Why did it take 13 years for proof of Jacko’s depravity to be revealed?

The Mail knows these pictures, found in a police raid at Jackson’s Neverland home, are disturbing. But, just released, they shatter all his protestations of innocence . . .

EverythInG a young boy could ever crave is all there. the lifesize models of Superman and Batman, another one — with movable limbs — of the pneumatic action heroine Lara Croft, tomb raider famously played on screen by angelina Jolie.

there are arcade games (not computer versions but the real thing), squadrons of radio-controlled cars and an endless sea of dolls of every description.

and what child doesn’t love the thrill of secret rooms — there’s one hidden behind the giant jukebox and another, heavily locked, behind the master bedroom?

If all the excitement proves too much, you can have a lie- down in a bedroom decorated with Peter Pan pillows and a smiling troll doll.

On a nearby table is a signed photo of the child star Macaulay Culkin on which, obviously referring to his hit film home alone, he’s scrawled: ‘Don’t leave me alone in the house.’ he couldn’t have put it better.

For the house in question is Michael Jackson’s neverland ranch and the images of what it contained were gleaned during a november 2003 police raid and subsequent report that must finally lay to rest any claims that the superstar’s peculiar interest in children was entirely innocent.

It has taken 13 years — Jackson has been dead for seven of them — for the sickening truth to emerge of what detectives found that day as they swept through the fabled estate in Santa Barbara, California. and many are now wondering: why has it taken so long?

although police insisted yesterday that the report and accompanying pictures were passed to both sides in Jackson’s subsequent trial and acquittal on child molestation charges, they admit this gruesome report was never revealed to the media.

and while the trial did refer to the singer’s taste for pornography, nothing on the scale or severity of what is mentioned in the police investigation was ever reported at the trial.

ron Zonen, the case’s surviving senior prosecutor, insisted to me last night that the strongest physical evidence found in the raid was certainly presented to jurors, despite defence efforts to have some of it ruled inadmissible.

Whatever the case, looked at in the light of this truly horrendous 88-page report — some of which has now been published online — Michael Jackson’s home, supposedly a funfilled, Peter-Pan fantasy land where he entertained hundreds of children, smacks of something very different.

It is more like the witch’s cottage from hansel and Gretel, made of gingerbread and sweets to entice unwary children . . . all the way into Jackson’s bed.

the investigators found a sickening collection of pornography that included images and footage of naked children and adults, as well as animal torture, bondage and sado-masochism.

Some of the children pictured were bleeding or in pain, while naked adults had children’s faces superimposed on them. and the collection was extensive — as well as books, notes, documents, photos and audiotapes, police seized more than 80 videos as well as computer hard drives.

Some 70 detectives from the Santa Barbara County Sheriff ’ s department and the local district attorney’s office conducted the raid when Jackson was in Las vegas. It took place after 13-year-old Gavin arvizo, a cancer survivor and one of the constant young companions Jackson creepily called his ‘special friends’, had accused the singer of molesting him.

the accusation led to a court case in 2005 where, defended by a formidable array of lawyers, Jackson was cleared on 14 charges, which included, among others, molesting a minor, intoxicating a minor and conspiring to commit extortion and child abduction. Fans rejoiced around the world at his acquittal, with hundreds flinging confetti outside the California court house.

Jackson’s lawyers branded the prosecution as a ‘personal vendetta’ by a local district attorney, tom Sneddon, and the verdict convinced many that Jackson — an innocent in a cynical world — had indeed been foully wronged.

a previous civil case had collapsed in 1993 after the alleged victim, Jordy Chandler, 12, and his family accepted a reported £10.6 million settlement, and he refused to testify in a subsequent criminal case.

the huge payout made it easier for the Jackson camp to dismiss a

string of later allegations as cynical gold-digging exercises.

Meanwhile, Jackson’s career rebounded and the biggest star in the history of pop music was about to embark on a new series of monu-mental comeback performances in London when he died in 2009 after overdosing on powerful painkillers.

His death was met with a huge outpouring of international grief. Would it have done so if the world knew what it does now?

The police report claims that in Jackson’s master bedroom and bathroom alone there were at least seven collections of pictures that showed boys, teenagers or younger, fully nude or partially clothed.

There was also clear evidence the singer and his stooges had tried to hide it. Some of the most disturbing material was hidden in a secret, triple-locked room con-cealed at the end of another room off Jackson’s own bedroom.

Abook Jackson him-self had reportedly titled ‘Room To Play’ contained a particu-larly disturbing picture of a little girl made to look like the murdered U.S. child beauty queen Jonbenet Ramsey with a noose around her neck.

Another picture in the book showed a child holding a goose that had been bludgeoned to death. The same book, said police, depicted ‘photos of children that are altered, heads morphed onto older bodies, kids made to look sexualised… some are nude photos of kids’.

Jackson kept pictures of his own nephews, who were in a pop band called 3T, wearing just their underwear.

Some of the pictures were not full-blown pornography, but erotic or provocative art books by brit-ish artists such as the Chapman brother and Tracey Emin. Jackson also owned a book of nude photos of teenage Sicilian boys taken by the Victorian photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden.

but there were also conventional pornography magazines — such as Hustler’s barely Legal and Girls of Penthouse — found in Jackson’s bedroom and bathroom.

Acting on a tip-off that many of the worst- offending images had been moved to a locker in a stor-age facility after the investigation began, police also found other images here. More still were reportedly hidden in a safe in a room used by Neverland’s staff.

Investigators were in no doubt of Jackson’s intention in stockpiling all these explicit or disturbing images.

They described much of the mate-rial as being employed in part to ‘de-sensitise’ the children, noting that disturbing, pornographic mate-rial ‘can be used as part of a “groom-ing” process by which people (those seeking to molest children) are able to lower the inhibitions of their intended victims and facilitate the molestation of said victims’.

Mr Zonen told Radar online news website, which first pub-lished the report: ‘Michael admit-ted taking one child after another into bed with him for long periods of time. We identified five different boys, who all made allegations of sexual abuse.’

He added: ‘There’s not much question in my mind that Michael was guilty of child molestation.’

A source involved in the investi-gation said they discovered Jack-son had possessed ‘disgusting and downright shocking images of child torture, adult and child nudity, female bondage and sado-maso-chism’, adding that the singer had ‘truly perverse sexual appetites’.

The raid — which was filmed by police and which can in part be viewed online — is also telling in the way it tallies with some of the specific allegations that have been made publicly against Jackson.

At his 2005 molestation trial, for instance, the 18-year-old sister of his alleged victim testified that the star would get young boys drunk in a wine cellar on his ranch that was reached by a secret door hid-den behind a jukebox. (She also said she saw her brothers lounging with Jackson on his king-size bed, the room strewn with empty and half-empty alcohol bottles).

Sure enough, the police video shows the detectives looking for the jukebox in the games room and finding the secret door it conceals. Jackson was also accused of putting wine in fizzy drinks cans and, calling it Jesus Juice, giving it to the children he called his ‘special friends’.

In another detail from the 2003 police report that will sound familiar to those who have followed Jackson’s tawdry later years, detectives said they found ‘drugs to treat sex addiction, with multiple prescriptions written by a variety of physicians’.

Could this be the same sex addiction described in 2009 by a respected U.S. doctor, Alimorad Farshchian? He said he had pre-scribed Jackson a ‘chemical castra-tion’ drug given to sex offenders.

NEVERLANd, of course, was the home of the Lost boys in J.M. bar-rie’s Peter Pan story. Lawyers claim Jackson paid up to $200 million to buy the silence of as many 20 boys who described losing their innocence on the estate.

Those who pursued their cases to court came up against an army of highly paid lawyers who suc-cessfully portrayed them as gold-digging liars and opportunists, cynically exploiting the eccentricity of a multi-millionaire who at heart was another little boy.

And Jackson certainly admitted to behaviour that at the time he insisted was innocent but which, in the light of the new revelations, looks deeply suspicious.

In early 2003, just months before the Neverland raid, he admitted in a memorable ITV interview with Martin bashir that he had shared his bed with ‘ many chil-dren’. Jackson, then 44, said that people who worried about that were ‘ignorant’. As bashir becomes visibly more and more astonished, Jackson adds that what he did was a ‘beautiful thing’. He goes on: ‘Why should it be worrying? Who’s the criminal? Who’s Jack the Ripper in the room?

‘This is a guy trying to help heal a child... It’s very right. It’s very loving… what’s wrong sharing love?’ His ‘love for children’ was ‘very charming, very sweet’.

of course it was. Tom Sneddon, the Santa barbara county district attorney who pursued Jackson on child molestation charges over more than a decade died in 2014.

He was mocked by Jackson in a song ‘d.S.’, in which — changing his name for legal reasons — he sang ‘dom Sheldon is a cold man’.

Sneddon, who was admired by colleagues, continued to insist Jackson was a danger to children, but claimed he would have con-sidered the singer’s conviction tragic given how much joy he had brought to people.

Sure enough, that is essentially the line being trotted out by those who still protect Jackson’s legacy.

His estate condemned the release of the documents, insisting his fans ‘prefer to remember the won-derful gifts Michael left behind instead of having to once again see his good name dragged through the mud by tabloid trash’.

It claimed all the allegations were false and condemned the molestation charges against him as a ‘failed witch hunt’.

Jackson’s daughter, Paris, 18, wrote on Twitter: ‘The most pure people are always torn down. It will continue to be proven that my beloved dad has always been and forever will be innocent.’

No amount of evidence will con-vince Jackson’s fans that he was anything other than a saint, a former child star who never had a proper childhood and became — like his idol, Peter Pan — the singer who never grew up.

others will ask how on earth, with this sort of evidence available to prosecutors, did Jackson ever man-age to escape a guilty verdict.