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Senior Member
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Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Tralfamadore
Posts: 10,343
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Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Tralfamadore
Posts: 10,343
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A 15-year-old who killed herself after leaving a diary naming DJs as abusers
Jimmy Savile publicly denied having known her
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-involved.html
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Back in the Seventies, when Jimmy Savile was at the height of his fame, he was interviewed by a newspaper about the death of a teenage girl.
The youngster was Claire McAlpine. She was just 15 years old and had been a regular dancer in the audience of Top Of The Pops.
On the morning of March 29, 1971, Claire, a former convent school pupil, was found lying on the floor of her bedroom at home in Watford, Hertfordshire, by her distraught mother. She had taken a fatal overdose.
Near her body was a bottle of tablets and her red diary. ‘Don’t laugh at me for being dramatic, but I just can’t take it any more,’ Claire wrote.
It was her last heartbreaking entry to her parents before she killed herself.
On the preceding pages, she had named a string of radio disc jockeys — and other showbusiness personalities, all household names — who, she claimed, had ‘used’ her.
One of the DJs, she said, had taken her to his house for the night and given her a pill which made her feel like she was ‘floating on a cloud’. Another had also invited her back to his ‘sumptuously furnished’ residence.
Savile, then in his 40s, who presented Top Of The Pops, was asked during the interview if he knew or remembered Claire from the show.
‘I studied a photograph of Claire very closely,’ he replied. ‘I cannot recollect ever seeing the girl in my life. They say she came from Watford. I don’t know anyone who lives in Watford.’
The inquest into Claire’s death was held shortly after the article appeared. The coroner ruled that Claire committed suicide after deciding her ‘day-dreams’ of becoming a pop star would never come true.
Claire’s diary was scrutinised by Scotland Yard, but no action was taken against the DJs, who, she alleged, had ‘used’ her for their own sexual gratification.
They were never even questioned, let alone identified. ‘It would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything mentioned in her diary with reality,’ a police spokesman said at the time.
Or, to put another way, Claire was a portrayed as a troubled fantasist. Her death, however tragic, had nothing to do with a sex scandal involving the showbusiness establishment.
Suicide: Claire McAlpine, 15, pictured dancing in the Top Of The Pops audience just weeks before she died
A picture from Top of The Pops in 1971 shows Claire McAlpine, centre, dancing on stage with Jimmy Savile, third from right, only weeks before she died
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Claire is very pretty, blonde, and wearing hotpants - not exactly forgettable .....
Bizarre: Late BBC Radio DJ John Peel, who died in 2004, poses wearing a schoolgirl uniform in 1973
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Peel, awarded the OBE in 1998, is perhaps best remembered for his Saturday morning programme Home Truths on Radio 4 in which he talked about family life to Middle England.
But as a young man, he worked in Texas as a local radio station DJ and self-appointed ‘Beatles expert’.
When he was older, he recalled some of the ‘perks’ of the job in several newspaper interviews in the Seventies and Eighties.
Girls, some as young as 13, he said, used to queue up outside his studio to offer him sexual favours. ‘Well, of course, I didn’t ask for ID,’ he said.
‘All they wanted me to do was to abuse them sexually which, of course I was only too happy to do.
‘It was the glamour of the job . . . but frustratingly, American girls of that period — as they do now, actually — had this strange notion of virginity as a tangible thing which you surrendered to your husband on your wedding night.
‘So they would do anything but s*** you. They’d give you a b*** *** before they’d s*** you.’
Even now, and allowing for Peel’s famously sardonic humour, it is troubling that those words came from Radio 4’s cuddly champion of middle-class values. One of the girls who queued up outside his studio was a girl called Shirley Anne Milburn. She and Peel were married in Texas on September 29, 1965.
Peel was 26 years old. Shirley Anne was just 15.
‘She lied about her age and so did her family,’ he would later declare.
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Of course she did, John .....
Last edited by Omah; 06-10-2012 at 12:06 AM.
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