Andy Woodward, one of the boys lost and brutalised during Barry Bennell’s decades of preying on young footballers, can remember one story that probably helps to explain why the detectives investigating the man described as a “child molester on an industrial scale” believe the true number of victims will be incalculable.

Bennell had taken a group of Crewe Alexandra players to Florida in the summer of 1990 to help with a series of junior coaching courses. He had hired jet-skis and was out in the sea at Pensacola beach, with an 11-year-old on the back, when he fell into the water. He was climbing back on board when Craig Hignett, the first-team striker, came past on his own jet-ski and turned to spray him. Except Hignett also lost control of his machine.

Woodward, raped several hundred times during Bennell’s years as Crewe’s youth-team coach, was on the beach. “I heard the crack 100 metres away. Craig had hit him full-on and suddenly it was pandemonium. I just sat there, praying Bennell would go under. Everyone was on their feet shouting: ‘Oh my God’ and panicking. But I didn’t move a muscle. ‘Please,’ I thought, ‘let him sink.’ I knew what that man was like, I knew what he was capable of. ‘Please, just let him die – just die, please, please.’”

Timeline Barry Bennell's career and crimes Show Hide Barry Bennell starts coaching, aged 16 Involved with Senrab FC, a junior team that had links with Chelsea Bennell’s association with Manchester City begins Joins Crewe Alexandra as youth development officer Leaves Crewe. Takes up coaching roles with Stoke City and Stone Dominoes Receives his first prison sentence, in the US, for offences against boys after being arrested there while on tour with Stone Dominoes Admits 25 offences against six boys and gets nine-year sentence in the UK Bennell released and takes new identity as Richard Jones Gets further two-year sentence for offences against 12-year-old; serves half of it Andy Woodward tells the Guardian he was abused by Bennell; other former players follow suit Bennell charged with multiple child sexual abuse offences between 1979 and 1990 Found guilty of multiple sexual offences against boys from the youth systems of Manchester City and Crewe

Bennell had suffered a compound fracture of his femur, leaving his thigh bone protruding through the skin. He returned to England with his leg in a protective cage but even when he was convalescing it did not stop him bringing countless boys to his house, with their dreams of becoming professional footballers, and subjecting them to unspeakable horrors.

According to the latest available figures, 294 suspects had been identified since Woodward’s interview in the Guardian in November 2016 instigated what the Football Association’s chairman, Greg Clarke, has described as the worst scandal he can remember in the sport. A total of 839 alleged victims had come forward by late-December 2017, with 2,094 incidents reported and 334 different clubs named.

Nobody, though, was as prolific as the man who has just been convicted of 50 charges relating to 12 of his former players, with the youngest of his victims being eight years old. Bennell started coaching at the age of 16 and the first evidence of his offending goes back to 1972, two years later, when he was involved with Senrab FC, a junior team that had links with Chelsea, the club where he was once a young prospect and first encountered Dario Gradi, the man who later employed him at Crewe.



Now 64, Bennell coached numerous teams in Greater Manchester, Cheshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire and had almost a quarter of a century in the industry, including seven-year associations with Manchester City and Crewe, before he was finally arrested in the US in 1994 and sent to prison for the first time. He has coached in boarding schools, Butlin’s holiday camps, Stoke City’s centre of excellence and lived for two years in Atlanta where he ran teams and organised tournaments. The American authorities have described him as having “almost an insatiable appetite” for young boys. Bennell has called himself a “monster” and, numbers-wise, it is difficult even to contemplate the sheer scale of his offending other than to say Gary Cliffe, the first player to press charges in the case at Liverpool crown court and now a detective for Staffordshire police, is not alone when he says it will be in the hundreds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Woodward, who was abused by Barry Bennell, says he felt ‘sadness’ that the coach survived a jet-ski accident. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Bennell is facing a raft of new allegations from 86 former players and there will inevitably be fears that Bennell was operating in a paedophile ring given his previous links with the late Frank Roper, another established coach who preyed on young boys. Roper, like Bennell, eluded the authorities for many years. His victims included the schoolboy Paul Stewart, a future England international, and it was part of Bennell’s grooming process to give his boys free kit from the sports shop Roper ran in Blackpool.

Yet Bennell was also the get-away driver one Sunday afternoon when two of his mates robbed Roper’s warehouse in Cheetham Hill, Manchester. The fourth person in Bennell’s green Volvo 740 turbo, with its engine running in one of the side streets near Strangeways prison, was one of the boys, aged 13, he had picked out from Manchester City’s junior set-up. That boy, now in his mid-40s, has given this newspaper a full account of what happened and his shock when he realised what was going on. “All I can think is that Frank Roper had crossed him and this was Barry’s way of getting him back,” he said. Another football coach from that time can also recall a “bitter fall-out” between the two men who previously directed boys to each other’s teams.

What can be said for certain is that it is troubling, to say the least, that Bennell got away with it for so long and that the two clubs at the centre of this scandal are facing serious questions about what they knew, what they did about it and what they make of the victims’ complaints that the people in charge seriously let down the boys in their system.

There were virtually always boy staying overnight, in a house that has been described as a 'children’s paradise'

Steve Fleet’s evidence in the Guardian shows that Bennell’s notoriety for being “dodgy” went as far back as the late-1970s and that City’s youth-team coach tried to warn the club off him. Len Davies, formerly City’s youth-team scout, has said “suspicions about him were aired on many occasion” and, in Crewe’s case, there has never been an explanation why Bennell was allowed to continue taking children home when their former managing director, Hamilton Smith, has stated the club received a specific complaint about their coach being a paedophile. Several victims have renewed their calls today for the people at the top of the club to resign. The investigating detectives have been scathing about the regime at Crewe. One said: “I don’t know what colour the door is but it might as well be Tardis blue because you walk through that door and you’re in another world.”

Bennell, described by Norman Rowlinson, Crewe’s late chairman, as a Pied Piper figure with “a magnetic attraction with boys”, had a spare key for Gradi’s house and would take boys there when he knew it was empty. At his own place there were virtually always boys, mostly aged 11 to 14, staying overnight, often three in a bed, in a house that has been described as a “children’s paradise”, featuring arcade machines, a pool table, a juke box and his own mini petting zoo, including a monkey, two Pyrenean dogs, an Alsatian named after the Brazilian footballer Zico and, most bizarre of all, a puma that he walked on a lead until it clawed someone in a local Woolworths.

In a statement on Thursday Crewe expressed their “deepest sympathies” to Bennell’s victims and said: “The club wishes to make it absolutely clear that had it had any suspicion or belief that Mr Bennell was committing acts of abuse, either before, during or after he left the club’s employment, the club would have informed the police immediately.”

'There will be hundreds more,' says player Bennell abused on Maine Road pitch Read more

Many of Bennell’s victims suffer from anxiety, depression, panic attacks and flashbacks and have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Some have spiralled into alcohol or drug addictions and the Guardian has learned that one, having waited 40 years before finding the strength to tell the police, died waiting to hear if charges would be pressed. Others have told this newspaper they are too emotionally damaged to come forward or feel compelled to suffer in silence now they have children of their own and elderly parents. Every single person affected seems to have another list of former team-mates who are likely, or definite, victims. It is difficult to keep track of all the names, spanning three decades, let alone comprehend the suffering that has been caused, or the kind of guilt and regret their parents have had to endure.

Some of those parents, Fleet suspects, were swayed by Bennell’s reputation as a star-maker. “Barry Bennell was very good at finding boys, playing them in his team and offering them things to get his own way with them. He was in cahoots with Frank Roper and the kit he [Bennell] was giving to his kids was better than the kit I was giving to youth-team players at City. He bought them gifts. He paid for them to go on overnight trips.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barry Bennell had such a hold over his victims and their parents he persuaded many of them to give him character references before his 1994 court case. Photograph: Facebook

“I could see it wasn’t healthy. In fact, I’d think: ‘How can other people not see what he is?’ But a lot of people are blinded by fame and fortune. The kids, of course, were young and naive. The parents were all so desperate for success and the boys were starry-eyed because of his background at Chelsea. He was a circus act, juggling with the ball, and he fascinated young people. But he fascinated their parents, too.”

Bennell was cynical, controlling and predatory but he was nothing like the stereotype of the dirty old man. One mother recalls her first impression being that he was “gorgeous – bronzed, handsome, with bouncing curly hair”. Bennell wore designer labels, drove expensive cars – he once bought a Porsche in cash - and liked to be known as Bené, insisting it was spelt with the accent because that was how Pelé had it.

The parents of some boys went on holiday with him and one group of mums even used to clean his house – “to surprise him,” one recalls – on the frequent occasions he arranged trips to Spain, the United States and countless other football tours where his real motive was to be alone with the boys.

Others parents talked about joining him in Atlanta when he moved there in the early-1990s. There was even a “Friends of Barry Bennell” fund to raise money for his legal costs when he was first arrested in Florida in 1994, enabling him to pay a $100,000 bond. Bennell wrote to parents asking them to remortgage their houses. One boy’s grandparents gave up £6,000 of life savings then lost the lot when Bennell broke the conditions and was put in prison. Bennell, under orders to keep away from children, had been caught coaching, and filming, a team of under-11s in Jacksonville.

Bennell had such a hold over his victims and their parents he persuaded many of them to give him character references before the 1994 court case and, after finally admitting the offences and receiving a four-year sentence, prisoner 94-24843-9 continued to send letters asking boys he had raped and molested if they would be good enough to remember their old coach and send whatever money they could spare.

He was imprisoned for a further nine years after being extradited to England to face 45 charges in 1998 – Bennell admitted 25 offences committed against six boys, as young as nine, and the remainder stayed on file – and when he was released in 2004 he moved to Milton Keynes and took a new identity as Richard Jones.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A screenshot from a YouTube video, posted in October 2016 but marked as showing Barry Bennell in March 2015.

Bennell bought a Pyrenean dog, Sonny, and a golden labrador, Sky, sent Facebook friend requests to several victims from an account in the name of “Richard Barry” and signed off YouTube videos of holidays with his new girlfriend with “Happy Days”. He became known locally as a laptop repairs doctor and earned money on the side by burning DVDs to sell at car-boot sales until another case from the 1980s, this time involving a 12-year-old, led to a further two-year sentence in May 2015. He served half of it before returning to Milton Keynes with a story that he had spent the previous year recovering from cancer in Cornwall. Neighbours recall one of his addresses being a “hive of children” and being taken aback that a man of his age had so many different games consoles lined up in his front room. Nothing, however, was known about his past until Gary Speed’s death in 2011 brought journalists asking questions to his estate.

Bennell denied abusing the schoolboy Speed, another of the boys who used to stay at his house, but said that even if he had he would not admit it. Speed’s family have always said they do not believe he was abused. At least two other players – Alan Davies, formerly of Manchester United, being one – were coached by Bennell and killed themselves.

Mark Williams, another of Bennell’s boys, was the captain at Milton Keynes Dons when his old coach was released midway through his nine-year sentence. Williams, a former Northern Ireland international, had no idea Bennell was living in the town until one day, walking to his car outside the training ground, he saw a familiar figure. “I just froze. I couldn’t believe he was in front of me. He’d had an operation on his throat so he had a croaky voice and it was hard understanding everything he was saying. But I remember him saying he didn’t see any of the lads any more. He told me he’d been following my career, he’d seen me ‘on the box’ and that I’d done really well for myself.

Timeline Barry Bennell's career and crimes Show Hide Barry Bennell starts coaching, aged 16 Involved with Senrab FC, a junior team that had links with Chelsea Bennell’s association with Manchester City begins Joins Crewe Alexandra as youth development officer Leaves Crewe. Takes up coaching roles with Stoke City and Stone Dominoes Receives his first prison sentence, in the US, for offences against boys after being arrested there while on tour with Stone Dominoes Admits 25 offences against six boys and gets nine-year sentence in the UK Bennell released and takes new identity as Richard Jones Gets further two-year sentence for offences against 12-year-old; serves half of it Andy Woodward tells the Guardian he was abused by Bennell; other former players follow suit Bennell charged with multiple child sexual abuse offences between 1979 and 1990 Found guilty of multiple sexual offences against boys from the youth systems of Manchester City and Crewe

“I didn’t know what to say. I was a big centre-half and I battled a lot of people in my career but in that moment all that horrendous childhood fear came back. I was 33 but it was like being 11 again. ‘Thank you for not saying anything,’ he said. I was absolutely petrified. I just wanted him gone.”

That weekend, Milton Keynes Dons were preparing for their first home game of the season. “I came in from the warm-up at 2.45pm, put on my pads and the players’ lounge steward knocked on the door. ‘There’s a guy outside asking for a ticket,’ he said. ‘He says his name’s Barry Bennell.’ I couldn’t believe he had actually turned up again. I went out to play and tried to block it out of my mind but I knew that if he came back one more time I would have to tell the club.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Crewe Chronicle marks the appointment of Barry Bennell as youth development officer. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Williams recalls Bennell being regarded as a “god” not just by the youngsters by also their families. “All the mums fancied him, all the sisters fancied him, all the dads wanted to be around him. He was the star-maker, a Pied Piper figure. He had a hold over everybody.”

Not everyone was taken in, though. Fleet recalls it being “general knowledge” in coaching circles that Bennell was not to be trusted and a number of parents have confirmed they removed boys, or would not let them join his teams, because of their own suspicions.

Ray Hinett, a former scout and coach for City, is among those who believe the club should have done more. “Parents heard rumblings and went to Bennell to ask him face-to-face why people were saying it about him. ‘Oh they’re just jealous,’ he’d say. ‘They’ll put anything out about me.’ He was a clever man. And if you look at it from [the chief scout] Ken Barnes’s point of view, Bennell was doing Ken’s job for him. He was finding City really good players.”

In the late-1980s Bennell’s reputation was so bad one junior league in Manchester had banned him from watching games and instructed the relevant clubs to ring the police if he refused to leave. One game at Cheadle Town had to be held up while the manager, helped by one of the dads, frogmarched Bennell to his car. Bennell would often take Crewe’s boys on scouting missions and arguments, even violence, became commonplace when people saw him. On one occasion he knocked out someone with an elbow to the face. Another time, he ended up exchanging punches with someone behind one of the goals. One row flared up after Bennell saw Roper and started shouting abuse. One father, siding with Roper, turned on Bennell and left him in a bloodied heap.

Bennell had been offered a job as Port Vale’s youth-team coach before his first arrest and previously worked as a care worker, with his own accommodation, at the Taxal Edge children’s home in Derbyshire’s peak district, giving him access to yet more children and another place to satisfy his fantasies. Taxal Edge, run by the Boys And Girls’ Welfare Society, closed down in 2004 and has a chequered past of its own.

He was so close to joining Manchester United at one point he tried to persuade some of City’s more talented youngsters to switch clubs, just as he did when he moved from Crewe to Stoke, ending a letter to one of the better prospects with the words “I love you”. Yet his visits to United’s training ground, where he claimed to be close friends with “Butch” Ray Wilkins from their days at Chelsea, stopped after Alex Ferguson took over. “Barry turned up to watch a United game,” one parent with close United links recalls. “Mr Ferguson noticed him: ‘Security, get that man off this property.’ And credit to him.”

He got us out of the minibus and drove off. Then we had to walk down this country lane which was absolutely pitch black

In a 1989 programme column for Crewe, “The Finding of a Player”, Bennell listed some of the players he had brought through. “I believe you need to know the boy a lot more than ‘the number six with the curly hair’. I’ve been coaching for 19 years and I think I’ve gained enough experience, including seven years at Manchester City where I surfaced players such as Nicky Reid (Blackburn), Darron McDonough (Luton), John Sheridan (Leeds), Steve Kinsey (ex-Man City), Jon Hallworth and Mike Milligan (Oldham) and many more, plus of course the youngsters who are there now.”

The CV he wrote for potential employers, seen by this newspaper, also included Rob Jones (Liverpool), Roger Palmer (Oldham), Ian Butterworth (Norwich), Gary Blissett (Wimbledon), Paul Warhurst (Blackburn) and Paul Gerrard (Oldham) and boasted how he started “the now-famous coaching School of Excellence” that gave Crewe a reputation for having one of the more envied youth systems in the country. “No one would believe you,” he once told a boy he had molested. “I have had loads of players who are now professionals, who would believe you?”

David White, a future England international, was among the boys Bennell coached at City, along with Paul Lake, Andy Hinchcliffe, Steve Redmond and the Brightwell brothers. White was one of Bennell’s victims and has described him as “an adult who was prepared to play mind games with a kid … a sly, scheming master of disguise who’d become an expert in hiding his true nature behind a cloak of respectability and responsibility. People like my dad were so blinded by the lure of professional football, and so in awe of ‘The King’ and his promises, Bennell could dupe and deceive them with ease.”

Yet Hallworth, contrary to what Bennell says, was actually taken out of City’s set-up because the youngster’s father, Geoff, was so suspicious. Bennell visited their house in an attempt to talk them around but he was told to clear off. “I thought that would be the last time I ever saw him,” Geoff says. “But we went into Stockport one afternoon and there was a gang of boys, all about 10 years old, outside one of the stores on Princes Street. Who was in the middle of them? Barry Bennell. I said to these boys: ‘Get away from this fellow, clear off for your own good and don’t have anything more to do with him.’ He looked at me but he didn’t say anything.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barry Bennell, right, with Crewe’s then manager, Dario Gradi, in March 1989. Photograph: Stoke Sentinel/BPM Media

One of Bennell’s favourite tricks, especially on trips away, was to take the boys into woods late at night and deliberately frighten them. He loved to scare them and would play tapes of ghoulish noises when they were trying to sleep. On at least two occasions a team of 11-year-olds woke to find a severed sheep’s head at the end of their bunk beds.

Hallworth, eternally grateful that he was not among Bennell’s victims, remembers a 1976 trip to Barry Island. “He took us on a minibus into the sticks in south Wales, got us out and the minibus drove off. Then he told us we had to walk down this country lane which was absolutely pitch black. ‘I’ll see you the other side,’ he said. We couldn’t see anything apart from a house by the side of the road. All the windows had been knocked out and there was a fire in the front room. The house was filled with people in hoods, chanting and dancing around, like a druid ceremony. They were all dressed like the grim reaper. We were kids, scared out of our wits, and we just ran as fast as we could.”

Jason Dunford, another boy from City’s junior system, remembers a similar trip to Dunham Massey in Cheshire. “We were walking down this dark country lane and Barry was telling us to link arms and stay close because ‘I’ve got to show you this, boys, there’s a house down here where many years ago an old man died and every now and then, if we’re in touch with the spirits, they come out’. I don’t know who he had in there but when we got to the house the light flickered on and this silhouette appeared. We were terrified.”

Bennell’s thinking was that if the boys were scared there was more chance of them agreeing to share his bed and cuddle up rather than being alone. Another trick was for him to turn the lights off and put on the horror and snuff films he kept under the floorboards of his video shop. “Everything was calculated,” Dunford says. “‘It scared me as well,’ he’d say. Then he’d pick out the lads he wanted. ‘I tell you what guys, come upstairs and you can sleep with me if you like.’”

Bennell had a sinister hand game with the children called “follow me” and would sometimes put a pillow over their faces when he was raping them. He made boys style their hair to his liking and even when they were asleep they were not safe. Bennell often sneaked in to abuse them in the dead of night.

On one trip to Orlando he smuggled a .357 Magnum revolver back to England in the suitcase of a 13-year-old from Crewe

“The child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang ... did it with cherry pie and lollipops,” prosecutors at his trial said, adding that Bennell was “a child molester on an industrial scale”. One victim described himself as “just a bus that came along, he wasn’t picky”. Quizzed about his crimes as part of the biggest operation of its kind ever undertaken by Cheshire police, Bennell said: “I wish I could have sex for two to three hours ... I last two or three minutes.”



He could also be sadistic and reckless in other ways. On one trip to Orlando he smuggled a .357 Magnum revolver back to England in the suitcase of one of the 13-year-olds from Crewe he has just been convicted of molesting. Bennell told his players he had been stabbed when he was younger, showing them a scar on his back. He was a martial arts expert and regularly let them know he was capable of inflicting hurt. Boys would be ordered to line up while he threw ninja stars against the wall by their heads. At other times they would be made to hold out a piece of paper while he split it into two with nunchucks.

Crewe’s youngsters had an annual trip to Blackpool and on one occasion he tried to persuade one of the boys to share his bed. The boy refused and, as punishment, Bennell woke the entire team at 6am and made them run through sand dunes for two hours, with no water or breakfast, until many of them were physically sick. Bennell told them his minibus would be waiting outside Blackpool tower, at the other end of the seafront, but if they did not run there in a certain time it would drive away. When they arrived, exhausted and bewildered, he had gone and they had to walk, or hitch-hike, the five miles back to their hotel, still wearing their kit.

Other players remember the trips to Butlin’s in Pwllheli when he would take them on to rocks, either in groups or alone, and let huge waves crash over them until they were “crying in fear”, terrified they were going to be washed away.

Then there is the story Steve Walters, the youngest player in Crewe’s history, tells of the time the club’s youth team lost at Manchester United and on the way home Bennell dumped everyone at Beeston Castle, 15 miles away. “He told us to run round the castle three or four times and then he pointed us one way and said: ‘Home’s that way, you can make your own way back.’ Except he’d pointed us towards Chester. It took us eight or nine hours to get back to Crewe. We were kids and we didn’t have phones or anything in those days to show us the route. In the end, we had to hitch-hike.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Steve Walters says Barry Bennell left him and the rest of Crewe’s youth team 15 miles from home and pointed them in the wrong direction. ‘It took us eight or nine hours to get back.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

That incident became the subject of conversation between a number of concerned first-team players but there is no evidence of Crewe doing anything to discipline their coach. One mother has since said she wrote, anonymously, to Gradi to complain that on one trip the boys were told there not enough beds and someone would have to share with a member of staff.

Hamilton Smith’s account is damaging in the extreme given he was previously the club’s managing director – “I’m incredibly angry the club continue to refute that they knew anything about suspicions of Bennell’s activities,” he told the Guardian in November 2016 – and there is a specific allegation from a number of victims that the club should have recognised Bennell was a serious risk anyway. All of them remember the club being filled with rumour and innuendo. Bennell’s reputation was such opposition players and fans – sometimes even the managers in the case of Harry McNally, for example, at Chester City – were often known to shout abuse.

Rowlinson was concerned enough to contact Manchester City and ask what they knew but Crewe, the Guardian have learned, actually paid Bennell extra for arranging the stopovers. A copy of Bennell’s expenses, seen by this newspaper, claims £5 a night per boy as well other payments for trips to London, Norwich, Plymouth, Wales and Scotland. “It is a rough guess but I accommodate 3/4 boys every weekend,” Bennell writes. Often, it was more. Bennell says he had bunk beds and sleeping space, including a caravan in the garden, to accommodate 11 children.

All of which probably explains why on that summer day in 1990 one of the boys who had endured years of his own abuse sat alone on Pensacola beach and silently prayed that the helicopter that had come to pull Bennell out of the sea did not get there on time. Bennell had continued abusing the teenage Woodward even after he started dating his sister, Lynda, and married her the following year.

“I had to visit him in hospital that night,” Woodward says of that sea rescue. “I didn’t feel any emotion – just sadness, I suppose, that he’d been wearing a lifejacket that stopped him from drowning. I was 17 and he had moved on to younger boys, like a conveyor belt. I knew what would happen when he was back. I knew there were so many other kids who would have to suffer like I did.”

Two of Bennell’s victims were later diagnosed with a blood condition that can be brought about by sexual contact. Bennell claimed at one point he had studied child psychology. Boys who turned him down were dropped from the team – ostracised, bullied and told they were in danger of losing their dream and letting down their families. None of his victims came forward for years out of shame, fear and embarrassment and, in many cases, because they thought it would ruin their chances of becoming footballers. Then a 13-year-old boy, terrified he might have Aids, told his parents what had happened to him on a trip to Florida and, finally, Bennell’s luck ran out.

He was the £18,000-a-year head coach of Stone Dominoes, a Staffordshire youth team, at the time – in tandem with his work with Stoke’s under-13s – and the club’s former chairman Bob Bowers has described Bennell’s time in football as “the con-job of all con-jobs”. Bennell, the Guardian has learned, has subsequently said he had to leave Crewe because a complaint had been made against him. Yet Bowers remembers Crewe supplied a reference for their former employee and this, perhaps, sums up a story that shames the entire sport. That reference, he says, came back “squeaky clean”.