Commander Peter Spindler, the head of inquiry for the Jimmy Savile case, has said that Savile had spent “every waking minute” of his life thinking about abusing children and had even used the final edition of the BBC’s Top of the Pops to commit sex offences.
He said that Savile had “groomed a nation” and preyed on 450 victims, aged between eight and 47, over a 54-year period. Almost a fifth of his victims were boys.
A Metropolitan Police report giving the findings of Operation Yewtree, the investigation into Savile’s offending launched after an ITV documentary exposed his paedophilia last year, said that 450 people had made complaints to the police. To date 214 offences have been identified across 28 police force areas. They include 126 indecent acts and 34 rapes.
Savile was “hiding in plain sight” during his offending, which began in 1955, says the 37-page Giving Victims a Voice report.
The report says there is no evidence that Savile was part of a pedophile ring, though he could have been part of an “informal network”.
Detective Superintendent David Gray, the leading investigator, said, “He spent every minute of every day thinking about it. He is programmed to think and act in that way. He only picked the most vulnerable, the ones least likely to speak out against him.” Savile preyed on 450 victims, aged between eight and 47, over a 54-year period. Almost a fifth of his victims were boys.
One of the most striking figures in the report relates to the number of children under 10 who were abused by Savile. A total of 18 girls and 10 boys under the age of 10 were abused by Savile, with 23 girls and 15 boys aged 10 to 13.
Savile’s earliest reported offence was in Manchester in 1955. He went on to sexually abuse children at the BBC from 1965 to 2006 at Leeds General Infirmary, where he volunteered as a porter, from 1965 to 1995; at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where he was also a porter, from 1965 to 1988, and at Duncroft School between 1970 and 1978.
Other offences were committed at Broadmoor secure hospital, where he had his own room, at his holiday cottage at Glencoe in the Highlands and in his mobile home.
Savile was investigated by police five times while he was still alive – by the Met in the 1980s and in 2003, by Surrey Police from 2007 to 2009, by Sussex Police in 2008 and by Jersey Police in 2008, but none of them resulted in charges. The Crown Prosecution Service has today released a separate report into its reasons for deciding not to press charges.
The report suggests that part of the reason Savile was never caught was because at the time he was most active, “police investigation of such crimes was more basic and lacked the specialist skills, knowledge and the collaborative approach of later years”.
