In 1215, King John allegedly spent the night before signing the Magna Carta at Duncroft, a manor about 20 miles west of London. By the 1970s, Duncroft had become an “approved school,” a stately home with bars on the windows for intelligent wayward girls. It was visited often by the BBC’s radio and TV star Jimmy Savile, Britain’s greatest pedophile. Growing up, BBC producer Meirion Jones would visit Duncroft, where his aunt was the headmistress, and he would witness Savile, the flamboyant M.C. of the music show Top of the Pops, alight from his Rolls-Royce proffering cigarettes, rides, and invitations to the BBC studios in London, where, it is now believed, he violated dozens of under-age girls—as well as boys—in his dressing room. “My parents would say to my aunt, ‘What are you doing letting a 50-year-old man take a bunch of under-age girls in his car?’ And my aunt would say, ‘Oh, he’s a friend of the school.’ ” (Jones’s aunt has recently said she had no idea Savile was a predatory pedophile.)

When Savile died, on October 29, 2011, at the age of 84, having been knighted by the Queen as well as the Pope, he was one of Britain’s most famous personalities, a combination of Dick Clark, Johnny Carson, and Wolfman Jack. The self-proclaimed creator of the first disco, he claimed to be the first D.J. to play records for money, in rough dance halls in Leeds and Manchester as far back as the 40s and 50s. In the early 60s, he counted among his friends the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Savile became so renowned for his charity work that he was literally given the keys to several hospitals and institutions, where he had his own rooms and volunteered as a porter and administrator, all the while cunningly waiting for chances to pounce on ill and vulnerable girls. He was proud of spending New Year’s Eve with Margaret and Denis Thatcher by the fire at Chequers, the British prime minister’s country house, and of acting as a go-between when Diana and Charles’s marriage was falling apart. A senior Health Service official known to one BBC staffer remembers once in the 80s being called to Highgrove House, where Prince Charles introduced everyone to “my health adviser, Jimmy Savile.” Dan Davies, Savile’s biographer, told me, “He was a very serious confidant to the heir of the throne up until Charles got together with Camilla. Then his influence waned.”

In his narcissistic 1974 autobiography, Love Is an Uphill Thing, Savile recounts a scruffy, almost Dickensian childhood as the youngest of seven in a Catholic family in Leeds, where he worked in the mines, and where his mother, nicknamed the Duchess, was the only true love of his life. On the first page he boasts that as a baby he once peed into his grandmother’s eye, adding, “I have continued to pee on the Establishment ever since with similar success.” The book is riddled with sexual braggadocio: “Were I to tell all, no one would believe it, plus I’d have to take up residence in some inaccessible Himalayan village.”

The BBC made him a star, though his outrageous style was in striking contrast to the network’s high-minded tweed-think, and today most there claim that he was never their kind. “Brash figures like Savile were aggressively anti-intellectual, childishly anti-political, anti-everything the BBC was concerned about,” says Jeremy Paxman, the anchor of Newsnight, the current-affairs program. “The managerial class was scared of them, and they were left to get on with it. So nobody really knew, and didn’t want to know.” Meanwhile, generations of English children were mesmerized by Savile’s show Jim’ll Fix It. They would write in their wishes, and he would have them appear with him on-air, where he would grant those wishes. One of the boys, then nine, now says he was assaulted in Savile’s dressing room. (According to the latest police report, 18 percent of Savile’s known victims were male.)