Posted on 12/01/2003 8:51:25 PM PST by ijcr
On Saturday morning, the 73-year-old convicted paedophile Arnold Hartley was beaten to death in his house in Redcar. Police suspect it was the result of a vigilante assault - the sort of attack Hartley had been subjected to for years. Esther Addley asks his neighbours and acquaintances if they believe he was a victim - or whether he got what he deserved
By early evening yesterday, as the black, dirty rain battering the small Teesside town of Redcar ushered in an even blacker, dirtier night, the phone lines in the incident room at the local police station had rung precisely once. Several dedicated phone lines and operators have been assigned to the case, and no less than 40 officers are working on pursuing potential leads, yet three days after the savage murder of an elderly local man, the response from the public has been one of deafening, resolute silence.
"One of our last murders here was a prostitute," says a rather exasperated spokeswoman from Cleveland police, "and we had, ooh, dozens of phone calls to the incident room on the first day. The phones were ringing off the hook. So, yes. We're disappointed with the response. You could certainly say that."
Arnold Hartley died at some point between the hours of midnight and 3am on Saturday morning, in the front bedroom of his home at 107 Queen Street, a short walk from the centre of Redcar. He was 73, lived on his own, and died after being savagely bludgeoned in the head and face with a heavy object.
But the dead man was not the standard kindly, twinkly-eyed pensioner-victim of popular stereotype, and Queen Street is certainly not enacting all the normal community rituals, following a violent murder, of pity and regret and fear.
Hartley was a convicted child sex offender, having been sentenced to a year's imprisonment in 2001 for eight counts of making indecent images of a girl under 14 and one charge of indecent assault. And so, while the rain may have been battering down in stair-rods yesterday from sodden skies, every eye in Redcar remained determinedly, defiantly dry.
"I'm terrible, me," says a local publican drawing heavily on a cigarette, "but do you know what I said? That's one less on the streets. Cos I don't think they should ever be let out. And most people round here will say the same."
"There's no need to do something like that," says Chris Lord, 16, swaggering down Queen Street with two teenage friends, "but he had it coming to him, didn't he? I mean, you wouldn't wish it on anybody. But I don't think anyone's that bothered that he's dead."
"I just think they should be segregated," spits one neighbour, with indignant satisfaction. "I don't think they should be put next to normal human beings. Can't they just go and live on an island somewhere? God knows there are enough islands around this country. It worked when they did it with the lepers, didn't it?"
How does she feel about the fact that he has been killed? She half smiles, and shrugs. "Indifferent. Not bothered."
Was Hartley killed because he was a paedophile? The police remain unsure - two early suspects were arrested but later released "unconditionally" - but they know, depressingly, that it is probably their most likely lead. So often had the front windows of the pensioner's two-up two-down terrace been smashed by angry locals that he had given up replacing them, blocking the gaps instead with a thin, cheap chipboard that soon bowed and stained in the rain.
His car, neighbours recall, would frequently have its lights and windows smashed; one remembers seeing youths jumping up and down on the roof until it was severely dented. He did not exactly present a promising burglary prospect.
"Quite a few times you'd see people at night kicking the door in," says Stephen Bendall, who is 19 and lives almost exactly opposite. "People who were drunk, you know, on the way home from the pub. They'd stop and kick at his door - it was a laugh, I think."
"I would like to think it was not a vigilante attack but it is a major line of inquiry," Detective Superintendent Brian Dunn says. "We accept that Mr Hartley was a sex offender and he probably was not liked by a number of people, but let us put that to one side and remember that he was murdered.
I think there could be some prejudice and it could be that people think he deserved what happened. We have to go beyond that." The number of phone calls he has received may be testimony to his success in convincing the public as much.
Paedophiles, we know, are the 21st-century's bogeymen, the witches whom it is still - almost - acceptable to pursue and torment and burn. Certainly life for a convicted child sex offender is a deeply dangerous one.
In June last year Martin Goldrick, a heroin user from Rochdale, was jailed for life for battering to death with a set of ornamental lamps a 68-year-old man, only days before the pensioner was due to appear in court on charges of abusing young boys.
Two months later the Edinburgh home of another convicted paedophile, 70-year-old David Murray, was ransacked by an angry mob, some of whom were as young as 10 years old. In 1998, the Association of Chief Officers of Probation published details of 40 former offenders who had suffered violence or been forced to go to ground as a result of vigilante action.
All of which is deplorable, many will say, but what of the children whose lives these men have ruined? Hartley was deemed to present a "medium risk" of re-offending, it has emerged since his death, but none of his neighbours was ever officially told as much. What does that mean, in real terms? Were the residents of Queen Street right to believe their children weren't safe while Hartley was in their midst?
Risk is assessed on a number of factors, says Donald Findlater, the deputy director of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, a child-protection charity that works with child sex offenders, as well as with victims and their families.
They would include the offender's age, the number of convictions, whether the victim, for example, was a family member, and the victim's gender. Crudely, he concedes, while there may have been other factors considered in Hartley's case, a 73-year-old with one sex offence conviction against a girl may not be considered a particularly high-risk candidate.
Only in cases where the offender is felt very likely to commit another crime, he points out, would the community be told.
And it has to remain so, argues David Wilson, professor of criminology at the University of Central England, as anonymity and integration remain the only way for society to solve the problem of what to do with released paedophiles, however uncomfortable the circumstances of individual cases may become in individual communities.
Wilson has worked with many former offenders and written a book, Innocence Betrayed, on the subject of paedophiles, the media and society. Increasing the social exclusion experienced by paedophiles, put simply, increases their risk of reoffending.
"One particular person whom I did the research with feared he was going to be exposed, and spoke openly to me about his feelings that he may as well go and reoffend, since he had nothing else to lose.
I had to stop working with him and refer him to the probation services." The government should investigate innovative schemes such as are used in Canada, he says, which encourage communities to seek to include offenders and make them feel less isolated - and which have dramatic affects on reoffending rates.
But he concedes that communities are rarely, if ever, given any information on training on how to deal with child sex offenders who may be in their midst.
Whatever the varied tragedies of Arnold Hartley's life, of which there are clearly several, the ultimate tragedy is that in Queen Street, the road in which, according to neighbours, he was born and raised, he will never be anything more than his conviction.
The scraps that can be pieced together from those who knew him, or had known him, or recognised him by sight, or knew him by reputation, amount to a shadow of a life as derelict as the crumbling, window-less pile in which, remarkably, he lived until his death.
If Hartley had friends, nobody ever saw him with one. Some neighbours remember his mother - not, hastily, as a friend - but she died about 15 years ago, one said, and a brother has also not been sighted for many years. He was a loner who had never married and had no children, say police.
He did his shopping at the local Spar at 6am so that nobody would see him out, says a local businesswoman who was one of the few also to be up at that time. He wore odd trainers, giggle Lord and his friends: one Adidas, with three stripes, one a cheap imitation with four. He lived at the back of the house, adds another neighbour, because the front was dark and leaking.
And now that he is dead, neighbours are willing to tell strangers with a notebook the stories they told each other about him for years, so long as you don't name them.
The story that he would entice innocent 12-year-old girls into his house, for instance, offering them money and tablets left over from his mother's final illness.
The story that the girls were, in fact, child prostitutes whom he had ordered over the internet. The story that a girl was found dead in his house once after taking an overdose. One neighbour says she knows a woman who once had to drag her daughter out of the house. "But all that might just be hearsay," concedes another neighbour, with an unhappy shrug.
Now he is dead, Lord says, the mood in the street has changed noticeably. "Before, people were really nervous to let their children play in the road, they always had to be inside. But they've all been out today." That seems implausible considering the ghastly weather? He merely shrugs.
"Whatever you say about him,"says another neighbour, her thin lips set, "nobody round here will mourn him." So what happens now? Is it just back to normal life in Queen Street, as if there a brutal murder never happened? "Yeah, I suppose so. Except" - she stops. "Apparently there's another one in the street. I just heard that today. We don't know where he lives yet."
There will be more and more articles like this to come until we find Paedophile hate crime laws....we have been down this road before.
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