‘Many People Were Damaged By Carl Beech’

‘Many people were damaged by Carl Beech’

Carl Beech ruined lives with fake accusations of sex abuse. Why? Vanessa Engle, the director of a new film about him, explains

Ed Potton

Monday August 17 2020, 12.01am, The Times

Vanessa Engle, director of The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech

Vanessa Engle has built a reputation on asking straight questions about knotty subjects. Engle’s television documentaries on the art world, Jews, lefties, Harley Street and domestic violence have been marked out by humanity, curiosity and her disarming, direct interviewing style. The British journalist’s new film, though, is perhaps the most disturbing of her 30-year career. The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is one of those rare titles that’s not an exaggeration.

In 2012 Beech, a hospital inspector in his forties from Gloucester, claimed to police that he had been abused, raped and tortured as a boy in the late Seventies and early Eighties by a paedophile ring that included the politicians Edward Heath, Leon Brittan and Harvey Proctor and the senior army officer Lord Bramall. Beech, referred to by the police as “Nick” to protect his identity, also said that he witnessed members of that ring murder three boys and that he had been abused by his stepfather. “I had poppies pinned to my chest whilst they did whatever they wanted to do,” he says of the “VIP ring” in a police interview. That would normally begin with him being forced to perform oral sex, he adds, “but would always culminate in being raped”.

As Proctor said in an incendiary press conference at the time, Beech’s claims amounted to “just about the worst allegations anyone can make against another person”. Yet, after an 18-month investigation that cost £2.5 million and put huge stress on the accused men — Proctor lost his job and home — not a single arrest had been made. The allegations were completely fabricated. Last year Beech, who had been awarded more than £20,000 in compensation for non-existent injuries suffered in the alleged abuse, was tried and sentenced to 18 years in prison for offences including fraud and perverting the course of justice.

Carl Beech (left) in Court 2018

And yet his unbelievable story was at first widely believed in a country that was reeling from Jimmy Savile’s crimes. Victims of abuse were being listened to like never before. In the police interviews Beech looks plausibly nervous, vulnerable, damaged. 

“We were at a moment where people would believe literally anything on this subject,” Engle, 57, says by phone from her home in north London. “The press believed it, politicians believed it, police believed it, the public believed it. There are still people saying, ‘Oh, no smoke without fire. It must be true.’ ”

Except in this case it wasn’t. Beech, it is clear now, is a fantasist on a grand scale. If notes read out in the film are anything to go by, he is also a dreadful poet. “Electrocution and drowning were some of the tools/ They used when I broke the rules,” he wrote. “They used snakes and wasps/ Or left me out there to die in the frost.”

“Well he obviously didn’t die, did he, because he’s alive and still in prison, for f***’s sake,” says his ex-wife, Dawn Beech, in the film. She is a peach of an interviewee — candid, courageous and funny — which is extraordinary, given her travails. Her sex life with Beech, she tells Engle, “just wasn’t good at all”. 

Another interviewee is Mark Conrad, a journalist who was taken in by Beech. “Some people have probably assumed that Beech took you for a fool,” Engle says to Conrad. See what I mean about direct? “I’m a very direct person,” she says. “I did ten years of therapy and that gave me the tools to be very aware of what’s happening in the room when I ask questions and what it’s possible to ask. You know you’ve done a good interview if you know you’ve taken a risk in some of your questions.”

Nevertheless, she says she was nervous about making this documentary. “Why would I spend time on somebody who was not a real victim, as far as we know, and who had inflicted so much damage to the real victims? Normally, the more you familiarise yourself with stories, the less strange they become, but with this one Carl’s motivation just seemed stranger and more despicable to me.”

What was that motivation? Engle thinks there may have been a past trauma. “You just have to look at him. He does not look comfortable in his own skin, does he?” When police searched Beech’s home they found substantial amounts of child pornography, the possession of which contributed to his prison sentence. While there is no evidence that Beech was abused, Mike Pierce — an anti-abuse charity worker and survivor of child sexual abuse who appears in the film — met him and felt that he had been. “So, I can’t categorically say that he wasn’t,” Engle says. “I don’t know how bad a thing has to happen to someone to send them off the rails.”

The film ended up becoming an examination of the damage that Beech has done. “There was just wave upon wave,” she says. “We all understood that the falsely accused were very damaged, but I hadn’t really realised that Beech’s own family was damaged too. The family of his step-siblings has been really badly damaged. I hadn’t understood that the journalists [who covered the case] were damaged.”

Conrad talks about the long period of depression he went through when Beech was found to be a liar. “I know that some of the police who were fooled have had breakdowns as well,” Engle says.

She coaxes brilliant details out of people, punctuating the grimness with off-kilter interludes. Brittan’s widow and housekeeper talk about the police searching the house. “The thing that hurt the lady more than anything — they took his slippers,” the housekeeper says. “Were they nice slippers?” Engle asks. “They were pretty awful, to be honest,” Diana Brittan replies. “No monogram.” 

This is ultimately, Engle says, “a film about truth. Which, of course, is very relevant in the post-truth era.” In the age of Trump and Johnson, will fantasists like Beech become more common? “That’s a terrifying thought,” she says. There have always been fantasists, she points out. Her previous film, The $50m Art Swindle, was about Michel Cohen, a Frenchman who made a fortune by selling Picassos and Monets that he didn’t own. “He was a conman and a very deluded person too. We all have a tiny strain of deluded thinking. That’s not always a bad thing. It’s what makes people have dreams and grand ambitions.”

It’s hard to put a positive spin on Beech’s case, though. What’s most heartbreaking is how much damage it has done to the cause of genuine abuse victims. “We just were at a moment where the victims of historic child sexual abuse were coming forward and were being believed,” she says. “What kind of a person would want to get in the way of that?”

Engle asked Beech for an interview, but he refused. “We’d have loved to ask him why he did it. But when you see his extraordinary performance in those police videos, I don’t think you could whip off the mask and the real Carl Beech would step forward.”

Does she think he feels any remorse? “From everything I know and from everything I’ve heard from those closest to him, no, he doesn’t,” Engle says. “He’s never said, ‘I made it up.’ He really does seem to believe what he’s saying.”

The Unbelievable Story of Carl Beech is on BBC Two on August 24 at 9pm