My dad was a solid monster...but Mum was a total psycho

FEW could make worse parents than Fred and Rose West.

- - BY HOWARD SOUNES

Their daughter Heather, 16, was strangled, dismembered and buried under the patio.

West's eight-year-old stepdaughter Charmaine was discovered under their previous home.

Two of his pregnant mistresses were found in unofficial graves.

And more young women were found in the cellar, where the youngest West children slept.

But those who lived at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, did not count themselves much luckier.

In our serialisation of former Mirror reporter Howard Sounes new book The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation, he shares his harrowing, previously unpublished interview with West's son Barry, revealing what it was like growing up in the House of Horrors...

Anne Marie West was just eight when her father and stepmum first raped her.

Thereafter, rape became routine. She was strapped to metal torture contraptions builder Fred West made at work - and told it was perfectly normal.

Once, a few of the West children were allowed to go to their parents Fred and Rose's party - only, according to one child, to be molested by drunken men with the pair's encouragement.

Incest was part of Fred's DNA, and child abuse was as routine as mealtimes at 25 Cromwell Street.

But it wasn't always him who inspired the most fear among the West children. It was Rose.

The mum and stepmum has denied all allegations against her for 30 years. But in November 1995, she was found guilty of 10 counts of murder between 1971 and 1987.

During the trial, the court heard abundant evidence of her committing serious sexual and physical assaults against children.

She later became only the second woman after Moors Murderer Myra Hindley - to be handed a Whole Life Order, meaning she'll never be freed.

Her son Barry received a life sentence of his own - his mental health suffered terribly and he had used drugs.