LEICESTERSHIRE IS FAMOUS!

1. Brad lane was allowed to visit 'pedophile' gangster Reggie Kray, inside Gartree prison, in Leicester.

Brad lane died young. (MYSTERIOUS PRISON; MYSTERIOUS DEATHS)

2. Madeleine McCanns' home county is Leicestershire.

3. In a number of Leicester children's homes, between 1973 and 1986, various adults were involved in the sexual abuse of children. (Uncovering The Past Abuse of Children in Care ).

These were homes run by Frank Beck.

At his trial in 1991, Beck was found guilty of 17 counts of physical and sexual abuse.

There was a Police Complaints Authority investigation into why so many of the complaints made to police by children had been ignored.


4. Over a period of years, two children were raped, starved and beaten.

The two children are from Leicestershire in England.

How could horrifying child abuse have gone on so long?

The two Leicestershire kids, Ben and Amanda, accuse Leicestershire County Council of a cover-up of what happened.

For years, the two kids were abused by their step-father Mark Thomas and his brother, Paul Thomas.

Ben was raped when he was 4 years old.

At school the kids were seen to be covered in bruises, half starved, unwashed, covered in head-lice and stinking of urine.

Leicestershire social services seemed to turn a blind eye.

At home the kids were kept caged behind an iron gate.


In 2011, Mark and Paul Thomas were jailed, for 18 months; and the kids' mother, Alyson Mepham, was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

"I'll always remember thinking 'Please get us away. Please get us out'. But they never did," said one of the kids, now 16.

In 1999, the kid first told a nursery nurse that her daddy had hurt her on the bed.

The nurse informed social services.

Neighbours, a head teacher, a housing officer and health professionals also alerted the social services.

But, Leicestershire Social Services did not get the kids out of their home until near the end of 2002.

The kids went to live with foster parents.

But, the kids were made to see Mepham and Mark Thomas at a child-parent contact centre.

Leicester Town Hall

After 2002, the Thomas brothers may have gone on to prey on other children.

The Thomas brothers went free for nine years after Ben and Amanda were taken into care.

"They had a string of addresses up and down the country."


The foster parents are very fond of the two kids.

"We don't class them as our foster kids," says Don. "They're our family and that's the end of it.

"We're so proud of them. We couldn't be more proud."

Amanda and Ben came to live with Don and Angie in January 2003.

"They didn't know anything of life," she says. "They didn't know what birthdays or Christmas were. Birthdays and Christmas petrified them. They'd never had anything, you see."

The children were taken into care on the grounds of neglect.

The truth of the sexual abuse was revealed to the foster parents in 2003.

The police investigation seemed to go nowhere.

Detective Constable Spence first interviewed the children in 2007.

He found allegations and concerns that had been reported by neighbours, a head teacher and health and welfare professionals over the years.

Spence's paedophile inquiry looked at several missing persons' cases.

"Myself and a colleague went to France for five days to track down one witness," says Spence. "We ended up interviewing about 70 witnesses."

When the police caught up with him, Mark Thomas was in Scarborough.

A week before the trial, a social worker is alleged to have told Amanda that she and her brother would have to leave their foster home when they turned 18.

5. What drives a father to annihilate his family? Tobias Day, from Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, who had recently lost his job as a policeman, killed his wife Samantha and seven-year-old daughter, and attacked his two other children before taking his own life.

~~

Journalist who exposed abuse of children in state care dies

CHILD ABUSE LINKS TO LAW CHIEF, ISLINGTON ...