A regional news website has vowed to focus on the victims of Fred and Rose West in its coverage amid renewed interest in their case.

Gloucestershire Live audience and content editor Jenni Phillips has urged both the media and the public to remember the killer couple’s 12 known victims, saying her site “owes it to those families” not to trivialise the fresh fascination with the Wests’ crimes.

Police have been searching The Clean Plate Cafe in Gloucester since Friday 7 May after a team making a TV documentary about Fred West, who killed at least 12 women between 1967 and 1987, found “possible evidence” of human remains.

Retired journalist Alan Watkins subsequently told Gloucestershire Live of his “frustration” at years of police inaction after claiming he was the last person to see Mary Bastholm, a suspected victim of Fred West, alive in 1968.

In a piece discussing the current coverage of the case, Jenni, pictured, said there had been “A lot of wounds reopened and headlines published which make for grim reading.”

“Those two faces, mugshots from the past, have returned to haunt a city which has been scarred by their actions,” she wrote.

“In the stories you may read elsewhere in the coming days and months, look out for twelve missing details. Twelve names of twelve women, fourteen if you count two unborn babies never given the chance of life, who must never be forgotten when it comes to that pair.

“Those names are important and it is time they were remembered ahead of the other names which this case is forever linked to.”

She then listed the names of the known victims – Anna McFall (and her unborn child), Charmaine West, Rena Costello/West, Lynda Gough, Juanita Mott, Thérèse Siegenthaler, Shirley Hubbard, Carol Ann Cooper, Shirley Robinson (and her unborn child), Alison Chambers, Lucy Partington and Heather West.

Jenni added: “Once you’ve remembered this, and given thought to the families who lost a daughter or a sister, or to those like the Bastholms whose loved one has still not been found, only then is it fair to talk about Fred and Rose West.

“Gloucester carries an immense weight of guilt and shame in relation to that couple. All those jokes about patios hide the fact that a lot of people feel disgust that they didn’t know just how far from normal the West family were and a few feel a sense of shame that perhaps they did.

“The modern fascination with murder and true crime should not be an excuse to rake over the past at will. Old tapes and interviews should not be presented without the context of what happened next, without the background about who is speaking and their own stories.

“Only a few of the many podcasts about the pair take the time to name each victim, list their age and give them a place in the story of their own death.

“Now this new investigation has brought it back into sharp focus. The sound of the Sky TV helicopter over Gloucester, the glaring mugshot eyes and that picture of them looking like a happy couple, hiding their true selves.”

“We will continue to report on the factual elements, with what is actually happening at the Clean Plate and what, if anything is found. But we will focus on Mary, and those 12 names we must never forget.

“The impact the Wests have had on our city and on so many lives was far from trivial and we owe it to those families to make sure our coverage from now on is not either.”