Lord Janner: Liberal Democrat councillor Frank Beck and police sirens
Lord Janner: a look at reporting on the allegations of a Westminster peadophile cover-up.
The Daily Mail (page 10): “Janner’s thak you note to detective who was forced to drop case by bosses”
We hear from retired detective Kelvyn Ashby.
The policeman who led the original investigation into Janner in the early 1990s spoke yesterday of how he was ‘gutted’ after orders to drop the case came ‘from the very top’.
That’s 14 or 15 years of being “gutted”.
Retired Detective Inspector Kelvyn Ashby, of Leicestershire Police, said his team uncovered evidence supporting allegations that the then-Leicester MP used his home and a hotel to abuse a teenage boy. He said he and fellow investigator Mick Creedon, now Chief Constable of Derbyshire Police, were prevented from arresting Janner.
So. He did as he was told. But now he will tell all.
‘Someone higher up told us that we couldn’t just arrest an MP and it went no further. We were told that by someone senior, who I can’t name, but the order had to have come from the very top. I’m sure my bosses’ hands were tied,’ he told The Mail on Sunday.
The “revelation” is looking light on facts. Why can’t the man who is gutted at an alleged cover up not reveal names? What prevents him?
‘I was extremely frustrated. Janner should have been arrested. He was treated differently because he was an MP.’
So says the retired copper, who says he cannot name names about other coppers at “the very top”.
Mr Ashby, 65, added: ‘The bit that really got me was that I later got a Christmas card in the post from Greville Janner. The card was an official House of Commons Christmas card and was handwritten. It said something like “I was very pleased with the way you treated me” and invited me and my wife for a dinner at the House of Commons. I couldn’t believe it. My wife was disgusted, as was I. Needless to say we never replied and never went.’
Maybe you should have? Maybe you should have put your detective hat on and gotten to know Janner a little better? Maybe…
The Mail than makes a link:
The decision not to charge Janner in 1991 was taken just weeks after Sir Allan Green quit as Director of Public Prosecutions when he was caught kerb crawling in King’s Cross in London.
In October 1991, the LA Times reported:
The nation’s senior criminal prosector, Allan Green, resigned Thursday after police reported they saw him talking to prostitutes in a notorious red-light district in Central London Wednesday night.
“I bitterly regret what happened,” said Green, 56, the director of public prosecutions who until recently was on the Bar Council’s professional conduct committee and had been knighted earlier this year by Queen Elizabeth II.
Green was widely liked and respected throughout the profession in a difficult job, which he held since 1988. In his post, he was required to decide who would or would not be charged in criminal cases.
Atty. Gen. Patrick Mayhew said of Green: “This is a tragic event. I have deeply admired Sir Allan’s work and I’m deeply grateful for it. I accept his decision with great sadness. In resigning immediately, he has behaved in a most honorable way.”
Tragic? More like stupid. And for what ‘s worth, if consenting adults want to sell their bodeis for sex, and other consenting adults want to hire said body, what law has been broken? The only thing tragic is the State’s claim on tour body.
…The slight, graying, bespectacled official was reported by police for alleged “curb crawling”–the British term for those who cruise an area soliciting prostitutes–shortly before 11 p.m. in a seedy area behind London’s King’s Cross railroad station. “A report will be written and passed on to a senior officer in due course,” said the terse police statement on the matter. “The man was not arrested.”
But police sources said that Green, who earlier had attended a friend’s book-launching party at London’s literary Groucho Club, was seen getting out of his car and approaching prostitutes. Police stopped him and took his name…
Why did he do it?
The plight of Green, who is married and has a son and a daughter, prompted widespread speculation in the British press and television about why he conducted himself as he did, placing himself so precariously in a well-policed haunt of prostitutes. One psychologist, Dr. Brian Thomas-Peter of the Reaside Clinic, said that judges, politicians and other public figures sometimes seek out sex in public places for no other reason than the thrill of their risky behavior.
The link from Green to Janner is gossamer-like.
But the police did make arrests.
In 1991, Frank Beck, the former head of three Leicestershire children’s homes, was given five sentences of life imprisonment after being convicted on 17 charges in Britain’s biggest child sexual abuse scandal.
Frank Beck was a Liberal Democrat councillor on Blaby district council, Leicestershire, between 1983 and 1990.
Frank Beck is dead. His obituary in the Indy told of his capture:
It was a chance remark by a mother that sparked Britain’s biggest investigation into child abuse. The conversation between the woman, accused of ill-treating her son, and a Leicestershire council officer did not take place until 1989, three years after Beck resigned as head of three children’s homes, the Poplars in Market Harborough, the Ratcliffe Road home in Leicester, and the Beeches in Leicester Forest East.
She confided in the official, blaming her own behaviour on the abuse she suffered herself while in Beck’s care at the Ratcliffe Road home in the mid-1970s. She was advised to go to the police and detectives she spoke to noted the names of other children who also claimed they were abused. Senior police officers decided to interview every child who had been in care in homes run by Beck from when he started work at them in 1973…
Two damning independent reports published in February 1993 criticised police and social services in Leicestershire. One report, by West Mercia Police for the Police Complaints Authority, accused officers of ‘incompetence, negligence and prejudice’ in dealing with Beck. It said his activities should have been uncovered earlier and blamed police for tending to disbelieve children who complained because they regarded them as young criminals.
In November 1991, the Indy reported:
After five days’ deliberation, the jury found Beck guilty of 17 charges: rape, buggering five children, two attempted buggeries, six counts of indecent assault and three assaults causing actual bodily harm. A damning confidential report produced for Leicestershire by Barry Newell, a former Nottinghamshire deputy director of social services, has found 12 complaints made against Beck over four years to 1986. The report provided evidence that the council should have acted against Beck and shut the Beeches home, in Leicester Forest East, which he ran.
The report criticises as an error of judgment that Beck, then single, was allowed, despite complaints that he was homosexual, to foster two boys. It describes as extraordinary that when Beck left Leicestershire in 1986, after complaints by two junior colleagues that he sexually molested them, he received a reference from the then director of social services….
Beck, 49, a former Liberal councillor was not sacked but resigned and took up work at a London children’s home. Peter Jaynes, 42, of Chatham, Kent, Beck’s former deputy at the Ratcliffe Road home, Leicester, was jailed for three years after conviction on three assault charges and one of sexual assault against children
Another 1991 story added:
The police also missed the warning signals. Time and again, they returned to the homes children who had told them they had been abused. During the trial both prosecution and defence said that Beck was highly regarded in the social services department and treated locally as an authority on child care.
The police say they received four formal complaints against Beck, but three were uncorroborated and so they brought charges in only one case. In 1983, Beck was cleared of assault causing actual bodily harm to a boy in care at the Beeches in a trial before Mr Justice Jowitt, who also heard the case which ended yesterday. He admitted hitting the boy, but claimed ”lawful chastisement”.
In 1977, an inquest into the suicide of a teenage boy in care at Ratcliffe Road, where Beck and Peter Jaynes worked, heard concern about methods used by social workers. The boy, Simon O’Donnell, 13, hanged himself using a towel in public toilets nearby.
Jaynes left Leicestershire for a job in child care. He worked at Medvale, a 10-bed home for adolescents in Rochester, Kent, where he became officer-in- charge in 1986. He faces disciplinary proceedings. The home was closed last year.
And Janner? On November 30 1991, the Guardian reported:
In a statement released last night, Greville Janner, Labour MP for Leicester West, said he would answer allegations that he participated in sex sessions with an orphan teenage boy in care in parliament next week.
During the trial, Mr Beck claimed Mr Janner had a two year affair with Mr A, now 30, who had later been placed in his care. Mr Winston repeated the claim.
In his statement Mr Janner said: ‘This matter raises issues which go far beyond my own personal position. In my opinion, the appropriate way and place to deal with them is in the House of Commons.’
Lord Janner denied the allegations. He denies any wrongdoing. You can read Lord Janner’s statment here.
And we’ll leave you with this from The Observer, December 1st, 1991:
Christopher Mcguire, now 21, one of the several lost shadows haunting Leicester Crown Court last week, just waiting to see the man who ruined their lives sent to jail, saw his baby son taken away last year after the boy’s mother accused him of molesting the baby and of being ‘bent’. Mcguire has spent a period in prison himself, on an indecency charge.
‘I’ve lost my family, my baby boy, everything,’ he said, ‘My life has been pure and utter hell.’ Frank Beck was convicted of buggering and assaulting Mcguire while the boy was in his teens. Mcguire tried to commit suicide during his stay at the Beeches children’s home in Leicester Forest East..The broken men giving evidence against Beck during the 11-week trial which ended on Friday detailed some of the most sickening offences committed against children. The victims were listened to sympathetically by the court. No one doubted their credibility, even though many had criminal convictions themselves.
The broken men giving evidence against Beck during the 11-week trial which ended on Friday detailed some of the most sickening offences committed against children. The victims were listened to sympathetically by the court. No one doubted their credibility, even though many had criminal convictions themselves.
Yet these witnesses were the same men who, as adolescents, had in vain tried to tell their parents, the police and social workers about what was happening to them. This case, along with the collapse of the Epping satanic abuse trial, highlights the difficulties the authorities have with believing what children say to them.
No. Do not blame the children for the Satanic panic. That debacle was about adults looking for trouble.
Mcguire told his parents and the police that he was being abused by Beck at the time. He even telephoned the then director of social services, Mr Brian Rice, to complain about his treatment at Beck’s hands.
No one believed him. Yet as an adult saying the same things, the jury at the trial convicted his abuser on all three charges and Judge Justice Jowitt sentenced Beck to life. After the trial had ended, Mcguire told The Observer: ‘All my life I have tried to get people to listen to me. The main thing I want to know is why is why no one believed what I said.
‘What I want to say is if kids come up to you and say they have been abused, check it out, please, because kids have no one to turn to.’
Did they listen? No. Did they listen in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford and Blackpool? No.
Beck trial re-posts via Ian Pace.
Posted: 27th, April 2015 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
