Sin, depravity, debauchery ... and the privileged friends who cheated justice
EXPLOSIVE claims that a paedophile ring operated at the highest echelons of the Scottish legal establishment have been the subject of a lengthy investigation by the police.
Called Operation Coriaday, Police Scotland detectives have spent six years investigating allegations that some of the country’s top lawyers carried out child sexual abuse in the 1970s and 80s – among them the late Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, QC, and other prominent legal figures, including the late Robert Henderson, QC.
The investigation was sparked by Henderson’s own daughter, Susan, who told detectives in August 2014 that she had been repeatedly raped between the age of three and 12 by her father and a group of other prominent men.
Five of her alleged abusers are now dead but officers have told Ms Henderson that the evidence they uncovered would have been strong enough to prosecute the men for child sex offences if they had been alive. It was during raucous parties at Henderson’s house in Heriot Row, Edinburgh, that his daughter says she was abused not just by her father, but by his influential friends.
‘My father had parties where I had to dance for people,’ she has previously said. ‘He’d then put me in a bedroom.
‘People came in. There was drugs, lots of drink. My dad used to give me drink.’ It was during one of these encounters that Ms Henderson, aged only four, alleges that she was raped by Fairbairn, Henderson’s best friend and a selfstyled eccentric who dressed in blue baronial tartan adorned with two miniature (working) silver revolvers, which he would load with blanks and fire when drunk.
She alleged: ‘The house was five floors and the top floor was where the guests used to stay.
‘I was in bed in the guest room with Fairbairn and another guy.’
Yet Henderson, who was at the time one of Scotland’s most admired and respected defence lawyers, covered his tracks for almost two decades, and even concocted rumours of a so-called ‘magic circle’ of judges, sheriffs and advocates being blackmailed by ‘rent boys’ to protect the perverted interests of himself and his close circle of friends.
He claimed to have a secret dossier showing many of Scotland’s senior legal figures had conspired to ensure homosexual criminals were given soft-touch justice by the courts.
Despite being exhaustively investigated by police, no proof was ever found of a ‘magic circle’ – merely evidence that Henderson had wanted everyone to think there was one.
‘I was in bed in the guest room with Fairbairn and another guy’
Throughout his distinguished career, Henderson was a lawyer considered so brilliant that Lord McCluskey once said of him: ‘It was a joy when Bob walked into court and announced he was appearing as counsel for the defence. The lights seemed to shine a little brighter.’
The sad reality seems, however, to be that the charming QC was part of a paedophile ring at the heart of the Scottish legal establishment.
Henderson died at his home in the south of France in 2012, aged 75, before the paedophile allegations became public and his reputation was still largely intact, which was also the case with Fairbairn, who died seven years earlier.
The flamboyant Tory MP for Kinross and Western Perthshire for many years had been a favourite of Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister.
Three other abusers named by Ms Henderson are Sheriff Andrew Lothian,
QC, and the advocates, Raymond Fraser and Lawrence Nisbet. But they will also never face justice.
Lothian died, aged 74, in 2016, eight years after he was forced to step down from the bench, following revelations that he had paid prostitutes at an Edinburgh sauna to spank him.
Meanwhile, Fraser, an alcoholic who lived out his final years in poverty in a B&B, died of cancer at 55 in 2002.
He was carpeted on numerous occasions by the Faculty of Advocates for his conduct, which included being charged with shoplifting and being drunk in court.
Nisbet was professionally best known for interrupting his Italian holiday in 1982 to try to free Scottish nanny Carole Compton, who had been accused of witchcraft there and faced a criminal trial.
A noted bon viveur of the legal world, he had a heart attack and died, at the age of
45, in 1993.