Two notorious predators who targeted young players at football clubs across Britain deployed almost identical methods to isolate their victims.Barry Bennell, a former scout with Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra, and Gordon Neely, who coached at Hibernian FC, Rangers and Dundee United, would both
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Times
Marc Horne
Two notorious predators who targeted young players at football clubs across Britain deployed almost identical methods to isolate their victims.
Barry Bennell, a former scout with Manchester City and Crewe Alexandra, and Gordon Neely, who coached at Hibernian FC, Rangers and Dundee United, would both terrify players aged 11 to 15 with ghost stories and “haunted house” pranks before abusing them.
Bennell, 66, is serving 31 years in jail for molesting children on an “industrial scale” between 1979-90.
Several of Neely’s victims accused him of rape after he died of cancer in 2014, aged 62.
The Offside Trust, which supports survivors of abuse in sport, is convinced that a host of high-profile offenders who coached British youth teams exchanged grooming tactics and passed around victims.
The Times revealed last week that an investigation had been launched into claims that some of the country’s most infamous sex abusers were
part of an organised cross-border “paedophile network”.
Steve Walters, director of the Offside Trust, said: “The ‘haunted house’ techniques used by Bennell and Neely are too similar for it to be a coincidence. We have also received reports about other coaches who used these scare tactics as a means to groom their victims.”
A number of Bennell’s victims recall being abused at a property in Wales known as the haunted house. They gave evidence that he told ghost stories, made them watch horror films and played sinister pranks.
“I can recall one of the boys in a dormitory waking with a sheep or ram’s head in their bunk bed,” Chris Unsworth, a former Manchester City youth player who was abused by Bennell for years, said.
Mr Walters, who was also abused by the coach, said: “When I was with Bennell at his house he would always put on
A Nightmare on Elm Street with Freddy Krueger. It was extremely frightening and he used it as a tool to force us to get closer to him.”
Victims of Neely told how he hosted “ghost weekends” at an outdoor retreat centre in Perthshire when he was a coach with Hutchison Vale, an Edinburgh youth side, in the early 1980s.
One survivor, now in his forties, said Neely would tell scary stories and have accomplices run around in white sheets pretending to be ghosts.
“We were put through all manner of terrors and Neely would be the one with the hugs, the one we could go to if we couldn’t sleep,” he said. “It seems obvious now we were being groomed in a very deliberate way.”
The Offside Trust believes that Bennell was working with paedophiles including
Jim McCafferty, the former Celtic kit man and boys’ club coach; Frank Roper, a youth coach with links to Manchester City and Blackpool; Bob Higgins, who abused 24 victims at Southampton and Peterborough United; and Kit Carson, a Norwich City and Peterborough United coach who killed himself after being accused of offences against boys.
They are all either dead or imprisoned on child sex charges.
One survivor has told an Scottish FA-commissioned review that he was abused separately by McCafferty and Bennell after being introduced to them by
Bill Kelly, a former coach with the West Lothian team Uphall Saints. Kelly was jailed for sexually assaulting 12 players at the now defunct club over a 22-year period.
Another of his victims claimed that Kelly was an associate of Harry Dunn, the former Rangers and Liverpool youth scout, who died before he could stand trial on abuse charges in 2017.
Four senior figures at Celtic Boys Club being found guilty of child sex offences has further strengthened claims of collusion between abusers.