Investigator who exposed Jimmy Savile has new case against 'very significant' person

[sharonl]

Investigator who exposed Jimmy Savile has new case against 'very significant' person

After his death at age 84 in October 2011, the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal broke when it emerged the media personality has used his position to abuse hundreds of people throughout his life.
By ROSIE JEMPSON
14:06, Sun, Oct 2, 2022 | UPDATED: 14:09, Sun, Oct 2, 2022

Former police detector Mark Williams-Thomas exposed Savile's crimes, which saw 19 arrests and seven prison convictions on the back of his investigation. Now, the same detective has warned that a "very significant" person is waiting to be exposed for similar crimes.

The former investigator's revelations about the once-loved TV personality shocked the world in 2012.

His award-winning film, The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, told of five women who revealed that they suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Savile.

Hundreds more came forward a year after he died, meaning his victims never got justice.

Operation Yewtree was subsequently launched by the Met Police, which saw 19 other, some high-profile, people arrested, and seven of them were sent to prison.

Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris, DJ Ray Teret, Stuart Hall and Max Clifford were some others who were sentenced for sexual assault crimes under Operation Yewtree.

But now, 10 years later, Mr Williams-Thomas has claimed that another high-profile celeb has committed similar crimes.

Speaking to the i, he said: “There are still people out there who are untouchable.

"There is one very significant person who I've done everything to try and get prosecuted because he is clearly a child sex offender."

"To date, the CPS won't prosecute. The police and I have tried really hard to get there.

"He will die in due course and then the floodgates will open in the same way they did with Savile. That's not right. But justice takes many different forms.

"The truth is no broadcaster would have done a programme about Savile when he was alive - we live in a society where there are some people you can't take on and that's really sad.”

The detector didn't divulge any further details about who the "significant person" was.

But he hinted that the case could come to light if the victims gave up their right to anonymity.

He explained: “I've seen the value of lifting anonymity for victims to come forward. It's one of the reasons the CPS didn't have evidence to prosecute Savile when he was alive.

“The media plays a vital role in getting victims to come forward by publicising names, but they have to consider the impact on the accused because there is no more abhorrent crime than child sex abuse.”

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1677199/jimmy-savile-investigator-operation-yewtree-sexual-assault-cases-significant-person

[Verdi]

Crime

Former detective believes Maddie McCann’s ‘real abductor and killer has got free’

Matthew Hart - Oct 08, 2022



A former detective turned investigative journalist has made the concerning claim that Madeleine McCann’s “real abductor” could still be at large despite authorities recently naming a suspect in the long-running mystery.

Madeleine went missing from her bed at a resort while holidaying with her parents in Portugal on May 3, 2007. The case of the then three-year-old’s disappearance attracted considerable global attention. Despite a long-running investigation, Madeleine’s whereabouts remain unknown to this day.

A major breakthrough was made in the case when prosecutors from the Faro Department of Criminal Investigation and Prosecution (DIAP) announced in a statement on Thursday, April 21 that a “person was made an arguido” which translates to a person of interest or suspect.

“As part of the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007, a person was made an arguido on Wednesday,” the statement said.

“The person was made an arguido by the German authorities in execution of a request for international judicial cooperation issued by the Public Ministry of Portugal.

“The investigation has been carried out with the cooperation of the English and German authorities.”

Despite the seemingly major step forward in the investigation, journalist Mark Williams-Thomas believes the evidence presented by the German prosecutor “is not true”.

His belief that the evidence is false came after analysing a theory put forward by prosecutors regarding a telephone number that was used by the recently named suspect close to where McCann went missing.

An investigation by Williams-Thomas and his team found that the number was not only placed a fair distance away from the site of the toddler’s disappearance but also that the number belonged “to somebody else”.

“The whole public I think have been fed a story from the prosecutor in Germany,” Williams-Thomas told Dan Woottonas as part of the Channel 5 documentary Madeleine McCann: The Case Against Christian B.

“They cannot place him on the night using that telephone number.

“So unfortunately, the evidence that has been put into public domain by the German prosecutor – and I’ll give him some benefit, there may be a language barrier – is not true.”

Williams-Thomas went on to highlight that directing the focus of the investigation on the newly named suspect could mean those responsible remain free from prosecution.

“The problem is, if you focus solely on him, the real abductor and killer has got free,” he said.

It has been almost 15 years since Madeleine went missing while on holiday with her family in Portugal and despite the extensive investigation finding no answers as to the toddler’s fate, her parents have never given up hope.



After authorities named a suspect in their daughter’s case, Madeleine’s parents took to Facebook to issue an official statement on the development regarding their “beloved daughter”.

“We welcome the news that the Portuguese authorities have declared a German man an “arguido” in relation to the disappearance of our beloved daughter Madeleine,” the statement said.

“This reflects progress in the investigation, being conducted by the Portuguese, German and British authorities. We are kept informed of developments by the Metropolitan police.

“It is important to note the “arguido” has not yet been charged with any specific crime related to Madeleine’s disappearance. Even though the possibility may be slim, we have not given up hope that Madeleine is still alive and we will be reunited with her.”

https://startsat60.com/media/news/crime/former-detective-believes-maddie-mccanns-real-abductor-and-killer-has-got-free

[PeterMac]

A lot of what has been put into the public domain as being allegedly directly from Wolters is through Clarke and the Olive Press. 
Make of that what you will.

Fibres in the van
Orthodontic surgery
Extensive Facio-maxilliary surgery
cruciform scar or tattoo on thigh

All total inventions.

[CaKeLoveR]

M W-T is right in one respect - those involved in Madeleine's disappearance are still at large.

[Verdi]

[PeterMac]

Mark Double Barrelled-Thomas strikes again
This time with unparalleled drivel.

https://www.ladbible.com/news/madeleine-mccann-mark-williams-thomas-20221116

In 2007, the three-year-old disappeared from her family's villa in Praia da Luz, Portugal, and she was never seen again.
Since that tragic day, there have been a number of leads police have followed, but they have been unable to determine once and for all where she went and who, if anyone, took her.
However, investigative journalist Mark Williams-Thomas, who was responsible for exposing Jimmy Savile's sick crimes, says he thinks he has an idea of what happened.
Speaking to LADbible for the Extraordinary Lives podcast, the 52-year-old said he had pored over the evidence, and spoken to a number of witnesses about Maddie's disappearance, and come to one conclusion.
He told us: "So when I looked at Madeleine McCann... I brought all the information together, read all the police files, I spoke to all those key witnesses around there, and I had a contact via one person removed from the family, and so I was able to pull all this information together.
"And my conclusion is that on that night of Madeleine's disappearance, she woke up, looking for mum and dad, and she'd been told the following morning that if she were to wake up, the parents were only in the tapas bar, which was just across the courtyard.
"What we do know is that her brother and sister had woken up on the previous nights a number of times, and I suspect as a result of that, Madeleine thought, well, where is mum and dad, as they'd been out on those previous nights as well."
Williams-Thomas went on: "So I believe she woke up, she left the apartment, we know the apartment was insecure, the back patio door was open to allow some flow of air, it was very hot.
"And so I believe she got up and went wandering looking for her parents."
Williams-Thomas explained that Maddie would have had to have gone out onto a main road in order to get around to the courtyard, where her parents were.
He said: "What we know about abductions is when they are stranger abductions, they are opportunistic.
"If you abduct a child and you know who that child is, which is the majority of child abductions, then, of course, that's planned and you know who the child is.
"But when it's opportunistic, when it's not somebody known to the child, that is not planned, in terms of who the victim is."

Adding: "So I believe she walked out on the road, and in a matter of seconds, was abducted by a predator outside."
***
Where do we even start with tosh like this ?
I brought all the information together, . . . . and so I was able to pull all this information together.   What does this MEAN ?
"And my conclusion is that on that night of Madeleine's disappearance, she woke up, looking for mum and dad, and she'd been told the following morning that if she were to wake up . . ."   This defies analysis in a Euclidian universe.   How can you have told some who disappeared anything the following morning ?
"if she were to wake up, the parents were only in the tapas bar, which was just across the courtyard.   1.  The conditional makes no sense since the parents were in the Tapas bar whether she woke or not.   2.   I thought MWT claims to have been to the scene.   Where is this COURTYARD ?  Is this new evidence we have never seen before. ?

"So I believe she woke up, she left the apartment, we know the apartment was insecure, the back patio door was open to allow some flow of air, it was very hot.'     This undoubtedly IS new evidence.  Sadly there is no record of it anywhere in the files.  But now we have the patio door OPEN to allow a flow of air, and the weather has gone from being freezing and windy (JT wearing partner's fleece, and KM's whooshing curtains) to being very HOT. Not 'warm'.   HOT
""And so I believe she got up and went wandering looking for her parents."    A conclusion based - "and so . . ." on no evidence whatsoever. Hence the giveaway use of the words "I believe" ?
"Maddie would have had to have gone out onto a main road in order to get around to the courtyard, where her parents were."    It is not a main road.  It is a side street, off a side street.  
"If you abduct a child and you know who that child is, which is the majority of child abductions, then, of course, that's planned and you know who the child is.
"But when it's opportunistic, when it's not somebody known to the child, that is not planned, in terms of who the victim is."
Adding: "So I believe she walked out on the road, and in a matter of seconds, was abducted by a predator outside."
I confess I can make no sense of this at all.
But the extraordinary coincidence of a small child in the street at exactly the same time and place, to the second and to the square metre as a predatory paedo*** stretches credibility slightly beyond its normal breaking point.

[crusader]

Perhaps he's come to this conclusion by talking to the person who is removed from the family who told him it was hot that night.

He believes the McCann's are innocent, so he must believe their statements of finding whooshing curtains, window and shutter open, patio door left slightly ajar as they had left it, child gate closed, gate at bottom of patio steps. closed, all of which Kate said Madeleine would not be able to manage.

All very convieniently left out of his observations.

[crusader]

If MWT, responsible for exposing Jimmy Savile's sick crimes, put more effort into his "investigation" into Madeleine's disappearance, perhaps he could become the ex cop responsible for exposing the McCann's.

[Verdi]

All these fringe benefiters work only with self-interest.

They use big names to big-up their own names. There's been quite a lot of them joining the throng over the years.

I have no time for people who use the name of a missing child to make money or advance their careers.

[sandancer]

" I had a contact via one person removed from the family " 

How far " removed " was this person ? 

A " source close to the family " , a " family friend " ? 

If it was " hot " and they were across a " courtyard " that person was very far " removed " 

Strange term to use . Otherwise MWT waffling as usual , how much of the PJ Files has he really read ?

[Verdi]

Williams-Thomas has proved to be a fraud.

Like so many others, what he doesn't know he invents.

All these cling-ons are the same;  they totally disregard the documented Portuguese police investigation in favour of their own fantastical world of make believe. Just like the McCann brethren and their propagandists in chief - the press and media.

Nincompoops!

It maketh me

[crusader]

I wish someone would challenge him at one of his talk events.

[Verdi]

Watch, listen and then ....

[Verdi]

How two BBC journalists risked their jobs to reveal the truth about Jimmy Savile

Listening to the women who alleged abuse, and fighting to get their stories heard, helped change the treatment of victims by the media and the justice system

by Poppy Sebag-Montefiore

On Saturday 29 October 2011, the day the entertainer Jimmy Savile died aged 84, a couple of comments were posted on the Duncroft School page of the networking site Friends Reunited. Duncroft was designated as an “approved school” by the Home Office, and offered residential care for “intelligent but emotionally disturbed girls”. “He died today, RIP no RIH yes rot in hell,” read one message. “Perhaps some closure for the childhoods that were ruined by this animal.” Over the next few days a handful more messages appeared: “You child molester – you were no better than all the other pervs who have been banged up … only your celebrity status saved you.” Someone else wrote how she would never recover from what “JS” did to her.

Across the news bulletins and weekend front pages, Savile was being given a sendoff fitting for someone who had achieved national treasure status. As BBC Radio 1 DJ, and co-presenter of the BBC’s flagship music programme Top of the Pops, Savile became a personality in the pop music scene in the 60s and 70s; his oddness and mannerisms enhanced his celebrity. As the host of the long-running Saturday evening TV show Jim’ll Fix It, he played godfather, granting the wishes to children who wrote in. On the Monday after his death, during the news editors’ 9.15 morning meeting at BBC headquarters in west London, those present were asked to take coverage of Savile’s funeral seriously. The concern was that the news editors might sneer at Savile; they were reminded that, to much of the audience, Savile was a northern hero. He had started out working in the mines, going on to earn a knighthood and befriend royalty through his television shows and charity work.

Meanwhile, George Entwistle, the BBC’s head of television, was trying to work out how BBC light entertainment would mark the death of one of its biggest stars. Entwistle was informed that there was no obituary ready to run on Savile – unusual for someone who had made such a contribution to British public life. The decision had been made by successive controllers, a colleague told him by email. Savile had a “dark side”, which meant it was “impossible to make an honest film to be shown so close to death”, his colleague said.

Entwistle emailed his team: the best way forward was to avoid making anything new about Savile. Someone suggested making a Fix It Christmas special hosted by a new BBC star. All agreed. Problem solved. It’d be “a real Christmas treat”, said the BBC1 controller in an email.

Rumours about Savile being a sexual predator and a paedophile had persisted for decades. In his trademark brightly coloured shell suits, scant shorts and string vests, Savile had performed his perversions almost as much as he’d hidden them. His manner almost dared people to challenge him. Because of the UK’s punitive libel laws, no one ever had. On the Monday morning after Savile’s death, in the Newsnight office at BBC Television Centre, social affairs correspondent Liz MacKean and producer Meirion Jones began to investigate Savile’s history.

Jones had a personal connection to the story: his aunt ran the Duncroft School. Over three years in the early 1970s, when he was in his mid-teens, Jones visited Duncroft on weekends with his parents and his sister. They would often see Savile’s white Rolls-Royce parked outside. His parents were concerned about Savile taking the girls off site. Jones met Savile there a few times, always finding it curious how he seemed to speak in catchphrases that created what Jones described as “a screen between him and people around him”.

In 1988, Jones became a journalist at the BBC. It soon became one of the stories he wanted to get a purchase on. Once social media arrived, he would search sites for references to Savile and Duncroft. In 2010, he found a memoir published online by a former Duncroft pupil, detailing abuse by a celebrity “JS”. Jones had spoken to MacKean at different times about pursuing the story, but they were at a disadvantage legally. Savile was part of the establishment, a leading charity fundraiser, and some of the Duncroft girls were offenders. Some had been abused from a young age, and had run away from care homes. No one would believe them against him. “Any witness would be destroyed in court so we’d never get it past the lawyers,” Jones told me. “It’s exactly why he targeted places like that.”

MacKean, then 46, from Hampshire, had two children and worked at Newsnight part-time. As a journalist she was drawn to people on the margins – people who’d been wronged and couldn’t get justice. “She was a lucky person, highly attuned to the unlucky and the unfair,” MacKean’s friend Amelia Bullmore wrote to me.

Within a few weeks of Savile’s death, MacKean had collected on-the-record testimony from 10 women who had been at Duncroft. Seven had been abused and three had witnessed abuse by Savile. It had been difficult to convince them to go public. Some told her they worried they would be seen as complicit; they were sure they wouldn’t be believed. Some feared a backlash, that people would claim they were out for something: compensation, notoriety. MacKean, a BBC journalist of 20 years’ standing, assured the women that they’d have the weight of Newsnight behind them, and the support of the BBC. But a few days before the transmission date, the Newsnight editor, Peter Rippon, told MacKean and Jones that the piece couldn’t be broadcast.

He said they needed to focus on some kind of institutional failure. What about the police investigation that had been halted? MacKean told Rippon that the women’s stories corroborated one another – they didn’t need any other elements. It all stacked up. And on top of this, they had found institutional failure by the BBC. Some of the abuse had taken place on BBC premises, in dressing rooms in Television Centre, the very building in which they were standing.

MacKean couldn’t know the extent to which she’d have to take on the BBC in order to make sure that the former Duncroft pupils were taken seriously. Nor could she know that she and Jones would be risking their careers. But in refusing to drop the story, they helped to change the culture about the way past sexual abuse is talked about, and survivors listened to, in the UK.

The BBC is now making a mini-series about Savile. One of the few details it has announced is that Steve Coogan will play Savile. Some viewers are uneasy about the BBC putting Savile back in the limelight, and have expressed concern about how people still living with the impact of his abuse will feel about it. But the BBC feels the time is right for a reckoning, and says the drama “will examine the impact his appalling crimes had on [Savile’s] victims and the powerlessness many felt when they tried to raise the alarm”.

Savile’s funeral was broadcast live on BBC News on 9 November 2011. The pavements around Leeds Cathedral were thick with mourners as his gold coffin was borne past. MacKean told the documentary maker Olly Lambert in 2014 that she watched this and thought: “The difference between that and the sort of things that people now felt able to start telling us – a gulf like that – that’s a story.”

Working with Jones and MacKean, BBC trainee Hannah Livingston tracked down about 60 former Duncroft pupils. Most immediately assumed the call would be about Savile. Those willing to talk were passed on to MacKean. Over long calls, MacKean began to understand how Savile masterminded the abuse. He would offer the girls cigarettes and trips to Television Centre in his Rolls-Royce. In return, they’d have to give him oral sex in a layby.

Among the Newsnight editorial team there were some squeamish discussions about the Savile story. Jeremy Paxman, Newsnight’s lead presenter for 25 years, whose rigorous, curmudgeonly questioning style defined the programme, told me: “I think there were an awful lot of people who felt that it was at the tabloidy end of things.” One member of the team wanted nothing to do with it on grounds of “taste”. Some thought it was too close to Savile’s death, and sensationalist. “That was one of the arguments deployed at the time,” one former senior Newsnight journalist told me. “Newsnight was meant to be serious, high-minded journalism about politics, economics, foreign affairs and culture, and this isn’t what it should be doing.” Rippon was initially enthusiastic about MacKean and Jones pursuing the Savile story, but, as MacKean told Jones in an email after a meeting she had with Rippon and a member of his editorial team, they were “[of] course concerned about the credibility of the women”.
Jimmy Savile in 1981.

MacKean told Lambert in 2014, during a long interview that he recorded but never broadcast: “The women we spoke to were middle-aged. The fact that they’d been in a school like Duncroft showed that their lives were on a difficult course. Perhaps they weren’t the most appealing interviewees for television. There is, within the mainstream establishment, a dislike of those sorts of people, an official indifference, or they just find them difficult to deal with. I think that’s why the BBC then found it so hard to admit that we were investigating Jimmy Savile, because there was a real embarrassment at admitting that the BBC, like all these other official institutions, had just shrugged its shoulders and turned away from people rather than listened.” The BBC said in a statement: “Savile’s actions were profoundly wrong and we are sorry for the pain caused to his survivors … Today’s BBC is a very different place, where complaints about any form of harassment are considered with the utmost seriousness.”

When MacKean arrived at Newsnight in 2000 after being a presenter on BBC Breakfast News, Jones had been producing investigations for the programme for five years. He noticed that she would get stories from people who didn’t usually talk to journalists. “You could absolutely 100% trust her, and the women [from Duncroft] knew they could trust her too,” he said. “And she was totally unafraid.”

While MacKean was working on Savile, I was working as a freelancer, producing another investigation with her at Newsnight. When I first met her in the office that summer, she looked at my hands, saw they were covered in scratches and asked me if I had a kitten at home. Nobody asked questions like that on first meetings at Newsnight: not personal, not domestic, not about kittens. Newsnight was a tough environment, but MacKean was disarmingly herself. She drew people out. Over the next year I would watch MacKean fight for the Savile story, see how her work went unrecognised, how she was ignored and sidelined at the BBC, and how profoundly that affected her.

“She’d always struck me as a very ordinary journalist,” a former senior news executive told me. “She wasn’t ambitious or sharp-elbowed. She didn’t fill the screen.” I put it to him that MacKean’s talents for listening to sources were one of the qualities that made her extraordinary. He considered this for a moment and said: “Listening wasn’t a quality we gave much credit to back then. It should have been.”

In 2010, Jones and MacKean won the Daniel Pearl award for investigative journalism for their report on Trafigura’s toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast, co-authored with the Guardian. Paxman told me: “Meirion’s like a dog with a bone. I always took it as read that if Meirion said something was true, it was true. Even though there might be very expensive lawyers for the other side, I always believed him. And he worked with Liz. They were not what you’d call ‘clubbable’. I admired Liz very much. She was a difficult woman, but the best journalists very often are difficult.” Because Jones and MacKean had been given freedom to get on with their work in the past, when their editor questioned whether they had done enough on the Savile story, it was a shock.

On Monday 14 November 2011, cameraman Simon Monk picked up MacKean, Jones and Livingston from a train station in the south of England and drove them to the home of the only one of Savile’s victims they had spoken to who had agreed to record an interview on camera. Monk didn’t know what the story was that he had been booked for. “I’ve often thought about that interview,” he told me. “It stayed with me, you know, just little moments of it. I realised – I’m listening to something that happened to this lady, that I was privy to something that had maybe never been shared before.”

In the car on the way back, the team were quiet at first. Slowly they prompted one another’s responses. They had all believed her. “It was subdued,” Monk said, “and I’m thinking: we’re at the beginning of something. The lid is being prised open on this. I’ve worked there for a long time and seen how people have been dealt with, especially women in the Beeb.” Monk turned on the car radio, and by coincidence the BBC Christmas schedule was being announced – including the Savile tributes. “They’ll have to cancel those now,” someone said.

The team were working to corroborate as many fine details as possible from their collection of quotes by the former Duncroft pupils. Rippon asked Jones and MacKean to confirm claims that the police had investigated Savile. On 25 November, Jones received confirmation that Surrey police had investigated Savile in 2007, and that a file had been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Rippon gave the story a transmission date of 7 December. He wrote it on the Newsnight whiteboard, which meant it was certain to be going on air.

Jones sent a draft version of MacKean’s script to the BBC Impact team, which makes sure important stories are headlined on news bulletins across the network. The Impact department expected a lot of interest, and asked if MacKean could be available for live interviews across all BBC outlets on the day of transmission. Two minutes later, Rippon sent an email to his line manager: “The women are credible and have no motive for speaking to us other than they want the truth to be known … We also think that Sky are chasing the story too so we don’t want to sit on it.”

Rippon received a reply from his manager Stephen Mitchell, the deputy head of news, saying he’d call later. At the 2012 inquiry into the BBC’s conduct over the Newsnight investigation, both said they could not remember whether any subsequent conversation took place. Nick Pollard, chair of the inquiry, wrote in his review: “The inability of both … Mr Rippon and Mr Mitchell to provide any recollection of whether they did or did not speak and, if so, what was said, was frustrating.” (When I approached Stephen Mitchell for comment about this, he said: “I would refer you to the two inquiries carried out into these events and the published outcomes of these, as I recall the reports were clear on how the item was handled.”)

But the next day, Rippon had pulled back. He emailed MacKean and Jones asking them to confirm if it was true that the CPS had dropped the case because of Savile’s old age, as some of the Duncroft women had been told. “That makes it a much better story,” he wrote to Jones and MacKean. “Our sources so far are just the women.”

Pollard quoted Rippon’s testimony in his review: “The extent to which we had to rely on the testimony from [the on camera interviewee] was stark. She was the only victim in vision we had and would be the face of our allegations and I remained concerned about how well her testimony would stand up to the scrutiny it would get.”

MacKean, however, was enraged by that phrase “just the women”. She walked into Rippon’s glass-walled office, leaving the door open. “Liz would have been grandstanding,” Jones recalled, “making sure the whole office could hear. He’d have been looking at his toes. Liz, with big arm gestures, was saying: ‘How dare you talk about “just the women”?’ … I don’t remember whether I’d ever seen her bawling out the editor before.”

MacKean asked Rippon to watch their interview with Savile’s victim, but he refused. Pollard wrote in his review: “Mr Rippon told me: ‘I don’t think seeing the interview … seeing something with an eye … gives you any more help in making a judgment about whether something is true or not … I think the kind of concerns that I had, that I was weighing, would not have been swayed by having sat down and watched the interview.’ I think this is a strange thing for a television news journalist and editor to say. Common sense and experience would surely suggest the opposite.”

Rippon wiped the Savile story from the Newsnight whiteboard and told Jones and Mackean to stop work on it until they heard back from the CPS. They didn’t stop. For them, the police investigation was superfluous. They had the story: Savile had been a paedophile and numerous institutions had facilitated his crimes. Jones hired a white Rolls-Royce and filmed it the next day pulling up outside Duncroft.

MacKean and Jones were beginning to realise that Savile’s abuse had taken place on a bigger scale than they’d thought. “By then, we’d also heard rumours about Broadmoor, and quite serious allegations about Stoke Mandeville [hospital],” MacKean told Lambert. “Meirion thought there could be 100 victims … I said, I don’t know, but certainly dozens. And of course we’d both wildly underestimated it, as it turned out. But there was certainly enough there to think, right, a lot of institutions have questions to answer: clearly the BBC, certainly the NHS, and also the Home Office.”

For the next few days, the atmosphere in the Newsnight office was tense. MacKean and Jones quietly continued working on the story as they waited to hear back from the CPS. On 9 December that email came. The CPS said they had dropped the investigation into Savile because of lack of evidence.

“I knew that was the kill,” Jones said.

“This statement [from the CPS about lack of evidence] specifically denied the allegation that the investigation was dropped because of his age,” Rippon later wrote in the Editors’ blog on the BBC website. “I felt it was significant the guidance was included and we had not established any institutional failure and I judged it weakened the story from a Newsnight perspective. I took the decision not to publish.”

The Pollard review recorded that Rippon told them that “the decision to drop the Savile story was his, and his alone”. Pollard found that there was no inappropriate pressure or interference from BBC senior management with the editorial decision not to broadcast the Savile Newsnight programme. MacKean had to ring the women she’d convinced to trust her and tell them the story wasn’t going on air.

“It was crushing and disappointing, but I didn’t accept it,” MacKean told Lambert. “Now she was on a mission to get this story out and to get the truth told, she really was,” MacKean’s wife, Donna Rowlands, told me. There were still a few weeks before Christmas, and MacKean wanted her sources’ voices to be heard before the tributes could air. She leaked the cancellation of her Newsnight investigation to the press. Reporter Miles Goslett got hold of the story and pitched it to seven Fleet Street editors. All turned it down, also on grounds of taste, and because getting into a tussle with the BBC so close to Christmas would cause problems. Even with Savile dead, the story was too much for the British press at that time of year.

On Boxing Day evening, after the regional news and before the family film Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, 5 million people tuned in to BBC One to watch the actor Shane Richie present the Jim’ll Fix It Christmas special.

In the new year, MacKean and Jones, with more than four decades of service to the BBC between them, gave all their research on Savile to the BBC’s rival, the commercial channel ITV. “Now, obviously that doesn’t make us feel very good as BBC journalists,” MacKean told Lambert. “But given that by then, we really had the feeling that the BBC didn’t want to run this story, the only chance for us to get it out was going to be through someone else.”

n Wednesday 3 October 2012, ITV ran a documentary in their Exposure strand titled The Other Side of Jimmy Savile. Five women, two from Duncroft, spoke about how Savile had sexually assaulted them as underage girls. Not long into the 49-minute programme, the NSPCC helplines began to light up and didn’t stop ringing. And so began a gradual national outpouring of people, mainly women, talking about their own experiences of past sexual abuse, by high-profile figures, or people in their communities, workplaces or families, which many had kept silent about for decades.

The weekend before the Exposure documentary aired, the tabloids had splashed on the Savile allegations. “Sensation as TV legend Jimmy Savile is accused of underage sexual assaults” was the front page of the People. The broadsheets joined in, too, but their focus was specifically on Newsnight’s dropped investigation: “BBC ditched Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile,” was the Times’s headline. “BBC denies cover-up over claims Savile targeted underage girls” was the Independent’s.

To tell the Savile story, the BBC had been looking for a case of contemporary institutional failure. By not running it, they had created one. MacKean and Jones were now greeted by cameras and a press mob every time they entered Television Centre. The BBC press office was doing all it could to deflect the story. It put out statements saying that Newsnight had been investigating Surrey police’s Savile investigation, not Savile himself. On 2 October, Peter Rippon published the blog explaining his decision. “Newsnight is not normally interested in celebrity exposé,” he wrote. MacKean was horrified that the former Duncroft pupils, who’d trusted her with painful stories, were being ignored once again by the BBC. And now her and Jones’s work was being publicly undermined. In November, Chris Patten, then chair of the BBC Trust, and George Entwistle, since promoted to director general, were called before a House of Commons select committee to explain what had happened.

Journalists were calling MacKean and Jones, wanting to know their side of the story. Jones ignored the calls at first. MacKean didn’t. MacKean told Lambert: “I remember I had a two-week period of journalists ringing up around the clock, knocking on my door at home, and there was absolutely no one at the BBC I could talk to or get any sort of advice from because we were seen as the enemy within. I remember driving home on Sunday and the phone going, and it was someone from one of the national newspapers to say that a senior member of BBC management had told him that the investigation had been run by a work experience person, and I almost drove off the road.”

The BBC told me that after this year’s investigation into Martin Bashir’s 1995 Panorama interview with Diana, Princess of Wales, which identified profound failures in the application and oversight of editorial values, the BBC Board had commissioned the Serota review “to look at how to further strengthen BBC processes and practices”. The remit of the Serota review was to establish whether the BBC had learned from the mistakes of the past, and to consider whether current practice addressed the challenges that had arisen since 1995. It considered the BBC’s oversight of, and accountability for, editorial decision-making processes; the mechanisms in place for staff and others to raise concerns about editorial issues; the effectiveness of the BBC’s whistleblowing procedures; and the culture within the BBC that supported compliance with the BBC’s editorial values and standards. The Serota review was published in late October, and one of its key findings was that many BBC employees “are apprehensive that speaking up could impact negatively on their career”.

Back in 2012, MacKean and Jones wrote to Rippon, Mitchell and Entwistle trying to correct what they felt were inaccuracies in the BBC’s statements. But the same BBC lines kept appearing in the press. “We were feeling huge pressure from the machine basically saying: go along with what we’re saying,” Jones said. “We were under a lot of scrutiny. There was incredible stress on both of us. And then we decided to do something which meant we’d incur the wrath of management, which was to make the [programme for] Panorama.”

MacKean and Jones had convinced Tom Giles, the editor of Panorama, the BBC’s investigative current affairs programme, to make a programme about what had happened to Newsnight’s Savile investigation. They handed over to Panorama all their emails and paperwork. MacKean and Jones were told by Panorama that a senior manager had said that if they gave interviews to Panorama, they’d lose their jobs.

“We stopped worrying about her BBC career,” Rowlands, MacKean’s wife, told me. “And I’m not just saying that. That was going to fall the way it fell. OK, it fell more disappointingly than we’d hoped. But the important thing was that the women were heard – that was her number one. And then number two, that the truth was told about what the BBC had done, and the cover-up.”

The BBC press office was split. Part of it promoted the Panorama programme that MacKean and Jones were speaking on, while the other put out the BBC’s corporate reaction to the programme. “It was a baroque arrangement,” one former senior BBC manager said.

“It felt weird, like we’d gone beyond the looking-glass,” one former senior Newsnight journalist remembered, “and we didn’t quite know what the rules were. It was very tooth and claw. You could see there were desperate people among management.”

The weekend before the Panorama investigation was broadcast, Jones received a call from a journalist with a “tipoff” that someone from the BBC press office had told him that the reason Newsnight hadn’t run the Savile investigation was because Jones was trying to conceal the fact that his aunt had been complicit in Savile’s abuse. Jones received official permission to deny it from senior news editor Peter Horrocks, who had come over from the World Service to take on editorial oversight of the Panorama film to avoid a conflict of interest, as senior BBC news managers were the subjects of its investigation. On 21 October, the Mail on Sunday ran the story, and noted that the “BBC civil war intensified,” as the BBC press office and a BBC journalist gave out information that entirely opposed each other.

“It’s just massive pressure,” Jones told me, “when it feels like all your bosses, the whole press office, were fighting a war against you. I would have collapsed over it if I had been on my own – and they would have got away with their pack of lies. But it felt like Liz and I were covering each other’s backs. And there was never a feeling that Liz would crack. She was rock solid on this.”

On Monday 22 October, the Panorama film, Jimmy Savile: What the BBC Knew, was broadcast on BBC One at 10.35pm. On the programme, MacKean said the BBC had been “misleading” the public. Viewers watched as the BBC seemed to be criticising itself. Meanwhile, MacKean amplified her criticisms of what she saw as the BBC’s deafness to the victims of past sexual abuse. She said: “[The] women collectively deserved to be heard, and weren’t heard, and that was a failure. We’d convinced them to talk to us, we’d believed them, and we let them down.”

Rippon stepped down as the Newsnight editor a few hours before the Panorama film went out. (Pollard would later write in his review that Rippon was already “becoming something of a ‘fall guy’”.) The BBC put out a statement saying that the BBC Newsnight investigation had not started out by looking at Surrey police. It was a small admission, but on that point the record had been corrected.

“We were both pretty smashed up after all that,” Jones told me. He remained on a short-term contract with Panorama while MacKean returned to Newsnight alone. “Overnight my relationship with the BBC changed,” MacKean told Lambert. “All of a sudden I was persona non grata, and people who knew me wouldn’t talk to me. I’d sort of sit down and all the usual chit-chat of an office seemed to just fall away.”

MacKean felt that for many in management, and colleagues who were fearful of management, she was now tainted. “It became a world where people were disappearing – you didn’t know if all your bosses were going to be sacked,” a former senior Newsnight journalist told me. He talked about the awkwardness of bumping into MacKean and Jones at the time: “You didn’t know what to say. You didn’t know what they wanted, or how far they wanted to take this.”

MacKean was hurt. “She wasn’t a rebel. So to suddenly be so outside the tent was quite hard,” Rowlands explained. ‘She was so determined that all the truth would come out and all the people who’d lied would be held accountable. But it suddenly put her in a position that wasn’t comfortable for her. Because really, I mean, it sounds corny, but she was a team player. You know she’d always liked the collegiate nature of the BBC.” Her former colleague Jackie Long told me: “It was the one period in the time I knew her that she sounded at all fragile. That inner confidence was rocked.”

Dee Coles was abused by Savile in his campervan when she was 14, while on holiday with her mother in Jersey. When she saw that the Exposure documentary was coming out, she noticed scepticism in some of the papers, and worried that the women coming forward wouldn’t be believed. She wrote to the independent news production company, ITN, and in early October 2012 spoke about her own abuse by Savile on ITV news.

She felt MacKean and Jones’s intervention on Panorama was crucial for building victims’ confidence if they were going to come forward. “Nobody else was fighting that particular corner.” Coles said she saw interviews with people who had been at the BBC when Savile was alive saying they hadn’t seen anything, or there was nothing they could have done. “And so it became massive that someone with a journalistic background who had nothing to gain and everything to lose said [that Savile abused children]. It underpinned the whole thing going forward, because otherwise it would just be a bunch of women saying ‘me too’ before it was hash-tagged. It was so courageous.”

“A lot of how the BBC behaved was as other institutions behaved,” MacKean told Lambert, “whether the courts, the police and NHS hospitals, even within families, people making the complaints are sidelined. They’re disbelieved. And in that way, the BBC behaved exactly as other institutions did.”

A mental shift was now taking place. In a rushed attempt to catch up, Newsnight tried to do a film about another sexual abuse case involving a wealthy industrialist, based on victim testimony. But after the accuser said he got the wrong person, the BBC issued an apology. On 11 November 2012, Entwistle, the BBC director general, resigned.

The Pollard review was commissioned by the BBC to look into “the management by the BBC of a Newsnight investigation relating to allegations of sexual abuse of children by Jimmy Savile”. Pollard, a journalist at Sky, took the chair on 16 October 2012 and collected testimony from all the BBC players involved. On 18 December 2012, he released his findings.

MacKean and Jones turned up at the door to Pollard’s press conference in Broadcasting House. A press officer stopped them from entering. “We were shocked,” Jones said. “But we couldn’t do anything about it.” MacKean and Jones stood together at a television set in another part of the building and watched the press conference, live on the news, together. Pollard told the room: “The Newsnight investigators had got the story right. They had found clear and compelling evidence that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. The decision by their editor to drop the original investigation was clearly flawed, though I believe it was done in good faith.”

After being barred from Pollard’s press conference, MacKean and Jones decided to address the members of the media who were waiting on the forecourt outside Broadcasting House. A BBC press officer told them that their statements needed to be approved first by the acting head of BBC News. MacKean turned and said: “I think you’ll find they won’t.” She and Jones walked out through the revolving doors to the microphones and stood in front of the flashing cameras. MacKean said: “I think the decision to drop our story was a breach of our duty to the women who trusted us to reveal that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile … Our editor didn’t watch the interview with our main witness. Nick Pollard did, and found her credible and compelling, as did we … I welcome the recommendation that the BBC should trust its journalists.”

MacKean and Jones were both invited to individual meetings with the then-acting (and now current) director general of the BBC, Tim Davie. Jones said: “We were both half-expecting that he might say: ‘We’ve got new hands on the tiller, it’s all going to change. Congratulations for going after that really important story. And – I’m sorry.’ But we got the opposite of that. It was new face, same suit.”

In a statement, the BBC said: “In response to Pollard’s findings, BBC management dealt with the issues appropriately at the time setting out a number of actions including the replacement of the senior editorial team at Newsnight; the introduction of regular reports from the Director-General to the BBC Management board about the highest risk programmes and investigations across the BBC.”

Newsnight moved into Broadcasting House in central London in mid-October 2012. The old Television Centre in White City had been sold, and would later be rebuilt into a complex of high-end apartments and restaurants. MacKean was asked to stay behind, sitting in Paxman’s old chair, ready to present the programme should the satellite link fail in the new studio. MacKean called it the “Miss Havisham” role – she’d done it before when presenters were on location. But as she sat there alone in the empty studio, an understudy, it was her story that made the headlines. The Metropolitan police had launched Operation Yewtree on 9 October to investigate Savile and other establishment figures, and 450 people would come forward to give testimony about being abused by Savile. The NSPCC said that in November and December 2012 it intervened to protect 800 more children than in a similar period in previous years. And since its establishment in 2013, the child sexual abuse review panel has sent 78% of cases referred to them to be reopened by the police or CPS because of flaws in the original investigations.

MacKean and Jones had reframed the Savile story. It could no longer be dismissed as a celebrity sex exposé. Now the victims were at the centre. From that moment on, when women spoke out about past sexual abuse, the media, the police and the courts were prepared to listen.

“I think the scandal really did change things,” a senior journalist told me. “In our world, the idea that you wouldn’t run a story where you interviewed victims is now very unusual. Certainly if you have lots and lots of adult women saying something like that – you would run that story now. Weinstein was done partly by the New Yorker and the New York Times – the most heavyweight outlets in the world now do that kind of story.”

MacKean left the BBC in 2013. She went on to make award-winning documentaries for Channel 4’s Dispatches, but she missed the daily grind of the news and her world at the BBC. In 2017, she and her friend and former Newsnight Northern Ireland producer Michael Hughes were watching the BBC’s general election coverage together. “Liz was sad about it,” Hughes said. She wished she was mucking in, reporting the results with her colleagues on election night. “She always had her head held high, but I think she was sad that the Beeb hadn’t fought harder to keep her.” In August 2017, at the age of 52, MacKean had a stroke and died.

I had seen how MacKean’s sense of justice, courage and incisiveness had set off a chain of events that helped to bring justice, and reduce isolation, shame and repression for countless women across the UK and beyond. When I miss Liz’s friendship, I look online for an account of what she helped to achieve through her work on Savile, but I can never find one. So here it is.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/02/jimmy-savile-bbc-journalists-risked-jobs-reveal-truth

[Verdi]

Exposure - The Other Side of Jimmy Savile - 3th Oct 2012 - Full Documentary ITV

49:48 minutes

Former detective Mark Williams-Thomas investigates allegations that broadcaster Jimmy Savile, who died last year, sexually abused vulnerable teenage girls at the height of his fame in the 1970s.

In life, Jimmy Savile built a reputation as dream-maker, champion fundraiser, and eccentric spinner of discs. In death, his epitaph may prove to contain darker secrets. This ITV investigation will feature women who allege that, when they were under-age teens, they were sexually assaulted by Savile during the 1970s. Savile's passing means their evidence cannot be subjected to the same robust judicial scrutiny it would have earned while he was alive. So saint or sinner? You, the TV audience, form the jury.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv03is

[Verdi]

How I Exposed Jimmy Savile | Minutes With | @LADbible TV

1 year ago

14:23 minutes

[Verdi]

Man who exposed Jimmy Saville has a new theory about Madeleine McCann's disappearance

17th November 2022

He says he's pored over the evidence and come to one conclusion

The man who exposed Jimmy Saville for his sick crimes says he has a new theory about Madeleine McCann's disappearance.

Investigative journalist Mark Williams-Thomas has set his sights on the mysterious episode that has dominated front pages since 2007 - and says he has a new working hypothesis.

A man from Germany has become the latest suspect in the case having been allegedly involved in five offences between 2000 and 2017 in Portugal.

McCann went missing in 2007, and investigators believe he is responsible.

However, Williams-Thomas, who was responsible for exposing Jimmy Savile, thinks he has a different idea of what happened having pored over the evidence and spoken to a number of witnesses.

Speaking to LADbible, he said: "So when I looked at Madeleine McCann... I brought all the information together, read all the police files, I spoke to all those key witnesses around there, and I had a contact via one person removed from the family, and so I was able to pull all this information together.

"And my conclusion is that on that night of Madeleine's disappearance, she woke up, looking for mum and dad, and she'd been told the following morning that if she were to wake up, the parents were only in the tapas bar, which was just across the courtyard.

"What we do know is that her brother and sister had woken up on the previous nights a number of times, and I suspect as a result of that, Madeleine thought, well, where is mum and dad, as they'd been out on those previous nights as well."

Williams-Thomas went on: "So I believe she woke up, she left the apartment, we know the apartment was insecure, the back patio door was open to allow some flow of air, it was very hot.

"And so I believe she got up and went wandering looking for her parents."

Williams-Thomas explained that Maddie would have had to have gone out onto a main road in order to get around to the courtyard, where her parents were.

And citing two infamous cases in the UK - Genette Tate, who vanished in 1978, and Sarah Payne, who was murdered in 2000 - Thomas explained that it was most likely an unplanned abduction.

He said: "What we know about abductions is when they are stranger abductions, they are opportunistic.

"If you abduct a child and you know who that child is, which is the majority of child abductions, then, of course, that's planned and you know who the child is.

"But when it's opportunistic, when it's not somebody known to the child, that is not planned, in terms of who the victim is."

Adding: "So I believe she walked out on the road, and in a matter of seconds, was abducted by a predator outside."

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/man-who-exposed-jimmy-savile-has-a-new-theory-about-madeleine-mccanns-disappearance-367497

[Verdi]

The latest update expands on the initial report..

Man who exposed Jimmy Savile says FBI data tells him Madeleine McCann likely 'dead in 72 hours'

Dominic Smithers

Published 15:33, 17 November 2022 GMT
| Last updated 17:37, 17 November 2022 GMT

For over 15 years, police have been searching for Madeleine McCann.

Just three years old at the time, Maddie disappeared from her parent's apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, on 3 May, 2007.

Parents Kate and Gerry had been enjoying a meal with some friends at a tapas restaurant in their apartment complex that night, and when Kate returned to the apartment to check in on their children, she found that her eldest daughter had gone.

But with no sign of an intruder, police have struggled ever since, despite a number of leads and alleged sightings, to track her down.

Mark Williams-Thomas is an investigative journalist who helped uncover Jimmy Savile's horrific crimes.

Speaking to LADbible for the Extraordinary Lives podcast, he said he pored over the evidence and concluded that Maddie will probably never be found.

The 52-year-old said the most likely scenario is that Maddie woke up in the middle of the night, wondering where her parents were, and went out to look for them.

"What we do know is that her brother and sister had woken up on the previous nights a number of times, and I suspect as a result of that, Madeleine thought, well, where is mum and dad, as they'd been out on those previous nights as well."

He went on: "So I believe she woke up, she left the apartment, we know the apartment was insecure, the back patio door was open to allow some flow of air, it was very hot.

"And so I believe she got up and went wandering looking for her parents."

However, citing a couple of high profile cases - Genette Tate, who vanished in 1978, and Sarah Payne, who was murdered in 2000 - Williams-Thomas said he believes Maddie was snatched and killed within a matter of hours.

He told us: "Evidence tells us, through the FBI child abduction manual, which is very detailed and very good, because they've got 10 times the child abductions/stranger-child abductions as we've had in the UK, that she would have been dead within 72 hours."

And when asked whether he thought we will ever find out what happened to her once and for all, Williams-Thomas said he believed it was unlikely.

"Sadly, I think it's probably unlikely," he said. "But I always use the caveat that we have to remain positive that one day we will."

https://www.ladbible.com/news/madeleine-mccann-died-72-hours-20221117

[Verdi]

"Evidence tells us, through the FBI child abduction manual, which is very detailed and very good, because they've got 10 times the child abductions/stranger-child abductions as we've had in the UK, that she would have been dead within 72 hours."

I guess this theory at least explains why the stranger abduction theory continues to run, despite there being no evidence to support that theory. Now we have an opportunistic strange-err abduction - a chance abductor lurking on the streets of Luz on the off chance of someone or thing to abduct being in the vicinity?

Jane Tanner?

No doubt Mark Williams-Thomas has a theory to cover all eventualities. The phantom lurker had been watching apartment 5a every day and night (read witness statements) in the hope that a very young child might go for a midnight ramble.

[PeterMac]

Just another of Kate's "coincidences" ?

A random predatory Paed*** with nothing better to do on an exact cold Thursday evening in early May
happens upon the exact back street, outside the exact garden gate, out of which at the exact time, timed to the second, 
an exact blond 3 year old girl who has been abandoned by both exact parents, chooses to exit.
At an exact moment when he is unobserved by anyone, despite the parents of all the children passing and re-passing
more than ten times in the space of an hour, and despite there being at LEAST two other members of the public, one
carrying a child, one with a child in the pushchair, also passing and re-passing and generally meandering about in the 
general vicinity .. .

Just another coincidence ?

[Verdi]

No doubt there was will be a convenient witness to say the right things about the right time - if Mark Williams-Thomas talks to the right people.

I'll wager his distant informant was none other than *trumpet    fanfare* .... Clarence Mitchell.

After all said and done, he knows - he was there.

[crusader]

There is no doubt in my mind if Madeleine had gone out of the apartment looking for her parents, she would have been shouting at the top of her lungs for her Daddy.

If Mrs Fenn is to believed, she said she heard Madeleine shouting and crying for her Daddy on Tuesday night, so there is no way she would be wandering around quietly outside .

[Verdi]

It doesn't make any sense does it, just baseless waffle.

According to Ms Healy, Madeleine adored the twins - would she go wandering off into the night leaving them behind?  Even if she did, why wait until the night of Thursday 3rd May when she and her brother and sister had been left alone every night from Sunday onwards - allegedly.

Madeleine must have been very mature if the parents thought her responsible enough to care for her siblings, babysit so to speak.

Far be it from me to suggest Mark Williams-Thomas take a look at all the documented evidence before embarking on a magical mystery tour of speculation based on nothing but a desired effect!

[Verdi]

I don't wish to be too scathing about Mark Williams-Thomas, I understand he has been dealing with personal mental health issues - which could explain his random thought processes about the case of Madeleine McCann and other criminal cases he has tried to claim as his own personal achievements.

He should however quietly leave the stage. The world's camera lens is still focused on Madeleine McCann - it's shameful how he's allowed to spread false information for world consumption.

Freedom of speech? Bah!

[CaKeLoveR]

Cynic that I am, suspicion raises its head when some people claim mental health issues. Sometimes, it's used as an excuse, should there be a backlash. Yes, he should quietly leave the stage.