The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[David Guyatt]

Inside the house of horrors: Revealed in chilling detail, how a boy taken to infamous gay brothel gave name of a senior politician he said abused him there to the police - who left the MP's name OUT of their report

• Elm Guest House in Barnes is at heart of probes into paedophile activity
  
• South-west London hotel allegedly visited by VIP paedophiles for decades
  
• It was closed down in 1982 amid sensational allegations of child sex abuse
  
• One boy who stayed there told police of attacks by one senior politician
  
• His statement was left out of reports in an 'establishment cover up'
  

By STEPHEN WRIGHT and RICHARD PENDLEBURY FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 22:03, 5 December 2014 | UPDATED: 23:15, 5 December 2014

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Elm Guest House in Barnes, south-west London, has been at the heart of probes into historic paedophile activity by Westminster MPs for decades

Bedtime at a large Edwardian house in a genteel London suburb.
In a room on one of the upper floors, a small boy is taken to a bedroom by a middle-aged woman. The world beyond the curtains is dark and cold.
On the common across the street, huge trees rustle and loom scarily. It is not a night to be outside.
In the bedroom, the child lies quietly as the woman speaks.
Across the city, countless other youngsters must be listening to lullabies and fairy tales; the confirmations of love, comfort and security before sleep.
But not this boy. He is full of foreboding. That is because his night terrors are not imaginary but real and inflicted upon him with this woman's connivance.
Tonight, her bedside chat would sound very odd to an eavesdropper.
She calls the boy a little queen' and talks of him doing tricks' for money: £20 a time.
He knows that soon after she leaves him, a strange man will come into the room and close the door. The stranger will then undress and the boy's ordeal will begin again.
Eventually the boy, who is of primary school age, will tell this heart-breaking story to the authorities. But, as we shall see, scandalously little will be done to investigate those allegedly responsible.
For more than 30 years, the now-defunct Elm Guest House in Rocks Lane, Barnes, South-West London, has been at the centre of serious and often sensational allegations concerning paedophile activity.
The main contention has long been that the address was a meeting place for a VIP paedophile ring which held orgies and abused young boys, many of whom were in local authority care.
A list of famous alleged attendees, including Cabinet ministers, MPs, churchmen, pop stars, spies, judges, tycoons and members of the royal household, has been widely circulated.
While supporting evidence for the presence of most of those named remains elusive, police accept that the late Liberal MP Cyril Smith, a known child abuser, was indeed a visitor to the guest house.
New claims, and a resurgence of interest in the historic allegations, culminated in the launch last year of Operation Fernbridge, a full police investigation into what is supposed to have happened at Rocks Lane. This summer, Home Secretary Theresa May announced a wide-ranging independent inquiry into historic child sex abuse by prominent individuals.
Last week, Mrs May suggested that the allegations aired so far including a claim of three child murders by Westminster-linked paedophiles who frequented exclusive flats in the Thames-side Dolphin Square amounted to the tip of the iceberg'.
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Both inquiries would like to get hold of a dossier of alleged abuses handed to the then Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, by Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens in November 1983.
Lord Brittan has explained that he passed the dossier to Home Office officials for examination, but the dossier remains missing from Whitehall files. There have been repeated suggestions of an Establishment cover-up.
For the past two years, the Mail has pursued its own investigation into the Elm Guest House story and child abuse by senior figures.
We led the way in revealing how a young man called Peter Hatton-Bornshin, who as a schoolboy was allegedly abused at Elm Guest House, killed himself in 1994, aged 28. Friends say the emotional trauma he suffered at Rocks Lane drove him to his drugs-related death.
We have also examined the circumstances surrounding the death of Carole Kasir, the German-born owner-manager of the Elm Guest House. She'd always maintained that the business was nothing more sinister than a gay-friendly hotel.

Leon Brittan asked about dossier passed to Home Office









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Cyril Smith is thought to have frequented the house before it was closed in 1982. The following year, Geoffrey Dickens MP (right) handed a report into paedophile activities among Westminster politicians to then Home Secretary Leon Brittan

A coroner decided that she had killed herself, again with a drugs overdose, but child protection campaigners claimed she was murdered as part of the VIP cover-up.
One friend told us Kasir had boasted she had a stash of incriminating photographs in a bank vault, for which she had turned down an offer of £20,000. One of those pictures allegedly included Cyril Smith.
Last week, the local Tory MP, Zac Goldsmith, repeated allegations that a former Cabinet minister was photographed with a naked boy in the sauna of Elm Guest House. If so, that picture has yet to emerge.
It is often hard to separate fact and fiction in the Elm Guest House affair. Over three decades, so much has been muddied by conspiracy theorists, fantasists, those bent on making political capital, and those with personal grudges who have practised smear by association.
As always, it is best to listen to those who were directly involved.
Today, following fresh investigations during which we spoke to former social workers, council officials, retired police officers, lawyers, campaigners and other key witnesses, we can present a compelling picture of Elm Guest House in the weeks leading up to its final closure in June 1982.
In particular, we can reveal that a social worker was present when the boy described above identified a senior politician as being one of his abusers. Crucially, that social worker alleges that when he later saw the police transcript of that interview, the MP's name was missing.
The boy happened to be at the property when it was raided by police.


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Leon Brittan said he handed the report to the Home Office in the 1980s, but it has been found in its files

The never-before-published details of what the child claimed to have suffered at the Rocks Lane address supported by medical evidence are deeply shocking. Much is simply too disturbing to print. Equally, while the Mail knows his name, we are being careful not to publish details which could result in him being identified.
Under Carole Kasir's ownership, Elm Guest House was transformed from a nondescript suburban hotel into a gay rendezvous which was advertised in Gay News and other specialist publications. These included the newsletter of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality, which strongly recommended' the guest house to its gay Tory readers.
At the time (it was still only 15 years after the decriminalisation of homosexual acts), complaints of police harassment against the gay community were commonplace.
Elm Guest House was under observation because of reports that it was being run as a brothel. Yet police interest in what was going on there in the early summer of 1982 was also focused on reports of there being a number of vulnerable' children on the premises.
Two young officers were selected to pose as a gay couple to go undercover as guests at Elm Guest House and find out more. Contemporary accounts show that the pair went to the address on June 12, 1982.
At the door, they were greeted by a youth called Lee, who, aged 16, was five years below what was then the gay age of consent.
Once inside, the two officers were introduced to other members of the guest house staff, including a man called Nellie' and a barman named Errol, both of whom called the policemen dear'. Lee then took the officers upstairs.
After being shown their £17-a-night room, the policemen were asked by Lee if they knew what other services' were on offer at Elm Guest House. They were told there was a sauna in Room 7, a selection of gay sex videos and a top-floor room in which Lee massaged' guests.
Nellie' was equally solicitous. Were the officers married, he asked. If so, it didn't matter; there would be no questions asked about their identity. The staff at the guest house were unimpeachably discreet, and were all gay apart from Mrs Kasir.
That is what made Elm Guest House unique; it was the only gay joint run by a straight woman. Later, the officers were told that Kasir had run the guest house as a straight' establishment for two years, before deciding that an exclusively gay clientele would be more lucrative.


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The Mail understands that one of the undercover officers asked a member of the staff whether children might also be among the services' on offer. While no explicit reference to sex was made, the enthusiastic answer included a reference to a youngster who was going to be a lovely queen'.
Later, the undercover officers met Carole Kasir herself in the guest house bar. She spoke of 16-year-old Lee as her little queen', and then introduced them to a much younger boy, allegedly saying that the child could show the men some new tricks'.
In their presence, Kasir called the child my little queen' and referred to him as she'. The boy seemed very camp, and acted in an effeminate manner, the officers thought.
The undercover policemen went to Lee's room and waited while he noisily finished massaging' a male client. The teenager complained to them that the establishment's gay porn videos were worn out by over-use and needed to be replaced. They were provided by a guest house lodger who got them from a Soho sex shop run by a notorious organised-crime family.
At dinner that night, Kasir boasted of the amount of trade' that Lee the latest of a number of in-house masseurs' conducted upstairs. It earned the teenager some £200 a week.


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Carole Kasir, the owner of Elm Guest House, once reportedly told a friend she had photographs incriminating public figures in paedophile activity

She asked if Lee had invited the policemen to a sauna party due to be held at Elm Guest House the following weekend. Entrance would be £5 per head, but because of the high expected attendance some 200 guests the men might have to share a bed with a number of other regulars.
During conversation with another member of staff, they were told that an elderly retired judge acted as the guest house's legal adviser'.
The officers made their excuses and left after breakfast the next morning. Plans were made to return the following Saturday, so that a police raid would coincide with the sauna party.
On the day of the raid, the undercover men returned and paid their £5 entrance charges. One of them was wearing a fake plaster cast on his arm, under which there was a device which, when pressed, would send the signal for his colleagues outside to enter.
The Mail understands that this plan went awry when Kasir hugged him on arrival, setting off the device. The raid began with only a handful of people on the premises. Kasir was arrested, along with Lee and another man.
Nevertheless, one of those present at Elm Guest House that day was the young boy. He was removed from the premises and interviewed by detectives in the presence of a social worker at nearby Richmond police station. His initial testimony was truly shocking.
He said that a man at the guest house had explained to him about how homosexual men did tricks' with each other. Afterwards, the man raped the boy in a bedroom. This was the first time the child had been sexually abused in this way.
A few weeks later, the boy was again at the guest house when Kasir told him that other men could do tricks' with him, for which he would get paid. The boy told her that he didn't want to do it, but Kasir, he said, told him the money was too good to turn down.
The boy said that afterwards, a foreign' man who was staying at the guest house came into a room in which the boy was asleep, woke him and got undressed.
The boy said he told the man that he didn't want to do anything and he should get his money back from Kasir. The man said nothing and, despite the boy's struggles, committed a serious sexual assault on him.
When the man had gone, Kasir came in and spoke to the child as if nothing had happened.
He claimed that some days later, in the same room, another man undressed and brutally raped the boy for about an hour. The boy remembered that it hurt a lot.
The following morning he saw the man with Kasir, and the adults both remarked quite casually that he looked in physical discomfort. The man even said he hoped he was all right.
This became routine. The boy was raped by a succession of clients, he said. One of them assaulted him while dressed in military uniform. Carole Kasir would leave him Vaseline.


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Home Secretary Theresa May previously said allegations of murder and paedophile activity at a number of addresses thought to have been regularly visited by MPs and public figures were 'the tip of the iceberg'

Kasir began to refer to him as little queen', the boy recalled. In return for being abused, he would receive video games, jewellery and cash. The money the men paid to abuse the boy was put in a cash box behind the guest house bar.
After the boy had been raped, Kasir would often come into the room and replace his soiled bed clothes.
Those present at this interview felt that the boy was very sexually aware for his years, and had also been made very materialistic. He referred to himself as a little queen'.
A police surgeon who examined the boy shortly after his rescue found that he had injuries consistent with male rape over a period of time.
If Uncle XXXXX' had done what was alleged, this was not just a sordid suburban scandal, but one of national importance

We have learned that one of those present when the boy was first interviewed by police recalled how the child had seemed torn between telling everything, and maintaining a silence about his ordeal.
When spoken to the following day, he was markedly more reticent.
By the following year, the boy, who was in local authority care, was insisting that his original statement was largely untrue. Officials believe that Carole Kasir had managed to communicate with him in order to buy his silence.
Elm Guest House closed for good after the police raid, which sections of the gay community viewed as an example of official homophobia.
There is no doubt the raid was bungled, but why was no one prosecuted for the alleged sustained abuse of the child they found there that day? No doubt the boy's growing reluctance to co-operate would have been fatal, in the end, to any chance of success.
Kasir was found guilty at the Old Bailey in 1983 only of running a disorderly house and possessing obscene videos. She was given a suspended sentence. She always denied that child abuse had taken place at Elm Guest House. Similar minor charges against the teenage masseur Lee were dropped. He recently claimed to have had sex with the undercover officers.
After years of drug and alcohol abuse, Kasir was found dead of an insulin overdose in 1990. Child protection campaigners who had been in contact with her claim she thought she was being watched shortly before her death.


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Dolphin Square, the Thames-side apartment complex reportedly frequented by senior politicians, is also being considered as part of the investigation into historical sex abuse

Neighbours said that police had set up an observation post by her final address because they suspected she was dealing drugs to children.
Now in early middle age, the young victim from Elm Guest House refuses to co-operate with new police inquiries. He has also declined to speak to the Mail.
The other significant players in this affair who are still alive are being interviewed by detectives as they attempt to ascertain the truth of the legend of the VIP paedophile ring at Rocks Lane.
Was there a cover-up? We now understand that the social worker present at the boy's interview in 1982 was later shown copies of the resulting police statement. What struck him most was what had been left out.
The man recalled that during the boy's testimony at Richmond Police Station, he had spoken of an abuser whom he called Uncle XXXXX'. This abuser worked at the big houses', the boy said.
As the boy talked, at least two of those officials present came to independent realisations of his testimony's significance.
If Uncle XXXXX' had done what was alleged, this was not just a sordid suburban scandal, but one of national importance.
Why? Because it had become clear to them that the boy was describing a prominent politician of the time. The Mail knows the identity of the politician, but cannot name him for legal reasons.
Yet no politician was ever charged or even questioned, as far as we know, and there is a simple reason for this.
When the same eyewitness to the boy's interview was later shown the child's police statement which should have been a verbatim account of all his allegations there was no mention of Uncle XXXXX' or the naïve reference to the Houses of Parliament. It had simply disappeared (if it were ever put to paper at all).
This troubled the social worker. It is now troubling senior figures at the Home Office. In fact it should trouble us all. What reason could there have been to sanitise' the child's statement?
A former senior Metropolitan Police detective offered this explanation last night: You have to remember there was a Cold War still going on. Allegations concerning a senior British politician would have been of great interest to the Kremlin.
For that reason, Special Branch and the security services would almost certainly have been aware of these claims, and might have had a hand in suppressing them.'
Many will think that is an Establishment cover-up by any other name.


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