Tag Archives: London borough of Richmond

London borough of Richmond and the Met Police deny historic child sex abuse after survivor’s predator gets jailed for six years

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Keith Hinchliffe

Met Police says it was not a crime for council staff to proposition children for sex in 1984

Keith Hinchliffe, the child sex abuse survivor, who got his predator sentenced to six years in jail 40 years after he abused him for three years , is facing an uphill battle with the Met Police and the London borough of Richmond to get compensation or even recognition there was a problem.

The Met Police are describing his allegation that he was propositioned for sex by a member of staff at Grafton Close Children’s home as ” not a crime” and the council have employed lawyers and insurers to say it did not fail in its duty of care to look after him.

Keith’s abuser, Phillip Saunders, had open access to the children’s home where he took him out to sexually abuse him and the member of staff propositioned him when she invited him to her flat in return for saying she would help him leave the home early.

Documents show the Met Police has reviewed the allegations he made in 1984 which resulted in ” no further action” but came to the same conclusion again. The documents show that at first Richmond Council tried to say there was no evidence that he was at the home and then because he was not certain whether her name was Christine or Linda they could not trace anybody.

But the most damning finding was that the Met concluded that no crime existed in the first place.

The report said: “You stated ..that you had been propositioned but that the suspect had not touched you or physically sexually abused you. You stated that it was verbal comments only. I agree that crimes of such nature are fully within the public interest, however, there has to have been a crime committed for that interest to exist.”

Detective Sergeant Alex Woolley of the Met Police Child Sex Abuse Investigations Team, wrote to him saying: ”

“In relation to what happened you at Grafton Close, this report has been closed and classified as a “no crime”.
“Clearly the conduct of the member of staff is entirely unacceptable. However, we have to apply the law as it was at the time that the incidents happened. This happened before the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and so we have to consider what legislation is available to us in the 1980s.”
Keith Hinchliffe was very dissatisfied by the decision and has appealed to the London Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) for a review of the case at the end of October when Saunders was convicted. The office has accepted his complaint but warned him it could take 8 months to get a reply because of a backlog of complaints against the Met.

Richmond’s response has been even more negative. First they questioned whether he had ever been at Grafton and said there were no records showing he was there. Then by pursuing the issue with his local MP and a Freedom of Information request the South London Legal Partnership found a log confirming he had been admitted to Grafton Close and discharged six weeks later. But it said all the social work records at that time had been destroyed. It refused to release any documents on the Fernbridge investigation by the Met into child sexual abuse at Grafton Close home in 2015 which the authority did confirm it had co-operated with the police on the grounds that they were too sensitive because they contained details of third parties involved.

When he persisted in pursuing Richmond over this the council turned the case over to lawyers in Nottingham, Browne Jacobson, an Anglo-Irish firm, who cover business, government and health issues.

The firm in a letter this month set out to demolish Keith’s claims of negligence or breach of duty of care at Grafton Close. It cited case law to exonerate social workers who may be involved in his case and also said he had to meet stringent tests to bring any claim that the staff failed to protect him. One of them included he couldn’t produce documents to show the council’s policies at the time – since the council has destroyed all the records.

You can’t bring a negligence case if there was no duty of care -Richmond Council’s lawyers

The lawyers also said he was out of time to bring a case and they would challenge this in court. They were also sceptical of whether the conviction of Saunders would help. The lawyers wrote to him saying ” a claim in negligence cannot succeed if there is no duty of care in the first place”.

It goes on to say the council have neither admitted or denied the conviction of Mr Saunders but would need a certification of conviction or indictment.

The firm warned him they had agreed to represent Richmond if he brought a case and that he could incur substantial costs and he should take independent legal advice.

Since publication of the first blog I have been contacted by one other resident at Grafton Close suggesting there was a woman member of staff at Grafton Close who did sleep with at least one of the boys there. What Keith is exposing is a cess pit of behaviour which the Met and Richmond Council want to forget.

I don’t think Keith is going to give up on this so I expect there will be further developments. Watch this space.

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Exclusive: Child sex abuse survivor gets his predator jailed 40 years after he committed multiple sex acts against him in London and Buckinghamshire

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Keith Hinchliffe. He contacted me and gave me permission to use his name to encourage other survivors to come forward and get justice in the courts and compensation.

Judge described him as ” an immensely impressive witness, honest, reasonable and composed under pressure”

A child sex abuse survivor has got justice 40 years after he was groomed and sexually assaulted by a paedophile who went on to commit other offences against boys in Holland and a girl in Kent.

Philip Saunders, 67, was sentenced to six years in jail, with the judge saying only a rule that sentences had to reflect the law in the 1980s stopped him from giving him an even longer sentence.

Keith Hinchliffe, now 54, was abused at Saunders home, in his car, in his office at night, at Wembley Stadium and his predator was given open access to Grafton Close children’s home in the London borough of Richmond to take him out to abuse him when he was put in care.. The abuse continued for three years starting when he was 12 until he turned 16. Saunders was 27 at the time.

His case raises questions again about the role of Richmond Council under Liberal Democrat control and the Met Police in the 1980s who took no effective action to stop paedophiles abusing children in the borough. Grafton Close is the same home where a Roman Catholic priest, Tony McSweeney, was jailed for three years for indecent assault after escaping justice for 35 years following a fresh Met Police investigation in 2015. Like Saunders, McSweeney was able to take boys out of the home with the help of John Stingemore, then the deputy manager of the home, who was already a convicted paedophile. Stingemore died before the case got to court. See my blog on this here.

Richmond on Thames Council sign

Keith reported the incidents to the Met police when he was at Grafton Close care home in 1984 and allegations that he had been propositioned for sex as a 15 year old by a woman staff worker at the home. The Met interviewed him and decided to take no further action.

Keith plucked up courage in 2019 to report the abuse again after seeing the BBC investigation into paedophile Jimmy Saville and went to the NSPCC who reported it to Thames Valley Police.

Unlike the Met, Thames Valley Police took his claims seriously and the case went to Reading Crown Court where Saunders tried to deny everything but he was convicted last October and sentenced in December.

The judge, recorder John Ryder, in his sentencing remarks in court, told the whole grisly story. He revealed that Saunders, after abusing Keith, went over to the Hague and sexually abused two boys in his care and was sentenced to two years and six months in jail. In 2005 in Maidstone he was jailed for four years for three indecent acts with a young girl, the daughter of his current wife.

Saunders got access to Keith and his family because he was his sister’s boyfriend for about a year. The judge described how he got Keith to stay overnight at his home in Langley and then asked him to sleep in his bed because he claimed the spare bed was broken. The abuse began overnight and then he was given expensive gifts. This included a microcomputer – rare in 1982 – a Raleigh bike and a Michael Jackson DVD, Thriller. He also exploited the boy’s passion for fast cars taking him to test drives and shows.

” unusually expensive gifts were to groom him for sex abuse”

As the judge said: “giving unusually expensive gifts coveted by an adolescent boy and exploitation of his interests were a means of grooming him to sex abuse.”

He also took pictures of him with an Instamatic camera naked or dressed up at his home, in his car, at work and at Wembley Stadium where he took him to see an American football match.

Keith told the Judge if he didn’t comply Saunders , who is six foot four inches tall, became violent.

The judge says he said: “If I didn’t do things, he would let me know. Arm behind back- pain” .”Rebuffed once and pinned to floor and decanter of scotch all over my face as punishment and made to pleasure him again.”

Other times he was plied with drink, forced to watch pornography and forced to perform oral sex on him.
These events made Keith feel both fear and shame and he started skipping school. The judge summed up his evidence as finding “relationships hard. No friends. Initial abuse hard, aftermath is life changing. Did not finish education. Rebelled. Hated the world and everything around me. Navigated life without education guidance and to relive events in court and answer challenges again and again – had almost broken him.” His changed behaviour led him to be put into care by Richmond council.

He was too ashamed to tell his family and feared his father, an ex merchant navy man, would take it out on him if he knew. He has now told his mother, his present wife and has children of his own and has a job as a furniture maker. But he told the police he now regretted never taking exams at school and getting a good job because of the constant abuse from Saunders.

The judge said:

“I found Keith Hinchliffe an immensely impressive witness, honest, reasonable and composed under
pressure about [a] sensitive and damaging experience. Impressive man.” He described him as an ” insightful and measured in expression”. “Trauma and fear and shame shaped his personality and altered [his] outlook on the world.”

The judge was highly critical of Saunders for trying to deny the whole story and showing no remorse for what he had done.

” You continue to deny any sexual activity at all with him.{You] told PSR author only interested in adult female relationships. That assertion is completely contradicted by the facts in the Holland conviction. I have no doubt on the basis of evidence I heard from KH at trial – he suffered substantial and serious psychological harm as result of your actions. {You] abused a position of trust in relation to him.”

The police interview with Keith revealed he partly came forward because he had seen in the media that perpetrators of historic child sexual abuse were now being caught and jailed.

Despite securing a conviction against Saunders he is now having to fight the Met and Richmond Council to get redress. They won’t admit they did anything wrong in the 1980s or had a duty of care towards him. In the second part of this grisly story I will be revealing their responses to him.

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Can the Independent Child Sex Abuse Inquiry really properly investigate Elm Guest House?

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Elm-Guest-House

The former Elm Guest House in Barnes, south west London, now a respectable residential property

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The news that the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is to investigate events  surrounding Elm Guest House in the London borough of Richmond is to be welcomed. But I have serious doubts whether the inquiry will have the time and space to properly investigate.

The item is one of a number sandwiched into three weeks of hearings under the Westminster  strand of the inquiry and Alexis Jay, the chair made it clear ,last month there is no intention to make any of the investigations exhaustive.

As she said:”It is important that everyone, including the public, understands that this is not, and has never intended to be, an exhaustive examination of  all Westminster-related child sexual abuse issues. Even focusing on institutional issues, a comprehensive
examination of all the allegations that have been made, and all the questions that have been raised, particular on the internet, would involve hearings lasting months, if not years.”

So what will this brief cover. Again  according to her statement it will be limited:

“Another category of these investigations concerns allegations relating to Elm Guest House. Those allegations include possible misconduct on the part of the Metropolitan Police in the way in which investigations into goings on at Elm Guest House were conducted, and also allegations that the fruits of those investigations were covered up.

“The latter allegations include the well-known allegation that evidence relating to Leon Brittan’s presence at and/or involvement with  Elm Guest House was suppressed. We propose to call some more detailed evidence relating to these cases at the hearings next year.”

So even the remit looking at Elm Guest House will be confined.

I got involved in reporting this after a source  who was neither a  child sex abuse survivor nor a politician, stumbled across it during an unrelated dispute. The source had also discovered – and I have never had time  to investigate this – allegations of elder abuse at a home in Richmond. Until then as a journalist I had never investigated any cases of alleged child sexual abuse.

What followed was a whirlwind of allegations, some involving national politicians, others pointing to a lack of duty of  care for children by Richmond Council at Grafton Close children’s home, a muddled police investigation, and a series of  very disturbing stories from people  who were children at the home at the time.

Father Anthony McSweeney

Father Anthony McSweeney; Pic Credit: BBC

It ended with the successful prosecution of  a well connected Roman Catholic priest, Father Tony McSweeney and charges against the former deputy manager of the children’s home., John Stingemore.  McSweeney was sentenced to three years in gaol, Stingemore died a fortnight before he was due to appear before Southwark Crown Court.

Unlike Operation Midland the Met Police  investigation did produce results. In McSweeney’s case it forced the Roman Catholic Church to commission a report into what went wrong when it was revealed that the paedophile priest was caught some 30 years later with a file of indecent pictures on his computer while playing a major pastoral role with young boys and men in Norwich scouts, boxing clubs and with the Norwich City Football youth team.

While the evidence about any connection between Elm Guest House and Grafton Close was never tested in court because of Stingemore’s death the trial did reveal that both McSweeney accompanied  by Stingemore took boys away from the home without permission for weekends at a flat in Bexhill. They were present where various alleged sexual assaults took place. If Stingemore had been convicted, the jury would have found out that soon after leaving Richmond, and working for another authority he was arrested and convicted of child sexual abuse.

All this suggested that Richmond Council was seriously amiss in looking after children in its care and that both elected councillors and officials should have known what was  going on. But it looks that the inquiry would not look at this aspect, allowing the council to be let off the hook.

As serious as this is when Elm Guest House was raided by the police, Grafton Close was designated as a place of safety for any children that might be found there. Effectively the police  unwittingly were sending children to an establishment run by a paedophile with a paedophile friend who regularly visited it.And by alerting Grafton Close in advance if there was a connection with Elm Guest House, the establishment would have got a tip off about the raid.

As for the place itself  it seems like many hotels that welcomed gay guests in late 1970s and early 1980s, tolerated both consenting gay adults staying overnight and possibly paedophiles. The fact is unlike today homosexuality was viewed as a closet activity, driving both adults and paedophiles to the same venues. The situation is reflected in hotels used as gay haunts in North Wales at the same time.

As for VIPs and a police cover up  at Elm Guest House the inquiry will have its work cut out. Perhaps they can throw light on the Metropolitan Police’s reply to Channel Four Dispatches that Sir Cyril Smith visited the venue. As for Leon Brittan, the identification that he is alleged to have visited the venue come not from survivors or any list compiled by anybody but from enraged residents of this posh Barnes road. They say they spotted  both him  and at other times boys getting out of cars late at night and were fed up with this sort of traffic in a respectable neighbourhood.

 

 

Second venue identified in Elm Guest House child sex abuse scandal

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A  child sex abuse victim has identified a second house in the London borough of Richmond where children in care in the borough were taken en route to Elm Guest House.

The property in Avondale Road, Mortlake, has since changed hands but appears to be some sort of holding house for children in care who were taken out for the day.

The Met police have been informed about the existence of the property but it is not clear whether it is part of their  current investigation under Operation Fernbridge.

 A report by my colleague Mark Conrad on the Exaro website interviews  the victim who says that he knows of other children  taken to the property in the 1980s.

Elm Guest House is part of a current investigation but no charges have been brought against anybody for abusing children there. The guest house  was  at the time used by gays including it is claimed by MPs and other important figures. The Met Police have said that one of the visitors was  Sir Cyril Smith, the Liberal Democrat MP, who since his death has been exposed as a paedophile.