'We were accused of raping little girls, having orgies, killing cats

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jul 11, 2004 | by Vicky Allan

EXCLUSIVE: The full story of the families whose lives were shattered when they were falsely accused of abusing children on a remote Scottish island; For the past nine months Vicky Allan has been talking to the families accused and finally cleared of being involved in the ritual abuse of children on Lewis. This is their story

John and Susan Sellwood were staying at a caravan park in the northeast of Scotland when the phone call came through. Susan came back from the toilet to find John pacing outside the awning. He started to cry. She assumed the worst: that finally the indictment had come through and that soon her husband would be appearing at Glasgow High Court, along with the seven other accused. Soon the whole story would be hung out in a court room and fed to the media: a tale of animal-sacrifice, robed ritual, mass orgies and the sexual abuse of children, set on the Isle of Lewis. "The case has been dropped," he told her.

The Sellwoods were still in a mildly celebratory mood when they picked me up on Monday. Their "camper van" was a cobbled-together affair, constructed from bits that John finds at the tip where he works. Susan listed the accusations she and her husband had been bombarded with in police interviews. "We're supposed to have all raped the girls and then the men did. Then we were having sex orgies. We had sex orgies with each other's partners - wife-swapping, whatever you want to call it - at each other's houses. We're supposed to have killed cats, chickens, rams and lambs, then drunk the blood.

"We were accused of drug taking and making snuff movies. I didn't even know what a snuff movie was. The satanic cult was supposed to have threatened the mother to keep quiet. John was accused of trying to get her to change her evidence after a complaint. This was supposed to have been on CCTV. Porno photos are supposed to have been taken by us using a webcam. The police said that they had medical evidence that the accused had sexually assaulted the girls." She pauses. "But they had no DNA. They had no DNA evidence."

Most people's reaction on hearing such a list is one of disbelief: as a society we are poised in a mixed state of credulous horror and denial of the existence of "satanic abuse". Since the first wave of alleged cases arrived from America in the 1980s there have been hundreds of such claims in Britain. Only one case, in Pembroke, Wales, where the investigation arising from a boy's allegation of sexual abuse against his father exposed a large paedophile ring, has ever led to convictions.

The notorious Orkney case of 1991 saw nine children snatched from their beds in dawn raids in South Ronaldsay on suspicion that they were the vitims of ritual satanic sexual abuse at the hands of a paedophile ring. In February of 1991 the case was thrown out of court, and followed by the seven-month Clyde Inquiry into the case, and its condemnation of the actions of the social workers involved.

A 1994 report on cases in England and Wales by anthropologist Jean La Fontaine suggested that what was presented as the testimony of children in satanic abuse cases was almost always an adult construct, and it has become a widespread conviction that the whole phenomenon was a "moral panic". Which elicits the question: why has yet another case of alleged ritual abuse got so far - costing over (pounds) 100,000 of tax-payers' money - only to lead to a dead-end.

The police investigation on Lewis started nearly two years ago, sparked by a series of allegations made by the children of a family we will refer to as Family X.

The first overt signs of it were a series of interviews across the island, followed by the arrest in October of the eight accused - Sellwood, Ian Campbell, Timothy Tetley, Peter Nelson, David Disney, Lily Place, John Gray and Neil Stretton - in a series of dawn raids across Lewis and England.

Visiting the island in March, I was struck by the silence - that paralysis that descends at the mention of "child abuse". Locals who lived only metres away from one of the accused would tell me: "I don't know him. I've never met the man." A rift of suspicion had cracked through the community, and there was a feeling among the islanders that, as the accused were all incomers, it was the "white settlers" bringing their bad ways. As local councillor John Mackay told me: "The problem was it gave every incomer a bad name. They were all tarred with the same brush."

Still, it was possible to pick up a little information. Most of the accused lived or had lived in the Ness area. David Disney was actively involved in the community, a member of the Church of Scotland, and worked a croft. Neil Stretton was an aeroplane model- maker who kept chickens. John Gray had moved from Rotherham and used to be a Boy Scout leader. Ian Campbell was openly a "pagan" and had moved with his wife, Penny, to the island on a council house swap. Lily Place, 75, of Leicester had lived in the Lional area. John Sellwood was a Mormon who worked as a tip cleaner, helped his wife run a cat rescue centre, and had been Santa Claus at a grotto they ran to raise money for charity. On the whole, these people lived just a few notches up from subsistence. Their lives were held together by disability allowance, medical prescriptions and, certainly since the arrests, anti-depressants. They had come to the island for a "better way of life".