Crime Immemorial

July 29th, 1981 was a significant day in British history, as it was the wedding day of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, who would famously go on to become the much beloved Princess Di. London was thronged with spectators to the lavish event, and among the crowds was a small family known as the Mehrotras. Vishambar Mehrotra, a solicitor who would later become a magistrate, had immigrated to the UK from India in 1978, leaving his estranged wife behind, and he was accompanied on the move by his two children, one of which was an eight-year-old boy named Vishal.

Vishal, his father, sister, and nanny had watched the wedding procession as it wound its way through the London streets, and soon afterward began making their way back toward the East Putney tube station. Vishal was going to take the train home alone, while the rest of his family stayed in the city to do some shopping. The boy waved goodbye and headed off toward Carlton Drive. He was never seen alive again.

A massive search was undertaken, though at first, authorities were operating under the assumption that Vishal had set out of his own volition, perhaps in an attempt to return to India to see his mother. Days after he vanished, anonymous tips placing the child on a Chelsea-bound bus, or in the company of an unidentified middle-aged man in a khaki jacket and hat, kept police on their toes, but none of these nebulous leads panned out.

Vishal’s fate would not be discovered until two months into the following year, and his gruesome death would dredge up uncomfortable rumors in the capital about the possibility of a secretive and murderous pedophile ring comprised of high-placed members of the British government.

On Thursday, February 25th, a pair of men out hunting pigeons in a copse near Chichester happened upon a human skull and part of a rib cage. It didn’t take long for the partial skeleton to be identified as eight-year-old Vishal Mehrotra, who had disappeared on his way to the Putney tube station back in late July of 1981. Since the remains were recovered more than thirty miles away from where the boy had last been seen, it seemed almost certain that he had been abducted and murdered.

No clothing was found alongside the body, which was thought to have been deposited at the dump site on or around July 29th, the same day that Vishal had gone missing.

Police fielded more tips from the public, including the sighting of a suspicious vehicle parked on the A-272 near where the bones were found, but all of the clues led to nothing but dead ends. Easily the most ominous occurrence in the days following the discovery of Vishal’s body, though, was the phone call received by the child’s father Vishambar.

The voice on the other end of the line informed Vishambar that his son’s death was connected to a secret cabal of highly-placed pedophiles who operated out of a former hotel called the Elm Guest House in southwest London, a location less than a mile from where Vishal had vanished. According to the caller, several prominent figures in the British government were engaged in kidnapping and sexually molesting young boys there.

Vishambar recorded the strange phone call and took the recording to police, but investigators didn’t seem to take it all that seriously, believing it was probably a crank. The fact that the lead was not sufficiently followed up on, however, would suggest to many later researchers into the case that the authorities were deliberately trying to cover up for the judges, politicians, police officers, royals, and pop stars though to be involved in the alleged pedophile ring.

It would take until 2012 before the accusations concerning Elm Guest House would be formally looked into; an investigation called Operation Fairbank was launched on the back of a list of purported pedophiles drawn up by Labour councillor Chris Fay. Later investigations—Operation Fernbridge in 2013 and Operation Midland in 2015—failed to find any evidence of wrongdoing at Elm Guest House, though, and notably, Chris Fay was later convicted of fraud. In 2016, all investigations into the charges were ceased, and apologies were issued to people whose names had appeared on the list. And in 2019, the man whose allegations of abuse had linked the Vishal Mehrotra case with Operation Midland in the first place—Carl Beech—was convicted of lying to the police and given an eighteen-year sentence. Despite this, many individuals still suspect a cover-up in several cases of missing and murdered boys in the area.

There was another suspect in the murder of Vishal Mehrotra who was not connected to the goings-on at the Elm Guest House, but was involved with a proven gang of pedophiles nonetheless. This was Sidney Cooke, a carnival worker also known by the nickname Hissing Sid, who between the decades of the 1960s and the 1980s used his fairground “Test Your Strength” attraction to lure young boys into his orbit, whereby he would then drug them and take them back to his accomplices to gang-rape, abuse, and sometimes kill.

Though he was ultimately convicted of two murders—those of fourteen-year-old Jason Swift and seven-year-old Mark Tildesley—Cooke admitted to a horrifying number of rapes of young boys, and was given two life sentences in 1999. It should be noted that in July of 1981, there were two fun-fairs operating very close to the area where Vishal had disappeared.

Another person of interest in the homicide was laborer Brian Field, who in 2001 was convicted of the 1968 rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Roy Tutill. Though Field was reportedly investigated in regards to the death of Vishal Mehrotra, there was insufficient evidence to charge him with the crime.

The kidnapping and murder of the eight-year-old remains open and unsolved as of this writing.