House of horrors

David Brown

The Australian

AT the end of a winding country road in a remote northeast spot on the Channel Island of Jersey you'll find a 150-year-old building called Haut de la Garenne.

Set back from the road on a cliff overlooking stormy seas, Haute de la Garenne is a grand, institutional-looking place that operates as a youth hostel following extensive renovations in 2004. It was previously used as the headquarters of the fictional bureau des etrangers in the BBC television detective drama Bergerac and during World War II it was used by the Nazis as a signalling station when the Germans occupied Jersey.

But Haut de la Garenne has a darker past. It opened in 1867 as an industrial school for young people of the lower classes and neglected children. Later it became known as the Jersey Home for Boys, though at times both boys and girls were housed there until 1986. The gruesome secrets escaping its imposing stone walls today are ugly and deeply disturbing: stories of beatings, rape, torture, imprisonment of children.

Sunny, wealthy Jersey, famed for its beaches, double cream, French food and a flat-rate income tax of 20 per cent, has become the centre of one of Britain's worst child abuse scandals. An inquiry began more than a year ago after police found links between an earlier abuse inquiry involving the Jersey Sea Cadet Corps and institutions including Haut de la Garenne, which means Forest Heights. Last November they appealed for victims of abuse to contact them. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's hotline received four times more calls in the first week than in any other British case of this type.

Two sisters, Karen Coote and Cathy Le Monnier, came forward to reveal they were sexually abused at the home during a five-year period from 1974 to 1979. The sisters - aged 10 and nine when they went into care - were allowed to see their mother only a handful oftimes.

Coote, now 44, says: "We were both abused. Cathy looked to me as her older sister as a mother figure, but I couldn't do anything to stop it happening to her. She was put in a different ward to me and I couldn't even see her. Cathy came down to see me one night and she got sent to the cell for three days. It was so cruel."

The prison-style solitary confinement cells contained just a bed and a potty. Le Monnier, 43, says: "It made you feel depressed, lonely and degraded." Le Monnier was also aware of children disappearing without explanation and says two friends committed suicide after leaving the home.

Cyril Turner, 49, has vivid memories of his time at Haut de la Garenne. He recalls beatings and a culture of fear that led to an escape attempt in 1971, a car crash and being hospitalised for a year. But recovering in a hospital was far better than remaining at Haut de la Garenne, where Turner was sent at 13 for repeated truancy.

Turner recalls being hit over the head with pillows filled with boots and shoes. "You'd go to bed and pow, they'd get you," Turner says. "Times change. It was acceptable back then. It wasn't just me, it was a lot of the children, most of the children." The father of four, who lives in the Jersey village of St Clement, says he was afraid every night. "Finally I did a runner with two older boys."

Another victim, Peter Hannaford, 59, told a local newspaper he and other children were raped nearly every night for several years. An orphan who lived at the home until he was 12, Hannaford described how children were held down and forced to submit to sex and to routine beatings and other physical abuse.

In all about 140 alleged abuse victims from Britain, Australia, Thailand and Germany came forward. Two Jersey officers have flown to Australia to interview former residents of the home. Allegations provided to the inquiry span a period from the 1960s up to 1986, when the home closed, during which more than 1000 children passed through the home.

Former residents told police that abuse also took place on sailing trips and that children were forced to watch others being abused. Former victims say they were chained and physically abused in underground cellars. Based on this information police began searching Haut de la Garenne.

Human bloodstains, a pair of shackles and a large concrete bath were discovered in a bricked-up cellar last month. Officers reportedly found a message scrawled on a wall saying: "I've been bad for years and years." Police also discovered part of a child's skull together with a girl's hair clasp, a button and a piece of fabric buried in a stairwell.

Jersey's deputy police chief Lenny Harper, the officer in charge of the inquiry, says the discovery of a trapdoor into the cellar corroborates what victims told police. It leads down into a complex of at least four cellars.

Specialist sniffer dogs trained to detect human remains have identified at least six other hot spots at the home where bodies could be buried. Detectives believe at least one child may have been murdered and that suicides and mystery deaths of other children may have been hidden.

A second suspected underground torture chamber was broken into by police and sniffer dogs indicated the presence of possible human remains. Detectives believe there are another two connected chambers beneath the southern wing and other underground rooms elsewhere in the building.

As well as excavating the cellars of the two-storey Victorian home, police are searching an area the size of a football pitch behind Haut de la Garenne.

But not everyone in Jersey is happy about the digging. About 40 suspects had been identified in the investigation, most of whom are "respected figures of the establishment". Investigators have already charged a former warden with child abuse between 1969 and 1973 and expect to arrest more people.

The discovery of the second chamber came as Jersey police say corrupt former police officers, politicians and a businessman are trying to discredit the inquiry. Police say at least one of its former officers made threats against those co-operating with the inquiry. This has included sending a large number of letters, including a threat to damage the home and vehicle of one of the officers concerned.

Police are also investigating claims that victims are being threatened by former childcare staff.

Harper has received threats from people who wanted to limit the scope of the investigation. "I received about 140 abusive letters with threats to burn my house and my car," Harper says.

Asked whether there has been pressure to limit the scope of his investigation, Harper, who is from Northern Ireland and has served in Jersey for almost six years, says: "There has been stacks of it. Mainly from ex-cops, corrupt cops who have got friends among senior politicians on the island. I would not insult the island by saying there is a culture of corruption; there is a cache of corrupt ex-coppers.

"There is no doubt allegations were made by children in the past and they were simply not dealt with the way they should have been; that includes the police, the social services and everyone else. British police have been invited to Jersey to support this work."

Harper, 56, says the attempts to block his investigation have arisen from an earlier attack he mounted on police corruption. He was responsible for sacking a hard core of officers who had allegedly demanded sexual favours from members of the public and taken holidays paid for by Jersey businessmen.

He says the former officers, including one high-ranking policeman, threatened him when it became clear his child abuse inquiry would expose their failure to investigate. "I received about 140 abusive letters with threats to burn my house and my car," Harper says.

Jersey is often regarded as a law unto itself and attempts to wreck the police investigation suggest there is a culture of silence.

A former victim, Fred Carpenter, 75, says: "It should have come out ages ago but nobody would listen."

John Rodhouse, 78, director of education at the time much of the abuse is alleged to have occurred, says he has searched "my conscience to see if there had been warning signs during my tenure. My position is I knewnothing."

Reg Jeune, 87, the highly respected former president of Jersey's education committee, also knew nothing. According to a woman at his home, he was not aware of any allegations of abuse during his time in office.

The ongoing inquiry has split the island of 88,000 people and revived class rivalries dating deep into the feudal past. On one side is an elite who staff the island's States, as the parliament is known, under whose watch Jersey has built a tax haven economy. They are personified by Chief Minister Frank Walker. Walker has spoken of "our absolute horror" at the revelations and has promised authorities will identify and prosecute anyone who has perpetrated crimes against children, or who has colluded with that abuse.

Walker is a former chairman of the Jersey Evening Post's publishers. It was under his chairmanship eight years ago that the paper declined to publish a report into abuse in homes. Under the headline "The island need feel no shame", the Evening Post accused the British of portraying the island as some kind of North Korea of the English Channel.

Opponents accuse the elite of ignoring the abuse in their obsession to preserve Jersey's glossy international image. But the island's best hope of a charmed future is to get to grips with its past.

One senior community figure has been prepared to admit to disturbing memories from more than 20 years ago. Lawrence Turner, 64, the Anglican vicar of St Martin le Vieux, near the home, says after the child's remains were found: "I sat for a long time trying to think if I should or could have done something." He recalls being told of untoward goings-on at the home just after he arrived in the parish in the mid-'80s.

The priest describes the whispers as little rumours from one or two people expressing distress. But one of the abuse stories, although vague, was worse than the others. Turner pondered whether he should tell the police himself but decided against. "I only heard it secondhand and I thought the person would go to the authorities," he says.

Jackie Penfold, 63, a former worker at the home who now runs a guesthouse in Fishbourne, West Sussex, also has found old memories resurfacing. "There was one occasion when two young girls had cuts and scratches. One of the houseparents said: 'Take no notice.' The houseparent came to us later and said they were from an abusive home and had self-harmed themselves. I just believed them, but now I am questioning it."

Others have lived with their suspicions for years. Roley McMichael, a Jersey resident, says: "I was a schoolboy during the times the alleged abuse and murder took place and the threat from my father if I received a bad school report was that he would send me to Haut de la Garenne ... Everybody knew it was a nasty place and rumours were rife."

Additional reporting The Sunday Times and Associated Press.