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Vishambar Mehrotra’s voice takes on a wistful tone as he remembers his eldest son Vishal’s cheeky demeanour and determined personality. Before Vishal vanished, not long after his father moved him and his younger sister to London from India, the eight-year-old boy was thriving. “He turned out to be a very, very bright boy,” Vishambar recalls proudly. “In just an 18-month period, he went to almost the top of the class. He was good, sensible and intelligent. He was going to prove himself.”
But he never got the chance. On July 29, 1981, as the nation was captivated by the televised wedding of Charles and Diana, the small boy waved goodbye to his nanny as he skipped down a street in Putney, southwest London. Vishal should have made it back to his nearby home in less than ten minutes but instead he disappeared without a trace.
With most people glued to their TV screens for the fairytale royal nuptials, the streets were deserted and there were no reliable witnesses. Vishambar and his ex-wife, Aruna, were plunged into every parent’s worst nightmare as a nationwide appeal resulted in scores of reported sightings but no viable leads.
Seven months later, Vishal’s remains were found in a woodland copse in Sussex, more than 50 miles from where he disappeared. The police investigation trailed off and was eventually shut down with not so much as a publicised arrest, let alone criminal charges.
Hopes of justice have been raised many times in the decades since, with Vishal’s disappearance connected with notorious paedophiles and other crimes, but they have always been dashed.
Now extraordinary findings from a podcast series have reignited interest in the unsolved case. Vishal, a meticulous nine-part investigation by the BBC, links the child’s disappearance to a previously little-known gang of prolific sex offenders operating at a school near where his body was dumped. Colin Campbell, an investigative journalist at the broadcaster, unearths new lines of inquiry, points out intriguing links missed by the police and uncovers circumstantial evidence pointing to possible perpetrators.
Yet Sussex police are resisting further inquiries without properly explaining why. Its apparent indifference to Vishal’s fate has fuelled his family’s suspicions that discrimination is at least partly responsible for the failure to bring his killer, or killers, to justice.
Diagnosed with lung cancer, Vishambar, known as Vishu, 77, says he is “running out of time” to find the answers that he is desperately seeking. Speaking from his home in Surrey, the retired magistrate accuses the police of being “reluctant and negative”.
“Why are they closing their doors on us?” he asks. “There is evidence they didn’t really properly investigate this murder. They are trying to cover up their shortcomings. But we need their help.”
In the late 1970s Vishu emigrated to London with his young family after he split with Aruna, who stayed in India. His son adjusted quickly and became a high achiever at his prep school in Kensington. He took up boxing, enjoyed playing the violin (his father still has the instrument at his home) and formed close friends with other boys in their neighbourhood.
On the day of the royal wedding Vishu, then a solicitor, took his two children to Fleet Street in central London, where his law firm held a party at their office as the newlyweds went past in their carriage. Vishal’s sister, Mamta, who loved princesses, was enthralled, but the boy was more interested in racing cars. That afternoon, as the family returned to Putney, Vishal had had enough and wanted to go home. While his nanny took Mamta to the nearby shops for provisions, Vishal set off alone. It was a route he had followed many times before.
His disappearance sparked a major search as the Metropolitan Police deployed dogs, divers and helicopters to scour rivers, parks and commons. Over several weeks officers spoke to 10,000 people, trawled for witnesses and investigated reported sightings across the country. They found nothing.
“We did our utmost,” recalls Jackie Malton, then a young detective who was assigned to liaise with the family and give them information on the case. “It was terrible, like an alien had come down from another planet and taken this boy off the street. Those days, we didn’t have CCTV or automatic numberplate recognition [to track cars].
“Literally everybody was doing their own thing watching the wedding on TV or having parties in their homes. The streets were deserted. There were no leads. But, hand on heart, the Met did their best to find this little boy.”
After several weeks Malton was deployed to the Met’s Flying Squad to investigate armed robberies. She went on to have a stellar career taking on hard-nosed criminals, and sometimes even corrupt colleagues, and ultimately became the inspiration for Jane Tennison, the no-nonsense detective played by Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect.
But she never forgot Vishal — “Every detective has a case that stays with them.” When his remains were found at Alder Copse, near Petersfield, in February 1982 she says, “My heart was hurting.”
Sussex police took over because the body had been found within their jurisdiction, and interest appeared to dwindle. The Met’s handover of its massive inquiry, involving tens of thousands of documents, took place in a pub. Although official guidelines recommend unsolved murders are examined every two years, it recently emerged that Sussex police have only ever conducted one full review, in 2015.
On the 40th anniversary of Vishal’s disappearance, the force told the family they would carry out a major appeal, but nothing transpired. Over the years Vishal’s murder has hit the headlines when journalists explored potential links to notorious criminals such as Sidney Cooke, the paedophile child murderer. The publicity always faded without results.
In 2019 Shaun Keep, a former Met detective, was reviewing Sussex police documents for the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. His team uncovered a piece of paper, written in 1983 by a sex offender about a boy he was abusing. Rather than using the boy’s real name, he had changed it to Vishal, an extremely unusual name at the time, even in India. The document was written just a year after Vishal’s remains were found, and had been discovered in the mid-1990s when police investigated a paedophile ring at a school in West Sussex. It was not until four years ago, however, that the potential link to the murdered child was made.
As part of the Met’s team that brought two of the racist killers of Stephen Lawrence to justice in 2012, nearly two decades after the murder of the 18-year-old, Keep knew only too well that cold cases could turn on a tiny piece of evidence and a bit of persistence. So when Sussex police said there were no further investigative opportunities, he contacted Campbell.
Where the police insist there are only dead ends, Campbell on the podcast finds a series of disturbing connections that warrant further investigation. In a painstaking inquiry he tracks down the sex offender responsible for the document and discovers that, although he denies involvement in Vishal’s case, his mother lives in the village near the remote copse where the remains were found and he knows the area. The paedophile gang that operated at the boarding school had links to west London, and their pupil victims came from the troubled families in the area. The connections include a property in Kew, where boys were taken to be abused, that is a short drive from the Putney street where Vishal disappeared. Campbell establishes that Asian boys were among the gang’s victims, and one of the gang had a predilection for Indian boys in particular. That man, James Russell, fled abroad to India to teach in schools when he was being investigated by police for sex offending.
When Campbell tracks him down in Sri Lanka, Russell admits to being a paedophile with an interest in Asian boys but tries to claim that society misunderstands sex offenders. It emerges that he has been wanted by Sussex police for years, and the force have his address overseas because he is still collecting his old age pension. Police claim it would have been disproportionate to travel to interview him, although Russell is briefly spoken to by detectives when he returns to the UK in 2022, shortly before his death.
Vishu tells the podcast: “I can’t forgive them for their inaction.”
Campbell continues to pull at the thread, and discovers that another associate of the gang also had links to Putney and a conviction for sex offences.
Vishal’s father believes the circumstantial evidence merits further investigation by the police but at an extraordinary meeting, taped and broadcast by the podcast team, he is read a prepared statement by a female detective dashing his hopes.
She informs him that as the sex offenders abused boys in their care, they had no need to abduct victims from the street. Her insistence that there is no intelligence they did so is quickly disproved by Campbell, who discovers from a public newspaper archive that Russell had a conviction for indecently assaulting boys he picked up at random from a street in Ealing. Nonetheless the force say it is content that their detectives have spoken to the gang, who were not treated as suspects, and taken them at their word that they know nothing.
Vishu’s frustration and despair increases when the same detective tries to hand him back a clump of his son’s hair, the only remaining piece of forensic evidence that might be tested for DNA if there was a future breakthrough. His pleas that they search Alder Copse for more evidence, as only Vishal’s partial remains were found, are rejected on cost grounds.
Vishu cannot help but compare his son’s case to other cold cases where money has been no object. The disappearance of Genette Tate, the schoolgirl who disappeared in Devon in 1978, was the subject of multiple reviews, a reinvestigation and major searches even after her suspected attacker, the serial killer Robert Black, was placed behind bars for life. Millions of pounds have been spent on investigating the disappearance of three-year-old Madeleine McCann, who went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in Portugal in 2007. Sussex police themselves spent years and massive resources pursuing the convicted paedophile Russell Bishop, who was found guilty four years ago of the 1986 double killing of Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, both nine, known as the Babes in the Wood murders.
Vishu sighs: “They are willing to do good things investigating white children. Vishal was the only non-white [missing child]. That’s my honest opinion. I am now convinced that the police’s attitude is cover up, cover up, cover up. It cannot be anything short of institutional racism.”
Keep and Malton, who have given Campbell advice in his inquiries over the past few years, are also perplexed. “They’ve determined it’s unsolvable, but I don’t think they’ve done enough work,” Keep says.
While he acknowledges that much of the podcast’s evidence is circumstantial, there are “too many coincidences” in the paedophile gang’s numerous potential connections to the case.
Using up some “shoe leather” and interviewing their victims and acquaintances, as well as the members of the public who reported sightings of Vishal might just yield results, he believes. “The service that the family has got for their little boy [from the police] is not the same as other cases. There should be someone who says, ‘We’re going to do this for this little boy.’ ”
Appearing exasperated, Malton believes the force has been “hugely defensive”. “It’s all very well saying there’s no evidence. But they haven’t gone to find it, Colin has. Never say never. Never give up.”
Sussex police say they have completed “two comprehensive reviews” of the case in 2005 and 2015-16, although the police watchdog has previously concluded that the earlier review did not meet the required standard.
The force say that their inquiries of the paedophile gang have been “throughly conducted and completed”, but they could not go into further details as the case remains live.
A spokeswoman says: “Sussex police is satisfied all inquiries were thorough and completed with careful consideration of all surrounding information. We are reviewing the contents of the podcast and assessing whether any further inquiries should be undertaken as a result.
“We firmly refute any suggestion that our inquiries over the past 40 years have been hampered or influenced in any way by Vishal’s ethnicity. The reports of the 1982 investigation and subsequent reviews are in the public domain and make very clear the thorough and considered nature of the detailed and painstaking work that officers and staff have carried out over the years.”
She adds: “This tragic case has been the subject of extensive and thorough police inquiries since Vishal first went missing in July 1981.
“We have maintained contact with Vishal’s family and are committed to undertaking all reasonable and viable inquiries to identify those responsible for Vishal’s death and to deliver justice for Vishal and his family. This includes examining any new information or forensic opportunities that may arise.”
Vishu recently wrote to prime minister Rishi Sunak asking for help, because he wants someone with the power to force the police to do more, but has heard nothing.
“I don’t have much time,” he says. “I want all the remains to be found, I want forensic evidence to be obtained if possible. I want scoping of the copse with modern gadgetry, I want a fresh DNA search and modern science which they have access to. I want the police to do their job.”
Sussex police say the investigation into Vishal’s murder is still open. The force can be contacted online or by calling 101 quoting Operation Moor. Information can be passed on anonymously via the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111