Chris Fay and the ‘snuff movie’ confessions

Following up on last week’s post about Bill Maloney, Chris Fay, and the supposed “tattoo” found on Leon Brittan (which turned out to have started as a birthmark on an unidentified person, and magically morphed into a tattoo on Brittan thanks to a hyperventilating Maloney) we’ve come across a report featuring Fay and Andrew Ash, dating back to 1990.

Many thanks to Bandini, commenting on Richard Bartholomew’s excellent report yesterday, for links to the Sunday Times piece from 1990:

 

Detectives are to study tape recordings of a teenager who has ‘confessed’ that he helped film a ‘snuff’ movie.

The tapes could provide some of the most revealing clues yet for police investigating reports that up to 10 boys have been murdered during the making of such films by paedophile rings from London and Kent. 

Andrew, 19, disappeared earlier this year after giving evidence to welfare workers from the National Association for Young People in Care (Naypic)

He claimed he was taken to Amsterdam in 1988 by a group of men from London, and forced to film in a warehouse where a 12-year-old boy was raped successively by 12 men, beaten with chains, run over by a motor cycle and his body dumped in a canal. 

‘Andrew said that the men who had done this then sat around drinking champagne’, said Mary Moss, the association’s London development officer. 

A few days before his confession, Andrew was drugged by two men, who bundled him into a van outside Moss’s home. ‘At first we took what he said with a pinch of salt, but when he began to be followed and was then kidnapped from my house we took him seriously’, she said. 

In this instance, Andrew’s allegations sound bizarre on the face of it. No explanation is given as to how he managed to escape the same fate as the 12-year-old boy, for instance. Would brutal rapist/murderers really have allowed a witness to their foul crimes to just hang about and watch them drink champagne after the fact?

And if Andrew was brazenly kidnapped in front of Mary Moss’s house prior to telling his story, by what means was he rescued?

While we have no doubt that NAYPIC did do some valuable work on behalf of children and youth, such as its 1989 report on violations of human rights of young people in care homes, it seems possible that delving into the “snuff film” trope of the latter part of the 20th century was something more akin to a publicity stunt.

The reporter appears to be basing this story not on a live interview with Andrew, but on a video of an interview with him, presumably made by NAYPIC in an effort to impress funding bodies of the day:

The association, which is campaigning for a network of safe houses for runaways to protect them from paedophiles, has collated information on two films in which boys are alleged to have died. 

Scotland Yard said yesterday that it was anxious to receive any evidence that such films existed. It has had an overwhelming response from the public since issuing the number for a telephone hotline. [number]

Given that NAYPIC was campaigning for a network of safe houses for teens, it appears that the videos which they made were for the benefit of potential funding bodies, not necessarily the police.

However, given the videos’ subject matter, the police would inevitably have become involved:

The 24-hour incident room at Arbour Square police station in London’s East End was inundated with calls yesterday from young people who claimed that they had been victims of sexual abuse and from parents worried about missing children. 

It was set up by detectives as part of Operation Orchid, an investigation into child murders that began last year after four men were jailed for a total of 19 years at the Old Bailey for the manslaughter of Jason Swift, 14. 

Jason died after being drugged and held down by four men in a homosexual orgy in a flat in Hackney in East London in 1985. Police have since been told that his death was recorded on a hand-held video camera, and that at least one videotape is in circulation. 

Although no such tape has been seized or seen by a British police officer, an Englishman arrested in Amsterdam has told Dutch police that a video was made. 

‘To date we have not discovered any snuff movies’, said Detective Superintendent Michale Hames, head of Scotland Yard’s child pornography squad. ‘We don’t say they don’t exist, but we have not seized any. If they do exist, the distribution will be very exclusive’. 

Detective Supt. Hames is quite right: although there may be genuine films out there of people being murdered—the video made by Canadian murderer Luka Magnotta of his rape, murder, and subsequent dismemberment of a young man springs to mind—the market for such things is extremely insignificant.

Welfare staff at Naypic have been convinced by Andrew and other runaways that such films are being made. They have been told of a paedophile group known as the Elite Twelve, which is prepared to pay up to £5,000 to youngsters to make videos involving torture and sado-masochism, and which may lead to murder. 

They have also been told of a snuff movie made last year when a 14-year-old boy was beaten by three men in an East End flat, raped and battered to death with clubs. 

Chris Fay, an adult adviser to the association, said: ‘I am convinced that such videos exist. I have been shown one in Amsterdam by a Dutch colleague. It showed three men wearing leather masks cutting up a girl aged about 13 with a flick knife’. 

The above paragraph, we think, tells the most significant part of the story.

Just as true believers in Satanic ritual abuse are convinced that a vast network of cults routinely rape, murder, and consume babies and children, Fay is utterly certain that snuff films are being made. And like the SRA enthusiasts, he is determined to prove it, by hook or by crook.

However, certain questions arise: for example, if Fay really did believe that he watched a video of men cutting up a teen with a flick knife, why did he not immediately report it to police?

However, scenes in such films  are often found to be faked. A Soho pornographer was jailed for 18 months in 1984 for distributing a video called Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, which appeared to show a boy aged 10 cutting off a woman’s head. 

Ray Wyre, who now runs Britain’s first clinic for convicted paedophiles in Birmingham, says he has seen snuff films in the United States and has no doubt killing takes place. 

Again, if Ray Wyre (whom we have run across before) saw “snuff films” (note the plural—how many did he need to watch?) in the USA, and had no doubt that what he was watching was indeed murder, why were these crimes not reported to police?

One must also ask who, exactly, was showing Fay or Wyre these videos? Surely they ought to have been reported as well, for possession of evidence relating to murder?

It seems inconceivable to us that anyone could live with the knowledge that they had watched a child being killed on film without immediately reporting it to police and attempting to assist the investigation by giving details of the purveyor of the video. And yet, strangely, this is what seems to have happened.

And Andrew, with his stories of kidnapping, snuff movies, and champagne, seems to have thus embarked on his career as Chris Fay’s marionette, acting as a “witness” to any crime he was told to.

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