Summary
Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story finds an excuse to superficially recount a truly heinous case, but doesn’t do so in a way that adds anything meaningful to the story.
It says a lot about how truly depraved two people can be that they remain at the forefront of the public consciousness decades after the peak of their infamy, not to mention within a true-crime-obsessed media climate that has shaken the skeletons from what feels like every closet in the world. But such is the case with Fred and Rose West, a married couple from Gloucester, England, who kidnapped, bound, abused, murdered, and dismembered at least ten women and girls and buried them in, around, and beneath their shabby terraced home. A British Horror Story, streaming on Netflix, recounts the case with the aid of recently discovered police recordings and first-person testimony, but doesn’t dig up a reason for doing so beyond the usual justification of satiating our endless appetite for macabre voyeurism (and driving more and more eyeballs to the Big N’s innumerable thumbnails).
The best true-crime comes pre-packaged with a reason for being; key insight into the psychology of a killer, examination of institutional and systemic failings, or the prudent memorialization of the victims instead of glorification of their murderers. This three-part series has none of that, sadly, instead taking a drier, more procedural path through the case, leading from the original discovery of the West’s victims under the patio of their “House of Horrors” at 25 Cromwell Street, through the join-the-dots case-building against Fred and, eventually, his wife Rose, and culminating in the trial itself, which Fred had committed suicide prior to. Rose was found guilty of ten murders and handed a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
The docuseries proceeds as if it’s recounting well-known information, which it is. But it also wants to acknowledge the scale and severity of these crimes, and the lasting horror they inflicted not just on people directly associated with Fred and Rose but on the police investigating them and the journalists reporting on them. In this regard, each episode feels like it’s teasing something that never quite arrives; the more lurid details are glossed over or omitted entirely, which is merciful but misses the point. This is the rare documentary that is significantly less shocking than its relevant Wikipedia page.
You can’t fault a documentary for not lingering on the basest elements of the case – on the contrary, it should be applauded for not indulging in the details to a degree that would seem salacious. But it has to offer something else in return, a different angle from which to approach the story that lends some value to the stress of its retelling. But there’s little of that here. Because of where it picks up, A British Horror Story completely avoids the backstories of Fred and Rose West, their lives prior to meeting each other, and, for the most part, the truly monstrous circumstances of their marriage and home prior to that information becoming public. A lot of the most illuminating and terrible details live here, frustratingly unexamined.
In their place is Fred’s voice in police interview tapes. His detached explanations are terrifying in their way, the nonchalance with which he describes killing and dismembering his own daughter, Heather, being particularly heinous. Heather’s disappearance was regularly deployed as a threat to the other children, who were warned that misbehaviour would result in them being buried under the patio like she was. But the documentary’s framing implies, oddly, that these threats were themselves responsible for the police deciding that action must be taken, when in fact Fred and Rose were known to the police, and many of their ten children had already been taken into care following accusations of molestation.
Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story Key Art | Image via Netflix
I have no clue why this key detail is skipped over so completely. And it isn’t the only one. From the outside looking in, it seems like the entire point of Fred & Rose West: A British Horror Story is to recount the investigatory details with as little nuance and context as possible, which is an extremely odd purpose for any documentary, let alone one about such a familiar subject. The interview tapes and archival footage are treated as the series’ core USP, but that’s a tool for reiterating the same information, not mining it for any additional insight.
You have to wonder not only what the point of a series like this is but why it’ll inevitably play like gangbusters on Netflix, reigniting all kinds of social media furore and public interest in the case despite how deliberately it seems to skirt over the aspects of it that are most compelling. The blatancy of Fred’s extensive crimes should have made him a target of the police long before he had the chance to murder as many young women as he did. Rose’s involvement – she was proved to have murdered Fred’s step-daughter, Charmaine, while he was in prison, and was at the very least aware of but much more likely complicit in everything he did beyond that point – as it relates to her own terrifyingly bizarre upbringing and adult life is a series in and of itself. So much of this stuff is unaddressed or rushed past that it can only be concluded that doing so was intentional.
And you can’t skip over this stuff, I don’t think. That at least one of Fred’s victims were pregnant with his baby, that several of the children in the home were sired by Rose’s clients when she was working as a prostitute from an upstairs bedroom, that one of Rose’s regular clients was her own father, that these two depraved people somehow found each other and operated with startling obviousness often under the noses of the community and the authorities, all of these macabre details are part of the story’s horrifying fullness and deserve full examination. Nothing happened in a vacuum. And if you’re going to retell a story that exhumes so much trauma and pain, both for the relatives of the victims – some of whom participate in A British Horror Story, hopefully in a way that is beneficial to them – and the sleepy culture who read about it in newspaper articles and saw it on the news, you have a responsibility to do it justice.
