The Establishment paedophile: how a monster hid in high society

The five-year-old girl cowers naked and crying in a corner. She is so frightened that she urinates. One of the men in the room hits her repeatedly. The others laugh. Another man picks her up and throws her face down on the bed. Then the men rape her. She dies soon afterwards of atrocious injuries.

This is the scenario that the respected art historian and curator, Roger Took, boasted repeatedly about in internet ‘chat rooms’ to fellow paedophiles. In the chat rooms, Took relates how a Dutch man bought the child in Cambodia, kept her for a week and how Took was part of the group who enjoyed ‘splitting her apart’ one night. After Took was arrested last April, the police interviewed him in connection with the child’s murder but Took insisted it was mere fantasy and the police passed the case on to Interpol. Fantasy it could be, but the fact so many like-minded men laughed and masturbated over a helpless child’s torture, terror and death is chilling and profoundly disturbing.

Roger Took was sentenced this February to a minimum of four and a half years in prison as part of an indeterminate sentence for 17 other crimes relating to child abuse. They included molesting two of his step-granddaughters and the possession of 260 photographs, including 102 ‘Level 5s’, which mean they contain images of children being tortured or penetrated, including by animals. One photograph showed a penis entering the vagina of a baby. Many images showed small children shackled to chairs or bars, in obvious pain. The police recovered these images from Took’s laptop. There were, apparently, thousands more on his main computer but the hard drive had broken and police experts were unable to retrieve them. When police raided Took’s home, they found a locked case containing a large bundle of photographs of naked young Russian women, believed to be prostitutes, one having sex with Took, and clippings of children’s hair.