'We
were accused of raping little girls, having orgies, killing cats
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4156/is_20040711/ai_n12590204
Sunday
Herald 11th July 2004
EXCLUSIVE:
The full story of the families whose lives were shattered when they
were falsely accused of abusing children on a remote Scottish island;
For the past nine months Vicky Allan has been talking to the families
accused and finally cleared of being involved in the ritual abuse
of children on Lewis. This is their story
John and
Susan Sellwood were staying at a caravan park in the northeast of
Scotland when the phone call came through. Susan came back from
the toilet to find John pacing outside the awning. He started to
cry. She assumed the worst: that finally the indictment had come
through and that soon her husband would be appearing at Glasgow
High Court, along with the seven other accused. Soon the whole story
would be hung out in a court room and fed to the media: a tale of
animal-sacrifice, robed ritual, mass orgies and the sexual abuse
of children, set on the Isle of Lewis. "The case has been dropped,"
he told her.
The Sellwoods
were still in a mildly celebratory mood when they picked me up on
Monday. Their "camper van" was a cobbled-together affair,
constructed from bits that John finds at the tip where he works.
Susan listed the accusations she and her husband had been bombarded
with in police interviews. "We're supposed to have all raped
the girls and then the men did. Then we were having sex orgies.
We had sex orgies with each other's partners - wife-swapping, whatever
you want to call it - at each other's houses. We're supposed to
have killed cats, chickens, rams and lambs, then drunk the blood.
"We
were accused of drug taking and making snuff movies. I didn't even
know what a snuff movie was. The satanic cult was supposed to have
threatened the mother to keep quiet. John was accused of trying
to get her to change her evidence after a complaint. This was supposed
to have been on CCTV. Porno photos are supposed to have been taken
by us using a webcam. The police said that they had medical evidence
that the accused had sexually assaulted the girls." She pauses.
"But they had no DNA. They had no DNA evidence."
Most people's
reaction on hearing such a list is one of disbelief: as a society
we are poised in a mixed state of credulous horror and denial of
the existence of "satanic abuse". Since the first wave
of alleged cases arrived from America in the 1980s there have been
hundreds of such claims in Britain. Only one case, in Pembroke,
Wales, where the investigation arising from a boy's allegation of
sexual abuse against his father exposed a large paedophile ring,
has ever led to convictions.
The notorious
Orkney case of 1991 saw nine children snatched from their beds in
dawn raids in South Ronaldsay on suspicion that they were the vitims
of ritual satanic sexual abuse at the hands of a paedophile ring.
In February of 1991 the case was thrown out of court, and followed
by the seven-month Clyde Inquiry into the case, and its condemnation
of the actions of the social workers involved.
A 1994 report
on cases in England and Wales by anthropologist Jean La Fontaine
suggested that what was presented as the testimony of children in
satanic abuse cases was almost always an adult construct, and it
has become a widespread conviction that the whole phenomenon was
a "moral panic". Which elicits the question: why has yet
another case of alleged ritual abuse got so far - costing over (pounds)
100,000 of tax-payers' money - only to lead to a dead-end.
The police
investigation on Lewis started nearly two years ago, sparked by
a series of allegations made by the children of a family we will
refer to as Family X.
The first
overt signs of it were a series of interviews across the island,
followed by the arrest in October of the eight accused - Sellwood,
Ian Campbell, Timothy Tetley, Peter Nelson, David Disney, Lily Place,
John Gray and Neil Stretton - in a series of dawn raids across Lewis
and England.
Visiting
the island in March, I was struck by the silence - that paralysis
that descends at the mention of "child abuse". Locals
who lived only metres away from one of the accused would tell me:
"I don't know him. I've never met the man." A rift of
suspicion had cracked through the community, and there was a feeling
among the islanders that, as the accused were all incomers, it was
the "white settlers" bringing their bad ways. As local
councillor John Mackay told me: "The problem was it gave every
incomer a bad name. They were all tarred with the same brush."
Still, it
was possible to pick up a little information. Most of the accused
lived or had lived in the Ness area. David Disney was actively involved
in the community, a member of the Church of Scotland, and worked
a croft. Neil Stretton was an aeroplane model- maker who kept chickens.
John Gray had moved from Rotherham and used to be a Boy Scout leader.
Ian Campbell was openly a "pagan" and had moved with his
wife, Penny, to the island on a council house swap. Lily Place,
75, of Leicester had lived in the Lional area. John Sellwood was
a Mormon who worked as a tip cleaner, helped his wife run a cat
rescue centre, and had been Santa Claus at a grotto they ran to
raise money for charity. On the whole, these people lived just a
few notches up from subsistence. Their lives were held together
by disability allowance, medical prescriptions and, certainly since
the arrests, anti-depressants. They had come to the island for a
"better way of life".
Most of
the accused denied knowing each other particularly well, though,
through talking to them, a flimsy web of connections started to
emerge. The Nelsons bought chickens from Neil Stretton. The Nelsons
had given the Sellwoods a clapped out old van. Susan Sellwood had
known John Gray when he lived in Rotherham. Stretton knew John Gray
well and was often round at his home. More crucial, though, is the
series of links that existed between all the accused and the family
of the alleged victims of abuse and in particular the mother of
that family, the adult believed to have been involved in initiating
many of the allegations. Mostly the accused denied seeing Family
X very much, but painted a picture of a disturbed family, in and
out of care, with a history of contact with the social services.
Peter Nelson
was leaning over the gate of his garden, propped up on a crutch,
when I first met him. He and his 37-year-old daughter, Mary-Anne,
had moved to the island in 1998, having bought their property on
an exposed patch in the Lochs area of the island cheap, although
it had a big garden. This was his challenge, his dream: to create
a garden more ambitious than the one that had won him Gardener of
the Year. In 2003 he opened his mini-Eden to 280 visitors, raising
money for Save The Children.
Nelson seemed
anxious to tell his story when I met him following the allegations.
Even at that point he was still not committed to trial. He knew,
he said, Mrs X, the mother of the victims. She had even come to
him a number of times for help, asking if she could come and live
with him. He had been concerned about the children's welfare and
had contacted social services several years ago. Like the Sellwoods
and Penny Campbell, he would occasionally struggle to remember the
names of people involved.
Nelson had
tried to commit suicide just the previous week, taking sleeping
and blood pressure pills. "It's a nightmare," he said.
"All I've done is come here to make this garden."
Without
doubt the accused have their peculiarites. For the most part they
seem outsiders. Nelson's garden is fenced off and surveyed by CCTV.
"I stand out because I'm different," says Nelson, "People
say: 'Why don't you go to a football match? Why don't you go to
the pub? People are suspicious of you because of that. You're not
anything unless you're into sex, drugs and drinking."
The Sellwoods
and Campbells suspect that certain small prejudices may have coloured
the investigation. Penny Campbell believes that the police showed
"blatant religious discrimination, equating paganism with devil
worshipping Ian and I believe that it was because he described himself
as pagan and I didn't that he was charged and I was released."
Within the
community it was well-known that they were pagan. When their homes
were raided it was pagan books that were taken. As one South Dell
inhabitant told me: "Before they came, the community was warned:
'We've got some witches coming.'"
In the months
following John's arrest the Sellwood's lives were derailed. For
the first 10 days Susan lay on the sofa, propped up, numbed by diazepam.
When he went to prison in Inverness, she travelled to see him, spending
in that first month (pounds) 1000, a crippling stretch on their
pension and disability allowance. They don't run their market any
more. They always go to the supermarket before 8.30am. Some friends
no longer call. John feels nervous now in all dealings with children:
"I am different than I used to be. It gets me upset and I don't
know how to handle it."
So why did
the case get as far as it did? The Crown Office says it was dropped
because there was "insufficient available evidence". Many
of the accused feel that they had not been properly investigated
before arrest. Instead, supposition and "shock tactics"
were used in the hope of eliciting an easy confession. John Sellwood,
for instance, tells me they informed him that they had him "on
video". This turned out to be vague and highly interpretable
CCTV footage of him supposedly threatening one of the witnesses.
Bill Thompson,
an expert in false allegations and consultant on the Orkney case,
believes, however, the real problem may lie in the credibility of
those making the allegations - both Mrs X and the children. He questions
whether the methods used in obtaining the story from the children
were valid.
The victims
had been in disclosure therapy with National Children's Home (NCH)
and the social service. There are guidelines for this, but, Thomson
says, they are often not followed and the truth is determined using
a series of validity indicators.
"What
has to be asked," says Thompson, "is whether the guidelines
for the interview techniques have been broken?" This, he believes,
is just another Orkney all over again. "It will be the same
methodology. It always is. What it boils down to is a social worker
or police officer starts asking leading questions and this then
sets off a whole series of speculations."
There is
no accusation in our society worse than paedophilia, no word that
clings more damningly. "It's just that one word," said
Peter Nelson. "I would rather die than be called a paedophile."
Because
of this word the Nelsons had their car torched, their greenhouse
smashed and bleach poured round their trees. Because of it, the
Campbells received abusive phone calls. Nobody, certainly, on Lewis
is going to forget that word. These are airtight communities - so
close, the phone book published in Ness lists not just the names
of the inhabitants, but also their nicknames or their parents' names
- and a history is difficult to escape. Even in the past week Peter
Nelson has had his garden raided at night, teenagers shining torches
into his CCTV cameras. As Dell councillor John McKay commented last
week, the dropping of the case has provoked a "mixture of emotions
and reactions" on the island. "You know what people are
like. You're always guilty in the eyes of some."
In March,
I met Penny Campbell in her home in South Dell. With a whispered
intensity she told me that she was not going to leave Lewis. Even
then she was already involved in a letter-writing campaign on her
husband's behalf.
"Our
fight," she wrote to me later, "is on all sides at the
moment. Against an incompetent, biased and politically motivated
police force, against social services and against ignorant people
who, through no fault of their own are unaware that such injustices
can happen." Since then she has issued press statements, enlisted
the help of Bill Thompson, and attempted to fuse the fellow-accused
in solidarity. Just as on Orkney, perhaps, they think they can win
an apology and compensation. They want to have their names cleared.
They want to make the point that, in allegations of child abuse,
perhaps names of accused should not be released until proven guilty.
Meanwhile, however, a single fact remains. All the evidence suggests
the children in Family X were sexually abused. And, in the cloud
of smoke and the feverish cries of "satan", it looks as
if the perpetrator(s) is/are set to disappear.
Social
worker lied to court about children 29th July 2003
