Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read (20 page)

But I didn’t realise that another and very significant turning point lay just ahead.

11

T
HE
M
APPERTON
C
ASE

I
had not answered the door when the cops came around first because, two weeks earlier, I had been involved in a road-rage incident and had knocked out an off-duty copper. My old anger still simmered beneath the surface, and my resolve to avoid situations that might conceivably lead to violence didn’t have a clause to deal with the rude, aggressive drivers I seemed to come up against on a regular basis. This man had deserved the dig he took, but, as cops always stand up for each other, I had been concerned that there might be repercussions and afraid that the two women officers on my doorstep meant that there could be a spot of trouble ahead. Having just been found innocent of a charge of GBH, getting into legal difficulties again was the last thing I wanted.

What had happened was this: a driver behind me in a fast car with a girl he was trying to impress had been driving right up behind me on an Essex road flashing his lights and generally being annoying. Remembering my promise to myself to avoid getting into the sort of situations that could become difficult, I pulled over into the slow lane to let him past, but the idiot wouldn’t go; he just kept driving right behind me, flashing the headlights and making gestures that I couldn’t quite make out but that I suspected were obscene.

I stopped at the traffic lights, and so did he. He jumped out of his car and started to approach me with a swagger. That was enough. I had been as patient as possible for a man with a short fuse. I got out of my car, closed the door and faced him. I could see that he had something in his hand, and I certainly did not want to be the first to get hit, so I punched him hard and he fell heavily on to the ground while his girlfriend looked on, shrieking and wobbling on her high heels.

Then I saw that the thing in his hand was a luminous police jacket.

Fuck, I thought. Great fucking timing. This was the last thing I needed at this particular point in my life.

The policeman came around and staggered to his feet. ‘You’re in trouble, mate,’ he said. ‘I’m going to read you your rights.’ He got me into a bear hug.

‘Mate, I’m leaving,’ I said. ‘You provoked me and I’m pretty sure I haven’t done anything much wrong here. Let go of me.’

He wouldn’t let go so I head-butted him, left him groaning on the floor and drove off.

When I left to get petrol the next morning, about twenty police officers surrounded me and nicked me for assaulting a police officer. They took me down to Romford Police Station where I was greeted with outright hilarity, because the man I had hit had been an Essex copper, and the Romford boys are not fond of the Essex police.

‘Look,’ I was told, ‘this guy was an idiot. He’s a young copper and he was trying to show off in front of this girl and, when he saw you speeding or whatever it was, he wasn’t even on duty and had no right to do anything. This isn’t going to go any further. Trust me. This will be dealt with. He’s in serious shit because he was overstepping his remit.’

In fact, I even got an apology from the coppers and a letter saying that there wouldn’t be any more action.

But then these two women police officers came and would not go away. They just kept coming and knocking on my door and trying to peer in through the front window. They would leave, and then come back. They would stand and wait, talking quietly among themselves. This happened many times, and, as I assumed that they had come because of the incident with the copper, I didn’t answer the door because I just didn’t want to know about it. But then I realised that they must have been there for some other reason, although I had no idea what it might be.

Eventually, as you know, I let them in.

When they told me that a big investigation was ongoing into the abuses at St Leonard’s, I was deeply shocked, because it had never occurred to me that anyone would ever be punished for what they had done or that I would ever find myself in an encounter with the coppers in which they were doing their best to be kind and to make me feel at ease.

While, of course, I was pleased that perhaps the men and women who had done so much damage to so many children would finally get in trouble for their crimes, I also learned that most of the kids I had grown up with were dead, many years before their time, and that, awful as my childhood had been, many of the others – including my best mate Liam – had it a lot worse than me. I learned that I had not even realised quite how bad things had been at St Leonard’s. I had thought that I had been living through hell, but I hadn’t even known the half of it. All of us kids had known about the sexual contact between the adolescent children and the caregivers, and obviously we had known about the violence and abuse, because we had all suffered it to varying degrees. But now I learned that the abuse had been more widespread, more organised and more sinister than I had ever realised. So much so that many of the kids who had grown up in the home had found life too intolerable to continue with and had decided to end it, in one way or another.

Apparently, the first formal complaints against the abusers had been made in the mid-1990s by someone who had been there at the same time as me, but it had taken some time for the investigators to uncover enough evidence to bring the case to trial. It would take a couple of years for the case to come to court. Meanwhile, anyone who had survived their experiences of St Leonard’s and now learned that many of their childhood friends had not would just have to learn how to cope with a massive dose of survivor’s guilt.

They hit me with everything: ‘Were you in St Leonard’s children’s home? Are you Paul Connolly? We’ve got some bad news for you, I’m afraid. All the children you grew up with are dead, except for one, and he’s in prison.’ Despite the fact that several of my girlfriends had been police officers, I had always tended to see the coppers as enemies who couldn’t be trusted and who should generally be avoided as much as possible. Now I realised that they could be human too.

Everything slowed down and I felt as though I was leaving my body. With a couple of sentences, the women police officers had taken me back twenty years. Almost all the people I had thought were living their lives somewhere, and possibly doing better than me, were dead.

Dead!

For years, I had deliberately pushed any thought of the children I had grown up with to the back of my mind. I had chosen to assume that things were OK for them, that somewhere out there Liam and the rest of them had jobs and houses, and wives and kids and dogs they took for walks – normal, pleasant, unremarkable lives. I had hoped, vaguely, that they were living better lives than mine. Now I had to confront the reality, which was that, as grim and gritty and difficult as my life had often been over the years, I was one of the lucky ones. I was one of the survivors.

The case against the former care workers of St Leonard’s would take place in two parts. First there was a criminal prosecution taken by the state. Only later could a civil action on the part of the victims occur. The criminal prosecution was supposed to establish the guilt or innocence of the various people who had been accused, and lay the ground for any compensation cases that would be taken against the London Borough of Tower Hamlets Council.

Sadly, the criminal prosecution was a bit of a fiasco, despite the fact that many of the former residents of the homes gave statements, some in court. The witnesses were brave. Some of the people who had suffered the most as children now had to face their demons and lay their secrets bare in front of the jury at the Old Bailey in London. It must have been painfully difficult. On 23 January 2001, one of the local newspapers, the
Braintree and Witham Times
, published the following about the harrowing ordeal of one of the former victims of Uncle Bill:

A woman sobbed at the Old Bailey as she told how she was raped by William Starling while resident in an Essex children’s home.

Weeping uncontrollably, the alleged victim, now 38, said she didn’t reveal her terrible ordeal at the time because she thought no one would believe her and she would be ‘locked away’.

She said the attack happened when she was ten or 11 years old. She left the home shortly afterwards but the abuse continued, she claimed.

The slim blonde revealed how Starling, now aged 74, of Rantree Fold, Basildon, would visit her at her parents’ address and indecently assault her.

He is also alleged to have attacked her siblings as well as eight other children.

‘Bill would give my mum some money to go shopping down the market and give my dad some money to go and have a drink at the pub,’ she continued.

Once alone with her she said Starling would indecently assault her.

Afterwards she claimed he would sneer at her: ‘No one will believe you, you are just a disturbed kid.’

She said that the rape happened in a shed in the back garden of the children’s home.

Starling, the retired children’s home worker, is said to have sexually abused 12 ‘vulnerable’ children over a 20-year period. Miss Sally Howes, prosecuting, told the jury he carried out a ‘cynical and calculated catalogue of abuse’ while employed by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

Starling has pleaded not guilty to 25 sexual assaults, including three rapes, four counts of other serious sexual assaults, and 17 of indecent assault and indecency with a child.

After a long trial and the courageous disclosures of other victims of Bill Starling, Alan Prescott and some of their colleagues, the case finally ended. The outcome of it was reported as follows in the
Recorder
newspaper on 12 October 2001:

Two former workers at St Leonard’s care home in Hornchurch have been jailed for sexually assaulting youngsters in two separate hearings at The Old Bailey.
 

Former magistrate Alan Prescott, 62, who was in charge of St Leonard’s care home for 15 years, was jailed for two years on Friday for abusing boys.

Prescott’s sentence was dreadfully brief, in light of all the damage he had caused to so many young lives. One cannot help but wonder if his position as a local magistrate helped him out. Bill Starling, however, received a longer sentence:

Prescott’s jailing follows that of William Starling, 74, who was sentenced to 14 years jail at the Old Bailey last April. Court restrictions however have prevented the
Recorder
from printing the details until Prescott was sentenced.

Prescott had admitted to a number of cases of assault, but, when I was in the home, we were all confident that his inappropriate relationships with young boys were much more numerous than the four that he admitted to:

Last Friday, Prescott, who lives in Stepney, East London, admitted that he too had been abusing boys in his care, pleading guilty to sexually assaulting four victims between 1970 and 1980.

Almost hilariously, Prescott’s dominant position in his local community seems to have been cited by his legal counsel as a point in his favour, as if the abuse of trust of his position did not make what he had done even worse than it already was:

He was described by his solicitor as a ‘pillar of the community’ and commanded great respectability.

The social worker was a Havering magistrate for 24 years, a Labour councillor in Harold Hill and chief executive of an East London charity.

He joined St Leonard’s in 1968 and became superintendent in 1976, remaining in charge until it closed almost nine years later. But by the time he was in charge, he had already started abusing his position.

The pervert plied one victim with drink before abusing him and even offered to help another with a court case in return for sex.

Prosecutor Sally Howes told the court how Prescott first struck in 1970, sneaking into a 15 year old’s dormitory before performing a sex act on him.

He was finally arrested when police investigated allegations of a spate of abuse at St Leonard’s.

Several of the charges against Prescott were never heard by the court, presumably because of a lack of evidence after the passage of so many years or, perhaps, because the boys he had taken advantage of had grown into the men who were so wounded and distressed that they had ended up taking their own lives and were no longer available to give evidence about what had happened to them as children. This meant that Prescott never faced trial for some of the crimes he had been accused of: