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One Small Case of Ritual Sacrifice, one Attorney-General, one Chief Constable and £1M

Reading Nick Cohen’s piece (right) must have brought back memories for some of West Yorkshire Police’s finest. Ten years ago the force wasted twelve officer/years (and the thick end of £1M) chasing a satanic coven. And all at the instigation of ace ‘forensic psychologist’ Paul Britton. The force’s press office managed to keep the debacle hidden from the media – until now. (Sorry about that.)

The story started in the Holt Park district of north-west Leeds towards the end of 1989. A rookie beat constable, in the execution of his duties, as they say, met a young woman (‘Jane’) who had an incredible story to tell. Ten years earlier, she told him, she had been abducted and taken to a house near Hyde Park in the city’s student flatlands. In the cellar of the house was a kind of temple with an altar at one end; in the middle of the floor a pentangle had been drawn.

The policeman listened wide-eyed as Jane told him about the crazed and drugged men and women who offered human sacrifices up to the Devil at the temple. The woman – then a teenager -- told how she had been used as a ‘brood mare’, producing human foetuses for the blood-stained altar. But the best was yet to come. Senior police officers – right up to the Chief Constable were members of the evil coven. So was the then Attorney-General, the senior law officer in the House of Commons.

For some days, the young copper mulled over what he had heard. Clearly a whole shedload of serious crimes had been committed. But how the hell do you prosecute a case against the Chief Constable and the Attorney-General? Eventually he plucked up courage and asked his sergeant at Weeton Police Station for ‘a quiet chat’. The older officer listened patiently, but eventually patted him on the head and suggested it would be in the best interest of his career if he got a grip and went off to find some real crime.

This sound advice was rashly ignored. After another meeting with Jane, he jumped the chain of command and asked his inspector for ‘a quiet chat’. The inspector’s instinctive reaction was the same as the sergeant’s, but this officer decided that something had to be put on file. It seemed that a series of major crimes had been reported and that gave him an obligation in law to do something, to investigate.

Of course the matter went right to the top. It was not something that could be laughed off. A neighbouring force – Humberside – was right in the middle of a messy ‘satanic abuse’ case which had been sparked off by a series of similar mad allegations made by boys being coached by a campaigner called Dianne Core, the founder of Hull’s Childwatch charity. And Nottinghamshire Police were engaged in open warfare with local social workers who claimed they were not taking the widespread satanic abuse of children seriously.

It is not known (by OffMSG anyway) who decided to seek the services of a forensic psychologist, but Paul Britton was soon on the scene. It was, after all, a trendy thing to do. Indeed it still is; more money to 'science', less to 'snouts'. Britton read the statements, spoke to the officers involved and then interviewed Jane.

His report was unequivocal – he thought she was telling the truth.

West Yorkshire Police decided that the investigation should be done with some discretion. To make up a team of twelve officers, a cross-section of ranks from around the force was chosen. Based at the force training centre in Wakefield, they were provided with mobile phones and specially leased, unmarked cars. They were also provided with a cover story; if anyone in the job asked them what they were up to, they were to say they were investigating a complaint that an inspector had been having an affair with his neighbour’s wife. (A quite unprecedented incident demanding such resources, of course.)

One year and about £1M later… Nothing. No evidence, no case, no charges. And, amid an embarrassed shuffling of feet, the matter was quietly dropped. Britton had got it wrong.

Two years later though a television producer who had been sniffing around the Hull and Nottingham cases was tipped off about ‘the big satanic business in Leeds’. What ‘big satanic business in Leeds’? He thought he was well plugged in on these cases, but this was a new one.

Finding Jane wasn’t easy, and when she was found she didn’t want to talk. But her husband, ‘Mike’ was up for ‘a quiet chat’ of his own. The meeting took place in the reception bar at the Post House Hotel in Bramhope not far from the couple’s home. At first Mike was adamant that his wife had been telling the truth.

‘But,’ asked the tv man, ‘when did Jane first start talking about her involvement with the er… coven?’

‘Oh that was when we had a counselling session at the outreach place.’

‘Outreach place?’

‘Yes,’ Mike nodded, ‘it’s a City Council place near Hyde Park that helps people in the Care in the Community programme. They have a hotline there, and you can go in and talk if you are upset or anything. We were both a bit down – that was how we met – so we went to see our counsellor.’

‘What happened?’ the producer nudged him a little.

‘The counsellor had all these books on a shelf behind her desk.’

‘What sort of books?’

‘Books about satanism and witchcraft. Stuff like that.’ Mike shrugged, increasingly aware, seemingly, of the significance of what he was saying. ‘Jane asked about the books and the counsellor explained…’ At this stage Mike and the producer were still on their first drinks: ‘And the Chief Constable? The Attorney-General? How did they come into it?’

‘She recognised them when she saw them on television. It was remarkable.’ Remarkable indeed.

The journalist drove off into the night with a list of all the police officers on the enquiry team in his pockets. This later proved to be enough to get him into the Assistant Chief Constable (Crime)’s office at force headquarters in Wakefield. The ACC was pleasant enough. He smiled benignly and shook his head and revealed nothing – not even an admission that such a major enquiry had taken place. Questions to members of the West Yorkshire Police Authority about the £1M also ran aground.

The next time the names ‘Satan’ and ‘Britton’ appear in the same paragraph is ten years later in Nick Cohen’s column in The Observer.

For more Mind-Doctor Madness see OnRECORD.

Originally published in The Observer, 10 Sept. 2000

Shrink rapping

Why on Earth is the Government listening to these flawed psychologists?

Nick Cohen

Sunday September 10, 2000

Psychologists lecture patients on the need for uninhibited honesty. Treatment just doesn't work unless you open up and let your every secret pour out. As members of the British Psychological Society proved last week, it is an entirely different matter when frank speaking is requested from therapists. A demand for glasnost pushed them into exhibiting distressing symptoms of repressed personalities in blanket denial. On 26 November they will hear accusations of professional misconduct against Paul Britton, the most celebrated forensic psychologist in the land. But the Society won't relax and tell us all about it. 'I'm afraid I can't give you any information,' said Lauren Russell, one of its officers. 'Everything is confidential.'

Not quite everything. You can guess that Britton will find the disciplinary hearing a jolt. He is used to being treated as the inspiration for Cracker - Robbie Coltrane without the booze and gambling. He is treated with deference by a Home Office which regards him as the great pioneer of the criminal profiling of offenders and police forces which allow him to advise murder investigations and on occasion run them.

As for the media, Britton is a voluble refutation of Andy Warhol's democratic notion that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. His case shows that once your name is in the newspaper contacts files and BBC libraries as the authoritative expert without compare you can elbow out competitors and ensure your fame stretches to the crack of doom. Whenever there is an unsolved crime to discuss or an opinion is needed on the effects of Hollywood violence on the young, Britton is called for his view by everyone from the Sunday Times to the Today programme. He's the man who knows; a beneficiary of the Neil Hamilton culture which keeps interview requests and appearance fees rolling in to talking heads whatever they do.

Russell did let slip one nugget under pressure. The inquiry will be into a sinister psychodrama in which Britton cast an unknowing Colin Stagg as male lead. Britton was convinced Stagg had murdered Rachel Nickell not because there was a shred of hard evidence against him, but because he fitted his psychological profile of the killer.

The demand for a reckoning is pressing. Virtually everyone involved in the Nickell case has suffered. Stagg, a lonely and naïve man, has been hounded by police and hacks who have come close to screaming he is guilty until proven innocent. Ms Nickell's family has not seen her killer caught and charged. An undercover police woman Britton told to pose as a sadistic temptress collapsed under the stress of the pretence.

The resonance of the hearing goes beyond the misery provoked by a frighteningly capricious investigation. Mr Justice Ognall threw out the prosecution of Stagg in 1994, saying the police operation Britton directed as 'puppet master' was a 'wholly reprehensible' attempt to incriminate a defendant by 'deceptive conduct of the grossest kind'. The unteachable Home Office is nevertheless now considering the indefinite incarceration of citizens whose psychological profiles 'prove' they have 'dangerous severe personality disorders'. The scandal raised by the murder of Rachel Nickell in 1992 is about to be ressurected as a contemporary event.

It still has the power to shock. The 23-year-old was stabbed 49 times on Wimbledon Common in front of her two-year-old son on a July morning. Britton's investigation of Stagg was almost as shocking. It revealed the tenacious and dangerous techno-utopianism that moves many in authority to this day. For if the police were not gripped by the belief that pseudo-science can make the complex simple and obviate the need for hard work, then Stagg would never have been dragged to court and Ministers would not be contemplating the internment of the innocent.

Stagg was the detectives' prime suspect. They had no identification or forensic evidence. They regarded him with distaste because he had once written dirty letters to a woman, lived near the common and was a bit odd. Britton instructed a police woman, codenamed Lizzie James, to write to and then meet Stagg. For 28 weeks she dangled the possibility of an affair in front of the target.

Time and again Stagg came over as a timid soul desperate to impress Britton's puppet. When James said she enjoyed hurting people, he mumbled, 'Please explain as I live a quiet life. If I have disappointed you please don't dump me. Nothing like this has happened to me before. Please, please tell me what you want in every detail.' She wanted blood, buckets of it. James described how she had spent her teenage years in a coven of satan-worshipping witches, as so many girls do these days, and had slaughtered a mother and baby. She could only enjoy a truly meaningful relationship with someone with a similar formative experience. Stagg pretended he had murdered a woman in the New Forest and Lizzie turned quite frosty when Britton found there had been no killing and Stagg was lying to impress her. 'I don't believe the New Forest story,' he told her to say. 'If only you had done the Wimbledon Common murder; if only you had killed her it would be all right.'

'I'm terribly sorry but I haven't,' the hapless Stagg replied. His cringing behaviour - the exact opposite of a domineering alpha male - didn't stop the police and Crown Prosecution Service believing that he was a terrible killer and driving Lizzie James to carry on acting until she reached the edge of a nervous breakdown.

On its own the above should be enough to keep the British Psychological Society busy for all of its six-day hearing. But the complaint they will hear has a novel twist. It was made by Ian Ryan, Colin Stagg's solicitor in 1994, and has taken a mere six years to come to receive an airing. If Britton believed that Stagg was a dangerous lunatic, Ryan has asked the psychologists to explain, why was he telling James to incite him? Where were the safeguards to protect James and anyone else Stagg might stumble across.

Britton will defend himself. Even if his arguments fail the Society won't punish him too severely. 'Anyone can practice as a psychologist whatever we say,' Lauren Russell told me, 'there's nothing we can do.'

The Government may reply that it faces an agonisingly difficult problem which the Stagg affair does nothing to help them solve. The public can be protected from convicted criminals by the simple expedient of locking them up in prison. Those with treatable mental illnesses can be held in secure hospitals. Nothing can be done about those with untreatable 'personality disorders'. They are left to roam the streets until one day they kill or maim. Surely, a tough yet tender regime such as ours has a duty to protect their potential victims by picking them up before they offend?

Yet one reason why Ognall condemned Britton and released Stagg was that other psychologists demolished his profile of Rachel's murderer. Britton said the killer was a sexual deviant so rare that anyone who fitted his psychological profile had to be the killer. Professor David Canter, of Liverpool University, told the court the killer seemed like a brutal man who went wild when he met resistance - a type which is all too common. Their disagreement goes to the heart of objections to locking up the unconvicted because of an alleged propensity to violence.

Mind, the mental health charity, told the Commons last year that confusion and controversy between the dozens of rival schools of psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors bedevilled attempts to designate a man a criminal before he committed a crime. There was no consensus and no record of clinical success. It quoted a study of murderers and suicides who lay on the couch in the year before they killed. Ninety four per cent were said by their therapists to pose no or a low risk to themselves and others.

If the Government drops its proposals, there would inevitably be a case when a patient the NHS had warned had an untreatable violent disorder went mad and hurt someone. You can predict with equal certainty that the press will bellow at the Home Office when his medical records were uncovered. We know there's nothing our politicians hate as much as bad publicity. The question remains, how many people who have never and will never harm anyone are they prepared to see locked up in the name of a dubious science to save their faces? Ten? A hundred? A thousand? The innocent will be sent down without trial before judge and jury. There will be no Ognalls on hand to call a halt second time around.

For me the best reason for opposition came last year when the Government announced its plans and Britton was asked for his verdict on Radio 4. Jack Straw was absolutely right to propose internment, he said. Experts such as his good self could identify killers before they had lifted a finger in anger. Endorsements from this quarter should make any Minister, even a New Labour Minister, think again.