14th September 2020
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In late August, BBC2 aired a documentary covering the case of Carl Beech or “Nick” – the man who falsely accused a dozen prominent men of historical child sexual abuse: a case I reported on.
The film by award-winning director Vanessa Engle was a strong attempt to tell the complex story of Beech’s extraordinary allegations, his un-masking as a liar and fraud, and his conviction for a CSA offence involving indecent images of children. Engle had less than an hour to cover a vast landscape and brought a fresh perspective by interviewing those who met or knew Beech.
Engle and the documentary’s executive producer, ex-Panorama journalist Alistair Jackson, invited me to be interviewed as part of the programme. I met Beech in 2014 and was the first journalist to report his allegations – although, contrary to some claims, never reported that his claims were true.
I have nothing to hide over my handling of Beech’s allegations while working as a freelancer at the former investigations website Exaro News – and was happy to accept Engle and Jackson’s offer. Both journalists are robust, objective and independently-minded folk who challenge the material and evidence before them. I quickly grew to respect them.
As is often the case with broadcast material, I gave a more detailed interview than could be accommodated in any documentary. For almost three hours, I talked Vanessa through what I knew of the Beech case – answering every question asked about my actions, Beech, the role of Exaro News and the damaging £2.5m Metropolitan Police Service investigation which infamously described the allegations as “credible and true”.
I also spoke candidly about the specific mistakes made at Exaro, which unfortunately brought public profile to a determined criminal making the most heinous claims about former politicians, senior military men and celebrities. In particular, I was brutally honest about the role played by Exaro’s former editor-in-chief, Mark Watts – but the BBC opted not to use any of the material.
I won’t linger on the details here, not least because Watts is a tiresomely determined complainant, but it is no secret that he and I fell out long before he was sacked from Exaro.
(Note: Watts was dismissed over an unrelated issue shortly before Exaro entered administration for financial reasons in 2016. He later won a tribunal claim against his then non-existent former employers).
As my former Exaro colleagues such as David Hencke, Fiona O’Cleirigh, Alex Varley-Winter and Nick Fielding will attest, I (and others) had long believed that Watts handled some CSA-related investigations badly.
In my view, Exaro’s editor-in-chief made strategically poor decisions to publish material too soon – despite internal and external warnings about the credibility of some sources, including witnesses used to “second source” information provided by Beech. Watts was a single-minded editor who regularly reminded his reporters that he took all key decisions at the website.
Despite this, Watts has shown little humility or contrition.
Irrespective of Watts’ role, however, I also reported on many of Beech’s allegations – and must take some legitimate criticism for failing to expose “Nick’s” lies sooner. Beech’s claims destroyed the later years of men such as Lord Bramall, the former head of the UK armed forces. I cannot imagine the particular hell he and others were dragged through.
There is almost too much to write about the extraordinary, horrific and brutal Beech case. But today, I want to focus on the most common question I have been asked since Engle’s documentary.
Why did Exaro, the BBC and the Metropolitan Police Service take Beech’s extraordinary – and ultimately fantastical – allegations so seriously?
What follows should not be taken as a definitive explanation. It is merely intended to give people a flavour of a case which, to outsiders, seemed straightforward due to Beech’s unlikely claims – but which, in reality, was far from easy to categorically dismiss for journalists and the police.
In short, the police, Exaro and BBC continued to investigate Beech’s allegations because a significant amount of circumstantial evidence could not be ruled out for many months.
Before I describe some of this circumstantial evidence, let me be clear: ultimately, it was nothing more than circumstantial evidence. What I am about to describe turned out to be in no way corroborative of Beech’s allegations and for one reason:
He made it all up.
The people he alleged had abused him were entirely innocent of the acts he described to me, the police, BBC journalists and many CSA campaigners, MPs, charities and others.
Nevertheless, in the early days of our investigation – and Scotland Yard’s ‘Operation Midland’ – there existed several troublesome lines of inquiry which Exaro, detectives and (later) BBC News were professionally compelled to pursue.
One such piece of circumstantial evidence involved an extraordinary coincidence. In August 2014, several weeks after meeting Beech and before he decided to report his allegations to the police (meaning there was no police investigation which could be prejudiced), I asked him to undertake a picture test involving images of properties.
I showed Beech ‘clean’ images of several buildings, some of which were of interest to Exaro while others were simply duds or decoys. The point was to determine whether, having described properties at which he alleged abuse had taken place, Beech could identify sites.
During this period, Beech indicated he was familiar with a property which (we think) unbeknown to him was the former home of a convicted paedophile. This offender, long deceased, had been imprisoned in 1987 for his part in a notorious CSA and trafficking gang in London. Other members of the gang included Sidney Cooke, who was later found guilty of the manslaughter of 14-year-old Jason Swift.
Through some ex-police contacts, I was aware that the property Beech loosely identified had been used as a ‘holding house’ by Cooke’s vile gang. They would abduct young boys and literally ‘store’ them at the property until they could be taken to other venues, where they would be abused. When the police raided the flat in the 1980s, they discovered at least one minor inside.
Contrary to some opinions, when Beech first outlined his extraordinary allegations about CSA and murders, journalists at Exaro were aware that such alleged incidents of extreme sexual violence and killings are rare – and therefore unlikely. But Mark Watts rightly (in this instance) took the view that we needed to rule out, or in, the possibility that there may be some truth to what Beech was saying.
Beech’s flawed identification of the property was interesting to us, but by no means definitive. It merely constituted one piece of circumstantial evidence which required further research. There were other coincidences, too.
What was truly remarkable about the property, however, was that we also discovered a prominent relative of one of Beech’s alleged abusers had lived directly behind it. In those exceptional circumstances, we simply had to investigate the possibility of a link between the two buildings and the people inside them. In the post-Savile climate, it would have been remiss of us to have not followed that path.
Electoral Roll records were incomplete, and we could not immediately place associated persons of interest in the area at the same time. But, initially, the geographic anomaly was troubling.
We set to work on official records searches, letters and emails to various public bodies, tracing people, and gumshoe work door-to-door across several areas. It would take months – but, contrary to some media interpretations of the case, we did the hard yards.
What we were not expecting was that several weeks after claiming to have identified the trafficking-related property, Beech performed a U-turn and decided that he would, contrary to his earlier declarations, formally report his allegations to the police. He did so in October 2014.
After meeting and, later, formally interviewing Beech, the (then) lead detective asked whether I could provide statements about my dealings with “Nick” up until that point. Naturally, I agreed.
I produced three lengthy statements for the police – including an entire MG11 (formal witness statement) re-tracing a ‘walk-around’ I had undertaken with Beech in London. That statement also covered the circumstantial anomalies involving the trafficking-related property. Like us, the police were initially taken aback by the geography involved. We all agreed that the mere proximity of the two properties was far from definitive or corroborative – and that Beech’s identification was not ideal.
Yet the Henriques Review of Operation Midland incorrectly accused me of failing to mention the ‘walk-around’ to the police.
Whether Beech had meticulously researched the geographic, and other, anomalies we may never know.
But what did emerge from his 2019 trial in Newcastle was a belated understanding, discovered after Northumbria Police raided Beech’s property and seized electronic devices (something Exaro could not do), that he spent years researching men he falsely accused.
Following Engle’s documentary, I hope this blog gives readers some indication of just how the case was not, initially, as straightforward as some make out.
Of course, none of this is of any comfort to the true victims in the case: those he falsely accused and their families. They live with what happened every day – and it is only right that several were given more airtime in Engle’s film.
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