In March 1981, Geoffrey Dickens used parliamentary prvilege to name senior diplomat Sir Peter Hayman as a paedophile and member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The case is summarised in a recent article from the Mail, and all the original press reports can be found here.
But there is still a mystery surrounding the trial of two paedophiles in Hayman’s network.
The sequence of events that led to Hayman being named began in 1978 when a packet was found in a London bus containing correspondence – “obscene literature and written material” – between Hayman and a number of other people. As a result of this find, seven men and two women were named by the Metroplitan Police as possible defendants in a report submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions, but he advised against prosecuting any of them.
“Subsequently, the Metropolitan Police submitted a further report which revealed that one of the nine, not Sir Peter Hayman, was carrying on a correspondence with a tenth person. The police investigation showed that the two shared an obsession about the systematic killing by sexual torture of young people and children. In view of the extreme nature of the material they had sent each other, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided to prosecute them for conspiring to convene Section 11 of the Post Office Act”. Source: The Guardian 20.03.81
The trial of the two people took place at St Albans Crown Court in 1979-80. They were both found guilty but walked free with a conditional discharge. The weak sentence in itself is very worrying, but even more worrying is the fact that the trial doesn’t seem to have been reported at the time despite the shocking nature of the case. I have searched the Guardian and the Times archives, along with most tabloids from the time and can’t find any reports. The two reports from 1981 that referred to the trial didn’t name the individuals and didn’t even say whether they were male or female.
Many PIE members were thought to have worked in education, residential care, and other professions that would bring them into contact with children. These people could have walked free and straight into a job working with children, with the public none the wiser as to their conviction.
The Times voiced their concern about the case after Hayman was named in Parliament:
“The wider question for disquiet is what happened to the two individuals mentioned in Sir Michael’s statement who shared an obsession about the systematic killing by sexual torture of young people and children. They were prosecuted at St Albans – and conditionally discharged. Such execution of the law singularly fails to match the sense of public outrage.” Source: The Times 20.03.81
Geoffrey Dickens was still talking about it in August 1983, when he said that “the Attorney General had conceded that within the PIE organisation there were people obsessed by the death of children by sexual torture”. Source The Sun 23.03.83
Who were the two individuals, and why were they never named in the press?