In response to being asked, ‘That in your view, I take it, was a pretty serious failing?’ DCS Baggs replied, ‘It was in retrospect a serious failing, yes. It is a failing that had very severe knock-on consequences, yes.’
Unbelievable. A total cock-up was responsible for the fact that Huntley was not correctly vetted for his caretaker’s job.
It was alleged that in August 1995 Huntley had a 13-year-old boy and the boy’s 15-year-old sister living with him in Grimsby. The girl’s father claimed to the police that Huntley had been having unlawful sexual intercourse with the girl, which she appears to have informally confirmed. This resulted in Huntley admitting everything to PC Teasdale under caution when interviewed at his home. Huntley signed the interview statement, and his exact words were: ‘If her parents were OK about it, it was not an offence.’ Why wasn’t Huntley charged?
Which leads me back to the Bichard Inquiry and the questioning of DCS Baggs on 3 March 2004 over this matter.
This is what DCS Baggs said about why Huntley was not charged or even cautioned over the matter of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor in August 1995: ‘The test that is applied in terms of whether or not someone should be cautioned for any offence is initially the sufficiency of evidence test, as has been alluded to. The sufficiency of evidence test is based on whether or not there is sufficient evidence for there to be a likelihood of a successful prosecution. In considering this particular crime, at the time that Mr Billam made his decision, it is my view – and of course this might not be the same view as everyone else – but it is my view that there was not sufficient evidence to make it likely that there could be a successful prosecution because there was no signed statement from the victim in this case. The evidence in the Officer’s notebook was hearsay evidence and could not have been introduced into a court case, as I understand it, so we are left with a situation where the only evidence that is in a suitable format for introduction in a potential court case is the confession evidence in the interview record which Huntley had himself signed. So it is my opinion – and I have in the past been the head of the Admin and Justice Unit where these policies are set – it is my opinion that there was insufficient evidence as it stood at that time to properly authorise a caution.’
To the credit of the Bichard team, I should add that one of them said to DCS Baggs, ‘I am grateful for that. You are aware, of course, that others within the force and HMIC take a potentially different view in relation to incident 1 and the appropriateness or otherwise of issuing a caution?’
DCS Baggs answered, ‘I am aware of that. Certainly within the force, at the time of the chronology document being put together, there were divided opinions. I think that, within the force now, those divided opinions are much more reconciled along the view that I have just expressed. I am aware that the HMIC also takes a different view. Perhaps I could just take it one stage further. Although at the moment, at the time when Mr Billam made his decision, it is certainly my opinion that there was insufficient evidence to justify an appropriate caution, it is possible – and we will never know now, I expect – but it is possible that by doing some further work we could have reached a situation where a caution could have been justified because, although the complainant in that case had expressed a view that there should be no action taken against her boyfriend, it does appear to me, at least, that she was not being obstructive insofar as she has actually given a verbal account and signed the pocket book. Whether she would have been prepared to go that one stage further and sign the written statement, I do not know, but it is possible that with some more work we could have reached that situation where a caution would have been appropriate.’
Had Huntley received a police caution, he would have been more detectable in future searches on the police’s criminal intelligence database. Personally, I am less than happy at what I have learned about police incompetence in this matter.
In response to DCS Baggs’s answer just quoted, a further question was put to him at the Bichard Inquiry: ‘In your view, with the benefit of hindsight, is that work that you think should desirably have been taken?’
DCS Baggs replied, ‘I do not know exactly what Mr Billam was presented with and he made a decision on all of the facts before him at the time, and maybe he had information before him that I am not in possession of.’
A follow-up question was put to DCS Baggs: ‘Thank you. Let us go to contact three, the incident number 3, which is the second of the unlawful sexual intercourse allegations that appears to have come to the attention of the police on 22 May 1996. Again, I want to concentrate on the record-keeping and creation so far as this is concerned. You have already expressed the view that it would have been desirable and helpful to have created a record on CIS Nominals in relation to incident 1. Does it follow that the substance of your answer is the same in relation to this incident, namely that although you say in 12.1: “With the information obtained from the original police officers … [Reading to the words] … in relation to this contract”, and so on, your view is that a record should have been made on CIS Nominals in relation to this incident also? Paragraph 12, 0070 0086.’
DCS Baggs: ‘I am just trying to remind myself of the full details of contact. It is contact three we are referring to, is it not?’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘It is. You will see in 12.1 how you deal with it. You do not express a view one way or the other. In relation to the earlier incident you had said you would not have expected it and it was not normal practice but that matter does not…’
DCS Baggs: ‘No, I remained silent on this one.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘Sorry, at 14.1 you say “would not be expected”. If you want to have a look at that as well, 14.1?’
DCS Baggs: ‘Yes. I say it will not be expected in this case because we did not actually get involved in the investigation at all and the decision was made by Mr Billam again to leave this matter with the Social Services, so on that basis I would not expect anyone within my organisation to submit that intelligence for entry on our criminal-intelligence system.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘The fact of the allegation though, in retrospect, surely, would have been information which it was important to recall? It was information about an allegation of the sort of offence in relation to which he had already made a confession nine months earlier. He had been given the sternest warning. Even though he had not been formally cautioned, he knew the form in relation to having sex with underage girls and here he was alleged to have done it again.’
DCS Baggs: ‘Yes.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘It would surely have been helpful to have had some record, if only of the allegation, and with whatever specific reliability grade you chose to put on it, but some record surely would have been helpful in relation to incident 3?’
DCS Baggs: ‘Again, clearly with the benefit of hindsight then some record would have been very helpful, but at the time – and in this document I have tried to comment on what people did at the time and whether it was appropriate or not – and at that time, of course, as far as we could tell, there was no recognition of a previous incident because there was no URN, no record from the previous contact created.’
Follow-up question to DCS Baggs: ‘But it was no record, was it not? You started saying “No URN”, and corrected yourself rightly, because there was no record on CIS Nominals?’
DCS Baggs: ‘That is quite right, yes.’
When I look at all these failings and how Huntley was able to get a job working in a Cambridgeshire school with children after having been investigated over my allegation and further allegations, I am filled with disbelief. From the onset of the Soham investigation, it took the police nearly two weeks to become aware of the previous sexual allegations against Ian Huntley. Also, early on during the investigation, his story was not even checked out as regards his whereabouts.
But this can lead on to things such as when I made the complaint to the police. I have said to this d
ay that it was always questioned that when it came out they said they were going to get a special unit in from the police department, a lady that would come and chat with me. After all this, I thought, Thank God I am speaking to a woman or girl or whatever, and then this man rolled up and he just sat there with his notebook.
In 2004, when the investigation into my allegation was brought to light again, in tears I said to the lady, ‘What happens if I’m not believed?’
She asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because,’ I said, ‘I can’t remember whether I told this copper that was interviewing me or taking notes, whether he [Huntley] had inserted his fingers into me or not, because I can remember feeling embarrassed with him being a man.’
After the attack was reported to the police, to some of my family members I was the biggest whore walking. But, if that was the case, I was a dead whore walking. My soul had become pickled and lost. I endured quite a bit of spitefulness, and I don’t know why. This isn’t just about Huntley, it is about the whole lot of them. All are as bad as each other. I was goaded by my brothers and even branded a cow and similar names. I saw myself as worthless and saw no way out of the mess in which I had become embedded.
Really, though, there was only one person that was able to lift me from my quagmire of misery. Nobody could make me feel the love of mankind as much as my granddad could. Forget therapists and child psychologists. What happened to the old shoulder to cry on? People have grown apart and modern living has killed off the old-style doorstep counselling.
Thinking back to when I was about 14, I don’t know if Granddad knew about Huntley’s attack on me. Maybe Mum told him in confidence and, if she did, he never let on. I feel, in retrospect, that he could have changed something but then sometimes I’m glad that he didn’t know because it would have broken his heart knowing that somebody had done that to me.
Anyway, returning to how things have gone wrong in terms of law and order: murders, stabbings, shootings, drinking, drugging, raping, mugging. Ideally, you are brought up to learn how to respect people and their possessions and to respect and look after your own. People who are doing those bad things have not learned respect for others or themselves. They have not been mentored or shown the right way. I know that if I kicked someone’s car window in I would get a fine. But these people aren’t getting the right message.
By this, I mean the justice system in this country stinks. I think they would rather punish the innocent and let the guilty just go away and carry on. I am able to say that after what has happened to me, and my experience has brought the issue to the fore for me. More understanding is given to the criminal than the victim.
Criminals should be made to pay for their crimes and made to show respect to their victim. But instead, the way the justice system works now, I think the people whose job it is to punish crime are too worried about people like Ian Huntley; they are too worried about his rights and his needs. The European Court protects that bastard’s rights. Who protects mine?
He has committed a crime and he is in prison, where nobody from outside can get to him. Now if somebody from outside wanted to stab him, they wouldn’t get the chance because they can’t get close enough to him. Others behind bars can get him, but with every attack that is made on him – whether it’s hot water thrown over him or whatever – he will sue the Prison Service and come up smelling of roses as well as receiving a big payout.
But what’s to stop that sort of attack from happening to me? Who is there to protect me if anything like that happens? I know things will happen to Huntley in prison, but I would not like to see him murdered, as that is too good for him. Leave him to suffer behind bars as I am suffering, in a prison of his making. Let us see who lasts the longest. Maybe I could sue him for the money he will win from being attacked. There’s poetic justice for you.
Huntley and other supermonsters, like Ian Brady, make me feel sick. These criminals are mentally flawed by a weakness that controls them and they will never be cured, no matter how much therapy, medication or shock treatment they get. I have looked into the eyes of Huntley and survived. I know what makes him tick.
I can also say that, if Huntley had been prosecuted over one of the sexual allegations but not sent to prison, or if he had just been put on file or on the Sex Offenders’ Register, he would never have got that job in that school, as he would have been more closely monitored and probably would not have had that opportunity to kill. Even so, I do believe that, given the chance, Huntley would have killed or tried to kill in order to silence his victim – it was only a matter of when – but it may not have been a double killing.
In a nutshell, Huntley was born evil. Obviously, that’s easy for me to say, but I do think about society and, if he had been punished for a crime that he did to me nine years ago, would he have gone on to murder Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in 2002? There are people who are inherently evil and no amount of badgering and cajoling, or respect or education, by society does any good when they are determined to commit evil acts.
My task now is to prevent Huntley from ever being unleashed on society again. If ever he is released, he will still be an evil person; he will still have the same evil within him in 40 years’ time as he had when he assaulted me. His evilness was there from day one. His soul and his whole character are evil. But I do believe that his childhood played a major part in what he has become. I think that when he was a child he was never given any control, no say in what happened in his life. That is why I think he is now such a control freak, crazed by power.
In his mind he made me into his possession. He wanted to control me, like the others in his life, like turning a tap on and off. But, in the end, he just couldn’t stop his own dark heart doing what it wanted and going even further in this quest for power over others.
In addition to my aim to see this murderer stay locked up, I’m still determined that lessons should be learned by those who made massive blunders in the Huntley case. What really angers me is that the police logged the allegation I made against Huntley as ‘stranger abuse’. I only found this out near the end of 2005. Can you imagine how I feel now at the failings of those in power? This terminology, ‘stranger abuse’, even if in police terms technically accurate to distinguish from an attack by a family member, for example, seemed to me to be completely misplaced in my case. Huntley was known to me, known for some time. The damning North East Lincolnshire Area Child Protection Committee Report into Ian Huntley (for the period 1995 to 2001), headed by Sir Christopher Kelly, suggests that I might have been at further risk of harm from Huntley. Too right. For years I lived in fear that he would come crashing through my window and murder me. Even now, I awake with a start at the slightest unfamiliar noise.
The 2004 report also noted ‘the apparently very hands-off approach taken by social services to what was obviously a very troubled time for MN [me] after the assault’.
Earlier that year the Bichard Inquiry, conducted by Sir Michael Bichard, was also highly critical of the investigation into Huntley’s previous allegations and suggested that the intelligence system of the Humberside Police, which dealt with some of the cases, was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and that the force’s child-protection database was ‘largely worthless’.
The then Chief Constable of the Humberside Police, David Westwood, has much to answer for in the systems failure, which allegedly ‘failed to identify Ian Huntley as a danger’.
I just wish those that I told about Huntley had said that they believed me and taken a more proactive approach. I can’t get rid of this bitterness within me. Why am I left feeling that my allegation could have been dealt with more thoroughly and sensitively? I wish with all my heart that the police had prosecuted on the basis of my complaint and those of the other girls allegedly assaulted by Ian Huntley.
What also infuriates me is how, in one of the reports after Soham, the 15-year-old-girls Huntley had sex with were referred to as ‘young women’, as if, somehow, their maturity being exaggerated in this way wou
ld make them look less vulnerable and so make the offence seem less than it was. In the eyes of the law they were minors: girls, not young women.
Huntley’s pattern of behaviour deviated from his predatory, exploitative relationships with girls in their mid-teens when he carried out that brutal sex attack against me. I was supposedly the first much younger girl that he sexually assaulted. But had he carried out this sort of attack on other girls of my age and younger before he did what he did to me?
The dark cloud of paedophilia that has stalked the Soham case has revealed how easy it was for Huntley to work with children. While the police and the government were at war over who was to blame for the shocking situation in which information about Huntley’s history of sex allegations was not included in any of his police files, parents mourned the loss of their loved ones.
When I learned of another gigantic blunder made by the Humberside Police – PC Michel Harding recorded allegations that Huntley was a serial sex attacker and on the basis of these allegations added that he was ‘likely to continue his activities’; this was put on the force’s computer in 1999 by a police officer and wiped off in 2000 – I thought, Clever or what? What a bunch of incompetents!
A leaked report prepared by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary revealed a catalogue of incompetence surrounding the Police National Computer. It was taking many forces almost two months to enter details of convictions and arrests on the system: something that should have taken just a week.
This damning document also underlined the ease with which another Huntley could slip through the net! It said, ‘There is the potential for known offenders or those suspected of serious offending to be overlooked during the Criminal Review Bureau checks.’ This situation left the way open for newly convicted paedophiles to apply for jobs knowing that they were safe from being discovered and so put them in a position to strike undetected, although this flawed system was due to change in 2005. To date, I am unsure whether it has changed or not.
Hailey's Story--She Was an Eleven-Year-Old Child. He Was Soham Murderer Ian Huntley. This is the Story of How She Survived Page 10