The prosecution, startled by this suggestion, argued that this would harm their best evidence—the pattern of King’s seduction. But Judge Paget agreed to split the trials.
“Oh, fuck,” whispered an arresting officer, putting his head in his hands, when the judge announced his decision.
The unspoken assumption, shared by all parties, was that there would never be three trials. The prosecution was likely to throw in the towel after trials one or two, whatever the outcome. So the preparatory hearing turned out to be a great victory for King and Thwaites.
Every day in the Old Bailey, Ron Thwaites launches another merciless attack on anybody he can think of who is not his client. The victims are “cranks” who “came out of the woodwork” seeking “compensation.” This includes one who cried in the witness box. “Crocodile tears!” he snarls. Others are “drug addicts and fantasists and liars.” One is “completely mad.”
Admittedly, Thwaites does have something of a point here. One of the victims, Chris Sealey, admits within five minutes of cross-examination that he sees black cats that nobody else can see and thinks that Gypsies are going to come to his house to rip out his throat. Chris also admits that he came forward solely for the money. He hopes to sell his story to a newspaper. (He does: to the Sunday People, embellishing his testimony with extraordinary relish.)
Chris’s argument is “So what?” Jonathan King got something out of him, so why shouldn’t he get something out of Jonathan King?
Thwaites even brings me into the mix at one point. During his summing-up he points in my direction and says to the jury, “I cannot prove that there is a contract in which [the complainants] have agreed to appear on TV or in the newspapers. . . .”
His implication seems to be that the Ronson-Victim financial pact is so cunning that the poor, justice-seeking defense team cannot break through its steely ramparts. The real reason why Thwaites cannot prove this contract exists is, of course, because it doesn’t (Nick does not want to be paid for our interview), but I cannot let the jury know this. I just have to sit there. From a distance, the game-playing between prosecution and defense in an Old Bailey trial might seem impressively ingenious, but close up I sometimes find it quite horrible.
But Thwaites does highlight some of the unfortunate aspects of the case. There is no material evidence. No DNA. How can King defend himself against crimes that occurred so long ago?
“Justice delayed,” says Thwaites, “is justice denied.”
Nonetheless, for all of Thwaites’s mini-victories, Jonathan tells me he has already packed his bags, all ready for a guilty verdict. He says he has bought every book on the Booker Prize short list in preparation for life in jail.
It takes the jury three days to reach a verdict. The night before they do, Jonathan sends me an e-mail that reads: “Pray for me.”
I don’t e-mail him back. I have grown to like Jonathan King, but he is guilty. As likable as he is, he did it. Perhaps there is some homophobia in this case. Bill Wyman, after all, got away with having sex with a younger girl. Is it unfair, as Jonathan claims, that his initial high-profile arrest was simply a way for the police to advertise for more victims to come forward? Most observers agree that the prosecution would never have secured a conviction with the initial complainants’ allegations, and that the police were hoping for more reliable witnesses to come forward. Is it unfair, or clever police work?
I don’t see Jonathan in the canteen or the lobby on the day of the verdict, but I do see him in the dock as the jury files in. He smiles at me. Every male juror makes a point of looking at Jonathan as they take their seats. The women all look away. The clerk of the court asks the foreman for the verdict on the first count, and he says, “Guilty.”
Jonathan nods.
Then it is time for count two—the most serious charge. Buggery. This is the charge that relates to Chris Sealey. The foreman says, “Guilty.”
Jonathan nods.
There are six guilty verdicts in total. A clean sweep. Judge Paget says that, under these circumstances, bail must be revoked. Within seconds, Jonathan is led downstairs from the dock and straight to Belmarsh prison.
• • •
LITTLE KELLERSTAIN, Tam Paton’s large, outlandish, rural bungalow near Edinburgh Airport, his home for twenty-seven years, give or take his twelve months in jail for child-sex offenses and the years traveling the world in Learjets and limousines with his young charges, the Bay City Rollers, is noisy today. You imagine it to have always been a noisy place. Indeed, the old neighbors, the now-dead rich couple who lived next door at the grand Kellerstain House, used to complain bitterly about their eccentric legendary pop-impresario neighbor, the packs of screaming Roller fans forever camped outside his electric gates, the parties, the teams of police officers searching his house for clues of pedophile activity, and then more screaming—the screams of the headlines: “Sordid Secrets of Twisted Tam,” “Tam’s Night in the Sauna with the Boys.”
Today, the place is noisy with dogs and boys. The dogs are Rottweilers. There are four of them, and they seem to hate one another. There are about half a dozen boys living with Tam. They live in spare rooms and in trailers in the garden. They are all around eighteen years old. Tam is sixty-three now. He is polite to a fault, almost humble. It is as if the years of being considered a pedophile have reduced him to a position of constant subservience around strangers. The Tam Paton of today is nothing like the fearsome Svengali you would see on television during the Roller years.
I have come to see Paton because of the similarities in his and Jonathan King’s crimes. They were friends and colleagues, and would visit the Hop together. The boys Paton “indecently assaulted” were not that young like Jonathan. The youngest was fifteen. I know it will take Jonathan years to settle into his new role in life as a convicted celebrity pedophile. Paton has had twenty years to do this. So I imagine that meeting him will be like meeting Jonathan in the future.
“I was jailed for six years for underage sex,” says Tam. “Underage sex. Under the age of twenty-one. This was 1981. I served a year. My victims were . . . one was fifteen. I never even touched him. There was nothing physical in that particular charge. The chap was deaf and he had a speech impediment. He came to my house and he saw a pornographic movie, a heterosexual pornographic movie.”
“What was it called?” I ask.
“Tina with the Big Tits,” says Tam. “This happened right here in this very room. It was all to do with women’s boobs. Big boobs. All sizes of boobs. And he’d had two lagers. The charges that were raised against me was that I’d subjected a fifteen-year-old handicapped boy to pornographic movies and supplied him with stupefying alcohol with intent to pervert and corrupt. I got six months right there for that.”
Tam takes me to the scene of more of his crimes—his sauna room. It was built in the seventies, in what used to be his utility room. He turns on the Jacuzzi. It bubbles into life. “I got six months for putting my hand on a guy’s leg in the sauna,” says Tam. “And then I got another two years for a chap who willingly came up here. He was sixteen, educated, a nice guy. He came up in a taxi. I gave him a bottle of Lambrusco.”
Of course, the stigma of being imprisoned for underage-sex crimes remains with Tam. Just last week, one of his friends—who has a three-month-old baby—was visited by social services and warned that the baby should be kept away from Tam.
“A tiny little baby!” says Tam. “People look at me like I’m an animal. People who don’t know me judge me. I always remember going up to visit someone in prison, and this woman was sitting there. She was looking at me, growling a bit, and I could imagine what she was thinking: ‘There’s a pedophile!’ Anyway, I later discovered about her character. And I’ll tell you, it outweighed anything I’d ever done.”