Rose West’s former lawyer claims police dumped shocking abuse evidence before murder trial

Rose West’s former solicitor claims police lost disturbing material that never reached her murder trial.

Over two decades after one of Britain’s most chilling murder trials, the former solicitor for Rose West has revealed that potentially vital evidence was never presented in court—material he claims mysteriously vanished in the years leading up to her prosecution.

Leo Goatley, who represented Rose West for 12 years, has spoken out to say that only a fraction of the available police evidence made it before the judge and jury during the infamous 1995 trial that saw West convicted of ten murders.

“The actual evidence heard at court was probably only 10 to 20% of the material police had gathered,” Goatley explained in a recent interview. He alleges that during the early 1990s, key photographic and video evidence linked to the couple’s disturbing abuse of women and children vanished without trace.

Among the most unsettling items, Goatley says, were Polaroid photographs believed to have been taken by Fred West—intimate, graphic images that could have helped identify additional victims and provided forensic material for expert analysis.

“In the porn trade they call them ‘hamburger shots’,” Goatley said bluntly. “Fred used to take these really intimate pictures of women he abused. They were available at child sex abuse hearings in the early ’90s—but by the time of the murder trial, they were gone.”

He claims the disappearance of this material raises serious questions, particularly as police insisted at the time that their investigation into the Wests had never been closed, even after earlier abuse charges were dropped in 1993.

“A lot of this material—photos, home videos, paraphernalia—was apparently thrown out or lost after the collapse of the child abuse case. But if they knew they were still investigating Fred and Rose, why dispose of it?”

Goatley says the missing material could have offered vital clarity on the number of victims and the full scale of the abuse. He previously prepared an application to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), raising concerns about the disappearance of evidence and the potential influence of media payments made to key witnesses.

But Rose West halted the process. “She told me, ‘I don’t want to continue with this application. I’ve decided I want to stay in prison.’ I asked if that meant she was admitting the offences, and she said, ‘no.’”

Goatley, who no longer represents West, said he hasn’t spoken to her in years. But more than 20 years after the trial, he wrote her a letter in which he told her directly that he believed she was guilty of the murders. He never received a response.

Rose West is currently serving a whole life order in a Yorkshire prison. Her husband, Fred West, died by suicide in his prison cell in 1995 before their murder trial began. The couple were jointly responsible for the rape, torture, and killing of at least 12 young women and girls, including their own daughter, Heather.

The case, revived in public memory by a recent Netflix docuseries, continues to haunt the nation. Goatley’s revelations about lost evidence suggest that even now, decades later, parts of the Wests’ crimes—and the failings in how they were investigated—remain shrouded in disturbing uncertainty.