Inside the Shoebury 'sex ring' investigation

A little over a month ago, Essex Police made an announcement which prompted a news firestorm. Chief Constable Stephen Kavanagh and Police Commissioner Nick Alston issued a joint statement announcing a formal review of the force's investigations into alleged child abuse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The review was launched after three whistleblowers met with senior police officers and detailed a catalogue of alleged failures by Essex Police and other local bodies.

The story immediately went national, picked up by outlets including the MailOnline, ITV and BBC, which also ran a 12-minute news package on its Essex radio station. But, as the BBC acknowledged, the review had been prompted by a year-long investigation by another media outlet - regional newspaper the Yellow Advertiser. The paper's work made headlines in the trade press, covered by HoldTheFrontPage and Press Gazette, which later ran a second piece on the 'mighty' Yellow Advertiser's 'dogged investigative journalism'. Mr Alston thanked the Yellow Advertiser for its key role in prompting the review. I was the reporter behind that Yellow Advertiser investigation and am continuing to run it weeks after the wider media seems to have forgotten about the whole affair.

In late 2014, I was browsing Essex Council's Freedom of Information webpage, where it publishes information in response to requests from the press and public. The database of recent releases is often overwhelmed by residents demanding details of pothole repairs and the council's part-night lighting scheme, but occasionally you stumble across a gem, such as that the council spent £30,000 trying to recover £50,000 in expenses which turned out to have been legitimately claimed, or that a child was paid £15,000 compensation after a school worker threw a DVD at their head, or that teachers who had sexual abuse complaints upheld against them were never reported to police.

In late 2014 I opened up what looked to be a fairly mundane spreadsheet - a member of the public had requested the release of some data from County Hall's accounts. What I found set in motion a chain of events which culminated in last month's announcement by Essex Police.

Sifting through a list of 600 compensation pay-outs, I came across one made for 'alleged abuse'. Then another one. Then another one. In total, I found 10 pay-outs in 2014 alone for abuse alleged to have occurred on Essex Council's watch in the 1970s and 1990s, nine of them relating to children's social care departments.

I immediately compiled a list of questions for Essex Council to answer in relation to each of the 10 cases. For each one, I requested details such as the gender of the complainant, their age at the time, whether they were in care, when the abuse had first been reported to County Hall, whether County Hall had alerted police, whether anybody had been charged and whether anybody had been convicted. The council's press office refused to answer the questions and forced me to submit them as a Freedom of Information request. On Christmas Eve 2014, I received an email from Essex Council's Freedom of Information department, saying it had refused to answer any of the questions because doing so could identify the victims - a plainly meritless claim.

To check I was on solid ground, I ran the dispute by child abuse charity NAPAC - the National Association for People Abused in Childhood - whose chief aim is to protect and embolden child abuse victims. Its founder Peter Saunders confirmed that as far as NAPAC was concerned, the information the Yellow Advertiser was asking for clearly did not present any threat to the anonymity of the complainants and, he continued, Essex Council's behaviour was 'tantamount to a cover-up'. NAPAC and the Taxpayers' Alliance joined our campaign to uncover the details, which we ran as our first news front of 2015.

That week, I spotted that since I had started asking questions about the 'alleged abuse' pay-outs in late 2014, a member of the public had filed a Freedom of Information request for some Essex Council accounts data which would have included those same 10 compensation claims. Wondering whether the council's response to that resident might contain further details, I downloaded the spreadsheet. I discovered it actually contained fewer details; there was no longer any mention of 'alleged abuse' anywhere in the compensation listings.

By matching up the figures, I could see the 'alleged abuse' pay-outs had been reclassified in the fresh release as 'personal injury' settlements, making them indistinguishable from people who had received money for cut fingers or back injuries. That became a second front page story.

Following our second report mentioning 'alleged abuse' at County Hall, a man walked into the Yellow Advertiser's office and asked to see me. His name was Robin Jamieson. Robin was a retired NHS manager - the former district psychologist for Southend - and he had some information on historic abuse in Essex that he thought I might be interested in.

Robin's information was of enormous public interest value but without corroboration there was little we could do with it. Essex Council's lack of transparency thus far made it highly unlikely, in my opinion, that it would cooperate unless circumstances dictated it had little choice.

We had to wait almost six months but in June those circumstances arose. Robin was invited to a 'whistleblowers event' in a committee room at the Houses of Parliament, organised by child abuse pressure group the WhiteFlowers Campaign. At the event, in front of an audience of MPs, barristers and campaigners, he gave a speech detailing a raft of alleged failures by police and Social Services to properly tackle child abuse in Essex in the 1980s and 1990s.

We sent a copy of Robin's speech to Essex Council's press office and alerted the authority that we would be running a story about it the following week. In actuality, this would have been near impossible without the qualified privilege that a response from County Hall would provide; if they had replied 'no comment', the story would have been effectively scuppered.

But our gamble paid off. The press office responded with a lengthy statement which admitted knowledge of 'some historical child abuse concerns in relation to individual members of staff employed by Essex County Council in the 1980s and early 1990s'. The revelation resulted in another front page story.

We forwarded the council's statement to Essex Police Commissioner Nick Alston and asked him whether he would ask officers to investigate. Describing the allegations as 'disturbing', he promised any alleged victims who contacted his force would be taken seriously. That became a further front page.

After securing this promise, the we continued working on the story behind the scenes. Acting as a go-between, we assisted in the early stages of arranging a meeting between Nick Alston and Robin Jamieson, then remained in touch with both parties as they began communicating directly. Mr Alston was so impressed by Robin's 'eminent credibility' at their meeting that he arranged a second, with the Chief Constable and a senior child abuse officer present. Two new whistleblowers, who had contacted Robin after the summer stories, were also invited. That meeting happened in early 2016, following which, a decision was made to launch a review.

By maintaining communication with Robin, Mr Alston's office and one of the two new whistleblowers - Rob West, a former charity worker turned probation officer - we learned that the focal point of the review would be an investigation into an alleged 'sex ring' which had targeted 'adolescent boys' in Shoebury in the late 1980s. Police had arrested two men - Dennis King and Brian Tanner - in 1989 and each had pleaded guilty and served jail time for child sex offences in 1990.

At their meeting in early 2016, Robin, Rob and the third whistleblower - former child abuse charity worker Jenny Grinstead - had told Mr Alston and Chief Constable Kavanagh that a number of boys who were known victims of King and Tanner had reported abuse by far more men.

Moreover, police had failed to interview a number of other boys who disclosed abuse by the ring to local charities, and even those who were interviewed had mostly not received any of the appropriate aftercare, such as counselling.

A number of the boys, with whom Rob had stayed in touch into their adulthoods, had since died of suicides and drug overdoses, while others were in prison or homeless. Many of the three whistleblowers' claims were supported by contemporaneous paperwork, including a report penned in 1990, which stated the 'active paedophile sex ring' may have had as many as 80 victims.

It took police several weeks to make arrangements with abuse helplines to field calls from anybody who came forward after the review was announced. With the helplines confirmed, the morning of March 8 was earmarked for the announcement. On March 7, deputy editor Steve Neale and I conducted an hour-long interview with Mr Alston. At just past midnight on March 8, we broke the story online. That week, we ran it across pages one, three, four and five of the paper.

The initial wider media interest has since dissipated but we continue to run weekly updates and revelations, including details of the 1990 report into the 'sex ring' and the original convictions, the emergence of a fourth whistleblower, tracked down by the Yellow Advertiser, and the fact that evidence and court records from the original prosecutions appear to be missing. We have plenty more ready to go and, with Essex Police's and our own investigations ongoing, this is a story which will run and run.

As for why we continue to pursue this issue when the wider interest has apparently fizzled out, this quote from Nick Alston probably sums it up quite well. During our March 7 interview, he told us: "Many of [the alleged victims] have gone on to have very troubled lives, and that, for me, is one of the great sadnesses in all of this - if there was a missed opportunity to provide safeguarding which might have helped. So there is an opportunity here to see whether any of those people are perhaps prepared to engage again, if not with police then a professional agency, to see whether there's anything, even at this stage, which can be done to help them."

Anybody with information can dial 101 and ask for the Essex Police Child Abuse Investigation Team.

Alternatively, call one of these specialist helplines:

NAPAC - 0808 801 0331.

SERICC (south and west Essex) - 01375 380609.

CARA (mid and north Essex) - 01206 769795.

SoSRC (Southend) - 01702 667590.

National Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse - 0808 800 5000.

Harvey Proctor

Earlier this week I was sent to London to report on a mysterious press conference, announced by former MP Harvey Proctor. We knew he intended to comment on Operation Midland, a historic child abuse probe under which his home was searched in March this year, but did not know the substance of what he would say.

People sometimes say that being a journalist gives you a front row seat as history unfolds; in this case, it was true. I bagged a front row seat and what I witnessed could very well go down in history, although in what context remains to be seen.

Mr Proctor delivered a 40-minute speech in which he lambasted 'inept' police officers and described, in graphic detail, what he said were 'ludicrous' allegations against him, made by single, 'uncorroborated', anonymous accuser. He told the packed Marlborough Suite at St Ermine's Hotel, Westminster, that he stood accused of torturing and murdering children as part of a paedophile 'gang' that included former Prime Minister Ted Heath, at sex parties attended by Jimmy Savile. What he revealed would be shocking and disturbing both if it were true and if it were false.

I have published an eight-part special report, exploring different themes which arose during the press conference. Below are some of my exclusive pictures from the event, plus links to each part of the report.

 Part 1: The Press Conference

Part 2: The Alleged 'VIP Paedophile Gang'

Part 3: The Alleged Murders

Part 4: The Alleged Castration Attempt

Part 5: The 'Evidence'

Part 6: Proctor Slams Police 'Press Leaks'

Part 7: Proctor Calls for Top Cop Resignations

Part 8: Cops Dragging Heels Over Fear of 'Cover-Up' Claims, Says Proctor

'Weekly Print Journalist of the Year'

I am very proud and honoured to report that today I was named 'Weekly Print Journalist of the Year' at the Regional Media Awards.

As I reported a few weeks ago, I was nominated for a portfolio of work which included a long-running road safety campaign after the death of a 23-year-old man, and two one-off investigative articles.

The first investigative piece revealed that hundreds of teachers accused of sexual abuse had never been reported to police by the education authority, despite dozens of them having the complaints upheld and receiving professional sanctions. I obtained the data by taking legal action against the Government.

The second told how a Government Jobcentre had unwittingly signed up an escaped life sentence prisoner, fleeing a jail term imposed for a brutal attack with an iron bar, and sent him to work for a local company. Despite using a known alias, his identity was only discovered when he threatened to murder his new boss over a pay dispute, at which his boss Googled his name and discovered him on a Crimestoppers 'Most Wanted' list. Jobcentre staff then refused to give police the dangerous criminal's address, claiming it was 'personal information'.

I was surprised and humbled to win, and must thank my editor Mick Ferris and my mentor and news editor Steve Neale, as well as the whole team at the Yellow Advertiser and all those who have supported me in my career to date.

Awards Nominations

A short note to say I am extremely flattered and grateful to have been nominated for two Regional Media Awards.

I have been nominated for 'Print Journalist of the Year' on a weekly newspaper, and a road safety campaign I ran following the death of a young musician has been shortlisted for 'Community Campaign of the Year'.

Among the articles for which my 'Print Journalist' nomination was awarded were two investigative pieces and one campaigning piece about the above road death.

The first investigative piece was the revelation that hundreds of teachers accused of sexual abuse had never been reported to police by the education authority, despite dozens of them having the complaints upheld and receiving professional sanctions.

The second told how a Government Jobcentre had unwittingly signed up an escaped con, fleeing a life sentence for a brutal attack with an iron bar, and sent him to work for a local company. Despite using a known alias, his identity was only discovered when he threatened to murder his new boss over a pay dispute, at which his boss Googled his name and discovered him on a Crimestoppers 'Most Wanted' list. Jobcentre staff then refused to give police the dangerous criminal's address, claiming it was 'personal information'.

I will find out whether I have won at a ceremony in late February, although just to be nominated is very rewarding, as the shortlist is selected by a panel of experienced journalists.

The Mirror, the People, and the settlement that never was...

It's a funny thing. Ever since the high-profile Michael Jackson death trial started going pear-shaped for promoter AEG Live, a lot of newspapers which carry prominent and lucrative advertising for its events have become more intent on smearing Michael Jackson than ever.

Leading the way has been The Mirror in the UK. A few weeks ago, contemporaneous emails presented at trial showed that AEG boss Randy Phillips had 'slapped' Michael Jackson because he was scared about attending a press conference. Slapped him and screamed at him 'so loud the walls shook'.

The shocking revelation was widely ignored by the press. Several days after the evidence was heard in open court, only one outlet had summoned the courage to publish it. AP did not include the testimony in its daily missive from the courtroom. The wire's reporter claimed on twitter he had been out of the courtroom sending emails when the testimony occurred.

It was only when fans started making noise about the 'cover-up' on sites like Twitter that other media companies grudgingly published the comments. AEG-sponsored newspapers like the Mirror, though, bizarrely tried to paint Michael Jackson as the bad guy. According to the first line of the Mirror's story, Jackson 'needed to be slapped'. Interestingly, the Mirror was a lot faster to publish a story last year accusing Janet Jackson of slapping a minor. A story which turned out to be a lie.

This weekend - days after Jackson's son took the stand and testified that he saw Phillips in his home while his father was not there, behaving 'aggressively' towards Jackson's doctor - the Mirror's Sunday edition, called the People, is at it again. It has published a highly misleading story about some 'FBI files' which allegedly show Michael Jackson was witnessed molesting children by multiple Neverland employees. The 'FBI files' also detail a supposed settlement with a young accuser in 1992 - before the Jordy Chandler case.

In reality, the story is a nonsense; a birds nest of mangled and misstated accusations which are neither 'new' nor 'exclusive', despite the People's repeated claims that they are. In fact, the documents are not 'FBI files' at all. This is a flat-out lie. Moreover, the claims have all been in the public domain for a very long time, some having been discredited two decades ago.

Of course, most readers won't bother to fact-check the story. Why would they? The newspaper is supposed to do that before publishing it. Sadly, it seems other media outlets can't be bothered either. Britain's Mail newspaper has already rehashed the story, evidently making no attempt to investigate its veracity before doing so.

I could go into a whole lot of detail about the claims made by the People - and the various lazy journalists who will copy and paste its story hundreds, or perhaps thousands of times onto their own websites and into their own newspapers in the coming days. But what is the point? The info is already in the public domain.

Those who hate Jackson will adopt the People's story as evidence for their case. Those with an interest in hearing both sides of Jackson's case will already know that these claims were debunked a long time ago. Nobody else will even bother to research the story. The People's readers buy the newspaper because they like and trust it. They, as intended, will believe this story and will not question it.

Briefly, however, for the record:

1) The 'FBI files' are not FBI files. They are transcripts of interviews compiled by a tabloid journalist who paid his sources - including one who, it seems, might not have actually existed.They were acquired by a PI who worked for Jackson's defence team. A decade later, he was prosecuted for tapping phones. The FBI seized all of his files, of which these tabloid interviews formed a miniscule part. The documents are therefore in the possession of the FBI - but they are not FBI files. If I order a Pizza Hut margherita to my home, that doesn't make it a 'Charles Thomson pizza'.

2) The allegations of Jackson being caught by multiple employees do not, as the People infers, come from a host of different documents. They all come from one document - a transcript of an interview with a couple called the LeMarques, who worked at Neverland in the late 80s and early 90s. The People intentionally does not state that all of these uncorroborated accusations come from just one of the documents, instead purposely misleading readers and suggesting that they're taken from a cache of evidence.

The LeMarques never contacted police about the abuse they claimed to have witnessed, instead opting to negotiate deals with tabloid newspapers - including the Mirror. Their claims were investigated by cops probing Jackson, who found the couple had agreed to add increasingly graphic details to their interviews for more and more money. Investigators concluded in the 90s that the pair had no credibility and possessed no evidence of any genuine abuse. They were called on out of desperation to testify in Jackson's 2005 trial after prosecutors watched their case begin to disintegrate, but were destroyed under cross-examination. Jurors rejected their testimony and acquitted Jackson, unanimously.

3) The supposed 'settlement' in 1992 was detailed to a tabloid reporter, for money, by a serial tipster called Taylea Shea. She never showed the reporter a document - she simply 'read it out' over the phone. A police investigation into the claim found that the boy named in the settlement did not exist, there was no record of any settlement ever being paid, and Taylea Shea disappeared into thin air. It became apparent she had used several aliases and nobody knew who she really was. She was never heard of again.

This leaves one element of the People's story standing; that Jackson 'allegedly' - what a convenient little word that is - paid $35million to two-dozen young accusers. The newspaper presents no evidence to corroborate this claim. Just a note in the tabloid reporter's documents, which the People intentionally misrepresents as an 'FBI file'.

Contrary to the People's claim, investigators knew about and investigated these files as part of their probe into Jackson in 2003/4, in which they were assisted by the FBI. Despite all of their resources, neither the Californian police nor the FBI was ever able to locate any evidence that any child besides Jordan Chandler or Jason Francia ever received a settlement.

Award Nomination

A happy topic for my first blog of 2013.

I received a text message from my editor this afternoon - I was crossing the River Thames from Gravesend to Tilbury on a dilapidated ferry at the time (long story) - to tell me I had been nominated in the Best Newcomer category at the EDF regional press awards. Although I have worked as a freelance reporter since 2008, I only began full time work on a regional newspaper in late 2011.

I've been nominated for a trio of stories. The first was a gonzo account of my thwarted attempt to interview controversial former TV presenter Michael Barrymore. Barrymore, for those who don't know, was the king of British primetime TV in the 1990s but his career was left in tatters when a dead man was found floating in his swimming pool after a drug-fuelled party. DNA cleared Barrymore of any involvement in the man's death but the scandal was sufficient to ruin him.

I arrived at a secret location, where Barrymore was recording a guest show for a local radio station, under the impression that he had agreed to an interview. He denied ever agreeing to any such thing and seemed quite perturbed by my arrival, but allowed me to stay on the condition that I sat quietly and didn't ask him any questions. That didn't last long.

About a third of the way into the recording he began interrogating me on-air. "I'm interviewing a journalist!" he declared. His refusal to give me an interview became a running joke throughout the broadcast and his antics were perfect fodder for a first-person feature. The icing on the cake was that after our radio chatter he did give me a few exclusive nuggets for the newspaper after all.

The second piece I've been nominated for was a court story about a local man who had been caught in possession of more than 100,000 images of child sex abuse. Several hundred were considered to depict the most shocking and sadistic level of abuse. There were videos too.

Sadly, that is not a particularly uncommon story. What made this scenario unusual was that I arrived at the courthouse to discover that a magistrates court had slapped a bizarre reporting restriction on the case in a previous hearing. They had banned any publication of the man's address because he did not live alone and they said his family could suffer from vigilantism.

UK libel laws dictated that preventing the publication of the man's address amounted to a blanket ban on all reporting of the case. In a large town it is highly likely that somebody will have at least one namesake. There will be lots of John Smiths, for example. If I put in the paper that John Smith has been convicted of possessing child porn - but don't include his address - every other John Smith in town can sue me and my newspaper for defamation by claiming the report caused their neighbours to think they were the convicted pervert.

In my view, the reporting restriction was a nonsense. Firstly, making court orders to prevent vigilantism is like putting signs up in car parks reminding people that it is illegal to steal cars. People don't need to be reminded that it is wrong. Everybody knows that it is wrong. It is already regulated by existing laws.

But more importantly, I was alarmed by the potential precedent of a ruling which said that because a child porn collector did not live on his own, he should not be held publicly accountable for his crimes. What of future cases? Could all paedophiles ensure their anonymity by simply moving in with somebody?

I raised the issue with the court clerk, who in turn agreed to pass my concerns to the judge. However, the clerk forgot and the hearing concluded. Just as the judge was about to rise, I stood and addressed him. He sat back down.

The defence barrister and I swapped legal arguments and the judge deliberated. He sided with me, concluding that the restriction set a disturbing precedent. He ordered that it be lifted so I could publish details of the man's crimes. It turned out I was the first reporter at our newspaper to ever overturn a reporting restriction completely off the cuff - reporters are usually aware of them and able to plan their arguments for days before the hearing.

Three months later I stumbled across the story that would lead to my third nominated article - again at the local courthouse and again involving child abuse.  I knew that a man called Barry Snow was due in court over alleged child abuse. I didn't know that the circumstances of his offending would lead the presiding judge to publicly criticise the Jehovah's Witness church over its handling of child sex abuse cases.

Snow had repeatedly molested a girl under the age of 10 in the late 1970s, when he was in his late teens. His crimes were reported to the Jehovah's Witness church, where he was a dedicated member. Instead of reporting the abuse to police, church elders handled the matter internally. Snow went on to molest several more children.

At first I assumed that the church elders had committed a criminal offence by failing to report the abuse to police. But after a little digging I discovered that this was not the case. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, in the UK there is no statutory obligation for anybody - even a school - to report suspected child abuse. If you sign your child up to a scouts group or a football team or a nursery and they suffer abuse while they are there, they have no statutory right to have that abuse reported to the authorities.

The result was a news feature which used the Barry Snow case as a springboard to explore the ongoing but little-known campaign in the UK to introduce laws requiring schools and other children's organisations to report suspected child abuse to police. Just a few weeks after it was published, the Jimmy Savile scandal erupted and sent shockwaves around the country, bringing this very subject to the forefront of popular debate.

I haven't yet heard where or when the ceremony will be held. I have no idea what articles any of the other nominees have been shortlisted for and I certainly won't go in the expectation of winning. I didn't even think I'd be nominated. But it is an honour that I have been, and I am most grateful.

How I Stumbled Upon A Religious Sex Abuse Scandal

Last Wednesday afternoon I headed to court, as I often do, to sit in on an afternoon sentencing hearing. I had checked the court listings that morning - which I do every day - and spotted a name which had been on the lists a lot in recent months. Barry Snow. I had some vague awareness that it was a sex abuse case but couldn't remember the details, so I rang the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) press office for the charges.

Nine counts of indecent assault, I was told. 'On children?' I asked. The press officer said they didn't think they were supposed to say either way. That was a nonsense, of course - all charges are public information - but the press officer's reticence told me everything I needed to know.

It was lucky that I headed to court that day, because the prosecution of Barry Snow highlighted an appalling oversight in the British legal system - and I was the only journalist in court to hear about it.

In the late 1970s, Barry Snow - a member of the Jehovah's Witness church - repeatedly molested a girl under the age of 10. When the girl's parents, who had connections to the religion, discovered the abuse, they reported Snow to the church as Jehovah's Witnesses are often encouraged to do. When the church confronted Barry Snow, he confessed everything.

The church, now aware that multiple crimes had been committed against a child, did not report these crimes to the police. Instead, the church dealt with Barry Snow internally. It gave him counseling and imposed 'sanctions' on him - although nobody remembers what they were. The sanctions didn't work. Roughly three years later, Barry Snow repeatedly molested another girl. His abuse this time around was more invasive than in the previous case. He had escalated.

Snow's crimes only came to police attention in recent years when his two victims found out about each other's abuse through mutual acquaintances and decided to report him. As a result of Snow's prosecution, his first victim's report to the church in the late 1970s was made public. Summing up before he sentenced Barry Snow, Judge Jonathan Black criticised the church's handling of the allegations. I wondered whether anybody would be prosecuted over their failure to report the abuse at the time.

This led me to a shocking discovery. Under UK law, there is no legal obligation for any organisation - be it a school, a church or a football club - to report child abuse to police. If a teacher witnesses your child being molested by another teacher and fails to report the discovery, they may be sacked but they cannot be prosecuted. Or, as child abuse campaigner Tom Perry put it to me, when your child attends any sort of school, club or church and a staff member sees them being abused, your child has no statutory right to have that abuse reported to anybody.

Campaigners, charities and lawyers are fighting to introduce a law which criminalises the willful withholding of information about child abuse, but some told me that the government simply refuses to listen to them - perhaps too embarrassed to acknowledge that the law has not existed for all these years. Most people assume - as I assumed - that such a law would exist. It seems like a no-brainer.

My reports on Barry Snow and how Britain's legal system is failing child sex abuse victims have sparked some debate. Articles on our website very rarely generate comments, with most contributors favouring our Letters Page, but these stories have attracted international attention. Here they are as they appeared in the newspaper, splashed across the front page and continued inside.

To join the debate, visit the online versions here and here.