The wise outsider stepped lightly yesterday in the village where brothers aged 10 and 11 almost killed two children by subjecting them to the horror of pre-planned torture, sexual humiliation and prolonged, sadistic violence.
A day after revulsion was prompted by the boys’ guilty pleas in court to a series of offences linked to the attack in April, the South Yorkshire former mining village of Edlington was raw with the infamy thrust upon it.
As criticism locally pointed in all directions — at the brothers, their family, their foster carers, the police and Doncaster social services — there was anger that the crime had somehow diminished an entire community.
The brothers, who will be sentenced in November, grew up seven miles away on a former council estate in the northern outskirts of Doncaster. They were taken into care and placed with foster carers in Edlington only 25 days before launching their assault.
Police and social services had extensive dealings with the boys. It emerged yesterday that they had even been taken on treats — to watch a Doncaster Rovers football match and on a seaside outing — to encourage an improvement in their behaviour.
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Sam Walton, 84, knew who was to blame. “There’s nowt wrong with this community; it’s the kids they send here. I blame Donny care [Doncaster social services] for this. They brought them from the town and put them here with a couple aged in their 60s who were too old to be foster parents. If their own mother couldn’t cope with them, how were the foster parents going to manage?” Mr Walton was once a miner with the grandfather of the elder of the two friends, aged 9 and 11, who were on a fishing trip when they became the victims of the brothers’ savagery.
“It was his grandbairn, one of ours. We look after our own here and everyone’s pulled together to raise money for those kids so that they can go away on holiday and try to forget about it. Those two lads that did this had better not come back here, because they’d be hung from the lampposts.”
The brothers were not quite outsiders. Their violent father grew up in Edlington and moved back to the village at Christmas after separating from their cannabis-addicted mother. He left soon after his sons’ arrest. Feelings were running so high that he had been asked by the Edlington allotment committee to give up his plot of land.
Vickie Wright, at the Tasty Bites caf?, went to school with him. Her 17-year-old son is a close friend of one of the victims’ brothers. This is the sort of village, she explained, where everyone still knows everyone.
“People have made lots of assumptions about this place. They see kids in hoodies leaning against a wall and assume they’re up to no good. Well, one of them’s probably my son. He’s not perfect but he knows the difference between right and wrong. He and his mates could never have done what those boys did. They were as upset as anyone when it happened.”
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Ms Wright’s fiercest anger as she read accounts of Thursday’s hearing at Sheffield Crown Court was directed at the “kid gloves” with which she felt the brothers were handled. To make them “as relaxed as possible and not unduly intimidated”, in the words of Mr Justice Keith, he and the barristers did not wear wigs or gowns. The boys sat with social workers, not in the dock, and public access to the courtroom was severely restricted. In a deal agreed behind closed doors, the Crown also dropped attempted murder charges and accepted guilty pleas to the lesser offence of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.
“I can’t believe how easy it’s been for them. It’s like everyone’s bending over backwards to look after them. What about the kids they attacked? Why is everyone trying to find excuses for what they did?”
Prayers for the injured boys have been said every Sunday since April by the Rev Jeffrey Stokoe, vicar of St John the Baptist Church. An 11-year-old attacked by the brothers a week before their near-fatal assault on the two children is one of his choirboys. Mr Stokoe admitted to “utter bafflement” that two boys so young could have carried out such a vicious attack, involving sharpened sticks, bricks, a noose and burning cigarettes.
“It was utterly abnormal and beyond comprehension. As a priest, I have to believe in the possibility of evil at work in human beings but I’m more concerned with the possibility of redemption.”
He said the court case had stirred up unhappy memories from April. “Okay, we’ve got our problems. The pit closed [in 1985] and the community is still in the process of change. But a lot of good work has been done here and there’s still a strong sense of community. People don’t leave Edlington. All they want is a bit of normality.”