For some three decades, Barry West had tried to escape the ghosts of his childhood.
As a schoolboy, he had been given a new identity and moved to a different part of the country – a place of safety – to help him bury the nightmare of his upbringing.
But the odds were stacked against him.
Death at the age of 40 would have been a release from the horrors he witnessed as a child at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, the notorious address where his parents Fred and Rose West slaughtered nine girls and young women including Barry’s older sister Heather .
It is more than 30 years ago that the West murders first came to light. On Thursday, February 24, 1994, police turned up at Cromwell Street with a warrant to search the garden for Heather’s body. Two days later, they unearthed a human bone.
I reported on the case extensively for the Mail – from those early days as more and more bodies were being discovered, through to the trial of mother-of-eight Rose at Winchester Crown Court in the Autumn of 1995.
What the victims went through – how they were abused, tortured and raped before being killed and dismembered – was utterly terrifying.
Over the years, many books have been written about the West case and countless TV documentaries made. All have focused largely on the killers and those they slaughtered.
But there is another category of victim whose stories have not been reported so widely. These are the West children, brought up in the most depraved and dysfunctional family imaginable.
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