How I uncovered shocking failings in the case of Shoebury’s Lost Boys
As a new podcast recounts his award-winning investigation into an alleged paedophile ring cover-up, Archant journalist Charles Thomson reflects on his five-year battle with the establishment
It would have been so easy to ignore Robin Jamieson. I suspect many journalists in my shoes would have done. It was February 2015 when he walked, unannounced, into the Yellow Advertiser’s office in Essex and asked to speak to me. White-haired and bright-eyed, he introduced himself as a retired Southend NHS manager and told me he had a big story I needed to look into. I took him into the board room and listened for around an hour as he recounted a dramatic tale about what he believed had been a major child abuse cover-up in the late 1980s — a paedophile ring which had not been properly investigated.
It was not long after the Jimmy Savile revelations had sent shockwaves through the UK. Historic abuse allegations were one of the hottest topics of the era. Britain was going through a sort of precursor to the #MeToo movement. Claims were pouring out about celebrities, teachers, politicians. Some proved to be true — but some were debunked as scams. I worked at a free, weekly newspaper whose staff and resources seemed to shrink every year. I couldn’t spare any time to chase an illusion.
But Robin didn’t seem like a crank — and something in my gut told me there was a story there. He’d chosen me because I’d recently unearthed and reported on out-of-court payments Essex Council had made over historic abuse allegations. The council had refused to answer even the most basic questions about those payments, making what I felt were tenuous excuses and putting up obstacles to block my investigation. I was annoyed at the way in which my queries had been handled and felt the council was actually making itself look suspicious. Why was it being so obstructive?
It is no exaggeration to say that my decision to follow-up Robin’s story changed the course of not only my own life but many others too. Just over a year later, as a result of my work with Robin, Essex Police was forced to launch a formal review of how it had handled a paedophile ring investigation in Shoebury, Southend, just over 25 years earlier. That review inspired new complainants to come forward, spawning a brand new police investigation. A year and a half later, another new complainant provoked a second new police probe.
In 1989, I learned, several Southend youth charities had stumbled upon the existence of a large paedophile ring. Two men were charged with offences carrying a minimum sentence of around 15 years but a maximum of life. But when the charity workers began receiving disturbing disclosures from the child victims — stories about corrupt police officers, dodgy social workers and other predators in positions of power — the investigation took a series of sinister turns. Evidence went missing. Good leads weren’t followed up. Many professionals working with the victims reported threatening or intimidating behaviour by police officers. Then the two ringleaders were inexplicably gifted an extremely generous plea deal and none of the other abusers were pursued.
My attempts to scrutinise the official records of the case proved impossible. Essex Police said it had destroyed all its paperwork. The Essex court system said its records of the case had vanished from the archive. Essex Council fought hard against my attempts to obtain some paperwork, and claimed other bits were simply missing.
I spent years tracking down people who’d worked on the case — health workers, charity workers, victims and their families. Some were easy to find, others proved impossible to trace. Those who I did find varied greatly in their willingness to cooperate with me. Some of the child protection workers remained terrified. One of the most forthcoming was Chris Hickey, who had run the Rainer Project — a youth justice organisation in Southend, which played a leading role in uncovering the ring. But many of his colleagues have still never spoken publicly.
“All of us are scarred by it,” he told me. “And a couple of people are still scared… a couple of them were so traumatised by the threats and the implications of, ‘We know who you are and where you live’ — and even though we’ve nearly all retired now, it’s cast a shadow over our lives.”
Each new person I did convince to cooperate possessed a different piece of the puzzle — be it their own memories, their links to other potentially useful sources, their handwritten notes and diaries, or their copies of official paperwork. Some had been left so paranoid by the events of the original investigation that they had duplicated their paperwork several times over and stashed copies around Europe, fearful that the documents would be disappeared. So despite the volume of missing, withheld and destroyed paperwork reported by official bodies, I was nonetheless able — through my sources — to piece together an almost day-by-day chronology of the original investigation, in all its frightening detail.
To make sense of all these documents, held by all these different sources, I created a digital timeline with an entry for each piece of paper, summarising what it contained. The timeline initially began with the discovery of the ring in early 1989 and ended with the continuing fall-out in late 1991. But as I began to place the Shoebury incident within the context of a much larger, multi-faceted scandal, the timeline became a living document that spanned decades, including my own investigation. I had so many leads to follow, so many Freedom of Information Requests and Information Commissioner’s Office appeals, that I used it to keep track of where I was up to on each arm of the investigation. Presently, the timeline is more than 350,000 words long, covering well in excess of 500 A4 pages.
Much of this work was carried out in my own time. The investigation was shortlisted for prizes every year from 2016–2020, winning nine national awards and commendations — but kudos doesn’t pay the bills. The YA continued to shrink, my workload continued to mushroom and the Shoebury project became a passion project. I stopped just short of missing a close friend’s wedding to attend a court hearing — but did wind up using my own money to pay a freelancer.
It’s been a wild ride — but I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. The investigation has uncovered some truly shocking secrets, which might go some way towards explaining what happened in 1989/90 — but there remain serious, unanswered questions and the two ringleaders still remain the only people ever prosecuted over their involvement in the devastating Shoebury ring.
Archant’s new podcast, Shoebury’s Lost Boys, has enabled me to tell the story of the original case — and my subsequent investigation — in a way I could never have managed in print, given space confines. Hopefully the right people will listen to it and get in touch. There are a lot of victims out there who still haven’t had all the answers they need.
To subscribe to Unfinished — Shoebury’s Lost Boys, visit: https://podfollow.com/unfinished-1/.
