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You're listening to a morbid network podcast.

Hello and welcome back to Cult Leader. I'm your Cult Leader Spencer Henry. If you're listening and you're new, Cult Leader is a podcast about dismemberment.

And this week we are going to be talking about Fred and Rosemary West, which is probably one of the craziest stories I've ever heard.

It is full of incest and abuse and murder and all of the things.

But before we get into it, I'm really excited because April 20th, March 20th, this Wednesday, the act comes out on Hulu. That's the one about Gypsy and DD Blanchard.

And I'm so excited. I'm going to be live tweeting it on Twitter. You can follow along at Spencer Henry on Twitter. Make sure you're following along on Instagram at Spencer Henry at Cult Leader Podcast.

And then as far as merch, it's relaunching. It'll be here within the next two weeks. And I will let you know, so I'll be posting on post updates on all of the platforms and all of the things.

But let's get right to it. So Fred West, he was born on November 29th in 1941 in Herfordshire to Walter West, a milking herdsman and his wife Daisy.

He was the second of six children and growing up, Fred was really close with his mom.

Too close. Because from the time he could remember, he engaged in incestuous relations with his mom. He was abused by his dad as well who was known to have quite the temper.

The West children worked hard on the family's property. His three sisters were assigned to picking hops and strawberries, Fred and his two brothers were harvesting wheat and hunting rabbits, making sure the children could survive off the land was super important to their dad Walter.

He believed it would build a really strong work ethic, which like, hey, I'm here for it. Teach your kids your responsibilities, teach some lessons, but not here for the abuse. You can't do that.

His siblings became really close with each other. They were like their closest friends at school. Fred was known for being this like scruffy dumb kid. He had a lot of trouble learning in class.

He had more of a creative mind. He barely learned to read and write and he was pretty illiterate, but he did have an affinity for like woodworking and art.

So he definitely was able to tap into that more creative side. He remained in school until he was 15 and then he dropped out December of 1956 to take a job as a laborer on a farm.

From the age of 12 onwards, Fred claimed his mom introduced him to sex. When he was a teenager, he had already had a lot of experimentation with sex, but all within his own family.

It really was how he was raised though, so he looked at it as a normal thing.

You can't blame him, right? Because he was like a product of his environment that he grew up in. But he was also fucking animals.

So that I think we can all collectively agree is just not cool, you know. Keep your dick out of the goat's Fred.

But do you think his mom never got jealous? She's like, oh here comes that slutty chicken, Fred's benign. It wasn't just Fred though.

They're father continuously abused his sisters, but this all came into question later on when Fred's youngest brother dug denied any claims of abuse in the family.

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