In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Another regular, a company director who refused to be named, confirmed that Savile, ‘liked to give the impression of being some sort of Godfather, sitting menacingly at the centre of his web’.3

  Baker remembers around a dozen people attending each week, of which he says three quarters were usually serving or retired police officers. According to the West Yorkshire Police, however, only eight of its men were ever present at these weekly socials: four on a single occasion, and four as regulars. Of the latter, two are known to be Inspector Mick Starkey, now retired and formerly the Force Incident Manager based in the control room at Killingbeck Police station in Leeds, and Sergeant Matthew Appleyard, who is stationed at Wetherby police station.

  Mick Starkey joined the force in the mid Seventies and within a short period was seconded onto the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry. Following this unusually rapid promotion, he spent most of the remainder of his three-decade career as a plain-clothes detective.

  One retired West Yorkshire Police inspector, who served alongside Starkey in the Chapeltown division in the mid 1980s, recalls that his colleague was among a group of officers who made regular trips to visit Jimmy Savile. He maintains it was common knowledge at Chapeltown Police Station that Savile was visited by Starkey and other colleagues, and that it was accepted as the norm. ‘I didn’t really ask questions about it,’ he said.4

  ‘One morning they set off in a police car, there were about three or four of them. It was as if they were all going there for some reason. They were all on duty and in uniform. I knew [Savile] had a relationship with the police, and that is not unusual as a high-profile person. But whether [he] would see that in terms of protecting himself, I don’t really know.’

  Savile described Starkey as his ‘bodyguard’ and the burly inspector had appeared in the local papers talking about how he regularly drove his famous friend across the Yorkshire Dales in his Rolls-Royce Corniche.

  ‘He was a part of my life as I grew up,’ Starkey explained in the days after Savile’s death. ‘He was a distant figure associated with Top of the Pops, Pan’s People and everything that was trendy. I never thought for a minute that in later life, as a serving police officer, I would meet him professionally or that subsequently we would become close friends.’5

  At the wake following the requiem mass for Jimmy Savile, I spotted Mick Starkey sitting at a table with a number of men in their late fifties and sixties. He seemed suspicious at first, but when I reminded him how he had frisked me in the foyer of Savile’s Roundhay Park flat some seven years before, he invited me to sit down and join him and the other members of the Friday Morning Club for a drink.

  Only Starkey seemed willing to talk, however; the others did not want to know. He told me he thought Savile was lonely towards the end of his life, and talked a bit about driving him out onto the moors to the tiny railway station where his father had once worked, or to Dunnies Café in Otley and country pubs. He said that Savile expressed regret that he couldn’t go into pubs and simply blend in.

  When I mentioned the Ripper manhunt, and the fact that the body of one of the victims, Irene Richardson, was found in Roundhay Park close to Savile’s flat, Starkey laughed and explained how Savile enjoyed the commotion and getting his breakfast off the police in the mornings.

  More interesting still was what Starkey said – or didn’t say – about the secret Jimmy Savile, the one seen only by members of the inner circle, including, presumably, those who attended his weekly coffee mornings. Although I didn’t ask, Starkey said he thought Savile was ‘asexual’. The answer arriving before the question was a reminder to me of the times I had spent interviewing Savile, and clearly of the considerable time Starkey had spent in his company. He had picked up on some Savile’s habits and phrases, such as the next one that came out of his mouth: ‘You know what the big secret about Jimmy Savile is, don’t you? There was no secret.’

  *

  Almost exactly a year after this brief encounter with Starkey in a bar in Leeds city centre, and a month after the West Yorkshire Police had issued its inaccurate statement, Theresa May, the home secretary, commissioned a review by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. She instructed it to ‘explicitly concentrate’ on establishing ‘which police forces received reports and/or allegations in respect of Jimmy Savile’ before the launch of Operation Yewtree, and whether those allegations were ‘robustly investigated and if there were any police failings in so doing’.

  Little over a month later, West Yorkshire Police conducted an initial review of the Friday Morning Club. It found that officers on neighbourhood patrols had attended the meetings, which consisted of nothing more salacious than ‘Savile and his friends sitting drinking tea and discussing current events’.6 In the report it submitted to the HMIC, it stated, ‘No evidence of impropriety by the officers who had attended Savile’s home address was found.’7

  The HMIC made enquiries of all 43 police forces in England and Wales but when its report was published in March 2013, records disclosed only five allegations of sexual assault being recorded by police against Savile between 1955 and 2009. Only three police forces on the mainland had investigated him in his lifetime: the Met in 2003, Surrey between 2007 and 2009, and Sussex in 2008. (In 2009, the State of Jersey Police had deemed there to be insufficient evidence to proceed after a man came forward to claim Savile had sexually assaulted him as a child at the Haut de Garenne home.) ‘The results are stark,’ stated the HMIC in its introduction to ‘Mistakes were made’, a survey of the systemic failings of police forces across Britain.

  Given the prolific nature of his offending over such a long period of time, it is deeply concerning that the enquiry succeeded in uncovering only three new pieces of intelligence relating to Jimmy Savile. The first was the paper ledger created by the Metropolitan Police Service Paedophile Unit in 1964, in which the DJ was mentioned as visiting a house in Battersea where absconders from Duncroft School were known to reside.

  The second was an anonymous letter sent to the Vice Squad at New Scotland Yard in 1998 by someone who claimed to be ‘closely involved’ with Savile. The letter stated Savile was a homosexual and a ‘deeply committed paedophile’, and related how Savile had been ‘extremely angry and frightened’ after being threatened with blackmail by a rent boy. So much so that he’d changed his telephone number.

  The third new piece of intelligence was a 2003 crime report by the Metropolitan Police following a complaint by a woman who claimed Jimmy Savile had sexually assaulted her during filming of Top of the Pops in 1973. The woman told officers she would not support a prosecution, but would reconsider if others came forward.

  As the police force area in which Jimmy Savile lived throughout his life, West Yorkshire Police should have received details, and had records on its systems, of not only the intelligence reports generated by Surrey Police and Sussex Police in the course of their recent investigations, but also the 1964 paper ledger, the computerised record of the anonymous letter sent to the Vice Squad at New Scotland Yard in 1998, and the 2003 crime report by the Metropolitan Police.

  West Yorkshire Police reported that it was initially unable to retrieve any of these records.

  While HMIC’s findings variously laid blame at the door of the Metropolitan Police Service for categorising the 1998 letter and the 2003 report in such a way that access to both was restricted (due in both instances to Savile’s celebrity status), and with Surrey and Sussex for being unable ‘to move beyond the reluctance of victims to support a prosecution’, and for their failure to inform victims that ‘others like them existed’,8 the most acute discomfort was felt by senior officers at WYP force headquarters in Wakefield.

  The issues identified read like a catalogue of ineptitude, negligence and possibly worse. They included, not surprisingly, the call made by the West Yorkshire Police Inspector (unnamed in the report) to offer his assistance with arrangements for Savile’s interview by Surrey Police, and the comments Savile made in that interview about his close relati
onships with senior police officers, including the passing on of ‘weirdo’ letters. HMIC felt these ‘clearly suggested police officers in West Yorkshire may have been inappropriately close to Savile’.9

  It was also pointed out that more than forty of Savile’s victims from West Yorkshire had come forward to Operation Yewtree, along with two former West Yorkshire Police officers who stated they had been aware of Savile’s ‘contact with young girls’.10

  Prior to the report’s publication, an exchange of correspondence had led to a meeting between the West Yorkshire Police and officers from HMIC. At this meeting, the topics for discussion included the knowledge or otherwise of intelligence reports sent by the Metropolitan Police in 1964 and 1998; the seemingly total absence of information and intelligence on Savile on WYP systems; the information received that WYP officers had been told to patrol near to Savile’s home address; Savile’s involvement in the Yorkshire Ripper enquiry; and the need to obtain relevant information on Savile from current police officers and staff.

  The officers from HMIC finished by reiterating its determination to understand the relationship between the force and Jimmy Savile.

  John Parkinson, the then chief constable of West Yorkshire Police, referred the matters to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) and announced that the force would conduct its own internal enquiry, with a view to publishing a report. To all intents and purposes, Jimmy Savile’s home police force would be investigating itself.

  On 12 February, West Yorkshire Police admitted that it now believed it had in fact received an electronic copy of the 1998 letter but was still trying to identify the material. Further entries had been found in the form of four crime reports with Savile as the victim.

  Crucially, as we shall see, a West Yorkshire control room report was also unearthed that expressed concern for Savile’s welfare.11 A day later, a letter from the IPCC requested that the force record as a conduct matter the action of retired Inspector Mick Starkey.

  By May 2014, some seven months later, a spokesman for the IPCC could not tell me when the findings of the independent investigation (the most serious of its type) would be published.

  64. TWO 16-YEAR-OLD GIRLS FROM THE UKRAINE

  Late on a dark, wet November night on the coast of north-east Yorkshire, the proprietor of Café Fish, one of Jimmy Savile’s favourite Scarborough restaurants, joined us in the bar area. Savile was wrapped up in a thick jacket, and a furry Arctic cap with earflaps was pulled down over his forehead. He’d told me earlier in the day that he was suffering from angina. He suddenly looked very old.

  The proprietor was a large man who perspired gently beneath a white short-sleeved shirt. He seemed excited to see Savile and made a fuss about telling us all about which fish had been freshly caught that day. I suspected he was upping his game because the local celebrity was in.

  Savile settled on the lobster. The memories from the QE2 of the white crab flesh stuck to his jagged teeth, coupled with the volume of cigar smoke I’d inhaled over the course of the day, made me nauseous for a moment. Struggling to speak, I put myself in the proprietor’s hands. He deliberated theatrically before making his choice, and then brought the chef out from the kitchen to confirm the wisdom of his selection. Savile sat quietly, brooding beneath his layers. I sensed he was less than impressed with all the fuss that was being made.

  We were offered a complimentary drink each; ‘Good old fashioned Scarborough hospitality,’ said the proprietor. Savile had a large scotch – his second of the evening. I went for a large glass of the house red, hoping it would settle my stomach. The proprietor went behind the small bar to fix himself a drink before rejoining us to recount some of the times his famous guest had been in. Savile stared ahead, occasionally nodding. He said nothing.

  Suddenly, the door flew open and a woman burst in looking wet and wind-lashed. The proprietor was called away. ‘Two weeks ago she was like an obedient dog,’ muttered Savile, jutting his chin at the woman. ‘Now she’s got him right at it.’ He settled back into the banquette and took another loud slurp at his whisky.

  A few minutes later, we were joined in the small bar area by a group of couples, all talking loudly and laughing. They looked to be in their late thirties and early forties, so a chance encounter with Jimmy Savile represented a big deal. He seemed happy to chat, though it was standard fare to those who had heard it all before: ‘Indestructible,’ when asked how he was; ‘Ah, but you didn’t remember a stamped addressed envelope,’ when they asked him why he’d never replied to the letters they’d written to him on Jim’ll Fix It.

  Our drinks were nearly done. A waiter approached to ask whether we needed anything. ‘Two 19-year-old girls from the Ukraine, please,’ said Savile without a flicker. Our table was ready. He signed an autograph on a napkin for one of the men in the party and shuffled through to where the tables were set.

  The only other people in the dining area were two elderly women who were tucking into their main courses at a small table next to a window. The rain streaked the glass, blurring the red brake lights of traffic moving up the hill outside. We were shown to a table for four in a corner of the room. I sat down opposite Savile but he motioned for me to move because he wanted to put his feet up on the chair next to mine. We ended up sitting diagonally across from each other. Another round of drinks was ordered.

  For some reason, the conversation began with global warming and as usual, Savile was uninterested in any opinion other than his own. Whatever argument I put forward or comment I offered, he seemed intent on contradicting it. Experience had taught me that this was how he could be at this time of day. He’d had a drink now and I believed him when he said he rarely, if ever, touched a drop during his heyday. It clearly affected him now.

  I had seen him in this sort of mood with Louis Theroux; it was as if he wanted to remind himself of his superior intelligence.

  The conversation then switched onto ‘flag birds’, his system of ensuring that none of the disc jockeys he employed in his dancehalls ended up falling out over girls. They had women throwing themselves at them, he said, and the way his system worked was that every lad was allowed one ‘flag bird’, which meant that none of the other lads could make a move on her. As soon as he switched his flag bird, the previous one would be fair game. He said it worked a treat.

  The starters arrived and Savile was now working up a head of steam, rattling on about how stupid the Romans were for inventing marriage. I was bored; I had heard his views on ‘brain damage’ and the fact he did not want to be responsible for a ‘living thing’ on for too many occasions.

  The arrival of the main courses seemed like an appropriate junction at which to change the direction of the conversation, if such a one-sided discussion could be described as such. So I asked him whether he ever got angry. I had seen what I considered to be anger flush through him earlier in the day when he launched into his diatribe about Gary Glitter and the tabloids.

  ‘Never.’

  It was like he said, there was no room in his life for normal human emotions. There never had been. He did admit, though, that he occasionally got annoyed with himself for bumping into things. He was 83 years old but still living his life on his own terms; bowing to nobody, changing for nobody. I wondered whether he was beginning to fray mentally.

  ‘Do you know what I do when that happens?’ he asked me, smiling for the first time in the evening. I shook my head.

  ‘I say to myself, ‘Jimmy, you – stupid – fucking – CUNT.’

  The last four words of the sentence were delivered in a growling crescendo, climaxing with the word ‘cunt’ being spat with such force that I noticed the shoulders of the women at the other table rise involuntarily. There was an eerie silence in the room, not even the clink of cutlery.

  Hearing the commotion, the waiter rushed over to check that everything was OK. He asked whether there was anything else we needed. ‘Two 16-year-old girls from the Ukraine,’ said Savile, shaving three years off his previous ans
wer, before craning forward to shovel another hunk of lobster into his mouth. He looked up and his lips stretched into the same thin grimace that I had first witnessed in the lift going up to his penthouse flat in Leeds.

  Little more was said that evening. On returning to his flat, I left him sitting in his front room, electric fire blazing, and went to bed. This time I wasn’t billeted in the Duchess’s room, but in a tatty box room opposite the bathroom. The next morning I woke early, packed and left. I never saw Jimmy Savile again.

  Four months later, at a graduation ceremony in St Mary’s Church, Luton, he was given an honorary degree from the University of Bedfordshire in recognition of his work for the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.1

  65. THE LAST GREAT GIMMICK

  Death was one of Jimmy Savile’s favourite subjects. He talked to me about it on many occasions, beginning at our very first meeting in Leeds in 2004. He was 77 at the time and we were sitting in the flat where his body would be discovered some seven and a half years later.

  I asked him whether death was something he feared. ‘No,’ he replied firmly, as a thick coil of cigar smoke unspooled around his head. ‘For 25 years as a voluntary hospital porter I had to put the lately deceased away in their boxes. I got quite used to death.’ He then explained he’d been comfortable with death ever since the nuns in the old people’s home opposite his childhood home had invited him to say goodbye to the recently departed.

  Later during that first interview, he also told me about visiting the site of a former Nazi concentration camp near Brussels. ‘As a student of people I had to go on my own and wander about just to pick up the vibes,’ he said. ‘I thought it was an amazing experience. I came out with absolutely no answers but I didn’t go there looking for answers. I went there to pick up the vibes.’

  In The World of Jimmy Savile, the 1972 film that offered him a platform for his bizarre views, he had tried to explain what his faith meant to him. ‘My own God, in that he’s moulded to my own image a bit – he suits me,’ he said while perched on a spindly exercise bike. ‘I believe in God, because if for nothing else it’s a good gamble.