How police chief Lenny Harper lost the plot over the Jersey children's home 'murders'By DAVID ROSE
UPDATED: 22:08 GMT, 15 November 2008
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For some of the journalists assembled for a Press conference at Jersey's police headquarters last Wednesday morning, the shock was almost palpable.
Since February 23 this year, when the island's then deputy chief officer, Lenny Harper, first addressed them outside the granite walls of the Haut de la Garenne former children's home, they had been led to believe it had been a house of horror - a place where children were tortured and abused in a labyrinth of cellars, and that possibly as many as seven were murdered.
Now, a bluff, straightforward and extremely experienced Lancashire detective, Det Supt Mick Gradwell, who had taken over the investigation after Mr Harper retired in August, was telling them that most of what they had been told about Haut de la Garenne and Mr Harper's £4.5million inquiry was nonsense.
'There are no credible allegations of murder, there are no suspects for murder,' Mr Gradwell said, and neither was there a scrap of evidence that there had ever been any victims.
On the wrong track: Former Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper talking to the Press outside the Haut de la Garenne home in July
Illustrating his presentation with slides and the actual physical evidence, he went on to demolish every detail that the world had been told supported the notion that children had died in horrifying circumstances.
For example, the home's 'cellars' were not cellars at all but merely an underfloor space so low that any adult could only walk bent double, with no door or stairway leading down to it.
Metal 'restraints' were in fact an old bed spring, and a piece of wood on which someone had scrawled 'I've been bad 4 years and years' was not placed in the building until 2003 - 17 years after it ceased to be used as a children's home.
Yesterday, in an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Mr Gradwell, 48, revealed that such discoveries were continuing.
Mr Harper had publicly described a rusty piece of metal found beneath the floorboards as 'shackles', presumably used to chain children. Mr Gradwell said the metal item had just been positively identified - as a roofing gutter bracket and electric cable pin of a type used widely on Jersey's granite buildings until the Fifties.
Mr Gradwell's disclosures were already so extraordinary that some refused to accept them, claiming, without the least justification, that a man with no previous connection to the island and an impeccable record in charge of some of the biggest criminal inquiries - such as the drowning of 23 Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004 - had somehow been 'nobbled' by Jersey's rulers, and was perpetrating a cover-up.
In fact, the truth is still more shocking. The questionable aspects of Mr Harper's claims about homicides at Haut de la Garenne do not, as Mr Gradwell stressed last week, detract from the fact that there remain serious, credible allegations about the abuse of children in care in Jersey, and these must be investigated.
However, The Mail on Sunday has obtained confidential documents, including a crucial email written by Mr Harper and the official log book kept by his own forensic science team.
They show he repeatedly misled both the media and the island's government, and made a series of statements that proved to be inaccurate.
Twisted logic: The rusted metal 'restraints' found in the children's home turned out to be nothing more than an old bed spring
The Mail on Sunday's investigation has revealed that:
• On February 24, a day after Mr Harper made Haut de la Garenne an international byword for infamy by announcing his team had found the 'partial remains of a child' who might have been murdered, forensic scientists warned him that the so-called remains - allegedly a fragment of a child's skull - were so old as to be 'beyond the parameters of the investigation'.
• His chief scientist, Dr Julie Roberts, re-examined the 'skull fragment' in early April, because the country's top radiocarbon dating laboratory at Oxford University had concluded it was not bone at all.
When this newspaper published the laboratory's findings in mid-May, Mr Harper said they were irrelevant because Dr Roberts was sticking to her original conclusion, and he trusted her more than the Oxford scientists. In fact, she had changed her mind - and as the documents reveal, had personally informed Mr Harper.
• On May 2, at a time when Jersey politicians were starting to ask awkward questions about the inquiry, Mr Harper sent a personal email marked 'confidential' to Frank Walker, the island's chief minister, Wendy Kinnard, the former home affairs minister, and Bill Ogley, the chief executive.
In it he said that the previous day, May 1, he had received the results of new tests conducted on more bone fragments recently dug up at La Garenne, claiming they proved there was a second child's skull buried there.
Mr Harper wrote: 'The bone fragments are from the skull of a child, they are extremely well preserved and the expert's initial findings are that the child died fairly recently, certainly no earlier than the Fifties but probably later.
'These findings will be confirmed by carbon dating. You will realise the significance of these findings, as confirmation will mean that a homicide inquiry will have to (be) launched.'
Mr Walker said yesterday: 'The impact of that email was devastating. It seemed there was evidence that the most dreadful crimes imaginable really had been committed, and at that stage we had no reason to call Mr Harper's handling of the case into question.'
It was true that some freshly excavated bone fragments had just been tested, and The Mail on Sunday has seen the report to Mr Harper by the expert - Professor Andrew Chamberlain of Sheffield University's Centre for Human Identification.
The report stated the pieces were so small it was impossible to 'provide a confident identification (of them) as human or non-human'.
Last night Prof Chamberlain said: 'Mr Harper's email was not a fair representation of my findings. All of the stuff I looked at was too small to say what part of the skeleton it came from, and I never looked at anything that was recognisably part of a skull.'
Unlocking the truth: What were said to be 'shackles' have now been revealed to be a bracket for guttering and an old hook used to support electric cables
Later, Prof Chamberlain did manage to have these fragments carbon dated, showing that their owner had died between 1470 and 1690. But he said he still does not know what species they came from.
As for Mr Harper's email, Mr Walker said he never retracted or corrected it. But if Lenny Harper had been misleading, it wasn't for the first time.
One of the strangest aspects to this very strange saga is that Mr Harper was ever in charge of such a huge and high-profile case at all.
On the wall of his office in Jersey, Mick Gradwell displays a certificate - his formal Home Office qualification as a 'level three senior investigating officer'. It is the 'membership badge' of the crème de la crème and attaining it requires many years of CID experience in handling steadily more difficult cases, as well as attending courses and building skills on everything from the finer points of forensics to dealing with the media.
Inquiries into alleged large-scale child abuse and possible homicide are officially classed as 'category A-plus' - meaning that, on the mainland, only the very best level three officers would even be considered for running them.
Yet when Mr Harper began to look at La Garenne towards the end of last year, he had not worked as a detective for more than ten years and had nothing approaching level three experience.
'He was in way over his head,' one top UK officer said. 'I suppose that's the charitable explanation for the fiasco that followed.'
In any event, what is now clear is that the fiasco goes back to the beginning, with Mr Harper's sudden and dramatic announcement on February 23 about finding the remains of a child, along with the claim that Eddie the sniffer dog - the very same beast that had already caused the parents of Madeleine McCann months of unjustified misery by finding the 'scent of death' in their Portugal apartment - had identified six further sites where children might lie buried.
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Harper's email saying parts of a child's skull had been found
Mr Harper claimed then, and again last week, that he was always determined to be 'transparent' with the media and that this was part of the reason why he had attracted intense hostility from parts of Jersey's 'establishment'.
Yet even in February, that transparency was limited. Mr Harper's first Press conference made a huge impact, but having been called at very short notice, it attracted only a large handful of journalists.
He repeated the exercise over the following two days and by February 25 he was speaking to an audience that included reporters from all over the world. He was honest about the purpose of attracting such vast publicity: it would, he believed, encourage victims of abuse at La Garenne and elsewhere to contact his inquiry.
Hence, perhaps, his decision not to make public a very inconvenient fact.
After they had identified the item dug up the previous day as part of a child's skull, the next job for Mr Harper's scientists, who were contracted through the well-established UK firm LGC Forensics, was to try to work out its age.
Yesterday, LGC's spokeswoman, Helen Newman, revealed that as early as February 24, the day of Mr Harper's second Press conference, 'we advised the police investigation team that it was in an archeological layer from before the Forties and, to this extent, it would appear to have been beyond the parameters of the investigation.'
In other words, if the 'skull' really belonged to a murder victim, his or her killer was bound to be dead and beyond the scope of meaningful investigation.
Ms Newman added: 'We confirmed that it related to the earliest phase of building on the site - dating back to Victorian times. This view was reported to the police investigation team on April 9.'
Back in February, LGC also advised Mr Harper that the fragment needed more physical testing. This was why it was sent to the radiocarbon lab in Oxford, where, as The Mail on Sunday reported in an article published on May 18, the laboratory discovered it was not bone at all - and had told Mr Harper's team as early as April 7. Yet this too was not made public.
Later, after our story was published, he attempted to justify this, telling one newspaper that he failed to mention the original fragment wasn't bone because to do so would have 'distracted' from his inquiry.
Even then, as the logbook recorded by the LGC scientists and kept in Mr Harper's own incident room reveals, he was being less than straightforward.
Police oversee excavations in the grounds at Haut De La Garenne
Publicly, he continued to insist that the fragment might well be bone after all and, in an interview with this newspaper, he said that the opinion of the Oxford scientists did not matter because Julie Roberts, LGC's forensic anthropologist, was still 'quite content it's human - Julie Roberts is still of the opinion that it's a piece of human skull'.
This, at best, was misleading. Dr Roberts's log for April 9 states: 'On 8 and 9 April I re-examined JAR/6 (the fragment) ... It had dried out considerably and changed in colour, texture and weight.
'These changes caused me to reconsider my initial observation that the fragment was human bone, although I cannot reach a definitive conclusion without conducting further chemical analysis.
'I reported my findings to Senior Investigating Officer Lenny Harper and we discussed a number of options regarding how to proceed.'
Last week, Det Supt Gradwell's boss, Jersey's new acting chief officer, David Warcup, said Mr Harper's conduct of the Haut de la Garenne investigation was becoming a matter of deepening concern and, as officers continued their review of the case, it was increasingly coming under scrutiny.
His staff say they are particularly worried that Mr Harper misrepresented Dr Roberts and have asked for access to our recording of interviews. Considering this to be in the public interest, we have agreed.
The Mail on Sunday has learned that officers from Sussex are carrying out an investigation into alleged breaches of the Data Protection Act over leaked email correspondence between Mr Harper and Jersey's attorney-general, and the police are also said to be concerned at the inquiry's profligate expenditure - such as a decision to send two officers First Class to Australia, and a £100,000 bill for the use of Eddie the sniffer dog.
Last night Mr Harper told The Mail on Sunday: 'The wording of the email actually corroborates my account of what I have said during the Historical Abuse Inquiry.
'I describe the findings as we received them. In the expert's opinion, the bones were no more than a few decades old.' When asked what he meant by this, he replied: 'The Fifties or Sixties.'
He went on to say: 'As everyone now knows, subsequent carbon dating failed to tie the age of the bones down. One typical estimate received from it was that the bones were of someone who died between 1650 and 1950.
'On receiving this information we immediately made it public. In the event, the required standard of confirmation was not received and no murder inquiry was ever launched.'
Red herring: Forensics officers work in the area were the 'skull' was found
Referring to the rusty metal identified as a gutter bracket and electric cable pin, he said: 'The rusty piece of metal referred to me as shackles was a length of chain with a manacle type bracelet on each end.'
He said he did not know a lot about gutters but had never seen anything resembling a pair of manacles, adding: 'We might have no evidence that those items were used as shackles but we did have evidence that children were shackled in there. Where is Gradwell's evidence that they have not been used in that way?'
Regarding the authenticity of the 'skull fragment', Mr Harper said: 'This item has never been positively identified and we did not pursue it further as we had already ruled it out of the inquiry following our archaeologists confirming it was placed where we found it before the parameters of our inquiry.'
He added that Stuart Syvret, Jersey's former health minister, was in touch with many victims and would be 'interested to see the lengths to which the establishment, police or otherwise are going to in their attempt to smear me and brand the victims of horrific abuse as liars'.
Mr Harper still insists he did nothing wrong, and acted only in the interests of the victims of abuse.
To an increasing extent, others question that view. Two trials of alleged abusers are pending.
'The fear is that Lenny's behaviour will make it impossible to get convictions,' one senior Jersey legal source said. 'Instead of obtaining justice for the victims, he may have weakened their prospects of getting it.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1086018/How-police-chief-Lenny-Harper-lost-plot-Jersey-childrens-home-murders.html
