by Dan Davies
At the end of the service, a curious-looking figure rose to his feet and shouted for everyone to clap. He had a mop of rust-coloured hair and was wearing black tracksuit trousers and a mustard-coloured sweatshirt bearing the legend ‘Jimmy’s Eager Helper’. A Jim’ll Fix It badge hung from his neck. It was Dave Eager, one of Savile’s protégés and his ‘personal assistant’ from the 1960s. Outside, meanwhile, reporters surrounded Frank Bruno and the former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read. They were the only ‘celebrities’ to attend.
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British seaside resorts in winter project a peculiar sense of foreboding, and on this particular November morning, the atmosphere in Scarborough was as leaden as the skies. From the Grand Hotel, the vast sandstone typewriter that serves as a reminder of to the town’s Victorian heyday, a small crowd was visible on the corner of the Esplanade, gathered in front of the flat Jimmy Savile bought for his mother.
Below on the Foreshore, beyond the flashing lights and bleeps of the amusement arcades, the billboard running around the front of the Futurist Theatre (forthcoming attractions: Ken Dodd, Cannon and Ball and the Chuckle Brothers) bore a simple message: ‘Goodbye Jimmy’.
I walked north towards the harbour, past the lifeboat station, the rock shops and chip bars, tracing the route I had taken with Savile on previous visits. Outside the Ivy House Café, a free bus was waiting to take mourners to Woodlands Cemetery. It was clear that after the turn-out in Leeds, Scarborough’s farewell was to be a more low-key affair. The bus left before the cortège had rounded the corner, and did so with only six of its fifty-two seats occupied.
The only other people on the top deck were two women who sat at the front. As we trundled along Marine Drive and away from the town centre, they chatted excitedly about the photographs they wanted to take of the coffin. The bus stopped at the railway station but nobody else got on.
Climbing out of the town, we passed Scarborough Hospital before alighting at the end of the tree-lined driveway leading to the cemetery. Inside, police officers and marshals in fluorescent bibs patrolled the perimeter of a cordon erected for the 200 or so people that had gathered to watch. The grave had been dug on a slope and in front of a stand of tall trees. There was no view of the sea, only the faint outline of Scarborough Castle in the gloom.
Once the funeral vehicles arrived and the seven-foot gold casket was lifted out and placed on a platform above the grave, Father Martin Kelly of the Diocese of Leeds made an address that was broadcast over loudspeakers, followed by a short reading by Amanda McKenna, Savile’s niece. Then, when the undertakers took their positions on either side of the coffin, the press photographers and gaggle of curious onlookers surged forward, snapping away as it was lowered into the ground.
Finally, as Father Kelly concluded his Hail Mary, the clouds parted for the first time in three days to reveal the briefest glimpse of blue skies beyond.
Like Savile at the site of the former concentration camp, I had picked up the vibes. On the way in, I had noticed a pub near the gates of the cemetery. It was called The Duchess, and on the pavement outside a blackboard invited mourners to ‘celebrate Jimmy with us’.
He’d always said his only wish in life was to have a telephone to heaven so that he could talk to his mother. In death, there was nothing more for me to do than sit and drink in a pub that could have been named after the only woman he loved.
66. IN THE PALM OF HIS HAND
Operation Newgreen, as the West Yorkshire Police enquiry was named, took four months to complete. Its review staff included an investigation team of 14 detective constables. More than 200 people were spoken to and 400 inquiries conducted in the course of over 3,000 working hours.1 In May 2013, Assistant Chief Constable Ingrid Lee wrote in her foreword that she hoped it would show ‘the open and transparent nature of its review’.
The reality was somewhat different. The Newgreen report reads not as a genuine bid to understand and learn from mistakes that were made, but as a study in defensive self-justification and the redirection of blame. In many passages, it is characterised by a tone of barely concealed exasperation. This despite 76 crimes involving 68 victims having been reported in the West Yorkshire area relating to Jimmy Savile in little more than seven months; among them, eight incidents of rape: four on males, four on females.2
Assistant Chief Constable Lee conceded that ‘it was important for the public to know the scale and nature of West Yorkshire Police officers’ involvement with Savile during his lifetime’, and said to that end West Yorkshire Police had ‘committed resources’ to search for the truth and to ‘separate myth and rumour from fact’.3 Information, she claimed, was sought from every serving police officer and staff member, including where possible, those who had retired from the force.
Then, without issuing any form of apology to those who had felt unable to report Savile’s crimes in the past, or weren’t listened to when they did, she played straight into detailing the positive steps WYP had made in its tackling of sexual abuse.
According to the report, the West Yorkshire Police cannot categorically say whether it or its predecessors ever received information on the 1964 ledger uncovered in the files of the Metropolitan Police’s Paedophile Unit. What is known is that the handwritten ledger lay undiscovered for decades.
Before computerised intelligence systems became commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s, retention of intelligence was not co-ordinated nationally. The system used by the West Riding Police, which preceded the formation of the modern West Yorkshire constabulary, was typical: each division had its own collator’s office responsible for the collation and action of intelligence linked to crimes. It was a system based on paper cards in which, as the Newgreen report pointed out, ‘the decision making process [about whether or not to record a specific piece of intelligence] was at times subjective’.4 When the force introduced computer-based intelligence recording in 1992 and 1993, not all the historic information on these paper cards was converted.
By rights, though, intelligence should have been ‘owned’ by the collator’s office in the area where the person resided. Information about Jimmy Savile should therefore have been forwarded to Leeds. The Newgreen report stated that when its officers examined the 1964 ledger there was ‘no information contained within it that relates to West Yorkshire nor any entry regarding its communication to WYP’. This appears to have been enough for them.
The case of the anonymous letter dated 13 July 1998 and sent to the Vice Squad at Scotland Yard is far more troubling. The letter begins with the line, ‘I supply here information which if looked into by one of your officers will yield a secret life not unlike that of [name redacted]. I can not [sic] give you my name as I am too closely involved and do not wish to be in the limelight and have the finger pointed at myself.’5 It went on to explode the myth of Savile’s charity work, and described his homosexuality as ‘an open secret with those who know’.
The letter also said Savile had been recently involved with a ‘young rent boy’, to whom he gave his telephone number in Leeds. This number was subsequently changed because Savile received ‘threatening calls from the rent boy, who was going to go to the press and expose his paedophilia, if he did not give him more money’. The letter contended Savile was ‘very angry and frightened’ at the time. Furthermore, it said Savile kept pornography at one of his houses before outlining further details about his regular activities in Leeds.
‘He thinks he is untouchable because of the people he mixes with,’ the letter continued. ‘… There are many more things I could tell you but they are trivial in comparison with the main issue.’ The letter closes with a warning that now appears remarkably prescient: ‘When JIMMY SAVILE falls, and sooner or later he will, a lot of well-known personalities and past politicians will fall with him.’
This uncorroborated piece of intelligence was processed and forwarded to both the Met’s Organised Crime Group Paedophilia Unit and the West Yorkshire Police Force Intelligence Bureau. And yet it was never properly investiga
ted, despite the obvious lines of enquiry into Jimmy Savile, including the fact he had changed his telephone number because of a blackmail attempt and, not least, the allegations he was a practising paedophile.
A full audit of all West Yorkshire Police systems failed to confirm that it was still in possession of what could, and should, have been a vital piece of intelligence.
The review team for Operation Newgreen tracked down and spoke with the detective constable at the Met who is thought to have handled the letter and created the initial intelligence report. The officer insisted that he remembered receiving the information, entering it into a master ledger and then faxing it to West Yorkshire Police.
While working in the Clubs and Vice Team at the Met in the 1980s and 1990s, the same officer also recalled receiving a number of other similar letters about Jimmy Savile, which he believed to be written by the same author. He said he submitted the letters to another unit within the Met and also sent a number of them to West Yorkshire Police. He maintained it was common knowledge among his colleagues that Savile was a paedophile, adding that at some point in 1989 he believed an officer within the same team was investigating him.
Further enquiries by the Newgreen team identified another former police officer who had worked within the WYP Force Intelligence Bureau on the specialist sexual offences intelligence desk during the time the anonymous letter was supposed to have been received. This officer recalled receiving information relating to Jimmy Savile ‘in or around 1998 but could not remember the specific content of the report or who had sent it’.6
When this officer was spoken to again, he remembered the ‘information may have included some discussion around conducting a joint investigation into Savile involving WYP and a number of forces,’7 although he was said to be unable to specify which. He recalled the information had been sent from New Scotland Yard’s Paedophile Unit, with whom he had a ‘good working relationship’.
And this is where the picture becomes murky. According to Operation Newgreen, for some inexplicable reason the West Yorkshire Police officer ‘did not record the information on any WYP computerised system’. Instead, he brought the information to the attention of his second line manager [listed in the report as Detective Inspector Z]’. He said that D/Insp Z ‘took the information from him and when [he] later asked what was happening with it, [he] was told that it was in hand’. Detective Inspector Z died in 2002.8
Neil Wilby, who runs a whistle-blowing website that exposes corruption and miscarriages of justice within the West Yorkshire Police, is not altogether surprised. ‘I think when Savile’s name was typed onto the police system, there was probably something that flashed up and said that all enquiries were to be turned over to a specific officer that acted as his liaison … It seems to me that there was some sort of barrier preventing the normal process of officers within that police force.’ Could that specific officer have been the unnamed, mysterious and now dead Detective Inspector Z?
In its report, West Yorkshire Police made little effort to conceal its eagerness to cast doubt on the accounts of both the officer at the Met and its own officer who worked on the specialist sexual offences intelligence desk. Nothing was found, it stated, when searches were done to locate the additional anonymous letters the Met officer spoke of, and nor were details uncovered of an investigation into Jimmy Savile in 1989. West Yorkshire Police went as far as identifying a further 24 officers who worked alongside the detective constable in question and ‘all of those spoken with cannot remember having seen or heard any intelligence relating to Savile’.9
But despite such protestations, it appears that Savile’s predilections and offending behaviour were known about well beyond the Clubs and Vice team at Scotland Yard. Of the 35 serving and retired West Yorkshire Police officers who came forward with information (a number just big enough to confer credibility), one, a former member of Leeds Vice Squad, said he believed his unit had conducted an investigation into Savile in the early 1980s which involved allegations of assault on two girls.
In countering the claim, the WYP stated that it had traced a number of officers working in Vice and none could recall such an investigation. The retired officer was clearly sticking to his story, however, as the matter has been voluntarily referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
Another former WYP officer who offered information to Newgreen served with the force in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and recalled accompanying a member of the Police Women’s Unit (a female-only unit that dealt with incidents involving women and children) to Savile’s flat to look for a female reported missing by her parents. The retired officer said this was ‘a regular enquiry by the Police Women’s Unit’ because girls – in his words, ‘not children as such, but teenagers around 16/17 years and upwards’ – regularly attended Savile’s club on Mill Hill in Leeds.
This is the only mention I have ever seen of such a club, and again, no police records of these visits would appear to exist. If nothing else, the account demonstrates at the very least that Savile was known in police circles for associating with teenage girls.
Of the four retired West Yorkshire Police officers who had contacted Operation Yewtree after its launch in October 2012, two had information about rumours that circulated about Jimmy Savile. One said he was known in the early 1960s for taking young girls to his barge in Leeds for parties, while the other said he was renowned for being a ‘pervert’. Doubts were cast on the veracity of these claims, too.
But in trying to answer every allegation, the report succeeded only in undoing itself. The Met Police officer spoken to by Newgreen did not work on Scotland Yard’s Paedophile Unit and therefore was not in contact with the WYP detective constable who recalled receiving the intelligence on Savile. As the report conceded, this ‘brings into question whether the information being referred to by both officers is one and the same’.10 It also raises the very real possibility that the 1998 letter was not the only piece of intelligence to have mysteriously disappeared.
Jimmy Savile had no qualms about covering his tracks. He was open with the Surrey Police officers about the type of letters he received, and the fact he had trusted police officers to whom he could turn in times of trouble. It was a tried and trusted tactic on his part: placing evidence right under the noses of the police because it was the least obvious place to look.
But while the West Yorkshire Police’s report on Operation Newgreen could not conceal its embarrassment over the cosy relationship Savile enjoyed with some of its officers – despite its claim that ‘Much of the conjecture has been fuelled by Savile himself’11 – it did try to nail the perception that he exploited these connections to evade arrest.
At the beginning of the section on the Friday Morning Club, the Newgreen report stated that ‘rather than rely on the accounts provided by the police officers due to their perceived close relationship with Savile, the review placed a great emphasis on identifying all of the people who attended the FMC. The intention,’ it said, ‘was to bring a degree of independence to this important issue and once and for all establish what happened at the FMC.’12 Sadly, this degree of independence did not extend to naming the police officers who visited Jimmy Savile in his flat.
Sergeant Matthew Appleyard was first questioned in December 2012. He is said to have explained that he first met Savile while working as a community officer in the Roundhay Park area. He was invited in for a coffee and accepted. In its defence, WYP pointed out that at the time officers were being encouraged to have ‘more interaction with the community’. But Appleyard became a regular at the Friday morning meetings, even going into Savile’s flat for a coffee when he wasn’t there. He denied that anything occurred that compromised his position as a serving officer.
It then emerged that Savile had spoken in his Surrey Police interview of handing ‘weirdo’ letters to ‘senior police people’, and that the letters were either destroyed or kept in case anything happened to him. Savile also named a West Yorkshire Police Inspector, who o
ther officers attending the meetings identified as being responsible for inviting them. But not one of the officers recalled seeing or hearing about letters that involved ‘any accusations of sexual assault or any other crime committed by Savile’.13
There was one letter, however, that the Inspector talked about in his interview, albeit without ‘being able to provide any detail’.14 This was not the usual begging letter or lame request for support for a charitable cause. This message contained threats of violence and, according to the Inspector, it caused Savile considerable concern. So much so that it was read out in front of other members of the Friday Morning Club who advised it should be preserved for fingerprints and reported to the police.
The Inspector contended that the local detective chief inspector at the time was informed about the letter by one of the other WYP officers at the meeting. Curiously, none of the other police officers present recalled notifying the DCI, and only one could remember a conversation about such a letter. As for the DCI in question, he claimed no knowledge of investigating threats to Jimmy Savile or being made aware of any threatening letter.
What the DCI did recall, though, was attending Jimmy Savile’s flat at the request of the local divisional commander. He was there, he said, to provide ‘crime advice to Savile after he had expressed concern for his safety’.15 Somewhat predictably, the WYP’s ‘extensive enquiries’ failed to establish whether this was one and the same incident, and it reported ‘no other people have any recollection of the matter’.
At this point in the 59-page document, there was no mention of the West Yorkshire control room report, the same one HMIC stated ‘expressed concern for Savile’s welfare’, or what the early part of the Newgreen report referred to as a ‘communication log relating to a friend of Savile’.16 Given that Inspector Mick Starkey managed the Killingbeck police station control room, and is under investigation over the claims he made the call to Surrey Police, there would appear to be reasonable grounds to question whether it was Starkey who put in this separate call on his friend’s behalf.