Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Fucking House of Horrors, man…

More than 140 people had already contacted police, claiming to have suffered assault, indecent assault and rape.

Police expect further grim discoveries at the former children’s home where a skeleton was found at the weekend.

Sniffer dogs have led searchers to six more potential burial sites, both inside and outside the Victorian building.

All will have to be excavated inch by inch. Detectives are also studying plans of the building, as several of its cellars have been filled with concrete.

The horror at Haut de la Garenne, in Jersey, is emerging as the worst-ever child care scandal on British soil.

Many youngsters who went to the institution - first opened as a home for the ‘neglected’ in 1867 - were orphaned or abandoned children with no one to notice if they simply disappeared. Staff at the home did not keep proper records of the children, possibly deliberately.

The discovery of the skeleton of a girl under seven inches of concrete followed the launch of a major inquiry into abuse at the home.

More than 140 people had already contacted police, claiming to have suffered assault, indecent assault and rape.

Sources say corporal punishment, flogging and solitary confinement in cells were ‘routine’ as part of a “systemic failure in childcare”.

During interviews with victims, police began to suspect that bodies had been hidden at the home, which was used as a police station in the TV series Bergerac.

Three former residents independently told of friends suddenly disappearing. Jersey police called in the two sniffer dogs - both used in the Madeleine McCann inquiry - and ground-penetrating radar.

The skeleton was found in a corridor leading off a central courtyard. Among the remains, thought to date from the early 1980s, were a girl’s hair clasp, a button and a piece of fabric.

The man heading the inquiry, Deputy Chief Officer Lenny Harper, said the discovery may be only “the tip of the iceberg”.

Asked if he expected to find more bodies, he said: “There could be six or more. It could be higher than that. Half the sites are inside and half are outside.

“In each case the radar has tended to show some sort of disturbance under the ground where the dog has picked up the scent of something.

“We can’t say it was homicide but much of the information we are receiving leads us to this fear.”

More than 1,000 children are thought to have lived in the 60-bed home, now a youth hostel, from the early 1950s until its closure in the mid-1980s.

Children from eight to 14 were sent there for various reasons. Many had special needs and came from broken or dysfunctional families, making tracing relatives an even tougher job.

There was also a secure unit for youngsters who had committed offences in Jersey.

When the home closed down, children were transferred to other institutions across Jersey where abuse continued until the early part of this decade.

The police inquiry began in secret and was made public only in November last year.

By then victims had been traced as far away as Australia and Thailand.

In January, Gordon Claude Wateridge, 76, was the first person to be charged in the inquiry. He is accused of indecently assaulting three girls under 16 between 1969 and 1979.

Police say they have a list of 40 suspects among former members of staff at the home, in St Martin, on the east coast of the Channel Island.

Deputy Chief Officer Harper said: “In common with many institutions back in the late 1940s and 50s, when children reported abuse from respected figures, adults tended to look at these claims very differently than they would do today.”

Read the full Daily Mail article here.