Charles Thomson - Freelance Writer/Reporter

GRASS SNAKE: Notorious paedophile who ran child sex ring from Southend was secretly working for Essex Police
Tue 8th Jan 2019, Yellow Advertiser

A NOTORIOUS paedophile who ran a Rotherham-style child sex ring from Southend was secretly working for Essex Police, a historic charity document has revealed.

A police officer admitted to a charity worker in an on-the-record meeting that Dennis King was a ’registered informant’, the paperwork said.

King was arrested and charged with running the Shoebury ring in 1989 and faced a maximum term of life behind bars – but child protection workers were left furious when he cut a last-minute plea deal in 1990 and ended up getting just four years.

The court heard he was one of two ’leaders’ of the ’massive’ ring, which abused ’dozens’ of boys.

He and his accomplice, Brian Tanner, groomed the boys, abused them, then transported them around Essex and beyond to be drugged and abused by other paedophiles, sometimes on camera.

But after King and Tanner were offered a cushy plea deal, no other men involved in the ring were prosecuted and the duo, having already spent a year on remand, were soon released.

By 1993, King was back under investigation, this time for offences against young girls.

In June 1993, a Children’s Society worker representing some of the girls met with police officer Bob Fugl, who had worked the Shoebury Sex Ring case and was now assigned to the new King probe.

Minutes from that meeting – typed up and mailed to a Children’s Society manager – stated King was under police surveillance but a senior officer was ’blocking investigation’, saying he ’did not think King was important enough to resource’.

The notes state: “We talked around motives and concluded it could be conspiracy, although incompetence and attitude were factors.”

The document then says Fugl – now dead – admitted to the charity worker that King was a ’registered informant’, but claimed the relationship between police and the paedophile had ’no bearing on apparent police inaction’ over his offending.

It is not known who police were asking King to inform about.

In August 1993, the charity worker again met with Bob Fugl, where the cop said the investigation into King had been scaled down, leaving him to work the case alone.

Meanwhile, King had suddenly relocated to Lincoln amidst the new probe and moved in with a county councillor.

The charity worker again sent notes to a manager and requested a meeting to discuss ’what appears to be inaction and incompetence on the part of the statutory authorities’.

King ultimately settled in Peterborough, where he continued to abuse children and receive lenient sentences for more than two decades, until he died of AIDS on November 30, 2018.

Essex Police said it would not comment on the use of Dennis King as a grass, owing to national legislation governing police use of ’covert human intelligence sources’.

But a spokesman said: “We robustly investigate all information received in connection with crimes committed in the present and the past and we will continue to do so. If you have been a victim of sexual abuse, contact Essex Police on 101.”