Murder of Childhood

Ray Wyre

Description

New Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: Contains extracts from Ray Wyre's revealing interviews with child serial-killer Robert Black (Wyre was the only person Black ever opened-up to). Analyses Black's murders of children, including Susan Maxwell, Caroline Hogg and Sarah Harper as well as his implied confession to the murder of Gennette Tate.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Human sexual activity

Informations

• Publié par: Waterside Press
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910979655
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Murder of Childhood
Inside the Mind of One of Britain’s Most Notorious Child Murderers
Ray Wyre and Tim Tate
With Charmaine Richardson
Copyright and publication details
The Murder of Childhood
Inside the Mind of One of Britain’s Most Notorious Child Murderers
Ray Wyre and Tim Tate with Charmaine Richardson
SECOND EDITION
ISBN 978-1-909976-62-7 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-910979-65-5 (Epub ebook)
ISBN 978-1-910979-66-2 (Adobe ebook)
Copyright © 2018 This work is the copyright of Ray Wyre, Tim Tate and Charmaine Richardson. All intellectual property and associated rights are hereby asserted and reserved by the authors in full compliance with UK, European and international law. No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, including in hard copy or via the internet, without the prior written permission of the publishers to whom all such rights have been assigned worldwide.
Cover design © 2018 Waterside Press by www.gibgob.com
Printed by Lightning Source.
Main UK distributor Gardners Books, 1 Whittle Drive, Eastbourne, East Sussex, BN23 6QH . Tel: [phone]; [e-mail] ; www.gardners.com
North American distribution Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd, La Vergne, TN 37086, USA. Tel: [phone]; [e-mail]
Cataloguing-In-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.
e-book The Murder of Childhood is available as an ebook and also to subscribers of Ebrary, Ebsco, Myilibrary and Dawsonera.
Second Edition published 2018 by
Waterside Press Ltd
Sherfield Gables
Sherfield on Loddon, Hook
Hampshire RG27 0JG.
Telephone [phone]
Online catalogue WatersidePress.co.uk
Email [e-mail]
First edition published by Penguin Books in 1995.
Table of Contents
About the authors v
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction to the Second Edition 9
Preface by Charmaine Richardson 13
Original 1995 Prologue 17
Introduction 27 A Rush of Blood 33 Nobody’s Child 65 A Kind of Madness 89 Ghosts in the Machine 115 The Price of Failure 149 Into That Darkness 181 Unquiet Graves 209 The Politics of Paedophilia 241
Original 1995 Epilogue 271
Twenty-five Years Later 281
Index 291
About the authors
Tim Tate is an award-winning documentary film-maker, investigative journalist and best-selling author. Over a 32-year career in television he made almost 90 documentary films for all British terrestrial networks, as well as Sky, Al Jazeera and Discovery, A&E and Court TV in the United States. His films have won awards from Amnesty International, the Royal Television Society, UNESCO, the New York Festivals, the US National Association of Cable Broadcasting and the Association for International Broadcasting.
He has written for all national newspapers and is the author of 14 other non-fiction books, including the best-selling Slave Girl, which told the story of a young British woman sex-trafficked into Amsterdam’s Red Light District. His most recent books are an investigation into the assassination of Robert F Kennedy, an enquiry into more than twenty unsolved murders allegedly carried out by the Yorkshire Ripper, and the harrowing story of Ingrid von Oelhafen, a Slovakian child kidnapped by the Nazis for the Lebensborn experiment to create a new ‘Master Race’.
For much of his career he specialized in investigating child sexual abuse and paedophilia, often working with Ray Wyre on books and documentaries. His investigations into organized child pornography dealing led to the arrest of more than 12 active paedophiles.
In 1994 he produced and directed Channel 4’s acclaimed Dispatches film investigating Robert Black’s life and the police failure to catch him.
Ray Wyre (1951–2008) was a nationally acknowledged expert in the sexual crime field. He began working with sex-offenders as a member of the Probation Service in the 1970s. From 1981 to 1986 he established a groupwork programme for sex-offenders in a top-security prison. On leaving the Probation Service he established the Clinic for Sexual Counselling, a hospital-based programme, until he founded the Gracewell Clinic and Institute in Birmingham in 1988. Ray Wyre was made a Churchill Fellow for his research in America into the treatment of both sex-offenders and their victims. He became an independent sexual crime consultant working closely with police services in profiling investigations and training police officers in interview techniques. He often appeared in court as an independent expert witness for either prosecution or defence and appeared in and acted as a consultant for many TV programmes and commentaries. He published numerous articles on sex-offenders and sex abuse and was the author of Women, Men and Rape: Working with Sex Abuse; Sexual Crime Analysis Report; and Murder Squad. He died, after suffering a stroke, in June 2008.
Charmaine Richardson grew up in Ealing, the second of four children before moving to Watford where she attended St Michael’s Roman Catholic Senior School then a secretarial course at Casio College. Her first marriage, aged 22, produced two children. In 1986, after a bout of depression she sought counselling for sexual abuse experienced in childhood. She went on to set up a self-help group, subsequently joining Luton Rape Crisis Centre. She obtained a degree in English Literature at Northampton University as a mature student and has since pursued a variety of careers: counselling, home tutoring and funeral celebrant. She met and married Ray Wyre in the late-1990s. Her life with him forms a central part of her 2018 book, Pick Up the Pieces . Now retired she spends her time ‘visiting tea-rooms with friends and spoiling her grandchildren’.
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to all those who supported us through this difficult project. In particular, I owe an enormous — and unrepayable — debt to Chris Bryer and Grant McKee at Yorkshire Television, and to the Dispatches editors at Channel 4 — David Lloyd and Francesca O’Brien.
The backing of a raft of lawyers was ultimately crucial in getting the documentary on screen: Jan Tomalin at Channel 4, Patrick Swaffer of Goodman Derrick and Patrick Maloney of counsel gave calm and rational advice throughout very difficult times.
Others, too, gave of their time and experience freely. To Magnus Linklater and Alan Hutchison of the Scotsman, and to our agent Caradoc King, I extend my grateful thanks.
Families played an important part in the long birth of our book and film. There are no words to convey my admiration, respect and affection for Liz and Fordyce Maxwell and for Jacki Harper. These feelings were unsolicited: I sought out the families, and the extent to which they allowed me into this painful corner of their lives is a testimony to their courage and commitment to a wider public understanding.
My family, as ever, have been the cornerstone of the four years it took to bring this project to fruition. Making films and writing books about the terrible things adults do to children leaves its own inevitable mark. My own children were a wonderful antidote and therapy. Thanks, one and all.
Tim Tate
Introduction to the Second Edition
It is now almost a quarter of a century since The Murder of Childhood was published, and more than a decade since it went out of print.
Why, then, the need for a new edition?
The first answer lies in the continuing interest in the story of Robert Black. Over recent years — and particularly following his 2011 conviction for the murder of Jennifer Cardy and then his death in 2016 — a succession of documentaries and television news programmes have revisited his case, and sought to explain the scope of his crimes against children.
Ray Wyre’s widow, Charmaine Richardson, and I are regularly asked to contribute to these films; we try to respond as honestly and calmly as Ray did until his untimely death in 2008. Ray knew — and taught us both — that the single most important part of his brave and ground-breaking work with sex-offenders was to inform the public; protecting children from those who seek to abuse them depends on greater understanding of why, and how, paedophiles seek out their victims.
The second reason for this new edition follows on from that. The world in which the book was written, and the systems then in place for investigating paedophiles and the trade in indecent images of children (IIOC) — what used to be termed child pornography — have changed dramatically in the intervening years.
In 1995 police forces in Britain were only just beginning to realise the scale and impact of child sexual abuse. In the years since then the overwhelming size of the problem has become much clearer — as has the fact that this is not simply a domestic issue, but rather a global crisis which crosses national borders with ease and regularity.
At the heart of this is something which, when we wrote The Murder of Childhood , was then in its infancy. The World Wide Web came into public existence in 1993, but it was slow and cumbersome, constrained by slow dial-up access and with relatively limited content. Today there are more than 600 million open websites worldwide (and a vast number of additional, largely criminal sites on the Dark Web) and we take for granted instant access via the smartphones in our pockets. In excess of two billion people worldwide do so.
The dynamic growth of the web, together with the ubiquity of smartphones with cameras allowing still photos and video files to be shot and uploaded to the internet in real time, have dramatically increased the linked problems of child sexual abuse and IIOC. Much as they democratised public spaces, enfranchised law-abiding citizens and helped hold power to account, they have also enabled paedophiles to transcend geographical and cyberspace borders, facilitating their abuse of children and the distribution of child se