Dr Anke Hill case: Police were forced to drop the original charge of kidnap

(Richard returns later this year.  Please be patient with him.  In the meantime, you may appreciate the extract below, taken from work-in-progress on the Anglesey Child Rescuers case.)

A police report was filed four days after the recapture of the boy.  Its purpose was to give the “key evidence” for a crime of kidnap.

Though the police had interviewed the boy, there was no complaint of crime by the boy in this “key evidence” report.

After recapture, the boy did not complain to police against Dr Anke Hill or her associates.

The boy himself was not a complainant to kidnap.

This child who had previously complained to police about being raped did not complain to police about any kidnap.

The boy did not see himself as a victim of kidnap, and did not complain of kidnap, because he had quite clearly consented to being with Dr Anke Hill and her associates.

This “key evidence” report contained no evidence whatsoever that the boy had suffered even in the slightest by going with Dr Anke Hill and her associates.

The boy did not disagree with leaving his captivity in ‘care’ behind, and going off instead with Dr Anke Hill and her associates.

(Indeed, police found the boy neither gagged nor restrained when they recaptured him.  On the contrary, the boy was sat happily next to Dr Anke Hill.  He had no injuries and was not distressed.  In the police report, there is not a word of thanks or relief from the boy that the police had seized him back from the adults with whom he was found.)

The law normally requires that, for a crime of kidnap to have occurred, there must be a complainant.  When a person has quite clearly consented to being in certain company, and is perfectly happy to be in that company, it is obviously a nonsense to speak of kidnap.  However, where children are concerned, the legal system grants to itself the right to totally disregard a child’s clearly-given consent, if lawyers succeed with the assertion that the child is not [legally] capable of giving consent.

The prosecution for ‘conspiracy to kidnap’ began not because the boy complained that he had not consented to being with Dr Anke Hill and associates, but rather because the fact of the boy’s consent was considered irrelevant in the machinations of a hostile legal system.  In the eyes of the legal system, the boy belonged to Social Services and was the property of the State.  In reality and in fact, the boy consented to being with his rescuers, and there was thus no kidnap; but in law, because the legal system denied legal personhood and competence to the boy, the legal system thus entitled itself to rewrite reality.

* * *

Three days after the failed rescue attempt, the original six arrested (Hill, Wong, the Stevensons, Going-Hill and Frith) were charged by police, on the evening of Saturday 7 November 2020.  All six were charged not with ‘conspiracy to kidnap’ but actually with kidnap itself.

The original charge, which was asserted to be “contrary to common law”, stated that:

“On 04/11/2020 at [location of foster woman’s home] unlawfully and by force or fraud took or carried away a child namely [boy’s name] against his will.”

This was plainly a charge of kidnap, and was obviously not applicable to four of the six so charged.  The boy was “carried away” from the foster ‘carer’ only by Dr Anke Hill, with the direct assistance of Wilfred Wong.

On this point of ‘carrying away’ the boy from the foster ‘carer’, there was never any doubt that the Stevensons, Going-Hill and Frith did not participate in this act; therefore, for this reason alone, these four could never have been convicted of this kidnap charge.  But there was another fatal error in the original charge, such that none of the six were guilty of it.

The boy never complained to police that he had been seized “against his will”, and thus this assertion in the charge was not true, and accordingly there was no evidence for it.

It would have been impossible to prove to a jury that the boy had been seized “against his will”, and so none of the six rescuers were ever in any danger of being found guilty of this kidnap charge.

Quite clearly, in law as in fact, there was no kidnap.  From the boy’s own point-of-view, what happened was a rescue to which the boy himself consented.

So, all six of the rescuers charged in the first instance were wrongly and falsely charged.  (In total, eight were eventually charged in this case.)

But what did the State do?  The original kidnap charge was changed to a different charge of ‘conspiracy to kidnap’.

Under the new charge, the rescuers were charged with “conspiracy to kidnap, contrary to section 1(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1977″, in that Dr Anke Hill and all the others accused “between the 1st day of July 2020 and the 5th day of November 2020 conspired together to kidnap [boy’s name], a child aged 8 years.”

By definition, the rescuers were no longer charged with an actual kidnap, but rather with having conspired to commit a kidnap.  The emphasis of the alleged criminal act was henceforth placed firmly upon conspiring rather than kidnapping.  A charge of ‘conspiracy to kidnap’ did not necessarily need any actual kidnap to have happened in order to succeed in securing criminal convictions against the accused.

This major change in the particulars of the charge was a tacit admission by the State that (1) in law, the boy had not been kidnapped, and (2) the ‘carrying away’ of the boy by Dr Anke Hill and Wilfred Wong had not happened against the boy’s will.

This changing of the charge against the Anglesey Child rescuers – from an alleged act of kidnapping the boy to, instead, the alleged act of conspiring to do so – had the subtle-yet-profound effect of serving to conceal the fact [or to obscure the significance of the fact] that the boy himself had consented to what happened.

Whilst, strictly speaking, this issue of the previously alleged lack of consent from the boy did not cease to be relevant to the new charge, the changing of the charge removed this issue from the spotlight, helped the prosecution to pretend it didn’t really exist, and enabled the jury’s attention to be diverted away from the fact of the boy’s actual consent and refocused instead upon the prosecution’s assertion that, in law (though not, of course, in reality), this eight-year-old could not be found capable of giving his consent to anything, and so therefore he could not have consented to what the ‘conspirators’ planned to do to help him.

Furthermore, because the boy’s captors, Anglesey Social Services (the real kidnappers), did not consent to the boy being ‘carried away’ from them by Dr Anke Hill and her associates, and because Social Services’ custody of the boy could be presented, on the face of it, as being lawful to the jury, the change of charge facilitated the prosecution in filling jurors’ minds with the ‘lawful’ will of social workers, as opposed to the legally ‘irrelevant’ will of the boy.

Changing the charge helped the prosecution to muddy the waters, and to hide the huge ‘elephant in the room’ that the boy was quite content to be in the company of Dr Anke Hill and her associates, and had no wish to return to the captivity of foster ‘care’.  From beginning to end, the prosecution of the Anglesey Child Rescuers was an extremely deceitful operation.