Brainwashed by sex abuse violin teacher
He preyed on pupils at a top music school – then shot himself this week to cheat justice. Here, one victim tells how he drew girls into his web
ON TUESDAY afternoon, Clare White received a voicemail on her phone. It was a detective from Greater Manchester Police telling her to get in touch as soon as possible.
As a key witness in a forthcoming trial in which she was due to give evidence against a man accused of serial sexual abuse, she immediately did as she was asked.
But when she could not get through she began to panic. She locked the doors to her house and shut the windows.
‘I was frightened,’ she says. ‘My first thought was that maybe they were going to tell me he was on the loose, that he was trying to come and find me, to try to stop me from giving evidence against him. After all these years, the truth is I was still scared of him.’
Clare need not have worried. The phone call from police was, in fact, to inform her that the man in question, Chris Ling, her former teacher at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, had been found dead in his £1 million home in California.
Rather than face justice, the 58-year-old had instead chosen to take his own life, shooting himself as U.S. marshals arrived at the door of his property to arrest him so he could be extradited back to Britain.
For Clare, the news was bittersweet. After all it meant that neither she nor the other ten women whom he was accused of indecently assaulting during the Eighties would have to go through the ordeal of appearing in court.
But at the same time, she knew his premature death also meant that the true, shocking story of how Ling had been able to carry out his campaign of abuse would never be told in public.
Over the course of a decade, the violin teacher had targeted his pupils, exerting a Svengali-like hold over them.
Once in his thrall, he would force them to play the violin naked for him or let him spank them. Others were groped and fondled or forced to touch him intimately. His youngest victim was just nine when he targeted her.
Shockingly, what he got up to was hardly a secret: his group of pupils, known as Ling’s Strings, was openly referred to as Ling’s Flings by other students.
While his victims were scared to speak out — it is claimed that complaints were dismissed by staff — eventually, in 1990, word reached police about Ling’s activities.
What happened next — or, rather, what did not happen — remains a mystery. Clare reveals that she was interviewed at the school by police in 1990. She told them how Ling had seriously abused her during a music lesson and then pressured her into keeping it a secret.
Others gave similar statements to police. And yet nothing happened.
Perhaps realising that the net was closing around him, a few months earlier Ling had quit his job at the school and headed to the U.S., taking with him his young wife, whom he’d met while she was a teenage pupil.
Apparently, no attempt was made to extradite him. Why that was we cannot say for certain because, incredibly, neither the police nor the Crown Prosecution Service has any record of the investigation.
It was only when another of the school’s teachers was jailed in 2013 for similar offences that the police resurrected their investigation into Ling, and finally attempted to extradite him.
It was an attempt that would end in Ling taking his own life.
‘Basically I told police the same thing 25 years ago as I told them this time,’ says Clare, whose name the Mail has changed to protect her anonymity. ‘Why wasn’t anything done to bring him back then?
‘Why was he allowed to spend the last quarter of a century living his life as a free man in America? At the very least his victims deserve some answers. Now they can’t get them.’
Above the fully stocked bar in the three-storey home in Santa Monica where Ling took his life earlier this week, there hangs a photograph of the movie star John Wayne with one of his famous quotes.
‘When the road looks rough ahead remember the man upstairs and the word hope,’ it reads. ‘Hang onto both and tough it out.’
How apt. Not only would Ling tough it out to the very end, but at Chetham’s he’d even begun to style himself like a cowboy.
Boasting a luxuriant moustache and tousled hair, he joined the school in 1980, sauntering about the place in a white leather jacket, open shirt and gaudy necklace.
‘Ling made a huge impression on us when he arrived,’ another of his former pupils told me. ‘He seemed to come out of nowhere and no one knew much about him.
‘At a time when music teachers were wearing brown slacks and sandals, here he was with a chain round his neck, swept-back hair and a bushy moustache. He wore these pointy crocodile-skin shoes — it was as if he’d walked off the set of Dallas.’ Among the pupils, Ling wielded immense influence.
The school caters for pupils aged between seven and 18, the majority of whom are boarders.
Entry to the school has always been based solely on musical ability and potential. In other words, it was an institution full of highly talented, but also highly vulnerable young children, many of whom felt their future musical careers lay in the hands of their tutors.
Clare, a talented young musician who had attended a comprehensive school in the South-East of England, was keen to further her musical education. Her audition for Chetham’s involved performing in front of two teachers — Ling and Michael Brewer, the school’s then head of music, who would be jailed in 2013 for indecently assaulting another female pupil.
‘I was asked to play two pieces of music and then did some oral tests and singing,’ says Clare.
‘Straight away Ling said he was going to teach me, that he wanted me as his pupil, and so from the start I was part of his group.’
Ling demanded total dedication — ordering his pupils to practise for six hours and more a day. But there were soon clues to his true intentions.
‘Right from the beginning the way he behaved with me was strange, talking about stuff that didn’t seem to be relevant to violin playing and behaving in a flirty way you wouldn’t expect from a teacher,’ she says.
‘He would make you play standing in front of a mirror and then come and stand right behind you, pressing right up against you.’
Did his behaviour make her feel uncomfortable? ‘To be honest, I was happy that it was all going well,’ she
He exerted a Svengali-like hold over pupils ‘Right from the start he behaved in a flirty way’
says. ‘As a child I thought, “This is good,” because he liked me, “this is positive”. Because I thought I was getting on well, I didn’t question it.’
Neither did she question the invitation to attend a course at his home in Reading, Berkshire, during the summer holidays, and nor did her parents. After all, she was just one of a number of girls from Chetham’s who would be going.
There Ling pushed the boundaries further still, offering them alcohol, making them watch horror films and commenting on the clothes they were wearing.
On the final day of her stay, in a private lesson, he suggested Clare should be rewarded with £1 for every musical phrase she got right, but be punished for any mistakes.
‘He asked what do you think people would have done in the olden days if they had done something wrong in a school?’ she says.
‘And I don’t know whether I came out with it — spanking — or he did. But he was making out that I suggested it and it was some sort of game. Inevitably, I made a mistake and he spanked me.’
To do so, he put her over his knee, pulled up her dress and pulled down her underwear.
‘It wasn’t just a smack on the bottom, it was a sexualised thing,’ she says. ‘It happened more than once. I knew it was perverted and I felt horrible.
‘I remember he said to me “Do you think you will tell your mum about this?” in such a way that I agreed that no, I wouldn’t.
‘And I remember being in the car on the way back knowing I should tell my mum, but couldn’t.’
Clare was far from alone in being targeted in this way. Had Ling been returned to Britain, he would have faced a total of 77 charges relating to 11 girls. Of these more than 20 related to spanking incidents.
Other victims were abused in a variety of different ways. One of Ling’s alleged victims claimed that as a 15- year- old boarder she was persuaded to let him massage her, during which he groped her breasts. He then made her touch him intimately.
‘I remember a feeling of being totally under his control, musically and emotionally,’ the woman would recall of the incident. ‘He could be so amazingly nice, and also so crushing, and I didn’t have the maturity to resist his way of controlling us.’
Like her, Clare felt controlled. She was aware that it was a ‘massive privilege’ to be at the school and felt she should be grateful for the attention of a teacher like Ling. AND yet returning to school after the summer holidays, she soon discovered what it was like to be excluded from Ling’s inner circle. ‘I don’t know why but the relationship changed,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t the flirty way it had been before, possibly because I felt I could not respond to him after that incident.
‘He got rid of me as a student; he basically dumped me and passed me on to another teacher. I found it really hard to take — in fact, it was horrendous.’
Clare started to misbehave, getting into trouble with the teachers for smoking, drinking and going out late at night.
She believes her behaviour was a direct response to her treatment at Ling’s hands. ‘It was a combination of having someone abuse your trust and then treat you like s***,’ she says.
‘ It was as if you were special because you had been chosen by him. There were lots of other violin teachers, but if you were one of his you were treated specially by other members of staff. And then I was suddenly out in the cold. The school made me feel I had failed.’
Ling’s charmed life would continue even as the rumours about his behaviour began to spread beyond the school.
In the summer of 1989 he’d married 21-year- old Pip Clarke, one of his former pupils. The following summer, having quit his job at the school, he moved with Pip to the U.S.
Just months later he would become the subject of a police investigation, sparked by a complaint from a girl who claimed she’d been abused by him since the age of 12.
It is understood that detectives interviewed at least ten of his former pupils at the time, including Clare.
‘There was a female police officer and a male officer and I told them exactly what had happened to me,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t very nice to have to sit there and tell them when I was a teenager. They just sat me down and started asking questions: whether anything had happened to me, that sort of thing.
‘It went on for a long time and at the end of it they said: “Oh well, what you have said is really useful because it’s backing up what other people have said.” They actually said that what happened to me wasn’t particularly bad, but that it corroborated other people’s stories.
‘Looking back on it now as an adult, I think his behaviour was totally outrageous. If someone did that to my child I’d certainly want them to go to prison for it.
‘Even so I felt that the police were taking it seriously and at least it was all official.’
Or so it seemed. Incredibly, though Clare was offered counselling by the school, her parents were never informed of the investigation or the allegations she had made.
Nor would she or her friends ever hear another word officially spoken about it.
‘There was the odd rumour that Ling had run away to Mexico or America, but that was it, nothing from the teachers, nothing concrete,’ she says.
And that, in all probability, would have been it — had it not been for the conviction of Michael Brewer almost 25 years later.
In 2013 he was jailed for six years for indecently assaulting a pupil, Frances Andrade. Tragically, Frances killed herself after giving evidence against him at his trial, having been accused of lying during cross-examination.
After her death, her relatives told how she’d hoped that by coming forward to speak out, others who had also suffered would do the same. Clare was one of those who bravely did just that. Interviewed for a second time by police, she and ten others revealed the extent of Ling’s offending.
The former teacher, who for the past 20 years had run a classical music talent agency in California, refused to return home voluntarily.
The British authorities moved to have him extradited and shortly before dawn on Tuesday morning U.S. marshals knocked on his door. But before they could gain entry he shot himself.
Hours later Clare and his other victims received phone calls from police here informing them of what had happened.
‘Initially, I was just relieved to be told that he wasn’t going to come round and get me,’ she says.
‘But now I just feel a bit sickened that he has got away without having to acknowledge the fact that he did this, to stand up in a court and be told that what he did to all those children was wrong.
‘It would have been a good way of closing it down — now I just feel it will be forgotten. I want to know about what happened in 1990.’ SHE also feels she is owed some sort of apology or explanation from Chetham’s. On the day after Ling’s death, the school issued the following 17-word statement: ‘ The nature of the historic allegations and this latest development are profoundly disturbing. We cannot comment further.’
That is not good enough for Clare or the other victims, who are planning to take civil action against the school.
‘I think it is really hurtful that they haven’t even said sorry, inquired how anyone is or taken any steps to contact anyone,’ she says.
‘All they have said is that it is “disturbing”. It isn’t good enough. After all this time, we deserve more than that.’
A sentiment with which few, surely, would disagree.