Original subtitles

This programme contains some strong language from the start

and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

"| had just turned seven.

"| didn't know what it was to mean, but for eight years, I endured it

"as a child and a teen."

"My father started to hit and touch me.

"But this was just the start."

"He groomed me and prepared me for the group.

"| had to participate in some awful things

"and deal with the nightmares that today it brings."

"Electrocution and drowning were some of their tools,

"when I was bad and broke their rules."

"It didn't stop there.

"They used snakes and wasps or left me out in the dark

"to die in the frost."

Well, he obviously didn't die, did he?

Because he's alive, and still in fucking prison, for fuck's sake.

In 2014, Carl Beech, a seemingly unremarkable man from Gloucester,

perhaps better known by his pseudonym, Nick,

claimed he'd been the victim of a VIP paedophile ring

in the 1970s and '80s.

I wish it never happened.

Life would've been very different if it had never happened.

These appalling allegations and all the aftermath

of that and the press and the...

You know, maybe the staring in the street. Who knows?

But all of that.

I mean, you have to have an enormous sense of inner reserves

just to get you through it.

It was humiliating.

It was an affront to everything he stood for.

You know, duty, service to his nation.

Um...

You know, it was sort of incomprehensible, really.

So who was Carl Beech,

and why did he choose to go public with this extraordinary story?

I think to understand what happened with Carl Beech,

we have to step back a few years.

Late in 2011, jimmy Savile died

and a number of people undoubtedly knew what Savile was up to.

The rumour had been spreading,

but it was suppressed.

We knew that jimmy Savile had been a prolific child abuser.

That changed the nature of the way

that the UK was dealing with child sexual abuse as an issue.

The pendulum went from the disbelief of jimmy Savile

through to the opposite spectrum

that actually, now, all these cases were coming out the woodwork,

if you like, and needed to be believed.

And into this mix came Carl Beech.

They knew where I was.

They knew where I went to school.

Don't know, they knew everything.

I don't know how.

In 2012, Beech told Wiltshire Police he'd been sexually abused

by his stepfather, by jimmy Savile

and by some other men he called "the group".

So how would you end up being at these places with the group?

|—| was taken there, sometimes from school.

During the day, I'd be taken out of school.

When you say taken out of school —

were you in a playground and dragged out,

or are we talking something different?

How were you taken out?

Just taken out of school.

After a brief investigation,

Wiltshire Police dismissed Beech's allegations.

But not before Beech had submitted a compensation claim

for the abuse he had suffered.

Two years later, he began writing about his abuse online.

I first came across the person

that I later identified as Carl Beech

through a blog on a website.

And, on that website,

there was a guest blogger who had blogged under the name Carl.

I met him in central London, in Self ridges.

He came across as very nervous, very vulnerable.

He's a bright guy.

He's very clever.

And he's very articulate.

Beech named 12 men who he said had abused and raped him.

The list included Beech's stepfather, an Army major...

...as well as more high-ranking members of the military...

...including Field Marshal Lord Bramall.

BEECH: I was just shown into an office

when the senior officer was there — General Bramall.

My father saluted and introduced me.

You didn't challenge them.

You know, that fear was ingrained from day one.

Also on the list were politicians

and other members of the establishment.

Some of them had already been accused of sexual of fences.

Others had unproven rumours about their sexual proclivities

circulating on the internet.

One of these was Lord Brit-tan.

BEECH: He was sadistic.

He took...

...pleasure...in hurting.

Or seeing us in pain.

Another was Sir Edward Heath.

BEECH: He told me he used to run the country.

INTERVIEWER: Right. Right.

Whether he actually said that he was Prime Minister, I don't know.

But he used to run the country. Mm.

Again, that didn't really mean much.

Yeah.

It doesn't, to an 11—year—old.

Yeah, I can understand that.

Beech even alluded to a possible murder.

Without question, they were the most serious allegations I'd ever heard,

certainly in terms of the magnitude of the allegations.

They were mind-blowing.

GRENADES EXPLODING, GUNFIRE

BEECH: That first occasion, I was seven.

It was mainly military bases for probably a good few years.

And the only one I'd know for sure now is lmber,

which is on Salisbury Plain.

It's just like a village, but a ghost village.

Nothing there.

I had, um, poppies...

...pinned to my chest.

Whilst they did whatever they wanted to do.

I remember thinking...

..."Blimey, this could make or break you."

But I'd said to him, "Obviously, I'm a journalist.

"In order for us to cover this,

"if we're going to go anywhere with this,

"we need to find other witnesses.

"We need to corroborate the information."

I took him to various locations in the early clays,

just to see whether or not he recognised them.

I remember taking him to an area that Ted Heath had lived in.

So I walked him down this road,

just to see if he picked out the property.

And, to my surprise, he stopped outside

the former home of Ted Heath.

He didn't identify the actual house,

but he stood on that part of the road

and he looked around and he said,

"This is very familiar to me. I'm familiar with this arrangement."

Although Beech couldn't provide any hard evidence, for Conrad,

this was an irresistible story with the potential to make his career.

He arranged an interview with Beech

on the investigative news website Exam.

VOICE DISGUISED: The common one was for us, or me,

to give them oral sex.

But it would always culminate in being raped.

It was a scoop.

And, you know, I know that we got contacted

by a lot of the UK's media after that,

who wanted access to Beech,

who wanted footage from the website.

We were getting phone calls left, right and centre

from not just the tabloids, but the broadsheets, too.

Did you ever go to his house?

I went to his house on a couple of occasions.

He lived in an unspectacular suburban home

on the outskirts of Gloucester with his son.

And, you know, obviously, he'd explained to me

that he was separated or divorced from his wife

and that, you know, he lived alone with his son.

Beech and his wife had first met

when they were both training as nurses in the NHS.

But in 2010, after 18 years of marriage, they split up.

He was friendly.

He was nice.

And, in a way, he could almost show me a life that...

...was a little bit more privileged.

Were you happy in the marriage?

Hmm. That's an interesting question.

Um...

I was happy...

...but then I was also unhappy.

Oh, God... It's all right, Dawn.

What were the things in the marriage that weren't good for you?

One of the issues was the intimate side of the marriage.

It was... It just wasn't very good at all.

Had it ever been good?

Not really, no.

Did he ever tell you that he'd been sexually abused as a child?

Yes.

He said to me, "I've got a letter that I've written to my mum,

"and I want you to read it."

This was the letter that he wrote to his mum to say

that he had been sexually abused by his stepfather, Ray Beech.

And when I read it, I just remember looking at Carl

and just saying, "Oh, my God."

And I think I hugged him, because what else can you do?

In the first instance, he said the reason why he went and sought help

through a counsellor was really through relationship counselling

and that what emerged from the discussions then

was the background of child sexual abuse

and how that had impacted upon him subconsciously down the years.

"| met a few counsellors

"before I settled on one that I felt comfortable with,

and this was so important.

"| would not have said I trusted them at that stage,

"but I felt comfortable with them and they helped me to share

"what happened to me, little by little.

"As I told her more and more over time,

"she said it was like looking at me through a forest.

"Gradually, as she gets closer, she can see more of me.

"She was cutting through my past to get to me."

As part of his therapy,

Beech's counsellor asked him to chart and describe the injuries

he'd sustained in the course of his abuse.

"Green — broken bones.

"Yellow — I was hit everywhere,

"face, side and back of head.

"Red — burn.

"The red on the soles of my feet was from a lighter.

"Blue — needles and pins were stabbed into me,

"mainly on the soles of my feet,

"in between my fingers and on my chest.

"Purple — snake bites.

"Black — wasps' stings."

BEECH: I never thought I would be in a position to...

...report any of them.

And then that all changed when the Metropolitan Police

contacted me via Exaro.

To my surprise, at that stage, Beech said,

"Yes. I'll talk to the police."

And that was the U-turn, that was the change of heart.

Encouraged to go to the Met by Labour MP Tom Watson,

Beech now claimed to have witnessed three murders.

An investigation called Operation Midland was launched.

The BBC conducted interviews with Beech, lending the story weight

by running it as the lead item on the news.

Police are investigating the possible murders of three boys

in connection with an alleged historic paedophile ring

involving powerful people.

The group is alleged to have included senior figures

in public life, the military, politics and law enforcement

in the 1970s and '80s.

Police are now appealing for witnesses to come forward.

ACTOR'S VOICE AS BEECH: I've never experienced pain like it.

I hope I never do again.

They had no fear at all of being caught.

It didn't even cross their mind.

The first murder Beech had described to police

was a hit-and-run incident he said he'd witnessed in Kingston.

BEECH: I heard, um, the car,

the engine.

And as I turned round to see what the noise was,

it hit him.

And he was, um... HE CLEARS HIS THROAT

...thrown up into the air,

and everything just stopped.

Everything just stopped.

There was a lot of blood.

I had blood on my hands.

And I was dragged away,

but he died because I didn't do as I was told.

Beech also said he'd witnessed a second boy being fatally stabbed,

and a third boy being strangled to death by the group.

"The murder of three young boys.

"To me, they were not just three boys.

"They meant everything.

"They were my friends.

"We shared a common bond, horrific as it was.

"We shared each other's fear and pain.

"And we knew what each other was thinking

"when no words were allowed.

"The trauma of watching them die, of holding them in my arms,

"of having their blood on my hands

"and the total helplessness of not being able to stop it.

"| feel guilty every day that I survived and they didn't.

"The grief is overwhelming.

"| have had no closure.

"| didn't get to say goodbye."

Carl Beech was becoming Twitter famous.

He had acolytes who followed him.

He became not just a middle manager for an NHS Trust,

but he was suddenly...

...courted by people on Twitter

who wanted to know more about his story.

I joined Twitter,

and, um, I saw what I felt was quite an amazing

kind of concept.

Beech had given himself the Twitter handle RAVSCA —

Raising Awareness for Victims and Survivors of Child Abuse —

and was proposing an art exhibition

inspired by the poppy installation he'd seen at the Tower of London.

It was, and remained, a very good idea that he came up with.

It would get victims of child sexual abuse to send in images or pictures

that were of emotional importance to them,

that would help them to tell us a broader story about child abuse.

And it was... I think it was called the Wall of Silence,

and it is all about breaking down the barriers of silence

around child abuse in the UK.

Did you meet him in person, Mike?

I did. I thought he was fragile.

He was anxious and, you know,

kind of unsettled, if you like.

And if I were asked if I felt that he'd experienced abuse trauma,

I would have said, "Yes."

Nick has been interviewed over a long period of time

by experienced detectives from the Child Abuse Command,

and he has also met an investigator from the Murder Command.

They and I believe what Nick to be saying is credible and true.

I was at the press conference.

There were gasps within the room when it was said.

I couldn't believe that the word "true" had been used.

Here he was,

a white, middle class male — well-spoken, articulate,

and a health professional in the NHS.

He was a person of some substance.

What reason would he have to say these things?

There's no doubt that, in the early stages of this investigation,

the police officers proceeded on the basis

that everything they had been told, remarkable as it was,

and in my view, highly improbable from the very outset...

They simply accepted the truth of everything

that Nick had said to them.

BEECH: It's been a secret for far too long.

It's not just me. There are others.

I'm trying to encourage somebody else to come forward,

but I can't pressurise them. It has to be their own decision.

I need others to come forward and speak to us.

You will be believed, you will be supported,

as we look to build this case.

At that time, Nick had talked about another victim called Fred,

and he had told Operation Midland

that he was in contact with Fred.

Um, and that Fred was ambivalent about coming forward.

And obviously the Midland officers,

you know, very much wanted to talk to him.

The police request for me to make contact with Fred,

because Nick had provided his e-mail address, came in February 2015.

"Dear Fred, from what Nick has outlined to the police,

"it is clear that your childhood involved some horrific ordeals.

"Many people who have experienced sexual and other types of abuse

"just want to move on with their lives and put it behind them.

"This might particularly apply to this abuse perpetrated

"against Nick, you and others, given the people involved

"and the allegations of previous cover—up."

BEECH: I don't trust people per se.

It takes a long time for me to establish trust.

But I do have confidence in the police.

They seem to be very... dedicated in what they're doing,

and passionate about getting results.

SIRENS WAIL

8:30 in the morning, knock at the door,

two police officers outside,

and they said they had to search the house.

I was sat in this room,

in that chair, traumatised with shock.

You know, like a fly stuck to a fly paper, I couldn't move.

On the 4th of March 2015,

the Met coordinated raids on the homes of three of the men

Beech had named, searching for evidence of murder.

As the police raided the Westminster home

of former Home Secretary Lord Brit-tan,

who had only very recently died,

in Yorkshire, officers also arrived to search the Brit-tans' second home.

The doorbell went, and it was about half past eight,

and the police were outside with this warrant,

and they came into the house

and they said they were going to go right through the house,

and they did, from top to bottom.

Penny! Penny! Penny! Penny!

The stuff that was taken was shown to me, and all I remember saying is,

"| can't think why you're taking those videos,"

because, you know, these were videos of, I don't know,

Inspector Morse and things like that.

The boss was fanatical about saving things.

Saved bank stubs, photographs, Christmas cards.

They bagged everything, dated it,

and they started to bring it all downstairs.

All these bags, full of... rubbish, really.

The thing that hurt the lady more than anything,

they took his slippers.

There's something about slippers which are different from shoes.

You know, it's... It's, you know, slippers and fires and pipes

and all the rest of it.

Were they nice slippers?

They were a pretty awful pair of slippers, to be honest.

No monogram.

At the same time, on the same day, the Met also searched the home

of the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor...

...and the home of Lord Bramall,

former head of the British Armed Forces, who lived in Hampshire.

There was a knock on the door

and two police officers stood at the door and he said, "Come in."

He thought it was possibly a security issue.

I said, "Oh, nice to see you. What can I do for you?"

And they said, "There's an allegation been made about you."

Behind those two men came a sort of truckload of...

...20 other people, I think.

And they went through the whole house.

They had a special officer, who dealt with paedophile cases,

asking my daughter questions and so on.

And my wife was seriously ill,

but she was downstairs on a walker,

and I had to move her from room to room,

and she just kept on saying, "What are they all doing here?"

And I, of course, couldn't really explain,

cos she had Alzheimer's.

I think they took...

...a speech he made to cadets at Sandhurst,

but there was nothing,

nothing here at all.

The trouble was that, once it was in the media,

the media made the most of it.

They thought there must be some presumption of guilt.

So of course, every time my name or my picture appeared in the paper,

it was connected with wider sex scandal,

or you had a picture and underneath it said,

"High level cover-up — question mark."

They always, by innuendo, tried to spread the idea

that there must have been something in these allegations against me.

You know, you're always worried about what you might call

a "no smoke without fire brigade", you know.

Were those tactics heavy-handed?

Well, we've not confirmed what searches

have taken place or have not,

so I'm not going to comment on individual actions that we take.

The point to make, from my perspective, is that we will go

where the evidence takes us without fear or favour.

I think that's what the public expect and it's certainly

what our investigators are doing and are keen to continue to do.

BEECH: They seem to be very careful

that they're doing everything correctly,

and it takes time to gather the evidence,

and, yeah, if the evidence is there, they need to make the arrests.

And, I mean, I would like to see justice.

As the investigation continued,

Beech received his pay—out from his compensation claim

and spent the money on a sports car.

Carl likes his cars, and he always liked American cars.

So, when he said to me that he was getting the Mustang, I mean,

I didn't have a clue what even it looked like.

But I wasn't surprised because I just thought,

"Actually, I can see him in it."

When he bought the Mustang, did you know how he was paying for it?

No. No.

In August 2015, Harvey Proctor made a bold move

in an attempt to clear his name.

Furious about the public insinuation of guilt,

he held a press conference

where he described in detail all of Beech's incredible allegations

and asserted his innocence.

I denied all and each of the allegations in turn

and in detail...

...and categorised them as false and untrue

and, in whole, a heinous calumny.

They amount to just about the worst allegations

anyone can make against another person,

including as they do...

...multiple murder of children,

their torture, grievous bodily harm,

rape and sexual child abuse.

I am completely innocent of all these allegations.

I am a homosexual.

I'm not a murderer,

I'm not a paedophile or paederast.

A month later, doubts about the story

began to emerge in the press...

...and the BBC Panorama programme ran an expose

that shed significant doubt on Nick's claims.

There may be a danger the police are now spending

an undue amount of time investigating cases

that have all the hallmarks of being fantasy.

ACTOR'S VOICE AS BEECH: I've never experienced pain like it.

I hope I never do again.

They had no fear at all of being caught.

As soon as I saw the silhouetted head,

I knew immediately it was Carl.

Had Carl ever mentioned to you that he'd been sexually abused

by a group of prominent people?

No.

Did you think any of it could be true, Dawn?

No.

I thought "What? What? What? Really?

"Really? Really? Come on."

You just think, "What the actual fuck is that about?"

I remember dropping our son off one day and Carl came to the door

and he was tearful, and I sort of said to him, "Oh, God, are you OK?"

And he sort of said, "Well, I am Nick."

I had to be a little bit of an actress

and say, "Oh, my God. Really?"

What were you thinking, Dawn?

"No shit, Sherlock."

I was called in nearing the end of the inquiry,

at the end of 2015, round about the November time.

What were your findings in this case?

That I thought that there was a big question mark

over the reliability of his memory.

I had serious doubts about the reliability of his memory.

And what was the police response to your serious doubts?

Well, they thought it was... It was food for thought.

They didn't check his computers.

They didn't seek his full medical records at the time.

They didn't even ask to see his injuries.

They didn't ask for his mobile phone.

These were all matters that would have brought this investigation

to a crashing halt within hours.

Astonishingly, the Met still hadn't even spoken to Beech's ex-wife.

But, in January 2016,

15 months into a £2 million police investigation,

they finally began to challenge Beech,

questioning him about the uncannily accurate drawings

he claimed to have made from memory.

There is an incredible amount of similar detail

contained within certain drawings and sketches

from a recollection of approximately 30 to 40 years ago,

in comparison to images

which are freely out there on the internet to be looked at.

Do you understand? Mm-hm.

Did you draw these places solely from your memory?

Yeah.

Do you understand why that question has arisen?

Can you see why it's arisen?

BEECH GRUNTS

Sorry? Yeah.

Beech started to get some criticism.

People started saying, "Is this guy a fantasist?"

And, at that point, he found that discomforting,

so then he would call me

and he would reveal his, um, new—found reticence.

He then started to ask me

about withdrawing as a police witness.

And that's when obviously I got very suspicious.

You know, why would you want to do that at this stage?

In March 2016,

the Metropolitan Police finally closed down Operation Midland,

having identified no murder victims and made no arrests.

By now, Exam were facing criticism,

having peddled Beech's allegations for nearly two years

without ever finding convincing evidence they were true.

Did you still believe Carl Beech at that point?

No, I would say that there was a very big change

in the way that we perceived it inside Exaro generally

at that point, because so much had been hung on the police's use

of the term "true" that, when the police investigation closed

without any action being taken, that made it impossible for us to think

that the police still believed the allegations.

So there was clearly a very big change of approach at that point.

Some people have probably assumed... Mm—hm.

...that Beech took you for a fool... Mm—hm.

...and that you believed what he said, hook, line and sinker. Mm-hm.

Did you? No.

No.

We're not talking about a guy who was easy to disprove here.

If that had been the case, we'd have got to that much, much sooner.

The police would have got to that much sooner.

Is that poor policing? Is it stupidity? What is it?

It was extremely poor policing.

Unjustifiable, and frankly incompetent.

There was a post-Savile over-reaction

and a determination to bring prominent people to justice

for sexual misconduct.

About that, there can be no doubt whatsoever.

They wanted this to be true.

This was like the Holy Grail of abuse, wasn't it?

And I think they were seduced by this

and they lost all sort of sight of sort of rational thought.

Following a report by Sir Richard Henriques

into the Met's disastrous investigation,

Northumbria Police were tasked with investigating Beech himself.

December 2016, I had four missed calls on my mobile and two messages.

And it was from a social worker...

...asking me to ring the school as there was a safeguarding issue

with my son.

And that's when the social worker told me

that Carl was a potential risk to children

and couldn't be with anyone under the age of 18,

which totally blew me away because I thought...

..."Hang on a minute.

"He's been living with our son.

"He's a children's nurse.

"Why are you saying this now?!"

The police raided his house in Gloucester

and seized electronic devices.

They went through them, analysed them and found that some of them

contained indecent images of children.

Indeed, he'd been filming, covertly, schoolboys

and analysis of these images later found

that there's 28 of the worst category —

the very most serious categories of abuse.

Another 100 at Category B and nearly 200 Category C images.

So, quite a collection.

I mean, they kept saying to me, our son is fine.

He hasn't, um...

You know, nothing has happened.

But how do you deal with that?

How-how do you deal with that? What...?

There is no words that you can actually describe how you feel

when you hear that about somebody...

...who you were married to for 18 years,

that you shared a bed with, and they've got that on their computer.

Everything about it.

I mean, even thinking about it now makes me just... Ugh.

I don't like to think about it. I don't want to think about it.

I was genuinely gobsmacked

by the revelation that he was himself, er...

...had paedophilic interest

and an unhealthy interest in young children.

Nothing within my interaction with Beech

had indicated that that was the case.

And, when that bombshell dropped, I was genuinely shocked.

In july 2018, Beech was due in court to face charges

of possessing indecent images, but failed to appear.

This is the house Carl bought,

and the house he renovated.

Whose antlers are they?

It is a... Um...

An elk's. An elk?

Elk's.

With the horn. Antlers. Mm?

In an unexpected turn of events, Beech had fled to Swedish Lapland,

where he'd bought a house near the Arctic Circle

and was living off his NHS pension.

Did he say why he had come here?

It's cheap to buy houses

and it's a beautiful place to stay.

Hm. It's quite cold.

Yes, but he said he liked...

"| like the cold."

I remember that. Mm.

"No problem," he said. "| like the cold."

Did he speak Swedish?

Yes, some. He speaks some Swedish.

My intuition said he was a good man,

honest man, who wanted to do his best and...

...he was grateful.

A friendly man.

A man you can trust.

Did he talk about his life in England?

No, never.

Did he mention that he had a child?

No, never.

So there was never any indication

that he had come here to escape justice?

No.

In October 2018,

Beech was extradited from Sweden and brought back to the UK

to face trial for perverting the course of justice,

fraud and the paedophile of fences.

NEWSREADER: Accused of being a liar —

the man who claimed several high profile figures were paedophiles

goes on trial.

The prosecution dissected all the many lies Beech had told.

It turned out there was no sign of any injuries on his body.

He'd also lied about being taken out of school by the group.

He claimed to being able to walk out of school any number of times,

and yet there was no equivalent record of absenteeism.

He claimed to have an aversion to poppies,

in that they'd been pinned to his naked body during abuse parties

by military people at Remembrance Day.

But when we were student nurses back in the end of the '80s,

we used to wear them on our uniforms,

buy a poppy and tuck them in behind your name badge to hold them on.

Never having an issue.

He used a Proton e-mail account —

that's a Swiss-based e-mail account which is anonymous.

He set up that account for someone he called Fred,

who was known as Fred to the police.

And it was Northumbria Police whose investigations eventually proved

that that e-mail account in Fred's name was, lo and behold, Carl Beech.

Carl Beech claimed that Ted Heath had taken him on board his yacht,

taken him into a cabin, on a double bed

and been sexually abused.

Police spoke to yachtsmen who'd worked with Sir Ted Heath

and found that racing yachts don't have cabins,

don't have double beds — they have hammocks.

That's demonstrably untrue, what he claimed.

Beech's lies were laid bare most clearly by the computer evidence.

It can take you two minutes to find those images of lmber

on the internet. We know now Carl Beech was doing that

and not only that, he'd also been back to lmber on one of the visits

that you can have every year.

So it wasn't that he was recalling memory from the distant past

with brilliant accuracy.

It was just that he was good at using Google

and got on a trip to lmber.

It turned out Beech had been researching his hoax

from the very beginning,

even before he made his compensation claim

and reported his abuse to Wiltshire Police.

The police were able to prove that Carl Beech had looked

at an Evening Standard article,

detailing how victims of jimmy Savile could...

...claim compensation.

One of the things you needed was a crime reference number,

so to do that, he obviously had to contact the police,

and that's what he did.

He contacted Wiltshire Police to make his allegations.

A fantasist who made false allegations

of murder and child sex abuse

against several high—profile figures has been jailed for 18 years.

The judge said Carl Beech was a manipulative and devious person

who'd fabricated a VIP paedophile ring,

accusing people with the highest integrity of vile acts.

Ultimately, Beech turned out to be a complete malicious hoaxer,

and incredibly dangerous.

They should have given him longer, actually...

...for the grief he's caused.

I can't fathom why anyone would do that in particular

to a group of random people.

I mean, it is beyond my comprehension, to be honest.

I think...

...possibly the incentive would be financial.

I don't buy that he was motivated entirely by the money

because £22,000 might seem like a lot of money to some people,

and it is fair chunk of cash,

but he's a middle class guy, he had a decent job,

it's probably about half his salary annually.

In those terms, when you weigh it up against what he did

and what he's been prosecuted for,

the financial motivation doesn't really make much sense.

£22,000 to ruin your life as well as the lives of so many other people,

to serve 18 years in prison, an 18-year sentence,

doesn't seem to be something that would tempt you into doing it.

Possibly the attention he was enjoying.

I mean, if you're suddenly surrounded by press

that are interested in your story,

police that are also interested in your story...

I suppose it's that five minutes of fame.

I think the backlash now against Carl Beech

is to dismiss anything and everything that he said

and to assume that actually he was a liar, a pathological liar,

right from the word go.

I was asked to look into this

and the fairly lurid accusations that he was making.

I think it's possible that something did happen

in the distant past in his childhood.

I still think that what he said about Ray is true.

I don't understand, if that isn't true,

why he would make something like that up.

I have to believe that.

He told me such a long time ago,

why would I not believe what happened with Ray really did happen?

As tempting as it may be to speculate

that Beech's story must contain a kernel of truth,

it seems that even Beech's allegation

that his stepfather, Raymond Beech, abused him was also, in fact, a lie.

Before he went to Wiltshire Police,

he made sure that his stepfather was dead —

in fact, he got a private investigator to check up on that —

so he was free to make whatever allegations he wanted

about his stepfather

without his stepfather being interviewed by the police.

I feel sure that these allegations against him

would never, ever, ever have happened.

Never.

It's alien to his nature.

He was too honest, too above board.

No, it would never have happened.

Explain to me why you're not showing your face, Heather.

I don't particularly want myself and my children

associated with this any more.

It's been such a horrendous time for all of us.

And even though it's been proven

that all of what he said is completely fabricated,

it's the sort of "mud sticks" thing —

you worry that there are still people out there who are saying,

"Where did this come from? "Something must have happened,"

whereas we are adamant that absolutely nothing ever did.

And it's so hard when you see that the public figures

have been given official apologies

and they're now getting that sort of level of sympathy

and yet we're still very much

the family of somebody who was accused.

It almost feels as though that name hasn't yet been cleared.

Do you believe that Carl Beech was abused by his stepfather?

I most certainly do not.

The only evidence that he was abused by his stepfather comes from Nick.

There is simply no evidence,

it's as simple as that.

It all comes down to evidence, and it has to come down to evidence —

that is what this country's criminal system is based on.

Does the evidence seem credible beyond reasonable doubt?

And in the Carl Beech case, it clearly didn't,

and that is not just a tragedy,

it is a scandal and has affected and ruined

a significant number of people's lives.

I think if I had not had a very good set of friends and supporters,

you do begin to wonder whether you wouldn't... you know,

have a nervous breakdown or be really quite ill

as a result of the stress.

What saddens me is a man who's had such a distinguished career,

the last four years of his life were really all about Operation Midland.

You know, a time that should have been for sort of quiet reflection

on a life well lived...

...became a nightmare, really.

Um, I can't really forgive the man for that.

I think Carl has got to realise what he's put me through,

what he's put his mother through,

and what he's put our son through.

It's his mum and his son, you know,

that are really the people that have been seriously damaged by this.

Has his betrayal been traumatic for you?

Mm, yeah, without a doubt.

I had someone who I felt really represented —

or wanted to represent — people who have had no chance in life,

and what he'd done, he's driven a wagon through that, you know,

and smashed the lot up, really.

Total destruction.

Total.

He has set back the cause by a considerable amount.

Not only are people now probably more wary to come forward,

there's now a suspicion that anybody who brings an accusation

of childhood sexual abuse is making it up like Beech did,

and that's a whole area of damage

that will last for many years to come.

"The men enjoyed what they did with always a grin.

"They hurt me in ways you just can't imagine."

"The counselling has been intense and gone really fast,

"dealing with the nightmare and reliving the past."

"Some powerful men were at the heart of the group,

"they are now being tackled so, at last, there's hope."

"| know some of them will get away,

"but despite it all, I survived here to stay."

Was this in his blogs? Yes.

Even one verse — would you even do me one verse?

Oh, God.

I couldn't read that.

MUSIC: Would I Lie To You? by Charles 81 Eddie

# No, no, no, baby

# Mm-mm-mm H00

# My, my, my, my, my girl Look into my eyes

# Would I lie to you? Would I lie to you, baby?

# Would I lie to you?

# Look into my eyes, can't you see they're open wide?

# Would I lie to you, baby, would I lie to you?

# Oh, yeah... #