Questions and Loopholes

Two detectives visited me and a few days later I visited them to give my full statement. Then came the questions. Simple things like did I have any photos or emails? Did I know the address of the house Tim had when I knew him? What areas did I know of that Tim had lived other than Swindon. The questions came reasonably regularly, by text or email, and I replied with the information I had. Then came a call from Ross, the lead detective. There were other boys. That’s why he’d asked me about the areas outside of Swindon that Tim had lived.

After Tim left my life, and Swindon, he moved to Bristol, taking Alfie and Ryan with him. Alfie was my best friend, and Ryan was Tim’s boyfriend, both were underage when Tim met them. But I’d already told Ross about them, so this new person, this new boy, was someone I didn’t know. Ross couldn’t tell me much, but he could tell me that someone had come forward a while back, with allegations eerily similar to mine.

I was silent, I had so many questions, but they were all stuck in my throat. They were being blocked by a statement. That boy, was abused by Tim because of my silence. My wilful delusions of it just being me, the lies I’d told myself to make it easier to live with, they had helped Tim, and they’d led to others suffering the same way I had.

It took a couple of days to get my head straight, but I had to know more, and Ross legally couldn’t tell me, so I went to Google. Starting with what I knew, I pulled on the threads and was presented with a bewildering amount of information. It turns out that ‘Tim Darch’ is a surprisingly common name, but when I clicked on a link to a local Wiltshire council, Tim looked at me for the first time in more than two decades. He’d got older, he’d got fatter, he’d grown a beard that along with his extra weight made him look like a budget Santa, but there was no mistaking his eyes. I slammed my laptop shut and paced from my sitting room to my kitchen, and back.

I knew it was him, and I knew the article about him making child pornography was him, but that maths didn’t add up. The council website was recent but Tim was still on the Sex Offenders Register, so how could that be? A person with a conviction like that simply can’t get a job as a respectable member of a community giving him access to vulnerable people and their families. I had to be missing something, so I went back to Google, and hit a wall.

The local council page with Tim’s picture on it was the only information about him on the internet, or at least the only information I could find. I needed help. I couldn’t live with the knowledge that my lack-of-action meant other boys had been abused, and not do everything I could to stop him.

A friend put me in contact with her brother, a freelance journalist. I gave him all the information I had, including known addresses, known aliases, and the page to Lyneham and Bradenstoke council. It didn’t take long for him to find out how all this was possible, but years later, I still can’t understand how it’s allowed.

Tim was born Julian Timothy Darch, and he was first convicted under that name. But he’d spent most his life going by the name of Tim Darch. The moment he was convicted of child sex offences, he changed his name by Deed Poll to Timothy Herbert Darch, and instantly had plausible deniability. The person who was convicted ‘wasn’t him’, it was just someone with a similar name to him. Worse still, his position in the council had been gifted to him. No need to stand for election, or go through vetting, or even a basic criminal background check. Doing adequate checks on prospective councillors is simply advised good practise, so Lyneham and Bradenstoke didn’t bother. They thought they knew who Tim was, and had no requirement to look any further into him. So, a convicted child pornographer who was on the sex offenders register was installed into local office.

More than two decades of hiding and keeping his information off the internet, he’d got arrogant and slipped up. That appointment to local council meant the journalist had a place to start work from. He hit the same hurdles I did, mainly that there are a lot of Tim Darchs, but he was better and sifting through them me. The next shock came in the form of where Tim chose to live. Tim had moved every couple of years, and every single address was looking at, or into, a primary school.

The CPS had no interest in this information, none of it was used in court, and the prosecution didn’t even get around to filing a bad character application. They were meant to, but they simply didn’t make time to do so. They also weren’t interested in the fact that if you looked at Tim’s Twitter likes, you’d come across him interacting with indecent images. But as much as I have many issues with the CPS, the blame for this situation I think can be apportioned evenly between there not being a law requiring any councillor or public representative to be thoroughly DBS checked. Allowing someone on the Sex Offender Register to change their name at will. And lastly, lazy, copy and paste, journalism.

Had any of the newspapers or news websites that reported Tim’s conviction actually done their job, Tim wouldn’t have been able to hide. All they did was copy the statement from the police announcing the conviction, edit it slightly, and click publish. Some of them even copied from each other, edited a bit, and clicked publish. Not a single outlet or newsgroup did any research, or journalism, and if they had done the absolute bare minimum, then Tim wouldn’t have been able to get away with what he did.

Tim even made his way to the comments section of some of the copy and paste articles, and got into arguments about how people should be allowed to download and view whatever they want in the privacy of their own home. How one-hundred child-abuse images wasn’t that many. And, how just being curious to know what those images look like, shouldn’t be a crime. All of this attached to articles about himself, and neither the ‘journalist’ that posted them, or the newsgroup responsible for them, did anything about it.

Yes, the laws need to change, and the holes in the net need to be made smaller, but without journalists choosing to do the job they claim to be able to, these predators will be able to hide in plane sight, and we will only know when it’s too late.