A victim in an abuse case that led to generous compensation payouts and has since generated over 1,000 claims and a police operation shares a name/location with someone who was once the subject of an injunction secured by a former city council leader to prevent the circulation of copies of photographs allegedly stolen in a burglary.
2002
Judge grants ‘smear’ ban
2004
Apology urged over photos incident
2009
The curious case of Rod Hills*
2012
A true horror story: The abuse of teenage boys in a detention centre
2014
Inmate speaks out against detention centre abuse
Feb 2017
1,400 ex-inmates at Medomsley Detention Centre are one step closer to claiming justice
July 2017
Operation Seabrook
* There is more online about Rod Hills including:
2003
Obituary
2005
Life sentence for prostitute who murdered her client "The trial heard she had previously lived with the late Rod Hills, a former leader of York City Council whom she claimed rescued her from a life of prostitution and drugs when he picked her up off the streets in Bristol and took her home."
This is the result of online explorations prompted by the 2012 Guardian article. Although it's dated April 2012, I came across it in the autumn of 2012, around the time of the Jimmy Savile scandal, when it was proposed alongside Guardian articles about that. When I read it, I took it at face value (as I did with the Savile allegations), but am no longer sure what to make of it. What are the chances of literally bumping into your perpetrator in the street and what would a minister of the United Reformed Church (
source) be doing near an Anglican cathedral like York Minster? Why would they have a "full carry-on" or a "big hat" (2012 Guardian article)? Low church preachers don't generally wear robes like Catholic priests let alone big hats. Could someone incarcerated really be raped/assaulted
daily, as alleged by both this man and another (
source,
source)? At the risk of being facetious, wouldn't an abusive prison officer occasionally have a day off work? Would they bother to come in to work to assault inmates on their days off? If he had been interfering with children at his church, would he also have done the same with older teenage boys at the detention centre, even raped them? I wonder if there was abuse going on at the detention centre but if a certain amount of exaggeration has taken place. It's phenomenal that hundreds of men would have experienced abuse and failed to report it or that the police would not have taken such reports seriously if they received them. It's hard to know what to believe.