Vile lies of a pervert
CARL Beech was introduced to the world on a primetime BBC News bulletin in 2014 as a shadowy silhouette under the now infamous pseudonym ‘Nick’.
He had a sensational story to tell. At the age of seven, he said, his own stepfather had farmed him out to paedophiles – and the paedophiles in question were among the most powerful and influential figures in society.
‘Give me some idea of the kind of people,’ he was asked during the interview. ‘Military?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, his words spoken by an actor, ‘others from law enforcement, the political establishment ...’
The abuse, he claimed, took place in hotels, apartments and private clubs around London, adding, chillingly: ‘We weren’t smuggled in under a blanket through the back door. It was done openly. They had no fear at all of being caught.’
Beech had given the Metropolitan Police the names of his abusers. He singled out former prime minister Edward Heath, ex-home secretary Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor, once a Tory MP.
Two senior Army generals were also implicated along with the former heads of MI5 and MI6. Almost the entire top tier of the security establishment back in the Seventies and Eighties, in other words, were involved in the depravity that culminated, Nick claimed, in three ritualistic murders.
Mr Proctor, he said, had strangled a fellow victim in front of his very eyes, having first stabbed him with a penknife.
He was prevented from taking the penknife to the young Carl’s genitals only by the intervention of the ‘other [adult] male present’. That person was Heath.
At one point during his recorded testimony with officers from Scotland Yard, Beech broke down in tears. Surely, though, detectives should not have accepted at face
value Beech’s fantastical account without evidence to corroborate it.
There was none. Not now. Not then. Nevertheless, his story, they concluded in a formal statement, was not only credible it was also true.
The decision to believe him unequivocally resulted in a £2million, 16-month investigation (Operation Midland) which closed without a single arrest. By then reputations had been trashed, homes raided and lives ruined.
POST-SAVILE HYSTERIA
Beech ruthlessly exploited the hysteria of the post-Savile era when the country was gripped by collective guilt over the institutional failings that allowed the now notorious DJ to abuse at will.
It’s still hard to believe he was taken so seriously for so long.
The irony is that the ‘star witness’ was himself a danger to children. At the time he was ‘helping’ detectives, he was viewing child pornography, making him a paedophile and a dangerous fantasist.
Money was one motivating factor in all this. Beech, now 51, was awarded £22,000 in criminal injuries compensation by falsely claiming he had suffered serious injuries as a result of having been sexually and physically abused as a child.
He also intended to make a living on the international ‘ survivor’ speaking circuit. But the thing he craved most was attention. Going on TV, providing ‘exclusives’ for the now defunct – and disgraced – ‘investigative’ website Exaro, and working hand in hand with the police who praised him for his bravery, made up for the inadequacies in his own life.
Beech might have had a good job as a £45,000-a-year inspector with the Care Quality Commission, the independent health regulator, but he was a loner with no friends and a failed marriage.
Beech may have also been attempting to assuage the guilt of his own paedophilia by creating an alternative reality in which he was the victim.
The prosecution – and a leading psychologist who followed the case – are convinced this gave him a form of sexual gratification.
THE TEENAGE LONER
Either way, Beech’s web of narcissism-driven lies would have been exposed at the very beginning – but for the wilful blindness of the Metropolitan Police. So, who is Carl Beech?
His mother Charmian, a community nurse (who became a Church of England vicar in 2001 after 37 years in the NHS) and his late father, a jeweller, separated when he was a baby.
Charmian remarried in 1976 when Carl was eight. Her new husband, Raymond Beech, was a major in the Royal Artillery; he was the person who is said to have begun abusing him, physically and sexually, after the family moved into officers’ accommodation on an Army base in Wiltshire.
Raymond Beech was not a pleasant man. His Army records show he had a drink problem and was retired on mental health grounds after evidence came to light that he had been violent, not just to Charmian, but to a previous wife and a live-in lover. There is no suggestion whatsoever of sexual abuse, however. Major Beech died in 1995 when Carl was 27.
Mother and son settled in Kingston-upon-Thames, south-west London, where neighbours remember a ‘big, well-built boy,’ without many friends.
Contemporaries at school paint a picture of a mummy’s boy who went plane- spotting on his own and loved horses and his English setter dog. It was on Coombe Hill in Kingston, that Beech would later say that he witnessed the hitand-run murder of a boy he remembered only as Scott.
It was apparently carried out by members of the paedophile gang – or the Group as he referred to them – because Scott had disobeyed an order from his abusers. Funnily enough, there was no report anywhere of a boy going missing; not at the local police station, not at local schools, and not in the local paper.
On leaving school, where his attendance was exemplary, Beech worked briefly as an estate agent before following his mother into the nursing profession.
A SELFISH HUSBAND
He trained at the Royal Berkshire Hospital where he met future wife Dawn, also a nurse. They married in 1992; he was 24; she was 22. He then moved to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where – disturbingly – he worked on the children’s ward. His career in paediatrics also took him to Swindon and the Great Western Hospital where he later took up a managerial post with the
Patient Advice and Liaison Service. He and his wife, who had now had a young son, rented a threebed house in Gloucester. According to one relative Beech was ‘selfish, controlling and mean’. ‘He didn’t speak very much,’ said the relative. ‘You had a job getting into any conversation with him.
‘I don’t think it was shyness. I think he thought he was a cut above us – intellectually superior. Dawn was so different. Happy, full of life, the complete opposite.
‘I suppose she loved him in her own way. But they weren’t a good match.’
His discontentment with his own life manifested itself in delusions of grandeur and a string of expensive purchases, including a luxury motor home (and later a Ford Mustang) which, at one point, left the couple with debts of around £70,000.
Beech visited the Southampton boat show every year and talked of flying lessons. There is one further telling detail to add about his marriage. ‘He told Dawn he’d been abused by his stepfather,’ revealed a family member.
‘She believed him then but she doesn’t now. But he never mentioned anything about being abused by VIPs or ritualistic murders.
‘When we heard about the allegations years later we just laughed and thought “what a load of rubbish”. His lies just got bigger and bigger.’
To everyone’s astonishment, the marriage lasted 17 years. In 2012, the year their divorce was finalised, Beech started a new job with the CQC watchdog body.
More worryingly, given his recent exposure as a paedophile, he was from 2012 to 2017 a volunteer for the NSPCC’s ‘Childline schools service’ – going into schools to deliver workshops and assemblies for children about the dangers of abuse and how to keep themselves safe in person and online.
MALEVOLENT FANTASIST
Savile had died in 2011 and the truth about his past had now emerged. Beech wasted no time in contacting Operation Yewtree – the investigation into the DJ led by Scotland Yard – and was referred to Wiltshire Police.
In his statement, he told how his stepfather had shared him among a group of paedophiles and one of them, he said, was Savile. But there was no mention of a VIP ring. After investigating his allegations, police took no further action.
Four months later, Beech submitted an application to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority as a victim of abuse.
He received £22,000 and used some of the money as a cash deposit on a brand new white convertible £34,000 Ford Mustang. Beech also started blogging about his childhood ‘experiences’ under the Twitter handle ‘CarlSurvivor’, writing poetry about his ‘ordeal’.
The final few lines of one passage read: ‘I’m taken upstairs, put on the bed/ Raped by each one of them, the sheets turn red/ It’s the last one who helps me get clean/ But I’m still dirty, survivors know what I mean/ As a child this was part of my daily life/The hurt pain and terror and threat of the knife/.’
Not a whisper, though, of MPs or the involvement of M15 and M16.
Nor, initially, was there on the website he founded, RAVSCA (Raising Awareness for Victims & Survivors of Child Abuse) which brought him to the attention of ‘investigations’ website Exaro. Before Beech went to Exaro, remember, there was nothing in his online accounts – or his testimony to Wiltshire Police – which suggested that some of his abusers were MPs or men in the top echelons of the secret services.
An Exaro reporter helped him ‘fill in the blanks’ by showing him pictures of potential suspects; previously, he could only ‘identify’ two of his abusers (Savile and his stepfather). Now, hey presto, he had a list of 12. His dealings with Exaro produced a series of explosive front page exclusives for the Sunday People. The first was published in July 2014 under the headline: ‘We Were Raped By MPs In Flats Near Commons’.
The second hit the news stands a few months later: ‘Police Probe “Abuse” At MPs’ Luxury Block.’
Exaro took their ‘star source’ to the Metropolitan Police who, unlike Wiltshire Police, took him seriously. Beech was given the pseudonym ‘Nick’ and Operation Midland was set up.
Beech now introduced the concept of a VIP ring in his blog. Not everyone took his ‘revelations’ at face value, however.
THE FIRST SUSPICIONS
One of them was Ian McFadyen, a survivor of childhood abuse, who said: ‘I rumbled he was not what he seemed after he took a post I had written about the abuse I suffered, being raped over a bath at school by a master, and then presented it as his own only a few days later, except he had added an extra dimension of violence just for good measure.’
But Beech, or Nick as he was now widely known, continued to lap up the media interest, particularly his TV interviews with the BBC and other broadcasters when he appeared in silhouette with a disguised voice.
There is only so long, though, that such a high-profile murder investigation can be sustained without a shred of evidence. By September 2015 questions were beginning to be asked about the anonymous source fuelling the inquiry.
In a major article, which raised serious doubts about his account, the Mail summed up the growing disquiet: ‘Nick: Victim or Fantasist?’ Operation Midland was finally wound up in March 2016. E Eight months later, officers fr from Northumbria Police, the outside force brought in to investigate n the fiasco, raided B Beech’s home in Gloucester. T They found more than 362 in indecent images of children on th three laptop computers, a USB st stick, camera memory card – an and an iPad left on the passenger ge seat of his Mustang parked ou outside. The names of the files rec recovered by police including: ‘M ‘Man and two boys 12 years of ag age’, ‘Little boy and man’ and ‘13 ‘13-year-old with ten-year-old’.
CHILD CH PORNOGRAPHY
Th The filth was obtained on the ‘dar ‘dark web’ with special software inst installed on one of Beech’s computers. put Police discovered he had also begun writing his memoirs, Too Many Secrets: Surviving a Chil Child Sex Ring, under the penname nam Charles Chassereau. Th There were striking similarities, it later la emerged, between the ‘exp ‘experiences’ described in his auto autobiography and an account of abus abuse contained in two books by an American A author. At Beech’s home, the curtains rema remained drawn after the raid. ‘His mother told us he had a break breakdown,’ said a neighbour. ‘He cut a pretty sad figure. Then he was gone.’ While on bail, Beech fled to Swedish Lapland and hid out in a remote forest cabin, which he told neighbours he was renovating. He gave his name as ‘Anderson’ to workmen employed to renovate the cottage before disappearing, owing them nearly £15,000.
CORNERED IN LAPLAND
A specialist fugitive unit in Sweden worked closely with Northumbria Police and the National Crime Agency to secure his extradition and arrest. He was sent back to Britain where he pleaded guilty earlier this year to making and possessing child abuse images – including ‘some of the gravest kind’ – as well as voyeurism for covertly filming a young boy.
Beech, who tried to blame his own son, was removed as a school governor and from the CQC.
During the prosecution opening at Newcastle Crown Court, where Beech stood trial for perverting the course of justice and fraud, Tony Badenoch QC said: ‘The fact Carl Beech is a paedophile may help explain how he was quite so able and willing to conceive of, and then relay, to a captive audience such detailed and graphic stories of the sadistic sexual abuse of young boys at the hands of much older men.’
He got a sexual kick out of it, in other words.
Consultant clinical psychologist Roy Shuttleworth certainly believes this was the case. ‘In one way or another I believe he gained sexual gratification from the stories he was telling which extended to him giving evidence in court. In my professional opinion, I think he got a thrill out of it.’
In his devastating critique of Operation Midland, published in November 2016, former High Court judge Richard Henriques identified 43 basic failings in the police investigation. But the very first, the most fundamental, was ‘believing “Nick” at the outset’.
Finally, after leading detectives on a merry dance for 16 months, Beech has been held to account for his wicked lies.
But not a single officer has been disciplined. In fact, three detectives investigated over the debacle were allowed to retire before the Independent Office for Police Conduct had even concluded its inquiry. Isn’t this as grave a scandal?
Additional reporting: