Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (21 page)

He pleaded guilty to four counts of indecent assault, but additional charges of six indecent assaults and one of buggery were ordered to lie on file.

Sentencing Prescott, Judge Jeremy Roberts told him: ‘These offences are aggravated by the fact that you were in a position of power, authority and trust over your victims.’

‘You were a figure of authority in the community and it’s most unfortunate that behind the outward appearance of respectability, you were behaving in this kind of way towards the people in your charge.’

Particularly galling to learn was the fact that Prescott served very little time for the serious crimes that he had committed while the children he had abused would have to live with their memories forever:

Prescott has already spent 14 months on
 
remand so he will be released from prison shortly. He will be forced to sign on the sex offenders’ registry for 10 years.

I was upset to learn that Prescott had received what was effectively a slap on the wrist for what had been very serious crimes.

While Alan Prescott’s main interest in life had been adolescent boys, Bill Starling found himself in more serious trouble, largely because of the lower age profile of his victims and, perhaps, because most of them had been girls:

In the other court case Starling, known as ‘Uncle Bill’, subjected 11 children as young as five to a ‘cynical and calculated catalogue of abuse’ spanning two decades.

The court heard how 74-year-old Starling, from Basildon, targeted problem kids at the Tower Hamlets run home…

His horrific spree of abuse ran from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, and his victims included three members of the same family.

He moved from child to child when the elder victims became too old for his perverted tastes, abusing two sisters and a brother…

…He bribed a number of victims with ‘money and cigarettes’ to make them comply with his twisted demands, and he raped an 11-year-old
girl in a garden shed as she returned from a swimming session in the home.

Prosecutor Sally Howes told the court: ‘There is a noticeable similarity of background to all these complainants at their time of residence at either St Leonard’s or in Basildon.’

‘They all had difficulties of one sort or another. Some had already been the victims of sexual abuse, others were emotionally damaged by either cruel, uncaring parents or parents who, due to inadequacies of their own, were simply unable to cope with the responsibility of bringing up their children.’

Starling was convicted of 19 sexual offences relating to eleven victims – nine girls and two boys. There was one offence of buggery, two rapes, one indecency with a child and 15 indecent assaults.

He was acquitted of one count of buggery and two indecent assaults, with a further count of buggery ordered to lie on file.

Judge Jeremy Roberts sentenced Starling to 10 years for each rape and the buggery, to run concurrently. He received two years for the first seven counts of indecent assault, concurrent to each other but consecutive to the 10 years.

For the remaining eight indecent assaults and the indecency with a child, he was sentenced to two years, concurrent with each
 
other, but consecutive to the other sentences – totalling 14 years.

The Judge told him: ‘It’s obvious from the jury’s verdict there came a stage when you fell prey to the temptation to behave in an inappropriate way towards these children.’

‘When you found you got away with it, one thing led to another, and you ended up committing this catalogue of offences.’

The newspaper also reported that the investigation was still ongoing:

The St Leonard sex abusers were finally brought to justice thanks to the courage and persistence of the Met Police’s Operation Mapperton and investigations are still going on.

The offences first came to light in 1995/6 when a complaint was made by one individual who said that he had been abused at the Hornchurch home.

Police set up an inquiry team called Operation Harmon and their evidence was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, but it was decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.

The same individual who had made the original complaint continued to pester the police, however, and in 1998 Operation Mapperton was set up.

A huge debt of gratitude is owed to the first person to speak out and complain about his experiences at St Leonard’s because, without this initial complaint, it is very unlikely that anything would ever have been done to bring the aggressors to justice. Following his initial accusations, once the wheels started to turn, more and more former residents of the homes were interviewed, including me, and the truth had begun to emerge despite the fact that the authorities had apparently never kept proper records:

The lack of records by Tower Hamlets’ social services department caused police problems, but talking to each former child at the home quickly opened many more doors.

From speaking to the former children, now adults, and many with their own families, it quickly became clear that Starling was a major suspect.

The team worked tirelessly, taking 360 statements and travelling across the country to interview victims. In October 1999 Starling was arrested and questioned, but from day one until the present day he has denied any wrongdoing.

It became clear from the statements that Starling wasn’t the only one involved and soon Alan Prescott was questioned and arrested. There was a pattern to their victims; Starling’s
 
being of both sexes and aged five to 14, and Prescott’s adolescent boys.

Det Con Ken Roast, part of the Operation Mapperton team, said: ‘It was quite easy for them in their positions of authority, and they were helped by the fact that they were 15 miles down the road from their controlling authority Tower Hamlets.

‘They wanted to be treated as their own little independent self-sufficient unit, and they knew that no one would believe the children if they told the truth.’

He said that the calibre of the evidence by the victims in court had been first class. He said the prosecution had expected some to crumble but they stood up admirably.

Apparently, quite a few of the children who had grown up in St Leonard’s went to court to watch their former abusers receive their sentences:

Many were in court for the sentencing, and welcomed Starling’s 14-year sentence, but were disappointed with the two years handed to Prescott, although apparently this was in line with sentences given in the 1970s, which judges have to take into account.

The article also stated that:

Det Con Roast doesn’t believe Tower Hamlets are to blame for the scandal, pointing the finger at the individuals responsible for employing the sex beasts in the first place. He said that another worker had been sentenced to 18 months for buggery in 1981, and yet there was no internal investigation. The person also continued to work for Tower Hamlets.

In the same edition of the local paper, a detailed report of the assault of one of the formers residents was described in the context of that individual’s struggle to have the names changed on the streets that now honoured the former abusers:

A victim of abuse at St Leonard’s is leading a campaign to have Prescott Close, which was named after convicted former home boss Alan Prescott, renamed.

The victim, who cannot be named, was abused by Starling. He went to the home when he was just five and was one of the last people to leave when it closed, aged 18.

Starling would threaten to send the youngster ‘to the funny farm’ unless he succumbed to his sickening advances, and told him no one would believe him if he tried to tell the truth.

He gave evidence against Starling at the Old
Bailey, which he said had lifted a massive weight from his shoulders, and he is now trying to have the name of the road in which the home formerly stood changed…

The victim said that Starling was a very cunning man who would play on what the children feared the most in order to get his way.

He said that one minute he would be nice, saying he wanted to keep him at the home, and the next minute he would be acting like ‘an animal’, threatening to get rid of him.

People made statements about Starling, he said, but no one believed them. Once they did complain to social services, but when they came to question Starling he already knew of the youngsters’ allegations and had come up with an excuse.

It was only when police approached him in the late 90s and told him that they believed him, that the victim was able to open his heart to the catalogue of abuse.

He said: ‘I used to suffer from paranoia and thought people were talking about me behind my back. People wouldn’t believe us back in those days, so why should they believe us now? We were brought up to think we were liars and no one cared, then all of a sudden the police came along and said they did believe us. It was amazing.’

The Mapperton case had involved testimony from hundreds of the former residents of St Leonard’s. For the first time, someone had been willing to listen to us. It turned out that some of the cottages in the home had been worse than others, and that Bill Starling had been pretty much the leader of a paedophile ring that had been operating with impunity for years, wreaking havoc on the bodies and psyches of the children in question. Bill was the only aggressor who got anything like a substantial prison sentence, although fourteen years isn’t a lot for what he did. The police had cocked up some of the investigation and they admitted as much, but there wasn’t that much that could be done about it at this late stage in the day. The women police officers who had called around to my house had more or less admitted that there had been problems with the investigation from the outset and that the police had lost important evidence that could no longer be found. Prescott had already been in prison on remand and had served most of his sentence, so now he was due to get out.

After the case was heard, it got some coverage in the national press, perhaps most notably in an article in the
Guardian
, originally published on 24 October 2001, that I still find painfully difficult to read, because it describes in plain and horrifying language what had happened in the cottage opposite mine and describes the truth behind the suicide of the man whom I had once loved as a brother and from whose life I had departed all those years ago, when I left the children’s home for the last time:

Nestling in the Essex countryside, the St Leonard’s children’s home should by rights have been a mini Utopia for the 300-odd youngsters in its care. With its 13 ‘cottages’, each housing up to 30 children, its own hospital, church, school, swimming pool and gymnasium, and generous avenues set amid 86 acres, the late Victorian ‘village’ appeared a world away from the squalid council blocks where many of its residents had previously lived in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.

‘It was potentially idyllic,’ says Seamus Carroll, who lived there with his brothers from the age of four, in the mid-1960s, until age 17. ‘We always said, when we were growing up, it would be a wonderful place to be – if it were not for the staff, that is.’

For St Leonard’s, which saw 3,000 children pass through its doors between 1965 and its closure in 1984, was a haven not for children, but for paedophiles who meted out abuse while purportedly providing the children’s care… the lifting of reporting restrictions at the Old Bailey meant the full scale of the abuse could be, if not exposed, then at least hinted at. In a revelation
 
largely banished from the news by the start of the bombing of Afghanistan, it emerged that one former house parent, Bill Starling, had indecently assaulted, raped or buggered 11 victims – aged from just five to 14 – over a 20-year period. Another defendant, the home’s superintendent, Alan Prescott, a former JP, Labour councillor, Assistant Director of Social Services in Tower Hamlets and, later, chief executive of East End charity Toynbee Hall, had indecently assaulted four teenage boys at various points throughout the 1970s…