Lodger says crumpled up newspaper gave clue to Fred West’s evil secret | UK | News

One early morning in January 1979, 17-year-old Kathleen Richards bundled her few belongings into a bag, gathered up her baby nephew, and followed her older sister Deidre, a year her senior, out of the front door of 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. They didn’t look back.

“We had escaped – but at the time, we didn’t know what from,” says Kathleen, now aged 65. Towards the end of the 14 months they had spent in Cromwell Street as lodgers, their landlord had repeatedly attempted to molest Kathleen. He began by squeezing past her on the stairs, then one night climbed into her bed. 

Using the language of the 1970s, Kathleen says she thought of him as “a dirty old man”. 

“Fred West was an idiot, he seemed harmless, a bit silly, always thinking he couldn’t get away with things,” she says in a soft voice. 

“At first, I quite liked him. He was friendly, nice even. But I didn’t like him touching me and I would then avoid him, so living there got very intense because I was trying to keep him away from him. I didn’t know he was doing the same thing to others”.

Never for one moment did Kathleen think he was evil. 

In fact, it was his wife Rosemary that she found more peculiar with her strange mood swings involving a singsong, childlike voice, rather than her usual abrasive tone.

It wasn’t until 15 years later in August 1992 that the girls’ early-morning departure would take on a heart-stopping significance. As Kathleen made dinner for her two young children, John, then 11, and Stephen aged five (her youngest Hannah wasn’t born yet), she heard on the radio that her former landlord and his wife had been arrested on suspicion of multiple murders. 

Kathleen collapsed on the kitchen floor.

“When I first heard what the Wests had done, I was in shock and felt sick. I couldn’t believe it. “You can’t believe he’s actually murdered people,” she says today. 

“The word evil didn’t cross my mind. Even though he touched me and I hated it, I still thought it was my fault. You feel ashamed, like maybe it is you who has done something wrong.”

She and Deidre were lodgers in the Wests’ now-notorious house in Cromwell Street from November 1977 to January 1979 after their mother, who had eight more children, needed the space at home. 

“Everyone in the area knew Fred West, the DIY man, and he was popular,” she says, so lodging at his house seemed like a good solution to the overcrowding at home. Cromwell Street was large and old, with solid walls, odd noises, and chilling undercurrents no one could quite explain. 

“In houses today you can hear everything, but there you couldn’t always tell where sounds were coming from,” says Kathleen, who sensed that the couple were “eccentric” when she arrived and Fred introduced Shirley Robinson, 17 and pregnant, as his lover. 

There were certainly warning signs, but the affable odd-job man always insisted he was just having a bit of fun. She says she didn’t leave because she doubted herself: he couldn’t be as bad as he seemed, and she kept hoping, each day, that his attentions would stop. 

Never, not once, did she imagine that this man who smelled of sweat and grease, and whose relentless DIY projects in the basement made the entire house vibrate, would turn out to be one of Britain’s most sadistic serial killers.

“There were things that didn’t sit right, and when he got into bed with me I remember thinking, ‘This isn’t right.’ But you also think, ‘He’s just being silly. It’ll stop. I’ll just keep avoiding him.’

Fred, she says, had an odd charm at first – an unsettling playfulness. “He could be funny. Always joking. Even when he groped me in the hallway, he made a joke about it. That was his way of brushing it off.”

But it wasn’t funny to Kathleen. Not then. Not now. Why didn’t she leave sooner? The answer is achingly familiar to survivors. Kathleen had grown up believing abuse was something she ‘deserved’ – that it was her role in life. 

“When you’ve been abused as a child, like I was, by a school caretaker and then by my own grandfather, you grow up thinking you’re not worthy,” she says quietly. 

“You think it’s just how the world works for you. Who am I to make a fuss? It’s only when you get much older that you realise it’s not normal.”

Kathleen and Deidre even found a way to rationalize the six small holes in the wall of the bedroom they shared, each about the size of a coin. Each night, their attempts to plug the holes failed. In the morning, their little balls of crumpled newspaper would be pushed through onto the floor. So, she began to look for more substantial ways to block the holes.

“I used to go to the park nearby and break twigs, measuring them and thinking ‘is that the size of the hole?’.” She did the same with pebbles, assessing them to fit the holes.

“I thought it was just mischief, like in a big family. I didn’t know whose room it was. I never imagined someone was watching us through those holes.” 

Then there was the situation with the withdrawn Shirley, their heavily-pregnant fellow lodger, whom Fred had introduced six months earlier in the presence of his stony-faced wife. 

Kathleen worked shifts at the Walls’ ice cream factory and, on Fridays, would bring Shirley a box of ice lollies from the factory shop. “She loved them,” she remembers. “I can still picture her eating them, laughing.”

Then one day, Shirley simply vanished. Fred told Kathleen she’d flown to Germany, but Shirley had left behind her small, neat pile of baby clothes.

“I was thinking, ‘How could she go an aeroplane?’ She had no money. It made no sense and I worried terribly about her.”

When the dismembered remains of Shirley and her unborn baby were discovered buried in the Wests’ garden in 1994, the full horror of the nature of Fred’s continual DIY in the basement of 25 Cromwell Street became clear. 

“When it came out that Shirley had been murdered, I was quite ill for a long time with sickness, headaches and fits,” Kathleen says today. “I kept trying to work out if I’d been in the house when she died. We were both 17. I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘Should I have done something? Could I have helped?’”

After extensive investigations by police, it would be revealed Fred West committed at least 12 murders, the majority with the help of his wife. The former builder died in prison by his own hand in January 1995 aged 53. His wife, now 71, remains behind bars. 

Police still believe the couple, who made a practice of befriending ‘lost’ teenage girls, may have been responsible for other unsolved murders.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, a kind of survivor’s guilt stalked Kathleen – who now lives in Yate, South Gloucestershire – for decades. While others called her lucky, she could barely look in the mirror.

“Surviving the West’s house was not about relief at all,” she says today. 

“I threw myself into helping others by becoming a foster parent. It was easier than thinking about what I’d been through. I didn’t want to look back. I just locked it all away.”

It was her daughter Hannah, aged 28, who encouraged her to finally tell her story. 

“She said, ‘Mum, you lived in that house. You have a story that might help others.’ At first, I didn’t want to. But I realised I’d spent so long thinking there was no hope – and I wanted people to know there is.”

Kathleen has attempted suicide, and has battled feelings of worthlessness, fear, and shame. But she says that writing her memoir has been transformational.

“It was painful. Things came up I hadn’t thought about in years. But talking really does help. Being able to say certain things in front of people I trust, especially my daughter, was freeing. The weight you carry for so long… it starts to lift.”

Today, she is happily married to Mike, a former gardener who is also 65. “He’s not an emotional man, but he’s so patient. He just sits and listens to me talk. We were apart for a time – busy with work and the kids – but we found our way back. We walk the rescue dogs now. I’d be lost without him.”

Although the couple no longer foster, the instinct to care has never left her. Some of the children she helped raise still call her “Nanny Kath”. To her own grandchild, she’s simply “Nan.”

“I think the children I’ve cared for knew I understood them. I’ve been there,” she says. “One boy didn’t talk and self-harmed. He said, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ And I said, ‘Oh, but I do.’ I didn’t give him the details, of course – but he could feel it. That I wasn’t just saying it. I hadn’t read a book. I’d lived it.”

Looking back, Kathleen credits her mother for keeping her safe – even if neither of them realised it at the time.

“She used to pop by Cromwell Street with bread or milk. Or she would send her sister or brother round, she had practical ways of showing love. At the time, we were almost annoyed. Like, ‘Oh, they’ve come again, why can’t they let us be independent.’ 

“But when we found out what the Wests had been doing we were so glad she came around as it told the Wests that someone would miss us if something happened to us.”

When the truth emerged, her mother told Kathleen she’d been lucky.

“She asked me, did anything happen to me, and I said no. I was ashamed, but I never told her any details because I wanted to protect her. I’m a mum as well, and I didn’t want her to feel guilty. I just wanted to protect her from that pain.”

Kathleen says that her late sister Deidre, who stood by her through it all, would be proud. “She’d say, ‘Well done. You’ve finally said it.’”

The legacy of 25 Cromwell Street is one of unbearable horror. But Kathleen’s story is also one of quiet resilience, love, and hope.

“I wasn’t relieved when I found out what Fred had done. I was devastated. I kept thinking, ‘Why not me? Why them?’ Shirley… she was lovely. She didn’t deserve that. None of them did.”

But when I gently suggest that Kathleen was a gift to Shirley in her final months – a kind friend who brought her ice lollies, who made her laugh, and offered human connection in a house of monsters – Kathleen breaks down in tears.

“You really think so?” she whispers. “I never thought of it like that. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

Kathleen Richards was not just the girl who got away. She was the girl who stayed – and made someone else feel less alone in their final months.