Paedophile innuendo & the Soham murders: Something for the wannabe censors to think about.
When he was Home Secretary,
David Blunkett discovered how disastrous the benefit of the doubt could
be. Had Alistair McAlpine been Home Secretary at the time, what would he
have done?
Ian Huntley…why was his past erased?
What follows is a disturbing tale of how ignoring circumstancial
evidence and doubtful acquittal may have led to the deaths of two little
girls, Holly Marie Wells and Jessica Aimee Chapman. They were murdered
in the village of Soham, Cambridgeshire on 4 August 2002. The girls
passed the home of local school caretaker Ian Kevin Huntley, who called
them into his house and then murdered them. In December 2003 he was
convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment,
with the High Court later setting a minimum term of 40 years.
After Huntley was convicted, it was revealed that he had been
investigated in the past for sexual offences, but had still been allowed
to work at Soham School – as none of these investigations had resulted
in a conviction.
This much many British citizens already know. But what most of them
will not know is how potentially fuzzy and misleading the phrase ‘had
still been allowed to’ actually is. And to learn more about this, we
have to go back to a past involving Huntley…..and a local Labour Party
bigwig on Humberside.
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The key figure in this case is a former social worker and Labour Councillor on Humberside called
Colin Inglis (Above).
When a 29 year old care home social worker in the 1980s, Inglis was
accused of sexually assaulting a teenage boy. It never came to anything,
but then in 1997, Inglis’s physical advances towards a teenage boy in
the Spring Cottage care home were the subject of a further
investigation. No charges were preferred.
Then on 4th December 2005, he was charged on 14 counts of indecent
assault in relation to allegations of child abuse from his social worker
period. And the trial was to say the least controversial – not least
because, by now, Colin Inglis had managed to get himself elected as a
Labour Councillor…having along the way somehow become
the Chairman of Humberside police authority.
Partway through the trial, Inglis was cleared of eight of the charges
on the orders of the judge.
At the end of an epic trial, the jury cleared him of a further charge
in little more than two hours. But it took considerably longer for them
to arrive at a verdict –
a majority verdict – on the
five other charges. He was found Not Guilty. These five charges related
to a man now 37 years old and a financial adviser. But the jury was not
told that the complainant was among
a number of other people who had made allegations against Inglis at the time.
I have no doubt that the merry band on the McAlpinite Committee
investigating Innuendoist Activities would dismiss all this as
scare-mongering smear tactics upon Colin Inglis. And they might have a
case, were it not for two vital facts: first, Inglis had a close
relationship with the top cop involved in the Soham murders, David
Westwood. Second, Huntley had an abuse record as long as your arm that
coincided with Inglis’s time in the same social worker/police authority
where Huntley lived.
In August 1995, when Huntley was 21 years old, a joint investigation
was launched by police and social services in Grimsby, after a
15-year-old girl admitted that she had been having sex with Huntley.
Police did not pursue the case against Huntley in accordance with the
girl’s wishes. But in March 1996, Huntley was once again investigated
over allegations of having sex with an underage girl. Again he was not
charged.
A month later, Huntley was investigated yet again over allegations of
underage sex, but this allegation too did not result in a charge. The
same outcome occurred the following month when he was investigated over
allegations of having sex with a 13-year-old girl.
In April 1998, Huntley was arrested on suspicion of raping a woman.
He admitted having sex with the woman but claimed it was consensual. The
police decided not to charge Huntley.
In July 1998, Huntley was investigated by the police on allegations
that he indecently assaulted an 11-year-old girl in September 1997.
However, he was never charged, though in April 2007 he confessed that he
attacked the girl. He was investigated over allegations of rape on a
17-year-old woman in February 1999, but no charges were made against
him.
Now in law, of course, this means nothing more than suspicion. But
when a third factor emerged later, the case went beyond any suggestion
of mere suspicion: it became a catalogue of at best wilful stupidity by
the authorities.
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The final astonishing episode in this tale occurred when the Home
Secretary during the time of the Soham murders, David Blunkett, received
a full report on the Enquiry about what went wrong in relation to the
school’s seemingly mad decision to employ psychopath Ian Huntley. We are
now in 2004 – nearly two years after the tragic deaths of Holly Wells
and Jessica Chapman. On reading the report documentation, Mr Blunkett
immediately demanded the resignation of a top cop related to the case,
David Westwood. Here’s why: the Enquiry criticised his Humberside Police
force
for deleting information relating to previous allegations against Huntley.
As if this isn’t bad enough – that is, the placement of former
Humberside Police Authority Chairman Colin Inglis firmly in a frame of
potential conspiracy to pervert justice – Mr Inglis and his colleagues
now effectively told the Home Secretary to shove his request for
Westwood’s dismissal. Furious, Blunkett announced that he would take
legal action if Humberside Police Authority didn’t carry out his request
to suspend him. Amazingly, the police authority had the brass neck to
yet again ask David Blunkett ‘to reconsider his decision to order the
suspension of David Westwood’.
Westwood had to go, and did. But this particular aspect of the case
is creepy for one overriding reason: here we have a man with a history
of sex abuse allegations and half-hearted acquittals to his name openly
defying a Home Secretary insisting on the departure of a police
associate whose force had conspired to erase crucial evidence about the
past of a man who, soon afterwards, became one of the most infamous
child-killers in British history.
It is creepy, I would contend, because clearly Colin Inglis
had no fear at all of potential retribution.
In the aftermath of these murky circumstances, it has been the
assumption of many people associated with this case that Huntley’s
girlfriend Maxine Carr was the key to him going unsuspected. Her failure
to expose Huntley’s lies in the early stages of the investigation (and
donation of a false alibi) meant that police initially eliminated
Huntley as a suspect. But as we can see, what’s emerged since –
following more thorough piecing together of the facts over many years –
is that without help of a different kind beforehand, Huntley would never
have been let near Soham school in the first place. And had that
happened, Holly and Jessica would almost certainly still be alive.
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Circumstancial or not, the nature of this case has all the classic
hallmarks of crony assistance in gaining employment, and then cover-up
afterwards. The weakness of the vetting system which allowed Huntley to
get a caretaker’s job at a school – despite four separate complaints
about him reaching social services - was shown up when Humberside
Police (where all the alleged offences had taken place) stated that they
believed that it was unlawful under the Data Protection Act to hold
data regarding allegations which did not lead to a conviction. The
Chairman of the police authority at this time was…..Colin Inglis.
That interpretation was and is total bollocks. It was roundly
contradicted by other police forces who thought it ‘too strict an
interpretation of the Act’. It feels to me, eleven years on, like a
false passport allowing Ian Huntley to go about his ghastly work.
Neither I nor anyone else remote to events is in a position to make
an unqualified accusation here. But some very, very disturbing questions
remain. Not only that, the trail is just warm enough in 2012 – with
enough people still alive – to ascertain the value or otherwise of these
queries..if the Establishment flesh is willing. They are:
1. How did Inglis (with dark grey clouds over him about sex abuse)
gain election to the post of Chairman of the Humberside Police
Authority…or indeed any other position in public life?
2. Did Inglis have any dealings with Huntley during his social worker or CPA terms? If so, what were they?
3. How did Huntley evade capture and incarceration as an obvious
sex-pest during the overlap period between his offences and the CPA rule
of Inglis?
4. Why didn’t David Blunkett – a man familiar with Yorkshire Labour
politics – look more thoroughly into the uniquely negative response of
Inglis to his demand for Westwood’s head?
5. What exactly was the relationship between David Westwood and Colin
Inglis, and why was the latter so desperate for the police constable to
remain in place?
6. How on earth did the Labour Party then allow Colin Inglis to go on
to become Lord Mayor of Hull? (On on 1 May 2008, he topped the poll in
the Myton Ward of Hull to return to the Council, and in 201o he became
Lord Mayor of the City.)
But the most fishy bit of this tale of a Hull infamous for its smell of piscean food processing came in this very year, 2012.
For the ever-rhinoceros-skinned Colin Inglis tried to become one of the newly invented PCCs for Humberside.
However, on March 14th he was dumped from the Labour ticket as a
prospective police and crime commissioner. Incredibly, a ‘source close
to Inglis’ told the local media, “Colin will be bitterly disappointed by
this. It is a snub, and it seems very strange that a man of his
experience within the politics of policing hasn’t been put on the
longlist.”
Perhaps we should look into the strange mentality of the source who
thought rejecting a dubious bloke like Inglis for the PCC job was
strange. Perhaps we should look into why Labour Big Beast John Prescott
(who got the nomination) was then humiliatingly defeated in the ensuing
contest. But most of all, we should definitely look very closely indeed
at why the local Labour mafia flatly refused to comment on why it had
firmly rejected the application of Colin Inglis at the longlist stage.
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We are now at the lessons-drawing conclusions stage of this piece.
I fully agree with Lord McAlpine that baseless accusation and wild
speculation in the media are things to be discouraged. However, where I
differ from the pools-winning Peer is on the question of where informed
hypotheses end and innuendos begin. You see, I have no desire to convict
on the basis of hearsay and gossip…even though the BBC has effectively
been convicted on the basis of threatened rather than actual litigation.
No, what I would like is for those accompanied by very thick
circumstancially paedophiliac clouds to be denied access to care system
and educational institutions. Not sent to prison: just barred from
access to children’s front or back bottoms and little willies.
The problem as I see it is this. As the case history above suggests
very strongly, there is a discouraging silence among the police, local
politicians, social workers and higher authorities when it comes to (a)
discovering the background of applicants for positions allowing child
access and (b) working out why and how – time and again – an odd
alliance between those authorities seems to at best obfuscate or at
worst eradicate WTF happened.
Now, were the information playing-field level, it would be a matter
of simple analysis to establish these facts, and thus the use of
innuendo, smear and pernicious suggestion could be banned from these
islands. But the data pitch is about as level as the north face of the
Eiger. So given the uncertain nature of this data-collection context, it
seems to me a bit of a no-brainer that – for the purposes of judging an
individual’s suitability for employment – billowing clouds of
throat-assaulting smoke should be accepted as evidence of fire.
It is of course vital to retain a scrupulous focus on complete
fairness in serious legal cases: ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is a
fundamental tenet of any enlightened judicial system. But what those who
so blindly support a blanket ban on all informed speculation forget is
that, in many ways, sexual abuse of a child is almost the perfect crime
when it comes to evading justice.
There are rarely any witnesses. The victims are often seen as
fanciful…a perception hardened by spread of the pernicious psychiatric
theory of ‘false memory syndrome’. It is an adult’s word against an
immature child’s. Inventing a case for childish vengeance is not that
dificult. As we saw in the case of Huntley, the police are wary of it as
an area of crime. The kids themselves are traumatised and convinced
they’ve been punished: in many cases, they have no grounds for judging
the degree of abnormality involved, but they do in turn have a natural
desire not to tell parents if they feel they have been bad in some way.
And of course last but not least, the defendant’s previous behaviour record is inadmissable as evidence.
Many McAlpinites would still regard the speculation as unsafe. But I
can guarantee to all of them that not a single sane parent in Britain
would object to overwhelming doubts being applied negatively to access
vetting.
In short, as the law is often a complete ambulance-chasing ass, it is vitally important for procedures
outside
the Courts to err on the highly conservative side of decision-making in
this regard. Particularly given the alleged proclivities of some
Conservatives. And without wishing to labour the point vis-a-vis
balance, especially give the quirky sexual desires of some Labour local
politicians.
As I have said from Day One of this utterly gross episode in British
socio-political history, Jimmy Savile got away with being a serially
destructive pervert because far too many people either looked the other
way, or gave him the benefit of the doubt. I have never tried to suggest
that Lord McAlpine having a sexually deranged second-cousin is in any
way a guide to Alistair’s own carnal preferences. But I would
respectfully suggest that one man’s reputation versus the deaths of two
young children is something of a no-brainer.
Hat Tip to John ward @
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/11/19/paedophile-innuendo-the-soham-murders-something-for-the-wannabe-censors-to-think-about/
