TEN years ago this week, on November 22, 1995, the final words were spoken in one of the most horrific murder trials this country has ever known.

Mr Justice Mantell, sitting at Winchester Crown Court, looked across to the stocky figure of Rosemary West standing impassively in the dock.

"Take her down," he ordered prison officers dismissively.

Fifty years ago, the judge would have solemnly donned the Black Cap and sentenced West to death.

For she had been convicted of taking part in the deaths of no less than 10 young women and girls, three of whom had connections to Worcester.

As a parting shot, after passing 10 life sentences, Mr Justice Mantell added darkly: "If attention is paid to what I think, you will never be released."

West remains behind bars, but the mere mention of the name still sends a chill through communities in the Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Here-fordshire border area.

The case had originally centred on her husband Fred, in public a cheerful, Jack-the-Lad jobbing builder, but with the private face of the Devil.

Fred had been due to stand trial for the series of sadistic murders, which involved torture, suffocation and lingering deaths, but he committed suicide in prison while on remand.

He was found hanged by a rope of blankets and laundry bag strips in his cell at Winson Green, Birmingham, leaving his wife to face the evidence alone. Damning and macabre evidence it was, too.

The prosecution told how the Wests collected girls off the streets on the pre-text of offering them a lift or other help, and took them to their outwardly innocuous end-of-terrace home at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester.

There, in a specially converted cellar, they were sadistically tortured before being killed and their bodies hacked apart and buried.

Among the couple's victims were Carol Cooper from Worcester and Shirley Hubbard, who was living at Droitwich, while a third, Therese Siegenthaler, was picked up in Worcester.

Fred and Rose West's bloodlust might have continued unchecked had it not been for a chance conversation between a group of schoolchildren and a beat bobby on the streets of Gloucester one August day in 1992.

What they told the officer prompted social workers to take all five of the West children, who were then all under the age of 16, away from the family home and into care within days.

The subsequent court case alleging abuse by Fred and Rose collapsed because two main prosecution witnesses suddenly decided not to testify. But during the investigation, detectives came across a grim family joke that missing daughter Heather, whom her parents maintained had simply left home, was "under the patio".

Det Con Hazel Savage convinced her superiors this was not just black humour and worth following up.

In February 1994 Gloucester Mag-istrates issued a warrant for police to search the back garden of 25 Cromwell Street and the full horrors of the perverted lives of its owners began to surface. Within two days the first body was found. It was Heather.

On the fourth day of careful digging, police uncovered two more bodies.

Innovative ground-penetrating radar, in use for the first time, arrived and bodies four and five, Therese Siegenthaler and Shirley Hubbard, were found in the floor of the basement.

A sixth body was then found in the basement before three more, including Carol Cooper, were discovered in the cellar and bathroom areas.

The search then switched to a field near Fred West's former home in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle.

Under the telephoto scrutiny of dozens of media lenses, police began careful excavations. After 13 days, they came across the remains of West's first wife Catherine. Work continued and more than a month later, in early June, the body of the Wests' nanny Anne McFall and the bones of her unborn baby were found.

Meanwhile, at another inner-city Gloucester house, 25 Midland Road, the corpse of Charmaine West, Catherine's eight-year-old daughter, was discovered.

As a litany of cold calculated horror, it has rarely been equalled in Britain, and the legacy of Fred and Rose's gruesome family lifestyle, involving prostitution, sexual abuse, sadism and mass murder, reached out well beyond their court case.

Fred's brother John committed suicide while on trial for raping his niece and Fred's daughter Anne Marie was dragged from the River Severn at Glouc-ester after an alleged suicide attempt. Two of Fred's cousins have also been jailed for offences against young girls.

Ten years on, and there may still be dark secrets hidden deep in the Herefordshire countryside.