In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies Page A

some cut and pasted sections from the script. That evening, Rippon emailed Mitchell again stating that he would send a script after speaking to Meirion Jones, who was due to interview Rochelle Shepherd the next day. A telephone conversation is then understood to have taken place between Rippon and Mitchell though neither could recall details for Pollard.
    Suddenly, on the morning of 30 November, the course of the investigation shifted decisively. MacKean’s background fears about the ‘alternative reality’ within the BBC over the tribute show that had aired and the
Jim’ll Fix It
special planned for Christmas suddenly emerged front and centre when she received an email from Meirion Jones. It was forwarding a message from Rippon in which he stated he now wanted to establish that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to press charges because Jimmy Savile was too old and infirm. To Jones, MacKean and Livingston, this represented a ‘journalistic bar’ that had never previously existed. Rippon’s attitude to the story had changed overnight.
    In his later statement to the Pollard inquiry, Rippon set out his thinking at the time: ‘The extent to which we had to rely on the testimony from [Keri] was stark. She was the only victim in vision we had and would be the face of our allegations and I remained concerned about how well her testimony would stand up to the scrutiny it would get. 12
    ‘I was also concerned with the way we collected the additional evidence from other victims and witnesses. The women were to remain anonymous. The interviews had all been done on the telephone. Some of them were done by a junior researcher who was with us on work experience who I had never worked with. I was also concerned that the evidence could be potentially undermined because some of the women had already discussed the claims amongst themselves via a social networking site. In my personal experience, the strongest testimony from victims of alleged child sexual abuse has to be collected individually, face to face, on neutral territory, with trained interviewers used to not asking leading questions. This was a long way from what we had done.
    ‘For these reasons I emailed Meirion on 30th November saying I wanted to pursue the CPS angle on the story to its end before finally deciding on publishing.’
    Rippon had previously expressed doubts about the women’s credibility and his desire for the CPS angle to be explored, but his sudden volte-face came as a total shock to the report team. The non-appearance of the letter from the police had suddenly become a major problem. I asked Liz MacKean whether she now thinks the letter ever existed.
    ‘I don’t know but I have to question whether it did,’ she says. ‘I really wanted to find that letter because clearly it would have been signed, sealed and delivered in terms of persuading
Newsnight
. I believed it did exist, although not necessarily as people were describing it to us. We were led on a complete goose chase [by one former Duncroft girl]. She was the one account that we had the greatest disagreements about.’
    This particular woman assured MacKean she had emailed the letter for her to see. On another occasion, MacKean offered to drive to the woman’s house to collect it in person. When the letter didn’t materialise, she began to suspect that the woman was enjoying rather too much the power she had in the whole investigation.
    Looking back, Meirion Jones agrees: ‘When you actually got down to people who said they actually had a letter from the police it was only one person. From what we know of the procedure, they would have got letters but the letters wouldn’t have said anything like [Jimmy Savile was too old and infirm]. I think, very likely, that whoever was dealing with them, the police officer or whoever, would ring them up and soften it by saying, “It’s not that you’re a bad witness but he’s very old and he’ll probably be dead by the time we got him to