In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  On 25 November, he phoned Meirion Jones to say that he had got what they were looking for: he had received off-the-record confirmation that Surrey Police did investigate Jimmy Savile about sexual abuse of minors, and girls from Duncroft were interviewed as part of their inquiry.

  In the rough early drafts of the script, Williams-Thomas’s expert testimony to camera was seen as an essential component of the package. ‘He’s absolutely key to “Is this man a paedophile or not? Is he behaving like other paedophiles?”’ said Jones.5 There were also discussions about Williams-Thomas appearing in the Newsnight studio to offer his analysis immediately after the film was shown. It proved to be the closest Newsnight got to getting its investigation to air. Williams-Thomas was never interviewed.

  When it became clear to Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean that the Jimmy Savile story was dead in the water, they agreed to let Williams-Thomas take it on.

  ‘I went to the ITV lawyer and I went to the exec producers and the commissioner and we all had a meeting,’ he recalls. ‘We started to talk about it and I said, “Look, this is still early stages. There is clearly something there, but I don’t know what it is yet …” An awful lot of people were making a lot about a letter from Surrey Police [but] right from the very beginning I said this letter was a red herring. The story was Savile is an abuser, not whether or not the authorities failed in their process.’

  There was no formal commission but ITV’s Factual and Current Affairs creative director, Alex Gardiner, supplied funding to develop the programme.6 ‘It is fair to say there was nervousness,’ says Williams-Thomas of ITV’s attitude. ‘You know, this was a big broadcaster and they were very conscious how that could be perceived. But I also have to say there wasn’t a single person … that didn’t feel that we needed to do something.’

  He teamed up with Lesley Gardiner, an experienced producer, and from the outset it was agreed that ‘Project DJ’ would be conducted in utmost secrecy. ‘I ran it as though it was a criminal investigation,’ says Williams-Thomas, ‘and on the basis that I didn’t want anyone else to know what was going on.’7 The other clear policy agreed on at the outset was any victims who were filmed or interviewed would appear in the final programme.

  While the starting point was Duncroft and some of the evidence already unearthed by the Newsnight investigation and online, Williams-Thomas says he was conscious of the need to broaden the search. ‘If it was Duncroft alone we’d never have been able to make the programme. [The Duncroft girls] were the most vulnerable in society and as a result of that, they’re the most preyed on. We’ve seen that with the Rochdale case [a group of men convicted in 2012 of sex trafficking of under-age girls]; people don’t believe them, they don’t listen to them and, of course, as a result of that they’re rich pickings. We had to weigh that up with the reality of the public’s perspective … So in order to have their stories told, we had to support them by going elsewhere.’

  Newsnight’s deputy editor Liz Gibbons had assumed Mark Williams-Thomas was the source of the leak that led to the February 2012 newspaper stories,8 a charge he categorically denies. He argues it was not in his interest, given he was by now conducting a top secret investigation himself. Whatever the truth, the stories worked in his favour because they prompted Sue Thompson, a newsroom assistant at BBC Leeds in the 1970s, to make contact with Newsnight.

  In her email, Thompson explained she had occasionally worked on a regional television programme called Jimmy Savile’s Yorkshire Speakeasy. In 1978, she ‘inadvertently walked into [Savile’s] dressing room’ and witnessed Savile molesting ‘a young girl perhaps 13 or 14 years old’. She then gave a particularly sickening detail about the girl that cannot be revealed as it could help to identify her.

  ‘I have never mentioned this to anyone before,’ Thompson signed off, ‘but felt compelled to write of my experience after reading the [newspaper] article.’9

  Jones forwarded the information to Williams-Thomas, although he suspected someone would beat him to the story.

  Eight months later, Sue Thompson became the first witness to speak on camera in the ITV Exposure documentary that decimated the ramparts of Jimmy Savile’s mythology.

  *

  When asked whether ITV set any editorial bars that needed to be cleared for his film to make it to air, Williams-Thomas insists it did not. ‘We set our own bar in terms of how many victims we needed in order to tell the story,’ he says. ‘We were constantly juggling it in terms of, is four enough? Is five enough? Six? Seven? But what we were also very clear on is that actually we needed to give them enough time to tell their stories in 49 minutes.’

  Working closely with Gardiner, Williams-Thomas began widening the net. The key to finding victims, he explains, was to delve into the places Jimmy Savile had worked. ‘Once we looked at Duncroft and that was basically finished … we focused on Leeds, we looked at Manchester, the Top Ten Club, the Mecca discos, and then Top of the Pops and Clunk Click … We started to try to get into those networks and groups of people. The focus was his routes and access to children.’

  He recalls the first interview as being a pivotal moment and maintains he approached it with the same mindset as when quizzing a key witness as a police officer. ‘I am very careful when I interview people,’ he says. ‘I use a whole range of techniques to see whether or not what they are telling me is truthful. I have to say that I came away the first time with the strong feeling that there was more to it. It was a gut feeling.’

  Over the following months, they scoured the country for witnesses and victims. Those they found were spoken to on the phone or in person. Williams-Thomas says he was in direct contact with around twenty victims, most of whom refused to go on the record. His experience in this particular field of police work, however, taught him that he needed to give these women the space to make up their own minds. Of those who were prepared to talk, some were given guarantees their identities would be concealed.

  What Williams-Thomas discovered in the course of his research was that victims and witnesses still felt a ‘genuine fear’ about coming forward due to Jimmy Savile’s connections. ‘[It was] a contributing factor to why they had remained silent for so long,’ he insists. ‘It is why it was such a difficult process to slowly coax these people, to give them the confidence that we [would] do them justice.’ After the experience of the failed police investigation and then the canned Newsnight report, he says, many within the Duncroft community remained deeply sceptical.

  Gradually, though, a pattern began to emerge, one that Williams-Thomas recognised from his work in child protection. ‘[Savile] is classic in regards to a predatory sex offender who has the access and opportunity to offend,’ he argues. ‘Those are the two fundamental areas. Had he not had the access and opportunity to offend, he may not have offended to the degree that he did. But this is a man whose life [was] dedicated to doing things around and for children and as a result his predilection for children was fulfilled every time.’

  He also found a compelling degree of consistency in the way Jimmy Savile approached girls and then inflicted his abuse. ‘I have to say I believe the allegations,’ he told me in late September 2012, a couple of days before the Exposure documentary aired on ITV. ‘You can dismiss one, you can dismiss two but when you start to build them up and the way they talk about the offences against them … and the fact they don’t know each other, it gives huge credibility to their accounts.’

  From the twenty victim accounts, it was decided to film interviews with five women: two from Duncroft, one who was abused at Stoke Mandeville and two at Top of the Pops. The latter proved to be a turning point for Williams-Thomas, who recalls one particular interview on a Friday evening.

  ‘Savile’s offending behaviour before that was horrendous,’ he says, ‘but it didn’t get to the level whereby I started to understand him as an offender. Up until that stage he was more distant … But when [one of the Top of the Pops victims] talked about the force that he used, the power that he used, the viole
nce that he used, the coercion that he used, that for me was the point when I [concluded], “This is a really nasty offender, and this guy has offended against an awful lot of people.”’

  One of the women from Top of the Pops revealed Jimmy Savile had raped her in his motor caravan outside BBC Television Centre. The other said he had sex with her on a number of occasions in his BBC dressing room. She was 15 years old at the time.

  ‘There were different groups,’ Williams-Thomas says of the witnesses and victims from Top of the Pops. ‘Some of them knew each other because they might have occasionally bumped into each other through Savile, but they were a bit distant from each other. We needed independence; we needed to separate Duncroft from Stoke Mandeville from Top of the Pops. It got to the position whereby the more independence we had, the stronger the individual allegations from the victims and witnesses were,’ he explains.

  Williams-Thomas is convinced Jimmy Savile was protected by his celebrity status. ‘He was untouchable in the era in which these things happened, and because of that he gained greater and greater confidence. The reality is that if you do something wrong in front of somebody and you know that you won’t get picked up for it, you’ll do it again and again. Nobody ever picked him up, from what we found out, and therefore he grew in confidence and arrogance. [He thought] If nobody is going to report me or stop me from doing it, I will just carry on.’

  Despite the progress they’d made with ‘Project DJ’, both Williams-Thomas and Gardiner remained acutely aware of the possibility the investigation could blow up in their faces, and the public could turn against them and ITV for sullying the reputation of a national hero. They were ‘taking on an icon’. ‘I said to Lesley, this is going to be the hardest project we’ve ever done but I also said if we get it right, it has the ability make a big difference.’

  The next key step was to validate victim testimonies. ‘We went into individuals’ backgrounds,’ Williams-Thomas says, ‘and substantiated [evidence] to such a degree that we validated them far, far beyond any police investigation would do; to the degree whereby we would date things through photographs, looking at bricks on walls, things in the background.’

  It was just as well because while ITV remained supportive, News Director Michael Jermey advised the film would only proceed to broadcast if the evidence could be used if Savile were still alive.10

  PART THREE

  23. NOSTALGIC MEMORIES

  Jimmy Savile’s last will and testament was in probate when Georgina Ray’s lawyers contacted the executors of his estate. They said their client would be taking a DNA test in an attempt to prove she was his daughter. If conclusive, it would pave the way for a possible claim under the Inheritance Act of 1975. As the only child of the late Jimmy Savile, albeit a father she never met, Georgina Ray could make the argument that she was entitled to the entire estate.

  Jimmy Savile was worth £7.8 million at the time of his death. He had £4.3 million in his bank accounts, a £2.5 million property portfolio made up of flats in London, Leeds, Scarborough and Bournemouth, plus a cottage in Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands. He was also estimated to have a further £1 million in assets.

  Other than the £600,000 he placed in a trust to be shared among six people, and the £18,000 to be divided equally between a further eighteen friends, he made provision for all of the proceeds from his estate to go into the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust, which was set up to help ‘poorly people in hospital beds’. The trust showed a balance of £3.6 million, soon to be increased by the proceeds from an auction of all his remaining belongings.

  In late June 2012, details about the auction of his belongings were released. The sale comprised 550 lots; a museum of Jimmy Savile’s life, one that he had diligently curated and stored over the course of 84 years. His flats were packed with curios, mementos and tat; on the last occasion I stayed with him in Leeds I had almost been buried under an avalanche of platform-soled boots and colourful outfits when opening a cupboard in his spare room.

  The sale was set for late July and was to be held at Savile’s Hall in Leeds, a conference and exhibition centre at the Royal Armouries Museum that had been renamed in his honour in 2007. Standout items from the sale were put on display at Dreweatts auctioneers in London before transferring to Leeds. They included his red chair from Jim’ll Fix It; the yellow BMW Isetta bubble car he bought himself while appearing at the Top Ten Club in Manchester in 1965 (and once used to collect the Duke of Edinburgh from Aylesbury Railway Station); his 18-carat gold and diamond encrusted Rolex Oyster watch; his 9-carat gold bracelet featuring 55 brilliant-cut diamonds; and his 6.7 litre silver Rolls-Royce Corniche, one of a limited edition of 56 ‘last of line’ Corniches built at the company’s plant in Crewe.

  But beyond headline-friendly lots such as these, the sheer size and scope of the sale spoke of his extraordinary need to be surrounded by the inanimate articles of his legend. This is what he’d talked about: the things that don’t live. The hundreds of items represented so many bricks in the wall.

  The auction of these 500 and more items was a final chance for Jimmy Savile to burnish his myth, and Georgina Ray was anathema to everything the collection represented. As the doors of Savile’s Hall opened onto the museum of his life and times, there was no place for a 41-year-old, blonde divorcée from Cannock. DNA analysis on cigar butts, a hairbrush and bedding from the flats in Leeds and Scarborough had failed to produce samples that matched her own.1 Ray was said to be ‘crestfallen’ and her solicitor Richard Egan responded by highlighting his ‘serious misgivings’ about ‘anomalies and inconsistencies’, including the fact analysts had not been able to find a single strand of Savile’s bleached blond hair on the hairbrush.2

  For Georgina Ray, the auction might have been the closest she ever came to gaining an understanding of the man she believed to be her father. For there, among the shell suits, the vests, running shorts and medals, the endless boxes of cigars, the jewellery and the Disc Jockey of the Year awards, were more revealing artefacts from a life still being celebrated, by the wider public at least, as one of giving, goodness and grace.

  An Oscar Egg lightweight 10-gear racing cycle with turquoise frame, leather saddle and his original ‘Express Tour of Britain’ entry tag, along with his original rider number, 48, from the race; a deerstalker hat with accompanying black and white photograph of Oscar ‘The Duke’ Savile during his days as a race commentator; an engraved cigarette box given to him when he left the Mecca Locarno for Ilford in 1955; the Mecca Dancing gold cup; unopened parcels of Teen and Twenty Disc Club circular medallions; a patchwork shirt by Lord John of Carnaby Street with accompanying photographs of Savile on a hospital visit with his mother; the red satin padded bedspread with gold ‘JS’ monogram he used to cover the single bed in the Duchess’s room in Scarborough; snaps of Savile with brides and flirting with nurses, and Savile with his brother Johnnie; the reproduction of a signed photograph of Winston Churchill; the suit, shirt, tie and white slip-on shoes he wore when he stood alongside Prince Charles and Princess Diana as they opened the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville in 1983; the race numbers and medals from his two decades of marathon running, an era in which he tried to control one addiction through another; the leather upholstered armchair and matching footstool from which he held court in his Roundhay Park penthouse.

  More interesting were the associations some of the items disclosed. A whole section of the sale was devoted to ‘The Royal Family’, which was a revelation given he had taken pride in refusing to talk about his relationships with them during his later years. There were thirty-five lots in total, among them numerous gifts and cards from Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson: a pair of silver and blue enamel cufflinks by Asprey & Garrard, given as an 80th birthday present by Prince Charles, as well as a pair of commemorative American cowboy boots. There were Christmas cards from Charles and Diana; Prince Charles, Princess Diana and their sons; Prince Charles and his sons; and Prince Charle
s and the Duchess of Cornwall, signed off with ‘kindest regards’, ‘warmest good wishes’ and ‘affectionate greetings’. They were souvenirs from his journey to the very centre of the establishment that gave away nothing of what he had done when he got there.

  Then there were the other gifts and tokens of esteem: the signed sketches by Rolf Harris; a Brazil nut mounted on a plinth from the patients at Broadmoor; a white onyx table lighter engraved ‘To Jimmy Savile from his friends at the Fraud Squad’; a Metropolitan Police helmet inscribed in blue ballpoint pen ‘To Jimmy Saville [sic] from Marylebone Police Station’; the plaques and presentation pieces from forces all over Britain; the engraved drill sergeant’s swagger stick from the senior non-commissioned officers’ mess at the Royal Marine Commando Training Centre at Lympstone, and a bronze statue from the sergeants’ mess; a stainless steel tray engraved ‘To Jimmy Savile OBE. With thanks for a great walk Easter Monday, 1976. From Aquila Youth Centre Jersey’.

  Before the sale, I was contacted by Luke Lucas, a trustee of both Jimmy Savile’s charitable trusts. He had known Savile for 42 years, worked for him full-time for the first seven years and described him as his ‘best friend’, although he refused point blank to talk about him. ‘I was involved in everything, believe me, and if I wanted to tell the 42 years of stories it would need to be a very thick book,’ he said. ‘Thicker than the Old Testament.’

  He told me a bit about Savile’s attitudes towards his relations, and discussed the ongoing Georgina Ray situation. In a subsequent call, Lucas informed me that boxes of Jimmy Savile’s private papers were to be deposited with Leeds University where it was hoped they would be held as a Jimmy Savile archive. He said the papers revealed the true picture of his friend’s place in, and value to, the establishment. He also insisted access would be impossible until claims on the estate had been settled.