Jimmy Savile investigator faces inquiry
The police's dealings with Jimmy Savile are under renewed scrutiny after a senior officer who led an inquiry into her force’s dealings with the paedophile was herself placed under investigation.
Nick Gargan, the chief constable of Avon and Somerset, is examining Assistant Chief Constable Ingrid Lee’s business relationship with serving and retired officers of West Yorkshire Police.
Mrs Lee commissioned and oversaw the force’s internal inquiry into its dealings with Savile, whose main home was in Leeds and who had a close association with the local police.
He hosted eight officers for regular “Friday Morning Club” meetings in his flat and fronted crime prevention campaigns.
She was placed under investigation yesterday after The Sunday Telegraph found she was a director of a property firm alongside four current or former officers from the force.
Mr Gargan will lead an investigation into whether Mrs Lee, 47, followed guidelines which say business dealings by serving officers must be fully declared and cannot present any appearance of allowing an officer to be unduly influenced.
Mrs Lee, who lives in Leeds, has not been suspended and there is no suggestion of wrongdoing.
She is one of 14 directors of Oree Activite. Four others are former or serving police officers. She was previously a director of a second company which had three other officers as directors.
The Sunday Telegraph asked whether any of the officers Mrs Lee is in business with were members of the Friday Morning Club or had dealings with Savile. We also asked whether Mrs Lee declared her business interest to superiors or to the team carrying out the investigation.
The force declined to comment on the questions. It also said Mrs Lee had no statement to make and that she had not been suspended, saying that would be a matter for Mr Gargan to decide.
West Yorkshire was already under scrutiny over its dealings with Savile. It was only in March, months after the start of Operation Yewtree — the main inquiry into Savile’s abuse — that 35 of its officers and staff came forward with information about his offending, leading to two new victims being identified and 11 further lines of inquiry.
A spokesman said yesterday that it was the decision of its former chief constable, John Parkinson, not to appoint an external force to investigate its dealings with Savile.
The new inquiry came as the officer leading Operation Yewtree, Detective Superintendent David Gray, said the police had grown too close to Savile and insisted an era when police mixed with celebrities was now over.
He said: “The great danger of the celebrity culture is that it makes it much harder for victims to come forward. The challenge is to make sure this does not happen again. That is where people are having to reassess their relationships.”
The BBC and hospital authorities have also been accused of failing to properly investigate Savile. On several occasions over five decades, police received intelligence about Savile but he was never arrested or charged.
Asked if he was surprised it had taken so long for some police to come forward, Det Supt Gray refused to comment but added: “Everybody knew. We had people phoning in [in the early stages] from Canada and Australia.”
He said: “Did we miss any opportunities to bring him to justice? That is a question I would pose. Did we? We will have to leave that hanging.”
He added: “People cannot believe this happened under our noses. Of course we challenge ourselves to ask was there something we could have done differently and that challenge was for West Yorkshire and also for us [Scotland Yard].”
Det Supt Gray said the initial scale of the allegations was overwhelming. Operation Yewtree has snowballed from a handful of complaints made against Savile in a television documentary into the pursuit of Britain’s most prolific sex offender, with detectives having completed 377 individual crime reports.
Thirty officers are working on Yewtree, processing 6,000 documents and the officer said he expected more arrests after the search through evidence.
However some victims have still to be contacted. “I wish we had got to victims sooner,” he said. “There are some people still who we have not reached because for whatever reason their contact details are not correct or they didn’t give us the correct details at the time. Maybe a dozen victims.”
Other celebrities — unconnected to Savile — have also been arrested by officers working on Operation Yewtree as a result of a new “watershed” which has led to alleged victims, who had feared their complaints would be ignored, coming forward.
Det Supt Gray disclosed that Savile was thought to have sexually assaulted eight children, both boys and girls, who were aged five at the time. A previous Operation Yewtree report in January had said the youngest victim was aged eight.
The Metropolitan Police received complaints from two adults in October saying they were assaulted by Savile when they were five. Those allegations were not fully pursued until after the report in January. “We were very, very busy because of the sheer number of victims,” said Det Supt Gray. “We wanted to speak to everyone but we couldn’t travel the breadth of the country.”
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