In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  His rebuttals continued in a similar vein, although he occasionally came up with new ways to deflect the accusations. ‘A girl said to me last year, “You take chances – newspapers would love to know about this”,’6 he told one reporter about a tryst in his van. ‘I told [the girl] I’d be considered the luckiest bloke in the world to pull a darling bird like her, but she’d be the one explaining what she was doing with an old geezer. She said, “No wonder no one’s written about you. You clever bastard!”’ It was stock Savile: flirting with the truth enough to make his story sound plausible and yet still managing to turn it into a testament to his enduring potency and brilliance.

  When asked what type of girl he went for, he replied: ‘It could be a gymnast or a girl of 18 or 19 I run with who’s got a terrific working body, and if it’s got nice running shorts on, that’s even more tasty.’ He was approaching his 75th birthday by this time, and still referring to a woman as ‘it’.

  In old age, Savile came across as an increasingly paranoid figure; one who appeared to be acutely aware of the prospects of his world crashing down around him. When it came to discussing one of his favourite subjects – money – he highlighted the financial provisions he had made for such an eventuality: savings in the form of income-paying policies rather than cash. Less cash meant less chance of being extorted,7 and as we shall see, the threat of blackmail was a very real one in his twilight years, particularly as those he had abused as children grew up and confronted what he had done to them.

  As the clouds gathered ahead of the catastrophic weather system that would sweep away everything he had built, the denials continued to pour out of his mouth. ‘I couldn’t tolerate the idea of being thought a paedophile, because it is sickening to me,’ he said on one occasion. ‘But as a single fella you can be anything to anyone, so they could stick you with it. If they haven’t written about it, it’s because I’m patently not one … If I saw a little kid looking at a lovely big boat in a toy shop window, once I might have gone in and bought it for him, but I’d never do that now. If I saw a friend’s child in a terrible storm, I would drive past rather than give them a lift. And if I was seen too much in schools, for example, it might be a bit strange, and they’d be right to tag you.’8

  His protestations were now beginning to start from a position of guilt and work backwards towards an alibi; he said he didn’t have a computer in any of his homes because he might be suspected of downloading pornography. ‘I prefer to stamp out the smouldering before the flames start,’ he said. In other interviews, he again trotted out the line about how boring he was: ‘I don’t do drugs, booze or underage sex … People get the wrong idea because people have had the wrong idea forever.’

  He was so well acquainted with the accusations that he was issuing his denials before they had even been made. He was also making threats, as a reporter on the Bucks Free Herald newspaper found out in 2000 on being summoned to Savile’s office at Stoke Mandeville following the death of a local man who was known to the hospital’s most famous volunteer. Savile had heard the man had died after being mugged in the street, and was raging when the journalist arrived.9

  ‘I want you to tell me what happened with [name of the dead man]. If you hear that someone has done this then I want you to tell me who straight away. I want to know names and I can have them waking up in hospital with every bone in their body broken. All I have to do is call my friends in the IRA. They’ll have someone waking up in hospital the next morning eating their breakfast through a f***ing straw.

  ‘I know the IRA, men from the IRA, and you don’t need to ask these guys twice,’ he spat. ‘I’m serious. Don’t f***ing think I’m not serious. I can get them done – just with a phone call. That’s all it takes, young man. If someone has done this to [man’s name] that makes them my enemy. And you don’t want to be my enemy.’

  As his fame and currency diminished, Jimmy Savile gradually retreated into a lonely netherworld of conjecture and ridicule; a fading figure with no place in, nor love for, the modern world and onto which a nation could project its mockery and fears. In July 2004, the Radio Times voted him ‘Britain’s Greatest TV Oddball’. Also on the list was Stuart Hall.

  A year later, Savile was offered a now rare payday, this time as ‘the face’ of Velcro. He was a curious choice as brand ambassador given nothing had ever stuck to him. In January 2006, he picked up a six-figure cheque for making a cameo appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, emerging as a surprise fairy godfather to housemates that included Jodie Marsh, Pete Burns, Chantelle Houghton, George Galloway and Michael Barrymore.

  ‘When he went into the Big Brother house it was striking to see him in a context where he was around people who were bigger or more famous than he was,’ said Louis Theroux. ‘In an odd way, he was actually quite shy. Because he was a control freak you could see that sometimes he was a bit vulnerable and at sea in situations where there were more important people around than him.’

  After his brief stint in the house, Savile came out publicly in support of Barrymore, the comedian whose career had nosedived after a partygoer had been discovered dead in his swimming pool. ‘He’s a lad who is OK, a very pleasant guy,’ Savile said. ‘But he got into choppy water and that can destroy people’s confidence. He’s on tenterhooks as he doesn’t know if anyone’s going to have a go at him.’10 He knew how Barrymore felt. Unlike the hapless comedian and game show host, though, Jimmy Savile had refused to stay even one night in the Big Brother house. Why? His mortal fear of being ‘banged up’.

  In June 2006, it was announced that Top of the Pops was to be axed. As host of the very first show in 1964, Jimmy Savile was invited back to co-present the last. In breaks between filming, the report on Operation Yewtree stated, he sexually assaulted a member of the studio audience, a teenage girl. It was the last allegation recorded against him.

  He was fast approaching his 80th birthday, a milestone that was marked by Prince Charles with a gift of a box of Cuban cigars and a pair of Asprey cufflinks bearing his fleur-de-lys crest. On the card, the heir to the throne wrote, ‘Nobody will ever know what you have done for this country Jimmy. This is to go some way in thanking you for that.’11

  60. OPERATION ORNAMENT

  Celebrity Big Brother turned out to be a bad move for Jimmy Savile. His appearances over two days and the resulting coverage in the newspapers were enough to provoke one woman in her early forties to act on the memories of her time at Duncroft Approved School in the late 1970s. They were memories she had been turning over in her head for some time.

  ‘It’s really sad that someone can work all their life for charity and everyone’s like, “He’s such a wonderful person”, and there’s silly old [me] sitting at home and she knows he’s not a wonderful person,’1 she said of her decision to pick up the phone and contact Childline. ‘He does paedo stuff under the guise of charity, it’s almost like he’s above the law, untouchable.’

  On getting through to the child protection charity, the woman told the voice at the other end of the line that she had witnessed Jimmy Savile indecently assaulting a fellow Duncroft resident who she believed was 14 at the time. She was advised to contact the authorities, so she telephoned Dorset Police on 11 May 2007 to recount the same story about the star of Jim’ll Fix It and Top of the Pops sitting among the girls in the television room one evening, grabbing the hand of her friend and forcing it down onto his crotch.

  The matter was duly reported to Surrey Police, the force covering the area for Duncroft, and on 13 May 2007, a female Detective Constable on the Surrey Public Protection Investigation Unit contacted the woman. The policewoman was informed by the woman that her friend had previously told her about Jimmy Savile’s advances, and they had agreed a code word that would be used if he did it again. At the time, there was a television advertisement for Vesta Curry containing the catchphrase ‘Oooh, beef biryani’. They settled on this as the signal because it was a running joke among the girls and it would not attract attention. When she heard her fri
end suddenly say, ‘Oooh, beef biryani’ on the evening in question, she looked over to see Jimmy Savile take her hand. ‘He was squeezing it,’ the woman said, ‘so then she would have been squeezing his testicles and his penis.’2

  The woman also said she had heard things from other girls and witnessed the arrival of large boxes of chocolates for Savile’s favourites. She explained that Duncroft’s staff had a high regard for their famous visitor.

  The Surrey Police investigation was codenamed ‘Operation Ornament’, and four days later contact was made with the head office of Dr Barnado’s, the organisation that ran Duncroft when the incident was alleged to have taken place. Surrey Police wanted to find out whether the charitable organisation knew of any other allegations and which other girls had been in residence between 1977 and 1979.

  On 21 May, the Detective Constable and a female colleague from Surrey Police visited the woman who made the original complaint at her home. Four pages of written notes were taken.

  A period of nearly five months elapsed before an address was found for the woman it was claimed had been assaulted. When a letter was finally sent to her, it explained Surrey Police were investigating ‘allegations of a historic nature that have [sic] alleged to have taken place at Duncroft Children’s Home in Staines in the 1970s’3 It requested that she get in touch. No reply was forthcoming. In fact the victim was furious that her erstwhile friend had started a process she wanted no part of.

  On 16 November 2007, the same female DC paid a ‘cold call’ on the woman’s house. There was nobody in so she left a card. A few hours later, the woman called. Since receiving the letter, she explained, she had been thinking it over. She then asked whether the investigation concerned a well-known person. When the police officer asked whom she had in mind, the woman replied: ‘Jimmy Savile.’

  An account of the incident was taken down over the phone in which the woman said he had taken her hand and moved it onto his groin and manipulated it until he got an erection. He had also invited her to go for a ride in his car. Two days later, she said, a box of chocolates arrived for her at Duncroft. She thought the incident must have taken place in 1978, when she was either 14 or 15.

  She claimed not to remember the girl who had made the complaint, and had not been in touch with her since leaving Duncroft. She also insisted she did not want to make a statement and was angry at being named.4 Four months later, she was still asserting that she did not want to be involved if the investigation was ‘just in relation to her.’5

  The corroboration of the original witness’s account, however, prompted a review of the investigation. As Surrey Police describe it, there was an ‘early recognition of the sensitivity surrounding the persons involved and the need for information security to prevent “leaks” to the media and subsequent compromise to the investigation and credibility of witnesses’.6 On 18 December 2007, Jimmy Savile was registered as a suspect on the Surrey Police computer system and linked to the investigation.7

  A little over a month later, West Yorkshire Police unveiled their campaign to fight crime in the Hyde Park, Headingley and Woodhouse areas of Leeds. Talking signs were attached to lampposts from which the voice of Jimmy Savile warned students about the risks of not keeping property securely locked up. ‘We had the idea of using a well-known voice,’ explained Chief Inspector Mark Busley, ‘and Jimmy Savile was asked because he is a well-known Leeds person.’8

  Jimmy Savile was indeed a ‘well-known Leeds person’, particularly with the West Yorkshire Police. Four serving and retired officers were regulars at the weekly ‘Friday Morning Club’ meetings he held in his flat.9

  The signs were still in use in the student areas of Leeds four months later, when an email was sent from the anti-corruption team at Surrey Police to their counterparts in West Yorkshire, informing them that they were investigating Jimmy Savile and to request any intelligence relating to him. It was now almost a year since Operation Ornament had been launched.

  The reason for using this back channel, it has been claimed, was the senior investigating officer’s concern that the investigation remained confidential. A week later, Surrey received an intelligence report, the only one West Yorkshire Police claimed to hold on Jimmy Savile. It related to an incident when a female student had jokingly stolen his pink-lensed spectacles one night at the Queens Hotel. It was an incident that Savile made hay from in the newspapers.

  *

  Back in Surrey, the task of tracing the other Duncroft girls identified by Barnado’s took over a year. But before they were contacted, there was a significant development. Another woman, Jill from Worthing, had reported a separate indecent assault by Jimmy Savile dating back to July 1970. Jill told officers from Sussex Police how she had been collected by his chauffeur and taken in his Rolls-Royce to Worthing where Savile’s motor caravan was parked. After inviting her inside, he pushed her down onto a bed, grabbed her hand and thrust it onto his groin.

  Jill emigrated not long after the incident. But on moving back to Britain with her husband, she had grown increasingly agitated by the sight of Jimmy Savile on television and in the media.

  In 2007, and by now divorced, she decided to write a letter to the Sun. In November that year, as Surrey Police began widening the remit of Operation Ornament, a reporter from the newspaper arrived to interview her, explaining that ‘a lot of others’10 had not been so lucky and managed to escape as she did. Jill was advised that if she were to make a complaint to the police, others would follow; however she decided she was not willing to go through with it.

  A little less than four months later, in March of 2008, the same female reporter returned. Jill was told that the paper now had new information that Jimmy Savile may have been connected to the disgraced Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey. But unless she was willing to report her allegation to the police there was little that could be done. She was convinced this time and rang Sussex Police to tell them what Jimmy Savile had done to her 38 years earlier.

  Jill was visited that evening by a detective sergeant and a detective constable who explained what they would need in order to ‘pursue an allegation’:11 she would have to contact her ex-husband, who she had told of the incident at the time, as well as her former workmates, who had laughed when she informed them what had happened in Jimmy Savile’s motor caravan parked in broad daylight near Worthing Town Hall. The police officers added that the complaint would need to be corroborated, and warned that while they believed her story, few others would. They also said Jimmy Savile would have expensive lawyers who would make ‘mincemeat’ of her.12

  The day afterwards, Jill, who was approaching 60 at the time, texted the reporter from the Sun to tell her she was unwilling to cooperate with a police investigation. She duly contacted the Sussex Police officers to tell them she had decided against making a formal complaint, insisting she wanted to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’.13 The bottom line was that she was not prepared to be the sole supporter of a possible prosecution.

  In early April, Sussex Police learned of what Surrey Police were doing after having made a confidential request for intelligence that might impact on their investigation into Jimmy Savile through the Impact Nominal Index (INI) computer database. Officers from the two forces spoke and swapped notes on the fact that the victim in each case did not wish to proceed.

  Nine days later, an entry on the Sussex Police crime report confirmed that a prosecution was unlikely: ‘The checks conducted have been time consuming and taking [sic] me away from other priority cases in the CID office,’ wrote one of the officers. ‘With a clearly reluctant witness and difficulties corroborating her claims from other sources I feel these papers should be filed.’14 The matter was not referred to the Crown Prosecution Service, although a copy of the crime report was faxed to Surrey Police.

  At a review meeting in North Surrey, the deputy senior investigating officer concluded that the modus operandi of the incident in Sussex, allied to the fact that the accounts of both informant and victim in the D
uncroft case were sufficiently similar, amounted to ‘further corroboration’.

  On 19 May, one of the former Duncroft girls identified from the Barnardo’s list responded to the letter sent by the Detective Constable from Surrey Police. She did not claim to be a victim but asked whether the person being investigated was Jimmy Savile. A day later, the same woman phoned back to reveal that another woman, who was not at Duncroft, had been indecently assaulted by Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the early 1970s. It was now also known that the incidents were being discussed openly on the Duncroft area of the Friends Reunited website.

  The DC contacted the woman in question and was told what had happened to her during a visit to Stoke Mandeville Hospital in or around 1973. On that occasion, Jimmy Savile had been larking about, climbing up a flagpole in the hospital’s grounds. As she left, he asked her for a kiss but rather than a friendly peck on the cheek he instead forced his tongue into her mouth. The girl was 14 at the time. She agreed to provide a written statement but also stated she was not interested in taking the matter further.

  A further meeting was called at Walton police station in which advice was taken from the senior investigating officer on Operation Arundel, the investigation by Surrey Police into historic sexual abuse that stemmed from the successful prosecution of Jonathan King, Jimmy Savile’s friend from Decca Records and his colleague on Top of the Pops. Caution was urged; there must be no allegations of ‘trawling’ for witnesses or victims.