’m his sister I wouldn’t get pregnant’”, Jean recalls her saying. Her friends suggested Kitty should have slapped Fred. “She said, ‘I wouldn’t do that … I quite like it’, adds Jean. “She seemed quite cool about it, ‘It’s normal, haven’t you done it?’ sort of thing.” Jean has never forgotten the conversation, adding: “I remember it to this day, even where we were when she said it, because we were all in shock.”