The next time you visit Stratford-Upon-Avon go to Lower Quinton some eight miles away for in 1945 this sleepy village was the scene of one of the most mysterious unsolved murders of recent times, a crime which even frustrated the celebrated Scotland Yard detective Chief Inspector Robert Fabian. The renowned down-to-earth thief taker was convinced the murderer used the smokescreen of black magic to cover up a more mundane motive but others insisted the crime had the smell of witchcraft about it. Even now, nearly seventy five years later, those who live in the village remain tight lipped….after all it has been written of Warwickshire “This is the country of the spook and the witch; of the spirits that haunt the hillsides; of the demon that halts horses in lonely roads and makes them refuse to take another step”

On St Valentine’s Day 1945, the mutilated body of 74 year old farm labourer Charles Walton, who lived his whole life in the sleepy village of Lower Quinton some eight miles from Stratford-Upon-Avon, was found on the nearby slopes of Meon Hill. Walton had set out at 8am that morning from the small cottage he shared with his niece, Edith Isabel Walton, for a day’s work hedge-cutting for local farmer Alfred Potter.

Riddled with rheumatism, the ageing villager carried with him his walking stick and the tools of his trade; a pitchfork and a billhook. When his corpse was discovered later that evening, all three of those implements had been used to end his life in the most horrifying of ways…….

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I watched the BBC’s take on the “Great Train Robbers” last night. The Telegraph dubbed it polished which it certainly was. But I can’t help agreeing with one of the comments.

For my money this show was more style than substance. Yes the filming, sets and score were immaculate but where was the script and believability? It sounded more like a 50’s Pinewood studio crime caper. The dialogue between the crooks was dire as if any of them ever spoke to each other in comic voice bubble language. As a consequence I found it very difficult to believe in them and it failed to add any depth to the plot and characters.

It was an excellent example of the geezer caper genre, but more “Italian Job” than “Get Carter” with the snappy one liners and lack of  atmospheric menace – and the production values were not always 100%….snow and leafless trees in August?

Presenting Bruce Reynolds as framing the blag as a symbolic strike against “The Establishment” was a laughable attempt to over egg the whole affair with retro sixties mythology. They were South London thieves, greedy, violent and preferring others to work hard so that they could then rob them of the fruits of their labour.

Robin Hoods they were not.

But then the romantic affair between media luvvies and violent criminals dates back to that very era of the sixties when the colour supplements began to glamourise the Krays.

Dan Hodges, I think, hit the nail on the head. During the “caper” the train driver, Jack Mills, and some of the postal staff were savagely beaten. Others were terrorised into compliance. But, of course, they weren’t chirpy geezers who were dreaming of opening a club or buying a villa in Spain. They were just ordinary anonymous faces who did the boring jobs that keep our society ticking over.

Tonight, the BBC will present the first of a two-part docudrama on the robbery. One, called the “Copper’s Tale”, focuses on the efforts of the police to catch the perpetrators of the crime. The second, “The Robber’s Tale”, shows things from the perspective of Biggs and his colleagues. I presume it was done that way in the interests of balance. I also suspect there will not be a third episode “The Railway Worker’s Tale”.

Amen to that, say I….

Gary Young, 41, and Amy Marshall, 29 from Hartlepool were on their honeymoon in a Torquay Hotel when they decided to cut out the middleman at the beginning of married life. Instead of going home and collecting benefit they short circuited the system and went to taxpayers direct and took the money from them.

Amy broke into a caravan and was seen by the family who were renting it leaving with £120 of their holiday money. They chased after her but she leapt into Gary’s car and sped off.

On the same day Gary tricked his way into an 81 year old disabled lady’s home by claiming to be a social worker. He then went through her belongings while she sat terrified in  her chair and left with her credit cards and the key to her mobility scooter

The two of them obviously thought the old lady was easy pickings so they decided to go back to her house and terrify her even further for a bit of fun and to thieve more stuff.

Hey, don’t be judgemental…..Gary has a car that won’t just run on thin air and a habit….and now a wife (who has kids by a previous marriage)

But while they were waiting to break in again they were caught by the police and Amy still had the old lady’s cards on her…..(maybe to hand them back? FLYING PIG ALERT!!!)

Now they will spend the first years of their marriage in separate prisons…how sad…Gary got 3 year 2 months, Amy got fourteen months – but I am sure he’ll be out in two years and they can kick start their marriage and even treat themselves to a second honeymoon. After all everyone needs a good beginning to a new relationship….

h/t pic

A deeply unpleasant and worrying story emanating from Burnley and Lancashire County Council.

Receptionist Mahdiya Khan accessed a computer database 60 times to get details of a child sex victim. She was jailed for eight months, but details have only just emerged. Three men have also been found guilty of interfering in the case.

She happened to be the “girl friend” of Mohammed Imran Amjad, 26, who was under investigation for grooming and abusing a 14 year old girl and lending her out for others in his circle to sexually assault.It’s a shocking story but merely the latest in a whole series of cases where Muslim men, usually of Pakistani descent, have groomed underage white schoolgirls and turned them into sex slaves.

However, apart from the obvious tragedy of a serious sex crime  there are a number of other issues arising from this story that give cause for concern.

This case was decided quite a while ago but the details have only come out in the last few days – now why would that be?

It also appears that of the national media only The Daily Mail and BBC published the story – did the others think it of less importance than Simon Cowell’s “lovechild” or Miley Cyrus’s “twerking?

Apart from Amjad several other men were brought to trial but they were freed after the girl said the sex was consensual. But by definition children under 16 cannot give their consent for sex –  it is automatically a form of rape. So why did the courts allow these men to walk away?

A receptionist (not a social worker) can access highly sensitive data sixty times with nothing being flagged? Why were there no safeguards in place – and what does this tell us about all the other databases used by public services? No wonder people are getting so concerned about who will have access to our files.

This information was then used to intimidate the girl and her family into keeping their mouths shut.

Three other people connected to Amjad had also attempted to interfere with the case.His cousin Waqas Khalid threatened to rape the victim and her mother. His friend Qasim Hussain persuaded her to change her statement. His brother, Furqan Amjad, contacted the victim 350 times

Attempting to pervert the course of justice by intimidation and/or bribery show a contempt for the law that deserves exemplary punishment – yet Furqan Amjad was jailed for 15 months, Khalid was fined £300 and Hussain will be sentenced next week.

Oh, and remember receptionist Mahdiya Khan was given eight months in prison – which means she is probably out already.

There is a nasty smell about this whole affair….

You know, Dan Hannan makes an excellent point here

When we call a man a terrorist, we bestow a certain status on him. He ceases to be a common criminal, a violent narcissist, a drop-out. He becomes, instead, a man with a cause.

Bellicose young men, in all ages and nations, look for ideologies that justify their aggression. Sometimes, they latch on to an organisation that already exists – the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the IRA, al-Qaeda. Sometimes, as with Anders Behring Breivik or Seung-Hui Cho, they develop their own Weltanschauung – often in language so conceited and hackneyed that, in other
circumstances, it would be laughable.

 

Absolutely right. In the 1980s several  IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland, serving sentences for crimes of murder or aiding and abetting murder, went on hunger strike because they wanted to be granted the status of being called political prisoners. Maggie Thatcher faced them down – she knew that giving  them that status would immediately transform  them into enemy combatants, warriors to be treated with respect outside the battlefield because they were fighting for what they believed was a just cause. So she instructed that they were to be treated as criminals, men and women who  murdered, tortured, kidnapped and robbed law abiding citizens.

Equally do not inflate these murderers egos by describing their victims as being “executed” – that portrays the murder  as a killing sanctioned by higher law and acts as a useful psychological justification tool for those with murder on their mind.

Calling a “terrorist” a criminal  buttresses his own self belief that his gruesome deeds have some sort of moral dimension that takes him far above the child killers, wife beaters and gang enforcers who inhabit the other cells. Calling him a criminal would demean his actions .

The killers of Drummer Rigby in Woolwich were murderers not religious/political activists. The more often we spell that out the less likely shall we hear those weasel words

“Of course I cannot condone these killings BUT……..”

News that all 800 members of SO6, the armed police unit guarding the UK’s political elite, are to be questioned over suggestions that – shock horror – some of them were a little economical with the truth over the Andrew Mitchell “Plebgate” affair has caused a bit of a ripple in the media.

The Met helpfully added that this investigation will cost about £64.000 and occupy 3,000 hours of police time.

Naturally Labour Party mouthpiece Daily Mirror found a rentaquote MP to sound off about wasting resources at a time of “cuts” and “police sources” (AKA the Police Federation) muttered about “witch hunts”……Labour politicians and Police Federation agitprop activists, of course, had previously milked the whole incident until the arrest of the SO6 officer when they then became strangely silent.

Some might suggest that the details of this police investigation and the accompanying press release have been deliberately designed to stir the pot again and paint the current government (which coincidentally is attempting to reform the police service) in an unfavourable light.

But that cannot be the case for we all know that every police officer is absolutely “wonderful”………

As Alistair Thompson points out the biggest mystery behind the phone hacking scandal that spawned the Leveson Inquiry is why the police and the Blair/Brown Labour government turned a blind eye to this illegal activity. Yet this is a question still largely unanswered by the Leveson Report – and, of course, ignored by Ed Milliband, Ed Balls and Tom Watson who were very close to the levers of power in those Blair/Brown years.

Could it be that from 1996 to 2010 Rupert Murdoch supported the Labour party?

A controversy is brewing in Rhode Island after four police officers seemingly made a group of young men do push-ups as immediate punishment for vandalizing mailboxes.

The mayor and the police chief of North Providence are apparently up in arms. There is talk of the officers being punished. Probably at this very moment regiments of lawyers are flooding into the town to snap up a juicy “human rights” case.

So perhaps it’s just the right moment for Katy Bourne to phone the four officers and offer them a job here in the UK with the Sussex police or, if that isn’t possible, at least show her officers the video.

No lawyers, no court process ending up months later with nil result, zero paperwork – a bunch of idiots have their time wasted (which irritates them) and victims see something being done….. now that’s what I call a great example of “community policing”!!!

The row that has broken out over Rotherham Council’s decision to take three foreign born children away from the couple who were fostering them because they were members of UKIP has certainly hit a public nerve. It’s a huge story not just in the tabloids but also the broadsheets and even the BBC, usually keen to avoid portraying UKIP in a sympathetic light, has been leading with it.

Initially the Labour controlled council stonewalled with pravdaesque blandness

Joyce Thacker, the council’s Director of Children and Young People’s Services, had earlier toured radio and television studios to defend the decision, saying the children had been removed in order to protect their “cultural and ethnic needs”.

But even boneheaded Labour apparatchiks can sometimes sniff the shifting of a public mood and are now promising a review of the decision.

Of course this is not the first time that Rotherham Council has been at the centre of a row over the care of children. It has been claimed that, as in Rochdale, over sensitivity towards “cultural” issues explained why for years the issue of Asian men grooming and exploiting young girls for sex was pushed under the carpet for fear of being accused of “racism” or “islamophobia”

Now Joyce Thacker has some form here as well – see how she contorted herself to avoid committing the deadliest sin of the church of political correctness…

Joyce Thacker, the strategic director of the children and young people’s services directorate at Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council, has a vast amount of experience in dealing with sexual exploitation of young people. She says that it is “interesting” to note that most of the men involved are Asian but that it is primarily an issue of the abuse of children by older men.
“What about the younger boys who are sent to befriend the girls in the first place?” says Thacker, “Are they also victims of abuse? Certainly we need to ensure that more work is done within all communities that explores positive, healthy relationships, or these young men may end up being the abusers themselves.”

However it could be that as more stones are being turned over as a result of this UKIP story Joyce Thacker and the Rotherham’s Labour political elite might be having to answer a lot more questions….

Interesting story from Guido Fawkes about how last December a journalist tried to get newspapers interested in an article about the BBC pulling the Savile exposure and highlighting some of the issues raised by it

I was told by several of the papers that taste was a factor in their decision but in at least one case the Leveson Inquiry, which was then at its height, was mentioned as being a problem as well. It’s common knowledge that at that time no paper wanted to take on what could turn out to be a controversial story, so they didn’t.”

Remember at the time the odious quartet of Steve Coogan, Max Mosley, Charlotte Church and Hugh Grant were swaggering from studio to studio being celebrated as heroes by fellow showbiz weasels. Who can doubt that in the febrile atmosphere of the moment, if he had been alive and some of his creepy antics reported he would have joined them in their well rehearsed performances of upright citizens hounded by malignant hacks. Indeed Charlotte Church was at it again a few days ago on the ITV chat show hosted by the oily Jonathon Ross, the man who has transformed insincerity into an art form.

Church, who was really there to push her seventh musical comeback, blathered on about being a timid and retiring soul deeply scarred by a vindictive media . But it all sounded a tad self serving in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.

The fact is these showbiz types need the media to keep their names in the public eye. Hence they are circulating constantly using their latest book, film, play, therap, divorce, rape or arrest as a hook to get their faces in the camera lens. Their publicity drones flood the airwaves with their presence to “maintain the profile”. These dysfunctional , self centred parasites need the oxygen of the media to flourish and survive. Hence the hypocrisy of attitude – they want to control medium by exercising a personal veto on all publicity that is not to their liking.

The Savile /BBC scandal is a timely reminder that the media must not be hamstrung by legislation which restricts their ability to tell us something about the darker side of these glittering stars….