Alan Shadrake has drifted all over the world – and back to the house where he was born. Along the way, he worked as a ghostwriter, getting close to the families of both the famous and the infamous.
At 82, he shows no signs of slowing down, and will soon be appearing in a documentary about a grisly case he first covered 44 years ago.
Edward Paisnel – aka The Beast of Jersey – wore a Freddy Krueger-style rubber mask and a nail-studded jacket as he abducted women from their beds and sexually abused them.
“It was a big story because this guy had been doing these bad things for 11 years and the local police could never catch him, so they appealed to Scotland Yard who couldn’t get him either,” Alan recalled.
“It fell to a Yorkshire traffic cop who chased him for hopping a red light. When he examined his car, the policeman found his jacket and mask in the backseat and realised he had got his man.”
Great-grandad Alan persuaded the rapist’s wife to work with him on a book about “her life with the beast”.
Joan Paisnel told Alan that she no idea why he had often been out and about at strange times in the night. “I think she knew but wanted a quiet life,” Alan said.
The Beast’s reign of terror has seen new light due to Operation Rectangle, an inquiry into historic sexual abuse Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey.
It came out during the inquiry that Joan’s mother ran The La Preference children’s home from 1954 and 1964 and the sex criminal even played Father Christmas for the children there.
After so many years writing the headlines, it came as some surprise to Alan when he made them himself in 2011.
He was living in Singapore when he became fascinated with the local justice system and interviewed an official executioner, which led to him writing a book exposing human rights abuses and the death penalty called Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock.
Just a few days before publication, he had posed for a photograph in front of the Supreme Court – not dreaming that the day after his book came out, he would be in the dock for offending the judiciary.
He went to prison for six weeks, and was deported back to the UK – and ending up right where he started, in Dagenham.
The modest reporter says he never thought his life would take the shape it had.
“I never dreamed that I would be a journalist – I didn’t dream that big,” he said.
Alan’s career in newspapers began when he left school at 15-and-a-half to work as messenger boy at the Daily Mail in the City.
“One of my jobs was to run the stocks and shares prices from there to Fleet Street twice a day.”
Then Alan was called up for his National Service during the Suez Crisis, and was sent to the Middle East Intelligence Office, which required a hefty security clearance.
“James Bond’s security clearance was cosmic.I couldn’t believe it when I saw those films,” he laughed. “I thought ‘big deal, I was cosmic’!”
Alan then went on to work for this very newspaper, where he wrote about the Dagenham East railway crash of 1958, and the Express, where he met the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin.
The Beast of Jersey is in production and is expected to air in spring next year.
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