My sister said she lives with a “great” family and told us not to worry. Three months later, she was murdered, dismembered and buried under the terraces of Fred and Rose West. This is the first truth about our family nightmare: Dezra Chambers

The 16-year-old Alison Chambers, written in tidy handwriting, sent home to her mom in May 1979, announcing that she had settled down.

“I am currently living with a very plain family, I take care of their children and do some of their housework,” she wrote. “We are all well together and I’m very easily accepting them as a second family.” But please note that you are and will always be my own family. ”

She ended her note, begging her mother not to worry about her and assured her that she was “safe”.

As her sister Dezra Chambers said today, “except she is not safe.” “She is the most dangerous place possible.”

Within three months of writing, Alison was murdered, dismembered and buried under the terrace at the home of Fred and Rosemary West. It was the sadist, murdered two who she wrote so passionately.

Her body will not be found within 15 years until it was discovered by police in 1994, the second of the second of the nine remains found in the home of the killing of the serial couple, whose pervert shocked the world.

Decades later, the horrors they released – they tortured, raped and murdered at least 12 young women and girls in Gloucestershire between 1967 and 1987 – continued to fight back and fascinate the public, while the victim’s family was largely silent on the consequences.

But now, a new three-part Netflix series centered on victim families reveals their pain – the previously unheard police videotape makes the pain even more painful, revealing the fearsomeness of Fred West’s lack of remorse. At one point, he shrugged at the victim and said, “I don’t know which one it is.”

Alison Chambers became the 11th victim of the West in August 1979

Fred and Rosemary West were the most notorious serial killers in the UK in the mid-1980s

Dezra, 64, spoke publicly about losing her sister for the first time, told me: “I did it for Alison. So the victims are often forgotten. I want people to know who she is, she is loved.

There is no doubt. Dezra is a passionate and friendly woman who struggles with deep emotions in our interviews as she recalls the “happy, smart and loving” girl she grew up with.

“It’s not easy to talk about it,” she said. “For a long time, I’ve put everything I feel in a box and put somewhere in my mind.” That’s how I handle it all.

Today, the two-year-old Dezra’s mother lives near Rotterdam and moved to the Netherlands with her then-husband in 1988. She grew up with two young sisters, Alison and a sibling, who had asked not to be named, first in Hanover, Germany, where her father lived in the army, and then Swansea, Wales. Their childhood was not a happy childhood, damaged by actions, violence and father’s drinking.

“I don’t have any good memories,” Dezra said. “Sometimes I’ll have to break my parents’ battles, and we used to be hit a lot.”

She recalled the moment she vowed to raise them in different ways from the moment she was in her 40s. “In my own words, I’m actually the exact opposite of what my mother did,” she said. “When you hold your first child, it changes how you feel about your childhood. You want to know how mom can do this to you.

Dezra’s coping mechanism was to “pass the tunnel” until she was big enough to leave, but Alison began to resist the narrowness of the family home.

“She would stay outside all night and sometimes the police would be called,” Dezra said. As a teenager, Alison was appointed as a social worker and by the age of 15, she was already cared for.

Alison and Dezra are together

Dezra speaks in new Netflix documentaries Fred and Rose West: British Horror Story

By this time Dezra, one year older than Alison, dates the man who will be husband, even though she always tries to stay in touch with her sister. “We’re very close,” she said.

After Alison lived in two nursing homes in Swansea in January 1979, Alison moved to Gloucester, where she initially lived at the Midway House and started a youth training program in the lawyer’s office. However, at some point, she moved in with the Westerners.

How her beloved sister gets into their tracks is a question Dezra can never answer. All she knew was that Alison wrote from here a letter describing the good family she met.

“She said there was no pressure, no atmosphere – I want to be the opposite of what we have at home,” Dezra said. “It seemed incredible, but they obviously put her in trouble.”

Dezra had talked with Alison several times before mom received the notes – her sister said she just wanted her to know she was OK.

“It was exciting because she wouldn’t say where she was despite my constant asking,” Dezra recalled the last time they spoke over the bar phone. “Then she called.”

This was the last time Dezra heard from her sister: She now knew that Alison was murdered shortly after writing in May 1979.

She said police believe she died before her 17th birthday in September. “But without momentary communication marks modern life, her increasingly anxious and confused family can’t know what happened to her.

Fred and Rose’s 12 confirmed victims. Police believe they are responsible for other murders and disappearances

Fred of the new documentary

“People would tell me that they found Alison at work in London and I don’t understand why she never got in touch,” Dezra said. “Of course, they haven’t seen her, they just thought. And you’re fighting yourself because you want to believe these people, but at the same time, there are things that tell you they don’t.”

Once, Dezra approached the Salvation Army for help, but was told they could not find any trace of Alison either.

“I always follow the news to see when they do stories about homeless people and see if I can find her too,” she said. “That’s all I can do.”

So several years after Dezra became a mother, during which time, the milestones – Alison’s birthday, the birthday of her own daughter – come and go.

“I wonder if she was drinking with her friends and what she might be doing. But I think she may have been dead for a million years,” she said.

She recalled the news, which was discovered in February 1994 when videos showed a forensic officer taking out a box from a house in the west.

As social workers report how young western kids “joking” to them, how their sister Fred and Rose’s 16-year-old daughter Heather, they start investigating.

This was convinced by police officers, and the garden at 25 Cromwell Street was excavated and Heather’s body was found.

Three days later, on Monday, February 28, 5.20 pm, Alison’s body was also found, and eight other groups of young women were found under the cellar and under the floor. There are also some porn and hidden camera hidings where Fred will record his wife having sex with the man.

Three bodies were then found in Fred’s former home and buried in a nearby countryside.

At home, Dezra watches the unfolding footage with horror, unaware of the individuals that will become devastating in time.

“Like everyone, I just thought about how terrible it was, and didn’t imagine that one of the people in those boxes might be Alison,” she said.

In a few weeks, she received a call from Gloucestershire police, asking for her mother’s phone number. Although they did not explain why, she later learned from her mom that they wanted a DNA sample to help identify some of the remains of Cromwell Street.

“You’re just rolling up, hoping that’s not the case,” she said.

But here is: a few days later, Dezra received another call, this time her stepfather, confirming that one of the bodies was indeed Alison. “I really remember, it crashed correctly. My daughter now tells me that this is the only time she has ever actually seen me crying. ”

Beyond their loss, Dezra has to face the horror of how it unfolds – her 16-year-old sister is found and physically dismembered. “You’re just a completely different world,” she said. “In the end, all I can do is try to lock these details.”

By June 1994, Fred West was charged with 12 murders and ten murders. But Fred will never face justice: Along with the rest of the world, Dezra wakes up on New Year’s Day in 1995, with the news that he hung himself in a cell in his custody time at 53-year-old HMP Birmingham.

Many of the victims’ families were angry and felt that he had gone the coward’s way out, but Dezra admitted to being happy.

“Whatever happens to a killer like him, they will get a form of life that refuses to my sister,” she said. “I don’t want to give it to him.” He shouldn’t be alive.

Her anger at Ross was equally in her heart: “I was really angry. I once said that I just wanted to lock with her in a room without windows, with only one door, and only one of us would go out.

Rose’s trial began in October 1995, with many families of victims, including Dezra and her mother, who participated in the competition for the first two days. “I think it’s important to be there in the beginning,” she said. The day before the opening, on a bright and cold autumn morning, Dezra asked a family liaison officer to take her to Cromwell Street 25 so she could see where her sister spent her last days.

“We stood outside for a while and he told me that Alison would sit on the wall where he talked to friends. It’s great to see it,” she said.

Dezra also asked to see where the terrace was buried. “I want to see where they found her,” she said. “It sounds strange, but I’m glad she found her in the garden. I think that’s where people are buried on Earth. So that was a little comfort.

Rose West sentenced ten murders in November 1995 at Winchester Crown Court. In 1997, Home Secretary Jack Straw signed a lifetime tariff on Rose Rose, which was only the second time imposed on British women in the modern day after serial killer Myra Hindley in 1990.

Justice, although justice cannot bring back lost loved ones.

“My daughter will never meet Alison, my grandson will never meet her, she will never become a mother. Nothing has changed. ” Dezra said.

Participating in a documentary has proven to be cathartic, although it elicits unexpected feelings.

“For years, my daughters told me that I should talk to someone, but I never wanted to, I just wanted to lock my feelings in that box and keep moving forward.”

“But when making the documentary, they suggested that I talk to the psychologists used by the team, and all these feelings came up. Sadness, anger, but also another feeling I didn’t understand. She now realizes, the guilt of survivors.

“I’m the big sister,” she said simply. “I can’t always get rid of the feeling that both of me should have done better.”

Fred and Rose West: Tomorrow’s Netflix is ​​a British horror story.