Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read

by Paul Connolly

  …Police believe that figures for the numbers of victims – 12 on the original indictment for Starling and seven for Prescott – may not be the full extent of the abuse, however. Daniel O’Malley, the detective inspector heading the continuing investigation, suggests there may have been as many as 70 victims – with 30 abused by Starling alone.

  Nor do the figures adequately convey the legacy of the abuse, nor the culture of despair and secrecy that enabled the supposed carers to perpetuate the abuse with impunity.

  ‘There was a complete conspiracy of silence,’ says Carroll, now 40, the man who prompted the police investigation when he finally made a complaint to Tower Hamlets about the abuse he says he suffered from four to 15. ‘As kids, we never spoke about it to one another because of the sense of shame, the guilt, and the feeling of helplessness, and the staff who weren’t involved turned a blind eye and pretended not to notice. The few children who tried to challenge them were threatened with Borstal, and when I did finally tell someone, he did nothing about it, because he was involved with teenage girls at the home himself.’

  One of the original charges against Prescott – again dropped because of the loss of video evidence – also alleged that he indecently assaulted a boy who went to him for help against another abuser.

  It wasn’t until I read this article that I found out that Auntie Coral and that friend of hers had not been the only female abusers at St Leonard’s, but that the situation had been awful in Myrtle Cottage, just opposite my cottage, too. That meant that my mate Liam, and many of the other kids in Myrtle Cottage, had been suffering untold horrors all the time I was at St Leonard’s:

  At first, the abuse came from a perhaps unexpected quarter – his house mother, who died before police began investigating in 1995 and so evaded prosecution. ‘It was almost instantaneous,’ says Carroll. ‘It started with her fondling us, and she was very persistent – waking us in the night and touching our genitals under the ruse of putting us on the potty.

  ‘She would do it to the girls as well as the boys, and she picked on the most vulnerable. We were so young that any affection seemed better than no affection. There was a sense that it was better to be touched than not touched at all.’

  The article goes on to describe the dreadful abuses that Seamus suffered, and the absolute failure of the authorities to do anything whatsoever to help him. It also describes some of the dreadful things that happened in Wallis Cottage, where I lived:

  And, all the time, the abuse was being secretly meted out elsewhere – at Wallis Cottage, opposite Myrtle, where Starling would bribe his female victims with money and cigarettes for sex and brutally rape the boys while telling them no one would believe the tales of such ‘problem children’. Prescott, as head of St Leonard’s, had the power to root out the abuse but instead did nothing.

  Seamus also described the absolute power that the house parents all had over the cottages in which they worked, and the extremely unhealthy atmosphere that reigned:

  Carroll says: ‘We were all suffering, but suffering alone because each house was a world unto itself. We lived in an atmosphere in which we were just like meat. When I searched for my files, I kept seeing notes like ‘he’s a pretty child’ or ‘he’s an ugly child’.

  Worst of all, the article revealed exactly what had happened to Seamus’s younger brother, Liam, and to the rest of his family when they grew up and left home:

  Carroll says that the legacy of such an upbringing has ‘devastated’ his family. One brother [Liam] flung himself in front of a high-speed train two years ago after being haunted for five years by rape flashbacks.

  After the court case, my brother Declan and I got in touch to talk things over. He had been contacted as well and had also been asked to give a statement. We agreed to meet up and go and read our files together, a decision that had also been taken by many of the other former residents of St Leonard’s. The files of all the kids who had grown up in St Leonard’s had been made available at a special centre in East London, in a large room with social workers and counsellors standing by, in case anyone got upset or out of hand.

  Whatever reaction they were expecting, I doubt the social workers anticipated the gales of laughter that came from Declan and myself. My file was enormous, because I had been in care from the age of two weeks right up to early adulthood. Declan’s wasn’t quite as big as mine, but it was still fairly substantial.

  I laughed so hard reading my file that I had to sit down. By now, I knew that Bill Starling was serving time for what he had done and Alan Prescott had also served a little time. Knowing that the reports had been written by convicted paedophiles gave them a sort of black humour that just reduced me to tears of laughter.

  ‘Paul is a very small child,’ my file read. ‘He has a bad temper and has trouble controlling himself. He is a violent boy who is expected to continue to have problems as he grows up.’

  It was hilarious! I was very small, and the reason why was that I was malnourished. We all were, because the money for our food was routinely stolen.

  Funniest of all was a note in Coral’s hand: ‘Paul will be in prison by the time he is 18.’

  Well, I fucking wasn’t, was I?

  Then again, neither was she.

  When I learned that Prescott was already due to get out, I was furious. How the fuck could that even be possible? The ironic thing is that, to me, Coral was probably the worst of any of them, because she could get into your head and your thoughts and tell you what a piece of shit you were until you had completely internalised this notion and believed it. She was pure evil and I will never understand her motivation. I can only hope that she dies a bitter, lonely death when her time comes.

  After the criminal case, a civil case, in the form of a group action, was taken by all the children who had been damaged in the course of their childhoods at St Leonard’s. Before the civil case, all the victims of the St Leonard’s case were sent to a posh hotel in the West End of London to be interviewed by a psychologist for the class action against London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Our state of mind had to be assessed in order to determine damages.

  When the civil case was settled out of court, the most any of the plaintiffs got for the dreadful childhoods they had endured was £25,000, which went to the families of the kids who had died. Most of them had still been very young, in their late teens and early twenties when they died. That is how much the court decided their lives were worth. I got £18,000 in total for my stolen childhood. You can get more sticking your leg in a door or tripping over a pothole in the bloody street. It is insulting.

  After the case hit the newspapers, the residents of the fancy estate that had once been St Leonard’s found out that some of the roads they lived on had been named after paedophiles. The residents were not impressed, and Havering Council had to rename all the streets. For them, I would assume that this was the end of the story. For the other former residents of St Leonard’s children’s home – the ones who were still alive – I can only hope that the case and the small amount of money that was provided offered some closure.

  Now that I knew just how bad things had been for the other children in the home – so bad that most of my ‘brothers’ were already dead – it just did not make any sense to me that the people who had committed the abuses were out going through the motions of normal lives, while their victims lay in their graves. I started to think about what I could do to try to even the score. I thought about it long and hard.

  12

  THE CLOSE CALL

  I had spent a lifetime trying to forget my past. I had spent twenty years trying not to be the scared little runt who had grown up in St Leonard’s. I had always insisted on standing up to bullies and fighting my own corner.

  Now my past was all back with a vengeance. Far from feeling relieved that Bill Starling was doing some time for his crimes, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that had gone on in St Leonard’s, those I had seen and those I had only learned about recently. I f
elt guilty and ashamed that I hadn’t known everything as a young boy and that I hadn’t done enough to stop the abuse from happening. I felt bad because here I was, not just surviving but thriving and doing well while so many of the others had already gone to their graves.

  Thankfully, I had started having therapy with a man called Terence Watts not that long before the case. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this book now. I would be dead, too. Dead or in prison. Or, most likely, dead in prison.

  Terence Watts really helped me. He asked me questions that were probably textbook stuff, but that I found very useful.

  ‘When you were being abused and you were a child, was it your fault?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’ I found it difficult to listen to questions like that, but I stuck it out because I knew that I needed help to cope with the emotions that were bombarding me from all sides, threatening to overwhelm me and take over my life completely.

  ‘Well, you are an adult now, aren’t you? Go back as an adult to you as a child. What would you want to do with that child?’

  ‘Well, I would want to protect him, wouldn’t I? I would want to take care of him. He’s just a little kid…’

  ‘Right. So have you been mistaken in blaming yourself for what happened to you and for how you reacted? You didn’t do anything wrong, and yet you are blaming yourself.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Terence helped me a lot with the task of vocalising my feelings. But I couldn’t shake off the awful feeling of guilt that I had survived and even made a good life for myself when so many of the others had died, and in such dreadful ways. I felt that I had to find a practical solution to how I was feeling; one that didn’t have very much to do with the gentle atmosphere of the therapist’s office.

  As soon as the air cleared after the case, I made a plan. I paced around my house until it came to me. I had always felt safe there, or at least as safe as I ever did, but now I felt hemmed in, unhappy, desperate and angry. I felt sure that I needed to do something drastic, something serious.

  Quickly, the solution to these feelings came to me. I was going to kill Auntie Coral – Bill was in prison and unavailable for the present but with any luck I would be able to deal with him later – Alan Prescott and the others. I was going to kill them all for the sake of the many children whose lives they had destroyed. I was going to wipe them out. I didn’t think many people would cry after they had gone. I knew that they deserved to die, and I also knew that I had both the means and the ability to give them what they had coming to them.

  That very day, I called up some old acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to in quite a while and arranged to get a gun. It didn’t take long to organise; it never does, if you know who to call. My weapon was top of the range and I knew how to use it. It was a classic; a Browning, with a clip with ten bullets in the bottom and one shot in the barrel. Brownings are easy to load and eleven shots should have been enough to take out the people I was planning to kill. I had been told by people who know that a Browning would be the best for the job because they are easy to use, reliable and clean. They don’t make a mess, and they do the job they are made to do effectively and well. I had no interest in hurting my intended victims or making them suffer. I just wanted them to cease to exist.

  Unbelievable as it seems, Alan Prescott was still working for Tower Hamlets so it wasn’t that hard to find him. I watched him for about a week. I watched Coral for three full days. It was hard to believe that, all this time, she had been living just a few miles away from me. It was astonishing that our paths had never crossed.

  I approached my task with all the professionalism and sobriety of a big-game hunter. I needed to understand my prey; how they thought, moved, behaved. Where they went and what they did. This was a very important job, and there was no way I was going to let myself fuck it up. They all did the same things over and over again. I developed a plan to assassinate them all in the course of a single day so as to minimise the risk of getting caught before I had time to take them all out. It was very difficult watching them covertly without doing anything. I was so angry that I could have torn them apart with my bare hands and a big part of me wanted to see the horrified shock on their faces when they realised that the man who was killing them was none other than one of the children whose lives they had made so very miserable. In fact, nothing would have given me greater pleasure – but the Browning was more of a sure method and I didn’t want to leave any room for doubt or failure.

  The funny thing was how very ordinary they all looked after all these years. Auntie Coral was just an elderly lady with wattles and too-bright lipstick on her wrinkled lips. Even Alan Prescott was just a pathetic, small, fat old man. Bill was in jail, but his picture was splashed all over the local newspapers. I had remembered Bill Starling as a big, aggressive man who had dominated any room he walked into, but now he was a pathetic little old creature. The sort of little old man you would pass on the street without giving a second thought to. They all looked weak, frail, vulnerable and devastatingly ordinary and seemed to be shadows of the terrifying creatures who had dominated my childhood. How could these less than ordinary people have obliterated the hope of so many children and led to so many untimely deaths?

  I made sure that none of them ever saw me, although I am sure that they wouldn’t have recognised me if they had. I imagined their deaths over and over again until I could practically taste the blood spatters when I licked my lips in satisfaction after the bullet went in and they keeled over. I had killed them in my head on countless occasions as a child and now, finally, my dreams were about to come true. I just knew that I had to accomplish my goal in the course of a single day, because, if I was apprehended after killing just one, the rest would go free. The challenge was that Auntie Coral was in Essex while the rest were in London. I decided that I would do Prescott first, then Auntie Coral. Bill would have to wait as he was in prison. If I managed not to get caught, I would have something special in store for him when he finally got out. They would be clean, execution-style killings, just one in the back of the head. They would not suffer, much as they deserved to. It would be easier this way.

  I told my therapist what I was planning. His reaction was interesting. He provoked me. He said, ‘Well, fine, do it. They deserve it, don’t they? But think about what killing them will do to you.’

  ‘I don’t fucking care what happens,’ I said. ‘At least I will have avenged Liam and all the rest of them. At least I will have brought death to people who deserve it. If I manage to take them out, it means that my life is worth something and that I have done something to help make things right.’

  ‘So you want to go to prison at thirty-six and spend the rest of your life there? Because that is what is going to happen if you do go through with this plan.’

  ‘If that’s what it takes, yeah. If that is what I have to do, then I will do it.’

  Terence advised me to watch a film called Sleepers. The story line is very similar to mine: a bunch of guys who had been abused as children kill their abuser and get away with it, but their lives are destroyed because they succumbed to the temptation to commit violence and became as bad as the man who had hurt them in the first place.

  Terence’s message to me was: ‘If you bury them, you are burying yourself as well.’ He told me that I could win by not letting Bill Starling, Coral and the other abusers beat me, and by not letting myself succumb to the urge to kill them. I could win by going on to live my life successfully and well and by being the better man that Auntie Coral had always told me I could never be. He said that by being happy and breaking the loop I could avenge the deaths of Liam and the others in a way that no killing could ever do and that that would be the best revenge I could take on Starling and the rest of them.

  They will never know how close they came to going down in a blaze of gunfire. I went right up to the verge, and stood there for a long time, looking into the abyss. I had followed them for a week with my gun, ready at any moment t
o take them out.

  Back at the house, I sat and looked at the gun. I felt deflated and ashamed. What if Terence was wrong? What if it would really make much more sense to kill them while I had the chance? For a black moment, I thought that maybe it would be for the best if I died instead of them, and joined the rest of the boys from St Leonard’s. I took my Browning and shoved it deep into my mouth until the barrel of the gun tore at the delicate tissue of my palate. I could taste the gun metal mingling with my own blood as I almost gagged. I knew that oblivion could be just a second away and that I wouldn’t have to feel anything. All I needed to do was pull the trigger, and then all my self-doubt, blame and recriminations would be gone, gone forever.

  But, thankfully, I could still hear the voice of Terence telling me that the only way I could really defeat them was to go on and be the better man they had always told me I couldn’t be.

  I took the gun out of my mouth and looked at it. The Browning is an elegant piece of machinery, but now it looked dark and hideous in my grasp. My hand was trembling. The gun was dark grey and ugly and with a shudder I realised how close I had come to doing something awful. I drove into London – dangerously, because it was hard to see the road through the tears that fell thick and fast from my eyes – and threw the gun into the silent Thames, because I knew that if I kept it I would use it, on myself if not on them. It splashed once and then sank into the dark water along with my plans to avenge the deaths of the children I had grown up with.