The making of a monster: Can sordid sexual depravity run in a family? In this ground-breaking analysis, the writer who has spent ten years probing the dark twisted mind of Jimmy Savile reveals the most deeply disturbing truths of all...

Jimmy Savile's brothers were both surrounded by abuse rumours

In 1980, Johnny Savile was sacked as hospital 'entertainment officer'

He had sexually assaulted a female patients in his Springfield office

Vince Savile left the Royal Navy aged 54, to work as a radio DJ in Cardiff



While in Cardiff he was seen with young girls 'on numerous occasions'

Witness says he 'had a group of teenage girls who stayed at his house'



Dark traits: After Jimmy Savile's death, witnesses have spoken about similar lewd and abusive behaviour from his brothers Vince and Johnnie

In October 2012, as the facade of Jimmy Savile’s saintly reputation lay in ruins, I was contacted by a woman who had been a patient at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital in Tooting, South London, in the late 1970s.

She had read a feature I had written for this newspaper outlining the long journey I had undertaken to find the real Jimmy Savile.

Specifically, her interest had been piqued by a reference to his older brother, Johnnie.

In April 1980, Johnnie Savile, who worked at Springfield as entertainment officer, a title uncannily similar to the one Jimmy Savile awarded himself at Broadmoor, was sacked for gross misconduct. He had been in the job for six years.

Seven months later at an industrial tribunal, a divisional nursing officer outlined the allegation against Johnnie Savile: that he had sexually assaulted a female patient in his office.

The nursing officer recounted how the 61-year-old had been ‘larking about’ before lifting the patient’s smock and fondling her stomach and breasts.

The woman wrote to me to explain how in the summer of 1979, just a few months before the assault that cost Johnnie Savile his job, she had been admitted to Springfield – and that Johnnie Savile had raped her in his office.

It was another sickening twist on my hunt for the truth about Jimmy Savile. I had set out, many years ago, hoping to discover what lay beneath the mask of a man who made himself more conspicuous than perhaps anyone in Britain, and yet who had succeeded in remaining hidden in plain sight.

Nothing could have prepared for me for the appalling reality of where it would lead – and how revelations about Savile’s own family would give me a grim insight into the making of a monster.

Despite the time I spent with Savile, and the fact I consistently challenged him over the dark and persistent rumours that swirled around his unhealthy interest in young girls, dead bodies and violence, I found nothing more solid than conjecture while he was alive.

That all changed on October 29, 2011, when Savile’s lifeless 84-year-old body was discovered in his flat in Leeds, and the grip he maintained on his own mythology was finally prised loose.

Months later, as allegations spewed forth that exposed Savile as a serial sex offender and predatory paedophile, I spoke to the woman raped by Savile’s brother.

She told me how Johnnie Savile used to run a weekly disco for patients at Springfield Hospital. It sounded like a carbon copy of the events Jimmy Savile put on as a smokescreen for his offending at Broadmoor.

‘His office was behind a stage in a big recreational hall,’ she recalled.

Family secrets: Jimmy Savile, aged 12, circled third from right, with his family, older brother Johnny, first from left, Christina, Mary, Joan, father Vincent, mother Agnes, Marjory, and oldest brother Vince, far right

‘I was sent there to play badminton once and he came up to me. He was very much like Jimmy. He sounded like him, and he played on the fact he was a relation.

‘He said he was often mistaken on the phone for Jimmy because they sounded so similar.’

Johnnie Savile, who was six years older than Jimmy, had been friendly to her and made her feel like he was the only person at the hospital who was prepared to treat her ‘like a normal human being’.

‘He said, “Pop into my office any time for a cup of tea.” ’

The woman, who was 28 at the time, was from a privileged background and was suffering a nervous breakdown.

‘I always looked a lot younger than I was,’ she said. ‘I was skinny and small, and maybe that’s why [Johnnie] came straight up to me. I think he got a buzz out of humiliating someone with a posh accent.’

A week or so after she met Johnnie, she went to his office for a chat and a cup of tea.

He welcomed her warmly and offered her a seat on a couch that was opposite the door, which he turned round to lock behind him.

He then dropped his trousers, pushed her down on the couch and raped her.

‘I was too shocked to protest,’ she said. ‘It felt like this was the price I had to pay for a bit of human conversation. It’s like what happened to the girls in that approved school [Duncroft, where Jimmy Savile groomed girls and abused them].’

Too ashamed to report the incident at the time, she informed hospital authorities and the police in 1998 and again in 2005. She says hospital staff told her that Johnnie Savile was forced to resign from Springfield to avoid a scandal after several other women complained of being molested by him.

So how did a family of seven children – four girls and three boys –growing up on the breadline in Depression-era Leeds, manage to produce at least two sons who went on to become repeat sex offenders?

Jimmy Savile was the youngest, and, at our first meeting in 2004, his opening revelation was that he didn’t have a childhood at all.

He leant back in his chair and cackled, blowing a self-satisfied plume of cigar smoke into the cloud hovering at head height in his living room, and said: ‘I grew up with adults, which meant I didn’t have anything to say. I finished up with big ears, listening to everything, and big eyes, watching everything, and a brain that wondered why grown-ups did what they did.’

Emulating Jimmy: Johnnie Savile, at a children¿s party in 1985, was fired from his job as entertainment officer at Springfield hospital after allegedly sexually assaulting a female patient in his office

He was what he called a ‘not again child’, an unwanted baby born on the day before his mother turned 40.

He had to scrap for attention and survival in a household that didn’t have the time, money or inclination to care, and in a city that had become infamous for its thriving black market, prostitution rackets and easy access to illegal gambling; the latter being where his father found employment.

I was sure his childhood held the key to unlocking the secrets he guarded so jealously, but he became irritable when pressed.

‘We had no time for psychological hang-ups,’ he said. ‘We were just survivors, all of us.’ The one surviving photograph of all nine members of the Savile family, all of whom are now dead, was taken in a photographer’s studio on Burley Road, Leeds, at the outbreak of the Second World War.

It was displayed in Jimmy Savile’s flats in Leeds and Scarborough.

Flanking the group are the two older brothers, Vince and Johnnie, both in their Royal Navy uniforms. Mary and Marjory, the eldest girls, stand at the back, while Christina and Joan stand together smiling shyly near their father, a balding, stooped and slightly apologetic looking figure. Jimmy, who was 12 at the time but looked considerably younger, is at the front.

Agnes Savile, the hub of the family and the sun that Jimmy said he orbited, is in the centre of the picture. Jimmy grew up as a solitary child who did not spend much time playing with kids his own age.

Instead – remarkably, as events would later bear out – he whiled away his free time in the corridors and wards of the St Joseph’s Home For The Aged across the road. It was run by nuns, and Jimmy’s father Vince was a trustee.

St Joseph’s, I suspect, was where the seeds of Savile’s long and sinister fixation with death were sown. ‘They were always dying,’ he said of the elderly residents. ‘The nuns would say, “Why don’t you go downstairs and say goodbye to her?”

He told me he enjoyed getting to ride in the hearse for the funerals.

He rarely talked about his father, even going as far as refusing to tell me when he died. And beyond the lessons he claimed to have learned from his siblings about the pitfalls of romantic entanglement, Savile’s two brothers and four sisters appeared only in brief cameos in his well-worn anecdotes.

When Agnes Savile died suddenly in 1972, Jimmy was heartbroken. He had devoted his adult life to winning her approval. He called her The Duchess.

After his father’s death in the early 1950s, he had claimed her for himself, lavishing her with gifts, buying her a flat in Scarborough and trailing her along to functions as his companion. Asked why he refused to get married, he often said it was because he felt it was his duty to look after his mother in her old age.

He described her as ‘the only woman I ever loved’, and the image he cultivated as a devoted son was, of course, just another layer of his meticulously designed disguise.

Allegations: Vince Savile, who volunteered on a children¿s ward, left the Royal Navy aged 54, to work as a radio DJ in Cardiff where he was seen with young girls 'on numerous occasions', and a witness says he 'had a group of teenage girls who stayed at his house'

When the Duchess’s body was put on display in an open coffin at his sister’s house in Filey, Savile sat next to the casket and hardly moved, later describing the period as ‘the best five days of my life’.

‘To me, they were good times,’ he said some 20 years later. ‘Once upon a time I had to share her with other people. We had marvellous times. But when she was dead she was all mine, for me.’

When the coffin was then transferred to Leeds, Savile chose to ride with it in the hearse. He did the same on the day of his mother’s requiem mass at St Anne’s Cathedral in the city. His two older brothers were among the pallbearers that day as the tiny casket was carried to the high altar, where Savile was waiting to kneel alone before it.

The tension between Johnnie and Jimmy was hinted at a week later, when Johnnie was pictured in a newspaper picking rotting wallpaper from the damp-infested walls of his basement flat in Clapham, South London. ‘I refuse to ask Jimmy for help,’ he declared.

Guy Marsden, the nephew of both men, said: ‘He could play my uncle Jimmy like nobody else.

‘[Johnnie would say,] “I’m your brother and you don’t give me ’owt. All I’m going to do is go on the radio and tell everyone.” And uncle Jimmy would cough up… he couldn’t beat him.’

Johnnie was in fact his younger brother’s Achilles heel, something Marsden, one of 14 children raised by Savile’s sister Marjory, witnessed as a teenage runaway in 1967.

Marsden told me that he and a group of friends from Leeds were hanging around at Euston Station in London when they were approached by a stranger who offered them food and a place to stay at a flat nearby.

A few days later, Marsden explained, his uncle Jimmy mysteriously appeared at the flat. Without explanation, Savile moved the boys into a house and over the following weeks took them to all-night parties at a series of large houses. Marsden said the only guests at these soirees were men and children.

He remembered the children as being aged between six and ten, and claimed they were periodically taken off into bedrooms.

He went on to tell me that their stay in London came to an end when one of his friends was caught stealing money at one of the parties.

Predator: Jimmy Savile, pictured at Leeds General Infirmary, was not the only Savile brother who liked to surround himself with vulnerable hospital patients

It was at this point that ‘Uncle John’, as Marsden called him, entered the fray, ordering the boys back to Leeds having first confiscated photographs they’d taken.

Another long-standing associate of Jimmy Savile told me that Johnnie once tried to sell a story about his famous brother to a newspaper. Given Johnnie’s knowledge of the parties, and, presumably, his possession of the photos taken at them, it is perhaps not surprising that Jimmy Savile repeatedly tried to pacify him.

In fact, it was not until his older brother lost his job over the allegation of sexual assault that Jimmy Savile decided to cut him loose.

I also discovered dark rumours about Jimmy’s oldest brother, Vince, who remained close to Jimmy and tried to emulate him. In 1972, aged 54, Vince suddenly left the Royal Navy to concentrate on voluntary work on the children’s ward at Cardiff Infirmary and trying to make it as a radio DJ.

A man who knew him in that era contacted me after Jimmy Savile’s death. ‘On numerous occasions Vince would turn up with a young girl. He always made sure that everyone knew his brother was Jimmy Savile and also used a lot of sexual innuendo in his conversations.’

The man explained that Vince had a coterie of teenage girls, some of whom stayed at his house and ran errands for him.

When he was later given his own hospital radio show, the man recalled: ‘Young girls were a-plenty in running the studio under Vince.’

Could it be that Savile’s predilections ran in the family?

In the ‘king flat’ Jimmy Savile bought for ‘the Duchess’ on Scarborough’s Esplanade, I probed him about his relationship with his late mother. He was adamant there was ‘no tactile affection’ during his childhood, and that he had to learn ‘how to enjoy her’.

It wasn’t love but friendship, he said. I wanted to know how their relationship evolved in the years following his father’s death, and how it reached the point where he described it as ‘living through her proxy’.

The first thing he told me was: ‘She was ruthless’. It’s an assessment that Tony Calder, who was 18 when he ran into Jimmy Savile in the corridors of Decca Records in 1961, and who encountered Agnes while staying with Savile in Leeds, agreed with. Calder described her as ‘domineering’, and Savile’s level of devotion as ‘embarrassing’.

‘He’d get up on a Sunday in his house in Leeds. His mum lived round the corner. He’d walk round and see her, and they’d go to church.’

Savile, Calder recalled, would be ‘kissing her hand coming out of the church. He had his arm around her like she was his girlfriend. It was a bit sad.’

The more Jimmy Savile provided, the tighter her grip became.

Savile said she never watched him on television or congratulated him on his achievements, and lived in constant fear of the police knocking at the door – she couldn’t believe how successful he’d become, fearing he might be some sort of crook.

But Agnes Savile also became her son’s most conspicuous companion. They went on holidays together, to the Imperial Hotel in Torquay and to Rome to visit the Vatican.

Bizarrely, Savile used sexual innuendo to describe his mother’s apparently inexhaustible energy levels, saying she had ‘the energy of a teenager and could pleasure all night as often as the opportunity arose’.

In the aftermath of the revelations about Jimmy Savile, I spoke to Jeff Dexter, who worked alongside him as a teenage DJ and dancer in the early 1960s. He said he believed Jimmy was a victim himself.

‘He should have really been in care,’ Dexter said. ‘Instead he created millions and millions of pounds of charity for lots of other people because he really didn’t know who the f*** he was.’

Anthony Clare, a psychiatrist who once interviewed Savile, wrote: ‘The denigrating, rejecting mother can breed in her son a view of women as controlling and castrating that survives into adult life and affects and contaminates his relationship with women. Such a son may spend a lifetime taking revenge or trying to win the approval that eluded him in childhood. Either way, it is the women in his life who will bear the brunt.’

It is almost impossible to say whether Agnes Savile knew of her son’s offending, or how much his childhood and their dysfunctional relationship contributed to what he became. But in the case of the many hundreds he went on to abuse, it was not just the women who bore the brunt, but men and children, too.



© 2014 Dan Davies