Soham is a town and civil parish in the district of East Cambridgeshire, in Cambridgeshire, England, just off the A142 between Ely and Newmarket. Its population was 12,336 at the 2021 census.
Michael George Bichard, Baron Bichard is a former public servant in the United Kingdom, first in local and then as a civil servant in central government. He was director of the Institute for Government, currently serves as one of its first fellows, and was chair of the Design Council. He was a created a crossbench life peer on 24 March 2010. He is an advisor to The Key Support Services Limited, which provide leadership and management support to school leaders and governors. He became chair of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) in 2013.
Soham Village College is a secondary school with academy status located in Soham, Cambridgeshire, England. It has around 1,400 pupils, aged 11 to 16. Although its wide catchment area does not include Ely, some pupils from there and its neighbouring villages attend the college. It is split between two adjacent sites: Beechurst, formerly a large house, and Lodeside, built more recently.
David Westwood, QPM, is a British former police officer. He was Chief Constable of Humberside Police from March 1999 until March 2005. In 2004, he was suspended from July until September as a result of the Bichard report into the Soham murders.
The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) is a non-departmental public body of the Home Office of the United Kingdom. The DBS enables organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors to make safer recruitment decisions by identifying candidates who may be unsuitable for certain work, especially involving children or vulnerable adults, and provides wider access to criminal record information through its disclosure service for England and Wales.
Stranger danger is the idea or warning that all strangers can potentially be dangerous. The phrase is intended to encapsulate the danger associated with adults whom children do not know. The phrase has found widespread usage and many children will hear it during their childhood. Many books, films and public service announcements have been devoted to helping children remember this advice.
Humberside Police is the territorial police force responsible for policing The East Riding of Yorkshire including Hull and northern parts of Lincolnshire including Grimsby and Scunthorpe.
The murder of Danielle Jones was an English child murder case involving a 15-year-old schoolgirl who disappeared from East Tilbury, Essex, England. There was a large and exhaustive search to find Jones' body and it was considered one of the biggest cases Essex Police had to deal with at the time. Despite the police's best efforts, her body was never found.
The Scottish Police Services Authority – Information Communications Technology (SPSA-ICT), formerly known as the Scottish Police Information Strategy, is an organisation within the Scottish Police Services responsible for the development of new systems with a national, cross-force scope. The personnel consist primarily of around 50 Police Staff, mainly IT professionals specialising in a range of discrete technologies, with a large contingent of those staff Java EE developers and Oracle DBAs. SPSA-ICT also retains a small number of development staff specialising in .NET technologies. Non-technical members of staff include project managers, administrative staff, internal personnel resources, software testers, senior management, and a very small number of seconded police officers with specialist knowledge of the areas impacted by projects under construction. Seconded police officers are drawn from Scotland's eight police forces, and from SPSA-Criminal Justice.
The Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA) was a non-departmental public body for England, Northern Ireland and Wales, that existed until 1 December 2012, when it merged with the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) to form the Disclosure and Barring Service.
The Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was created following the UK Government accepting recommendation 19 of the inquiry headed by Sir Michael Bichard, which was set up in the wake of the Soham Murders.
The Soham murders were a double child murder committed in Soham, Cambridgeshire, England on 4 August 2002. The victims were two 10-year-old girls, Holly Marie Wells and Jessica Amiee Chapman, who were lured into the home of a local resident and school caretaker, Ian Kevin Huntley, who subsequently murdered the children—likely via asphyxiation—before disposing of their bodies in an irrigation ditch close to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk. The girls' bodies were discovered on 17 August 2002.
Daniel John Morgan was a British private investigator who was murdered with an axe in a pub car park in Sydenham, London, in 1987. Despite several Metropolitan Police investigations, arrests, and trial, the crime remains unsolved. An independent review into the handling of the investigation of Morgan's killing was published in 2021; it found that the Met Police had "a form of institutional corruption" which had concealed or denied failings in the case.
Jonathan Rees is a British private investigator, and former partner of murdered private investigator Daniel Morgan.
Events from 2004 in England
Events from 2003 in England
Events from 2002 in England
The Babes in the Wood Murders were the murders of two nine-year-old girls, Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, on 9 October 1986, by a 20-year-old local roofer, Russell Bishop in Wild Park, Moulsecoomb, Brighton, Sussex, England. Bishop was tried and acquitted in 1987. The case remained open until 10 December 2018, when Bishop was found guilty of the murders in a second trial. The investigation into the two girls' murders is the largest and longest-running inquiry ever conducted by Sussex Police.
The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal consists of the organised child sexual abuse that occurred in the town of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, Northern England from the late 1980s until 2013 and the failure of local authorities to act on reports of the abuse throughout most of that period. Researcher Angie Heal, who was hired by local officials and warned them about child exploitation occurring between 2002 and 2007, has since described it as the "biggest child protection scandal in UK history", with one report estimating that 1,400 girls were abused by "grooming gangs". Evidence of the abuse was first noted in the early 1990s, when care home managers investigated reports that children in their care were being picked up by taxi drivers. From at least 2001, multiple reports passed names of alleged perpetrators, several from one family, to the police and Rotherham Council. The first group conviction took place in 2010, when five British-Pakistani men were convicted of sexual offences against girls aged 12–16. From January 2011 Andrew Norfolk of The Times pressed the issue, reporting in 2012 that the abuse in the town was widespread and that the police and council had known about it for over ten years.
Professor Patricia Wiltshire is a forensic ecologist, botanist and palynologist. She has been consulted by police forces and industry in almost 300 investigations in several countries and has been instrumental in solving several high-profile crimes, including the killings of Sarah Payne and Millie Dowler, the cold case of Christopher Laverack, the Soham murders, and the Ipswich serial murders.
