Police look into claims of secret suicides at Jersey home

Ian Cobain in St Helier

The Guardian

Jersey detectives are trying to establish whether staff at a home where scores of children were physically and sexually abused may have concealed suicides.

Several abuse victims have told detectives they knew of a number of boys who hanged themselves after being raped at Haut de la Garenne, and some believe others died in the home's sick bay.

Detectives have reports of a number of children who may have gone missing after entering the home at various times over the last four decades. Lenny Harper, the officer leading the investigation, said: "Many of them are identified only by a first name or a nickname."

Officers are scouring the records of the island's deputy viscount, who presides over inquests, attempting to match information about the identities of those who may have killed themselves, with the incomplete records.

An inquest was held into the death of one boy, Michael O'Connell, who hanged himself in 1966, but it is unclear whether any other inquests were held into the deaths of children at the home.

Carl Denning, who was at the home between the ages of five and 10 in the 1960s, says he knows of two boys who hanged themselves after being raped, and a third who died in the sick bay.

"I can't remember the names of the boys, I can just remember that one was about 12 or 13, and he had spent the previous week in solitary confinement. He hanged himself in the dormitory.

"The thing that I could never understand was there was never any police, there was never any ambulances. If you asked a member of staff what was going on, they would just tell you it had been dealt with."

Now aged 49 and living in Dinorwig, north Wales, Denning said that in addition to the underground cellar where a number of abuse victims say they were held, a modern wing attached to the 140-year-old building contained a series of small rooms, known as detention cells.

"It was a cell block for children," he said. "If you did something they didn't like you were locked up ... in some cases for two weeks."

Police have not ruled out the possibility that children were murdered at the home. They also say it is possible that no child - other then O'Connell - died there in modern times. Although a fragment of a child's skull was found 10 days ago, it was among material beneath a concrete floor and may have been brought from elsewhere.