Prosecuting Carl Beech – Just the Start

Well, it’s over. What should be seen as one of the most significant criminal prosecutions of the decade has finally ended with the conviction of Carl Beech, aka ‘Nick’, on twelve charges of perverting the course of justice and one of fraud. He has been found guilty as charged by a jury of his peers and now faces the prospect of what should be a very substantial sentence of imprisonment, given the utmost seriousness of his vile offences.

Carl Beech in the dock

In fact, there can't be many more heinous crimes than deliberately and falsely accusing innocent people of torture, rape and child murder. Yet, this is what Carl Beech – aka ‘Carl Survivor’, aka ‘Lucy Samuels’, aka ‘Sam Williams’, aka ‘Carl Andersson’, aka ‘Oskar Andersson’, aka ‘Samuel Karlsson’ – has done repeatedly in recent years, in a cruel attempt to get his grasping hands on a substantial tranche of compensation money to which he had absolutely no entitlement. The fraud conviction related to the £22,000 he fraudulently claimed from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), ostensibly to pay for professional counselling, which he immediately squandered on a luxury Ford Mustang Convertible car.

Ford Mustang Convertible

At length, in court one at Newcastle Crown Court, Beech's ludicrous, cruel claims have been revealed to be what they are. His despicable attempt to ride the historical sexual abuse gravy train has at long last hit the buffers. His trial exposed him to the world for what he really is: a loathsome liar obsessed with the topic of the abuse of children, a calculating fraudster and a man who is devoid of any form of moral compass. Utterly self-centred, to the point that he even attempted to throw his ex-wife and teenage son to the wolves, in a bid to blame them for some of his own vile, criminal, sexual perversions.

As someone who has become an active campaigner against the ‘you will be believed’ cult, and its close partner in encouraging crime, the compensation culture, which fuels the bogus sexual abuse industry by rewarding the most outrageous liars and fraudsters with sizeable cash payouts, I felt that I had a moral duty to attend the latter stages of the Beech trial in person. I wanted to see the man for myself – in the flesh – and to listen to the damning closing speech given by the prosecutor, Tony Badenoch QC.

Liar, Fraudster, Fantasist & Pervert

I also took note of the valiant efforts of Beech’s counsel, Collingwood Thompson QC, to try to salvage something for his client. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the material he had to work with, the end result was hardly in doubt. Even in his own evidence, Beech had repeatedly been compelled to admit to having lied and lied again. Mr Thompson did his best to defend the indefensible, but it should be clear that no-one, other than Beech himself, is responsible for his own public annihilation.

'Someone is Lying'

HH Sir James Goss QC

Moreover, I wanted to hear for myself – and to tweet to the wider world – the key points of the judge’s summing up and his directions to the jury. His Honour Sir James Goss QC was scrupulously fair in summarising the evidence that the jury had heard. In the end, as he rightly remarked, the whole case turned on one pivotal issue: that someone was lying. And, having heard details of the thorough police investigation into Beech and his plethora of lies and deceits and aliases, the members of the jury reached their verdicts: Beech guilty on every single count.

I thought I'd experienced it all during the past seven years, since I myself was targeted by a couple of unscrupulous, lying chancers. Indeed, during this time, I've come across what can be described only as the dregs of society, people who think nothing of trashing the careers, indeed lives, of committed, hard working professionals for their own nefarious, utterly selfish ends. But what I listened to at Newcastle Crown Court during Beech's trial has exposed a monster to surpass even those treacherous, greedy fantasists. Each time during the trial that the judge afforded us a break, I felt the need to take a shower, in a bid to cleanse myself of the wretched, sordid details I'd just heard.

Already proven to be a 'devious paedophile' himself at an earlier trial, Beech pleaded not guilty to twelve charges of perverting the course of justice after dragging the names of a host of totally innocent figures, comprising politicians and senior military officers, into his depraved, degenerate world, all in a bid for both financial recompense and also to assume some sort of heroic-figure status for himself. No doubt, had he succeeded in his imposture, a 'misery memoir' book and profitable lecture tours would quickly have followed. The thought is enough to turn the stomach of even the most experienced hack.

Beech interviewed on police video

It's not within the scope of this blog to detail all the sordid, depraved activities of Carl Beech over the past few years but I am able to state with certainty that one wouldn't need a degree in psychology, having watched him in the witness box delivering his 'evidence', to come to the conclusion Beech is ostensibly in an advanced state of sociopathy. Just suppose he had been traumatically abused as a child and had opened up about it, as he persistently claimed, and was then hauled into a court of law on the charge of lying through his teeth: adding insult to injury would be an understatement. Surely the man would have been hopping mad.

On the flip side, as has now been proven, if he were making claims in a court of law that were nothing more than the province of fantasy in extremis, you'd expect the person in the dock to be highly emotional when giving his ‘evidence’, knowing it all to be a pack of lies which would wreck careers, potentially lives, of innocent men. Yet, Beech stood and delivered his testimony with barely a hint of any emotion. No wonder they say it’s the sociopaths and the psychopaths who are most likely to deceive the lie detector test. On this evidence, Beech would certainly have done so!

Beech the Sex Offender
This much is now certain: Carl Beech, disgraced ex-nurse and NHS executive – and a former school governor – is a convicted sexual abuser of children. He entered guilty pleas at his earlier trial (he could have hardly done otherwise), so there can be no rational doubt about his sordid offences.

Beech: convicted sex offender

He collected a vile library of child abuse images (some of them in category 'A', the worst category imaginable). He amassed videos of horrendous child abuse, the titles of which alone are enough to sicken any decent person. He spied on his neighbours’ children and covertly photographed them. And he betrayed the trust placed in every adult by secretly filming a friend of his own young son using the lavatory, while he was visiting the Beech family home. Who knows where his sickening fantasies would have taken him next, had he not been caught up in the web of his own making?

At his trial in Newcastle, however, Beech asked the jury to believe that, despite the evidence of his own sexually warped nature and the plethora of lies he had admitted spinning over a period of years, that he himself was the real victim in all this. He maintained his claims to have been sexually and physically abused by a long list of men, many distinguished soldiers or politicians, as part of a so-called ‘VIP paedophile ring’. He continued to claim that he had witnessed young boys being raped and even murdered, regardless of the extensive police investigations that had exploded each and every one of his bizarre assertions.

Liar, Fantasist, Fraudster
In the end, it was a unanimous jury who found Beech guilty as charged. Its members had heard his 'evidence', as well as the testimony of the prosecution witnesses, and they reached their verdicts. Those twelve men and women in the jury box rejected the defence case that Beech genuinely, perhaps misguidedly, believed the claims that he’d made to the police to be the truth. They decided that, beyond reasonable doubt, he was a liar, a fantasist and a fraudster.

Beech: guilty on 13 counts

Beech could have entered a guilty plea. He could have spared some of his victims being forced to defend themselves in the witness box. He could have saved a substantial amount of public money being wasted during the trial – that is in addition to the more than two million pounds of public money already blown during Operation Midland, which was set up to investigate his lies and grandiose fantasies. He could have done the decent thing, but he didn’t. He chose to maintain a grotesque charade in which he posed as the ‘victim’ – a role that he has been playing for years.

DS Kenny McDonald

However, it is also important to point out that Beech (and others of his ilk) has been enabled in his grotesque falsehoods and deceits by police and prosecutors, who were far too ready to believe even the most bizarre and unlikely of allegations. Who can forget the Met’s Detective Superintendant Kenny McDonald proclaiming to the world in December 2014 that: “Nick [their pseudonym for Beech] has been spoken to by experienced officers from the child abuse team and from the murder investigation team and they and I believe that what Nick is saying is credible and true, hence why we are pursuing the allegations that he has made.”


By September of the following year, the Met was left desperately trying to row back from one of the most damaging and expensive fiascos in modern policing history. Arguably, the lasting damage will be to public confidence in a police team that was so easily duped by liar Beech, who would lead them on, what was dubbed during his trial as, ‘a merry dance.’

Believers and Enablers
I believe that the sheer extent of the Beech deception was made possible only because of bad political and ideological decisions. Sir Keir Starmer, in his role as the Director of Public Prosecutions during the period 2008-2013, was an enthusiastic proponent of the ‘you will be believed’ dogma, as was his successor, Alison Saunders. This approach effectively discouraged police officers from investigating allegations of sexual offences in an even-handed way. It pre-empted proper detective work and reversed the burden of proof in sexual offences cases. Police often preferred to pass cases with little, if any, concrete evidence onto the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), content to let prosecutors authorise charges and then leave it to juries to guess who might be telling the truth. In particularly emotive trials – such as those for alleged rape or child abuse – this approach of charging with little, if any, real evidence was a recipe for wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice.

From an #IBelieveNick supporter

In any sane world, Beech’s fantastic claims about a ‘murderous paedophile prime minister’ and a group of ruthless, brutal paedophiles, including senior military men of impeccable reputation, would have been given short shrift. However, in the febrile atmosphere that surrounded the multiple allegations made against the late Jimmy Savile, no-one wanted the role of the boy who called out the obvious deception in the legend of 'The Emperor’s New Clothes'. So Beech was left free to continue weaving his vast web of lies.

Yet, it was not just the police and CPS who indulged Beech’s vile fantasies. Certain sections of the national media were only too keen to jump onto the ‘VIP paedo’ scandal bandwagon. Lengthy features were churned out that gave unwarranted credence to the lies of Beech and others, such as ‘Darren’ (another warped fantasist, now utterly discredited). It is to be hoped at least some of the authors of this tosh now feel suitably humbled by the total destruction in court of Beech’s house of cards.

As Beech returns to his miserable prison cell – a convicted sex offender, a convicted perverter of the course of justice and a convicted fraudster – no doubt he will continue to see himself as the main victim in this disaster of his own making. During the week I sat in court watching him, I saw no evidence whatsoever that he had a shred of empathy for his many victims and their families. Lives and reputations have been tarnished, some who have given a lifetime of loyal service to this country. They all deserved so much better than to have become the innocent victims of the deceitful, cruel, manipulative Carl Beech and his shameless entourage of fantasists, chancers and believers. British justice failed the victims of the despicable Beech for far too long. Shame upon him and his enthusiastic supporters.

The Shame that was Exaro
And then there was the so-called Exaro news service, an online band of journalists, who often crossed the line from being objective reporters to enthusiastic believers in the grand VIP conspiracy theory. During the course of Beech's trial, evidence was given concerning the role that specific members of the Exaro team played in promoting and pushing their star source's increasingly outlandish claims.

Indeed, we heard in court that it was Mark Conrad, one of Exaro's reporters, who actually made the first contact with the police concerning Beech's allegations. Likewise, evidence was given in court that Conrad also taught Beech in 2014 how to mask his identity online, use the TOR web browser and to communicate via the ProtonMail encrypted email service.

Tom Watson MP

Beyond Exaro, Beech also amassed a hardcore group of cheerleaders and enthusiasts, who helped to give his allegations the oxygen of publicity, especially online, although public support from Tom Watson MP, currently Labour’s deputy leader, gave Beech’s noxious fantasies an unwarranted boost from a politician who was no doubt hoping that the ‘VIP paedo ring revelations’ could inflict serious damage on the Conservative Party. Will Mr Watson now make a public apology?

Beech’s most outrageous lies, that Britain’s ruling class was infiltrated by murderous kidnappers, torturers and paedophile rapists, found fertile ground among certain sections of the Twittersphere. Some of these ‘believers’ helped spread Beech’s lies because it all chimed with their own prejudices and fantasies. Their Twitter hashtag was #IBelieveNick. Anyone daring to challenge this cult risked being smeared as a ‘paedo apologist’ – or worse.

Sabine McNeill - jailed for 9 years

To date, none of these online reputation vandals has been brought to justice for the serious harm they have done, although the example of the infamous ‘Hampstead troll’ Sabine McNeill – jailed for nine years for her vicious campaign of false allegations against innocent people – may provide some hope that at least the very worse of Beech’s twisted and malicious cheerleaders might yet face prosecution. Of course, Beech was the author of this vile, vicious scam, yet he was not alone in promoting it assiduously. There are several people in professional positions whose careers should now be ended in shame, if only to protect the public from their obsessions in the future.

History is the study of the past, in order to understand the present, and so prepare for the future. Let us hope that the story of the lying, selfish, ruthless paedophile Carl Beech is a lesson none of us should ever forget.