I was so disgusted by the way the Daily Mail treated that poor man (who was totally innocent) that I made a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about their reporting.
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I watched the honour of Christopher Jeffries on BritBox today that was about him absolutely dreadful how he was treated
I was watching ‘Mark of a Killer’ on Hayu last week and they covered the I-5 killer (US). He was convicted of killing 1 person but is suspected of actually killing 40+ woman up and down the west coast of America, I just can’t get my head around the fact that all those families and all those woman won’t get justice! I hope they are actively trying to prove the cases like they did with the golden state killer, and not just ‘yeah we think he did these’.
It’s so sad isn’t it and completely baffles me as to how somebody could kill one person and go un noticed , never mind killing multiple people and get away with it
It's a very big landfill.
I'd like to watch this but can't find it on BritBox. I searched Christopher Jeffries and The Honour of. Is there anything else in the title?
The full title is The Lost Honour of Christopher Jeffries.
Got it! Thank you
it’s such a good watch, I remember watching it when it came out at the time, really interesting xGot it! Thank you
The Jill Dando murder, it’s bizarre why anyone would have wanted her dead.
Think it’s been mentioned but Charlene Burns. Similar age & location to me so always stuck with me. Sadly I don’t believe she’s still alive but the theories of what happened to her have always horrified me, from the grooming to her body ending up in takeaway food. She appeared to be from a fairly complicated family set up too which unfortunately seemed to overshadow a lot of the sadness in her case.
Norma dale-known as the red shoe murder in York (1950’s)
She went out to play and was found 3 weeks later
They could prove she had been stored in a coal bunker and she was found with one of her red shoes
My dad thinks she overheard something she shouldn’t and was killed in case she said something
He also says they called Scotland Yard out too late-my aunt (by marriage) was her cousin and I lived in the street over the road to hers
It’s a tragic shame but I don’t think they’ll ever solve it
There was loads of building work being done at the time at the uni and it was widely accepted that she’d been thrown into the foundations of one of the buildings
The whole case was a shambles-my ex was her bin man and it took them over 5 years to pull him in and talk to him to see what,if anything he had seen (which was nothing) it also took them years to check the ten foot (alleyway) at the back of her house
They arrested a guy in the burnhome area (a few streets along to her house) and the landlord of a pub in acomb (a few miles away) they seemed to think she’d been buried in the cellar but that came to nothing
Someone knows something but won’t say for some reason
She went out to play and was found 3 weeks later
They could prove she had been stored in a coal bunker and she was found with one of her red shoes
My dad thinks she overheard something she shouldn’t and was killed in case she said something
He also says they called Scotland Yard out too late-my aunt (by marriage) was her cousin and I lived in the street over the road to hers
It’s a tragic shame but I don’t think they’ll ever solve it
Yes I lived in York at the time (she must have walked past my old street and past my parents house in that morning)
There was loads of building work being done at the time at the uni and it was widely accepted that she’d been thrown into the foundations of one of the buildings
The whole case was a shambles-my ex was her bin man and it took them over 5 years to pull him in and talk to him to see what,if anything he had seen (which was nothing) it also took them years to check the ten foot (alleyway) at the back of her house
They arrested a guy in the burnhome area (a few streets along to her house) and the landlord of a pub in acomb (a few miles away) they seemed to think she’d been buried in the cellar but that came to nothing
Someone knows something but won’t say for some reason
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Thank you! That’s the one, don’t know where I got Burns from
Rebecca Coriam
Cruise ships & adult Disney fans
en.wikipedia.org
Cruise ships & adult Disney fans
Disappearance of Rebecca Coriam - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
That case is so chilling. Her parents must have felt so helpless.Thank you! That’s the one, don’t know where I got Burns from
This is an article from The Times dated 1st November 2013. I've transcribed it as there's a paywall. This was written years before the Charlene Downes documentary that was on last year, which I didn't watch by the way, as her family quite honestly disgust me.
Too little cared for, and too little mourned
There goes Charlene Downes, ten years ago today, skipping towards the bright lights of Blackpool. Never to be seen again. It was late autumn, the final night of the season. During the evening, the
www.thetimes.co.uk
Too little cared for and too little mourned.
"There goes Charlene Downes, ten years ago today, skipping towards the bright lights of Blackpool. Never to be seen again.
It was late autumn, the final night of the season. During the evening, the 14-year-old was spotted in a bar at the seaside resort’s North Pier. Someone bought her a vodka and Coke. She left with a young friend. They headed for a dark, waste-strewn passageway lined on each side by the rear entrances to several takeaway food premises.
This was “Paki Alley”, where chips and alcohol were in plentiful supply for children smart enough to know that one good turn deserved another. Arcades and kebab shops were a cheap escape from teenage boredom but on that particular night, November 1, 2003, a crime took place which meant that Charlene never came home.
A decade on and the unsolved murder has barely registered with the mainstream public. By contrast, Britain’s far-right parties have taken such an interest in the Downes case that banners demanding “Justice for Charlene” were raised on football terraces by sections of hardcore fans.
Their focus was triggered by a 2007 criminal trial at which it was alleged that the child was killed by a Jordanian kebab-shop owner who later disposed of her body with the help of his Iranian business partner. No remains were discovered.
Lacking concrete proof of murder, the prosecution was built on hearsay evidence from an unreliable witness and on a police officer’s transcription of low-quality recordings from bugs placed in the flat and car of one of the suspects. Its accuracy was repeatedly challenged by the defence.
On the eve of a scheduled 2008 retrial, after the first hearing led to a hung jury, the case collapsed. Both defendants were acquitted. The far-right’s conspiracy theory — dark-skinned men getting away with the rape and murder of a white girl — gained strength in 2011 when it emerged that an unpublished police report identified more than 60 girls who were groomed for sex by Asian workers at a cluster of takeaways.
Today, Charlene’s disappearance will be marked by a memorial service in the town, organised by the British National Party. Tomorrow, its supporters will stage a demonstration against “Muslim grooming gangs”. Leading the tributes will be her parents, Robert and Karen Downes. They are cherished icons of the nationalist movement. But they sit on a hollow throne.
The truth, hidden until now, is that so many men of all creeds and colours were suspected of sexual offences against Charlene that when she first went missing the police did not know which way to turn. One of the trails led directly inside the Downes family home. Confidential witness statements, social services records and internal police reports reveal that the child protection authorities first became concerned about Charlene’s home environment in 1989, the year she was born.
Then, the family were living in the West Midlands. Police and social services launched a joint investigation because a convicted rapist, jailed three times for buggery and indecent assaults on two young girls, was a regular visitor to the house and was allowed unsupervised access to a child.
Mr Downes, now 52, was “strongly advised” by social services not to allow the man inside his home but the visits were suspected to have continued. A witness told the authorities she saw the rapist “fondling [a child] in the house and that the parents were present”. They deny that any such incident happened.
In 1998, when Charlene was 9, she and another girl alleged that they were being sexually abused by a man “trusted by Mr and Mrs Downes to take them to school”. He was charged with rape but the case collapsed when the other girl failed to give evidence.
Charlene’s parents told The Times that the man seemed trustworthy because “he had a girlfriend”. They rejected a police officer’s report that they “had some knowledge of the abuse but failed to act”.
The family moved to Blackpool in 1999 after Walsall social services threatened to prosecute the parents for wilful neglect and to have the children taken into care. In the North West, a succession of men were introduced to the family after meeting Mr Downes in local pubs. Some stayed overnight or even longer.
They included a man in his 50s who described Charlene, then 13, as his girlfriend, and a 40-year-old who later admitted to police that he paid her to carry out a sex act. Three days after Charlene vanished, a 34-year-old man, staying with the Downes family while on bail, was jailed for crimes that included indecent assaults on three young girls. He admitted indecently touching the missing child.
An account of life inside the Downes home came from an environmental health officer, visiting one morning on council business, who walked into a downstairs room to find Charlene, then 12, lying on a bed in a “skimpy” nightgown. Lying alongside her was a man in his 60s. The girl jumped up and “started to scoop a number of pound coins off the bed”. The man, “shaken and trembling”, began “pulling his trouser zip up and fastening his belt”.
In a witness statement, the council employee described his shock at “the situation I had stumbled into”. He said Charlene was quick to tell him that “it’s OK — he’s my uncle”. Mr Downes then entered the room, apparently unconcerned, and explained that the man was “a family friend”. The incident was reported to social services but “it was decided not to pursue the matter further due to lack of evidence, lack of co-operation from the family and no complaint from Charlene”.
Her parents described it as a misunderstanding. Mrs Downes blamed the council worker for being too “nosey”. They said that the man on the bed with Charlene was “a lovely, nice old man” who had merely been adjusting his trousers. Mr Downes said he did not know, at the time, that any of the men he brought home had a sexual interest in children.
The couple did not comment on a hospital doctor’s report from June 2000, when Charlene was 11, warning of suspected sexual abuse, nor on the 13 visits she made to an NHS walk-in centre over a 12-month period in 2002-03, when she regularly sought help for sexual health problems.
Her mother insisted this week that her husband always sought to protect their daughter. She described the documents seen by this newspaper as “widely exaggerated and untrue”.
This is the mother of a child who apparently made regular visits, aged 11, to a Salvation Army soup kitchen and was seen dancing for men outside a pub, aged 12. Her parents explained that she enjoyed going “to church” and often danced to “music that she liked”. It was against this background that Charlene began swapping sexual favours, during the final months of her life, with Asian and Arab takeaway workers.
The Times understands that, three months before she vanished, she was one of two girls driven by Asian men from Blackpool to a lay-by in Blackburn. There, at midnight, she walked down an alley with one of the men, returning an hour later. Back in Blackpool, she was handed an envelope. Her friend asked what was inside and was told it was “what I got for what I did in Blackburn”.
Another Asian man is known to have taken her to Manchester in an old BMW less than a week before she disappeared. Neither incident was connected to the two men who stood trial over her murder.
It can also be revealed that a week before she went missing, a white man with the “motive and opportunity to murder Charlene” gave her £40. He met her again on her final night. A police report described him as a “compulsive, perverted paedophile” living in “a squalid flat knee-deep in pornographic material of all types including those featuring young children”.
Lancashire Constabulary today announces a new investigation, pledging “an open mind” about the murder. Its inquiry will not be short of suspects. Some are white; some are not.
Evidence shows that Charlene Downes was failed throughout her life. Until now, she has also been failed in death. The reports suggest that she was let down by her parents, by care professionals, by dozens of sex abusers, by her killers and by a police force that mismanaged a murder inquiry.
Today, the BNP distorts her story to sow seeds of divisive malevolence. Too little cared for, too little mourned. She deserves better."
@Be More Pacific Thank you so much for sharing! I had no idea about lots of things mentioned in the article. I only knew her story from a podcast that were very vague on her parents. I’m actually at work reading this while my year 10s are on break. It’s actually made me feel a bit unclean reading it in school.
It's an awful case and Charlene Downes remains missing. However, the sight of her parents weeping and wailing and letting themselves by lauded by the far right as some kind of heroes is truly repugnant.
Like I said, I didn't watch the C5 documentary last year and have no desire to do so but apparently this was all laid bare then for the world to see (even though The Times reported it back in 2013)
Like I said, I didn't watch the C5 documentary last year and have no desire to do so but apparently this was all laid bare then for the world to see (even though The Times reported it back in 2013)
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