In 1981 police were already investigating London ‘child pornography gang’ linked to trafficking and murder
15 year-old Martin Allen went missing on Guy Fawke’s Night in 1979. He was on his way home from school, and was last seen “being gripped tightly, by a man aged between 30 and 40, about 6ft tall with blond hair, at Gloucester Road tube station in London.”
A detailed artist’s impression of both Martin and his alleged abductor was left at every address in the Earls Court area, police visited over 40,000 people, but Martin was never found.
Another boy, 8 year-old Vishal Mehrotra, went missing near his home in Putney on the night of the Royal Wedding in 1981. His body was discovered in Sussex woodland the following year. His murder is still unsolved.
In August 1982, detectives from Scotland Yard were investigating connections between the disappearance or murder of the two boys and the Elm Guest House paedophile ring. This was reported in both the Daily Express and the Daily Star on 10th August 1982. These were the only news reports to link the two boys to Elm Guest House. The national newspapers were stopped from reporting on the scandal after 16th August 1982. It’s still a mystery exactly how they were stopped, but it involved legal threats from the Attorney General, Sir Michael Havers, and lawyers purportedly acting for Elm Guest House.
Was the police investigation into the missing boys shut down at the same time as the main Elm Guest House investigation?
The two boys disappeared within a couple of miles of Rocks Lane in Barnes, where Elm Guest House was located. But it turns out it wasn’t the geographical location alone that had prompted Scotland Yard to reopen their files on Vishal Mehrotra and Martin Allen.
In an interview with the Sunday Express from December 1981, just over 2 years after his son went missing, Thomas Allen said:
“I think our son was kidnapped by a gang of child pornographers. I think he was spirited away to some overseas country and forced to take part in films.”
This was an unusual conclusion to come to in 1981, when there was less public awareness of paedophiles, child trafficking, and the trade in images and films of child abuse. But it seems Mr Allen’s information had come from Scotland Yard, because the article goes on to say:
Police have sent European and other overseas police forces photographs of Martin so these can be compared with seized child pornography films.
This was years before Scotland Yard had a dedicated paedophile unit, and it must have been one of the first times Scotland Yard had liaised with overseas police forces in this way. They must have had strong information to go on, or this line of inquiry wouldn’t have been pursued.
When the Elm Guest House was raided in June 1982, police discovered a ‘video suite’ which was used to make films of boys being sexually abused. The door had a sticker on it saying ‘Spartacus Members Welcome’, and this was also mentioned in advertisements. Spartacus was an international paedophile network based in Holland, which traded child pornography to members around the world.
Detectives who had been working on the Martin Allen and Vishal Mehrotra cases must have been convinced that they were on to the abductor(s) of Martin Allen, and the murderer(s) of Vishal Mehrotra. There were too many similarities to put down to coincidence.
– Both boys disappeared within 2 miles of Rocks Lane, Barnes.
– Elm Guest House had a ‘video suite’ for commercial production of child pornography.
– The guest house had strong links to paedophiles in Holland, which was notorious for being the European hub for both child trafficking and child pornography.
It seems impossible that there was another ‘child pornography gang’ with links to Holland and beyond, operating from the leafy suburbs of South-West London in the early 1980s.
So, when the British Establishment covered up the Elm Guest House paedophile network, were they also covering up child trafficking and murder?
Sunday Express, 27th December 1981
The Elm Guest House: How an Establishment paedophile network was covered up for 31 years
Was the Scotland Yard investigation into missing boys stopped?
The Spartacus paedophile network was exposed by the Sunday People in 1983
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http://books.google.com/books?id=QzZDAQAAIAAJ&q=%22FROM+OUR+REPORTERS+November+5+%E2%80%94+Guy+Fawkes+Night+%E2%80%94+is+this+%22&dq=%22FROM+OUR+REPORTERS+November+5+%E2%80%94+Guy+Fawkes+Night+%E2%80%94+is+this+%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Qw3mU6-3KomBygTDqoLgCg&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA
The Illustrated London News, Volume 268, Issue 2 – 1980
[Page 31]
FROM OUR REPORTERS
A boy who disappeared
{An artist’s impression of the man and boy seen on Gloucester Road station last November 5. Was the boy Martin Allen? Was he being forcibly abducted?}
November 5 – Guy Fawkes Night – is this year the first anniversary of the disappearance in London of a 15-year-old boy in circumstances which have touched a sensitive nerve with both police and public.
The boy, Martin Allen, was raised in the Holloway Road area of North London. His father Tom has worked for many years as a driver with the Australian High Commission and, on his promotion to become the High Commissioner’s personal chauffeur, was given a cottage near the official residence in Hyde Park Gate. Martin was attending the Central Foundation, a respected school near Old Street, and it was decided that he should continue to do so, travelling across London from Gloucester Road Underground station to Old Street, changing at King’s Cross.
November 5 last year was a Monday and on Mondays the boy would not return home immediately after school but would visit the home of an older, married brother in Holloway, usually staying overnight. This was the plan on November 5. In his bright yellow Astral bag he carried a woollen balaclava his mother was sending for her grandchild, a transformer to use with a toy train, and other items reflecting his intention to visit his relatives. He had, however, left at home a £1 note he owed his sister-in-law. He told schoolfriends he intended to travel home and pick it up and then return to Holloway Road. (This seems a lot of trouble to go to but the police say it was only a 25 minute journey, and he had a travel pass so it would cost no more.) Thus it was that at about 3.50 pm he parted from a friend at King’s Cross station and walked into the short and usually crowded passage to the west-bound trains. This was the last definite sighting of Martin Allen. He then vanished.
A hue and cry should have been raised that evening but unfortunately his disappearance was not noted for over 24 hours. His parents thought he was staying overnight with his brother. His brother, who was not on the telephone, assumed that because it was Guy Fawkes Night the boy had gone to a bonfire party instead and would not be coming. Martin was not missing by his family until he failed to arrive home on the Tuesday evening.
Over 3,500 boys and girls are reported missing in London every year. They nearly all turn up within a few days. A high proportion are in the care of local authorities or in trouble with one authority or another and have run away. The first instinct of police investigators, therefore, is to look for reasons why a boy such as Martin might have absconded. Was there trouble in the family? At school? With a girlfriend? With the police themselves? Extensive inquiries, including interviews with every member of the family, every known friend of the boy or the family, teachers, schoolchildren and everyone who could possibly have known Martin revealed, however, that he did not fit the pattern for missing children. On the contrary, it became clear that he was a happy, home-centred, well liked boy without a problem in the world. The police began to feel very uneasy.
From the start the man in charge of the investigation has been David Veness, a father of two children and as highly regarded as his promotion to Detective Chief Inspector at 33 would suggest Veness, a policeman with 15 years’ experience, says that while missing children are not unusual, abducted children are. “Our inquiries were initially intended to answer three questions: had he run away because of some trouble? Had he run away to seek adventure? Or had he had an accident? There is not a fraction of evidence that he ran away from a problem, and we looked into his background and life with immense care. Nor by all accounts was he an adventurer, a boy with dreams of stowing away on the Concorde of the QE2. We conducted detailed searches of the North London area round Holloway and King’s Cross and in the area of the school, every piece of vacant land, derelict property. We also searched the open spaces round Gloucester Road. If he had had an accident he would have been found.”
By now Veness and his colleagues were treating Martin’s disappearance in almost every respect as if it were a murder inquiry. The next step was to seek publicity and in this respect the police had bad luck. The Anthony Blunt affair broke in the newspapers, devouring the column inches that might have been available to tell the story. The BBC television programme Nationwide prepared a programme but could not screen it because of the technician’s strike. A full three weeks went by before the Nationwide item finally appeared and Veness got his first breakthrough.
“From that programme we got a group of six sightings which described an incident on Gloucester Road station that day. A man was seen forcefully guiding a small boy, his hand on the back of the boy’s neck, on to a train travelling on the Piccadilly line to Earls Court. They were seen to leave the train at Earls Court station and as they walked down the platform the man was heard to say ‘Don’t try to run.’ They then vanished. Now six people had not all seen the whole of that incident but they saw bits and it came together like a jigsaw.”
Up to this point the investigation had been concentrated largely in North London. Now it moved to West London and a massive search took place of the Gloucester Road-Earls Cross area. The homes of 40,000 people were visited. The area was inundated with leaflets. A year later there has been no advance. Martin Allen has been seen or heard of no more.
But was the boy seen being led away from Earls Court station Martin Allen? Chief Inspector Veness says that while he cannot be definite, “I had enough evidence to mount a major police operation on the basis that it was. For a start, the timing fits. They were seen at about 4.20 pm, just the time when Martin could have been expected to arrive at Gloucester Raod. The description fits; the witnesses describe a boy who could be Martin, slim, 5 feet tall, wearing school uniform and carrying a bag. Despite all the publicity no man or boy has come forward to identify himself as one of that couple. Either that boy was Martin, or a boy with a remarkable resemblance to him was abducted on that train at that time, and that is a considerable coincidence.”
If it was Martin, why did he not appeal to others on the train or on the platform at Earls Court? He was, after all, 15 years old, intelligent, aware. It could be that the man had a powerful personality and had engendered such fear in the boy that he dare not call for help. Or it could be that he persuaded Martin that he was someone in authority, a London Transport security officer or a policeman, and that he was taking him to an office near the station to explain some misdemeanour. These are not questions anyone can answer.
Certainly it would have required remarkable nerve to abduct a boy of 15 in broad daylight in front of other travellers, but given the lack of any evidence, the police are having to work on the basis that this is what happened. The size of the police operation has been almost unprecedented. There is no question that the case has got under the skin of Veness and his colleagues, almost to the point of obsession.
Why? It is not, says Veness, because of the diplomatic connexions, for no special pressure has been applied. It is a combination of factors: the mystery itself, the warm picture that has emerged of Martin, and perhaps the fact that Veness and others working on the case, together with the public, have been increasingly disturbed by the evidence that a schoolboy could travel on the Underground at a busy time, be seen by scores of people but be remembered by hardly any, be forcibly abducted before the powers of Scotland Yard and a considerable force of policemen to find him.
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I do not think that winesses said that the boy was being gripped tightly, or forcefully guided. As the drawing, given with the help of witnesses, shows, the boy was being gently guided, with a hand on the back of his neck.
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