In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  But if this was the case, why did he decide to bypass the local detective chief inspector and go straight to the top of the chain of command instead?

  Neil Wilby has his own theory: ‘Either with the force’s knowledge or without, there seems to have been a process undertaken of cleansing the paper files and any electronic traces of documents or records that pertain to Savile. There’s been a disinfecting process here. If anybody comes along, they are not finding anything at all.’

  The destruction of evidence from the five-year Yorkshire Ripper enquiry would appear to be a case in point, even if West Yorkshire Police describes it as a quite normal procedure. What now remains of the 151,000 ‘actions’ raised, the 158,000 vehicle enquiries and the 31,000 statements taken are just 198 boxes containing key exhibits, the prosecution file and the list of people spoken to. These are listed on the enquiry’s nominal index card system.

  The Newgreen review uncovered four index cards relating to Jimmy Savile. From the paucity of information preserved on his place in Britain’s biggest ever murder investigation, the report stated that it ‘was not possible to establish the relevance of the reference numbers’. One card did reveal, however, that Jimmy Savile offered his services as a go-between should the Ripper wish to make contact with the police.

  *

  Neil Wilby’s views on Operation Newgreen and the report that followed are unequivocal. ‘If you look at the substance and the content and the overall intention … it wasn’t going to get to the truth. It wasn’t going to find anything out, it wasn’t going to get to the bottom of things.’

  The chairman of the West Yorkshire Police Federation, Jon Christopher, seemed to agree, highlighting the fact nothing was written down because of who Savile was. ‘At the time Jimmy Savile was a very large character in Leeds,’ he said, ‘and certainly some officers may well have been duped. It could have been seen as a bit of kudos for someone to be seen to have a relationship with someone as prominent as him.’17

  As cracks appeared in the credibility of the Newgreen report in the days following the publication of the Newgreen report, it emerged that four of Savile’s victims, rather than as the report indicated, had been five years old when Savile had attacked them.

  There were a few concessions. Among them was an admission that the long-standing relationship between Jimmy Savile and WYP was over-reliant on his ‘personal friendships’ with serving officers. But this was a relationship that went further than simple coffee mornings at his flat. He had fronted local campaigns on behalf of the police. He had been a lunch guest of the chief constable at Millgarth police station. He had opened a climbing wall at the notorious Killingbeck police station in 1995, after which a plaque was mounted to commemorate the event; in 1998 he’d been the guest speaker at an officers’ mess dinner, talking about how policing in Leeds had changed before being driven home by the assistant chief constable. He had also been invited by police officers to attend open days (2008) and made financial contributions to a variety of charitable causes linked to the WYP.

  What’s more, Jimmy Savile had repeatedly offered the use of his flat for the policing of large events such as pop concerts in Roundhay Park, a ruse he employed to befriend police officers. Some of those officers went on to attend his weekly get-togethers where they drank tea, coffee and sometimes something stronger, and thought they were putting the world to rights. And where sometimes they listened to Savile mocking those who wrote him begging letters. They did all this because he’d seduced them.

  After claiming to have spoken to more than forty people who attended the Friday Morning Club or knew of its existence, West Yorkshire Police stated it had found no evidence of any police impropriety or misconduct.

  So why did it not include in its findings the details of a conversation overheard by one company director who attended Savile’s weekly get-togethers? In October 2013 the man, who wanted to remain anonymous, explained to a national newspaper that he specifically recalled overhearing Savile talking to Mick Starkey at the end of one Friday morning meeting.

  ‘Jim said something to him [Starkey] about getting in touch with Surrey Police because they were trying to contact him. He never said what it was about, but he had lost their names and numbers. He thought Mick would be able to contact them more easily because he had access to the right numbers. Jim said he was going away on business so he wouldn’t have time to do it, but he could meet up with them at Stoke Mandeville.’18

  The businessman claimed detectives from Operation Newgreen interviewed him for more than two hours, and that he told them about this conversation. He also said the interview was witnessed by his daughter. But no mention was made of the conversation in the West Yorkshire Police report.

  When Assistant Chief Constable Ingrid Lee spoke to the BBC after the report was published, she stated, ‘The people engaged with Jimmy Savile [didn’t know] that actually there were these allegations against him.’19 This is hard to believe if indeed Mick Starkey did make a phone call to Surrey Police.

  The revelation that the Newgreen report’s authors did not deem it necessary to include the testimony of one of the Friday Morning Club regulars followed hard on the heels of another story that made a mockery of Ingrid Lee’s promise of transparency. As a former Leeds police constable, speaking under an assumed name, told the Mirror, ‘there wasn’t a copper in Leeds who didn’t know Savile was a pervert’.20

  In 1965, the officer recounted coming across Savile’s Rolls-Royce while patrolling on his bike at night in an area near Roundhay Golf Club. At first he suspected the car, which was parked in a secluded spot in a lay-by, had been stolen. As he approached the vehicle, however, he noticed the lights were on inside.

  ‘[Savile] was in the driver’s seat and next to him was a very young female. He was a famous local figure,’ said the retired officer, who was in his early twenties at the time. ‘I was quite impressed it was him. I said, “What are you doing Jimmy? What’s the matter?” He replied, “I’m waiting for midnight. It’s her 16th birthday tomorrow.”’

  He said that Savile then gave him a wink. ‘I checked my watch and saw it was 11.45 p.m. There was just 15 minutes to go and he seemed quite anxious. I looked over to [the girl] and asked if she was okay, and she just smiled at me but didn’t say anything. She was definitely young. She looked around 15.’ At this point, he recalled Savile looked up at him and told him to ‘piss off’, adding, ‘If you want to keep your job I suggest you get on your bike and fuck off.’

  Later, when the rookie officer relayed the incident to his sergeant, he was told to drop it: ‘He’s got friends in high places,’ the sergeant warned. ‘“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave it there.” … He was so well-connected, he was like a superstar … the police were in the palm of his hand.’

  By October 2013, two years on from Savile’s death, Operation Newgreen appeared to be fatally holed. After concluding a review into an entirely unrelated conduct matter concerning Assistant Chief Constable Ingrid Lee, for which she was exonerated, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset, Nick Gargan, expressed his views in a letter to his counterpart Mark Gilmore in West Yorkshire: ‘It seems clear to me that Operation Newgreen does not have the look and feel of an independent report,’ he wrote. ‘As I turned from one page to the next, I saw example after example of the author putting the case for West Yorkshire Police. At times this case was put with some force and emotion and more than a hint of exasperation with other bodies.

  ‘In that respect, Operation Newgreen was unsuccessful if it was its intention to give an impression of independent assurance: it may even have had the effect of strengthening suspicion that West Yorkshire Police was at the very least being defensive.’21

  And at the very most? Chief Constable Gargan did not deem it necessary to convey his thoughts.

  67. NO LOCAL CONNECTION

  If the report on Operation Newgreen did little to persuade the public that West Yorkshire Police had been as transparent as Assistant Constable Ingr
id Lee promised, at least it acknowledged Jimmy Savile had a relationship with his local police force in Leeds. In Scarborough, the other town in which he spent the greatest part of his time, Savile appeared to have been airbrushed out in same way the plaques and signs bearing his name were removed once his reputation had been reduced to dust.

  Tim Hicks and Nigel Ward, reporters on the independent local news website Real Whitby, began digging in October 2012. Initially, their curiosity was pricked by a series of newspaper stories about Savile’s alleged connection with a 2003 police investigation into a paedophile ring operating around seafront arcades in Scarborough in the 1980s.

  The first newspaper story1 claimed ‘senior police officers … had concerns that Jimmy Savile may have been involved’ and that a number of paedophiles were operating in Scarborough, ‘including a man who abused children at his caravan overlooking the seaside resort’. Jimmy Savile had told me about the caravan he’d kept a few miles down the coast from Scarborough, and how he’d taken girls there. He’d said the same to Louis Theroux.

  A second story followed that claimed police had named Jimmy Savile as being part of the ring, which also numbered ‘two prominent businessmen’, Peter Jaconelli and Jimmy Corrigan Snr.2 Hicks and Ward began investigating who, if anyone, knew, and if so, what they knew and when.

  Savile, Corrigan and Jaconelli were prominent figures in Scarborough. Jimmy Corrigan, the friend who accompanied Savile to the Otley Pop Civic Ball in the 1960s, was the town’s most famous amusement arcade owner. Peter Jaconelli was a former mayor, councillor and poster-boy for Scarborough; a millionaire who owned an ice cream business and a restaurant on the Foreshore. Corrigan’s amusement arcade and Jaconelli’s ice cream parlour were both on the itinerary for the outing Savile led for patients from Rampton Psychiatric Hospital in 1972.

  Two women came forward as the allegations about Savile multiplied. Both claimed he had sexually abused them in Scarborough, one in the late 1960s and the other in the late 1980s. A further two women, neither of whom is thought to have been abused, contacted the local paper in Scarborough independently to recount how they had been interviewed by police officers working on the 2003 investigation, and, more pertinently, questioned about Savile, Jaconelli and Corrigan. The Express reported North Yorkshire Police’s claim that it had ‘no record of an investigation’ into Jimmy Savile, as well as its request for the women to make contact.3

  The 2003 investigation was in fact extensive enough for intelligence to be uploaded to the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System [HOLMES]. The technology is used in major inquiries that generate large volumes of intelligence and witness evidence. The investigation ultimately led to the conviction of two men for sex offences, although one was later cleared on appeal.

  According to the original article in the Express, during the trial ‘Savile’s name was the hot topic of conversation’.4 A statement on the North Yorkshire Police website, however, told a different story, namely that after carrying out ‘extensive searches of force records’ no ‘local connection’5 in relation to Jimmy Savile had been revealed. This statement has subsequently been removed and retracted.

  It was this assertion, however, that ensured North Yorkshire Police was not included in Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) review, commissioned by the Home Secretary in November 2012 to ‘assess police knowledge of and response to the historical allegations made against Jimmy Savile, and potentially into similar allegations against other individuals’.

  In presenting the findings of that review to Parliament, Home Secretary Theresa May’s recorded that ‘In particular, I asked that [it] establish clearly which forces received reports or allegations in respect of Savile and related individuals prior to the launch of Operation Yewtree … For each of those forces, I asked HMIC to review the extent to which the allegations were robustly investigated and whether there were any police failings in doing so.’6

  HMIC’s report, published on 12 March 2013, made it clear, the Home Secretary said, ‘that failures by police forces, particularly in respect to the quality of investigations and the sharing of intelligence, enabled Savile to act with impunity for over five decades. It is also clear from the report that Savile could and should have been apprehended earlier …’

  The report’s author, HM Inspector of Constabulary Drusilla Sharpling, has confirmed that it was the lack of intelligence, or ‘local connection’, that explains why North Yorkshire did not figure in her investigation. This lack of intelligence also ensured Peter Jaconelli was not investigated under the terms of Operation Yewtree’s Strand 2 of ‘other individuals associated with Savile’.

  Allegations about Jaconelli being a paedophile were made by a number of individuals and first published on Real Whitby in February 2013, a month before the publication of HMIC’s report. They prompted more witnesses and victims to come forward with similar claims against the lascivious former mayor and close associate of Jimmy Savile.

  Hicks and Ward were convinced that North Yorkshire Police had knowledge about Jaconelli’s behaviour, and if this could be proved there was a good chance it also knew about Jimmy Savile’s. From October 2012 onwards, the information Real Whitby uncovered was consistently passed on to officers from Operation Yewtree, who then passed it on to North Yorkshire Police.

  Following the publication of HMIC’s report, Tim Hicks, who had by this time been interviewed by a Detective Constable and Detective Sergeant from Operation Yewtree, wrote to Drusilla Sharpling, outlining the statements made by the two witnesses to Jaconelli’s offending. Hicks detailed Jaconelli’s close connection with Savile and the fact both witnesses claimed the police were aware of his offending. He received no reply.

  Less than a month later, Hicks and Ward were informed that all matters relating to Savile’s activities in Scarborough were now being forwarded to North Yorkshire Police. Despite assurances from Scarborough Borough Council that the details of the two witnesses who had come forward with allegations about Jaconelli had been passed on to the police, neither had been contacted by the NYP.

  The widespread criticism of West Yorkshire Police’s report on Operation Newgreen prompted Hicks and Ward to redouble their efforts. A series of Freedom of Information Requests were submitted to North Yorkshire Police in a bid to ascertain whether any of its officers had attended Savile’s Friday Morning Club meetings. Having developed witnesses who testified to Jaconelli’s offending behaviour and vouched that the local police knew about it, Real Whitby felt confident in publishing its most serious claim to date: ‘North Yorkshire Police Force Intelligence Bureau failed to pass on the intelligence they undoubtedly had about Savile and his associate Jaconelli, to the Surrey investigation [2007–09].’ It was, Hicks contended, a failure that significantly diminished the chances of a prosecution being launched.

  Hicks also voiced his fears on Real Whitby that the North Yorkshire Police would be allowed to ‘investigate and exonerate itself’7 in the same way as its counterparts in West Yorkshire. He wrote to Detective Chief Inspector Orchard of Operation Yewtree requesting ‘any investigation into Savile in North Yorkshire must now include the Jaconelli paedophile ring first exposed by the Sunday Express … ’ He also recommended the North Yorkshire investigation be ‘conducted by another force or by the IPCC, to ensure an impartial investigation and avoid the lack of confidence over the recent West Yorkshire Police investigation’.

  Based on the information it received from Real Whitby, the Independent Police Complaints Commission. It wrote to the Chief Constable of North Yorkshire Police directing him to consider whether there were any conduct matters that should be the subject of a referral. Nine days later, on May 29, Assistant Chief Constable Sue Cross of North Yorkshire Police replied with the findings of an internal inquiry.

  ‘The research that has been conducted clearly indicates that Savile was not shown as a “Nominal” either in his own right or in connection with anybody else on any North Yorkshire Police systems,’ wrote Cross.8 ‘The availabl
e information clearly shows that there was no intelligence held on North Yorkshire Police systems in respect of Savile in his own right (or in respect of his alleged associations with others) which would have required investigative or enforcement action by North Yorkshire Police …’

  The report by Cross went on to dismiss all the specific allegations made by Real Whitby. Had, as Hicks suggested, North Yorkshire Police questioned witnesses about Jimmy Savile as part of its 2003 investigation into the seafront paedophile ring? ‘The available information indicates that the material investigation was conducted using the HOLMES facility,’ reported Cross, ‘and that Savile is not recorded in the HOLMES system in any form.’

  She also denied any North Yorkshire Police officers had attended the weekly socials in Savile’s flat in Leeds.

  What her letter to the IPCC did reveal, though, was that in September 2008 Jimmy Savile was invited by the North Yorkshire Police to join the Chief Constable as guest of honour at an awards ceremony held at Selby Abbey. A NYP vehicle and driver were sent to collect him from his home in Leeds. Cross described the Community Idol scheme as a ‘project intended to encourage positive behaviour amongst young people’. By this date, the police’s Impact Nominal Index system would have included intelligence reports uploaded by Surrey Police in 2007 and Sussex Police in 2008; intelligence that would have shown Jimmy Savile as being anything but an appropriate choice to hand out prizes to young people.