Lacking in self-esteem? No, Julie was an insatiable exhibitionist
As the ‘Richard and Judy’ of radio are jailed for 5 years over a string of sex sessions with under-age boys, her former partner reveals the truth about her . . .
A HUSBAND-AND-WIFE team of BBC presenters were jailed for five years each yesterday after a jury convicted them over a string of debauched woodland sex sessions with under-age boys.
Julie Wadsworth, 60, lured children as young as 11 into a secluded copse known as the Devil’s Cove by sunbathing topless or by wearing white stockings and suspenders under a ‘flasher’s mac’.
A court heard the grandmother was seen by youths having sex against a tree with her husband Tony, 69.
The radio veteran acted as both his wife’s ‘minder’ and a voyeur during her liaisons with the teenagers, performing sex acts on himself as his wife cavorted with the boys.
Yesterday, Mrs Wadsworth sobbed as she heard Judge Andrew Lockhart QC say many of the victims — in two groups, abused in 1992 and 1996 — had been left dam-
Daged by their ‘improper introduction’ to sex.
The judge said: ‘You, Julie Wadsworth, loved the attention and that young boys were attracted to you. You, Tony Wadsworth, did all you could to encourage her and facilitate the events which the jury have heard about.’
The judge added: ‘There was grooming behaviour — you gave instruction to these boys as to what they should do.’
The couple — who broadcast on BBC stations in Birmingham and Leicester — from Broughton Astley, Leics, were convicted of five counts of outraging public decency and nine counts of indecent assault. Mrs Wadsworth was cleared of other two counts of indecent assault.
Here, we uncover the truth behind this couple, who — although they no longer work for BBC — were once described as the ‘Richard and Judy of local radio’. rESSED in nothing but a bikini top decorated with a strip of tinsel, Julie Wadsworth poses next to a Christmas tree for a newspaper glamour girl competition. The year is 1979 and the 22-yearold go-go dancer appears to be entirely confident in her own skin. Which, given what was claimed during her trial last week, is something of a surprise. In court she and her husband Tony both painted a picture of a woman so self-conscious she would not dare sunbathe topless.
And that self-consciousness, they would claim, stemmed from her relationship with Sean Hegarty, with whom she had a child and from whom she split in 1977 — two years before that glamour photo.
She alleged that Mr Hegarty had been physically abusive towards her. As a result of that abuse, it was said she had become insecure about her looks and her body.
Indeed, Mr Wadsworth went so far as to try to justify their seedy sexual encounters with teenage boys by claiming he sanctioned them in the hope they would prove to her how attractive she really was to others.
‘Because of Julie’s past history with an abusive partner I think it’s fair to say that Julie was and to some extent still is a damaged person today,’ he told the jury. ‘ She was not confident in her appearance, and certainly not confident in her body.’
The dalliances were ‘positive’, he said, because they made her feel ‘empowered as a woman’.
By any standards it was an extraordinary defence.
Particularly given that 58-yearold Mr Hegarty, speaking exclusively to The Daily Mail, today denies that he was ever violent towards her during their two-year relationship. Those denials will bring further scrutiny on to the couple’s case, which unravelled spectacularly during the trial.
Example after example has emerged of the 60-year-old’s willingness to flaunt her gym-honed, surgically- enhanced body at the slightest opportunity.
As well as that glamour shot, there were pictures of her posing in a pair of hot pants for a racy fashion shoot for a different paper, and another that showed her seminaked on the front cover of a BBC radio magazine under a headline that read: ‘Temptress’.
Then there was the time she posed for a charity calendar, re-imagining the famous Lady Godiva pose, dressed in a nude body-stocking and sitting astride a white horse.
Another shot showed her apparently nude in a giant golf bag. Videos seized from the couple’s home by police included one shot by Mr Wadsworth up his wife’s skirt and another zooming in on her breasts as she sunbathed topless on a beach. Hardly the behaviour of a shrinking violet — but then Mrs Wadsworth never was one. Fiercely ambitious, she broke up her husband’s first marriage and having bagged him also bagged herself the sort of high-profile job she had always dreamed of.
She was, by Mr Wadsworth’s own admission, ‘ high maintenance, possessive and jealous’.
Indeed, what emerges is a picture of a woman who always got what she wanted, whether that was a husband, a career or teenage boys to satisfy her sick fantasies.
‘There’s no doubt that she was the dominant character in their relationship,’ was the way one acquaintance put it last week. ‘She called the shots and he followed her around like a little lamb.’
One of four siblings, Julie Moulds was raised in a broken home in a council house in Leicester. As a girl she landed a part in a local pantomime and, pushed by her seamstress mum, from then on dreamed of seeing her name in lights.
Aged 18 she was indeed treading the boards, albeit as a go-go dancer at Baileys nightclub in Leicester. There she met Mr Hegarty, the stage manager.
‘She wasn’t ashamed of her body then,’ said Mr Hegarty, who lives in Stoke- on-Trent and is married with two children. ‘She’d stand in front of 700 people dancing on a podium, in very revealing clothing.’ The pair quickly started dating.
‘We were 18-year-olds who were mad about each other,’ he said. ‘We enjoyed a great sex life. We’d have sex in my Ford Escort wherever we could, around the back of buildings, lanes or alleyways.
‘Sometimes we’d do it in the car outside the terrace house where Julie lived with her mum and sister. That was driven by her, she seemed to get a big thrill out of it.’
MrHEGArTy says he forgave her because she was his first love and he was besotted. Having met in 1976, the following year their son Simon was born. They split up soon afterwards, Julie telling her boyfriend she wanted to raise the child on her own.
Although she did not identify him by name, she would allege in court that the father of her child had been violent towards her. ‘It was a very violent and abusive relationship — both physically and mentally abusive,’ said Mrs Wadsworth.
Mr Hegarty categorically denies this is the case and is now taking legal advice. He says that the reason they split was because they were ‘young and immature’ and that his job meant him moving around the country.
He lost contact with his son, he says, because she prevented him from seeing him — but received a phone call out of the blue from Mrs Wadsworth in the Nineties.
‘She’d got my number from a mutual friend,’ says Mr Hegarty. ‘We talked about this and that and then suddenly she says, referring to the old days: “you know, Sean, we used to have the most fantastic sex, didn’t we?”
‘It was such an odd thing to say — it stuck with me to this day.’ While Mr Hegarty does indeed remember Mrs Wadsworth as an enthusiastic partner — like ‘a rabbit’ is the way he rather bluntly puts it — he thought it strange for her to have brought it up after all those years.
All the more so now, given the nature of the accusations she levelled against him during the trial.
A single mum, it was not until the mid-Eighties, then in her late 20s, that she met Mr Wadsworth, who is almost ten years her senior.
By then she was working at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester looking after the wardrobe department. He needed a costume for an outside broadcast and came in to see if they had something.
The son of a fishing tackle shop owner, Mr Wadsworth’s career was flourishing. He had presented shows at both BBC radio Leices-
ter and BBC Radio WM, where he went on to join the management team. From the BBC WM studios at Pebble Mill in Birmingham he would in time present all the mainstream programmes.
On the domestic front, Mr Wadsworth had been married for almost 20 years and had two teenage children. Meeting his wife-to- be, he was attracted not just by her bubbly personality but her ‘backside’ as well (or so he would reveal in a subsequent interview).
The pair hit it off. Mr Wadsworth encouraged her to try out for radio and became her ‘mentor’.
After freelancing for the BBC, she would go on to join Mr Wadsworth behind the microphone as a dou- ble act, broadcasting under the name Julie Mayer. It wasn’t long before their true feelings emerged, with her making all the running. ‘The point came in 1989, when I was in Egypt, and determined to use the time to get away from Julie, to think,’ he told the Leicester Mercury. ‘I was travelling the country and at every hotel I went to, there was a message from Julie Mayer at the BBC. ‘ She just wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was like being dragged into a vortex, I was hanging on by my fingernails. When I arrived back in Leicester, I’d made my mind up it was over. And then I saw her.’
In a scene worthy of Alan Partridge, the fictional Norwich-based radio DJ played by comedian Steve Coogan, Mr Wadsworth sent her a message from his computer asking her to marry him. She accepted.
As well as worrying about the anguish the split would cause to his wife and children, Wadsworth was concerned about their age gap. ‘There’s almost ten years between us and I needed Julie to be aware I’m quite the pipe and slippers kind of guy,’ he would recall. ‘She said she’d got all that young stuff out of her system anyway.’
Future events would firmly contradict that. The couple set up home in the village of Atherstone in Warwickshire, moving in to a house called Knob Hall, holding their wedding reception there in 1994.
They later moved to another property in the village where Mr Wadsworth invited a local architect to have a look round and draw up plans for renovations.
‘When we went upstairs and he showed me into the master bedroom I felt very uncomfortable because there were at least six or seven big full-length photographs of Julie posing naked on the walls,’ the architect told the Mail.
‘I didn’t know who it was until I asked him and he said: “It’s the wife.” He looked really pleased with himself but I just thought it was inappropriate to be letting a complete stranger look at them. I never went back to the house — there was just something that didn’t feel right.’
And it was around this time — between 1992 and 1996 — that the couple would indulge their more perverted fantasies. As well as being seen having sex in a car near to a school, locations they frequented included an area of woodland bordering Atherstone Golf Course.
There, in September 1992, one boy, now in his 30s, told the court how he and his friends went to investigate after being told there was a ‘woman with no knickers on’ in the woods.
‘We had never seen anything like it before,’ he said. ‘They knew we were looking and it was obvious she didn’t have any knickers on because she had a split skirt on and you could see. They were just laughing and giggling. They wanted us to see them, that’s how it felt.’
He said Mrs Wadsworth beckoned them in and the couple started having sex against a tree.
He added: ‘They said if we came back next week they might let us have a play.’
The following week he and another boy returned. Mrs Wadsworth was there dressed in a ‘flasher’s mac’, with stockings and suspenders and no underwear. The boys were invited to join her in the woods one at a time. When the second one took his turn he found Mrs Wadsworth sitting on her coat topless in white stockings and suspenders. Her husband was there with a camera around his neck.
The victim told the court: ‘I said “I’m not doing anything while there is a camera there.” She told him [Wadsworth] to go for a walk and she told me to sit down next to her. She started touching me and encouraged me to touch her.’
On a different occasion, Mrs Wadsworth propositioned a boy by lifting up her skirt in the woods to show her knickers and shouted: ‘Do you want to have a play with this?’
Another youth told how Mrs Wadsworth took his virginity in 1995 when aged just 14 after he witnessed her sunbathing topless. She told him to ‘come and have a closer look’ but because it was his tea-time he went home.
Two days later they met in woods at a park in Atherstone where they performed sex acts on each other as her husband watched.
The witness said a month or so later he went up to the woods on his own while playing golf. He hit his ball into the rough.
‘I hit my ball down to a tree they called the Witches’ Cauldron,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where she came from but she said: “If you want your ball back you will have to come and get it.” ’
When he was older he would be invited to their home on a number of occasions where it was claimed he had sex on up to 15 occasions, even once taking part in a threesome with the couple.
The man, now 36, said he fancied the presenter because she was attractive and spoke ‘really posh’. But he claimed after sex he was left feeling ‘weird and ashamed’ and like ‘a dirty pervert’.
HEFINALLy reported what had happened to him to police in 2015 after attending a child protection course for his job and realised that he had been ‘groomed’ as a child.
He gave officers the names of friends he had gone to the woods with. Following this, the couple were charged, after which the earlier group of boys came forward.
‘I didn’t talk to anyone about it because I felt ashamed, I didn’t want anyone thinking I was dirty or a pervert. She shouldn’t have taken my virginity in that sort of situation. That is why I have come forward.’
In her defence, Mrs Wadsworth admitted that she had met one of the youths when he had been spying on her and her husband as they petted in the undergrowth.
She described to the court how the youth — who she insisted was 17 years old — approached the couple with his hands down his trousers. ‘Flattered’ by his interest, she allowed him to ‘grope her bosom’ while she ‘just finished off what he was doing’.
She claimed that after bumping in to him at a garden centre, he came to their house and helped out with gardening where there was limited sexual contact.
On a later occasion she admitted taking part in mutual masturbation in the wood with two other boys, who she claimed were 17.
Defending her version of events, Mrs Wadsworth told the court: ‘I did not consider it illegal to have sex with my husband or for consenting adults to have sex in the woods. We are the victims here but not in the sense of a victim. But in the sense that we are being portrayed as abusers of young men.’
A portrayal that, after hearing the Wadsworths’ fanciful explanation, the jury clearly did not find at all convincing.