The sullen builder sitting opposite Margaret Newman at parents’ evening was gruff, guarded and had barely uttered a word after arriving alone at Hucclecote Secondary School in Gloucester to discuss his daughter Heather’s English progress. His wife as usual was nowhere to be seen.

To the teacher across the desk, he seemed stand-offish and disengaged. Perhaps that was hardly surprising. But what Ms Newman could not possibly have known was that she was sitting face-to-face with one of Britain’s most depraved serial killers.

Nor could she have imagined the horror that would emerge years later – that Fred West, the ‘grumpy’ father she had encountered that evening, would go on to torture and murder the ‘sweet’ Year 9 pupil whose schoolwork they were discussing.

Now aged 87, Ms Newman still shudders recalling that chilling meeting, held less than two years before Heather was killed by West and his sadistic wife Rose aged just 16 – her butchered body buried beneath the patio of their terraced home.

By then, at least 11 other victims had already met a similarly harrowing fate at the hands of Britain’s worst serial killer couple.

In her first ever interview on her dealings with Fred and Rose, Ms Newman told The Crime Desk: ‘Heather was very nice, a very sweet girl with a quiet personality.

‘She knew we had a similar birthday, and I remember she once came to the school with two glass tumblers all wrapped up in tissue that she’d brought from home, bless her.

Fred and Rose West are among Britain’s most depraved serial killers. The couple sexually abused and tortured their own children and buried them within their family home 

Heather West, the eldest child of Fred and Rose. She went missing shortly after completing her GCSEs – only for authorities to discover seven years later that she had been dead the entire time 

Margaret Newman (pictured) taught Heather West English when she was in Year 9 at Hucclecote School. She remembers Heather as ‘a very sweet girl with a quiet personality’

‘She was really a very nice girl, but she didn’t appear to have many friends.

‘I think it wasn’t the sort of family where kids went to spend time with each other after school or visit. They were a very private family – and now we know why.’

Recalling her encounter with Fred West, she said: ‘Fred came on his own to parents’ evening. He was just very casual, and not particularly well-spoken.

‘He had a grumpy sort of personality. I didn’t suspect anything at the time – not a bit – but what a nasty piece of work.

‘The parents were very guarded about communicating with the school and we only ever had the father at parents’ evening. We never saw her mother.’

At the time, the Wests’ reluctance to engage with the school did not appear especially alarming.

Many families kept teachers at arm’s length. Some parents never attended school events at all, while other children came from homes where adults were difficult to contact.

Only later would the family’s secrecy take on a far darker significance.

In 1994, their ordinary-looking terraced house at 25 Cromwell Street would become known across the country as the ‘House of Horrors’ – one of the most infamous addresses in British criminal history.

Behind its white front door, nine girls and young women were tortured, sexually assaulted and murdered.

Police excavating the site in 1994 following the discovery of Heather’s remains at 25 Cromwell Street. The house would go on to be dubbed Gloucester’s ‘House of Horrors’ 

Fred and Rose West pictured with their ten children. They would murder two of them – Charmaine and Heather West (pictured, far right)

Heather, the Wests’ eldest child, endured years of sexual and physical abuse throughout her childhood. Like many of her ten siblings, she tried to run away, only to return home after weeks of sleeping rough.

Ms Newman recalled that when Heather stopped attending school in Year 11, shortly after completing her GCSEs in June 1987, her parents claimed she had left for a ‘job in London’.

The truth was far more sinister. Heather had been tortured and raped, before being murdered and mutilated with a bread knife.

Ms Newman said: ‘They said Heather had gone to London, she’d disappeared – but she was dead by that point.

‘But they told the story at school that she’d got a job in the city so [the authorities] obviously didn’t think to look for her.’

Police suspect Heather was killed because she refused to collaborate in her parents’ evil crimes and had threatened to go to the police.

Her remains were eventually unearthed in 1994 when police obtained a search warrant following comments made by the Wests’ other children that their parents would ‘joke’ that family members would end up ‘under the patio like Heather’.

Ms Newman, also the form tutor to the Wests’ son Stephen – who unwittingly dug his sister’s grave – was teaching at another school when she learned the truth of Heather’s death.

The staff at Hucclecote School in the 1980s, before it was forced to close in 1988. Ms Newman (pictured bottom row, third from left) remembers it as a ‘caring’ school, but one which had an ‘awful lot of underprivileged kids’

She said: ‘I think it was such a shock to think that all that time we thought she’d been in London, she was actually dead. They were evil, evil.

‘I was very sad because she was such a nice girl.

‘I think their mother, Rose, was perhaps jealous of her children – hence why the boys, and Stephen, were spared.’

Police turned up at Cromwell Street in February 1994 with a warrant to search the garden for Heather’s body. Two days later, they unearthed a human bone. 

Fred West claimed he had strangled her in a fit of rage using the flex cable from a kitchen kettle – but evidence suggested she had been brutally beaten.

Ms Newman believes the upheaval caused by school reforms at the time may have helped the Wests’ lies about Heather’s disappearance go unchallenged.

Hucclecote School was forced to close in 1988, and she fears the teenager’s disappearance may have fallen through the cracks.

Ms Newman said: ‘All the schools were being overhauled, and Hucclecote was going to be made into a teacher training centre I think.

Fred West was charged with murdering 12 young women and girls but hanged himself in custody at HMP Birmingham on January 1, 1995, while awaiting trial, aged 53. Rose West, now 72, is serving a whole-life term at HM Prison New Hall in Wakefield, West Yorkshire

Detectives investigating rumours around Heather’s disappearance were led to the discovery of other remains at the house – leading to the unravelling of the scale of the couple’s horrific crimes 

‘They re-did all the schools and reorganised them, gave them new names, and all the children were moved from Hucclecote.

‘So there was quite a lot of turmoil, and Heather went missing during all of that.’

The West children’s attendance at Hucclecote was unusual in itself.

The family lived in central Gloucester, while the school was more than four miles away on the outskirts of the city.

Ms Newman described the decision to send some of the children there – a school she remembers as caring but one with ‘an awful lot of underprivileged kids’ – as an ‘odd choice’.

Whether that distance helped the Wests to keep a lower profile remains impossible to know.

But the tragedy of Heather’s death was not the last suffered by the children who survived Cromwell Street.

As the Daily Mail Crime Desk previously revealed, Heather’s younger brother Barry spent decades trying to escape the ghosts of his childhood.

Forensic police sifting the soil in Fred and Rose West’s gardens for bones. Nine of the 12 known murder victims were found in the house on Cromwell Street, while three others were found in fields 

As a schoolboy, he was given a new identity and moved to another part of the country in an attempt to help him bury the nightmare of his upbringing.

Barry suffered for years from post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression and long-term drug addiction.

In August 2020, at the age of just 40, he was found dead, slumped over a table by a mental health support worker in supported living accommodation.

Fred West was charged with murdering 12 young women and girls but hanged himself in custody at HMP Birmingham on January 1, 1995, while awaiting trial, aged 53.

The first known victim, Anne McFall – the 18-year-old nanny to his children – was murdered in 1967.

Other victims included his eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine West, murdered by Rose in 1971, and Charmaine’s mother Catherine ‘Rena’ Costello, killed by Fred weeks later.

Police also discovered the remains of student Lucy Partington, 21, lodger Juanita Mott, 18, and Shirley Hubbard, 15, in the cellar at Cromwell Street.

Swiss hitchhiker Therese Siegenthaler, 21, was found buried beneath concrete in front of a false fireplace.

Mae West (born 1972) and Heather West (born 1970). Heather, like many of the West’s children, tried to run away several times, but returned after a few weeks of rough sleeping 

The remains of lodger Lynda Gough, 19, schoolgirl Carol Ann Cooper, 15, Shirley Anne Robinson, 18, and Alison Chambers, 16, were also uncovered.

Some victims were kept alive for only hours. Others suffered for days – bound, gagged and repeatedly sexually assaulted before they were murdered.

At least one victim was discovered with plastic tubes forced into her nostrils through masking tape wrapped around her face.

Rose West, now 72, was convicted of ten murders at Winchester Crown Court in 1995 and told she would die behind bars.

She is currently incarcerated at HMP New Hall, serving a whole-life sentence.

Earlier this year it emerged that she spends her days in prison ‘watching David Attenborough’ and has ditched her distinctive glasses.

It is believed she struggles to walk and spends the majority of her time alone, knitting.

Speaking in 2001, she revealed she was ready to spend the rest of her life in prison after abandoning an appeal.

She said: ‘I know that if I was released life would never be normal. I would have to run and hide and be removed from my children.

‘At least in my present situation I can see them from time to time and have regular contact by correspondence.’

West is one of just four women in Britain to receive a whole-life prison sentence, alongside triple-killer Joanna Dennehy, Lucy Letby, and Moors murderer Myra Hindley, who died in prison in 2002.

It is long suspected that the Wests may have killed more victims.

It was claimed in 2001 that Fred confessed to 20 more murders while speaking to a social worker in prison.

Janet Leach, a trainee social worker assigned to West after he was arrested, said at the time: ‘Fred said that there were two other bodies in shallow graves in the woods but there was no way they would ever be found. He said there were 20 other bodies… spread around and he would give police one a year.’

In 2021, Gloucestershire Police spent weeks searching the Clean Plate cafe in Gloucester after a TV crew linked West to the 1968 disappearance of Mary Bastholm, 15.

However, despite an intensive operation costing nearly £80,000 and involving 130 officers, no remains were found.