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Chelsea, Palace in line of fire over abuse
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ENGLISH Premier League leader Chelsea and fellow London side Crystal Palace dismissed a police warning about a scout who had been convicted for importing child-abuse images, the detective who alerted them told The Times yesterday.
Clive Driscoll, who rose to the rank of chief inspector before retiring, said he might as well have been phoning “from the moon” when he made the call in 2001 about the scout John Butcher.
Butcher was convicted in 1993 of attempting to smuggle child-abuse images into England from the Netherlands and in 2009 he was put on the sex offenders register for seven years after he was caught looking at indecent images. Butcher, 67, is adamant he has “never physically abused children”.
The revelations — which will add to the deepening dismay of how football reacted to the allegations at the time in a scandal that has rocked the foundations of the sport — come days after London police said they were looking into allegations of abuse at 30 London clubs, including four unnamed EPL sides.
It was after Butcher’s earlier offense that Driscoll got in touch with Chelsea, Palace and Millwall over Butcher, who operated as a freelance scout. “I spoke to Millwall, Chelsea and Palace about Butcher and warned them about him in 2001,” he said.
“I was a detective inspector at the time and I was phoning them from the police, but I might as well have been phoning from the moon.
“I was saying he had a conviction but they just treated it as a football matter.”
Driscoll’s revelations will make further uncomfortable reading for Chelsea — whose present owner, the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, took over two years after Driscoll informed the club of Butcher’s conviction.
His regime was lambasted for imposing a gagging order on former youth player Gary Johnson as a condition of a 2015 deal to pay him 50,000 pounds (US$63,850) over abuse he suffered at the hands of ex-scout Eddie Heath.
Several other former Chelsea youth players have come forward since Johnson broke the gagging order to allege Heath, who died in 1983 aged 54, had either abused them or they knew of his abuse.
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