The Media and The Myth |
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The Media and The Myth |
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Where are they now? Andrew Boyd is a journalist with an agenda. This is not to be confused with a 'campaigning journalist' who, after substantial research into a particular story, decides to adopt a particular stance, one side of the fence or the other, with regard to that story. (Andrew Jennings and his campaign against corruption in the International Olympic Committee is a case in point. Such is the quality and width of the evidence he stands on, few outside the IOC press office bother to argue an opposite view.) But back to Boyd. As an evangelical Christian, his outlook on the world is based on a literal reading of the Bible. (Many professional journalists would argue that anyone who has moulded his brain to a literal reading of anything automatically ex-communicates himself from the broad Church of Hackdom.) This critique of Boyd and his work is not targeted at his Christianity but at the particular brand of Christianity he has adopted: the brand rooted in the insecurities of the US Deep South where God is franchised like hamburgers. Flash preachers oozing insincerity bring God’s word to America’s rural poor. It’s also the brand piped by cable networks to the intellectually-challenged Royle Families of Middle America, the brand that supports capital punishment, the bombing of abortion clinics and the gunning-down of doctors, the brand that claims AIDS is a plague -- God’s punishment of gay people for being homosexual. This 'end-timer' Christianity believes that souls need to be saved before the Second Coming. Satan, they insist, is alive and well and living on Planet Earth. The Horned One’s Mission Statement is to destroy the nuclear family through communism, the Federal Government and day care centres. Day care centres? Well, nurseries enable women to go to work when they should be at home looking after the kids. So the dodgy logic goes. In the early 1980s, the Christian right in the US started a campaign against day care centres, claiming they were a communist conspiracy against the whole basis of Western civilisation - the family. The Christian right simply added Satanism to the formula (reminiscent of the appalling 1960 Denis Wheatley novel The Satanist in which communist subversion of trade unions goes hand-in-hand with Satanic rights and sacrifices.The Satanist as fifth-column...) Now imagine the scene for Mr and Mrs America: you dropped your kids off at the nursery and, while you headed for a hard day’s work at the office, the sprogs were being helicoptered out to the desert where they would be ritually abused all day and returned in time for the afternoon pick-up. Yes, the idea is so preposterous that it should have been laughed out of court. However, American social work and law enforcement agencies, forever fighting for increased budgets, were only too willing to run with such headline-grabbing cases and child therapists, cops and private detectives were soon re-branding themselves as "cult crime consultants". (The first high-profile case to make prime-time news concerned alleged goings-on at the McMartin Pre-School in the Manhattan Beach suburb of Los Angeles. It was from "investigators" involved in this case that UK television researcher Tim Tate obtained the "satanic indicators" he was later to use to influence the Broxtowe Case in Nottingham.) Andrew Boyd first came to any degree of prominence in the UK in 1992 with the publication of his book Blasphemous Rumours. On the strength of that, he helped get a commission from David Lloyd’s Current Affairs team at Channel 4 to make a Dispatches documentary in which he as presenter was going to "prove" that Satan was alive and well and living in the underground. When it reached the stage of viewing the rough cut of Beyond Belief, C4 must have thought that Christmas had come early. There it was! Amongst the predictable footage of Boyd walking to spooky soundtrack along gloomy canal paths and interviews with equally-predictable "adult survivors", was a video showing a woman stretched out on an altar and some cloaked character waving a knife above her. Promos were edited and the C4 press office went into overdrive. The Observer fell for a pitch from one of the programme’s researchers and ran an unquestioning taster the Sunday before transmission. But the shit hit the fan while the credits were still rolling when youngsters from Manchester phoned in to the Duty Office to thank the channel for broadcasting a video made by their favourite band: "The last time we saw it was on the big screen at a rock club. It’s really cool!" The video even had a BBFC classification. For David Lloyd and his team at Charlotte Street, "ridicule" would be too strong a word for the media reaction over the following days. £85,000 down the pan -- and still no proof.
Andrew Boyd, psychotherapist Val Sinason and the New Christian Herald Andrew Boyd is thought to be associated with ‘Prophetic World Ministries’. That’s where he must have learned how to prophesy the conclusions of Department of Health Reports that haven’t even started yet. The editor of the New Christian Herald was later to say that: "The presentation and journalism in our [5 October 1996] ’satanic abuse’ story was carefully considered and prayed through." He probably prayed that no-one would read it too carefully. Hindsight is indeed a wonderful tool, especially when looking back at predictions. "Satanic abuse is real and is happening in Britain today, an official report for the Department of Health is about to conclude," states the opening par. We can’t wait! When exactly is "about to"? A few pars later we have it:
Three months? More than enough time for the police to investigate fifty Satanic crimes, surely. Let’s call it January 1997. It’s now October 2000 and the report still has not been released. The police have been dragging their feet, obviously. Later in the article, Boyd writes that: "¼the DoH report is still under wraps¼" So it had been written by 1996? Just not published? Boyd hadn’t actually read the report, but he purported to know what was in it. The only person who could have told him was the report’s co-author psychotherapist Val Sinason, of course. Either Sinason or God. Hold on though, the DoH didn’t fund the report until 1996. In which case, Sinason wasn’t telling Boyd what was in the document, but what she intended to put in it. No research was necessary it seemed. And, therefore no funding. OffMSG has learned that it is unlikely that the DoH will ever publish Sinason’s report. We think the Department should go further and ask for its (our) money back.
Tim Tate, like Andrew Boyd, is a journalist with an agenda. With a degree in theology and an even higher degree of chutzpah, he decided that Satanic abuse must exist and set out to "prove" it one way or another. Or at least prove it enough to meet the high evidential standards of the Cook Report. In so doing he single-handedly introduced the Satanic myth to Britain. For all those naïve people out there who still believe that ritual sacrifice, "brood-maring" and the raising of Old Nick has been going on in Britain, this is worth repeating: Tim Tate ‘cook-ed’ it all up so he could make a TV programme about it. You weren’t really supposed to believe it was true! The Cook Report couldn’t even find a British Satanist to beat up so they imported one from America and beat him up instead. In order to make this programme, Tate, aided and abetted by Ray Wyre, influenced Nottingham social workers to attempt to turn a particularly nasty case of multi-generational incest into a pantomime hotch-potch of supposed Satanism and witchcraft. Young children already forced to come to terms with having been sexually abused by their relatives where made to think that they may have witnessed babies being butchered. That was unforgiveable. (For a full account of what happened see The Broxtowe Files.) During the Joint Enquiry Team’s investigation, a map of Woollaton Park was discovered. The park, dominated by a Stately Hall at its centre, is not far from Nottingham city centre. Crucially, the map showed a tunnel running beneath the Hall and its grounds and Bea Campbell was to claim in her Channel 4 programme that this was a location for Satanic rituals. But the local authority’s Parks Department had been unaware of any such tunnels -- apart from a drainage channel to the ornamental pond. The map was sourced to the National Coal Board’s Survey Department which is responsible for the mapping of mine-workings in the UK. The police side of JET paid the department a visit at its office in South Yorkshire. The purpose of the visit was routine: could the NCB confirm that the map was one of theirs? It could - except for this, said the surveyor pointing to the lines representing a tunnel under the Woollaton Hall grounds. "Someone’s added these." The police officer thought that was quite interesting and asked the obvious question: "Has anyone else asked about this map recently?" Records were checked and the answer came: "Yes, we made a copy for Mr Tate from Central Television." From the point at which that map left the hands of the NCB to the point at which it became "evidence" of Satanic abuse, someone tampered with it. Anyone want to confess? Tim Tate has never denied that he was instrumental in introducing Ray Wyre to the Nottingham case. Wyre, a former prison probation officer and self-promoted expert on child sex abuse, first visited the city on 9 February 1988. It was a day that Wyre is unlikely to forget. Central to Social Services Team 4’s claim that the children in the case had been Satanically abused was its insistence that the children independently told their foster parents corroborating accounts of the abuse they had allegedly suffered. The foster parents then used diaries to record what the children had said. But this process had been corrupted in the following way. When Tate had visited the United States for the Cook Report he returned with a file of so-called "Satanic indicators" (signs for investigators to look for), given to him by cult-crime "experts" involved in the McMartin Pre-school Case. According to the JET Report, he gave these to Wyre (who knew nothing until then about Satanic Abuse). Wyre then used the indicators to brief the foster parents on the evening of 9 February. What the JET Report does not reveal was how the police knew that Wyre had the indicators. Earlier the same day, Team 4 leader Christine Johnstone took Wyre to the Incident Room at Hucknall Police Station -- centre of the criminal investigation into the Broxtowe case. Wanting Wyre to look over the files, Johnstone just walked in with him unannounced. The sergeant in charge of the Incident Room stopped them and demanded to know who Wyre was. "It’s OK, he’s with me. He’s a consultant to Social Services." It’s not all right, said the sergeant and led Wyre out of the room until he could confer with Det Supt Peter Coles, head of the enquiry. Coles told him to throw Wyre out. But, while all this was going on, and unknown to Wyre and Johnstone, Wyre’s briefcase was searched. It contained a copy of Tim Tate’s imported "Satanic indicators". The Cook Report on satanism -- The Devil’s Work -- was eventually condemned by the Broadcasting Standards Council; just about every witness and every piece of evidence included in the piece became discredited. So did its senior researcher, Tim Tate. Tate later wrote a book (foolishly based on the same evidence) entitled Children For The Devil. In it, he spectacularly and unnecessarily libelled Det Supt Coles. This resulted in substantial damages being paid and the book being pulped. Tate’s reward for all this? He got a commission from Channel 4 (Documentary Department this time) to make a one-hour retrospective about child abuse in the Death Of Childhood series. Suspend your disbelief!
For many years, Bea Campbell was an obscure hack on the Morning Star (né Daily Worker). She gave up Stalinism, took up Feminism and now promotes herself as the voice of working class women. This, however, didn’t cause her any hesitation when she became involved in social work attacks on working class families in places like Nottingham, Rochdale and Ayrshire. In those cases, oddly, it was the unlikely Independent and the even more unlikely Mail on Sunday that spoke out for the victims of the Satanic myth. As an acknowledged lesbian, Campbell, you would have thought, is a strange ideological bedfellow for the likes of Andrew Boyd. One believes that families are being attacked by Satan, the other that families - especially women - are being attacked by the 50% of the population that suffers from testosterone poisoning. In 1990, Campbell - somehow - got a commission from David Lloyd’s team at Channel 4 to make a Dispatches saying that Tim Tate had got it right after all and the abuse in the Broxtowe family was Satanic. And so, off to Nottingham, where Bea Campbell met Social Services Team 4 leader Chris Johnstone and her boss, senior social worker Judith Dawson. The resulting film had some memorable moments. In one of these (The Old Lodge Gatehouse, Derby Road : INT NIGHT), the camera, already placed inside a darkened room, picks up Campbell as she opens a heavy, creaking door and enters the room towards camera. The beam of her torch flickers over the walls of the gloomy interior. Spooky! The camera follows as she moves straight towards a chest of drawers. She opens a drawer and peers inside: "Oh," she exclaims with a mock-shocked expression, "what’s this?" and produces a huge dildo. Correct drawer, first time and Campbell is not believed to be associated with Prophetic World Ministries. Clear evidence of Satanic abuse? (OffMSG hates to spoil the fun, but the park is a well-known place of business for local toms and their clients. The park keepers are supposed to collect up all the left-overs. DSupt Coles had had the Police Special Support Group dig up the gatehouse basement looking for evidence of the Satanic rites mentioned by some of the Broxtowe case children. They found nothing satanic, and dildoes didn’t figure in their site report.) In another scene Campbell is seen in long shot walking through the same park with one of the second-generation parents of the Broxtowe family. "Yus," the young woman tells her, "I were a witch." (Exactly what a witch was doing in a Satanic group is beyond us and, it seems, beyond Campbell.) OffMSG has obtained a later account of an interview with this same young woman (who we’ll call Jean) conducted in the presence of her solicitor.
Nottingham Police came within a cigarette paper’s width of arresting Campbell and her crew. Alarmed at her antics, and concerned that she might be interfering with an already-disrupted and traumatised family, they put her under surveillance. Where are they now? Bea Campbell and Judith Dawson (now known as Judith Jones -- her maiden name) set up home together and now live in the North East of England. (We wish we could add "quietly".) "Jean" still hasn’t got her children out of care. © 2000 OffMSG |
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