How paedophile priest was allowed to evade justice

Former priest Bill Carney was named as one of the worst cases in Dublin's Catholic diocese in the Murphy report into clerical abuse there. However, for the last 10 years he has been free to live quietly in Britain.

Newsnight's Olenka Frenkiel has investigated his case and tracked him down in the Canary Islands.

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Carney used to invite children to his house in Ayrfield to watch videos

All the children in Ayrfield, Dublin, knew fun-loving Father Bill Carney - not just the altar boys and those who met him through school, but members of the Scout troop he ran and the groups of local children he took swimming.

His door was always open, there was a ready supply of Coke in the fridge and in the 1980s he had the very latest thing to lure youngsters in - a video player.

Adults disapproved of his swearing and crazy driving, but the Catholic Church was still so trusted, no-one suspected the truth about him.

Bridie Dwyer still lives in Ayrfield. Above the fireplace, with other family photographs is a picture of her youngest child, Paul, on his first Communion day.

At the age of 13 Paul went with other boys to watch videos at Father Carney's house and to have a sleepover, Mrs Dwyer told me. But at 2am Paul unexpectedly returned home.

"Thought you were going for a sleepover?" she recalled asking him as he pushed past her. "Didn't want to stay," he replied and shut his door.

Carney is accused of raping Paul Dwyer when Paul was 13

"That's when he'd been raped," Mrs Dwyer told me, "but I didn't know".

What no-one, except Carney's bishop and the local police, knew was that the priest was a paedophile.

The Murphy report into the cover up by the Catholic Church and Irish state of clerical sex abuse was published in November 2009.

It described Carney as "a serial sexual abuser of children, male and female", saying that there had been complaints and suspicions "in respect of 32 named individuals" about him, adding that "there is evidence he abused many more children".

'Child in his bed'

Michael Wheeler, who as a boy was one of Carney's altar servers, said that following the report a strange but vivid memory from when he was young suddenly made sense.

He told me that when he was nine years old Carney was late for Mass one day, so, fearful that he might not turn up, he ran into the priest's house and called his name.

He wanted Carney in court so he could ask him why, why had Carney raped him? That never happened and the way things are going, the way the police and the clergy are handling it now I can't see it ever happening Bridie Dwyer, mother of Paul

"I heard a groan," he said, "and I saw in the bedroom, a boy, a little older than me, naked between the sheets.

"This boy sat up, stared groggily at me, and fell back into the bed. I was terrified and ran out. As a child I couldn't understand why he was there. Now I know."

We now know that complaints about Carney were diverted away from the Irish criminal justice system to Bishop James Kavanagh, a man described by the Murphy Report as someone with "a soft spot for Carney".

Kavanagh did what he could to protect Carney from the law to avoid scandal for the Church.

One conscientious policeman, praised in the Murphy Report, did investigate complaints and they came to court. But the press were kept away as Carney pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault and got probation.

Six families were paid compensation and Carney was soon back working, with access to children.

Paid to leave parish

In its 40 pages on Carney, the Murphy report said that his was one of the worst cases the commission investigated and that the Church's handling of his case was "nothing short of catastrophic".

"It was inept, self-serving and for the best part of 10 years displayed no obvious concern for the welfare of children," the report said.

Bishop James Kavanagh protected Carney from the law

In 1992, the Church convicted Carney internally, under Canon law, of child sexual abuse.

But this compulsive paedophile refused to leave the parish house. So the Church paid him £30,000 to go away.

He moved to Cheltenham and then to Scotland, where he has lived for the last 10 years running a family-friendly guest house in St Andrews.

Back in Dublin, it took Bridie's son Paul Dwyer 21 years to come forward, but in 2004 he told the police about his rape.

The police said they had received two other complaints like his and sent the file to the Irish director of public prosecutions (DPP), but the DPP said there was not enough evidence to prosecute.

"So the case stopped," his mother told me, "and, a couple of weeks later Paul committed suicide. He couldn't handle it any more.

"He wanted Carney in court so he could ask him why, why had Carney raped him? That never happened and the way things are going, the way the police and the clergy are handling it now I can't see it ever happening," she added.

No warnings given

That same year, in Scotland, Carney got married.

Newsnight has established that the Irish authorities knew his address but no-one, either from the Church or the Irish state, thought to warn his new wife about his past, or protect any children who might be at risk.

His refusal to acknowledge his paedophilia means the prognosis for a cure is bleak Psychiatric assessment of Carney in Murphy report The Murphy report

Nothing was done to prevent him leaving, as usual, for his winter holiday in the Canary Islands, a popular destination for families with children, and no-one warned the local police.

The Murphy report quotes a psychiatric assessment which says he suffers from a "psychopathic personality disorder".

"His refusal to acknowledge his paedophilia," it said, "means the prognosis for a cure is bleak".

Confronted over abuse

I tracked Carney down in the Canary Islands, first at a restaurant on the sea front and then to the flat where he was staying, to ask about the abuse.

He refused to comment on the Murphy report, saying he had not read it.

He claimed that when he pleaded guilty to child sex abuse in 1983 it was not because he was guilty, but because: "I was told if I plead guilty the press would be kept away."

When I asked "Why did you rape Paul Dwyer?" his response was: "Rape. I'd like to explain that. Put it into context."

Carney got married in Scotland in 2004

What kind of context, I asked, could excuse the rape of a child? But he did not answer.

And when I asked "Are you still abusing children?" his answer begged more questions.

"I haven't done that in 26 years and I have had no inclination," he said. But he refused to be drawn on whether that was admission that he had abused before.

Assistant Garda Commissioner John O'Mahoney has been assigned the task of investigating whether anyone should be prosecuted as a result of the revelations in the Murphy report.

These investigations, his office has said, are ongoing.

In Britain, the Home Office said that because Carney's two convictions for indecent assault pre-date the 2003 Sex Offender's Act and took place in Ireland he would not be on the Sex Offenders Register and would pass unseen through the new stricter vetting procedures for child protection.

Carney meanwhile remains free to disappear beneath the radar.

Watch Olenka Frenkiel's full report on Newsnight at 10.30pm on Tuesday, 9 March 2010 on BBC Two, then afterwards on the BBC iPlayer and Newsnight website.

The children's secretary wants an urgent decision on whether the law should be changed to close a loophole that allows children to be smacked by Sunday school teachers and private tutors

• Jessica Shepherd
• guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 January 2010 12.10 GMT
• Article history

Parents can still smack children legally, but should any teachers be allowed to? Photograph: Rex Features

The children's secretary, Ed Balls, has ordered an urgent inquiry into whether Sunday school teachers and private tutors should be allowed to smack their pupils.

A loophole in the law means that while teachers in state and private schools are banned from smacking children, their counterparts in faith schools are not.

Teachers who take pupils for fewer than 12.5 hours of lessons a week have the same status as someone who is standing in for a parent, and can therefore give a child a mild smack. They can plead the defence of "reasonable punishment".

Balls has demanded that the government's chief adviser on children's safety, Sir Roger Singleton, report to him within a week on whether the law should be changed.

The issue has been raised by Ann Cryer, a Labour MP, who wants the loophole closed.

In a letter to Singleton, Balls wrote that the government would like to "progress to a point where smacking is seen as unacceptable by the vast majority of parents, and is only used as a last resort, if at all".

But ministers would stop short of making smacking illegal because it would "criminalise decent parents who decide to administer a mild smack," he said.

Balls wrote: "We recognise that whilst it seems that fewer parents smack their children, most currently do not believe they should be banned from doing so by law. Our approach is to provide parents with support and guid ance to help them manage their children's behaviour more effectively.

"The defence of reasonable punishment may be available to those who teach in certain part-time educational and learning settings, for example religious instruction that children attend at the weekend. I am concerned to establish the key issues here and whether this is an area in which we need to consider a change, in the interests of strengthening safeguards for children."

But the schools minister, Vernon Coaker, said he feared a change in the law could create "unintended problems" such as stopping fathers from smacking children they care for, but for whom they do not have parental responsibility.

In his reply to Cryer in the House of Commons last week, Balls said: "The important point to make is that there is not one rule for a child in a madrassa and another for a child in any other circumstance.

"The use of physical punishment against any child is wrong; it is outside the law and is not fair to children.

"I do not think we should tolerate any use of physical punishment in any school or learning setting in which trusted adults are supposed to be looking after children, not abusing them."

David Laws, the Liberal Democrat schools spokesman, said: "The government needs to legislate to protect children – not leave an opt-out simply because it fears some ethnic or religious backlash."

Two-year-old Brazilian boy found with metal sewing needles inside his body, including some in his lungs

• Associated Press
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 December 2009 18.18 GMT
• Article history

In this frame taken from a TV Globo video, a person points at a X-ray of a 2-year-old boy showing needles inside his body in a hospital in Ibotirama, northern Brazil. Photograph: AP

The stepfather of a two-year-old boy found with 42 needles in his body has confessed to jabbing them into him as part of a religious ritual, Brazilian police said today.

Roberto Carlos Magalhaes claimed that a woman who went into a trance commanded him to stick the needles into the boy's body, a police inspector, Helder Fernandes Santana, said. He said three people, including the stepfather and the woman, had been arrested.

Doctors found 42 needles in the boy, who was in stable condition in the city of Salvador after a 240-mile flight to a hospital in Barreiras with a special heart unit.

Inquiry into child abuse at Irish Catholic institutions condemns systemic 'perversion of power and trust'

• Associated Press
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 15.24 GMT
• Article history

The Roman Catholic church in Ireland hid decades of child abuse by its leaders to protect the church's reputation, an inquiry found. Photograph: Danilo Krstanovic/Reuters

The Roman Catholic church in Dublin covered up decades of child abuse committed by priests because bishops wanted to protect the church's reputation at the expense of victims, an expert commission reported today after a three-year inquiry into previously secret church records.

Abuse victims said they welcomed publication of the investigation into the mishandling of child abuse cases from 1975 to 2004 in the Dublin archdiocese, home to a quarter of Ireland's 4 million Catholics. But they said government and church leaders had not compensated for past wrongs.

The government said the investigation "shows clearly that a systemic, calculated perversion of power and trust was visited on helpless and innocent children in the archdiocese".

"The perpetrators must continue to be brought to justice, and the people of Ireland must know that this can never happen again," said the government, which apologised for the state's failure to hold church authorities accountable to the law.

This is the second major government-ordered report this year exploring how and why Irish authorities permitted widespread abuse of boys and girls at the hands of the Catholic church throughout most of the 20th century, the gravest scandal in the history of independent Ireland.

The 720-page report, delivered to the government in July, analyses the cases of 46 priests against whom 320 complaints were filed. The men were selected from more than 150 Dublin priests implicated in molesting or raping boys and girls since 1940.

The report named 11 priests because they all were convicted of child abuse. But 33 others were referred to only by one-name aliases, and two others had their names blanked out after the Dublin high court ruled that publication would prejudice their chances of receiving a fair criminal trial.

Investigators spent three years poring over 60,000 previously secret Dublin church files. They were handed over by the Dublin archbishop, Diarmuid Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat appointed to the Irish capital in 2004 with a brief to confront the scandal. Among the files were more than 5,500 Martin's predecessor, the retired cardinal Desmond Connell, tried to keep locked in the archbishop's private vault.

The investigators, led by a judge and two lawyers, said they had no doubt that the 46 priests were responsible for abusing many more than 320 children.

"One priest admitted to sexually abusing over 100 children, while another accepted that he had abused on a fortnightly basis during the currency of his ministry which lasted for over 25 years," they wrote. They said it was not their job to confirm the scale of abuse cases, but "it is abundantly clear … child sexual abuse by clerics was widespread throughout the period."

The commission found that three archbishops of Dublin – John Charles McQuaid (1940-72), Dermot Ryan (1972-84) and Kevin McNamara (1985-87) – did not tell police about clerical abuse cases, instead opting to avoid public scandals by shuttling offenders from parish to parish.

It was not until 1995, seven years into his reign, that then-archbishop Connell allowed police to see church files on 17 clerical abuse cases. The documents were kept in a secret, locked vault in the archbishop's Dublin residence. Records show Connell had records of complaints against at least 29 priests at the time.

The report rejected the bishops' key claim that they were ignorant of the scale and criminality of priests' abuse of children. It dug up a documentary trail showing that the Dublin archdiocese negotiated a 1987 insurance policy for future legal costs of defending lawsuits and compensation claims.

The investigators said McNamara, Ryan and McQuaid knew about at least 17 priests linked to child abuse in their archdiocese when that policy went into effect.

"The taking out of insurance was an act proving knowledge of child sexual abuse as a potential major cost to the archdiocese and is inconsistent with the view that archdiocesan officials were still 'on a learning curve' at a much later date, or were lacking in appreciation of the phenomenon of clerical child sex abuse," the report said.

In May the government published an investigation into decades of child abuse in Catholic-run schools, workhouses and orphanages. That investigation also found that thousands of boys and girls suffered rape, beatings and mental abuse by members of Catholic religious orders. More than 12,000 of those victims have received compensation payments from a government panel exceeding €800m (£730m).

Authorities aim to avoid media circus when bailed film director leaves jail

• Associated Press in Geneva
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 14.58 GMT
• Article history

The Swiss chalet which reportedly belongs to the US film director Roman Polanski. Photograph: Thomas Kienzle/AP

The film director Roman Polanski will be placed under house arrest at his Alpine chalet as soon as possible, the Swiss justice ministry said today, announcing it would not appeal against a court decision to release him on bail.

The ministry said it was still deciding whether to extradite the 76-year-old to the United States, where authorities in Los Angeles want him sentenced for having sex in 1977 with a 13-year-old girl.

The ministry said, however, that it would not appeal against a Swiss criminal court decision granting Polanski $4.5m (£2.7m) bail on the condition that he wear an electronic bracelet and not leave his Gstaad chalet. Polanski must also surrender his identity documents.

"He must not leave this house," the ministry said in a statement. Should he violate the terms of release, the bail will be forfeited to the Swiss government."

Ministry spokesman Folco Galli said the release would be handled quietly: "We don't want to show him off like an exotic animal," he told The Associated Press.

Polanski was accused of raping the girl after plying her with champagne and a Quaalude pill during a modelling shoot in 1977. He was initially charged with six offences, including rape by use of drugs, child molesting and sodomy, but pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse.

In exchange, the judge agreed to drop the remaining charges and sentence him to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation. The evaluator released Polanski after 42 days, but the judge said he was going to send him back to serve out the 90 days.

Polanski fled the US on 1 February 1978, the day he was to be sentenced, and has lived in France since.

The court last month rejected Polanski's first bail offer, with his Gstaad chalet as collateral. Before yesterday's decision, Polanski offered a bank guarantee that would cause him to sacrifice his family's home in Paris if he fled justice again.

"I am very happy and relieved," Mathilde Seigner, Polanski's sister-in-law, told Le Parisien newspaper, adding that the director's imprisonment had had "enormous consequences on a psychological level" for his children. After Polanski's release, "we're going to drink a nice glass of champagne and toast together", she said.

Posted by Ralph Bernardo on November 15, 2009

JON GAMBRELL writes on the AP via Yahoo News:

Evangelist Tony Alamo used his stature as a self-proclaimed prophet to force underage girls into sham marriages with him, controlling his followers with their fears of eternal suffering.

But the judge who sentenced Alamo on Friday to 175 years in prison for child sexual abuse warned of another kind of justice awaiting the aging evangelist. “Mr. Alamo, one day you will face a higher and a greater judge than me,” U.S. District Judge Harry F. Barnes told the preacher. “May he have mercy on your soul.”

Barnes leveled the maximum sentence against the 75-year-old, who preyed on followers’ young daughters and took child “brides” as young as age 8. A jury convicted Alamo in July on a 10-count indictment accusing him of taking the girls across state lines for sex.

Alamo, who has made millions through his ministry, also must pay $250,000 in fines. He will return to court for a Jan. 13 hearing at which Barnes will determine if the five women who testified about their sexual abuse will be paid restitution. Federal prosecutors say an expert believes each one should get $2.7 million for the physical and mental abuse they endured.

Traces of guilt

By John Leyden

9th November 2009 11:46 GMT

Free whitepaper – Creating an AUP: Common myths and mistakes

Innocent people have been branded as child abusers after malware infected their PCs, an AP investigation has discovered.

Technically sophisticated abusers sometimes store images of child abuse on PCs infected by Trojans that grant them illicit access to compromised machines.

The plight of those framed in this way is all the worse because paedophiles commonly use supposed malware infections of their PCs to explain the presence of images of child abuse. Because of this the "Trojan did it" defence is understandably met with scepticism from law enforcement professionals.

"It's an example of the old `dog ate my homework' excuse," says Phil Malone, director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society told AP. "The problem is, sometimes the dog does eat your homework."

AP interviewed former child abuse suspects who were arrested after depraved images were found on their computers, as well as police and computer forensic experts.

Michael Fiola, a former Massachusetts government worker, was arrested two years ago after child abuse images were discovered on his state-issued laptop computer after officials became suspicious of huge data use bills associated with the machine and began an investigation. He was eventually cleared nearly 11 months later after defence experts were able to show that the laptop harboured malware programmed to visit as many as 40 child porn sites per minute, far faster than a human surfer would be able to accomplish.

Forensics experts hired by the prosecution agreed with these findings and the case, which had nearly ruined Fiola's life, was dropped.

Fiola was fired from his job before enduring death threats and losing friends. His wife stood by him, however, and the couple were able to raise a $250,000 legal defence fund after selling their car, cashing in their savings and re-mortgaging their home. "It ruined my life, my wife's life and my family's life," Fiola told AP.

A cap on the amount of damages they might receive has effectively prevented the Fiolas from suing the state.

Child abuse webmasters sometimes use either compromised consumer or business systems as a warehouse for child abuse images and videos. Paedophile images can also land on systems as the result of a nasty prank or as an act of deliberate sabotage.

Two UK men were cleared of child-abuse offences in 2003 after it was shown that computer viruses were behind the presence of child abuse images on their PCs. One of the PCs was infected by a virus that changed the home page of the Windows machine to a child porn site. The other man's machines was infected by a virus that downloaded images of child abuse.

One of the two unnamed men lost custody of his seven-year-old daughter and spent a week in jail on remand because of the case.

In another case Chris Watts, a British computer forensics expert, helped clear a hotel manager whose colleagues found child porn on a shared workplace PC. The manager had been looking for ways to download pirated computer games when his web session was redirected to a child abuse site.

More details on the cases and discussion of the issue can be found here.

Tue Nov 3, 2009 2:22pm IST

RIYADH (Reuters) - A Saudi court of cassation upheld a ruling to behead and crucify a 22-year-old man convicted of raping five children and leaving one of them to die in the desert, newspapers reported on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Souhail Karam; editing by Inal Ersan)

Vanessa George, the Plymouth nursery worker who abused children and took camera phone images to send to friends on Facebook, will be sentenced next month. However, another sentence is proposed for the tens of thousands of nursery workers across the country: a ban on camera phones at work.

A mother whose children attended George's nursery has set up a campaign, nocameraphones.org, calling for nursery staff to lock up their phones and only be allowed access during their breaks; apparently 23 nurseries have signed up to this policy so far. Camera phone regulations are being hastily written. Plymouth City council has promised to issue "a written policy for nurseries" covering "advice on the use of cameras" and the teachers' and nursery staff union Voice is calling for a "no-mobiles rule" in nurseries.

Already, some nurseries are confiscating mobiles from their staff as they enter the door, and another has moved the lockers away from the nursery area so that staff are unable to hear their phones ring.

This is a familiar pattern: one case of depravity and criminality leads, like clockwork, to a new set of regulations for everybody. One twisted woman's use of a camera phone to photograph her abuse means that all nursery workers are frisked for mobiles.

Yet surely, somebody devious enough to abuse a series of children during work hours, without others seeing, would be devious enough to conceal her camera phone from view, which requires only putting it in a pocket. Others have suggested putting CCTV cameras in nurseries – but CCTV cameras cannot cover every corner of the nursery. So how about metal detectors? Tagging staff? Rules that staff cannot be left alone with children? If we try to organise nurseries around the assumption that every nursery worker could be Vanessa George, we will end up with horrifying fortresses.

The vast majority of children have happy and fulfilling times at their nursery. They need staff to be relaxed with them, and they also need videos and photography so their parents know what they have been doing in the day. "The use of digital cameras and videos are an integral part of nursery practice", says Purnima Tanuku, chief executive of the National Day Nurseries Association, "It is vital that nurseries are not discouraged from using these."

These calls for general regulations also let the woman in the dock off the hook. They make her crime, somehow, the fault of lax "child safeguarding procedures", which were not sufficiently strict and did not specifically regulate the use of camera phones. It makes it less her fault, and more the fault of the rules.

Yet if anything, George's case shows the failure of tick-box child protection procedures. The Ofsted inspection gave her nursery "good" ratings in all areas, including "protecting children from harm or neglect". George herself was vetted and had passed all the tests. No doubt the nursery had the appropriate "safeguarding policies" in place; they may even have had a 'policy' on the use of cameras.

Vanessa George's actions were highly unusual, which is why they were so shocking and can be firmly punished. The sentence should be imposed on her, not on thousands of nursery workers and the children in their care.

In 2002 I was a senior detective with Cambridgeshire police. That August two ten-year-old girls disappeared, and I took over the investigation. Two days later I set up the surveillance operation that led to the arrest of Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr a few hours later.

Huntley has not been a free man since. He was convicted of the murders of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in December 2003.

Last weekend my actions came back to haunt me. My wife and I went to Oxfordshire, to celebrate the birthday of my nine-year-old grandson. We went off to see him play as goalkeeper for his village under-10s football team. Mum and dad, sisters, uncles and both grandparents were there to cheer him on.

One of my hobbies is photography, so I took my camera to take a few “action shots” of my grandson. Ten minutes later I was approached by the manager, who said: “Can I ask you not to take photographs, it’s against the regulations. You have to get permission in writing from every parent of every child.”

I felt humbled. I am now a suspected paedophile — along, I fear, with millions of other parents and grandparents. I looked at the pictures I had taken. They were of my grandson making saves as his team came under pressure. I am sure he would have liked to look back on them in the future. Who knows, he may be England’s goalkeeper at a future World Cup, although it’s a remote chance. I deleted the photographs.

The furore that has gripped the nation since the Soham murders has made us all paranoid. Is this in children’s interests? The latest “regulations” will require us to be checked by the Criminal Records Bureau if we give lifts to children going to Scouts or similar activities.

Commentators constantly refer to Huntley and the events in Soham as the reason for this. I am sure Sir Michael Bichard, who chaired the inquiry into the murders, did not intend such a wave of recrimination over one case. Yes, changes were necessary: Huntley lived a charmed life in Humberside, where he was investigated for a number of crimes. He was charged with rape, but after he spent a week in custody the case was dropped for lack of evidence.

As a result of poor intelligence, Huntley was appointed a school caretaker in Soham. Did that give him access to children? Yes, hundreds. Did he abuse them? No. In fact he reported to the headteacher that several teenage girls had made inappropriate comments. What Huntley did to Holly and Jessica was as bad as it gets, but did he come into contact with them through being a caretaker? Not exactly — he was caretaker of Soham Village College, a school for the over-11s. The two girls attended St Andrew’s Junior School. Different building, different caretaker. Huntley had contact with them because Carr was employed at St Andrew’s as a classroom assistant. She worked in a class with Holly and Jessica, who both liked her. Holly’s mother sent Carr a box of chocolates on the last day of term to say thank you for helping her daughter.

The girls were sorry when Carr was not given a permanent job. This was what led them to Huntley.

Out for a ramble around Soham on the Sunday evening, they stopped outside Huntley and Carr’s house to ask after Carr. Huntley told the media that they were sorry she hadn’t got the job.

Tragically, she was away, visiting her family in Grimsby. It was the first time they had been apart overnight since their relationship started. Huntley was in a bad mood as Carr had told him she was going to her second party in successive nights. He was alone. Somehow he conned the girls into the house and they were never seen alive again.

Did he achieve this because he was a caretaker? He could have been in any occupation, lorry driver, architect, anything, and lived with a woman that the two girls knew and trusted. And were right to, as I am convinced that Carr would never have done anything to hurt them.

How do we prevent such chance encounters happening? We can’t. No amount of legislation, record keeping or checking could prevent this type of crime completely. Thankfully it is extremely rare. Children are far more likely to be killed by a family member or on the roads.

Only recently a young girl was murdered by her mother’s partner. There is a suggestion that she had been sexually abused. He then hanged himself. The girl’s mother described him as loving, caring and the last person she would expect to do anything like that. We await the inquest, when it will be asked if the killings could have been prevented. I doubt that the answer will be yes.

We are subjecting our whole community to paranoia. On Friday a BBC journalist announced on breakfast television that “a million children are being abused”.

Where do these figures come from? How do we know? Are we feeding the paranoia that stops a grandfather taking a picture of his nine-year-old grandson playing football? Surely this cannot continue. Someone needs to put things back on an even keel.

Chris Stevenson is a retired detective chief superintendent

This is an extremely good article and corrects some of the media myths that have been built up around the tragic Soham killings. I was not aware before reading this article that Huntley was not the caretaker at the school attended by the girls he killed. As this is so often used as a major argument for the multiplying security checks our government is so enamoured of, this is a very important point.