Link between school arsonist and Hampstead hoax

Yesterday we wrote about Philip Day, who was found guilty this week of having pursued a campaign of harassment against teachers in a Cheshire school, which culminated in his setting fire to the school.

One of the charges of which Day was found guilty related to his having also burned down a 700-year old house in Essex, where he believed that his girlfriend’s ex-partner was sleeping at the time.

The girlfriend, news outlets reported, was a woman named Samantha Baldwin. Two years ago, Baldwin dominated the news for a time when she disappeared, along with her two children.

According to the Northwich Guardian,

Ms Baldwin had accused her ex-husband of sexually abusing their children, an allegation that was found to be untrue by a family court judge before she abducted the children and hid for a week in Nottingham.

We reported on Baldwin’s case at the time, and cited HHJ Jeremy Lea’s April 2017 judgment:

In December 2014, the mother alleged that the father had sexually abused his sons. The father adamantly denied that he had done so. The police investigated. Given the seriousness of the allegations, all contact between the father and his sons stopped. There was a fact-finding hearing to decide whether the allegations were true before me in February 2017. I heard evidence over twelve days. I heard from the mother and the father who both had experienced senior Counsel to represent them and fourteen witnesses. I had regard to over two-thousand pages of documents. I heard oral submissions from the advocates on the evidence I had received. I made a prohibited steps order against the mother with her consent that she would remain living at her stated address with the boys.

I reserved judgment to Monday the 27th of March.

In the middle of delivering my judgment on that morning, the mother abruptly left court. It is now apparent that she picked up her sons from an unknown location and disappeared with them. This put her in breach of the Court order.

The police are investigating how she did this and I make no further comment save that it is my assessment that was plainly pre-planned and carefully executed.

The mother intended to prevent the court from taking decisions as to the arrangements that should be made for the boys in light of my findings.

I made a number of specific findings in my judgment.

At the beginning of that judgment, I set out the respective positions of the parents in these terms: “This is a calamitous case. The two boys that I am concerned with have either been grossly sexually abused by their father, members of the father’s family, and a number of his male friends. Or, in all probability, they now have a false belief that he, his family and friends have done so. On either basis the consequences for the emotional and psychological wellbeing of these boys may well be catastrophic.”

In my judgment I found that the father had not perpetrated sexual, physical or emotional abuse against the boys as alleged by the mother, or at all and that the allegations made by the mother were false.

I also found that the mother genuinely believed that he had done so, but that her belief was irrational and that the evidence of abuse was unreliable.

I also made a finding that in order to try to prove her case against the father the mother had caused the boys to ingest substances that would give rise to a positive testing for benzodiazepine products and zolpidem.

It is not uncommon in contested family proceedings, that one side, and occasionally both sides, are of the opinion that the judge’s decision was wrong. It is open to such a party to ask the judge himself or the Court of Appeal to give permission to appeal against the decision. What is not acceptable is for a party to attempt to obstruct the court’s decision by removing children, as I am satisfied that this mother did.

Both the Day case, which involved stalking and arson of innocent people at a school, and the Baldwin case, in which an innocent father was targeted with false allegations by a mother determined to keep her children from him, resonate strongly with different aspects of the Hampstead situation.

One common factor leaps out at us, though: Richard Carvath.

The Carvath connection

We noted last month that Carvath had recently filmed himself lurking outside the Hampstead school at the centre of the hoax. We noted at the time that while this is not illegal, it seemed an odd thing to do. Certainly, it was a marker of his interest in the Hampstead hoax.

On 19 November 2018, he tweeted:

Richard has obtained new information re the Hampstead case. (Chapman Pincher would approve.) RC’s team will not be passing any of this material to the Met. Enquiries are ongoing. RC may say more on his return. (obo)

(Carvath routinely refers to himself in the third person in tweets and on his blog. According to “obo”, his alleged amanuensis, Carvath is almost always away on unspecified business, which we are sure is very, very important and ultra-confidential. Top secret, we dare say.)

And on 22 November Carvath tweeted a “summary statement from Richard” concerning his views on Hampstead:

In 2017, we noted that Carvath, who bills himself as “investigative journalist”, had taken it upon himself to support Baldwin. At the time, he alleged on Twitter that Baldwin’s case involved Satanic ritual abuse. In a now-deleted tweet dated 11 April 2017, Carvath wrote, “He is an SRA child abuser – one of a network of SRA child abusers”.

Interestingly, 10 days earlier he tweeted that he had received a court order which, he implied, barred him from discussing Baldwin’s case:

He seems to have got round this inconvenient order by first claiming not to have received it, and then tweeting comments in which he named no names—but his meaning was quite clear:

More recently, according to his blog, Carvath has become a person of interest to Nottinghamshire Police once more.

On 21 January, Carvath wrote:

On Saturday I received a formal written communication from a Sergeant Timothy Cuthbert of Nottinghamshire Police.

(By the way, the Notts police force is actively engaged in protecting several suspected paedophiles I’ve investigated; though many individual police officers are doubtless unaware that, sometimes, their day-to-day duties actually serve the purpose of this unofficial paedophile protection agenda.)

This sergeant does not know me and has never communicated with me before.

The sergeant opened with “Richard …”.

Then, without stating [any details of] his business, he requested that I telephone him.

Moreover, this occurred in the context that the sergeant knew that I would know, on reading his communication, that he had already contacted female persons known to me without having any valid good reason for doing so.

On the same day, he announced his intention to resume involvement in the Baldwin case:

All interested parties are hereby notified that today I have issued instructions to seek to intervene in, or to have re-examined, the case of S******* B****** (2017, Nottingham).

I proceed on the basis that it is my assertion that the Greater Manchester Police force and the Nottinghamshire Police force are both compromised in regard of this case.  Furthermore, I assert that the judge in this case was/is compromised.  It is therefore my position that I refuse to submit [potential] new evidence to any of these parties or to cooperate with these parties.

It is my assertion that at the heart of the S******* B****** case there is a criminal conspiracy to cover up a paedophile ring.

This ring comprises child abusers who abuse from the primary motive of paedophilia, together with others, being Satanists, who abuse children from the primary motive of the fulfilment of their religious beliefs (SRA).

We suspect that this will not have gone down well with Notts police, particularly in view of any court order which he might have received regarding the case.

Nor, we suspect, will they be amused at his decision to make allegations of child sexual abuse against HHJ Lea, the judge involved in Baldwin’s case.

Nottingham news: child sexual assault allegation against Family Court judge. pic.twitter.com/sLa2E8VbFO

— Richard Carvath (@RichardCarvath) January 16, 2019

Following receipt of his gagging order in 2017, Carvath referred to HHJ Lea as “bent as a banana”, but judges are generally used to such abuse. However, they might not view allegations of child sexual abuse with such equanimity.

To be fair, we do not have any evidence that Carvath’s libelling of HHJ Lea is at the root of the Notts police’s concern.

However, it does appear that Carvath, like Day, is continuing to fight Baldwin’s case for her. It is not clear, in Carvath’s case, whether this behaviour is sanctioned by Baldwin.