In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Five days later after Cross had given North Yorkshire Police a clean bill of health with regard to its prior knowledge of Jimmy Savile’s offending, or that of his friends and associates, Hicks was informed by the IPCC that North Yorkshire would not be investigating Real Whitby’s allegations. He was told the concerns that he’d raised were ‘not eligible’ to be recorded as a police complaint because he did not ‘fit the definition of a complainant under the Police Reforms Act 2002’.

  Hicks and Ward refused to give up. By September 2013, they had found more witnesses to, and victims of, Jaconelli’s offending in Scarborough. One, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled how in 1968, as a fifteen-year-old, he had been lewdly propositioned for sexual favours by Jaconelli outside his shop. When he refused, Jaconelli openly mocked the teenager in front of passers-by.

  ‘I told my parents and my father took me to the police station where I made a statement,’ the man told Real Whitby. ‘The police officer I spoke to said he believed me and was aware of similar allegations against Peter Jaconelli. However, he said Jaconelli was a Town Councillor, I believe a County Councillor, Judo club owner, business man and all round pillar of society. I was a school boy!’

  With North Yorkshire Police still to comment or interview the witnesses and victims unearthed by Real Whitby, Hicks decided to write an open letter. It was emailed to North Yorkshire Police and Crime Commissioner Julia Mulligan and Chief Constable Dave Jones, and published on the Real Whitby website. Hicks highlighted what he considered to be the two ‘critical’ failings by North Yorkshire Police: the first was its failure ‘to arrest Jaconelli … which would have surely led them to wind up the vice ring he led in Scarborough, including Savile’; the second was ‘the apparent failure by the Force Intelligence Bureau to pass on intelligence North Yorkshire Police had undoubtedly developed on Savile during the 2003 paedophile investigation’. Again, there was no reply.

  On 1 November, North Yorkshire Police was officially exonerated by the IPCC of any blame for its failure to detect Savile while he was alive. ‘I am now able to let you know we have completed the review of all the evidence and material relating to the late Jimmy Savile,’ wrote Moir Stewart, the IPCC’s Director of Investigations, ‘and we have decided to take no further action with regard to your force.’9 Further Real Whitby emails to the IPCC and North Yorkshire Police went unanswered although at least the Metropolitan Police deigned to reply: an officer working on Operation Yewtree reiterated to Hicks that all communications to him would be automatically forwarded to North Yorkshire.

  The cycle of request, allegation and silence was finally broken when the BBC’s regional documentary programme Inside Out picked up on the story. By this stage, Real Whitby had received a letter from Scarborough Borough Council threatening legal action over its claims of a cover-up due to Jaconelli’s status as a prominent former Councillor.10

  On the evening of 10 February 2014, Inside Out broadcast its report. It contained interviews with some of the witnesses to Jaconelli’s abuse, and a succession of ‘no comments’ from the police and Scarborough Borough Council. More damaging to the police than its failure to respond to the series of questions posed by the BBC, however, was the revelation that it had failed to contact or interview any of the witnesses who had by now made allegations against Jaconelli. Contrary to what Moir Stewart had said, North Yorkshire Police were shown to be ignoring evidence, evidence it did not even have to go out and find. And yet, as its statement made clear, the IPCC still stood by its decision not to take any further action.

  It was now evident to the North Yorkshire Police that the matter was not now simply going to disappear. A statement published on its website immediately after the Inside Out report was televised, said NYP was ‘considering the content of the programme, its effect on previous matters and the potential need for any future investigative work that would best serve the interests of those directly affected’.11 Those who took part in the programme, and ‘who were the subject of direct contact with the late Mr Jaconelli’ were invited to get in touch.

  Sensing a decisive shift, Real Whitby’s reporters once again articulated their concerns to Drusilla Sharpling, and it was only then that the HMIC reversed its decision and instructed North Yorkshire Police to conduct further investigations.

  While North Yorkshire Police’s third internal enquiry was under way, a process that took six weeks rather than the nine days spent compiling the report delivered by Assistant Chief Constable Sue Cross, Tim Hicks again contacted Operation Yewtree. He stated his belief that the evidence in the Inside Out programme it contained proved the integrity of Yewtree had been compromised. The reply from a Metropolitan Police Detective Inspector on the Operation Yewtree team was perfunctory to say the least, notifying Hicks that allegations concerning Jimmy Savile and Peter Jaconelli did ‘not fall within the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police to investigate’.

  Hicks was again advised to direct new information to North Yorkshire Police and told that the Metropolitan Police would no longer correspond with him. This, despite the fact the Metropolitan Police was the lead force on Operation Yewtree, of which the second strand concerned ‘other individuals associated with Savile’. Individuals, surely, like the late Peter Jaconelli.

  What the review of all North Yorkshire Police systems to ‘ascertain if there was any recorded information in relation to Savile, Jaconelli and their known associates and friends, in respect of any reported offending found was enough for a further statement to be issued.

  On 3 April 2014, as a result of its third internal enquiry, North Yorkshire Police announced it had voluntarily referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission over the way in which the force recorded and responded to ‘reports it received against two men regarding child sex abuse’.12 It went on to say that the referral specifically related to how ‘North Yorkshire responded to an allegation it received over a decade ago about Jimmy Savile … ’

  The NYP statement also referenced ‘several allegations made recently about Savile’s friend, Scarborough resident Peter Jaconelli, who died in 1999’. It confirmed that had Jaconelli been alive today he would have been interviewed under caution and ‘a file of the evidence would have been submitted for consideration by the Crown Prosecution Service’.

  Chief Constable Dave Jones did not specify in which year the Savile allegation was recorded but the reference to ‘over a decade ago’ would appear to point to the 2003 paedophile ring investigation, as consistently argued by Real Whitby. Either way, this was information that could and should have been relayed to Surrey Police when a request for information about Jimmy Savile was made in 2007, and to Sussex Police when it did likewise in 2008.

  North Yorkshire Police added that it would look at whether information it held on record had been ‘comprehensively disclosed to Her Majesty’s Inspector of Contabulary (HMIC) when it, and other police forces, were asked to do so in December 2012 and again in May 2013’.

  68. ALL THAT REMAINS

  Two and a half years after his death, and more than ten years after first interviewing him in his penthouse flat in Leeds, my journey ended in the spring of 2014 in a garage in Aylesbury. It belonged to Janet Cope, a woman who refuses to believe the allegations levelled against Jimmy Savile, who she served with such devotion, and who sacked her so suddenly and unceremoniously some 15 years before.

  We had spent a couple of hours in her pristine bungalow, looking through boxes of letters and photo albums and talking about the past. Janet Cope had told me about her decades working at the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, and about how she had organised the sit-in that led to Savile taking on the task of building a new centre from the ground up. The campaign, which became a national cause célèbre, had, she recounted, been the busiest and very possibly the happiest time of her life, and she was not prepared for her abiding sense of achievement to be crushed under the debris from the ruined reputation of the man who led it.

  ‘It’s
been destroyed, all of it,’ she said quietly, turning over photographs of her and Savile mugging for the camera with her campaign colleagues in the office, or as dignitaries were led around the site as the foundations were laid and the buildings rose from the dirt. ‘It’s unfair. He can’t answer back so it’s up to me and others to defend him. If I’d have seen him doing anything wrong I would have challenged him. He knew that.’

  In the envelopes and boxes were letters and invitations from Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, and photos that recorded visits from Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Ferguson, Barbara Bush and the wives of the G7 leaders. There was a table plan from the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit in 1981, with a detailed minute-by-minute breakdown of his itinerary, and a letter thanking them for his subsequent visit three years later.

  Jimmy Savile had wounded Janet Cope; she explained she had cried for weeks after he told her she was no longer needed. But even after the threatening letter she received from his legal advisers, even after he had forbidden her from returning to Stoke Mandeville, and even after the way he had exerted control over her for nearly thirty years, she remained steadfast in her denial of all that has since been said about a man she insisted had taught her so much.

  In the garage were more boxes containing yellowing newspapers, photo albums and a dog-eared contacts book, the one that Janet Cope kept for Jimmy Savile and used to manage his life. In it were numbers for Downing Street, ministers and embassies; for Highgrove, Buckingham Palace and Balmoral; for hospitals, hospices and schools; for Peter Jaconelli, too.

  A survey of Britain in the light of what we now know of Jimmy Savile reveals a landscape littered with the fragments of shattered memories and splintered reputations. The most conspicuous fragments have fallen from some of Britain’s biggest institutions – the National Health Service, the BBC and the police, but the rubble is scattered far and wide. It includes the names of those arrested and charged by Operation Yewtree, even those who have been cleared. Buried within it too is the public’s trust in the judgement of leading figures in government, the Church and the royal family, as well as, surely, the private guilt of those who chose not to see, not to ask and not to speak out.

  For some, like Janet Cope and others who invested themselves in Jimmy Savile and what he asked of them, and even Roger Ordish, who explained how for so long he had enjoyed watching the reactions of those he told what he had done in his career, the past must now resemble a hall of mirrors. What was once taken for granted, and celebrated, is now so distorted and grotesque it is almost impossible to process. The same applies to Dave Eager, who wore a sweatshirt bearing the words ‘Jimmy’s Eager Helper’ to the Requiem Mass in Leeds, and got to his feet to call for Savile’s coffin to be clapped from the cathedral.

  I can only imagine what it must feel like to have the floor fall away from under your feet, and everything you believed in be dismissed as a lie. But what cannot be ignored is the gulf between their interpretations of the past and what is now understood about the man who beguiled them and so many others.

  ‘The universal abhorrence at Jimmy Savile’s predatory career is a rare moment of self-revelation,’1 declared an editorial in the Guardian the day after the joint report by the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC was published in January 2013. Hundreds of victims had come forward in the aftermath of ITV’s Exposure documentary, of which 450 made allegations of sexual abuse relating to Jimmy Savile. Across the 28 police areas in England and Wales, it was recorded that he had committed 214 criminal offences over a period of more than fifty years. Eighty-two per cent of those involved were females, of whom the majority were aged between 13 and 16. There were 31 allegations of rape, of which more than half were committed on minors.

  ‘This whole sordid affair has shown the tragic consequences of what happens when vulnerability collides with power,’ said Metropolitan Police Commander Peter Spindler.2 ‘He exploited his celebrity status, he traded on the currency of celebrity to get almost unprecedented access to our institutions, to our hospitals, to our schools. And there he took advantage of the most vulnerable in society, adults and children, though sadly primarily children, for his own sexual gratification.’

  On the same day, Keir Starmer QC, the director of public prosecutions, published the conclusions of an internal Crown Prosecution Service review carried out by Alison Levitt QC into the Surrey and Sussex police investigations of 2007 and 2008. He described its findings as ‘profound’ and apologised for the part the CPS had played in failing those women who reported Jimmy Savile when he was alive. Starmer also stated his conviction that wholesale changes were needed in the way authorities deal with victims of abuse.

  The CPS report showed that Savile could have been prosecuted over three allegations of sexual abuse if police had handled the complainants differently. Starmer also acknowledged that the police and the CPS were likely to have dropped many sexual assault complaints in the past because the victims were treated with a ‘degree of caution which is not generally justified’.3

  ‘In my view, these cases do not simply reflect errors of judgment by individual officers or prosecutors on the facts before them,’ he declared. ‘If that were the case, they would, in many respects, be easier to deal with. These were errors of judgment by experienced and committed police officers and a prosecuting lawyer acting in good faith and attempting to apply the correct principles.’

  It is the opinion of Liz Dux, the lawyer representing more than seventy of Savile’s victims, that the impact of Savile’s six decades of abuse is unprecedented. ‘Nothing has touched the country the way that this has,’ she argues. ‘His celebrity status is one part of it, but I think also it’s because people from all walks of life were affected, both male and female. If it’s a care home, like the poor kids in Jersey, people might think it doesn’t really affect them. And if it’s the Church, they might think it was not unexpected. But here was someone who was an everyday part of our lives. He was part of our generation’s childhood. And because his victims were from everywhere in the country, and from every type of social class, and the fact his offending was just indiscriminate, the combination of those things has really marked a watershed.’

  Watershed is the word Starmer also used, and it’s appropriate when assessing the surge in the reporting of historic child abuse cases since the Savile scandal burst like a sore. Across the country, rape charities and helplines have been inundated with calls; Greater Manchester Police witnessed a 121 per cent increase in such allegations in the period between November 2012 and April 2013,4 while Kent Police confirmed a 211 per cent rise. In total, 1,204 historic child abuse claims were made to police forces across the UK in the same period, an increase of 70 per cent. It is a black irony that the pull on resources has contributed to the arrest rate actually falling.5

  By Spring 2014, more than thirty separate investigations were still ongoing at NHS institutions that Savile came into contact with, while Education Secretary Michael Gove instructed further inquiries be undertaken into his dealings with 21 schools and children’s homes across England. Whatever is found and disclosed, the sheer number is testament to the extent he was able to penetrate society and the fixtures that hold it together.

  Sources close to Dame Janet Smith’s independent review into culture and practices at the BBC during the time Jimmy Savile worked there suggest her report will show he could have abused as many as 1,000 young people in the corporation’s dressing rooms and studios, and while travelling the country under its banner. Smith has used the same methodology she employed in the inquiry into serial killer Harold Shipman, where rather than the fifteen murders he was convicted of it was established the true figure was probably closer to 250.

  At two of the hospitals he was most closely linked with, Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor, Savile used his power and status to bully staff into acquiescence, and his victims into silence. At Stoke Mandeville, those who challenged him were reminded he could turn off the funding tap at any minute. Janet Cope confirmed to me that she h
ad witnessed him being ‘lethal to other people, and I mean lethal’. She also said he was ‘good at threatening people. It is how he got such a lot done.’

  At Broadmoor, the blackmail used on recalcitrant members of the Prison Officers’ Association was of a blunter variety. He was given offices and accommodation at both hospitals, a luxury he was also afforded at Leeds General Infirmary.

  ‘I saw his behaviour change from making a request to making a demand for anything he wanted,’ said Christine McFarlane, former director of nursing and patient care at Stoke Mandeville.6 ‘This happened as his power and fame for raising money for the spinal unit grew. He did change, and latterly was not the nice person that everyone knew at the beginning.’

  McFarlane spoke of the freedom Savile had ‘to walk wherever he wanted’ and also how he hated to be challenged. ‘He was Jimmy Savile, nobody argued with him,’ she said. ‘There was a fine balance for them [staff] to reach in not upsetting Jimmy to the point where he was likely to walk away or try to take his money away.’

  So how did he get away with it, and for so long? Commander Spindler coined a phrase that, at first glance, appeared to absolve those who either failed to see or turned a blind eye to what was taking place on their watch. It also provides comfort to those who prefer to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles like the ones Jimmy Savile used to wear. ‘It’s a question for British society to answer,’ Spindler said. ‘We are talking about six decades of abuse. We do need to set this in the context of society at the time … but we were all taken in. You could say he groomed a nation.’

  I now look back and wonder if he was grooming me, offering up all that access, taking me for lunch and fixing it for me to join him on the QE2 in return for a legacy he wanted me to secure in print; a legacy he surely knew was destined to end up like his gravestone – smashed to smithereens, ground down and deposited as landfill. Why else would he have chosen as his epitaph ‘It was good while it lasted’?