Sunday Herald
'We were accused of raping little girls, having orgies, killing
cats and chickens and drinking their blood ... it was all lies
but they wouldn't believe us'
Exclusive: The full story of the families whose lives were shattered
when they were falsely accused of abusing children on a remote
Scottish island. For the past nine months Vicky Allan has been
talking to the families accused and finally cleared of being involved
in the ritual abuse of children on Lewis. This is their story
…
John and Susan Sellwood were staying at a caravan park in the
northeast of Scotland when the phone call came through. Susan
came back from the toilet to find John pacing outside the awning.
He started to cry. She assumed the worst: that finally the indictment
had come through and that soon her husband would be appearing
at Glasgow High Court, along with the seven other accused. Soon
the whole story would be hung out in a court room and fed to the
media: a tale of animal-sacrifice, robed ritual, mass orgies and
the sexual abuse of children, set on the Isle of Lewis. "The
case has been dropped," he told her. The Sellwood's were
still in a mildly celebratory mood when they picked me up on Monday.
Their "camper van" was a cobbled-together affair, constructed
from bits that John finds at the tip where he works. Susan listed
the accusations she and her husband had been bombarded with in
police interviews. "We're supposed to have all raped the
girls and then the men did. Then we were having sex orgies. We
had sex orgies with each other's partners - wife-swapping, whatever
you want to call it - at each other's houses. We're supposed to
have killed cats, chickens, rams and lambs, then drunk the blood.
"We were accused of drug taking and making snuff movies.
I didn't even know what a snuff movie was. The satanic cult was
supposed to have threatened the mother to keep quiet. John was
accused of trying to get her to change her evidence after a complaint.
This was supposed to have been on CCTV. Porno photos are supposed
to have been taken by us using a webcam. The police said that
they had medical evidence that the accused had sexually assaulted
the girls." She pauses. "But they had no DNA. They had
no DNA evidence."
Most people's reaction on hearing such a list is one of disbelief:
as a society we are poised in a mixed state of credulous horror
and denial of the existence of "satanic abuse". Since
the first wave of alleged cases arrived from America in the 1980s
there have been hundreds of such claims in Britain. Only one case,
in Pembroke, Wales, where the investigation arising from a boy's
allegation of sexual abuse against his father exposed a large
paedophile ring, has ever led to convictions.
The notorious Orkney case of 1991 saw nine children snatched from
their beds in dawn raids in South Ronald say on suspicion that
they were the victims of ritual satanic sexual abuse at the hands
of a paedophile ring. In February of 1991 the case was thrown
out of court, and followed by the seven-month Clyde Inquiry into
the case, and its condemnation of the actions of the social workers
involved.
A 1994 report on cases in England and Wales by anthropologist
Jean La Fontaine suggested that what was presented as the testimony
of children in satanic abuse cases was almost always an adult
construct, and it has become a widespread conviction that the
whole phenomenon was a "moral panic". Which elicits
the question: why has yet another case of alleged ritual abuse
got so far - costing over £100,000 of tax-payers' money
- only to lead to a dead-end .
The police investigation on Lewis started nearly two years ago,
sparked by a series of allegations made by the children of a family
we will refer to as Family X.
The first overt signs of it were a series of interviews across
the island, followed by the arrest in October of the eight accused
- Sellwood, Ian Campbell, Timothy Tetley, Peter Nelson, David
Disney, Lily Place, John Gray and Neil Stretton - in a series
of dawn raids across Lewis and England.
Visiting the island in March, I was struck by the silence - that
paralysis that descends at the mention of "child abuse".
Locals who lived only metres away from one of the accused would
tell me: "I don't know him. I've never met the man."
A rift of suspicion had cracked through the community, and there
was a feeling among the islanders that, as the accused were all
incomers, it was the "white settlers" bringing their
bad ways. As local councillor John Mackay told me: "The problem
was it gave every incomer a bad name. They were all tarred with
the same brush."
Still, it was possible to pick up a little information. Most of
the accused lived or had lived in the Ness area. David Disney
was actively involved in the community, a member of the Church
of Scotland, and worked a croft. Neil Stretton was an aeroplane
model-maker who kept chickens. John Gray had moved from Rotherham
and used to be a Boy Scout leader. Ian Campbell was openly a "pagan"
and had moved with his wife, Penny, to the island on a council
house swap. Lily Place, 75, of Leicester had lived in the Lionel
area. John Sellwood was a Mormon who worked as a tip cleaner,
helped his wife run a cat rescue centre, and had been Santa Claus
at a grotto they ran to raise money for charity. On the whole,
these people lived just a few notches up from subsistence. Their
lives were held together by disability allowance, medical prescriptions
and, certainly since the arrests, anti-depressants. They had come
to the island for a "better way of life". Most of the
accused denied knowing each other particularly well, though, through
talking to them, a flimsy web of connections started to emerge.
The Nelsons bought chickens from Neil Stretton. The Nelsons had
given the Sellwood's a clapped out old van. Susan Sellwood had
known John Gray when he lived in Rotherham. Stretton knew John
Gray well and was often round at his home. More crucial, though,
is the series of links that existed between all the accused and
the family of the alleged victims of abuse and in particular the
mother of that family, the adult believed to have been involved
in initiating many of the allegations. Mostly the accused denied
seeing Family X very much, but painted a picture of a disturbed
family, in and out of care, with a history of contact with the
social services.
Peter Nelson was leaning over the gate of his garden, propped
up on a crutch, when I first met him. He and his 37-year-old daughter,
Mary-Anne, had moved to the island in 1998, having bought their
property on an exposed patch in the Lochs area of the island cheap,
although it had a big garden. This was his challenge, his dream:
to create a garden more ambitious than the one that had won him
Gardener of the Year. In 2003 he opened his mini-Eden to 280 visitors,
raising money for Save The Children. Nelson seemed anxious to
tell his story when I met him following the allegations. Even
at that point he was still not committed to trial. He knew, he
said, Mrs X, the mother of the victims. She had even come to him
a number of times for help, asking if she could come and live
with him. He had been concerned about the children's welfare and
had contacted social services several years ago. Like the Sellwood's
and Penny Campbell, he would occasionally struggle to remember
the names of people involved. Nelson had tried to commit suicide
just the previous week, taking sleeping and blood pressure pills.
"It's a nightmare," he said. "All I've done is
come here to make this garden." Without doubt the accused
have their peculiarities. For the most part they seem outsiders.
Nelson's garden is fenced off and surveyed by CCTV. "I stand
out because I'm different," says Nelson, "People say:
'Why don't you go to a football match? Why don't you go to the
pub? People are suspicious of you because of that. You're not
anything unless you're into sex, drugs and drinking." The
Sellwood's and Campbell's suspect that certain small prejudices
may have coloured the investigation. Penny Campbell believes that
the police showed "blatant religious discrimination, equating
paganism with devil worshipping … Ian and I believe that
it was because he described himself as pagan and I didn't that
he was charged and I was released." Within the community
it was well-known that they were pagan. When their homes were
raided it was pagan books that were taken. As one South Dell inhabitant
told me: "Before they came, the community was warned: 'We've
got some witches coming.'"
In the months following John's arrest the Sellwood's lives were
derailed. For the first 10 days Susan lay on the sofa, propped
up, numbed by diazepam. When he went to prison in Inverness, she
travelled to see him, spending in that first month £1000,
a crippling stretch on their pension and disability allowance.
They don't run their market any more. They always go to the supermarket
before 8.30am. Some friends no longer call. John feels nervous
now in all dealings with children: "I am different than I
used to be. It gets me upset and I don't know how to handle it."
So why did the case get as far as it did? The Crown Office says
it was dropped because there was "insufficient available
evidence". Many of the accused feel that they had not been
properly investigated before arrest. Instead, supposition and
"shock tactics" were used in the hope of eliciting an
easy confession. John Sellwood, for instance, tells me they informed
him that they had him "on video". This turned out to
be vague and highly interpretable CCTV footage of him supposedly
threatening one of the witnesses.
Bill Thompson, an expert in false allegations and consultant on
the Orkney case, believes, however, the real problem may lie in
the credibility of those making the allegations - both Mrs. X
and the children. He questions whether the methods used in obtaining
the story from the children were valid. The victims had been in
disclosure therapy with National Children's Home (NCH) and the
social service. There are guidelines for this, but, Thomson says,
they are often not followed and the truth is determined using
a series of validity indicators." What has to be asked,"
says Thompson "is whether the guidelines for the interview
techniques have been broken?" This, he believes, is just
another Orkney all over again. "It will be the same methodology.
It always is. What it boils down to is a social worker or police
officer starts asking leading questions and this then sets off
a whole series of speculations." There is no accusation in
our society worse than paedophilia, no word that clings more damningly.
"It's just that one word," said Peter Nelson. "I
would rather die than be called a paedophile." Because of
this word the Nelsons had their car torched, their greenhouse
smashed and bleach poured round their trees. Because of it, the
Campbell's received abusive phone calls. Nobody, certainly, on
Lewis is going to forget that word. These are airtight communities
- so close, the phone book published in Ness lists not just the
names of the inhabitants, but also their nicknames or their parents'
names - and a history is difficult to escape. Even in the past
week Peter Nelson has had his garden raided at night, teenagers
shining torches into his CCTV cameras. As Dell councillor John
McKay commented last week, the dropping of the case has provoked
a "mixture of emotions and reactions" on the island.
"You know what people are like. You're always guilty in the
eyes of some."
In March, I met Penny Campbell in her home in South Dell. With
a whispered intensity she told me that she was not going to leave
Lewis. Even then she was already involved in a letter-writing
campaign on her husband's behalf. "Our fight," she wrote
to me later, "is on all sides at the moment. Against an incompetent,
biased and politically motivated police force, against social
services and against ignorant people who, through no fault of
their own are unaware those injustices can happen." Since
then she has issued press statements, enlisted the help of Bill
Thompson, and attempted to fuse the fellow-accused in solidarity.
Just as on Orkney, perhaps, they think they can win an apology
and compensation. They want to have their names cleared. They
want to make the point that, in allegations of child abuse, perhaps
names of accused should not be released until proven guilty. Meanwhile,
however, a single fact remains. All the evidence suggests the
children in Family X were sexually abused. And, in the cloud of
smoke and the feverish cries of "Satan", it looks as
if the perpetrator(s) is/are set to disappear.
11 July 2004
