Carl Beech convicted of lying about VIP paedophile ring

A convicted paedophile has been found guilty of lying to police and tricking Scotland Yard into launching a costly investigation into a VIP paedophile ring that didn’t exist.

Carl Beech, 51, from Gloucester, was found guilty of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud. He had made allegations of murder and child sexual abuse against a series of public figures.

His claim that he was one of the victims of an “establishment group” that kidnapped, raped and murdered boys in the 1970s and 1980s, sparked a £2m police investigation that was closed without any arrests being made.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Daily Telegraph says “prosecutors proved he had invented a catalogue of extraordinary lies” which the Metropolitan Police had believed “hook, line and sinker”.

He was convicted yesterday of 12 counts of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud by jurors after just one day of deliberation at Newcastle Crown Court.

The former nurse, who denied the charges, did not react as the verdicts were delivered. He will be sentenced on Friday.

The details in Beech’s allegations were often “gruesome,” The Guardian says. Among his colourful claims was the false suggestion that the former MP Harvey Proctor was directly involved in the murder of two boys. Beech also made up a claim about another boy being deliberately run over.

He said he and others were tortured, raped and abused by senior politicians, military chiefs and the heads of MI5 and MI6. He alleged that he had witnessed the sadistic murder of three young boys.

Beech’s “lies were swallowed by bungling Scotland Yard detectives”, The Daily Mail says.

In court, Beech denied his story was “a figment of my imagination,” telling jurors: “I was there, I know it happened.”

He had persuaded the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority to pay him £22,000 for his “years of abuse,” including the false claim that he was raped by Jimmy Savile.

Last year, he was convicted on charges of child pornography and was was branded a “committed and manipulative” paedophile by a judge.