In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies Read Free Book Online

establish a reputation as one of Britain’s leading investigative journalists.
    ‘I always had my ears open,’ Jones says of the suspicions aroused by what he’d witnessed of Jimmy Savile at Duncroft. ‘I didn’t hear anything at first but when I moved into telly at the BBC, I startedto hear the odd story. I’d try to track down where the story had come from but it always ended up as a conversation in a green room, or something like that. There was never anyone who was a witness or who knew a victim or anything like that. Cameramen would say he had underage girls in his caravan but I could never get to the bottom of any of that.’
    Jones also heard Jimmy Savile’s name mentioned in the course of his investigations into paedophile priests within the Catholic Church. Having looked on websites such as Friends Reunited for references to Duncroft, he had found hints but nothing concrete. Something did grab his attention, though: mentions of a police investigation having taken place at some stage. 7
    *
    In late 2008, a 50-year-old woman named Keri began writing her biography. 8 The project was suggested by her counsellor as part of her therapy following a mental breakdown. Keri had suffered with chronic anxiety and depression since spending an abusive childhood in and out of care homes and approved schools.
    She had gone on to marry three times, and had seven children by five different fathers. ‘Due to my background of abuse, I was entirely unaware of how to have, or hold onto, any kind of intimate relationship with a man,’ Keri explained. Three of her children had been taken into care as babies, and another as a 10-year-old. In 1982, while she was pregnant with her fourth child, she spent a year in prison for deception.
    Keri had never known her natural father and claimed to have been abused by her stepfather. At the age of 12 she was sent to Garfield House in Norfolk where, she alleged to the local police in 1999, a care worker had sexually molested her. Two years later, in late 1972, she was transferred to Duncroft. She was 14 at the time.
    In late 2009 and throughout 2010, Keri began publishing online chapters from the second instalment of her biography,
Keri-Karin Part 1
. They covered her time at Duncroft. In one chapter, she wrote about typing classes, being taught dressmaking and thescreams she heard coming from the padded room. More pertinently, she referred to the first time she witnessed a celebrity visit to the school, by a man she referred to only as ‘JS’.
    Keri reported that the ‘girls flocked to gain attention’ from JS and a small group was tasked with cleaning and polishing his car. He brought with him records and cartons of duty-free cigarettes, which he distributed among the girls as gifts. She also wrote that he would spend hours with Margaret Jones, chatting and laughing in her office. ‘I always looked forward to JS visiting,’ Keri recorded, ‘because it meant pleasant food, rides down the lane in his sports car and extra cigarettes.’
    In the very next paragraph, she spelled out the price of such perks. ‘Sadly, it also meant one had to put up with being mauled and groped when he pulled into a lay-by some five miles along the road. I wasn’t the only girl that JS favoured with this either. In fact, he often tried to press me to ‘go further’ than simply fondling him and allowing him to grope inside my knickers and at my partly formed breasts. He promised me all manner of good things if I would give him oral sex.’ 9
    One of these inducements was the promise of a trip to see him record one of his television shows at the BBC. Keri acquiesced. Afterwards, she said she gagged and JS leaned across her and flung open the car door, telling her ‘Not in the car. Not in the car.’ He was good to his word, though, and the first of a number of trips to the BBC was arranged.
    In the summer of 2011, Meirion Jones found the website on which Keri had published her biography. ‘It was