Inside the House of Horrors: I lived with serial killers Fred and Rose West for a year – I’m haunted by a sickly stench and the moment I narrowly escaped death
The phone call that shattered Karen Hamilton’s world came while she was at work in Sydney one day in 1994.
The now 67-year-old tells the Daily Mail: ‘My mum was on the other end of the phone, distraught and upset.
News was spreading around the world that an ordinary terrace house in Gloucester, England had been unmasked as the ‘House of Horrors’. The owners of the house, Fred and Rose West, were unmasked as a prolific serial killer duo who had turned their own home into a literal graveyard.
They trapped, tortured, and murdered young women (including their own daughter Heather) for over twenty years, burying most of the remains under the cellar floors and garden porch.
Hamilton remembered those floorboards well. He had spent a year sleeping most nights at 25 Cromwell St while living on a working holiday in the UK.
Due to her deep family roots in Gloucester, she spent her days working secretarial jobs and her nights as a bartender at a local disco. There he met his bartender friend Liz, who lived in the top floor bedroom at number 25.
Hamilton began staying with Liz for weeks at a time to save his elderly aunt and uncle from being awakened by what he called their “evil hour.”
‘We were going out and going out a lot at night. “I didn’t get home until two in the morning on what he thought were ‘glorious days,'” he says.
Rosemary and Fred West are believed to have killed at least 12 people together, but some sources suggest the total may be higher as additional victims are suspected
“Fred always scared me, so I gave him a lot of space,” says Karen Hamilton, who was a tenant at Wests at the time of the murders
But while the two young people were ‘dancing around and enjoying their adventures’, a graveyard was being filled under their feet.
There’s a disgusting smell coming from the house downstairs.
Although he had no idea of the crimes committed at the time, Hamilton, who is writing a soon-to-be-published memoir about the experience titled A Nightmare on Cromwell Street: The Year I Lived with Fred and Rose West, recalls an oppressive ‘inaccuracy’ about the house and the Wests.
‘Fred always scared me, I gave him a wide berth,’ she recalls, adding that he warned her never to enter the small, locked silver metal door at the bottom of the basement stairs.
‘This became the place where many of his victims were kept,’ he adds.
But it was the smell that made the now 67-year-old immediately recognize him. He said he always noticed a strange, sickening smell coming from the ground floor of the house, but attributed it to cooking or spoiled food.
‘It wasn’t until I learned about the murders that I realized what this smell actually was,’ he says.
Karen was born in Australia but had strong family ties in the UK
When she was 20, Karen Hamilton went to Gloucester, England, for a working holiday. She spent her days working secretarial jobs and her nights as a bartender at a local disco. Because of the ‘impious hours’ he spent, he avoided the room at his uncle and aunt’s house and instead stayed at 25 Cromwell Street.
Karen’s friend and fellow tenant Liz also managed to escape West. The two spoke on the phone after news of the murder broke, but Karen never met Liz again.
A violent premonition with a tragic end
I am Tom Rawstorne, and nearly 30 years ago a 12-year-old murderer with a gold cross around his neck gave me a moment I will never forget.
Sharon Carr became Britain’s youngest femicide to date when she murdered an 18-year-old hairdresser in a horrific act of unprovoked violence. I watched him closely in court for three weeks and it’s something I’ll never forget. I wrote about this in the Crime Squad newsletter; Sign up to read for free.
Hamilton, who says that he has always been able to ‘feel’ things in his life and has experienced many premonitions, says that the most intense supernatural experience he has ever had was while talking to another tenant, Shirley Robinson, who was pregnant at the time.
‘I’d see him up and down the stairs from time to time,’ he explains, ‘but this was the first time I really got to know him and we spent an afternoon together in Liz’s bedroom because I was going home.’
‘I look at him, I say hello, we’re just facing each other, and then suddenly I’m thrown against the wall, as if someone had picked me up and thrown my whole body against the wall,’ he recalls.
‘It hurt and I was in shock but when I got back into my body, so to speak, I didn’t move at all. It’s hard to explain and sounds really weird, I know.’
Hamilton remembers feeling extreme violence and anger in his body at the time and being confused about what it meant.
‘To be honest, at the time I thought he secretly hated me and that I felt it too,’ he says.
Years later, she discovered that Fred West had strangled Shirley in that very room – Liz’s bedroom – using Liz’s own belt.
25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester became known as the House of Horrors after the victims of Fred and Rose West were found buried under the porch.
Warning bells and quiet little girls
Another spooky experience occurred one day when she knocked on the Wests’ front door to visit her friend Liz while she was living down the road with her aunt and uncle.
‘No one answered and I turned to walk towards the path leading to the door and I heard the door opening,’ he recalls.
Rose West stood there with two little girls on either side of her. They were gorgeous little girls, it was hard to tell them apart but they were so quiet and well-behaved.’
Hamilton said Rose told him Liz wasn’t home but invited her for a cup of tea. He says that when he thought about accepting it, the warnings and bells that went off in his head were beyond him.
‘It was really loud, like ding ding ding. “I actually turned around to see where the sound was coming from,” he explains.
‘And just now I heard this voice in my ear saying: “He’s so good, he’s so good, he’s so good,” not in a pleasant way, but as a warning. So, don’t believe it.’
Hamilton would discover decades later that Rose West often used tea to drug victims.
‘I won’t go near Rose or Fred from now on,’ he says. ‘Rose’s eyes were so dark and black I couldn’t look into them.’
Haunted dreams that last for decades
For Hamilton, the lasting trauma of committing what he unknowingly lived with has stuck with him in the years since he discovered West’s crimes.
‘I’m just a very small part of this,’ she says, ‘nothing has happened to me, I’ve never experienced anything like the trauma of those poor girls. But I kept thinking about the strange things I noticed. Just like I always felt like I was being watched on the stairs, they were so spooky and little did I know there were bodies buried underneath.’
When Hamilton contacted her friend Liz, who they had lost touch with in the intervening years, she says she was grateful to realize not only that she had survived, but that someone else had realized it, too.
‘When we spoke on the phone he said, ‘They were under us, Karen. They were in the basement. I was in shock.’
Unfortunately, Liz later sent Hamilton a letter informing him that she had cancer, and that was the last the Australian woman heard from her friend in the UK.
Now Hamilton recalls that he had recurring dreams before the crimes were discovered, and that these dreams suddenly stopped when the Westerners were caught.
‘For about 15 years, I dreamed of three bodies and three piles of soil being buried,’ he recalls.
‘I had the same dreams for years and when the story came out they ended.’
A Nightmare on Cromwell Street by Karen Hamilton is published by Hembury Books and is available to purchase Here and in all bookstores
