“I think he’s rather a sad, impotent man,” says Nick, “whose chickens have come home to roost.” He laughs. “But that’s probably a coping mechanism for myself to disenfranchise him of any power.”
On day five of the trial, one of the victims says in court that Jonathan had a blue door, when in fact his door was white. This presumably trivial inaccuracy gives rise to the following e-mail from Jonathan: “The accusers have provenly lied on oath—blue front door etc. Will the CPS prosecute them for perjury? Rather doubt it. If the verdicts are guilty, they collect their cash from the Compensation Board. . . . Is this right or fair? A topic you may feel inclined to raise in your wonderful story. See you later. JK.”
Most of the conversations that occur in the Old Bailey canteen among the journalists center not on Jonathan King but on Ron Thwaites, his extraordinary, shocking, charismatic defense barrister.
“Ron could get the Devil off,” one veteran Old Bailey tabloid reporter tells me.
Before the trial even started, during the preparatory hearings in July, Thwaites had great success reducing the charges against his client. “Lots of people,” he said to Judge Paget, “don’t enjoy sex.”
Lots of people don’t enjoy sex—but this doesn’t mean that assaults have been committed against them. Where’s the guilty mind if the boys appeared to acquiesce? An assailant, he argued, must know he’s committing an assault for a crime to have occurred. But there were no protestations. Nowhere in the evidence did a boy admit to saying “No!” or “Stop!” And if they really hated it—if it scarred them—why wait twenty years to come forward! Thirty years!
David Jeremy, the prosecution barrister, argued that the look on their faces would have suggested protestation.
Thwaites contended that if King was having anal sex with them, he wouldn’t have seen the look on their faces. Yes, said Thwaites, King approached boys. He approached thousands of boys.
“These encounters,” he said, “are the tip of the iceberg.”
But he did not approach them for sex. He approached them for market research. “My client interacts with his public,” he said, “on a grand scale.” I looked over at the arresting officers. They chuckled wryly at the words “tip of the iceberg.”
Then Thwaites attacked the police, accusing them of underhanded tactics. If a complainant said he was between fourteen and sixteen when the assault allegedly occurred, the police wrote that he was fourteen. He asked for six of the complainants to be struck off the charge sheet, and the judge agreed to four of them. Thwaites also asked for three trials instead of one, for the purposes of “case management.”
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.