Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Cops treated me like a crazy groupie, they wouldn’t believe the ‘nice’ Lostprophets star was a paedo...
THE former girlfriend of paedophile rocker Ian Watkins has accused police of treating her as “crazy” when she tried to expose the pervert.
Instead of listening, Joanne Mjadzelics says officers dismissed her as a crank.
She insists this allowed the Lostprophets frontman to target vulnerable fans for years in order to gain access to their children.
Vile Watkins, 39, was only caught after a drink and drugs raid at his Pontypridd home in 2012. In 2013 he was jailed for 35 years after admitting 13 sex offences, including the attempted rape of a fan’s baby. He will serve a minimum of 29 years. Joanne, 42, in an on-off relationship with Watkins for six years, said: “From day one, the police treated me like some obsessed fan, like I was crazy. They thought ‘let’s not listen to her, let’s not believe her – let’s trust the nice pop star instead.
“It’s been years of screaming until I was blue in the face, of knocking on police doors, of begging for someone to believe me, of banging my head against a brick wall.
“When he was finally charged it hit me like a cannonball. I started thinking that if they’d listened to me, could he have gone on to commit those sickening crimes?”
Two women were jailed along with Watkins for assisting his crimes.
Last week the Independent Police Complaints Commission revealed South Yorkshire officers ignored repeated warnings that Watkins was a dangerous paedophile. And yesterday it disclosed that South Wales police missed 11 chances to stop him; failing to take proper action over eight reports and three intelligence logs from six people between 2008 and 2012.
One of those whistleblowers was Joanne, who first told officers in 2008 that she had a message on her mobile phone from Watkins about his desire to sexually abuse children – but they did nothing.
This shocked the NSPCC, which said: “That a simple unchecked mobile phone could have helped to prevent further abuse by Watkins is unthinkable, and is just one cause for significant concern among this catalogue of basic failures.”
Assistant Chief Constable Jeremy Vaughan, from South Wales Poilice, said the force had “failed to listen and properly investigate, for this we are truly sorry.” Joanne, from Doncaster, also claims South Yorkshire Police mistook an indecent image of a young girl for that of an adult woman when she showed it to them in May 2012 as evidence of child sex abuse.
She wanted more about the incident in the IPCC report, adding: “When the investigator told me a paediatrician estimated the girl was five, I thought how dare police try to tell me it belonged to an adult. How dare they put children at risk.” However the watchdog says she was told a paediatrician believed the child was “aged well under 14”. The IPCC added: “It was impossible to prove conclusively what officers saw as the laptop was destroyed.”