Previous posts such as ‘A Solicitor’s Letter From North East Wales MIND’, ‘Dirty Rotten Scoundrels’ and ‘The Banality Of Evil’ gave examples of the constant lies, the forging of documents and the perjury used to secure convictions against patients who had made serious complaints about Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, Dr Tony Francis (Dr X) and their colleagues – complaints which routinely went uninvestigated but were then documented as having been thoroughly investigated but found to be groundless. Some patients who were deemed to pose a particular challenge to Dafydd and the paedophiles were completely ruined by all the ‘help’ that they received from the Top Doctors.
My post ‘Killing Floor – I Know Cos I Was There!’ introduced the story of F, a mental health patient from north Wales who was a witness to serious wrongdoing and was fitted up, assaulted by the police, wrongfully arrested, left to rot in the North Wales Hospital for a year and then fleeced of his property and denied all contact with his child. Someone who witnessed much of this was later found dead.
I can understand that people unacquainted with the practices of Dafydd et al would find accounts of what mental health patients and kids in care in north Wales had experienced and witnessed hard to believe. It was certainly easier for everyone if those relating serious criminal conduct on the part of Top Doctors with the collusion of Angels, social workers, NHS managers, the police, certain lawyers, magistrates and members of the judiciary could be dismissed as being mad, malicious or making up horror stories to gain compensation. Those involved in the criminality were everyone’s neighbours, the parents of their children’s friends and the people whom they socialised with locally.
I have mentioned before that Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, 1962-82, took the view that it was better that the Birmingham Six remain in prison rather than anyone admit to the enormity of the miscarriage of justice to which they had been subject. When the Birmingham Six first appealed in 1979, Lord Denning famously stated that: ‘If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous… This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’
The Birmingham Six were cleared in 1991.
The medical establishment undoubtedly operated on a Lord Denning world view of ‘it is far better that we continue to maintain that there are no serious problems in the medical profession because the reality of what has been allowed to continue in north Wales alone for decades is so dreadful that the fall-out would be unmanageable if anything approaching the truth were to be admitted’.
In my post ‘Killing Floor – I Know Cos I Was There!’ about F and the possibility that he had information about serious crimes committed before he ever arrived in north Wales in 1979 – including the death of Jimi Hendrix as a result of criminal negligence – and that being the possible reason why Dafydd and Dr Tony Francis (Dr X) destroyed him, I promised to write a further post with more details re F and the stitch-up and provide details of more celeb deaths with a link to those Top Doctors who were linked to the death of Hendrix.
I mentioned that it was Top Doctor’s wife Kathy Etchingham, a former girlfriend of Hendrix, who was sufficiently outraged by the claims of another girlfriend of Hendrix, Monika Dannemann, that Hendrix had died as a result of serious medical negligence that Kathy had attempted to have Monika imprisoned and gave multiple interviews to the press trashing Monika. After Monika was found dead, Kathy simply used this as yet more evidence that Monika was a mad, lying cow. Throughout it all F maintained that Hendrix had been killed by Top Doctors and that a cover-up at a high level had followed.
Despite F seeming to know some of the circumstances concerning Hendrix’s death, F was not at all au fait with the workings of the NHS. However, I am and I noticed that when Hendrix was found in a coma – Monika always claimed that Hendrix was still alive when the paramedics arrived – he was taken to St Mary Abbot’s Hospital. St Mary Abbot’s was located nearby, but I suspect that Top Doctors themselves would not use that hospital or allow anyone that they cared about to use it. Hendrix died in Sept 1970 and at that time St Mary Abbot’s still had an A&E/acute dept and it was there that Hendrix was pronounced dead.
By 1972 St Mary Abbot’s had lost its A&E/acute dept and was only a geriatric and psychiatric hospital. There is a great deal of snobbery in medicine and geriatrics and psychiatry are considered the pits and they were back in 1970 as well. No hospital ever wants to lose its A&E/acute services and it is when those services are threatened that Top Doctors tell patients that they will all die if the service shuts, that people write to their MPs and protest in town centres and that the BMA sends a clear message to the local MP that they will lose the next election if the closure goes ahead. If a hospital loses its A&E/acute dept, it loses kudos, funding and the best staff. It is often the first step to the long rundown to complete closure.
If St Mary Abbot’s A&E had gone by 1972 it suggests that there were very big problems in that dept because no-one was able to save it. Hospital depts don’t disappear overnight – it is preceded by years of discussion and gradual disinvestment and once word gets out that a dept is on the way out, doctors stop applying for jobs there because they know how grim the atmosphere will be and it won’t do anything for their CV either. In 1971 the transformation of St Mary Abbot’s into a dumping ground began – a psychiatry ward was added.
In the way that Top Doctors in Gwynedd had an arrangement to ensure that their own children were never taken to Ysbyty Gwynedd because paediatrics there was alleged to be so dangerous and that no relative of a Top Doc ever ended up in the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, I bet that Top Docs in London didn’t depend on the A&E in St Mary Abbot’s in 1970. It will have been for other people, particularly people who didn’t matter. Lest anyone believe that Top Docs don’t think like this, I’m happy to tell you that they do. If they think that no-one is listening, some of them will make this crystal clear. Dear old Dafydd once managed to say to me ‘you don’t matter’. What Dafydd didn’t realise was that someone else was listening to that call. (The security services were as well, but that’s because they had Brown and me under surveillance rather than Dafydd.) Hey ho Dafydd, you’re not very nice but you’re not very bright either.
Hendrix fell into a coma within spitting distance of some of the grandest, most elite teaching hospitals in London. He was taken to St Mary Abbot’s where, according to Monika, he died. When years later Monika made her allegations of serious negligence public, Kathy Ethingham and her Top Doc husband Nicholas Page didn’t inform the police, they contacted the staff who had treated – or failed to treat – Hendrix and then had a meeting with them. Where it was agreed that the witch should not be permitted to make such allegations and someone at least suggested that Monika had been responsible for Hendrix’s death herself.
By the 1990s Kathy Etchingham repeatedly stressed that her 1960s past was long ago and far away, but she had obviously remained in touch with at least one friend from those days, because in 1997 she invited him to the party that was held when Kathy – who had forgotten all about those days -succeeded in having an English Heritage Blue Plaque erected on the wall of the Mayfair flat that she had once shared with Hendrix. That old friend was Pete Townshend, who owned – and might still own – a house in Churt in Surrey. Kathy and the Top Doc lived in Churt.
In a 1989 radio interview Townshend acknowledged his bisexuality. He had recorded a song which he stated was an ‘acknowledgement of the fact that I’d had a gay life, and that I understood what gay sex was about’. However, in a 1994 interview for ‘Playboy’ Townsend said ‘in the interview I also talked about my “gay life,” which—I meant—was actually about the friends I’ve had who are gay’. Townshend later wrote in his 2012 autobiography that he at one point felt as if he was ‘probably bisexual’. Townshend also stated jokingly that he once felt sexually attracted to Mick Jagger.
In Jan 2003 Townshend was arrested by British police in a child porn investigation. However, he was given a tip-off that the police were going to raid his home three days before they arrived. Towshend’s credit card usage to access a child porn site was traced to him through Operation Ore, the British counterpart of the US Operation Avalanche. When confronted by the police, Townshend admitted using his credit card to access a child pornography website. Townshend claimed he had accessed the child porn website for the purposes of researching a book. He has not as yet written that book. On another occasion he claimed he was researching child porn to protect his son.
Because Townshend confessed to accessing the child porn website, he received a caution and avoided a trial. Bob McLachlan, the former head of Scotland Yard’s paedophile unit, described the caution as ‘totally inappropriate’. He asked ‘Why is this rock star being given such lenient treatment when he has accepted a caution and therefore admits his guilt?’ His admission to using his credit card to access a child porn website and that he had viewed child pornography images was the central component of his guilty plea.
Townshend had access to his lawyers at all times. He avoided charges beyond a caution, as the police did not detect any images of child rape on his 14 computers. Townshend was never cleared of his offence and remained on the Sex Offender Register for five years, 2003 –08. He had to give a DNA sample, check in with the British police regularly and inform them of his movements during his Sex Offender registration. Townshend will have a lifelong criminal record for the caution.
On June 22, 2006 it was reported that Townshend had withdrawn an ‘ill-advised’ story from his blog, which depicted graphic teen sex. He told the Daily Mail: ‘I’ve taken down my story. I want to make it clear that I respect the requirements of the Sex Offenders Register without condition.’
Confusion was introduced into the Townshend case by British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in an article he wrote for The Guardian in which he stated: ‘(Operation) Ore has dragged big names into the spotlight – such as the musicians Pete Townshend…falsely accused of accessing child pornography.’ Campbell knew that Townshend had admitted to breaking the law and had accepted the consequences.
Duncan Campbell’s arguments against Operation Ore – initially well received – were cast under a shadow when the computer expert he used, Jim Bates of Computer Investigations, was convicted in March 2008 of falsifying his qualifications and given a six-month suspended prison sentence. As a ‘pioneer of forensic computer analysis’, Bates had until his conviction been used widely by police and prosecutors. He is no longer used as an expert witness by prosecutors.
I presume that this Duncan Campbell is the Duncan Campbell who used to write for the ‘New Statesman’. He did write some good exposes but on one occasion there were complaints from readers when a copy of the ‘New Statesman’ was published with a photo of Duncan Campbell on the cover sporting a visible nasty injury to his face accompanied by words along the lines of ‘What happened when Duncan Campbell met Scotland Yard’ [or the phrase might have been ‘The Met’]. It transpired that Campbell had not been thumped by the police, he had fallen off of his bike after he left the station.
I read the ‘New Statesman’ for years until Brown and I noticed that it was getting light on intellectual content and heavy on features advising one on the sort of wine one should have with one’s meals. When I did used to read ‘New Statesman’, I noticed that there was never a word about the abuse of kids in care or mental health patients of which I had become acutely aware by then, although the plight of a number of other cohorts having a hard time was publicised. Neither was there any admission of certain problems in the NHS which were well-known to everyone who worked within it.
Richard Webster wrote the book ‘The Secret of Bryn Estyn’, which maintained that there was no serious problem of abuse of kids in care in north Wales and that the bellyaching in north Wales was the result of hysteria, a witch hunt and Alison Taylor telling porkies. The ‘New Statesman’ published a libellous article about Alison in the wake of the Waterhouse Report which was written by Richard Webster, ‘Can A Whistleblower Be Wrong?’ Alison sued – she represented herself – and won. It was admitted by the ‘New Statesman’ that they published the article on the grounds that Alison would not be able to afford to sue them. Alison accepted a settlement.
When that article was published, ‘New Statesman’ was owned by New Labour big wig and millionaire Geoffrey Robertson.
It was reported in the Mail Online that Townshend also claimed to have been sexually abused himself and gave this as a possible reason for his interest in child porn: ‘I believe I was sexually abused between the age of five and six and a half when in the care of my maternal grandmother who was mentally ill at the time. I cannot remember clearly what happened, but my creative work tends to throw up nasty shadows – particularly in Tommy’.
So Townshend didn’t encounter sexual abuse throughout his long career and friendships with people who used rent boys and sexually exploited vulnerable people – it happened as a result of a mentally ill grandmother…
The reference to ‘Tommy’ will have been the Uncle Ernie scene, in which Uncle Ernie, a stereotypical dirty old man dressed in a flasher’s mac, molests a ‘deaf, dumb and blind’ boy whilst singing ‘You won’t shout as I fiddle about’. Kids with sensory disabilities are often targeted by people who sexually assault them, but their assailants are as likely to be health and welfare professionals as the Uncle Ernies of the world – Uncle Ernies don’t usually have unsupervised access to disabled kids, but Top Docs, Angels, social workers, carers, teachers and others do.
The Torygraph published an article in which Townshend maintained that he had only accessed the child porn site to demonstrate that British banks were channelling child porn profits. Which they may well be, but I’m not sure that using your credit card to access the sites yourself and join in the fun is quite the way to expose what the banks are doing. Townsend stated that ‘I felt I had an understanding, and I could help’. Which is exactly what Dr Dafydd Alun Jones said on every occasion that he was challenged after being caught doing something unacceptable.
Townshend was also quoted in the Torygraph as saying that he suffered from ‘White Knight Syndrome’. I have never heard of such a condition, but according to Townshend, it afflicts those ‘who like to be seen to be helping’. I don’t know if White Knight Syndrome will be appearing in DSM soon, but Dafydd is clearly a fellow sufferer. During every investigation into Dafydd, his explanation for whatever serious malpractice was involved has been ‘I was only trying to help’. He even went on TV and said that after Mary Wynch won her case and accompanied it with the comment ‘I found myself in this bizarre situation’. Then bugger me if Dafydd didn’t say exactly the same thing to Robert Bluglass after I complained about him – ‘Well I found myself in this bizarre situation and I was only trying to help’.
Dafydd – take it from me, if you do not threaten women and then have them unlawfully arrested and imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals when they fail to succumb to your threats, you will find yourself in far fewer bizarre situations and you will not need to help quite so often. It’ll save you a lot of bother and it will be far cheaper for whichever organisation is stupid enough to employ you, because legal fees do mount up when Top Docs find themselves in bizarre situations and try to help in this manner.
Townshend was also quoted in one press report as saying that he had been accused of being a paedophile because he had a big nose. Not only is Peter Townshend’s nose not that big, but I rather suspect that the reason for the cloud of suspicion was his accessing a child porn website rather than his nose. As was said in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, ‘blessed are the big noses’ – a film which was co-authored by and starred Graham Chapman, a man who enjoyed sex with underaged boys (see post ‘Inside Information About A Hergest Unit Death’). Chapman didn’t claim to be undertaking research when he was questioned by the police, he just told them to take a running jump because he was a Top Doctor. Chapman qualified at Bart’s, which was where Dafydd’s protector Prof Linford Rees worked for years (see post ‘A Galaxy Of Talent’).
Townshend’s wiki entry doesn’t mention that caution for child porn and the five years on the sex offenders register, but it does have a great deal about his charidee work and explains that in 1974 Pete played a benefit show which was organised to raise funds for the Camden Square Community Play Centre.
The earliest public example of Townshend’s charidee work was in 1968, when he donated the use of his former Wardour Street apartment to the Meher Baba Association. The following year, the Association was moved to another Townshend-owned apartment in Eccleston Square. Townshend sat on a committee which oversaw the operation and finances of the centre.
In 1969 and 1972, Townshend produced two limited-release albums, Happy Birthday and I Am, for the London-based Baba Association. This led to 1972’s Who Came First, 15 percent of the revenue of which went to the Baba Association. In 1976 there was a further release, With Love. A boxed set of all three limited releases on CD, Avatar, was released in 2000, with all profits going to the Avatar Meher Baba Trust in India, which provided funds to a dispensary, school, hospital and pilgrimage centre.
In July 1976, Townshend opened Meher Baba Oceanic, a London activity centre for Baba followers, which featured film dubbing and editing facilities, a cinema and a recording studio. The centre also served as a regular meeting place for Baba followers. Townshend offered very economical lodging for American followers who needed an overnight stay on their pilgrimages to India. Townshend wrote in a 1977 Rolling Stone article:
| ‘For a few years, I had toyed with the idea of opening a London house dedicated to Meher Baba. In the eight years I had followed him, I had donated only coppers to foundations set up around the world to carry out the Master’s wishes and decided it was about time I put myself on the line. The Who had set up a strong charitable trust of its own which appeased, to an extent, the feeling I had that Meher Baba would rather have seen me give to the poor than to the establishment of yet another so-called ‘spiritual center’.’ |
Townshend also embarked on a MEFA, the Meher Baba European Film Archive, project dedicated to the collection, restoration and maintenance of Meher Baba-related films.
Townshend has been a champion of children’s charities. The debut of Pete Townshend’s stage version of ‘Tommy’ in San Diego’s in July 1992 was earmarked as a benefit for the London-based Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Foundation, an organisation which helps children with autism and intellectual disability.
Townshend performed at a 1995 benefit organised by Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden’s Paramount Theatre for the Children’s Health Fund. The following year, Townshend performed at a benefit for the annual Bridge School Benefit, a California facility for children with severe speech and physical impairments, with concerts organised by Neil and Pegi Young. In 1997, Townshend established a relationship with Maryville Academy, a Chicago area children’s charity. Between 1997-02, Townshend played five benefit shows for Maryville Academy, raising at least $1,600,000. His 1998 album A Benefit for Maryville Academy was made to support their activities and proceeds from the sales of his release were donated to them.
As a member of The Who, Townshend has also performed a series of concerts, beginning in 2000, to benefit the Teenage Cancer Trust in the UK, which raised several million pounds. In 2005, Townshend performed at New York’s Gotham Hall for Samsung’s Four Seasons of Hope, an annual children’s charity fundraiser. In the same year, he donated a smashed guitar to the Pediatric Epilepsy Project.
On 4 Nov 2011, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend launched the Daltrey/Townshend Teen and Young Adult Cancer Program at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, to be funded by The Who’s charity Who Cares. The launch, followed on 5 November by a fund-raising event, was also attended by Robert Plant and Dave Grohl.
Townshend has also advocated for drug rehabilitation. In a 1985 radio interview, he said:
| ‘What I’m most active in doing is raising money to provide beds in clinics to help people that have become victims of drug abuse. In Britain, the facilities are very, very, very lean indeed … although we have a national health service, a free medical system, it does nothing particularly for class A drug addicts – cocaine abusers, heroin abusers … we’re making a lot of progress … the British Government embarked on an anti-heroin campaign with advertising, and I was co-opted by them as a kind of figurehead, and then the various other people co-opted me into their own campaigns, but my main work is raising money to try and open a large clinic.’ |
You’ll be delighted to know Pete that Dafydd comes highly recommended by class A drug users. As one said to me – after he’d served a prison sentence for armed robbery – ‘DA’s great, he’ll give you anything that you want, anything that you ask for. And he’ll always give you a good for court report’.
The ‘large clinic’ to which Townshend was referring to was a plan he and drug rehabilitation experimenter Meg Patterson had devised to open a drug treatment facility in London; however, the plan failed to come to fruition. Two early 1979 concerts by The Who raised £20,000 for Patterson’s Pharmakon Clinic in Sussex.
Further examples of Townshend’s drug rehabilitation activism took place in the form of a 1984 benefit concert, an article he wrote a few days later for the Mail on Sunday urging better care for the nation’s addicts and the formation of a charitable organisation, Double-O Charities, to raise funds for the causes he’d championed. Townshend also sold fund-raising anti-heroin T-shirts at a series of UK Bruce Springsteen concerts and reportedly financed a trip for former Clash drummer Topper Headon to undergo drug rehabilitation treatment. Townshend’s 1985–86 band, Deep End, played two benefits at Brixton Academy in 1985 for Double-O.
In 1979 Townshend donated his services to Amnesty when he performed three songs for its benefit show ‘The Secret Policeman’s Ball’. That was of course the event at which Peter Cook performed his wonderful satire ‘Entirely a Matter For You’ in which he sent up the summing up of the judge who presided over Jeremy Thorpe’s trial. Cook’s performance included memorable lines about the hitman not even being able to carry out a simple murder plot without cocking the whole thing up and a man with a criminal past but no criminal future…
Why am I reminded of Huw Daniel every time that I watch ‘Entirely a Matter For You?’
Townshend had been invited to perform for Amnesty by Martin Lewis, the producer of ‘The Secret Policeman’s Ball’, who stated later that Townshend’s participation had been the key to his securing the subsequent participation for Amnesty (in the 1981 sequel show) of Sting, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Phil Collins and Bob Geldof.
Townshend’s band mate Keith Moon was an old flame of Kathy Ethingham’s. I won’t recite in detail the highlights of Moon the Loon’s life here – readers will no doubt be aware of the Rolls Royce in the swimming pool, the wrecked hotel rooms, the TVs chucked out of the window because the hotel staff were not up to Moon’s exacting requirements, the explosions in the bogs etc, but there are a few aspects of Moon’s life and death that are worth mentioning.
Keith Moon had a very serious drug and alcohol problem which by the end of his life was said by his friends to have sent him quite mad – Moon’s mates might have been describing an amphetamine-induced psychosis. Moon died in Sept 1978 of an overdose of Heminevrin, a drug prescribed to combat alcohol abuse. Heminevrin was routinely prescribed to people withdrawing from alcohol – although I’m not sure whether that is still the case. The problem with Heminevrin is – like so many drugs prescribed to people who are prone to not being particularly stable – is that Heminevrin is lethal if not used properly.
By the time that Moon was given a massive quantity of Heminevrin to take home and play with, his excesses were very well known and had been the subject of much media coverage. Some very nasty things had also happened to some of the people associated with Keith Moon.
On 4 Jan 1970 Moon accidentally killed his friend, driver and bodyguard, Neil Boland, outside the Red Lion pub in Hatfield. Pub patrons had begun to attack his Bentley and Moon, drunk, began driving to escape them. During the fracas, he hit Boland. After an investigation, the coroner ruled Boland’s death an accident and Moon received an absolute discharge after being charged with a number of offences. Those close to Moon said that he was haunted by Boland’s death for the rest of his life and Moon had nightmares about the incident and said he had no right to be alive.
I’d be interested to find out how on earth Keith Moon got out of that one, even if he did feel terrible about it afterwards. As someone who was fined £60 for staring at a colleague of a paedophile gang who had unlawfully imprisoned me after encountering her in a supermarket (see post ‘Some Big Legal Names Enter The Arena’), I am confident that if I had run over and killed someone whilst pissed, I would receive a little more that an absolute discharge.
In 1973 Moon’s wife Kim, convinced that neither she nor anyone else could moderate Keith’s behaviour, left Moon and took their daughter. Kim sued for divorce in 1975. Moon’s friends stated that Moon ‘couldn’t handle’ Kim leaving him and that she was ‘the only woman he loved’. So obviously to show how much he loved her, Moon harassed Kim with phone calls and on one occasion before Kim sued for divorce, sent several heavies in pursuit of her, forcing Kim to hide in a walk-in closet after the thugs broke into her home. Kim died in a car accident in Texas in Aug 2006.
In 1975 Moon began a relationship with model Annette Walter-Lax. She begged Malibu neighbour Larry Hagman (JR of ‘Who shot JR?’ fame) to check Moon into a clinic to dry out (as he had attempted to do before), but when doctors recorded Moon’s chemical intake at breakfast – a bottle of champagne, Courvoisier and amphetamines – they concluded that there was no hope for his rehabilitation.
Hagman had a long and successful TV career in the US and in the UK. He knew many of those who hung out with Dafydd’s umbrella Linford Rees’s actress daughter Angharad Rees and her husband Christopher Cazenove (see post ‘A Galaxy Of Talent’).
Early in The Who’s career, Moon got to know The Beatles. He would join them at clubs, forming a particularly close friendship with Ringo Starr. The Ringo who was a neighbour of one of F’s friends…Moon later became friends with Viv Stanshall, a man who was networked with Graham Chapman et al and who died in odd circumstances in March 1995, before there was any chance of him blabbing in the wake of the Waterhouse Report (see post ‘ The International Language Of Screaming’). In the early 1970s Moon helped Stanshall with his ‘Radio Flashes’ radio show for BBC Radio 1, filling in for the vacationing John Peel. Subsequently, in 1973, Moon himself filled in for John Peel in ‘A Touch of the Moon’. The John Peel who went to school in Deganwy in north Wales and who was later so helpful in creating rock stars out of the offspring of the paedophiles’ friends in the run up to the Waterhouse Inquiry and the publication of the Waterhouse Report (see post ‘The International Language Of Screaming’).
In 1974, Moon struck up a friendship with the drunken git Oliver Reed of ‘I’ve got a tattoo on my penis, would you ladies like to see it’ fame. The Ollie who wrestled naked in mud with other man, lest anyone might suspect him of having homophilic tendancies.
Keith Moon was mates with Graham Chapman who, as well as regularly visiting north Wales with his 13 year old ‘adopted son’, used to dip his penis – presumably untattooed – in folk’s drinks in pubs near his house in Belsize Park. He didn’t receive a kick in the carregs because he wasn’t in Wetherspoons in Caernarfon, he was a zany Python within spitting distance of Hamptead, so it was OK.
In mid-1978 Moon moved into a flat in Curzon Place, Mayfair, renting from singer Harry Nilsson. (The wiki entry for Nilsson states that he died of a heart attack in 1994 at 52 years of age – which is a bit weird because I can remember when he was found dead and I seem to remember that the media reports stated that it was thought that he’d killed himself. Nilsson was a close friend of Ringo.) The singer Cass Elliot had died in the same flat four years earlier, at the age of 32. Cass’s wiki entry states that she too died of a heart attack. Curiouser and curiouser – Cass Elliot definitely choked to death, on, I understand, a ham sandwich. I wonder if someone has been busy amending wiki? Nilsson was concerned about letting the flat to Moon, believing it was cursed. Townshend disagreed, assuring him that ‘lightning wouldn’t strike the same place twice’.
After moving in, Moon began a prescribed course of Heminevrin. He wanted to get sober, but he had a fear of psychiatric hospitals – very wise – so he wanted to detox at home. Heminevrin is discouraged for unsupervised detox because of its addictive potential, its tendency to induce tolerance and the risk of death when mixed with alcohol. The pills were prescribed by Dr Geoffrey Dymond, a Top Doctor from Harley Street. Dymond prescribed a bottle of 100 pills, instructing Moon to take one pill when he felt a craving for alcohol but not more than three pills per day.
On 6 Sept 1978 Moon and Annette dined with the McCartneys in Covent Garden, after a party. David Frost was a guest at the party – the Frost who conveniently pegged out on a cruise in Aug 2013 in the midst of Operation Pallial and the Macur Review and who’s death was followed by the sudden death of his 31 year old Miles not long afterwards (see post ‘The International Language Of Screaming’). Moon watched a film – ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ no less – and asked Annette to cook him steak and eggs. When she objected, Moon replied, ‘If you don’t like it, you can fuck off’. He then took 32 Heminevrin tablets. When Annette checked on Moon the following afternoon, she found him dead.
Police determined that there were 32 Heminevrin pills in Moon’s system. Six were digested, sufficient to cause his death; the other 26 were undigested when he died. Max Glatt – one of many Top Docs who has previously starred on this blog (see post ‘A Galaxy Of Talent’) – wrote in The Sunday Times that Moon should never have been given the drug.
When Moon’s friends discovered how lethal Heminevrin is in overdose they were all baffled as to why the Abominable Dr Dymond prescribed so many for him. The Abominable Dr Dymond maintained that he was ‘unaware’ of Moon’s lifestyle.
In 1978 I was a schoolgirl in Somerset. Even I knew about Keith Moon’s lifestyle, as did my friends and I had never been to London in my life, so how the Rolls Royces in the swimming pools etc escaped Geoffrey Dymond’s notice I don’t know.
Interviews with Moon’s mates suggest that they put a great deal of trust in Dymond and his abilities to ‘look after’ Keith Moon and just assumed that the Top Doctor had made an inexplicable error. I am happy to tell Moon’s surviving friends that a lot of Top Docs detest patients a lot less twattish than Keith Moon – and by the time that he died, Moon really was a twat of the highest order who had pissed off a great many people. Whilst working in medical research and in my capacity as a patient I have heard Top Docs and their associates express such callous attitudes towards patients and follow this up with criminally negligent conduct of such a magnitude that the general public would not believe that it ever happens. Take it from me, they help people on their way. I have heard the most shocking comments made by Top Doctors after distressed colleagues – let alone patients – of theirs have killed themselves and I know of at least three suicides of mental health patients which could have been avoided with very little effort but that effort was quite deliberately not made. When faced with someone like Keith Moon, a lot of Top Doctors really could not give a fuck.
How are you Dafydd and Keith Fearns? Is it not ironic that it was Tony Francis who committed suicide rather than me? You didn’t expect that did you? Christ almighty, all I did was complain about Gwynne the lobotomist and catch Toy Francis out on a lie and WW III was declared. To paraphrase Morrissey : ‘They bear more grudges/Than lonely High Court judges’…
F repeatedly told me, whilst he related anecdotes from his youth in the bosom of Ringo et al, that ‘they hated us’.
Another bedfellow of Kathy Etchingham’s was Brian Jones, the original leader of the Rolling Stones. F always maintained that Brian Jones was murdered. Jones died in July 1969 – he was found motionless at the bottom of his pool at Cotchford Farm. His girlfriend Anna Wohlin maintained that Jones was still alive when he was taken out of the pool but Top Doctors arrived at the scene ‘too late’ and pronounced him dead. The verdict was of death by misadventure. It was Sussex Police who stood accused of failing to investigate the allegations that Jones was murdered or to have even concealed a murder.
Brian Jones was someone else who developed drug and alcohol problems and was identifiably quite seriously mentally ill by the time that he died.
Brian Jones seems to have been treated very callously by many of those around him. When asked if he felt guilty about Jones’ death, Mick Jagger told ‘Rolling Stone’ in 1995: ‘No, I don’t really. I do feel that I behaved in a very childish way, but we were very young and in some ways we picked on him. But, unfortunately, he made himself a target for it; he was very, very jealous, very difficult, very manipulative and if you do that in this kind of a group of people you get back as good as you give, to be honest. I wasn’t understanding enough about his drug addiction.’
Ah well Brian Jones was manipulative unlike Mr Clean Mick, so who gives a stuff that he was treated badly and found dead in suspicious circumstances. Mick is now what Viz magazine calls a ‘shag relative’ of Rupert Murdoch ie. Mick has shagged someone that Murdoch has shagged. Or at least married. So I doubt that we’ll be reading much about any interpretation of Jones’s character other than that he was ‘manipulative’ and people ‘didn’t understand’.
Kathy also had a relationship with Georgie Fame. Georgie is still alive but his wife Nicolette, the Marchioness of Londonderry, isn’t. Her body was found beneath the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Aug 1993 and it was assumed that she had jumped. At the time it was reported that Nicolette was seen on the bridge, approached someone, gave them her name and asked them to ‘raise the alarm’. Whether they did or not I don’t know – Nicolette’s body was found later. A statement was given to the media explaining that Nicolette had been under the care of an expensive Top Doctor because she was distraught at the menopause and by her children leaving the nest. As someone who has now had a menopause, I can confirm that there is no need to even bother to read the volumes of rubbish that are published by the likes of Miriam Stoppard to ‘guide one through it’, let alone chuck oneself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge, it really is not that much of a big deal if you keep away from Top Doctors recommending unnecessary things like HRT. Some people do feel bereft when their children leave home, but women are no longer put in the dustbin when that happens and a lot of them have a great time, particularly if they’re a Marchioness. I cannot help suspecting that there might have been something far more serious worrying Nicolette than the menopause and the kids moving out.
Georgie Fame’s first job was at Butlins in Pwllheli. Like Kathy Etchingham, he went to London and the age of 16 and hit the music scene.
August 1993. Just before the North Wales Police wound up their investigation into the possible existence of a VIP paedophile ring in north Wales and declared that there was no evidence of any such thing.
The coroner who carried out the inquest into the death of Jimi Hendrix was Lt Col Gavin Thurston. Thurston was educated at Dulwich College and Guy’s Hospital Medical School. He served in the RAMC from 1939-45 in India and NW Europe. Thurston was called to the Bar in 1952 but never practised.
Thurston came under the influence of an older Guy’s man, Percy Barnard Skeels, a solicitor of the City firm of Hoddinott & Skeels, then HM coroner to metropolitan Essex. Thurston was appointed as Skeels’s deputy in 1949. He was appointed as Westminster coroner in 1956 and occupied this post until his death in 1980. Thurston served as Treasurer, Secretary and President to the Coroner’s Society and was President of the Medico-Legal Society in 1969. He was a member of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences and for a short period a lecturer at the West London Medical School. Thurston sat on the Council of the MDU, 1960-80.
Thurston lived in Sussex and was married to Janet, another Top Doctor who specialised in community medicine. Janet accompanied Thurston to medico-legal and forensic meetings. After Thurston died, in 1982 Janet married a colleague of Thurston’s, the pathologist Professor Keith Simpson, who also spent a career investigating suspicious deaths that could prove difficult for high profile people. More details about Keith Simpson can be found in my post ‘Oh, No! It’s The Pathetic Sharks…’.
Thurston had a son, John, who was also a Top Doctor. A Dr John Thurston, an A&E Top Doctor at Joyce Green Hospital, Dartford, contributed to one of those regular BBC News Online reports regarding How Fucking Daft All The Patients Are. Top Doc Thurston was able to tell the BBC that ‘people really can be stupid’. The Top Docs are often somewhat conflicted over the intelligence of patients. Top Doctor Devakumar, one of the paedophiles’ friends who was employed at the Hergest Unit for many years, once yelled at me ‘you are stupid’ because I did insist on complaining about Dafydd. Yet Devakumar was also a signatory to the documents detailed in previous blog posts in which the BMA, MDU and many other people were told that I was a wicked genius who needed to be banged up in a secure unit asap. Perhaps I should consider myself fortunate – in one ward round Devakumar rolled up his sleeves and told a male patient that he’d fight him whenever he wanted.
‘As experienced psychiatrists we are used to patients who are aggressive to us and have training in de-escalation techniques’ wrote Dr Sadie Francis in one letter to Hempsons, detailing the problem that was me, after Hempsons had written to her and Tony Francis and them that they were ‘over-reacting’ and strongly advised them not to pursue litigation against me.
De-escalation techniques – ‘SCRAAAAP’…
At the time of writing, the Guardian website features yet another article about Dangerous Psychiatric Patients attacking Top Doctors and Angels. It is a ‘global problem’ according to the Guardian.
Gavin Thurston was certainly Coroner to the Stars. His cases included Keith Moon, Cass Elliot, Stephen Ward (the scapegoat of the Profumo Affair – see post ‘In Memoriam – Bronwen, Lady Astor’), Judy Garland, Professor Gordon Fairley, Airey Neave, Sandra Rivett (Lord Lucan’s nanny) and Georgi Markov.
The Top Doctor who carried out the autopsy on Hendrix was pathologist Dr Donald Teare. Teare was from the Isle of Man and his father was a newspaper proprietor who also became a member of the House of Keys. Teare was educated at King William’s College on the Isle of Man and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He trained at St George’s Hospital Medical School. Teare began his career as a lecturer in forensic medicine at Bart’s Hospital Medical College. He was Reader and then Professor of Forensic Medicine at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, 1963-75. Teare was also a lecturer at the Metropolitan Police College, Hendon. He served as President of the MDU and President of the British Association of Forensic Medicine; President of the Association of Forensic Pathologists; President of the Medico-Legal Society, 1965-66. Teare was given a personal Chair in the University of London in 1968.
Donald Teare worked on many celebrity corpses and his famous cases included the murder of Beryl Evans and her baby Geraldine – for which Timothy Evans was hanged only to be posthumously cleared – and Podola (see post ‘The Discovery Of A Whole New Galaxy…’). Together with Prof Keith Simpson and Prof Francis Camps, Teare was one of the ‘Three Musketeers’, who dealt with almost all the suspicious deaths in the London area. Teare retired in 1975 and in Jan 1979 on the Isle of Man, at the age of 67.
Teare’s wife Kathleen was a magistrate in London.
The Royal College of Physicians website ‘Lives of the Fellows Online’ section informs us that Donald Teare was ‘much respected and loved – a combination not always achieved by men of distinction in medicine’. Someone’s been telling porkies then, because a read through the Royal College of Physicians ‘Lives of the Fellows Online’ reveals numerous distinguished Top Docs who were outstandingly brilliant, wonderful with patients, revered by everyone and had hearts of gold. In the cases of Top Doctors who were so obnoxious that even the Royal College of Physicians can’t pass them off as being lovely, it is stressed that they were really just very shy and no-one knew that within the complete bastard was a cuddly fluffy bunny. It was a CK Simpson who wrote Teare’s ‘Lives of the Fellows’ entry, who I suspect was Keith Simpson, Teare’s mate.
Thurston and Teare were both Top Docs to Scotland Yard and the Royal Family. Thurston was Deputy Coroner to the Royal Household.
I really am looking forward to reading Dafydd’s obituaries. A friend has already instructed me to pay a special tribute to Dafydd on this blog when he finally turns his toes up. When Lucille pegs out I could write a little piece along the lines of ‘together in heaven for ever’…
Professor Francis Camps was the son of Dr Percy William Leopold Camps, a GP and surgeon. Camps was educated at Marlborough College, followed by Guy’s Hospital. He went on to postgraduate studies at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and the Neuchâtel University, Switzerland. Camps took up the post of pathologist at the Chelmsford and Essex Hospital. He was Reader and then Professor of Forensic Medicine at the London Hospital Medical School; President of the International Association of Forensic Scientists; President of the British Association and Secretary General, British Academy of Forensic Sciences.
Camps worked on, amongst others, the Dr John Bodkins Adams case in 1956 where he identified 163 suspicious deaths and was an expert witness in the trial the following year. However, Adams was acquitted of murdering one of his patients, owing to lack of evidence of motive, among other uncertainties. Harriet Harman’s father Dr John Harman gave evidence supportive of Bodkin Adams, although Harman had very little experience in the matters on which he gave ‘expert evidence’.
Camps gave evidence during the trial of John Christie in 1953, having produced a detailed and comprehensive report on the many bodies found at 10 Rillington Place. The bodies were well preserved and so much relevant information could be gleaned from their condition. His report showed a consistent pattern of attack by Christie, most of the intact victims having been sexually molested and strangled. Beryl and Geraldine Evans had alone been strangled and their bodies were exhumed to be re-examined for Christie’s trial – by then Timothy Evans had already been convicted of their murders and hanged.
The skeletal remains of Christie’s older victims buried in the back garden at Rillington Place provided less information, although it proved possible to identify the women involved. There could be little doubt that Christie had murdered them all, that Timothy Evans was innocent and that he had been wrongly executed. The forensic and witness evidence pointed to a serious miscarriage of justice, although it was contested by a series of lawyers and politicians well after the events.
Several authors, including Ludovic Kennedy, pointed out the many contradictions and errors in the Crown’s case and the innocence of Evans is now widely accepted, by the public, experts and by the Crown itself.
Thurston and Teare were involved in having the final say regarding a few other suspicious celebrity deaths as well.
Tara Browne died in a car crash in Chelsea in 1966 – she was a friend of Paul McCartney’s. Jane Asher was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend whose dad Dr Richard Asher’s body was found in 1969 in the basement of the family home at Wimpole Street after he had been missing for days. It was deemed that Dr Asher died by suicide. McCartney had previously lived at the Asher’s Wimpole Street home in the mid-60s. Dr Asher was an endocrinologist and haematologist with an interest in the physical fators contributing to mental illness. He was the senior physician responsible for mental observations at the Central Middlesex Hospital but for some reason in 1964 his job was given to a psychiatrist. Asher was so upset by this that he effectively gave up medicine. In my experience this sort of thing is usually a consequence of war being declared upon someone who has fallen foul of their colleagues, rather than bearing any relation to their clinical skills. Dr Asher had possible connections with Profumo via Stephen Ward.
Donald Teare also performed the autopsy on Brian Epstein, the manager of The Beatles and Cilla Black. Epstein died in Aug 1967, at his home in Kingsley Hill.
Epstein’s homosexuality was not publicly known until some years after his death, although it had been an open secret among his friends and business associates. Whilst Epstein was in the Army, he commissioned a tailor to make an officer’s uniform for him that he wore when cruising the bars of London, but was arrested one night by the Military Police for impersonating an officer. Epstein managed to avoid a court martial by agreeing to see an Army psychiatrist, who learned of Epstein’s sexuality. After 10 months he was discharged from the Army for being ’emotionally and mentally unfit’.
Epstein spent a year studying acting at RADA, but dropped out shortly after his arrest for ‘persistent importuning’ outside a men’s public toilet in Swiss Cottage. McCartney said that when Epstein started to manage the Beatles they knew that he was homosexual but did not care, because he encouraged them professionally and offered them access to previously ‘off-limits’ social circles. John Lennon was often sarcastic about Epstein’s homosexuality but no-one outside the inner circle was allowed to comment. Ian Sharp, one of Lennon’s art school friends, when talking about Epstein, asked, ‘Which one of you [Beatles] does he fancy?’ Sharp was sent a letter by Epstein’s office within 48 hours that demanded a complete apology. Sharp apologised but received a letter from McCartney directing him to have no contact with any of them in the future. Epstein went on holiday to places such as Amsterdam, Torremolinos and Barcelona or Manchester at weekends, as the attitude to gays there was more tolerant than Liverpool.
In his autobiography, Pete Best, a close associate of The Beatles, stated that one evening Epstein expressed his ‘very fond admiration’. Epstein then supposedly said, ‘Would you find it embarrassing if I ask you to stay in a hotel overnight?’ Best replied that he was not interested and the two never mentioned the incident again. There were reports of a brief sexual encounter between Lennon and Epstein during a four day holiday in Barcelona in April 1963, although Lennon always denied the rumours. Male homosexual activity was not decriminalised in England and Wales until one month after Epstein’s death.
Epstein used stimulants, usually Preludin, which did not require a prescription at the time. Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr also used it. Epstein developed dependencies on carbromal, a barbiturate-like sedative/hypnotic drug.
In 1964 Epstein was introduced to cannabis by Bob Dylan. Epstein later became heavily involved in the 1960s drug scene. Whilst the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper was being recorded, Epstein spent his time on holiday, or at the Priory Clinic in Putney, where he tried unsuccessfully to curb his drug use.
Epstein attended a traditional shiva in Liverpool after his father died, having just come out of the Priory clinic where he had been trying to cure his acute insomnia and addiction to amphetamines. On 24 Aug 1967 Epstein asked Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis down to Kingsley Hill – Epstein’s country home in Warbleton Sussex – for the weekend. After they arrived, Epstein decided to drive back to London alone because an expected group of rent boys he had invited failed to arrive, although they did turn up after Epstein left. Epstein phoned Brown at 5 pm the next day from his Chapel Street house in London. Brown thought that Epstein sounded ‘very groggy’, and suggested that he take a train back instead of driving under the influence of Tuinals. Epstein replied that he would eat something, read his mail and watch Juke Box Jury before phoning Brown to tell him which train to meet. He never called again.
Epstein died of an overdose of the barbiturate Carbitral in his locked bedroom, on 27 August 1967. He was discovered after his butler had knocked on the door and then hearing no response asked the housekeeper to call the police. Epstein was found on a single bed, dressed in pyjamas, with various correspondence spread over a second single bed. At the inquest his death was ruled an accident, caused by a gradual buildup of Carbitral in his system, combined with alcohol. The Beatles were in Bangor at the time, with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Epstein had previously agreed to travel to Bangor after the August Bank Holiday. The second of two shows by Jimi Hendrix at Epstein’s Saville Theatre was cancelled on the evening of his death.
Peter Brown wrote in his memoir that he had once found a suicide note written by Epstein and had spoken with him about it. According to Brown the note read in part, ‘This is all too much and I can’t take it any more’. Brown had also found a will made by Epstein. When confronted with the notes, Epstein told Brown that he would be grateful if Brown did not tell anyone. He explained that when he wrote the note and composed the will he had simply taken one pill too many, and that he had no intention of overdosing, promising to be more careful in the future. Epstein’s doctor, Norman Cowan, was prescribing the drugs. The coroner, Thurston, told the Westminster inquest that Epstein’s death was caused by an overdose of Carbitral, and ruled it as an accidental death. The pathologist, Teare, stated that Epstein had been taking bromide in the form of Carbitral for some time and that the barbiturate level in Epstein’s blood was a ‘low fatal level’.
Bromide was famously used by Top Docs to suppress the sexual urges of men who were suspiciously gay, although Top Docs often deny this.
The Beatles did not attend Epstein’s funeral, both to allow his family some privacy and to avoid attracting fans and the media. Epstein was buried in the Long Lane Jewish Cemetery, Aintree. The service at the graveside was held by Rabbi Dr Norman Solomon, who stated that Epstein was ‘a symbol of the malaise of our generation’.
Whatever Epstein did paled into insignificance when compared to that cartel of Top Doctors.
It is worth discussing another Top Doctor who was called upon the investigate many suspicious deaths as well, Professor David Bowen. As Head of Forensic Medicine at Charing Cross Hospital between 1973-89 and Professor of Forensic Medicine at London University from 1977-89, Bowen investigated some 500 cases of murder and suspicious deaths.
In Feb 1983 Det Ch Insp Peter Jay, head of Hornsey CID, arrived at Bowen’s office at Charing Cross and showed him several strips of skin and four small bones which had been recovered from a house in Muswell Hill, where blocked drains had been reported. The strips had a few fine hairs and appeared to have been partially boiled; initially they were thought to have come from the skin of a chicken. But Bowen was certain they were human. Noticing indentations on the surface of the skin, Bowen remarked that it might well have come from someone who had been strangled.
On the strength of Bowen’s advice, the detective returned to north London to await the arrival home from work of Dennis Nilsen, a 37 year old civil servant with the Manpower Services Commission. ‘I’ve come about your drains,’ said Jay.
That evening Bowen was called to make an initial examination of Nilsen’s flat at Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill and was immediately struck by its unpleasant foetid atmosphere. When he examined two plastic bin bags taken from the wardrobe he found human chest tissue, expertly dissected from the rib cage and an almost complete human torso. He also found the upper half of a second torso with arms but no hands; a decomposed skull; and the freshly decapitated head of Nilsen’s last victim. In total Bowen counted up the major parts of two bodies plus a recently dismembered one which was easily identified by fingerprints. In this case, the head had been parboiled in a stockpot which Nilsen kept on his stove. Nilsen said the other two had died in March and Sept 1982.
At his previous address in Melrose Avenue, Cricklewood, Nilsen had dismembered another 12 victims and buried them under his floorboards. To make way for newcomers as space became tight, he progressively transferred the remains to his garden, burning them on huge bonfires before crushing the residuum with a heavy roller. Bowen and a colleague identified enough bone fragments retrieved from the topsoil to establish that at least six bodies were represented. At Nilsen’s trial, the jury found him guilty on six charges of murder.
At the time, the Nilson case involved the disposal of more bodies by one man than in any other case in British criminal history.
I remember the media coverage of the Dennis Nilsen case well. Some of the comments in court regarding Nilsen’s ‘madness’ were very stereotypical and quite farcical and although it was clear that human remains had been found, there was much confusion and speculation over exactly how many people Nilsen was alleged to have killed. Then there was the question that everybody was asking – why were none of the men whom Nilsen was alleged to have killed ever reported missing? The conversation at the time centred around how sad it was that numerous young single homeless men had been murdered by Nilsen and no-one even missed them. Some years after Dennis Nilsen was convicted, I encountered Dr Paul Bowden, one of the ‘experts’ in the Nilsen case. Paul Bowden was one of those called upon the ‘assess’ me when the paedophiles’ friends of north Wales perjured themselves and had me arrested in early 1991. Bowden was one of those who knew about the criminality of Dafydd et al but who said nothing (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London…’). Bowden worked at the Maudsley, where Dafydd had ‘trained’ and Bowden had also worked closely with Professor Robert Bluglass, who concealed the criminal conduct of Dafydd, Tony Francis, Gwynedd Social Services et al in 1989 (see post ‘Enter Professor Robert Bluglass CBE’).
Many years ago I found the transcript of a public lecture that Bluglass had given, of a ‘my brilliant career’ type. Bluglass waxed lyrical about murderers that he had known but failed to mention that there was a dearth of evidence in some of the cases that he discussed, there was merely rumour and speculation. Bluglass discussed Dennis Nilsen – the journal in which the lecture was published was illustrated by photos. Someone had recreated the imagined scene in Dennis Nilsen’s kitchen where he was alleged to have boiled someone’s decapitated head on the stove and for effect there were tufts of hair sticking out from under the saucepan lid. The journal was very complimentary about this touch. Now if one of Bluglass’s patients had done that for a laugh, it would have been recorded in triplicate and used as evidence as to how dangerous that patient was for years to come. In much the same way that Dafydd and Bluglass agreed that I was really quite mad and dangerous because I called Dafydd a wanker, yet Bluglass’s daughter Amanda – who fancies herself as an avant garde artist – can embroider a sampler with ‘Happy Fucking Holidays’ on it and display it on the internet. I don’t mind if Amanda Bluglass wants to do that, but it certainly illustrates that her father was moving goalposts.
Perhaps Dennis Nilsen did invite all those men back to his house, strangle them, have sex with them and then dismember them in the kitchen as alleged. Someone definitely killed someone, there were some human remains found. But beyond that no-one can be sure of anything very much because so many of the ‘experts’ involved were not only out of their depth but endemically corrupt liars as well.
Four years after the Nilsen trial, Bowen worked on the Railway Murders, two of which had been carried out by John Duffy and three by his close friend David Mulcahy. In 1988 Duffy had been convicted of two killings but acquitted of a third – that of Anne Lock – because of lack of evidence.
But 10 years into his sentence, Duffy named Mulcahy as his accomplice in some 25 rapes and three murders near suburban railway stations in north London, including the unsolved killing of Mrs Lock. Unlike the other two victims, she had been suffocated by a sock stuffed into her mouth. In Sept 2000 Bowen returned to the Old Bailey to testify about the tape that had bound Mrs Lock’s hands and was cross-examined on exactly how the tape had been fastened to her fingers, corroborating the story that Duffy had given. As a result Mulcahy was convicted of three murders, seven rapes and five counts of conspiracy to rape and given a whole life sentence.
David Bowen was born at Pontycymmer, near Bridgend, south Wales. After Caterham School and Garw Secondary School, Pontycymmer, Bowen completed a medical degree at University College of Wales in Cardiff and took a Master’s at Corpus Christi, Cambridge. He completed his training at Middlesex Hospital Medical School. Bowen was pretty much the same age as Gwynne the lobotomist – who also trained at the Middlesex. Bowen undertook house officer posts at the West Middlesex and London Chest Hospitals and followed them up with two years in the RMAC.
Such is the nepotism among Top Doctors that Bowen will have known Gwynne and Dafydd.
Bowen trained in clinical pathology and histopathology at the Royal Marsden Hospital and in 1957 was appointed as Demonstrator in Forensic Pathology at St George’s Hospital Medical School.
In his memoirs, Bowen recalled how a telephone call and an interview led to a job as ‘bagman’ to Professor Donald Teare. It was a ‘rare chance to gain a foothold in such a specialised sphere’ and Bowen seized it.
Bowen carried out forensic investigations into many notable cases, including the murder of Ross McWhirter who was shot on the doorstep of his north London home by the IRA in 1975; the death of the teacher Blair Peach at an anti-racism demonstration in London in 1979 and the killing of PC Keith Blakelock, hacked to death in the riots on the Broadwater Farm Estate, Tottenham, in 1985. Bowen also conducted autopsies in the wake of the IRA bomb at the Baltic Exchange in London in April 1992.
In 1999 Bowen was asked to provide a report on the case of Roberto Calvi, head of Italy’s Banco Ambrosiano and known as ‘God’s banker’ because of his close ties to the Vatican. Calvi was found hanging below Blackfriars Bridge in 1982. Bowen had been retained by lawyers acting for Italian insurers dealing with a claim by Calvi’s widow on a $4 million life insurance policy. She and her son insisted the banker did not take his own life, as the police had concluded.
Bowen believed that evidence pointed to Calvi having been forcibly taken to the bridge, possibly by boat, and to his having been the victim of foul play. In 2007 five Italians tried for Calvi’s murder were acquitted.
The Roberto Calvi case is yet another one in which no-one knows what to believe because of the very questionable track records of so many who were involved with it.
Another case of Bowen’s cases was the death in Spandau prison in 1987 of Rudolf Hess. A British consultant surgeon, Hugh Thomas, who attended Hess, sought Bowen’s opinion on the cause of Hess’s death. Bowen scrutinised two separate postmortem reports, one prepared on behalf of the Four Powers (Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France) and the other drawn up on behalf of Hess’s family.
The Four Powers believed that the prisoner had hanged himself using electrical cord he had found in a shed. But Bowen agreed with Hess’s son that the alleged method of Hess’s hanging left considerable doubt about the truth of the matter. Suicidal hanging, Bowen noted, usually leaves few marks on the neck or internal tissues because of the invariably short drop. In Hess’s case the autopsy had found bruising in the deeper neck tissues. Such bruising, Bowen reasoned, while unlikely to occur in a case of hanging, is, however, a feature of strangulation.
Bruising to the top of the head – again as found in Hess’s case – is also unlikely to occur in hanging. ‘Doubts must remain’, Bowen concluded, ‘on the reliability of the official statement given concerning the death of Rudolf Hess.’
As well as his London appointments, Bowen was examiner in forensic medicine at the Universities of Saudi Arabia and Colombo, Sri Lanka. David Bowen married, in 1950, Joan Davis, with whom he had two sons and a daughter. Following her death in 1973 he married, in 1975, Helen Landcastle.
Bowen will have been part of the Dafydd and Gwynne network, so once more who would ever know whether his opinion was worth anything at all.
I am left with the possibility that the ‘delusions’ of F are probably as reliable as the expert opinions of the tightly knit bunch of crooks who carried out so many of the autopsies and inquests of those 60s and 70s rock stars. They managed to condemn Timothy Evans to hang, although people were told very clearly at the time that the police had forced a confession out of Evans, had written his statement themselves and that the evidence wasn’t convincing.
The other thing worth noting is that Kathy Etchingham ended up as a Top Doctor’s wife, but when she went to London she was a 16 year old runaway with a troubled background. She was also from Derby – where a paedophile ring with links to Dafydd’s gang in north Wales operated. Hendrix called Kathy his ‘Yoko Ono From Chester’. Did Kathy end up in London via Chester? Chester was a major part of the north Wales sex trafficking network.
There is someone who is still very much alive who could fill us all in on many of the mysteries from swinging London who, like Kathy Etchingham, dines out on her status as someone who was at the heart of it all but experiences brain fades at very convenient moments – Michael Howard’s wife Sandra, who is the former model known as Sandra Paul.
Michael Howard was the Home Secretary who ruined Mary Wynch as she had the temerity to continue her fight after it was admitted that Dafydd did indeed have Mary unlawfully arrested and imprisoned for a year (see post ‘The Mary Wynch Case – Details’).
Sandra was the daughter of an RAF Top Doctor and seemed to have been expected to lead a rather pointless life when she was young, so she went to London and ‘became a model’. Sandra boasts of having been photographed by David Bailey and Norman Parkinson. She knew JF Kennedy, Frank Sinatra – aka Ol’ Mafia Connections – and Bob Dylan.
Like Kathy, Sandra stresses that she was never promiscuous, but Sandra did get through quite a few husbands in quite a short time before she married Michael Howard. Sandra’s first husband was the jazz pianist Robin Douglas-Home, nephew of former PM Alec. Sandra and Robin’s divorce occurred at about the same time as Robin was shagging Princess Margaret. Robin killed himself in 1968 after suffering clinical depression. Someone else whom the Top Docs didn’t manage to do much for then. After she divorced Robin, Sandra married publicist David Wynne-Morgan and once she’d finished with him, he moved onto advertising exec Nigel Grandfield. Whilst married to Grandfield, Sandra was at a charity knees up on behalf of the Red Cross when she met Michael Howard, who was at that time still working as a barrister. Howard and Sandra married in 1975.
Michael Howard began life as Michael Hecht. His mum had lived in Wales from the age of six months but his dad was from Romania. What with the UK being populated by so many bigots, Michael’s dad did what many immigrants did and changed his name. Thus Michael was able to rise to the top of a party containing even more racist bastards than the other parties.
Howard was from south west Wales and went to Llanelli Boys Grammar School. He then went to Peterhouse College, Cambridge. Whilst a student, Howard was part of the notorious ‘Cambridge mafia’, along with Ken Clarke et al who later filled Thatcher’s Cabinet. Howard was elected as the MP for Folkestone and Hythe in 1983.
Another Tory of that era who came from the Swansea area was Michael Heseltine. Then there was Geoffrey Howe who was born in Port Talbot, the son of a solicitor and coroner. After Bridgend Prep School, Howe went to school in England then went to Trinity Hall where he too became part of the Cambridge mafia. Howe worked as a barrister on the endemically corrupt Wales and Chester Circuit, along with Ronnie Waterhouse and so many others who concealed the crimes of Dafydd and co. Howe investigated the Ely Hospital Scandal in 1969 – conditions at the North Wales Hospital were known to be worse but there was no investigation. Howe was Solicitor General under Heath, 1970-72. Howe served as MP for Bebington on the Wirral, 1964-66, then for Reigate in Surrey, 1970-74, then for East Surrey, 1974-92.
Geoffrey Howe knew about Dafydd and Gwynne (and of course George Thomas) even before Sir Peter Morrison was elected as MP for Chester and began abusing kids in north Wales and Cheshire.
Geoffrey has turned his toes up but his widow Elspeth is still with us. Elspeth is a peer in her own right – Blair made her a People’s Peer, along with all those paedophiles’ friends. Elspeth was Deputy Chairman of the EOC, 1975-79 – so she’ll have known the paedophiles’ friends who log jammed that organisation them – and was Chair of the Broadcasting Standards Commission. Just in case anyone had thought of screening a TV expose of Dafydd et al…
Do you have anything that you wish to declare Elspeth?
Elspeth is a relative of Camilla, as in the Camilla who is married to Prince Charles.
Sandra Howard was interviewed by the Express Online in 2014, to promote her novel. Sandra stressed although she drew upon her days as a 60s It Girl for her novel, she’ll never write an autobiography. No, she would never dare.
Sandra told the Express that ‘the invitation to the White House came while she was staying with the British ambassador David Ormsby-Gore and his late wife who was godmother to Sandra’s eldest child, Sholto’.
David Ormsby-Gore aka Lord Harlech was later killed in a car crash. After Lord Harlech did that stint as the US Ambassador, Ormsby-Gores have a habit of dying in unfortunate circumstances. Alice Ormsby-Gore was engaged to Eric Clapton – who was a mate of Hendrix’s – and died of a heroin overdose. Eric has since admitted that he introduced Alice to heroin, treated her appallingly, managed to give up heroin himself and left Alice wrecked. One of the Ormsby-Gores shot himself and Francis Ormsby-Gore – who lived near Harlech rather than at the family seat in Shropshire – showed every sign of having come under attack from the paedophiles’ friends. For the full details of the many suspicious deaths among the last two generations of the Ormsby-Gores and the way in which poor Francis found his life falling apart once he’d been helped by the Top Doctors, see post ’95 Glorious Years!’.
Sandra states that she ‘was invited to the White House at a time when the special relationship was extremely special,’ she says.
Sandra met Ol’ Mafia Connections when she was 20, through a friend of her first husband Robin. Sinatra introduced them to Marilyn Monroe. ‘Frank invited us to California to discuss the idea for a book about him and his music. We were with him much of the next three months. Since he was between girlfriends and looking after Marilyn I met her at social events.’
Through Sinatra, Sandra also met Ava Gardner and Ella Fitzgerald. But Marilyn made the biggest impression: ‘Marilyn had to feel loved by all and wanted by every man in the room,’ recalls Sandra of a dinner party where Sinatra insisted everyone was served ‘telly dinners on individual trays’ and she found herself seated next to Marilyn ‘feeling awash with my own inadequacies’.
Never mind Sandra, you might have been green with envy but Marilyn was found dead in questionable circumstances whilst in the care of Top Docs and the down side of Marilyn wanting to feel loved and wanted by every man in the room – or people believing this of her – was that predators like JF Kennedy and Ol’ Mafia Connections moved in on her.
I don’t think that F, the Hergest patient whose life was destroyed by Dafydd and the paedophiles as described in my post ‘Killing Floor – I Know Cos I Was There!’, personally witnessed the death of anyone like Hendrix or Brian Jones, but he did know people who may well have been at or near the scene.
From what F told me, his life only seemed to begin unravelling after his father died. F had begun his life of excess before then, but he seemed to have a great ability to evade the sort of consequences which other people would have experienced. On one occasion F’s car was stopped and surrounded by armed police, after a prank that he and his friends had played with a replica gun at an airport. The gun was definitely not a real one, but pretending to be conducting an armed robbery was the sort of thing that would have landed most young men in prison. F wasn’t even charged. I heard many such tales from F and in passing he used to sometimes comment that the police were always OK about it because ‘they knew my dad and everyone liked my dad’. F’s dad was a Freemason. F used to stress to me that he had no knowledge of his dad ever abusing that position, as far as he could see Freemasonry was just a benevolent charitable organisation. When F’s dad was dying, he was cared for by the Royal Masonic Hospital and after he died the Masons helped the family financially.
After F’s dad died, F’s family suffered very badly. The family business – which had been a thriving one – went tits up in a major way and his mum, who had grown up in south Africa, returned to Capetown because there was nothing left for her in Surrey.
F then found himself constantly threatened and arrested by the police in Surrey and again when he moved to north Wales in 1979. F really enjoyed his recreational chemicals so there was plenty that the police could legitimately have pursued him for, but the police did a bit better than that. F was constantly fitted up for ludicrous offences which he had not committed. By the time that I knew him, this was undoubtedly happening to F because he was being targeted by Dafydd and the paedophiles.
There was another factor in F’s life as well, a factor that I believe F had seriously underestimated – his father-in-law, who was a society dentist in Surrey and was networked to Top Docs in Harley Street. F knew that his father-in-law hated him, although F did get on very well with his mother-in-law. After he married his wife, C, C revealed to F that her father-in-law had offered to pay her not to marry him. C was quite rebellious, didn’t get on with her father anyway and although she had a very volatile relationship with F, in many ways they were incredibly close – they are now pensioners and long divorced, but they still see each other. C refused to be bribed by her father. C then told F that after they married, her father gave her what he called ‘running away money’, a sizeable sum to leave F ‘when’ she decided to do that.
C didn’t ever utilise the running away money, but there were certainly traumas. F was constantly ending up in psychiatric hospitals and some of his experiences in those in the south of England before he ever reached the clutches of Dafydd and the North Wales Hospital Denbigh were quite extraordinary. He was nearly murdered by another patient in one hospital and although he was deemed to be far too ill to look after himself, he was discharged because the doctor on duty judged that the patient who had attempted to murder him was very probably going to try it again and they couldn’t keep F safe. So he was discharged onto the streets. Which is a good deal more common than the Top Docs ever admit.
What was happening throughout this time was that F’s father-in-law was conducting a very cosy relationship with the Top Doctors who were ‘caring for’ F. F did find out about this on two occasions and had serious bust-ups with the Top Docs concerned, but F seemed to think that it had only happened on those two occasions. I suspect that it was happening systematically. F did not like Top Doctors and certainly didn’t trust them, but he had no idea of the depths of corruption in medicine, the professional loyalty that Top Docs feel towards each other which nearly always takes priority over patients’ welfare and that the Harley Street crowd are the worst of the lot. F used to comment that his father-in-law was such a greedy horrible man that dentistry was a most inappropriate profession for him, but greedy horrible people working in healthcare are not unusual. When F first told me about his ‘evil’ father-in-law, I took the view that a society dentist probably wouldn’t be overjoyed at his daughter marrying someone with F’s lifestyle so a clash was inevitable. Then a couple of people whom I knew from Bethesda met F’s father-in-law when he visited his daughter and both of these people – one of whom was a conservative wife of a local businessman – remarked to me ‘gosh, C’s father is a really unpleasant man, I couldn’t feel at ease with him’.
I never met C’s dad, but I suspect that he was the sort of cold sadistic martinet that Gwynne the lobotomist was.
F’s in-laws lived in Weybridge in Surrey, as did he before he moved to north Wales.
Geoffrey Howe was a Surrey MP and senior member of Thatcher’s Gov’t whilst Thatcher’s friend and another member of that Gov’t, Sir Peter Morrison, abused kids that Dafydd delivered. The MP for Weybridge throughout many of the years that F did battle with his father-in-law and whilst F found himself banged up and harassed by Dafydd and the paedophiles, was Sir Michael Grylls – dad of the Boy Scout Bear – who, along with Sir Peter Morrison, was involved in the lobbying scandal re Ian Greer Associates (see post ‘Always On The Side Of The Children’).
I know how Dafydd works and it is by using corrupt contacts within a corrupt network. I think it highly likely that F found himself fitted up in Risley Remand Centre because of some sort of deal that was done between F’s father-in-law and Dafydd. I am not going to name C here or her father-in-law, because we are talking serious organised crime and C is a potential witness. But there is someone else who I think might have played a role as well – someone who knew how corrupt Dafydd was, who didn’t like him but who was very aware of how comfortable his life was and how difficult it would be if he crossed Dafydd’s path.
Step forward Jeff Crowther, the former psychiatric nursing manager at the Hergest Unit. Jeff came from Guildford, just down the road from F’s father-in-law and Jeff’s mother still lived in Surrey when Jeff worked at the Hergest.
Jeff: They killed your fucking wife for God’s sake and sent a thug after you. I am in hiding and none of them have ever stood trial. You might be prepared to take this sort of shit from a bunch of gangsters but I am not. Hand yourself in and fess up and whilst you are about it name everybody else involved. I do not know how any of you can live with yourselves, you knew what they were doing to people. It’s not as if they treated you any better, why do you think that Lil ‘never recovered’ once she ended up in the hands of Ysbyty Gwynedd? Just how bloody weak are you all? People DIED so that you could keep your job as an Angel and go to festivals with Gareth and Penny every summer – where you hung out with the rock star children of the paedophile gang… Was it really worth it?
Just call me The Green Green Grass of Home…
Only I don’t think that I am quite so fucking green as a bunch of dickwits who colluded with serious organised crime and I’ll be naming all of them. There was barely one person working in the NHS in north Wales who did not know something about the deaths, the organised sex abuse, the large scale drug trafficking and the en masse embezzlement of NHS funds. How about another interview with the Daily Post then suckers, telling the world about all those vicious attacks that you have to endure from the Dangerous Psychiatric Patients? Somehow I don’t think that it’s going to save your bacon.
Perhaps John Mullen, the former CEO of the Gwynedd Community Health Trust, who allowed his staff to conduct themselves in this manner and who failed to investigate every complaint about them, would like to explain what the ‘special arrangement’ with BT that he and his colleagues had going was. A new telephone sir? Of course. Will that be On The Special Arrangement? No need to talk receipts or invoices, just tell us who wants the phone and we’ll install it – the bill will be going to the Trust, no questions asked. Because they’re all a bunch of crooks in the finance dept as well. Hefin Davies, the Chairman of the Trust, Freemason and friends with the crooks of that parish who knew those involved with the massive theft of slate at Penrhyn Quarry will also have known about the Special Arrangement…
I am still unclear as to why Capitalist Extraordinaire Martin Sorrell resigned in a hurry the other day. Sorrell began his career with Saatchi and Saatchi who have links to the paedophiles’ friends in north Wales (see post ‘The International Language Of Screaming’), but I’ve found a link between Martin Sorrell’s company WPP and dear old Ronnie Waterhouse as well. I’ve nearly finished reading Waterhouse’s autobiography and gosh Ronnie did have a lot of friends in high places, as well as a personal connection with most of the paedophiles’ friends. No wonder William Hague gave Ronnie a call and told him that he would be Chairing the cover-up. I’m planning a mini-series of Ronnie-related posts, Ronnie’s friends and relations are too numerous to be dealt with in only one post. Meanwhile, here’s a little taster.
Among Ronnie’s many friends was Woodrow Wyatt, the most dreadful old bigot who advised Thatch and wrote one of those ‘The View From The Bar Stool’ columns for the News Of The World, telling the working classes why the millionaire Thatch – whose friend and aide Sir Peter Morrison was raping children from north Wales whom Dafydd had delivered to him – was On Their Side.
Woodrow was the Labour MP for Birmingham Aston, 1945-55 although he was also a friend of HM the Queen Lilibet, Thatch and Rupert Murdoch. In 1959 Wyatt was returned as the MP for Bosworth in Leicestershire where he remained for many years. So he will have known about Greville Janner, Frank Beck and the Leicestershire Child Abuse Scandal. Whilst out of Parliament, Wyatt worked as a reporter for Panorama, in which in 1957 he revealed ballot-rigging in the ETU (Electrical Trades Union). It was through the ETU that Waterhouse got to know Wyatt – Waterhouse represented the ETU in court and curiously although he lost the first big case that he did for them, he mentioned that from then on the ETU passed much work his way. In the mid-80s Wyatt played a role in the negotiations between Murdoch and the electricians’ union, aiding Murdoch’s move to Wapping. Wyatt opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Like Ronnie Waterhouse, Wyatt was a good friend of Roy Jenkins. Jenkins spent years concealing the wrongdoing of Dafydd et al and in later life acted as an advisor to Tony Blair (see post ‘The Most Dangerous Man In The World – Part I’).
Wyatt’s daughter Petronella worked at the Spectator and famously had an affair with Boris Johnson.
Woodrow Wyatt also hung out with Bertrand Russell – Wyatt conducted many interviews with Russell. Russell used to go and have tea with Woodrow and friends at Clough Williams-Ellis’s house at Llanfrothen.
In the late 1950s, Ronnie Waterhouse – in between dining at the Savoy (yes, even as a struggling young lawyer Ronnie was a regular at the Savoy and at Glyndebourne and of course at the Waldorf, where Ronnie’s dad used to stay when he went down to London to visit Ronnie) – was a member of a group of people who were mostly drawn from the Labour Party who imaginatively called themselves ‘The Group’. This was to distinguish themselves from The Bow Group, which was comprised of friends of Ronnie et al – although Ronnie was for quite a while active in the Labour Party (before he became a Liberal), he was also mates with many Tories, including Geoffrey Howe.
The Group thought that they tasted success in 1960, when they renamed themselves ‘The Labour Manifesto Group’ and presented their ideas at the Labour Party Conference. Their 1960 effort was co-authored by Tony Crosland and Philip Williams. Crosland was used by Blair’s mate Ernest Armstrong to conceal child sexual abuse in the north east of England on the part of those who had strong links to Dafydd and the paedophiles in north Wales (see post ‘The Most Dangerous Man In The World – Part III’).
Ronnie stated in his autobiography that ‘two of the main moving spirits’ in The Group were Bill Rodgers and Dick Taverne. Ronnie’s proud boast is that some members of The Group became the nucleus for the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, which supported Hugh Gaitskill. They also ran off and joined Dr Death in the SDP years later. Ronnie himself left the Labour Party when Wilson became leader. Not because Wilson was a crook, but because he was dangerously left wing for Ronnie’s tastes.
Ronnie’s biggest lifelong buddy was of course Sir Robin Day, who was just so appalled when Lord Lambton cheerily fessed up to sharing a bed with some call girls and smoking a joint. If only Lambton been molesting kids in care and killing witnesses.
Waterhouse also knew Lord Aberconway, the 2nd Baron, of Bodnant Gardens fame. As did Bertrand Russell – the Aberconways were another family who hung out at Clough’s place and had tea with Bertrand. The 2nd Baron was one of Ronnie’s lawyer colleagues, but as Ronnie observed, Lord Aberconway was such a hopeless lawyer that the clerk of the Court had to write the summing up and hand it to Lord Aberconway, who would then read it out.
Ronnie ingratiated himself to another north Wales family, the Pennants, who owned an estate not far from Ronnie’s turf at Holywell. The Pennants were an off-shoot of the slave trading Penrhyns of Penrhyn Castle fame. One of the descendants of the Pennants who lived near Ronnie is Antoinette Sandbach, star of this blog. Antoinette is the Tory MP for Eddisbury. Her dad was the highest ranking Freemason in north Wales throughout those years when the North Wales Police found no evidence of a paedophile gang, when Ronnie’s Public Inquiry found only a few Welsh sheep shaggers to blame and when other witnesses were found dead yet no questions were asked. Antoinette’s family have been doing favours for Dafydd and the paedophiles for years – her grandmother Geraldine was the President of the Denbigh branch of the Royal College of Midwives. Antoinette is a barrister. She won’t have dared become an historian with her ancestry. For more details of Antoinette and her proud family see post ‘News Round Up, 19 January 2018’.
Ever the one for keeping his eye open as to who around him it might be worth shamelessly toadying to, Ronnie was acutely aware of the presence of the Mostyn family in north Wales. Ronnie observed that Lord Mostyn was only interested in sheepdog trials – with neighbours like Ronnie I imagine that the sheepdogs would be rather better company – but Ronnie didn’t mention another younger member of the Mostyn family whom he will have known of.
Sir Nicholas Mostyn was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Sir Nicholas is a British High Court judge.
Sir Nicholas’s father was a British American Tobacco executive, thus Mostyn grew up in Nigeria, Venezuala and El Salvador. He was educated at Ampleforth College – alongside Edward Stourton. Mostyn studied law at Bristol University.
Mostyn was called to the bar in 1980 and earned the nickname of ‘Mr Payout’ after winning a number of notable cases including representing the wife of footballer Ray Parlour and winning the 1000 day marriage case for the wife of a leading City of London fund manager where no children where involved. Mostyn was retained by Fiona Shackleton in Paul McCartney’s divorce case with Heather Mills. Mostyn has been highly critical of the CSA and undertook pro bono cases involving the CSA where he thought there was an important issue of law involved. Mostyn has said:
| ‘I think the performance of the CSA has been the greatest failure of public administration in the history of this country. The figures are simply mind-boggling. In its history, it has assessed about £8bn in child maintenance, and managed to collect about £4bn at a cost of £3bn. You might as well just pay them out of taxes. And the government’s proposed reforms of the CSA are hopeless. The basis of the CSA is that child maintenance will be done by administrative assessment by a bureaucrat by reference to a formula – that was introduced in 1993. It did not work! They then had another act of Parliament to try and sort it out in 1995. It did not work! Labour came in, full of good intentions, “We’re going to sort this out, it’s going to be brilliant.” Act of Parliament in 2000 – total failure! So if I was given a free bill in Parliament, it would be that. Abolish the CSA.’ |
The first CEO of the CSA who presided over so many disasters and injustices – some of which led to suicides – was Ros Hepplewhite. Being let loose at the CSA was her reward for those years of sterling service as the CEO of MIND, 1989-92, during which time Ros concealed the crimes of Dafydd and the paedophiles in north Wales as well as elsewhere (see post ‘MIND Are Out For Mental Health – Never For Themselves Of Course’).
(F received communication from the CSA in which he was accused of failing to concern himself with the upkeep of the baby whom the paedophiles had stolen from him. Because F had been bled dry, even the CSA didn’t in the end demand money off him. So then they investigated his new wife to see if they could extract any dosh out of her.)
In 2015, Mostyn was removed from a case after he went against a landmark ruling of the Supreme Court concerning the rights of disabled people (namely that they have the same right to ‘physical liberty’ as non-disabled people).
Mostyn’s bonanzas included that which he won on behalf of Sandra, the wife of Martin Sorrell, a sum of £29m. Mostyn represented Di’s brother Charles Spencer – who’s track record towards female partners is not too brilliant. After losing the right to have the case heard in a closed court session, Spencer was upset at the final settlement. Mostyn, a keen farmer, named his latest batch of seven pigs after his thoughts on the case’s High Court judge, Mr Justice James Munby: James, Munby, Self-regarding, Pompous, Publicity, Seeking, Pillock. Earl Spencer later unsuccessfully sued Mostyn.
Mostyn was the presiding judge over the highly controversial decision a few years ago which authorised an NHS Trust to deliver a child by emergency caesarean section, as the mother was judged to have lacked capacity to have consented to the operation herself. The mother was an Italian citizen who was visiting the UK and during her visit she suffered a severe bipolar episode. The child was later the subject of a care application by Essex County Council. The mother was utterly distraught and pointed to her stable home and family in Italy as the reason why to have done all this was outrageous and damaging. There was much talk of Mostyn having read the opinions of Top Docs and social workers before he made his decision. Unfortunately Sir Nicholas, they lie. If they knew what they were doing and were honest, one could come to sensible decisions on the basis of their opinions, but at the moment that cannot happen.
It was Springfield Hospital who pioneered performing Caesarean sections on women who ‘didn’t know their own minds’. Shortly after I left their clutches in the early 1990s they performed a Caesarean on a silly young thing who worked as a veterinary nurse and who explained that she had a phobia of hospitals and did not think that she would cope with a hospital birth. She was sectioned, detained at Springfield and given a Caesarean at St George’s against her wishes. It was a disaster. She had a breakdown, couldn’t bond with the baby and over the next few months repeatedly attempted suicide. Her baby was taken into care. She sued and was told that the Top Docs had acted entirely in her best interests and lost the case. She gave an interview at a later date and explained very clearly how her life had been completely destroyed by the actions of Springfield Hospital.
From what I saw at St George’s not long before that event, the silly girl’s care on the delivery suite at St George’s would have probably been OK. A lot of the midwives there were very good, as were most of the Top Docs, although there was a lot of snobbery and casual racism among the Top Docs. One (female) Top Doc told a colleague of mine – another medical researcher – that ‘the midwives are all really thick, especially the black ones’. How bright was the researcher who repeated this in my presence, after berating me for being friends with the midwives? Er – well her boyfriend, a police officer with the Met, had just secured them and their friends tickets to see The Bangles in concert. The police officer had bagged tickets for the front row so that, my colleague told me, ‘the lads can look up the girls skirts’.
I say that most of the Top Docs on the delivery suite were good – most of them were and two of them were actually normal, pleasant people among much lunacy. There was however a Top Doc called Joseph who did all he could to get out of work, including declaring himself to be conscientiously against abortions. It was openly discussed by the other Top Docs that Joseph was anti-abortion because it was one less job for him. Then there was another one who was just as lazy as Joseph but more senior. He engaged me in an interesting conversation about how he went to Ronnie Scott’s several times a week and it was really great, I should try it. I was a little worried throughout this conversation because a midwife kept coming up and asking him to help with a birth because the woman had been pushing for a long while and she seemed to be in trouble. He batted the midwife away three or four times. I thought that if I stopped the conversation perhaps he would take a bit more notice of the now frantic midwife, so I went down to the other end of the ward. The jazz fan continued to sit there, chilling out, he read a newspaper and listened to a bit of music. I then noticed all hell break loose – the patient whom this man had refused to help was now in serious distress and a disabled baby was a very real possibility – WHOOPS, emergency caesarean necessary…
The midwife who’s pleas were ignored for over an hour wasn’t even black. Interestingly enough the jazz fan was, he was Nigerian.
So as long as women giving birth at St George’s managed to avoid the small number of lethal Top Docs – not that they would ever have been given any indication at all that the Doc caring for them was lethal, most patients are incredibly trusting and believe that standards in medicine are high and are robustly enforced and Top Docs always reassure patients of this – they would be OK. So I doubt that it would have been the staff on the delivery suite at St George’s who will have destroyed the veterinary nurse who didn’t know what was best for her.
It will have been Springfield. The brutal, drug dealing, swearing, screaming Angels of Springfield who were the henchmen for the Top Docs who were concealing a sex trafficking gang, who admitted in writing that they knew that Dafydd was sexually exploiting the patients but agreed with Dafydd that I really was very dangerous when they found out that I knew at least some of what Dafydd was up to (see post ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London’).
There was another person doing a PhD at St George’s in the late 80s/early 90s who may well have known about Dafydd et al. This man had previously worked as a psychiatric nurse at Prof Robert Bluglass’s empire in Birmingham, the Reaside Clinic. He had not been very complimentary about Bluglass – he told me that there were wards at the Reaside Clinic which were frankly dreadful but Bluglass ensured that no-one ever visited them. Bluglass concealed Dafydd’s crimes and also was called upon to ‘investigate’ the serious problems at Ashworth and blame the murders, violence and sexual abuse there on the patients rather than the staff (see post ‘Security, Security’).
So Dr Mark Roy, how about making a statement about old Bluglass and his crimes and the many other crimes that you will have gained knowledge of at St George’s, then during your stint in the Dept of Psychiatry at Oxford – home of Prof Tom Burns and Professor Mark Williams who also concealed the crimes of Dafydd and the paedophiles. After Oxford, Mark Roy bagged himself a job at the Dept of Biobehavioural Health at Pennsylvania State University, but I suspect that Mark left there under a cloud. He is now a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire.
As for the present Lord Mostyn – he is a young man from Chelsea who owns most of Llandudno.
The media continue to tell us all that one only has to ‘ask for help’ if one is experiencing mental distress and the fickle finger of suspicion continues to be pointed at men in particular who won’t Talk About It. Even ‘Farming Today’ on Radio 4 a few days ago had an article on male farmers who Won’t Ask For Help.
This is not what I have seen. When I lived in north Wales I knew of men who were desperately begging for help, but as with women, no help would be forthcoming. I am sure that transgender or intersex people would have had no more luck at getting any assistance from the north Wales mental health services. When I was doing my PhD was a member of staff who worked in Bangor University who was married to a farmer. The farmer became very seriously depressed and both his wife and him begged for help from the Anglesey Community Mental Health Team. He began to talk about killing himself and said that he had thought about how to do this, he would shoot himself. After quite some time of this, the Anglesey CMHT went out to the farm, visited him, offered no help but took away his shotgun. He had another one, as his wife had told them, but they ignored her concerns. Hours later he shot himself dead.
Bridget Lloyd, the Angel who perjured herself in an attempt to have me imprisoned (see post ‘A Solicitor’s Letter From North East Wales MIND’), was a member of the Anglesey CMHT at the time.
The suicide was widely discussed at Bangor University and a lot of people who knew the dead man and his widow were very angry. It was agreed by virtually everyone that it had been sheer inexcusable negligence. I was at a university function a couple of days after the farmer’s suicide and one of his friends, another member of staff, was there, fuming volubly about the idiocy of the mental health services and saying that someone should be sued. The dreadful Professor Tom Corns, latterly of the School of English at Bangor, started arguing the toss, trotting out the line that ‘it’s difficult, looking after people like that’. What the dead man’s friend didn’t know about Tom Corns is that he is married to a social worker, Pat Corns. Pat Corns spent many enjoyable years working as a paedophiles’ friend in north Wales and knew all about the unnecessary deaths, wrongful imprisonments and the child abuse. Tom Corns’s son is a Top Doctor.
I knew a number of other men in north Wales who did try and Talk To Their Doctors but who also got nowhere. I knew one man who developed a very serious drink problem and his wife confided in me that he had begun to get violent when he was drunk. She knew why he was drinking, it was because life had now got too much for him – his mum had killed himself when he was six, his dad hadn’t been able to look after him and he had literally scavenged in bins for food. This took place in rural Gwynedd in the 1970s. Most of the villagers in the village where this family lived knew what had happened to him as a child and they also knew about his alcohol problem. Finally he went to Bethesda surgery to ask for help with his ‘nerves’. He was given a prescription for valium and sent on his way.
His drinking continued and one day he arrived at my place completely bladdered and caused trouble, but didn’t actually damage anything or anyone. I rang the police at Bethesda and explained the problem and said that this man was clearly quite desperate. The policeman stated that he knew the ‘fat bastard’ and that if I wanted him arrested he’d do so. I explained that the fat bastard actually had serious problems and so far was a nuisance but not criminal. The police told me that they couldn’t do anything.
A few weeks later I heard that the same man had been the target of a malicious allegation that he’d sexually harassed a young woman. The basis of the young woman’s allegations that he was sexually dodgy was that he was a naturist who went to nude swimming sessions at the local swimming pool. Another local person went to those nudist swimming sessions as well – a local Top Doctor. I bet that no-one called him a fat bastard when he developed mental health problems or accused him of sexual harassment. Some months later the same young woman made allegations of rape against another man. She later admitted that she had made it all up – but not until he’d been arrested and held in custody on bail. One reason that this young woman’s complaints were taken so seriously by the police in the face of no evidence was her close friendships with a number of police officers. Very close friendships indeed with a number of male police officers – who in return for sex were quite happy to fit up anyone whom she cared to point the finger at. Interestingly enough, the people whom she accused had always crossed the path of the paedophiles’ friends…
Perhaps Donna Maria Morgan would like to tell everyone how she managed to have so many deep and meaningful friendships with so many social workers and police officers in north Wales. She might also like to pay me the £500 that she owes me after bouncing a cheque on me and writing me a letter telling me not to go to the police because she’s got mates everywhere ‘who’ll vouch for me’. Presumably the same mates who vouched for her when an innocent man was imprisoned on the basis of her malicious allegations.
Donna was a good mate of Denise Baker aka Denise Baker McClearns, who was for many years married to a children’s social worker employed by the Anglesey team. Prior to that Denise lived with a coke addict, who I was told, also flogged drugs to fund his habit. It was this man – Malcolm Fox – and Denise who were named by Donna as two of those who would ‘vouch for’ her should I contact the police. Denise later embarked on a career working with mentally ill female prisoners as a member of Prof Louis Appleby’s team on his flagship project re suicide. I was told that Denise was dismissed on the grounds that she was a danger to vulnerable people. So she went straight out and landed another job with vulnerable people…
I don’t wish to give the impression here that it was only Top Docs, social workers and police officers who abused or exploited vulnerable people in north Wales. A few other people tried their luck as well. F was a talented artist and before Dafydd et al ruined his life, he used to paint big oil paintings on 6ft canvases. When he was living in the south of England he used to sell them for several thousand pounds each. The market was far more difficult in north Wales because there were far fewer people with high disposable incomes, so F ended up with about eleven big canvases stored in his home.
In about 1993, two business graduates from Bangor University set up a cafe in Bangor called The Fat Cat and weeks they later opened another one in Chester. They made a deal with F that they would display his paintings in the Chester cafe – F might make a sale and meanwhile the cafe would have something nice on the walls. The Fat Cat men collected F’s paintings in their van and took them over to Chester. A few weeks later, one of them, Simon, contacted F and explained that there had been a break-in at Chester – the paintings were OK, but Simon and his business partner Matthew were worried that if it happened again and the paintings were damaged or stolen, their insurance wouldn’t cover it. F explained that he didn’t have transport to collect the paintings, so Simon said that he’d return them.
The paintings were delivered to F as arranged – except that one was missing. The most valuable one. Simon stated that it was slightly bigger than the others and wouldn’t fit in the van, but they’d return it soon. F waited and waited. Then he contacted Simon and Matthew and was once more told that the painting would soon be returned. This went on for many months. Then Matthew told F that if he wanted his painting back he’d have to hire a van himself and collect it from Nottingham of all places – where Matthew had a flat. Matthew had taken the painting to his flat ‘for safe-keeping’. F told Matthew that he couldn’t afford to rent a van and collect the painting from Nottingham. Matthew told F that he wasn’t getting the painting back unless he went to Nottingham. The price tag on the painting was £6k. F went to the police to report the theft. The police told him that it was a civil matter. A very kind local solicitor wrote to Matthew – and waived his fee – and asked for F’s painting to be returned. Matthew wrote to the solicitor and told him that F should spent his money on a van to collect his painting ‘rather than on expensive solicitors’.
Meanwhile, I had a friend who had been invited to a party at Matthew’s flat in Nottingham. There, hanging as the centrepiece, was the stolen oil painting. Matthew freely told his guests that he liked the painting so he kept it because he knew that the owner of the painting couldn’t afford to retrieve it or indeed take civil action against him.
By the time that my friend found the stolen painting, Matthew and Simon had opened a chain of The Fat Cats across the UK, had won an award for business and had stated their ambition to be create an international chain of The Fat Cats. Up in Bangor there was a stream of former The Fat Cat staff who had been treated abominably and not paid. Then there were the people who had enrolled for The Fat Cat ‘management training programme’ who found that health and safety legislation was being routinely flouted.
A few years ago, The Fat Cat chain of cafe bars appeared in the media. The business was in difficulties and the Director, one Matthew Saunders, was having to close many of his cafes because the bank had called in his overdraft without warning. Saunders gave interviews to the broadsheets about the outrageous behaviour of Lloyds Bank who had ruined the sort of business that this country needs no less.
I had a particularly good laugh at Saunders being stuffed over by the bank, as I’m sure did those waiters and waitresses to whom he owed money. The downside is that Saunders has probably flogged the painting that he stole to keep the wolf from the door whilst he works out another way of fleecing people.
I have begun wondering though. Is it possible that Saunders may have been acquainted with the paedophiles’ friends himself – that painting was stolen just when open season was declared on F…
One more conundrum before I finish this post. I have previously mentioned Dafydd’s habit of crashing his car every 50 miles or so and the multiple crashes that Dafydd had whilst he was flying light air craft. Dafydd was very obviously not medically fit enough to hold a driving licence yet alone any sort of pilot’s licence. From what I understand, the criteria for a pilot’s licence are stringent. One has to apply to the Civil Aviation Authority for a Light Aircraft Pilot’s Licence. There is a list of approved medical examiners. Does anyone know who was writing Dafydd’s medical reports, because I think that as ever with Dafydd, rules have been flouted.
NEWSFLASH – Carwyn announced this afternoon at the Welsh Labour Party conference in Llandudno that he is standing down as FM. Carwyn has never taken the action that he should have over the NHS, but Carwyn is the best of a very bad bunch. Paedophiles’ friend Mark Drakeford has stated that he will be ‘talking to his family’ about standing for election as FM. Now that really is an appalling vista.
