(article date June 2016 Vahey killed himself in 2014)
In 1970, aged 20, Vahey walked free from a California jail after serving a 90-day sentence for child molestation. He was placed on the sex offenders register, which required him to tell authorities when he changed address. However, it seems that he did not do so, and the authorities failed to keep tabs on him. (According to the Canadian newspaper, the National Post, when the California state register was put online in 2004, Vahey’s name wasn’t included because he was no longer living in the state.)
For more than 40 years, William James Vahey drugged and abused hundreds of pupils at international schools around the world. A Guardian investigation reveals that, despite numerous opportunities to stop him, nothing was done
,,,special agents at the FBI office in Houston were waiting for a search warrant that would allow them to open a 16 gigabyte flashdrive that had recently arrived from the US embassy in Nicaragua. For the previous seven months, Vahey had been teaching history at the American Nicaraguan School, one of 193 schools around the world supported by the US government to promote US-style education. On 11 March, his housekeeper had shown up at the school gates, and handed the flashdrive in...
It later transpired that the drive contained photographs of at least 90 unconscious adolescent boys, naked and partially dressed. The images of abuse, which dated from 2008 to 2013, were neatly arranged into digital folders with titles such as “Panama Trip”, “Costa Rica Trip” and “Basketball Trip”. Vahey had led these field excursions while teaching at two other private international schools in Caracas and London.
The head of the American Nicaraguan School, Dr Gloria Doll, immediately confronted Vahey with the cache of images. He confessed that he had spent a lifetime drugging his pupils and abusing them. “I was molested as a boy, that is why I do this,” he told Doll, according to an FBI affidavit. “I have been doing this my whole life.” The full scale of his crimes would only emerge in the coming months: four decades of abuse at 10 international schools in eight countries from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, and from Venezuela to the UK. The FBI described him as one of the most prolific paedophiles it has ever seen. It seemed inexplicable that nothing had been done to stop him.
The article is in depth, I'm just posting more snippets...Southbank International school in central London is located a few doors down from the Chinese embassy... [it's] owned by Cognita, a private company that owns a further 67 schools across Europe, Latin America and south-east Asia. But it remains part of a much larger global community of international schools, defined by internationally recognized curriculums, taught in English, to cosmopolitan student bodies. It was a familiar world for Vahey, the son of a US air force pilot, who as a child attended international schools and US Defense Department schools in England and Japan.
Vahey taught at Southbank until 2013, and was so admired by parents that they voted him the second-most-popular teacher in a school survey. In fact, Vahey had abused at least 54 of their children, aged 11 to 16, on long-distance school trips. When Vahey’s death was announced, news of his crimes had not become public. (At the time, the school said Vahey had died of a heart attack.) In London, staff cried and opened a condolences book. In Jakarta, where Vahey had taught for a decade, the headmaster Tim Carr urged staff to remember a “vivacious community member”.
Three weeks later, on 22 April 2014, the FBI made a shocking announcement. They were launching an “international sex crimes investigation” into Vahey’s 42-year teaching career in Nicaragua, the UK, Venezuela, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Iran, Spain and Lebanon. “I have never seen another case where an individual may have molested this many children over such a long period of time,” special agent Patrick Fransen told the media.
The news swept through the international school network and was broadcast on TV channels across the world. “I was in bed and my son came running into my room with a laptop with Vahey’s face on it,” one Southbank parent told me. “He was shouting, ‘I knew he was a paedo, but nobody believed me.’” Parents dropping off children at Southbank the next morning were bewildered. “Every teenage kid who went on those trips is asking: ‘Was it me?’” said one mother.
In a letter inviting parents to an emergency meeting, the school’s executive principal, Graham Lacey, wrote that when he heard about the FBI investigation, he “felt, as some of you will be feeling now, physically sick”. The evidence suggested that Vahey had abused hundreds of children across the world.
Vahey claimed he “never hurt any of the boys”, according to an FBI affadavit. “They did not know what had happened to them,” he said. “They were completely asleep.” That was not entirely true – in the morning, some woke with suspicions about what had happened to them. But it is true that the majority of Vahey’s victims did not know they had been attacked. Parents now found themselves wrestling with an awful dilemma: would finding out if their child was in Vahey’s photo files trigger trauma where there was none before?...
“I feel like a lot of people probably knew and didn’t do a thing about it,” said John [victim]. “It wouldn’t have taken much. All they had to do was put in a call to the US embassy. He was a convicted paedophile.” The FBI has since confirmed that had any employer required Vahey to obtain a criminal records check from the US, it would have disclosed that he was a convicted child molester.
There is no evidence to suggest that Jean knew about her husband’s crimes, and the investigation by the Metropolitan police in London concluded her husband was acting alone. She did not respond to a request for an interview for this piece, and the majority of Vahey’s crimes appear to have been committed on school trips where Jean was not present. But teachers, parents and victims wonder whether, without her knowledge, Vahey exploited Jean’s prominence as a leader on the international schools circuit as cover for his crimes.
“People didn’t want to cross her – not just because of her power, but because of her charisma,” said a source at JIS. The official review by child protection experts cited one occasion when, following a critical appraisal, Vahey threatened to use Jean’s influence to put a “concrete ceiling” on his head of department’s career. “You knew who his wife was all of the time,” said Geoff Smith. “Without hard, concrete evidence, it felt like he was bulletproof.”
In 2009, after having served as head of the Escuela Campo Alegre in Caracas for seven years, Jean moved to London to become chief executive of the European Council of International Schools. Vahey was keen to join her and wrote to Southbank International School for a job, mentioning Jean’s position. He boasted that his spring break trips provided experiences “far outside a typical family vacation” and of his “special appreciation for the middle school age group”.
Over the next four years, Vahey led 11 trips, including to Nepal and Jordan. After the trips, he would host slideshows for parents, pupils and the headmaster. “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” said a parent who attended one of these slideshows. “On the screen were pictures of boys in their trunks, a 15-year-old girl in her bikini. He gave a 13-year old boy a ‘babe magnet award’. It was so uncomfortable.”
We now know that while Vahey was at Southbank, teachers reported his suspicious behaviour on four different trips, either to the school principal, the teacher in charge of child protection or the head of pastoral care. On two trips, teachers reported him for taking ill pupils to his room. On another, he was reported for insisting on being alone with a boy who was ill, and on another he was reported for discussing pornography with pupils. There was “a clear pattern of intrinsically inappropriate conduct” sufficient for Vahey to have been stopped, said Hugh Davies QC in his report to parents.
Scotland Yard detectives eventually established that 53 boys, aged 11 to 16, from Southbank International school appeared unconscious in the digital photo archive that was discovered in Nicaragua. They contacted the families of all the boys who had been on Vahey’s trips and posed an awful question: do you want to know if your child was among the victims?
Parents were told they could meet with a detective and a social worker assigned to their case in their homes, in a police station or in the social workers’ offices. “My husband didn’t think our son should go, on the basis that you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, and not knowing the severity of what is in the photographs – whether it was full sexual assault, touching or nudity,” one mother told me. “I went on my own and had to decide whether to share what I was told with my husband and son. I had to ask myself, however awful it is, can I live with that?”