Baby X: Britain's Child Abusers Brought to Justice - Softcover

Keeble, Harry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847397875 ISBN 13: 9781847397874

Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK, 2010

Synopsis

When super-tough cop Sergeant Harry Keeble announced he was joining Hackney's ailing Child Protection Team in 2000, his colleagues were astounded. Known as the 'Cardigan Squad', its officers were seen as glorified social workers dealing with domestics. The reality was very different. Within a few months he'd fought machete-wielding thugs, rescued kids who had pit bulls chained to their cots and confronted the horrors of African witchcraft, exposing a network of abuse in the process - all in his unrelenting war against child cruelty.

Harry rescued dozens of kids - kids in crack houses, kids living in unimaginable filth and kids who had burned their houses down. Then there were the hostage situations, the lynch mobs, and the almost impossible process of interviewing paedophiles to get a confession. Without wading in sentimentality, Harry describes how his team - working alongside dedicated but chronically underfunded social workers - operated at the sharp end of child protection. This is a shocking and unforgettable story of how some of the UK's most disadvantaged children escaped their tormentors - and explains why some cases, similar to that of Baby P's, ended in tragedy.

About this title

About the Authors

Detective Sergeant Harry Keeble has almost twenty years experience in inner-city pro-active policing. In 1999, Harry joined Haringey drugs squad, planning and leading 100 raids on fortified crack houses. Appalled at the number of abused children he encountered, Harry joined Hackney's Child Protection Team. In five years he brought dozens of child abusers to justice, managing several international police investigations related to child abuse across the world. He currently works for Specialist Operations at New Scotland Yard.

Kris Hollington is a freelance journalist, author and ghost-writer of 14 books, including the Sunday Times bestsellers Baby X and Little Victim, written with Detective Sergeant Harry Keeble. Kris's articles and books have featured on television and radio (including Channel 4's Cutting Edge, ITV1's Real Crime, BBC Radio 4's Saturday Play and BBC Drama). He lives in East London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Siege Mentality

‘That’s the last time I leave you idiots in charge!’ my boss Rob yelled down the phone. Bloody hell. This was supposed to be an easy one. Practically my first job and I’d kicked off a full-blown siege and a thirty-strong lynch mob was ready to rip our suspect to pieces. I’d had better Monday mornings.

I glanced up at the windows of the council house in Hackney’s heartland. Somewhere behind the glass was our man, armed with a knife, threatening suicide. I shivered in the January drizzle as the van full of officers in riot gear pulled up. What was keeping the hostage negotiator? He’d been talking to the bloke for ages.

A white guy with a mullet was the most vocal of the growing mob. ‘Scum!’ he yelled at the house. ‘Castrate the bastard!’ About thirty neighbours and passers-by had joined him in the street. Pure hatred radiated from them to the house.

James and Simon were both giving me daggers. ‘What? It’s not my fault the guy’s a fruit loop.’ But I knew my gung-ho approach hadn’t helped. When I joined Hackney’s Child Protection Team at the end of 2001, I thought I had all of the answers to their many problems.

I was rapidly finding out that this was not the case.

The Child Protection Team (now called the Child Abuse Investigation Team or CAIT) investigates all forms of abuse (whether physical, mental, sexual or emotional) of a child by family members, extended family members, main carers, babysitters, youth workers and teachers – because in most cases of child abuse, that is exactly who’s responsible. In this case it was an uncle accused of molesting his nine-year-old nephew.

When my colleagues heard I had applied to join Child Protection they asked me, ‘What the hell are you going there for?’ It was a fair question. Nobody wanted to join the ‘Cardigan Squad’ – so-called because Child Protection officers were seen as woolly, glorified social workers that mopped up after domestics. It was the least glamorous department in the Met, a real career cul-de-sac. Ambitious officers were expected to fight drug-dealers and terrorists, the exciting big-budget departments with cool gadgets and massive, prestigious operations.

Not me. I wanted to be out on the streets, fighting crime, getting my hands dirty.

My hard-hitting approach had worked wonders at my previous posting, as a uniformed sergeant in charge of the five-man Haringey Drugs Squad. My team and I decided that the only way to return the streets to the community was to fight a war against crack. Our mission was to eliminate all one hundred crack houses in our borough in one year. It should have been impossible. But we did it. As a direct result all black-on-black killings in Haringey were halted for the following twelve months.

About six months into our marathon, we crashed into a crack house in Tottenham. By this time we were pretty much immune to the sight of prostitutes and their clients in a filthy stinking room but this time we were brought up short by a sight that absolutely stunned us – in one of the bedrooms we found two terrified kids hiding under the bed. One was six years old, the other eleven. The older child asked me if they could still go to school. Christ, I thought. What chance have they got? I made sure they were handed over to the care of Child Protection.

A few weeks later, as I took one dealer into custody, a little girl walked past me in the company of two adults – she looked terrified. I wondered what her life would be like, growing up surrounded by violence and horror. I hated the fact that, more than any other age group, drugs seemed to hurt children the most.

I didn’t know it then, but living just a few doors away was another little girl who was about to change my life.

Her name was Victoria Climbié.

From July 1999, the moment she arrived in Tottenham from the Ivory Coast, eight-year-old Victoria was tortured by her ‘aunt’ Marie Kouao and her boyfriend, Carl Manning, who believed she was possessed. To exorcize the ‘evil spirits’ she was beaten with belt buckles, bicycle chains, coat hangers and shoes. Razor blades were taken to her fingers and a hammer to her toes. She was burned with cigarettes, had boiling water poured over her and slept on a bin bag in the bath.

She died on 25 February 2000, of hypothermia, severe neglect and malnutrition. Her body had 128 injuries. According to the official inquiry that followed, a large part of the blame fell on the ‘blinding incompetence’ of Haringey social workers who missed twelve chances to save her. The police hadn’t fared much better; one officer from Haringey’s Child Protection Team decided not to visit Victoria’s home because she was worried about catching scabies.1

When the news of this reached me I was, like most, utterly stunned. I was horrified that this had happened round the corner from where we’d been closing crack houses. I’d been so close.

I wondered how on earth the Child Protection Service could have let this happen. I soon found out why. They had hardly any trained officers and no budget to speak of. I was amazed to discover that detectives investigating serious offences against children weren’t actually trained detectives. They were simply regular police officers with a job title.

Our little drug squad didn’t have any computer technology to speak of but Child Protection was supposed to be a serious department with countless cases requiring major resources. Yet their software was slow and unwieldy; it could take all day just to research four or five cases when they should have been able to do that many an hour.

Worst of all, no less than fifteen children had died in recent years in the London Borough of Haringey while in care. Nine children had died while they were either in council-run children’s homes or with council-approved foster parents or adoptive parents.2 Haringey council had also unknowingly recruited child molesters, two of whom worked as caretakers in the borough’s primary schools.3

And most worryingly, these examples weren’t restricted to Haringey – they were cropping up all over London and the UK. In one of the worst cases a mother rang social services and told them she was going to harm her two children aged eight and nine (who were already on their ‘at-risk’ register). She was ignored. The next morning she set fire to her house and both of her kids burned to death. A six-year-old girl was murdered, smothered to death after her stepfather stabbed her crack-addicted mother in the heart, killing her. In another case, a ten-week-old baby was on the child protection register when she died in agony from blood poisoning caused by severe nappy rash. She had been seen by social workers twenty-eight times in the weeks leading up to her death but was allowed to remain with her crack-addicted mother.

As I looked at the files, I realized I was staring at the faces of kids we’d ‘rescued’ from the horrors of crack cocaine. What was the point of handing them over to Child Protection Teams only for them to disappear, eventually showing up years later as crack addicts and prostitutes?

I was, like most, utterly stunned. Along with everyone else, I wondered how on earth the Met’s Child Protection Service could have let this happen. Unlike almost everyone else, I was in a position to do something about it. So, instead of accepting an offer to head up part of a major new glamorous drugs task force, I transferred to Child Protection.

I believed that the department lacked passion, had no sense of urgency – after all, something was desperately wrong if they didn’t have the money or manpower to save a little girl from being murdered while I was successfully busting all the crack houses in the neighbourhood. As far as I was concerned, they needed a boot up the arse.

But it was never going to be that straightforward.

There was no time for official training at the understaffed department, so I was magically transformed from a uniform into a detective overnight – a process which normally takes between four and seven years.

With barely enough time for a hello to the fifteen-strong team, I found myself standing on a Hackney doorstep, dressed in a suit, freezing my backside off on a wet January morning. The man inside was accused of sexually abusing his nine-year-old nephew. I knocked.

‘Fuck off! I’m not coming out,’ came the reply.

Idiot.

The sensible thing would have been for him to come out and play the game. Our chances of getting this guy locked up were slim to none. The allegation hadn’t been corroborated and his family didn’t even want to take it to court. But a complaint had been made, so the plan was to arrest and interview him in the vain hope he’d break down and confess under questioning. It was what was referred to as a ‘never to return’. In other words we bailed them, but because of the lack of evidence and willingness to prosecute from the family, they’d never be asked back.

My partners for the day were James and Simon. James was a real rarity, a lifelong detective constable, experienced in major inquiries. Like me, James had asked to come to Child Protection and was determined to make a difference. Simon had joined the squad around the same time as me. A natty dresser, he’d made a couple of million buying and selling property and came from the murder squad; his experience there would prove to be invaluable later. Many of his fellow officers wondered why he’d decided to stay in the Force, let alone sign up for the Cardigan Squad. (I for one was mortgaged to the hilt, with wife, three kids and two horses.) He jogged round the rear of the house, just in case our man made a run for it.

The plan was to nick the guy and head back to ‘Stokie’, Stoke Newington police station. Then we’d have a leisurely breakfast at the local Turkish cafe while we waited for the solicitor to show up.

Determined to have him come quietly, I turned on the charm but our suspect wouldn’t budge. We were freezing; our empty stomachs rumbled. I gave the flimsy blue door a push; it was on a piddly Yale lock. Sod it. We’re going in – Harry style.

I’d given the door a couple of warning kicks to alert him to the fact that we were about to crash through when James produced a shovel he’d found round the back and suggested we use it to prise the door open.

It worked. I held the door open while James wandered inside, me right behind him. The house was untidy but looked fairly normal, nothing that screamed ‘child molester’.

There was a ‘clunk’ from upstairs and Simon ran up. As I followed him our suspect screamed, ‘Get back!’ and suddenly Simon turned tail and bounded down the stairs towards me at top speed, screaming, ‘He’s got a knife!’ I wanted to run up and spank the idiot but Simon shoved me outside, slamming the door shut behind us.

‘Bloody hell!’ he cursed, catching his breath.

James tapped me on the back. ‘Erm ... where did that lot come from?’

A small crowd of about fifteen people had gathered. Some of them knew or were related to our suspect and were angry at what they saw as our heavy-handedness.

A woman joined the crowd. She went up to a tall bloke with a mullet who was in the middle of chastising us and said: ‘You should let ’em ’ave ’im. He’s a bloody paedo.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah, I’ve just been talking to Jill who’d met Kieran’s mum and she told her that he’d “touched” her son; he’s a pervert!’

The mood changed as they realized their friend, neighbour and relative was a ‘monster’. People think that child molesters are fiends who abduct kids. They aren’t. They’re the nice ones, the clever ones who persuade you to invite them inside your house. They’re a father, uncle, friend, brother, the helpful neighbour, the dedicated youth worker, the schoolteacher.

Now the crowd hated him.

Oh God. Oh no, no, no. I suddenly saw where this was going.

The crowd grew. And the larger it got the more people came to see what was going on.

We put our standard tactics into place. We surrounded the house and put in cordons. I started to shiver. No coat, and no hope of breakfast thanks to this fool.

We should have been on our fourth coffee and going through the paperwork. Instead we were stood around with blue noses while the hostage negotiator tried to talk our suspected paedophile out of killing himself. I couldn’t help but cough out a bitter laugh as I wondered what the angry mob would make of that.

The negotiator tapped me on the shoulder. ‘He’s lost it. Very likely he’s going to kill himself. You should go in.’

Great.

At least I was on familiar ground here. ‘No problem,’ I told the negotiator, ‘this should be a piece of cake.’ I’d been used to facing mob-handed suspects, dealers and addicts armed with every kind of weapon, but here we had just one puny guy with a knife who only wanted to harm himself.

After a quick scout round the outside of the house, I briefed officers from the Territorial Support Group (TSG). These are the Met’s muscle; they patrol the capital in vans with six or more officers ready to rush to any incident. They formed up on the pavement and, on my signal, stormed the house, much to the excitement of the crowd.

With rising horror, I watched as the mob, who had been whipping each other up into an outraged frenzy, stormed our cordon and charged after the TSG, mullet-man at their head crying the battle-charge: ‘Get the fucking paedo!’

Just when I thought this day couldn’t get any worse.

I sprinted back to the doorway and blocked it, pushing the mullet-man back. ‘Get back! Get the fuck back! I need some help here!’ The TSG started coming back out of the house, yelling for calm. I prayed that no one was taking pictures. An image of the TSG in full body armour looking like they’re about to charge a bunch of innocent civilians would be on the front page of the Evening Standard in a flash.

‘Bastard! Kill the paedo! Castrate the bastard!’

Meanwhile, our suspect, screaming all the way, had fled for his life out of the back door, straight into the arms of the waiting TSG officers. Foolishly, he decided against surrendering; not smart – especially when the TSG know you’re armed with a knife. He disappeared underneath a wave of blue overalls and NATO helmets. After a couple of well-placed thumps, our suspect was cuffed and carried, wriggling and screaming, into the van – yet another stupid move. The baying mob darted away from the front of the house and towards the van. Luckily the TSG were able to form an immovable wall and held the hordes at bay amid much shouting for calm and the occasional wallop.

After all that, once we got back to the station all I got was a brick wall of denial.

‘Bastards!’ the suspect shouted at me, his eyes red, his voice hoarse. ‘How can you think that?! I can’t believe that you think I did it ... whoever did this is sick.’

‘I’m not getting anywhere,’ I told Rob when I stepped outside. ‘Perhaps he is innocent, after all.’

Rob, who’d been listening in, sank back against his chair, which creaked under his massive frame. He pushed his glasses back onto his balding head. ‘No, Harry. You need to be able to pick these people apart. Within his denials are evasions; they give you something to work with, no matter how small. He was objecting to the question, answering a question with a question, saying he can’t believe – not that he didn’t do it – and uses projection: he doesn’t believe he’s sick. He thinks what he did was acceptable.’

I looked back at the suspect. He was forty-something, had a big, round face and was short and skinny. Definitely the runt of the litter.

‘Even the way they speak can tell you all you need to know,’ Rob continued. ‘Their words may sound truthful but their voice pitch may rise or perhaps they make a gesture which is out of synch with what they are saying. There are always micro-expressions of anger, no matter how hard they try and control it. Admittedly he’s good at lying but he’s been lying to his family for the last God-knows-how-many years. He’s practised for the moment when he’s caught for months, years even.’

Even with Rob’s advice, I wasn’t able to get anything more out of the suspect. As it was just his word against the kid’s, and as the family didn’t want to see him cross-examined, we had to turn our suspect loose.

He turned pale when I told him. ‘What? Back there?’ he gestured, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘With that mob?’

As I escorted him out of the station, I tried to hide my grin and said, in my most reassuring voice, ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be keeping a very close eye on you.’

After our dejected suspect had left to face whatever awaited him back home, we headed off to the Turkish cafe for a very belated lunch. I’d lost my appetite and poked at my food dejectedly. Rob leaned across the table and pushed his specs back on his head. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said sympathetically, ‘it’s a bit different from kicking in crack house doors, but you’ll get there.’

I wasn’t so sure.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847397875
• ISBN 13: 9781847397874
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288