In late 1981, the Metropolitan Police Service received a peculiar tip-off.
The source, describing himself as “a homosexual lord”, reported a west London B&B where “a male child was being sexually abused for payment”.
He added that the establishment – the Elm Guest House, in Rocks Lane, Barnes – was also committing alcohol licensing offences and circulating “illegal pornographic video material”.
According to police papers, this tip-off coincided with “rumours” that the same B&B was “being frequented by notable public figures including members of parliament”.
Thus began six months of “sporadic police surveillance”, which included sending two undercover officers into the B&B, posing as a gay couple.
The investigation culminated, in June 1982, in officers bursting into the B&B in a surprise raid.
A 10-year-old boy inside was assessed as showing signs of serious sexual abuse.
Owner Carole Kasir was initially charged with child sex offences, but only eventually convicted of running a brothel.
Also arrested in the raid was a 17-year-old boy, who had been living at Elm Guest House for around two months. He worked there as a masseur and admitted providing “sexual services” to visiting men.
Despite being underage at the time, he was criminally charged.
The Elm Guest House was located in Rocks Lane, Barnes, in the borough of Richmond (Image: Google Street View)
The Masseur
When revelations about Jimmy Savile in 2012 triggered an outpouring of historic abuse allegations, one of the many who came forward was the Elm Guest House’s former teen masseur.
Now a middle-aged man, he approached the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) to make abuse and corruption allegations against unnamed former Met Police officers.
He claimed the two undercover officers who infiltrated the B&B in the lead-up to the raid had each had sex with him on different occasions.
His corruption allegations revolved in part around Kasir. He said she told him she had paid protection money to local police, who accordingly turned a blind eye to the brothel’s activities.
But when she stopped paying the bribes, he alleged, police received the tip-off that led to the raid.
After his arrest in that raid, the masseur said officers stripped and digitally penetrated him, claiming it was necessary in case he was hiding something.
As his trial neared, he alleged, he was threatened by other officers who warned him to “keep his mouth shut”.
“We can get you any time we want,” he recalled them saying.
The charges against him had later been dropped anyway, so he never had to testify.
The Overdose
Kasir couldn’t corroborate the masseur’s allegations, as she had been found dead from an insulin overdose in 1990.
An inquest heard repeated testimony that she spent her final months a paranoid wreck, telling associates she was being followed, harassed and threatened by police and security services because she had evidence boys had been trafficked to VIPs.
The sensational claims made headlines in 1990, when they were heard in open court.
Kasir was so afraid she hired a private investigator. After a few months on the case, he too believed “she was in danger”.
He told the coroner he knew of MPs “involved in child pornography”, but police had instructed him and Kasir “to keep quiet”. Kasir had stashed papers with a lawyer, he said.
Two child protection workers testified Kasir had approached them with her information, naming “a lot of well-known people” and claiming she possessed photo evidence.
Kasir claimed boys had been trafficked for abuse from a Hounslow children’s home called Grafton Close. One trafficker lived in Bexhill-on-Sea and was involved in child pornography, she told them.
This turned out, years later, to be at least rooted in fact.
John Stingemore, a Grafton Close employee from Bexhill, was convicted in the 1980s for sexually abusing one of the boys in the home.
After the Savile revelations, several men contacted police to report Stingemore had photographed them for child pornography. He died before he could face trial – but his co-defendant was convicted.
The Bodged Raid
In 2012, police were under pressure to look again at Elm Guest House and Grafton Close.
The former masseur had filed his IOPC complaint. Grafton boys were coming forward. Journalists and social media users were revisiting the evidence from Kasir’s inquest.
Investigators discovered the 1982 case files had been either lost or destroyed, so decided instead to track down and interview surviving officers.
Some refused to cooperate, but others spoke.
Chief Inspector Brian Lock – the most senior officer involved in the raid – confirmed two officers had indeed gone undercover in the preceding months.
They learned of a party high-profile figures were expected to attend, so the raid was set up.
With colleagues hidden outside, ready to pounce, two undercover officers went inside.
One wore a fake plaster cast on his arm, concealing a “covert signalling device”. When it was time for colleagues to storm in, he would press the button.
But it all went wrong. He hit the button by accident and officers burst through the door when the event had barely begun.
The operation had been bodged and there would be no second bite of the cherry. Who would dare attend Elm Guest House for illicit activities now everybody knew police were watching it?
VIP visitors?
There is no doubt police anticipated they might apprehend VIPs in the raid.
One of the undercover officers told the post-Savile reinvestigation that Kasir had boasted to him, back in 1982, about “parties and prominent figures attending the address”.
But, he said, she never named names.
Another undercover officer had since died, but his 1982 statement survived. In it, he recounted Kasir claiming her clients included “a solicitor, priest and retired banker”.
Raid officer PC Christopher Wicks told the reinvestigation there had been “lots of confidentiality” about the operation, due to “the potential involvement of notable public figures”.
Three more officers each specifically remembered being told at the pre-raid briefing that “prominent individuals” might be present.
DC Christopher Carter, who processed those arrested in the raid when they were delivered to Richmond police station, said one had been “a respected member of society” – but they have never been named.
Chief Inspector Lock, however, maintained there were “no VIPs” present when officers burst in.
Officers ‘saw boys’
The deceased undercover officer wrote in his 1982 statement about a boy at the guest house, aged around 10, who behaved “in a sexualised manner”.
The child was “widely referred to as ‘she’ and ‘little queen’,” he recorded.
A witness from the raid, Stephen Short, corroborated this, telling the reinvestigation about a “young child” referred to as “Queenie”.
PC Jeff Goodhall remembered seeing a “young lad”, while PC John Osborne recalled two young boys: a toddler in a nappy and an older boy acting in “a sexually precocious manner”.
PC Osborne also remembered a man in an executioner’s mask, wielding “a buttock smacking paddle”, who turned out to be an architect from Cambridge.
Another officer, who went undercover at Elm Guest House for the first time on the day of the raid, said he was shown upstairs to a room full of televisions and “naked men all engaged in sex acts”.
He said he was then shown to another room and saw “a young boy, aged about eight years, with short, dark hair, on his knees, performing oral sex on an adult male”.
But he refused to commit these memories to a statement, saying he “could not afford” for his name to get out.
PS Nigel Plank, working at Richmond police station that night, remembered a forensic medical examiner attending and a “young male” being brought in who had been sexually assaulted.
PS Peter Simon, also based at the station that night, said he too remembered a boy aged nine or ten being brought in.
A social worker who sat in on the police interview of a ten-year-old boy removed from the guest house during the raid came forward post-Savile and claimed the boy had named one of his abusers as “Uncle Leon”, a politician from “the big house”.
‘Celebrities and government officers’
The operation, however, was regarded by officers as “disappointing” and “a cock-up”.
One – PC Brian Priest – even suggested to the reinvestigation that it had gone wrong on purpose.
“I am not too sure that this wasn’t a cover-up for something,” he said. “I’m suspicious but I don’t know why. It’s just a feeling I had at the time and still do. There was something wrong with this raid.”
PC Lester Ferguson told investigators he later heard “rumours about special branch police officers taking documents away because MPs and judges were involved” – but he had no evidence or firsthand knowledge.
A man arrested in the raid told police Kasir had “mentioned having photographs and videos of high-profile visitors”, including “celebrities and government officers” – echoing the claims attributed to Kasir eight years later at her inquest.
But she was ultimately only convicted of keeping a disorderly house. The disturbing allegations about Elm Guest House didn’t resurface until her inquest, where a coroner ruled her death a suicide.
Witness statements from the inquest, like the 1982 police files, appear to have been lost or destroyed. So too do Kasir’s own police files.
The coroner service has repeatedly refused to release two apparent suicide notes authored by Kasir.
‘Absolute Rubbish’
Chief Inspector Lock described the masseur’s IOPC complaint as “absolute rubbish”, saying the two undercover officers were straight and therefore would not have had sex with him.
The surviving undercover officer said he and his colleague would never have compromised themselves by doing “anything unlawful and indecent”.
The IOPC said there were “inconsistencies” in the masseur’s accounts and there was “no evidence gathered that would appear to be consistent with the allegations.”
But Adrian Fulford KC, one of Kasir’s lawyers, said he recalled suggestions at the time that “someone at the premises engaged in sexual contact with one or more undercover officers”.
Claims claims Kasir paid protection money to police “cannot be determined with any degree of certainty,” the IOPC ruled.
There was “no evidence available to support” the masseur’s report of being stripped and penetrated on the night of the raid, or of officers warning him to keep his mouth shut.
The only potential shortcoming identified was that he “was aged only 17 and he appears to have been treated purely as a suspect. Such a witness would today be treated differently by police.”
Grafton Close paedophile John Stingemore was found dead at home weeks before his trial.
His co-defendant, Anthony McSweeney, was convicted in 2015 of sexually abusing a teenage boy at Grafton Close, plus three counts of making indecent images of children.
He was later exposed as a paedophile who had researched existing allegations, cobbled together his own story and used it to claim criminal injuries compensation. In the process, he had smeared innocent men, like former Conservative MP Harvey Proctor, as paedophiles and murderers.
Beech was jailed for 18 years.
The claim that a boy named an Elm Guest House abuser as “Uncle Leon” was dismissed by the modern reinvestigation as having “no substance”, as the comment was not included in police’s interview notes.
In 2020, the national Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) concluded Elm Guest House had been “a tawdry establishment where child sexual abuse took place”.
Despite this, the title of the scandal’s Wikipedia page was changed in 2020 to “Elm Guest House Hoax”, by an editor who disappeared from the website shortly thereafter.
Your Local Guardian is currently fighting for the public’s right to review documents about the case.
