January 18, 1984: At the Central Criminal Court, Mrs X is cross-examined. She was testifying against her alleged rapist, the odious Kevin Kenneth O’Dowd. The article below appeared on page 7 of the Glasgow Herald the following day.
Serial rapist O’Dowd was given a life sentence in 2007, but two years later the Court Of Appeal ruled “regrettably” that the jury verdicts were unsafe. This was for purely technical reasons. A retrial was not ordered, the original trial having been spread over a period of more than six months.
The allegations about Edward Heath made in the article below were clearly scurrilous and were based on fabricated documents.
There was a document called The Fairweather Report, named after Superintendent Fairweather of Thames Valley Police who committed suicide in December 1981. I have met or at least seen Howard Marks in the flesh, at a burial service in June 2015, although I don’t think I actually spoke to him. This is one of the earlier false allegations against the former Prime Minister. Many allegations against politicians, celebrities, etc, are made by people cut from the same cloth as O’Dowd, and must always be treated with extreme reserve. One of the few such allegations that turned out to be true was that made by prostitute Monica Coghlan against Jeffrey Archer in 1986, but a politician having (paid) sex with a prostitute is hardly in the same league as the kind of depravity alleged here.
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