Fred & Rose West

February 24, 1994 was the beginning of the end -- the end of the extraordinary things that had been going on in the ordinary three-story house in central Gloucester. But it was also the beginning of a discovery as the layers of secrets hidden at 25 Cromwell Street were slowly peeled away.

(...)

Fred told how it all happened. The argument with the headstrong Heather, slapping her for her insolence and grabbing her throat to stop her from laughing at him. He must have grabbed too hard because she turned blue and stopped breathing. He tried to revive her, but he didn't have the training, so he dragged her over to the bathtub and ran cold water over her. He took off her clothes, lifted her out of the tub and dried her off. Then he tried to put her in the large garbage bin, but she didn't fit. So it was back in the bathtub where he knew he would have to make her smaller. But first, he strangled her with some tights just to make sure that she was dead. " I didn't want to touch he while she was alive. I meanif I'd have started cutting her leg or her throat and she'd have suddenly come alive" He closed Heather's eyes before he dismembered her. "If somebody's sat there looking at you, you're not going to use a knife on that person are you?" When he cut off her head, he found the sound -- a "horrible noiselike scrunching" -- very unpleasant. But, once her head was off, he started on her legs, twisting her foot until he heard "one almighty crack and the leg come loose, like." Cut into pieces, she fit nicely into the garbage bin. That night after the remainder of his family was asleep, he buried Heather's body in the garden, where she lay undiscovered for seven years.

(...)

In early 1967, Anna McFall became pregnant with Fred's child. She was trying unsuccessfully to get Fred to divorce Rena and marry her. Fred responded to the stress of her demands by killing her and burying her near the trailer park sometime in July. Not only did he kill his mistress and their unborn child, he slowly and methodically dismembered her corpse and buried her along with the fetus. Oddly enough, he cut off her fingers and toes, which were missing from the gravesite. It would be his ritualistic signature in future crimes.

(...)

One day in the summer of 1971, Charmaine was suddenly missing and Rose told her sister Anna Marie that Rena had come to get her. Colin Wilson believes that Rose "simply lost her temper, and went further than usual in beating or throttling her. She was, as Anna Marie said, a woman entirely without self-control; when she lost her temper, she became a kind of maniac." Since Fred was in jail when Charmaine was murdered, his involvement probably extended to burying her body under the kitchen floor of their home on Midland Road where it lay undiscovered for over 20 years. Before he buried Charmaine, he took off her fingers, toes and kneecaps. Fred would hold this criminal secret over Rose for the rest of her life.

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/serial_killers/weird/west/index_1.html