Bungled Investigation into Child Sex Abuse at Dolphin Square Reopened

Historical Child Sexual Abuse Case Reopened After BuzzFeed News Investigation

Lynyzy Billing / BuzzFeed News

“It’s one of the most positive things that has happened in the last 35 years,” said David, who spoke out about being abused at a flat in London’s notorious Dolphin Square in the 1980s.

Patrick Strudwick, BuzzFeed UK LGBT Editor

The survivor at the centre of a major historical child sexual abuse case has welcomed the decision by Lincolnshire police to reopen the case, following a six-month investigation by BuzzFeed News that raised multiple questions about the original police operation.

David, who asked that only his first name is reported, described the development as “one of the most positive things that has happened in the last 35 years”.

He approached BuzzFeed News in 2015 with concerns about how both Lincolnshire police in 2007 and the Metropolitan police last year investigated his claims. David alleged that Gordon Dawson, a well-connected member of the landed gentry, groomed and raped him aged 15 in Lincolnshire in the early 1980s before taking him on trips to London’s Dolphin Square where further abuse took place.

The apartment complex close to Westminster subsequently became embroiled in allegations of sexual abuse by politicians. David revealed that he was taken to dinners with MPs and other powerful figures and said he would awake the next morning in the Dolphin Square flat, in pain and with blood and semen on him that was not his. He still does not know who, other than Dawson, might have been involved.

David in the early 1980s.

During our investigation, which unearthed key police files and documents from the inquest into the sudden death of Dawson in 2007 – he was found dead less than two hours after a police officer warned him he was to be arrested – it emerged that several other men had also come forward. Some alleged Dawson abused them when they were as young as 5 years old.

Many of the files supported David’s testimony, such as his concerns that Dawson had been warned of his impending arrest on two occasions. David also alleged that he had advised police during their investigation to remove firearms from Dawson’s private gun collection, but they failed to do so, and amid the investigation, Dawson was found dead with a rifle next to him.

Within two weeks of the BuzzFeed News investigation being published, Marc Jones, the police and crime commissioner for Lincolnshire, said “there are lessons the force can and must learn” and Detective Superintendent Rick Hatton, head of Lincolnshire police’s public protection unit, apologised to survivors.

Keith Best, the chief executive of Survivors UK, the group for abuse victims, supported David’s calls for the case to be re-investigated, citing “grave errors” by Lincolnshire police, while leading criminal lawyer Nigel Richardson described the police interventions at the time as “odd”, “irregular”, and “unusual” for an “allegation of this seriousness”.

Gordon Dawson Property of David

Now, six months later, Lincolnshire police have started re-examining the original investigation carried out during 2006 and 2007. Details of this new probe are not currently being shared but BuzzFeed News understands that several lines of inquiry surrounding the case are being pursued.

Hatton, who is also head of Lincolnshire Police’s public protection unit, told BuzzFeed News: “Lincolnshire Police have reviewed the original file and spoken further with [David]. As a result of this, investigations are ongoing into the original allegation and further details that have come to light.”

“What’s happening now is very encouraging,” David told BuzzFeed News. He added that he hoped the fresh investigation would unearth “as many answers as possible” and that he was “very surprised” that the case is being re-examined “because it’s been so hard to get here”.

Frustrated with Lincolnshire police, who had closed the investigation following Dawson’s death in 2007, David responded to a request by the Metropolitan police in late 2014 for anyone who had been abused in Dolphin Square to come forward. After interviewing David, the Met declined to investigate further, prompting his decision to contact BuzzFeed News.

Police Files on Child Sex Abuse at Royal's School Have Vanished

Victims of teacher at school that taught royals are frustrated in search for truth

 Gordonstoun school in 1962. Former pupils are being sent letters asking if they
 were sexually abused. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

Alex Renton
The Guardian

Official files on police investigations of child abuse at Gordonstoun, the school in the Scottish Highlands that educated the Queen’s sons and Prince Philip, appear to have gone missing or been destroyed.

In a case investigated by the Observer, a teacher named Derek Jones seriously sexually assaulted a number of children attending the junior school around 1990. He was twice questioned by police in the following years after the children told their parents what had happened. Files were forwarded to the Procurator Fiscal, Scotland’s prosecution service, but it was decided not to prosecute. The files would normally be retained, but Scotland’s Crown Office says they now cannot be found.

Jones died in a car crash in Kenya six years ago. But two of his victims, now in their 30s, want to discover why he was not prosecuted. Gordonstoun sacked Jones, who had been an English teacher in the junior school for three months. The school’s bursar told the boys’ parents that the school would ensure he never taught again.

One of the boys, John Findlay, was drugged, photographed naked and sexually assaulted in his dormitory bed at Aberlour House, Gordonstoun’s junior school. He told his parents what had happened soon afterwards. A police investigation was launched, but the Findlays decided, after pressure from the school, not to press for a prosecution.

Another man, who does not want to be named, has told the Observer he was groomed and taught to masturbate by Jones when he was 12. He said that Jones also performed oral sex on him and showed him pictures of boys at another school who had also been the teacher’s “favourites”, implying that they also had sex with him.

He told his parents about the assault a year later. His family went to the local police, who mounted an investigation and assured them that a prosecution would happen because other complaints had been received about Jones. But shortly before the court date, the Procurator Fiscal told the boy’s mother that there would be no prosecution. No reason was given.

Findlay believes that Jones did go on to teach again. He has already served a freedom of information request on Police Scotland. He asked the force to reveal the details of all their inquiries at the time of Jones’s assault on him, first detailed in an Observer magazine investigation in April that also uncovered allegations of the rapes of two 12-year-old girls at Aberlour House.

The FOI request was refused on grounds of privacy and excessive cost. Findlay plans to appeal. “If there has been a tradition of abuse and cover-up anywhere children are looked after by people who aren’t their parents, it needs to be known by the public,” he says.

The Procurator Fiscal’s office told the Observer: “We do not have a record of a case against Derek Jones on the system and we are unable to establish at this stage if we did receive a report from the police and if so what the reason was for not prosecuting.”

But police in Elgin have assured the victims that files did go to the prosecutor, and found the reference number of one of the original complaints.

The Procurator Fiscal’s office said that such files would normally be kept, even if the decision was made not to proceed with a prosecution. But the cases all precede computerisation of the prosecutors’ archive.

The office was unable to say whether all records relating to abuse complaints at Gordonstoun, of which there have been several since the 1970s, had gone missing or just the documents that were concerned with the Jones allegations.

In England and Scotland, lost police files have been a recurring problem in the current wave of revelations around historical abuse in childcare institutions.

One of the reasons for setting up an inquiry, which is soon to begin in England under a New Zealand judge, Lowell Goddard, was the fact that the Home Office had lost files of allegations concerning important people given by Geoffrey Dickens MP to the then home secretary, Leon Brittan. Both men have since died.

The Scottish government has announced its own inquiry into abuse of children in institutions. After protests, its remit was extended to private boarding schools. Police Scotland recently announced that its National Child Abuse Investigation Unit had started inquiries into 45 institutions, including 17 schools.

I hope this inquiry and the one in Britain will investigate the loss of police and prosecution files and assign blame where it is due. It's almost certainly too late to prosecute anyone in this case, or in the VIP scandal in England. If stiff punishment can't be administered, at least some 'big names' can be shamed. It's a disgraceful practice to destroy evidence, and must not be tolerated at all.