Did this girl soldier die after being raped on the orders of Army officers?
Four mysterious deaths at a barracks. A 20-year ‘cover-up’. And devastating claims that could finally blow the case wide open
‘Since I retired, my daughter’s death has consumed me’ Some males could have been pimping female recruits
DeS JAMeS can recall very clearly the last time we met. It was on the afternoon of what would have been his daughter Cheryl’s 25th birthday. He had spent the morning tending her grave. That was almost 14 years ago. Since then, we had gradually fallen out of touch. To me, at least, it seemed that little more could be done to help him and his wife Doreen get closer to the truth behind Cheryl’s dreadful and perplexing death.
‘Since I retired, it has consumed me, to be honest,’ 66-year-old Des says today. ‘It has bordered on an obsession — and that has not been good for the family.
‘Losing someone usually creates a sense of grief that lasts just a few years. Then you can let go. But the injustice and secrecy surrounding what happened to Cheryl means that feeling lasts so much longer.’
This is a story of parental devotion, endurance and determination.
Private Cheryl James was an 18-year-old Army recruit when she died at her training camp in Surrey. She was hit by a single bullet between her right eye and the bridge of her nose.
Cheryl supposedly fired the shot herself. She was another love-troubled teen suicide — or so the Army and civilian police version goes. But for 20 years her parents have refused to accept the official version. Now they could be on the verge of exposing a much darker truth.
In exactly one week, a fresh inquest will open into Cheryl’s death, which occurred at the Princess Royal barracks in Deepcut on November 27, 1995.
At a pre-inquest hearing earlier this month it was alleged by the Jameses’ legal team, for the first time, that Cheryl, from Llangollen on the Welsh borders, had been subjected to ‘vile treatment’, sexual exploitation by senior ranks and may have been ‘sexually coerced or raped’ the night before she was found dead.
Almost 60 allegations of bullying and sexual assaults, said to have taken place in 1995, were made to Surrey Police by former recruits but have hitherto apparently escaped public attention.
Amid a regime of sexual bullying, it is suggested, Cheryl could have been ordered to sleep with a male colleague by a non-commissioned officer. She allegedly told another colleague ‘I have to sleep with him . . . this is just like them. I have to do it.’ Within hours, Cheryl was dead. However intent he may be on getting justice for his daughter, no father can easily listen to such allegations.
‘The day after the hearing was awful,’ says Des James, a retired executive with the Tetra Pak packaging firm. ‘A darkened room day for me. I couldn’t speak to anyone.
‘But for the first time we are hearing claims about what the culture at Deepcut entailed, and it offers a glimmer of explanation; a group of [male soldiers] took control of a group of young females and were pimping them.’
Deepcut was the training depot of the Royal Logistics Corps (RLC). Cheryl was a recruit who had signed up, aged 17, in May that year. At the time of her death she was undergoing ‘Phase II’ of her basic training.
In the hours before her body was discovered near the gates of the base, she had been on guard duty armed with an SA-80 assault rifle. The weapon was found by her side.
Her first inquest, only three weeks later, was a perfunctory affair. It lasted no more than an hour. There was a suggestion that Cheryl’s love-life might have been a factor. Her parents have always regarded this as little more than a smear.
‘As if the Cheryl I knew would have killed herself because she could not make up her mind between two boys,’ her father says dismissively today.
The coroner judged that there was insufficient evidence before him to be sure of suicide. But instead of adjourning so that more information could be gathered, he simply recorded an ‘open’ verdict. Why was the evidence so paltry? Although civilian police are charged with investigating unexpected deaths on Army property, the Surrey force allowed the military police to operate almost independently, readily accepting their findings, which were based on an extremely swift inquiry.
Despite the limited facts at their disposal, detectives and top brass were far more decisive in their assumptions than the coroner.
Years later, in 2002, the James family saw an Army document which had been written within days of Cheryl’s death, describing it as a ‘tragic suicide’.
And there the matter might have rested save for one crucial fact: Cheryl was not the first Royal Logistics Corps recruit to be found shot dead at Deepcut. Nor would she be the last.
Her death only came to wider public attention in March 2002, when 17-year-old James Collinson, of Perth, was also found at the Deepcut base with a fatal gunshot wound.
It then emerged that there had been two more such deaths of Deepcut recruits since 1995. Private Sean Benton, 20, died a few months before Cheryl James, while 17-year-old Geoff Gray died in September 2001.
Benton’s inquest recorded a verdict of suicide; Gray’s resulted in an ‘open’ verdict. Four almost identical deaths at the same place could no longer be ignored. Surrey Police, which had dealt so woefully with the individual deaths, had to reopen the cases, amid calls from the families for a public inquiry. Des is critical of the force’s motives. ‘In 2002, people started talking about Surrey Police’s “reinvestigation”. But the fact was they had not carried out any investigation in the first place.
‘In my view, when Surrey Police did eventually investigate the deaths, they were just interested in establishing a verdict of suicide.’
So what had happened? There was no shortage of theories. I was told by ex-recruits of unexplained shots fired close to them during their night guard duties — incidents that were later ‘hushed up’ by the NCOs to whom they reported. Were the deaths the work of a serial killer, or even terrorists? Or had the young soldiers been driven to take their own lives by the culture inside the camp?
As the Mail took up the campaign, it was surprising how much could be uncovered and how little was officially acknowledged. Bullying and brutality towards recruits by NCOs seemed to be a recurring theme.
One of the first suggestions that sexual abuse might also have played a part was made to me in 2002 by a female former RLC recruit. She said that she had been raped by a corporal in the dormitory of a barracks next door to the Deepcut camp.
The attack had devastated her. ‘If I had been given a loaded gun, I think I could have killed myself,’ she said.
Former recruits independently gave me the same names of allegedly abusive corporals or sergeants. I certainly came to be persuaded that on a camp of 1,500 resident soldiers, many of them little more than children, there had existed a cruelty and unkindness among a small number of adult NCOs that had caused desperate unhappiness.
In September 2003, Surrey Police’s ‘reinvestigations’ into the four deaths were completed. Four separate reports were written. The force said that ‘no evidence of third party involvement in any of the deaths had been uncovered’.
Their work — which was later to be savaged in a review by another force — was almost done. In March 2004, a ‘fifth report’ was published which raised more general concerns about the training and disciplinary environment of young soldiers at Deepcut.
That, at least, seemed to be getting close to the heart of the matter.
That very bad abuses had occurred there was made plain the following October when Leslie Skinner, an NCO instructor at Deepcut, was jailed for four-and-a-half years after admitting indecent assaults against four male soldiers between 1992 and 1997.
The scandal was growing. But two Government decisions combined to kick the matter into the long grass.
The first had been to invade Iraq in 2003. This took the public focus on military matters far away from Surrey. The second was to announce a ‘Deepcut Review’ into the deaths, conducted by Nicholas Blake QC.
The Government was sure this review would be ‘independent, objective and comprehensive’. But it would also be conducted behind closed doors, without the power to summon witnesses, and would not report until the spring of 2006.
By that time, the British Army was even more deeply embroiled in Iraq. In short, the story had moved on. The barracks and its dark secrets were becoming ancient history. But not to the families, of course.
In February 2006, the inquest into teenager James Collinson’s death heard that minutes before he died he had borrowed an SA80 rifle, which he was too young to carry under Deepcut rules. Was this for some kind of prank, suicide or desperate self-defence?
In the second week of March, an open verdict was delivered. Plus ça
change. Little more than a fortnight later, Nicholas Blake’s ‘Deepcut Review’ was published.
Blake made 34 recommendations –
but there were three stand-out conclusions that would dominate the next day’s headlines — and break the families’ hearts again.
The first was confirmation of what they and most observers already knew: that recruits at Deepcut had been subjected to an environment of ‘harassment, discrimination and oppressive behaviour’.
The second was that Blake agreed with the official position that all four deaths were ‘probably’ suicides.
Finally, Mr Blake suggested that the Public Inquiry the bereaved families so dearly wished for was ‘not necessary’.
The sighs of relief at the Ministry of Defence were of gale force. In their eyes, Blake’s findings and the recommendations he suggested could have been so much worse.
To this day, Des James regrets his co-operation with Blake, whose review, he says, ‘closed down’ the public interest in Deepcut. But what else could he have done?
Blake’s recommendation that Surrey Police should hand over its reports and supporting witness statements to the four bereaved families so they might apply to theHigh Court to set aside the previous inquests and have them heard anew, was simply ignored.
Des says he feels more let down by Surrey Police than the MoD.
And so the matter stood for the best part of a decade. It also seemed likely that all trace of the scandal was to be erased.
Deepcut itself had become a toxic name and, in light of military cuts, eminently expendable. In 2008, the Defence Secretary announced that the Princess Royal barracks was to be closed and sold off by 2013.
So, where to go from there? In 2011, as much in despair as hope, Des and Doreen approached the human rights organisation, Liberty, which agreed to take on the case.
It was only then that Surrey Police agreed to release what documentation it had on the Cheryl James case — though it did so very slowly. It was only last October, more than 20 years after Cheryl’s death, that the force handed over the last of the files to her family. The tranche includes almost 90 volumes of documents.
Going through the documentation was a formidable challenge, but the rewards soon became apparent. Fresh forensic and ballistic evidence became publicly available. There were previously unseen witness statements. Old ones were shown to be inaccurate.
In July 2014, the High Court quashed the ‘open’ verdict from the original inquest into Cheryl James’s death. Last summer, her body was exhumed and possible fragments were recovered for new ballistic analysis. ‘That was incredibly important,’ says her father.
Liberty is representing three of the four families of soldiers who died at Deepcut. The Grays have their own solicitor.
For the moment, Liberty’s legal focus is on the James inquest. There is much still to investigate, and potential witnesses are coming forward in numbers not seen before.
‘The irony is that the MoD has had a very well-employed strategy of obfuscation and delay,’ says Des. ‘You are supposed to be worn down, eventually.
‘But for once, that is backfiring. Had we had a proper inquiry in 2002, a lot of these people who are coming forward now would have been very reluctant to do so then. They were young serving soldiers.
‘Now, they are in their 40s, have kids of their own and, looking back, are outraged about what went on.
‘I was 46 when Cheryl died. It only dawned on me yesterday that these people are now the same age as I was when Cheryl died. They are prepared to talk in a way they weren’t earlier.’
What then of the barracks at Deepcut? Has it disappeared under a 5,000-home ‘eco-town’ as originally announced?
In fact, the building programme needed to house Deepcut’s departing soldiers has suffered from funding ‘delays’, and recruits continue to be trained there. It is still the home of the Royal Logistics Corps.
The Deepcut parents know all about delays. They have been denied justice, truth and emotional ‘closure’ for more than two decades.
‘Did those four kids commit suicide or not?’ asks Des. ‘Whatever caused it, we needed to sort it out. But it has felt like every element of authority was trying to stop us.’