One of the most prolific sex offenders in British criminal history yesterday admitted a series of kidnaps, rapes and assaults, leaving the home office to explain how he managed to attack two of his victims while he was serving a prison sentence for an earlier armed robbery.
Clive Barwell , 42, pleaded guilty at Teesside crown court to 11 offences between 1982 and 1995. One victim had her eyes superglued together; another was bound hand and foot and tossed into a canal; another was tied up in the back of her car while Barwell tried and failed to set fire to it.
Police want to question him about dozens of other unsolved sex attacks, and the murder of a woman whose body was found in a lake 12 years ago.
Barwell, of Wortley, Leeds, pleaded guilty to three rapes, one attempted murder, four kidnappings, one serious sexual assault, one indecent assault and one assault occasioning actual bodily harm.
His arrest in March last year followed one of the biggest inquiries ever conducted by British police.
Although his arrest is regarded as a triumph for the special operation that caught him, it revealed a series of horrific blunders in the past handling of Barwell and his victims.
The Guardian has established that:
* Barwell attacked two women while serving a 16-year sentence for armed robbery. After less than four years, he had conned prison authorities into transferring him to an open prison, where he was allowed to live the life of a free man – sleeping regularly in a local hotel, drawing a regular wage as the hotel manager, and marrying and fathering a child.
* Barwell was released from prison on early parole, after serving only seven years of his 16-year sentence. He attacked another woman within weeks.
* Police had earlier abandoned attempts to solve many of Barwell’s crimes, throwing out entire case files and destroying semen samples.
* A murder now attributed to Barwell was classified as a suicide even though the 26-year-old victim was found in a lake with her hands and feet bound and ligature marks around her throat. An attempted rape and abduction was recorded as an attempted robbery, rather than a sex crime.
* A serving officer used a case file, apparently as a source of pornography, and tried to visit the victim at home in an attempt to have sex with her.
The sex attacks admitted by Barwell took place in Bradford, Leeds and Nottingham.
The crown left on file charges of rape and kidnap in Leicester in 1984 and attempted kidnap in Leeds in 1993. Barwell denied false imprisonment and indecent assault in Doncaster in 1985. He is to be sentenced today.
Last night the prison service refused to comment.
