Our friend, the man who abused our child

“It was Sunday night and we were sitting watching Sports Personality of the Year on the telly and the door bell rang,” remembers John. “One of these men was showing me a badge. He said, ‘Mr Reilly? Leith CID. We need to talk to you about something.’” John nervously assumed he had forgotten to pay a parking ticket, until one of the men asked if his wife was home. “I wasn’t sure what the right answer was,” he says. “I thought, ‘What’s going to come out?’”

As soon as they were ensconced in the Reillys’ comfortable living room, one of the policemen asked if the couple knew Rennie. “At first,” says Maggie, “there was slight relief, because you think, ‘At least we haven’t done something.’” The police explained that they were calling as part of an ongoing investigation, Operation Algebra, and that they were investigating Rennie for possession of indecent images of children. And then the heart-stopping words were uttered: “We believe it involves your son.”

This is from an interview with "John" and "Maggie", the couple so shockingly betrayed by their friend, James Rennie. This piece makes around 3,000 words and appeared here in The Times Saturday Magazine

"He was a monster in a human skin"

“I see James Rennie as somebody who I thought I knew, but actually I didn’t know that person at all. That person is someone I once spent a lot of time with, a face I know and recognise because we shared experiences together. But he was actually an outrageous and disgusting monster. He had a job and a suit and went to work and bought Ikea sofas and shopped in Sainsbury’s, all the usual stuff. But it was just a façade. That’s how I rationalise it. I never saw this as a betrayal. I think, ‘You weren’t my friend at all. You just pretended to be to suit your own ends.’ He was just a skin and a shell. Underneath, that person was not in any shape or form a person I knew. He is an inhuman and amoral monster.”

That's the father of a child abused by James Rennie, who, with Neil Strachan, was given a life sentence for his central role in a criminal conspiracy to abuse children. Their network of contacts reached out all over the world through the internet, and the information obtained by police in Scotland will ultimately lead to hundreds of convictions in Britain, Europe and America. Read about it here:

Times front page.

Rennie profile.

How the internet normalised child abuse.