Exaro News is playing a dangerous game with its paedophile murder story
Exaro News has been drip feeding allegations and rumours of a paedophile sex ring in high places for many months.
Today – in collaboration with the Sunday People – it has alleged that it was not only a sex but a murder ring. A Tory MP strangled a 12 year old brown haired boy in a central London town house in 1980. Apparently,18 months to two years later two other men murdered a second boy in front of another Tory MP, “a cabinet minister.” Both MPs, are “still alive.” Its source is a man in his 40s to whom they have given the pseudonym “Nick”. Exaro even mentions rumours of a third child murdered by being run over in the street, though I don’t think Nick claims to have actually seen more than one murder.
The scene was set yesterday when the BBC decided to join Exaro News in broadcasting an interview with a man in his 40s known as “Nick” who alleges that he was repeatedly raped by Conservative MPs and other “VIPs” in the 1970s and 80s. Nick, it is said, is grateful to Exaro News and to his counsellor for “allowing” him to tell his story in public, and wants to encourage others to go, as he has now gone, to the police to corroborate his account. According to the BBC he has been “in counselling on and off since he was in his twenties” and has only now “found the strength to come forward.” There was no mention in the BBC interview of any murder and Exaro have never previously revealed that Nick witnessed a murder.
Mark Watts the Exaro interviewer suggests “a lot of people will find your account hard to believe,” but that does not mean that Nick is lying. Nevertheless Exaro, and now the BBC, have acted extremely unwisely by catapulting him into the public domain.
Both the BBC’s interview, and even more so Exaro’s, go into considerable detail about the alleged abuse. We are told, for example, how Nick and other children would be driven to Dolpin Square where sex parties were held. They would be made to dance and sing, before being sexually abused by a group including MPs, “an ex-Cabinet Minister,” and other “powerful people.” Nick says that he was repeatedly raped while his head was held under water in a bath, and on a number of occasions he nearly drowned. Boys were injured, and a doctor, he says, was part of the group to treat these injuries. It was, indeed, a paedophile ring.
The first effect of broadcasting Nick’s detailed allegations is that anybody wishing to make a false allegation has now been given not just rumours, which in truth have been flying around on the internet for years, but a detailed and apparently first-hand description of exactly how another witness says the abuse took place. This, of course, flies in the face of good policing practice in which the account of one witness is never given to other potential witnesses precisely because of the danger of contamination. It is true that neither Exaro nor the BBC has actually given the names of the alleged abusers but 5 minutes on the internet would supply a selection of Tory MPs and cabinet ministers about whom rumours have swirled. Most of those who were cabinet ministers in Mrs Thatcher’s first administration are now dead, so the tidbit that the Minister in question is still alive narrows the field to about 10 suspects.
In any case involving multiple complainants the defence always strives hard to show that the complainants may have colluded with each other, or at least that later complainants knew of the substance of an earlier complaint, while the prosecution tries to show that such collusion or awareness is unlikely. Well, Exaro and the BBC together have comprehensively ensured that any future complainant will be aware of the detail of Nick’s complaint and his evidence will for that reason be devalued. In a nutshell, if a future witness relates similar details to Nick’s he will be accused of having learnt them from the BBC and Exaro interviews. It is on such issues that cases turn.
And it is not just the evidence of witnesses who have yet to come forward: Nick’s testimony will itself be undermined if potentially corroborative witnesses can remember only details publicised in the interviews. Exaro insists that it has “withheld many of the details of the deaths to avoid hindering the police investigation,” which rather begs the question of why, if solving two or three murders is the objective, they have not withheld all such details.
If Nick’s account is untrue, then to broadcast it is to feed a monstrous hysteria. The broadcasting of his unchallenged and uncontradicted account can only serve to prejudice any jury at some future trial. We have sub judice rules for a very good reason: the evidence against defendants should be given, tested, argued over and assessed in court, not out of court by people from whom any ultimate jury would be selected. The broadcasting of Nick’s interview does not breach the letter of the sub judice rules since there is, as yet, no defendant and no pending trial. It is, however, about as flagrant a breach of their spirit as it is possible to imagine.
Furthermore, if Nick’s account is untrue then it is grossly unfair on innocent MPs and the ten living Cabinet Minsters from the period. Inevitably speculation will be encouraged and inevitably some of it – quite possibly all of it – will be nonsense. Such speculation is bound to damage innocent people: and for what?
The suggestion that it was necessary to broadcast the interview to encourage other “victims to come forward” sounds distinctly self-serving. When somebody makes an allegation, whether of sexual abuse or of murder the proper thing to do is to contact the police immediately, not to extract newsworthy information from the witness, and only then alert the police before placing the information in the public domain.
It is true that Exaro says the witness has now spoken to the police himself, although apparently only after he insisting that an Exaro reporter was present at the meeting. This again is a pretty bizarre state of affairs. Witnesses sometimes request a solicitor being present, but the presence of a journalist at the initial interview of the police with the main witness in a murder inquiry is most unusual. These days a witness such as Nick would in all probability have his evidential interview video recorded. Are we to understand that an Exaro journalist was sitting in on the interview? That seems to be the implication of the Exaro story and if so it is wrong. Quite apart from anything else it creates a further opportunity for confidential information to leak out, as well as putting pressure on the witness not to deviate from the account that he gave to Exaro.
I have seen nothing to suggest that Nick has been paid, or promised any financial reward by Exaro. One would assume that the organisation would not have been foolish enough to do so but the precise nature of the agreement between them is certainly something that will be very closely examined should the matter ever result in a prosecution.
What the police are making of these unorthodox arrangements it is hard to know, but it is doubtful that they can be very happy about it. The impression given – it may of course be quite incorrect – is of Exaro running a murder inquiry with the police struggling to keep up. Exaro has in its possession a considerable quantity of notes and video footage relating to Nick and perhaps other witnesses too. Clearly all such material needs to be seen by the police. Has it all been handed over? If so, when and on what terms? In these post-Leveson days it is much to be hoped that the police have not made some cosy deal to leak information back to Exaro.
As well as Exaro’s records the police will also want to see any records held by Nick’s “counsellor.” We know nothing, at present, about the sort of counselling that he was giving.
There is nothing new about allegations being made against Tory politicians of the period, and they are not necessarily truthful. A not dissimilar account of Conservative Party MPs being involved in sexual abuse was given in the 1990s by someone called Carol Felstead and it provides a cautionary tale for anyone who might wish to rush to judgement. According to Carol’s therapists, she was anally raped in Conservative Central Office by a Tory MP with a claw hammer, and raped by not one but two members of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet.
Just like Nick, Carol supposedly said she was abused first by her parents. She had been “ritually reborn out of a bull’s stomach, placed in a grave ‘on top of her dead sister’ and rescued by her father who was dressed as the Devil.” She later claimed to have given birth to six children who were then aborted and ritually sacrificed.
Some of Carol’s story was told, not to Exaro or the BBC but to one of the country’s best known therapists and psychoanalysts, Dr Valerie Sinason, who incorporated some of it (changing Carol’s name to “Rita”) into the work that made her name: Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse. According to Dr Sinason there are:
“Men and women, dedicated to Aleister Crowley’s guiding principle ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, worship Satan as their god in private houses or in churchyards and forests…They drink blood and urine and eat faeces and insects. They are involved in pornographic films and drug-dealing as a means of raising money. They are highly organised, successful in their secrecy and have a belief that through this pain and abuse they are getting closer to their god.”
Sinason is also on record as believing that Satanists go to “castles and woodlands” to practise human sacrifice, cannibalism and bestiality with dogs and goats.
Not surprisingly Sinason’s grand ouevre has been rubbished by many psychiatrists. “Credulous, superstitious, iatrogenic illness-inducing, self-righteous, incendiary garbage,” was one description of it at a Maudsley Hospital convention of psychiatrists, who together voted it the second worst psychiatric publication in the last hundred years, comfortably beating Laing and Freud. Indeed so dreadful did they find her work that it was beaten only by a bizarre 1943 experiment involving the near strangulation of prisoners and chronic schizophrenics to test the effects of stopping blood flow to the brain.
Sinason specialised (and is still paid by the NHS to specialise) in the treatment of a condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder (“DID”). This is a controversial diagnosis although it is recognised by the American Psychiatric Society’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V). Perhaps this is an over-simplification but it boils down to a person having at least two separate personalities. Thus the sufferer might be at times “controlled” by a quiet and introverted personality, and at others by a loud and extroverted one. Believers such as Dr Sinason think that the disorder arises “in response to extreme trauma and abuse.” The cure for the condition, surprisingly enough, is “long term therapy,” and it appears to be during such therapy that sufferers “find the strength” to make “disclosures” about the extreme trauma or abuse that the therapist believes must have occurred. The job of the therapist is therefore to uncover that abuse.
Now, despite the detailed and distressing history supposedly given by Carol to her therapists, her accounts of abuse at the hands of her parents were demonstrable nonsense. The family house had indeed burned down, but it did so a year before she was born so she could not possibly have remembered it as she said. She did have a sister who died in infancy, a girl who suffered from Downs syndrome and died in hospital from natural causes; again she did so before Carol was even born. As for the Satanic abuse, her four surviving brothers all agree that nothing of the sort took place and there is no evidence of it whatever from any other source. There was no coven, no witch-craft and no murdered babies: indeed her medical records show that she had never been pregnant. Her extraordinary story of being raped by politicians was likewise fantasy of a high order.
The fantasy only emerged after she had begun her therapy. Sadly she died in mysterious circumstances in 2005. Not surprisingly her family are contemptuous of therapists like Sinason and possibly even more contemptuous of a Dr Fleur Fisher who was also closely involved in her treatment.
Of course, merely because while under therapy Carol made bizarre and false sexual allegations about her parents and about Conservative politicians it does not follow that Nick’s allegations, also made after years of therapy, are false as well. However it certainly ought to serve as a reminder that such allegations cannot automatically be taken at face value.
Those involved should also be aware that people with mental health problems – and Nick’s revelation that he has been in counselling for twenty years ought at least to flag up the danger that he may have mental health or emotional problems – are not necessarily helped by being thrust into the limelight.
Even if the police cannot manage it, perhaps Theresa May’s over-arching Child Abuse Inquiry will help to get to the bottom of whether such a paedophile ring as Nick describes existed; and that it would also examine the extent to which (as has been alleged in Carol Felstead’s case) false accusations of sexual abuse have been, in effect, created or at least encouraged by rogue therapists, counsellors and psychoanalysts.
Unfortunately it seems extremely unlikely that the Inquiry will address the latter problem, not least because one of the panel members, Graham Wilmer, runs a project for the survivors of sexual abuse which itself practises an unconventional form of therapy called “unstructured therapeutic disclosure.”
A video on the organisation’s website explains how this works:
Today – in collaboration with the Sunday People – it has alleged that it was not only a sex but a murder ring. A Tory MP strangled a 12 year old brown haired boy in a central London town house in 1980. Apparently,18 months to two years later two other men murdered a second boy in front of another Tory MP, “a cabinet minister.” Both MPs, are “still alive.” Its source is a man in his 40s to whom they have given the pseudonym “Nick”. Exaro even mentions rumours of a third child murdered by being run over in the street, though I don’t think Nick claims to have actually seen more than one murder.
The scene was set yesterday when the BBC decided to join Exaro News in broadcasting an interview with a man in his 40s known as “Nick” who alleges that he was repeatedly raped by Conservative MPs and other “VIPs” in the 1970s and 80s. Nick, it is said, is grateful to Exaro News and to his counsellor for “allowing” him to tell his story in public, and wants to encourage others to go, as he has now gone, to the police to corroborate his account. According to the BBC he has been “in counselling on and off since he was in his twenties” and has only now “found the strength to come forward.” There was no mention in the BBC interview of any murder and Exaro have never previously revealed that Nick witnessed a murder.
Mark Watts the Exaro interviewer suggests “a lot of people will find your account hard to believe,” but that does not mean that Nick is lying. Nevertheless Exaro, and now the BBC, have acted extremely unwisely by catapulting him into the public domain.
Both the BBC’s interview, and even more so Exaro’s, go into considerable detail about the alleged abuse. We are told, for example, how Nick and other children would be driven to Dolpin Square where sex parties were held. They would be made to dance and sing, before being sexually abused by a group including MPs, “an ex-Cabinet Minister,” and other “powerful people.” Nick says that he was repeatedly raped while his head was held under water in a bath, and on a number of occasions he nearly drowned. Boys were injured, and a doctor, he says, was part of the group to treat these injuries. It was, indeed, a paedophile ring.
The first effect of broadcasting Nick’s detailed allegations is that anybody wishing to make a false allegation has now been given not just rumours, which in truth have been flying around on the internet for years, but a detailed and apparently first-hand description of exactly how another witness says the abuse took place. This, of course, flies in the face of good policing practice in which the account of one witness is never given to other potential witnesses precisely because of the danger of contamination. It is true that neither Exaro nor the BBC has actually given the names of the alleged abusers but 5 minutes on the internet would supply a selection of Tory MPs and cabinet ministers about whom rumours have swirled. Most of those who were cabinet ministers in Mrs Thatcher’s first administration are now dead, so the tidbit that the Minister in question is still alive narrows the field to about 10 suspects.
In any case involving multiple complainants the defence always strives hard to show that the complainants may have colluded with each other, or at least that later complainants knew of the substance of an earlier complaint, while the prosecution tries to show that such collusion or awareness is unlikely. Well, Exaro and the BBC together have comprehensively ensured that any future complainant will be aware of the detail of Nick’s complaint and his evidence will for that reason be devalued. In a nutshell, if a future witness relates similar details to Nick’s he will be accused of having learnt them from the BBC and Exaro interviews. It is on such issues that cases turn.
And it is not just the evidence of witnesses who have yet to come forward: Nick’s testimony will itself be undermined if potentially corroborative witnesses can remember only details publicised in the interviews. Exaro insists that it has “withheld many of the details of the deaths to avoid hindering the police investigation,” which rather begs the question of why, if solving two or three murders is the objective, they have not withheld all such details.
If Nick’s account is untrue, then to broadcast it is to feed a monstrous hysteria. The broadcasting of his unchallenged and uncontradicted account can only serve to prejudice any jury at some future trial. We have sub judice rules for a very good reason: the evidence against defendants should be given, tested, argued over and assessed in court, not out of court by people from whom any ultimate jury would be selected. The broadcasting of Nick’s interview does not breach the letter of the sub judice rules since there is, as yet, no defendant and no pending trial. It is, however, about as flagrant a breach of their spirit as it is possible to imagine.
Furthermore, if Nick’s account is untrue then it is grossly unfair on innocent MPs and the ten living Cabinet Minsters from the period. Inevitably speculation will be encouraged and inevitably some of it – quite possibly all of it – will be nonsense. Such speculation is bound to damage innocent people: and for what?
The suggestion that it was necessary to broadcast the interview to encourage other “victims to come forward” sounds distinctly self-serving. When somebody makes an allegation, whether of sexual abuse or of murder the proper thing to do is to contact the police immediately, not to extract newsworthy information from the witness, and only then alert the police before placing the information in the public domain.
It is true that Exaro says the witness has now spoken to the police himself, although apparently only after he insisting that an Exaro reporter was present at the meeting. This again is a pretty bizarre state of affairs. Witnesses sometimes request a solicitor being present, but the presence of a journalist at the initial interview of the police with the main witness in a murder inquiry is most unusual. These days a witness such as Nick would in all probability have his evidential interview video recorded. Are we to understand that an Exaro journalist was sitting in on the interview? That seems to be the implication of the Exaro story and if so it is wrong. Quite apart from anything else it creates a further opportunity for confidential information to leak out, as well as putting pressure on the witness not to deviate from the account that he gave to Exaro.
I have seen nothing to suggest that Nick has been paid, or promised any financial reward by Exaro. One would assume that the organisation would not have been foolish enough to do so but the precise nature of the agreement between them is certainly something that will be very closely examined should the matter ever result in a prosecution.
What the police are making of these unorthodox arrangements it is hard to know, but it is doubtful that they can be very happy about it. The impression given – it may of course be quite incorrect – is of Exaro running a murder inquiry with the police struggling to keep up. Exaro has in its possession a considerable quantity of notes and video footage relating to Nick and perhaps other witnesses too. Clearly all such material needs to be seen by the police. Has it all been handed over? If so, when and on what terms? In these post-Leveson days it is much to be hoped that the police have not made some cosy deal to leak information back to Exaro.
As well as Exaro’s records the police will also want to see any records held by Nick’s “counsellor.” We know nothing, at present, about the sort of counselling that he was giving.
There is nothing new about allegations being made against Tory politicians of the period, and they are not necessarily truthful. A not dissimilar account of Conservative Party MPs being involved in sexual abuse was given in the 1990s by someone called Carol Felstead and it provides a cautionary tale for anyone who might wish to rush to judgement. According to Carol’s therapists, she was anally raped in Conservative Central Office by a Tory MP with a claw hammer, and raped by not one but two members of Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet.
Just like Nick, Carol supposedly said she was abused first by her parents. She had been “ritually reborn out of a bull’s stomach, placed in a grave ‘on top of her dead sister’ and rescued by her father who was dressed as the Devil.” She later claimed to have given birth to six children who were then aborted and ritually sacrificed.
Some of Carol’s story was told, not to Exaro or the BBC but to one of the country’s best known therapists and psychoanalysts, Dr Valerie Sinason, who incorporated some of it (changing Carol’s name to “Rita”) into the work that made her name: Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse. According to Dr Sinason there are:
“Men and women, dedicated to Aleister Crowley’s guiding principle ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law’, worship Satan as their god in private houses or in churchyards and forests…They drink blood and urine and eat faeces and insects. They are involved in pornographic films and drug-dealing as a means of raising money. They are highly organised, successful in their secrecy and have a belief that through this pain and abuse they are getting closer to their god.”
Sinason is also on record as believing that Satanists go to “castles and woodlands” to practise human sacrifice, cannibalism and bestiality with dogs and goats.
Not surprisingly Sinason’s grand ouevre has been rubbished by many psychiatrists. “Credulous, superstitious, iatrogenic illness-inducing, self-righteous, incendiary garbage,” was one description of it at a Maudsley Hospital convention of psychiatrists, who together voted it the second worst psychiatric publication in the last hundred years, comfortably beating Laing and Freud. Indeed so dreadful did they find her work that it was beaten only by a bizarre 1943 experiment involving the near strangulation of prisoners and chronic schizophrenics to test the effects of stopping blood flow to the brain.
Sinason specialised (and is still paid by the NHS to specialise) in the treatment of a condition called Dissociative Identity Disorder (“DID”). This is a controversial diagnosis although it is recognised by the American Psychiatric Society’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V). Perhaps this is an over-simplification but it boils down to a person having at least two separate personalities. Thus the sufferer might be at times “controlled” by a quiet and introverted personality, and at others by a loud and extroverted one. Believers such as Dr Sinason think that the disorder arises “in response to extreme trauma and abuse.” The cure for the condition, surprisingly enough, is “long term therapy,” and it appears to be during such therapy that sufferers “find the strength” to make “disclosures” about the extreme trauma or abuse that the therapist believes must have occurred. The job of the therapist is therefore to uncover that abuse.
Now, despite the detailed and distressing history supposedly given by Carol to her therapists, her accounts of abuse at the hands of her parents were demonstrable nonsense. The family house had indeed burned down, but it did so a year before she was born so she could not possibly have remembered it as she said. She did have a sister who died in infancy, a girl who suffered from Downs syndrome and died in hospital from natural causes; again she did so before Carol was even born. As for the Satanic abuse, her four surviving brothers all agree that nothing of the sort took place and there is no evidence of it whatever from any other source. There was no coven, no witch-craft and no murdered babies: indeed her medical records show that she had never been pregnant. Her extraordinary story of being raped by politicians was likewise fantasy of a high order.
The fantasy only emerged after she had begun her therapy. Sadly she died in mysterious circumstances in 2005. Not surprisingly her family are contemptuous of therapists like Sinason and possibly even more contemptuous of a Dr Fleur Fisher who was also closely involved in her treatment.
Of course, merely because while under therapy Carol made bizarre and false sexual allegations about her parents and about Conservative politicians it does not follow that Nick’s allegations, also made after years of therapy, are false as well. However it certainly ought to serve as a reminder that such allegations cannot automatically be taken at face value.
Those involved should also be aware that people with mental health problems – and Nick’s revelation that he has been in counselling for twenty years ought at least to flag up the danger that he may have mental health or emotional problems – are not necessarily helped by being thrust into the limelight.
Even if the police cannot manage it, perhaps Theresa May’s over-arching Child Abuse Inquiry will help to get to the bottom of whether such a paedophile ring as Nick describes existed; and that it would also examine the extent to which (as has been alleged in Carol Felstead’s case) false accusations of sexual abuse have been, in effect, created or at least encouraged by rogue therapists, counsellors and psychoanalysts.
Unfortunately it seems extremely unlikely that the Inquiry will address the latter problem, not least because one of the panel members, Graham Wilmer, runs a project for the survivors of sexual abuse which itself practises an unconventional form of therapy called “unstructured therapeutic disclosure.”
A video on the organisation’s website explains how this works:
“The conventional approach involves the victims, at the outset, having to tell the police, a GP or a counsellor exactly what has happened to them, when it happened, who was involved and how long it lasted. This very detailed specific event is referred to as “disclosure” which inevitably re-traumatises the victim. Detail specific disclosure is not the place to begin the process.
After explaining that the Project’s counsellors (themselves survivors of sexual abuse) will make an “initial impact assessment” of victims “without them having to disclose the detail of their abuse,” it describes the next stage in the counselling process:
“Having completed the impact assessment we explain in appropriately graphic detail exactly what happened to us. This reassures the victim that we already know what happend to them because we have been through the same trauma. This provides a bridge of trust over which they can walk, removing at a stroke any fears they may have of what they are expected to tell us and how we may react.”
Having told the victim in “appropriately graphic detail” what abuse the therapist suffered, the next stage is to ensure that their abuse is acknowledged. How is that done?
“Victims also need some form of reconciliation which is usually in the form of compensation for the abuse or punishment of their perpetrators. This is another highly complex area and we identify with survivors the most suitable route how to go about it and the support they will need in the process.”
Whatever the therapeutic benefits of this, it would be hard to devise a form of counselling more fraught with the danger of producing unreliable evidence than one in which in which therapists prompt their “patients” to disclose sexual abuse by telling them in graphic detail about their own experiences. When those same therapists are also involved in “supporting” the complainants in civil or criminal litigation the potential for injustice is manifest.
Nick’s allegations about a paedophile and murder ring in high places, if true, are both astonishing and horrific. Aside, perhaps, from the mad court of dictators like Mao or Ceausescou it is impossible to think of any modern precedent for such a thing. It would mean that for year after year senior politicians and other public figures cast aside morality, threw caution to the winds and – aided and abetted by others, including a doctor – kept a group of teenage and younger boys as their sexual playthings, confident in the belief that nobody would expose them. For some reason some of them also chose to murder two or three of these boys in front of witnesses.
The reasons to doubt the existence of such a ring are legion. What were these boys doing when they were not at Dolphin Square sex parties? Were they kept in complete isolation? Did they stop going to school, for example, or never speak to anybody outside the paedophile ring? The Exaro line seems to be that they were so terrified by the fact that the men in question were powerful that they did not expose the ring while it was active. Are we really to believe that these “powerful people” were so sure that their affairs could be kept secret from the press and, still more, from their political rivals, that they kept returning to the orgies? When even a tame affair like that of Cecil Parkinson with his secretary could lead to political disgrace; when journalists were constantly scouring Westminster for a whiff of scandal and when political rivals would have been delighted to ditch the dirt on their enemies it seems – as Exaro themselves acknowledge – very unlikely indeed.
Nevertheless, if there is evidence of such a scandal – and Nick’s interview makes it clear that there is – then it must be investigated with the utmost rigour. The people to do that are the Police.
It does not seem to me that Exaro’s actions have made their job any easier.
Post navigation
As someone who suffered appalling rape from infancy through to age twelve, dissociated the abuse, recalled it (not whilst in therapy) – and subsequently received therapeutic support from Valerie Sinason and the Clinic For Dissociative Studies I can tell you that you are misrepresenting Dr Sinason and her work.
The rapes I suffered have been medically proven to have started in infancy. Look up the article “Child rape – patterns of injury, management and outcome.” authored by van As, Withers M, du Toit N, Millar AJ, Rode H and published in the South African Journal of Medicine (SAMJ) and you will find the kind of injuries I suffered and that have been proven by this country’s leading proctologist and academic researcher in his field.
That you have misrepresented and show no understanding of dissociation – a very real phenomena and entirely understandable as a psycho-social response to repeated trauma – leads me to question some of your other conclusions and their likely validity.
Most/many of us who survived this kind of treatment as children have little trust that any substantive facts will emerge as so many documents have “been lost”, police investigations stopped in their tracks and obvious cover-ups been perpetuated.
I understand your concern about prosecutions being prejudiced and this is valid yet Exaro have been extremely cautious whilst treading where most other media fear to tread. I trust them more than politicians, most journalists and – please accept my apologies – lawyers.
Thank you for taking an interest in justice regarding these matters. The reality would seem to be that justice may not be done but the current approach may at least allow some light to be shone into long-dark places.
Kindest regards,
Matthew
As far as Exaro is concerned I don’t agree with you that they have been “extremely cautious.” If Nick’s account is true I think their actions could destroy any possibility of ever mounting a successful prosecution.
“Anyone with any sense who was in trouble would come to the Whips and tell them the truth, and say now, “I’m in a jam, can you help?” It might be debt, it might be a scandal involving small boys, or any kind of scandal which a member seemed likely to be mixed up in, they’d come and ask if we could help. And if we could, we did. We would do everything we can because we would store up brownie points. That sounds a pretty nasty reason but one of the reasons is, if we can get a chap out of trouble, he’ll do as we ask forever more.” – Tim Fortescue, Chief Whip under Ted Heath, 1970-73
Source: ‘Westminster’s Secret Service’ broadcast by the BBC in 1995.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwkOWPauu_A?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent]
In no way does Fortescue’s statement say he actively helped cover up for paedophile MPs. You are reading into it what you want to hear ; so it *is* opinion and speculation. All you can conclude from this is that the Whip would help MPs in trouble for his own benefit ; the word “might” is ignored ; it’s an *example*. I don’t doubt it happened, but more in cases such as the NoTW/Mirror bonk journalism wars. They’re not going to cover up a murder.
Two things which might not occur to someone who doesn’t think things through. Firstly, if this statement did say what you claim it does, why has no-one done anything to Mr Fortescue between 1995 and his death in 2008. Secondly, if someone had gone to the whips with something as serious as this fantasy said, do you really think the Whip would cover it up ? Suppose it came out ; he’d end up in jail as an accessory to murder probably – CPJ at best.
I have tried to promote inquiry into the unknown number of deaths, of disabled children in Hackney Social Services care, at the Beeches Ixworth 1966 to 1972. Why minister Sir Keith Joseph refused Commons calls for inquiry 1972 into both the Beeches and the Sue Ryder Care Home West Suffolk. IMO there are questions which should be answered in the public interest. How was it the local HM Coroner did not get an overview of the pattern of child deaths (A question ruled beyond terms of ref of Stage 3 Shipman Inquiry) ? Were some of the deaths declared outside the local HM Coroner jurisdiction ? Why did Hackney rule the Beeches beyond the terms of reference of a retrospective inquiry into their social services in the 1990s ? Was there a staff connection between Sue Ryder Homes and the Beeches (especially if such a staff connection might have included the Sue Ryder Leeds child hospice where Savile committed abuse) ?
The fact is Dominic Grieve is the latest Attorney General to block access to High Court to appeal inquest verdict for a sudden death at the Sue Ryder HQ Cavendish 1972. There is a secret public interest custodianship aspect in the West Suffolk cases. I don’t think it is as straightforward as running interference to give Leonard Cheshire and Sue Ryder a clear path to sainthood.
I wonder how much tax-payers money is being swallowed by this sort of Pantomime. If nothing else it demonstrates the inability of the legal establishment to deal with the Irrationality in society by pandering to it.
“topdeckomnibus • 9 years ago
FOI ?
I have just applied to issue High Court proceedings against Suffolk Police. At issue is the case of the death of Matron Mary McGill at the HQ Care Home of Sue Ryder and Leonard Cheshire Cavendish Suffolk…. ”
http://sluggerotoole.com/2006/04/30/on_the_importance_of_transparency/
And for the record the Lord was sent a copy of the death certification 1972 for the last child to die at the Beeches. Tara Naiker April 1972. Bury St Edmunds Coroner had found the record (for TDO) but thus the concern was raised that the local Coroner had not gained an overview of the pattern of six years of deaths.
But Thank you so much for your interest and your purported custodianship of public funds.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/misc/kopkow_20040521.shtml
But that the former Pc original HM Coroners Officer in the McGill case refused to co-operate with Sunday press plans to publish.
The reason for that was that the article attributed suspicions to him that were in fact from a post Kopkow press briefing from “Impeccable Intelligence sources”.
The fact is the 1971 release scheme, of German held postwar internees, of 1971 did form the backdrop to suspicions reached independently by Matron McGill in Suffolk and the RCS DetSgt in Wales. But as far as McGill Decd quashing case affidavit is concerned its only use is to suggest that at a new Inquest High Court should sit as HM Coroner in public interest.
(The release scheme was run by Sue Ryder charity trustee Airey Neave and official Sue RYder with Willi Brandt)
The fact that RCS escalated inquiry to look at the suspicion of identity theft via GP death registration fraud may or may not be connected with a possible requirement of former “Internees” requiring UK identities.
The case to quash the 1972 McGill suicide verdict is complete purely within Section 13 Coroners Act 1988.
So I agree the sentiment of the thread. Be wary of the games journos play. And be wary of re-publishing.
I find it rather peculiar as to why Exaro published this story which may jeopardise any investigations and proceedings. If their desire was to prompt an investigation then – assuming the current investigation is indeed actually linked to Exaro’s version because, as yet, we have no proof of that- since they did indeed get their investigation then surely the time to publish would be if nothing came of that investigation and not before.
The Regional Crime Squad Wales encounter with Special Branch, in related inquiry of the time, would also now properly raise a question concerning Jimmy Savile abuse at Sue Ryder Child Hospice Leeds.
Are there more cases with evidence of a Special Branch liaison role ?
Police officers and a child protection officer suspended, moved or threatened when investigating child abuse
1. DCI Clive Driscoll – Removed from Lambeth care homes investigation 1998.
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/paedophile-mp-cover-up-claim-detective-1785273
2. Graham Power, former Chief Police Officer of Jersey, suspended Nov 2008, when investigating decades of institutional Child Abuse in Jersey’s State run Institutions
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/28/jersey-secrecy-culture
http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/interview-with-former-chief-police.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10597972
3. CID officer Jack Tasker, warned off investigating Cyril Smith and told to halt his investigation, papers removed on instruction of Lancashire Chief Constable in 1969/70. His boss, chief Inspector Derek Wheater, blocked from proceeding with the case.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2603848/How-police-forced-let-Cyril-hook-Here-case-chilling-case-Simon-Danczuk-MP-named-Cyril-Smith-abuser-reveals-powerful-friends-saved-exposure-paedophile.html
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2014/07/elm-guest-house/
4. Child protection officer Chris Fay alleges he was pushed up against a wall with a gun to his head and warned to back away from the Elm Guest House investigation.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/437954/Police-gunman-told-me-to-ignore-paedophiles-says-ex-child-protection-officer
Where the Matron McGILL Decd case and the Welsh RCS case differ, from the cases you cite, is that the officers in the cases did not meekly back off. They were constables charged with duties (Just as Driscoll was but he didn’t honour his constable oath and he allowed himself to be backed off until he could mitigate by wailing in press years later)
The Matron McGILL Decd case Pc pretty soon came to grief and resigned police in April 1972. The Welsh RCS sgt continued inquiry and died attracting a suicide verdict. A few months after resigning police in Suffolk the young ex Pc suffered a medical accident and cardiac arrest aged 23 being dead receiving CPR from his ambulanceman dad for 30 minutes.
17 years later and the ex Suffolk Pc was working as a contract electrical engineer in Plessey Torpedos factory Gwent. Security there was an ex Welsh RCS Dc.
The two surviving ex cops met. And thus each became aware of the others 1972 inquiries. Sir John Stradling Thomas Monmouth MP wrote to Attorney General and Police MInister. From the tone of the replies he suspected that both letters had been edited by civil servants before Ministers read them. But before Sir John could raise parliamentary ombudsman inquiry he died.
Labour Huw Edwards won the by election but was too scared to take on the McGILL Decd case. Hence the new prospective tory candidate Roger Evans,a barrister, took it on. And when Roger won the seat at the General Election he was as good as his word and made the first Section 13 Coroners Act 1988 application to Attorney General for access to High Court to quash the 1972 McGILL Decd suicide verdict.
By that time Commander Robert Green, RN Intelligence Retd, had helped by getting a free second opinion on McGILL Decd 1972 autopsy report from Prof Bernard Knight Home Office pathologist. Bernard had helped Robert in his fight for justice for his murdered aunt Hilda Murrell. And Robert was presumably grateful (re Belgrano) to receive reports about technical findings at the torpedo factory.
Prof Knight’s opinion was not earth shaking but it did create a need to ask questions of the original pathologist. When Bury St Edmunds Hospital was phoned
the answer was “We are sorry but Dr Harris died suddenly in retirement last week”
The East Anglian Daily Times decided they would look at the medical accident that the young ex Pc suffered in 1972. “We are sorry but Dr Hutt died suddenly in retirement last week”. The young Pc’s solicitor of 1972 contected and answer “We are winding up the practice after Mr Sarginson’s recent sudden death and there is no record of you ever having been a client”
The surviving ex Welsh RCS man was document targetting burgled 1992.
Tony Burden Chief constable Gwent then gave consent for men to trawl through remaining RCS records but it is not clear who they were. MI5 or a special SY War Crimes unit. I don’t know if they were still active in Gwent when about 94 all Newport Births Marriages Deaths records were stolen.
I think the case distinction is that RCS are clear there was a Special Branch secret monitor orchestrated by MI5 at “Force liaison level”. Whereas your cases are about hierarchy exercising power that a true constable would have fought against.
So although this new witness’s story may seem sensational (and I hope that he is mistaken about the violence he witnessed being actually fatal) there is no reason in my mind to dismiss it. Victims can be very powerless, predators very powerful.
And a girl may undergo pregnancies without them being recorded in her medical records.
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/right-on-time.html
Was Righton and/or an associate involved in Sir Keith Joseph’s decision 1972 to refuse care inquiry into the deaths of children, in Hackney Social Services care, at The Beeches Ixworth ?
We (that is I) know that top members of the Conservative party were members of Spartacus and used Elm Guesthouse because surviving printed copies of the newsletter of CGHE (Conservative group for homosexual Equality (advertised Elm Guesthouse and the advert offered a discount for members of Spartacus. Prof Peter Campbell, founder of CGHE, was on first-name terms with the chaps who ran Spartacus and most of the Monday Club. He appointed Peter Glencross, the manager of Spartacus, to edit the CGHE newsletter until Glencross had to flee England on paedo charges. Glencross was finally gaoled for multiple paedo offences in the 1990s.
There is a mass of documentary evidence all very complicated and corroborating the picture directly or indirectly.
Barbara Hewson tried to dismiss NAPAC just because it has links to a group that investigated Satanic abuse. Well, why not? I quote from a recent book on the subject, “A 1993 survey by the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and Family Law determined that 26% of prosecutors nationwide have handled cases involving ‘ritualistic sexual abuse.’ (Ross, 1994). Their website lists dozens of cases in every state of the USA and abroad during the past thirty years. Many resulted in the deaths of victims, about half of whom are boys. It adds, “Many ritual child abuse cases never are prosecuted due to the disbelief of authorities or the unlikelihood that young, severely traumatized children will be able to withstand cross-examination.”
http://www.care1.org/articles/a13_conviction_list.html
NAYPIC claimed that it had received similar tales from other runaways. It also alleged the existence of a group called “the elite twelve”, which paid thousands of pounds for snuff movies featuring young people: see Jenkins, “Intimate Enemies” (1992) p. 96.
Claims-makers like NAYPIC bought into the scare then current about predatory paedophiles in the 1990s. According to Jenkins at p. 99, “The figure of the pedophile had become one of the most terrifying folk devils imagined in recent British history.”
And what about NAPAC? Until recently, NAPAC had links on its website to the Beacon Foundation, one of the groups which propagated the notion of Satanic cults abusing children in rituals in the early 1990s. NAPAC has a leaflet devoted the topic of “ritual abuse”, which is the sanitised term for Satanic ritual abuse, or SRA. Until recently, NAPAC also had a link to Heal for Life UK, the UK offshoot of Liz Mullinar’s Heal for Life Foundation: Mullinar is a Christian and former casting director, who crusades against child abuse in Australia, after she recovered memories of child abuse, following a meeting with an aura reader, and then having undergone hypnosis. She believes in traumatic amnesia.
As with the Lantern Project which Matthew discusses in his insightful article, these “survivor” groups come across as well-meaning amateurs. They all seem fixated on the trauma model, and the mechanistic idea that everyone is a prisoner of their past. Like 12-step movements, they seem to think that you can never really be free. I doubt that their constant emphasis on damaged lives and lost childhoods is always as helpful as they seem to think. “Survivors” are supposed to move on, and become “thrivers,” but you hear very little about thriving from these groups, which depend for their existence on a steady supply of victims.