Keeble Harry - Baby X

Detective Sergeant Harry Keeble has almost twenty years experience in inner-city pro-active policing. He joined the Met after leaving university in 1989. In 1999, Harry joined Haringey drugs squad as a uniformed sergeant and spent the following twelve months planning and leading 100 raids on fortified crack houses. Appalled at the number of abused children he encountered, and in particular by the senseless death of Victoria Climbi, Harry joined Hackneys Child Protection Team. He spent the following five years bringing dozens of child abusers to justice, managing several international police investigations related to child abuse across Europe, Africa and the Caribbean. He has prosecuted major drug dealers, rapists and child abusers at the Old Bailey and currently works for Specialist Operations at New Scotland Yard.

Kris Hollington is a freelance journalist and author living and working in London. He has written for the Sunday Times, Guardian, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, News of the World, Loaded and Arena, among others. Kris is the author of five books including, also with Harry Keeble, Crack House, published by Simon & Schuster.

First published in Great Britain by Pocket Books, 2010
An imprint of Simon & Schuster
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright 2010 by Harry Keeble
with Kris Hollington

This book is copyright under the Berne convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Harry Keeble
and Kris Hollington to be identified as the authors of this work
has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
222 Grays Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB

www.simonandschuster.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-84739-787-4
eBook ISBN 978-1-84983-172-7

Typeset by M Rules
Printed by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, Berkshire RG1 8EX

For all the Baby Xs

CONTENTS

AUTHORS NOTE

It is important to ensure that the details of some of the individuals encountered through my work (witnesses, police officers, social workers, teachers, etc.) are not set out in a manner that would enable people to recognize them. It is of course also necessary to protect the identities of children and the parents whose stories are detailed in this book. The authors have, with the exception of names that are in the public domain, protected the identities of these people by changing names and altering some background details. Those cases that are a matter of public record are reported in their original detail.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I can only hope that I have done justice to the stories of the abused children in this book. The bravery of the children and those adult victims who confronted their traumatic past cannot be praised enough.

Special thanks goes to Rob and later Byron for their leadership and support of Hackney Police Child Protection Team as well as all the officers I served with for providing me with such an enjoyable and challenging posting.

Rob, my mentor and my very good friend, deserves additional praise for handling impossible tasks so incredibly well. I can think of no one better to work on the serious case review of Baby Peter.

To all those at Hackney Social Services, thank you for all your constructive advice, your courage and for being such a pleasure to work with.

To Detective Chief Superintendent Peter Spindler and Detective Superintendent Chris Bourlet, I am forever grateful for your unstinting support of front-line Child Protection officers.

My gratitude goes out to the Crown Prosecution Service who supported victims and our department through many very challenging trials.

Finally, for those who wish to contact me to discuss any issues raised in this book, then I am available via email: harrykeeble@btinternet.com

Thats the last time I leave you idiots in charge! my boss Rob yelled down the phone. Bloody hell. This was supposed to be an easy one. Practically my first job and Id kicked off a full-blown siege and a thirty-strong lynch mob was ready to rip our suspect to pieces. Id had better Monday mornings.

I glanced up at the windows of the council house in Hackneys heartland. Somewhere behind the glass was our man, armed with a knife, threatening suicide. I shivered in the January drizzle as the van full of officers in riot gear pulled up. What was keeping the hostage negotiator? Hed been talking to the bloke for ages.

A white guy with a mullet was the most vocal of the growing mob. Scum! he yelled at the house. Castrate the bastard! About thirty neighbours and passers-by had joined him in the street. Pure hatred radiated from them to the house.

James and Simon were both giving me daggers. What? Its not my fault the guys a fruit loop. But I knew my gung-ho approach hadnt helped. When I joined Hackneys Child Protection Team at the end of 2001, I thought I had all of the answers to their many problems.

I was rapidly finding out that this was not the case.

The Child Protection Team (now called the Child Abuse Investigation Team or CAIT) investigates all forms of abuse (whether physical, mental, sexual or emotional) of a child by family members, extended family members, main carers, babysitters, youth workers and teachers because in most cases of child abuse, that is exactly whos responsible. In this case it was an uncle accused of molesting his nine-year-old nephew.

When my colleagues heard I had applied to join Child Protection they asked me, What the hell are you going there for? It was a fair question. Nobody wanted to join the Cardigan Squad so-called because Child Protection officers were seen as woolly, glorified social workers that mopped up after domestics. It was the least glamorous department in the Met, a real career cul-de-sac. Ambitious officers were expected to fight drug-dealers and terrorists, the exciting big-budget departments with cool gadgets and massive, prestigious operations.

Not me. I wanted to be out on the streets, fighting crime, getting my hands dirty.

My hard-hitting approach had worked wonders at my previous posting, as a uniformed sergeant in charge of the five-man Haringey Drugs Squad. My team and I decided that the only way to return the streets to the community was to fight a war against crack. Our mission was to eliminate all one hundred crack houses in our borough in one year. It should have been impossible. But we did it. As a direct result all black-on-black killings in Haringey were halted for the following twelve months.

About six months into our marathon, we crashed into a crack house in Tottenham. By this time we were pretty much immune to the sight of prostitutes and their clients in a filthy stinking room but this time we were brought up short by a sight that absolutely stunned us in one of the bedrooms we found two terrified kids hiding under the bed. One was six years old, the other eleven. The older child asked me if they could still go to school. Christ, I thought. What chance have they got? I made sure they were handed over to the care of Child Protection.

A few weeks later, as I took one dealer into custody, a little girl walked past me in the company of two adults she looked terrified. I wondered what her life would be like, growing up surrounded by violence and horror. I hated the fact that, more than any other age group, drugs seemed to hurt children the most.

I didnt know it then, but living just a few doors away was another little girl who was about to change my life.

Her name was Victoria Climbi.

From July 1999, the moment she arrived in Tottenham from the Ivory Coast, eight-year-old Victoria was tortured by her aunt Marie Kouao and her boyfriend, Carl Manning, who believed she was possessed. To exorcize the evil spirits she was beaten with belt buckles, bicycle chains, coat hangers and shoes. Razor blades were taken to her fingers and a hammer to her toes. She was burned with cigarettes, had boiling water poured over her and slept on a bin bag in the bath.