Home, not so sweet home: they killed and buried their victims in the garden

There is no longer enough candor in the world for the phrase "all happy families are alike" to be anything more than a rhetorical quip from the classic Leo Tolstoy rather than a verifiable reality. It's also clear that all families carry within them some seed of dysfunction and that happiness is contingent and, above all, ephemeral. But it's one thing for the perfect family not to exist, and quite another for the members of that family unit to live immersed in a daily hell. That was what happened in the city of Gloucester, England, at 25 Cromwell Street, in late February 1994, when the horror became undisguisable and the ground began to drain away evidence of the horror.

And that's precisely what the docuseries Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story , by director Dan Dewsbury, recently released on Netflix, is about. It's three chapters connected by the sensitivity of a documentary filmmaker more concerned with the effects of a serial killer's crimes on the victims' families and friends than with a detailed account of horrors recreated to gratify the viewer's morbid curiosity.

The case dominated the covers of the era's massive tabloids and, over time, became a thorn in the side of our conscience that we never know what goes on behind our neighbors' doors. It is, therefore, a true-crime documentary series that refrains from resorting to the genre's entrenched habits: there are no reenactments of the murders with live action or animation, nor is there a compulsion to delve into the sordidness of human behavior. Instead, it delves into the effects of the long-standing trauma that still haunts the loved ones of the murdered women.

The West case surfaced through a shocking twist of fate: the family's youngest children, in an interview with social workers, revealed that their father had told them that if they misbehaved, they would end up "buried in the garden like their sister Heather," who had been missing since 1986. This information sparked the police investigation, which ended with the revelation that 16-year-old Heather had been murdered by her father and buried in the home.

Dewsbury weaves a choral work of voices of witnesses of that horror – relatives and friends of the victims, forensic experts, police, lawyers, local journalists and those from the major sensationalist media, survivors and psychiatrists who intervened in the investigation process – counterpointed by the recordings of the interrogations to which the British police subjected West, conversations that grew in intensity of terror as he admitted that in the garden and the basement of the house there were more corpses and that his murderous compulsion had begun in 1967, when he killed his first wife, Rena Costello and his little daughter Charmaine, the product of a previous relationship.

The confession settled on the figure of 12 victims—among them, tenants of the Wests' home, nannies, and teenagers on the run—although investigators always feared the number was even higher. West initially insisted on Rose's innocence, but the criminal loyalty that united them was shattered in a court hearing where Rose remained distant with him, and then Fred changed his story and claimed not to have acted alone. In a virtual interview with Ñ from London, Dewsbury addressed some of the central aspects of his documentary.

–There's a bit of a black hole surrounding Fred and Rose's origins. Was it a stylistic choice, or were there obstacles to exploring their early lives?

–I don't think there's a "black hole" surrounding the early years of both of them at all. There are a huge number of books and other documentaries that have already addressed this aspect, seeking to understand and establish some connection between Fred's early years and the crimes he committed years later. But I wasn't interested in including that angle in my film.

I suppose that, in England, many people know about Fred and Rose. And there's a wealth of documentation and many books devoted to their criminal "career." So the challenge was to find a new reason to undertake this documentary, and the justification was to give form to the materials I found.

But the second reason was that no one had made a documentary that delved into the legacy of the victims' families, and so I had to decide: you only have a limited amount of time, so I had to make sure there was enough space for the families of the murdered young women to speak, at the expense of cutting back on the space devoted to Fred and Rose. And it ended up seeming like the right decision, because many true crime shows focus excessively on the perpetrators and not enough on the effects of their murders or the beautiful aspects of the lives cut short. So I tried to redirect that trend in the opposite direction.

– Did the decision to film the documentary precede the emergence of those previously unreleased recordings of West's interrogation by investigator Savage in 1994?

–Originally, Netflix had some footage and was interested in making a documentary with that unreleased material. It wasn't until later that we discovered the videos the police had recorded. It was also a decision we made to combine archives from previous documentaries with the interviews we'd discovered now. And ultimately, finding new interviewees for this film was a truly complicated task.

The crimes were discovered 30 years ago, but some of the cases occurred 50 years ago. So, my job was to articulate a narrative structure with these different materials to try to do something new, or at least push the boundaries of the genre in a slightly different way than traditional. The true crime genre is one of the most popular worldwide, but it's not necessarily one of my favorites. I understood that I couldn't not include the videos and recordings of Fred's police interviews, because that's part of the audience's interest, but I also wanted them to look closely at the devastation wreaked on the victims' lives, which, at least in England, tends to be forgotten.

–Did they try to interview Rose West in prison?

–I understand that, under English law, it would not have been possible to access an interview with Rose. In any case, had I had the opportunity to interview her, I doubt I would have been interested in including her in the documentary. I don't see her fitting into this project; furthermore, I think it would be very mortifying for the victims' families to hear Rose maintain to this day that she never committed any of the crimes and that she was unaware of what her husband was doing. I have to maintain a balance between what people want to see—possibly knowing in greater detail how the young women died—and the relationship I establish as an interviewer with the families, and for me, the latter will always take priority.

–As the director of this documentary, has your film allowed you to more deeply understand the nature of evil?

–I filmed my previous documentaries in prisons. I spent many months filming in a prison in the United Kingdom and followed the work of various police units for two years. So, in terms of understanding evil and how people can commit terrible acts, unfortunately, I don't have the truth. And the only certainty I hold is that people are not intrinsically evil.

Personally, I believe that people like you and me could have been driven to commit certain acts if circumstances and our educational opportunities had been directed in the wrong direction as those of other people in prison. It's no surprise to anyone when I say that a large number of murders in England occur in socioeconomic environments of poverty or low income. Put in that situation, anyone can be driven to commit heinous acts.

But I also think no one wants to hear that evil is childish, ordinary. And those who are evil can easily be perfectly normal for 90 percent of their lives. I saw this in the West case: you talk to the neighbors, and none of them knew Rose was prostituting herself in her home, or about Fred's sexual abuse of her daughters. In short, I feel like I haven't learned anything new about the nature of evil, but I have learned something new about how the families of the victims had to carry on with the trauma, many of them waiting years to finally find out what had happened to their loved one. I do find them admirable people.

–How fresh are the crimes committed at 25 Cromwell Street in the English collective memory?

Fred and Rose had ten children, and they were also victims. In the third episode, we talked about Stephen West and what that situation must have been like for him and the rest of his siblings. And we made sure it was clear that the crimes came to light because of the courage of these children and teenagers who spoke to social workers. I contacted Stephen and his sister May, and they gave me permission to use the archival interviews I included in the documentary. It was hard to get them, but it finally happened, and I'm happy about it because I feel like I had the Wests' blessing. And after the series premiered, I received a message from Stephen thanking me for the respectful way I approached the subject of his family, and that was very reassuring to me.

–The testimony of a surviving nanny led to the accusation that Rose West, along with her husband, was involved in that kidnapping and rape, dismantling her alleged innocence regarding the other crimes. Is it beyond doubt that they constituted a two-faced serial killer, from the first murder onward?

–There are no certainties; it's only what one can infer after speaking with many participants in the case. Certainly, it's unusual for two people from different worlds to fall in love and begin interacting to commit abhorrent crimes. I think it began with a dynamic of sexual gratification that then led to perverse pleasure, and the inevitable next step was murder. My impression is that she provided the effective strategies for committing the murders, and Fred took care of carrying them out.

–Did your view of the West case change after filming the documentary?

–My perspective changed after hearing the testimonies of the family members who agreed to speak with us. When you start doing something about which more than 45 documentaries have been filmed and dozens of books have been written, you start to question why you're doing it.

And after speaking with the victims' families, I finally understood the justification for this project: seeing them speak to me and desperately trying to keep the spirit and memory of their loved ones alive, coupled with the fact that they saw this documentary as an opportunity. Or that they saw it as a chance because this would be material that would be seen around the world.

How else can you reach a large audience and make them aware that there are real people behind what is usually just historical information about crimes? I also think that true-crime films or series attract enormous attention because they desensitize people to what's happening out there right now.

And the truth is, what I aspire to do is much more than just sensationalize the Wests' crimes, showing specific details of what happened and how it happened. I want the viewer to focus on the fact that the victims were real people. And in these kinds of cases, the only way you can do that is if the families grant you the privilege of being able to tell their stories. And you can see this in all three episodes: there's a family, including Marion, Lucy Partington, and myself, people who have been dealing with this for a long time, trying to unravel the meaning of everything that happened to them.