‘Fantasy’ cases make police a laughing stock

Last week your shocking report exposed one of the people who accused Edward Heath of child abuse as a ‘satanic sex fantasist’. But more worrying than this is the reluctance of Wiltshire Police to acknowledge it.

It must be of concern to us all that while the police were conducting their growing list of historic sex-abuse operations, sex gangs in Rotherham, Oxford and elsewhere were carrying out the wholesale abuse of young girls, and Stephen Port was murdering an untold number of young men in East London, right under their noses.

I hope it’s not the case that police chiefs are opting to concentrate limited resources on easy, safe and politically correct investigations, where they can grandstand on TV (as they did with Cliff Richard), over today’s awful sex crimes.

Roy Daniels, Luton As Heath has been dead for more than a decade, and no evidence to support the accusation has surfaced in all of that time, I think the police force concerned has got its priorities wrong.

Officers can’t be short of modern-day crimes to investigate. The bill for this investigation is at £700,000 and I’m fairly certain that the law-abiding public effectively paying for it could think of better ways to spend that sort of money.

In the highly unlikely event of something being found to incriminate Sir Edward, what will they do anyway?

Ann Field, Manchester I read Dr Rachel Hoskins’s findings in your paper with total disbelief. She says that the accusations are likely to be based on false memories unearthed during therapy.

Repressed memory as a concept has been completely discredited through a significant amount of scientific research. Supporting discredited concepts and theories such as recovered memory simply serves to denigrate real victims who do need help and support, and, yes, justice. Memory is fallible and is open to suggestion. So Heath’s accusers may well have embellished their stories as a result of the questions they were asked in therapy.

Therapists may be unaware that the questions they pose, or information they give out, can be incorporated into the version of events being given by people they are treating.

The tragedy is that these cases divert our attention away from real cases of abuse, where the victims need our help and support.

Peter Duffell, Aslockton, Nottinghamshire Police are stretched enough as it is without this. When I was a victim of crime, all police could do was tell me to ring a hotline.

V. de Bheal, London