Deepcut: A Family's Fight for the Truth Week In Week Out

Deepcut was a place of fear.

It's where four young soldiers were shot dead.

One of them was Welsh recruit Cheryl James.

But did she pull the trigger?

We hear from those who knew her.

I can't put Cheryl's state of mind and suicide together.

Still, to now, it doesn't make sense to me.

We follow Cheryl's parents through her inquest.

They took on the army in a 20-year fight for the truth.

People don't want to be honest

and don't want to be straightforward with you,

and I just don't imagine that any parent could walk away from it.

And this week, as they prepare for the verdict, allegations of sexual

abuse and bullying still overshadow the camp.

I know lots of women who were sexually and physically assaulted.

If my dad had any idea what had gone on in that camp,

I tell you, he'd have gone to jail.

Tonight, there are calls for a new investigation into the truth

of what happened to others behind the wire.

People have never been held to account.

-Are you saying that we should deal with that?

-Yes, I am.

This is Cheryl James training to become a soldier.

These pictures have never been broadcast before.

Cheryl was 18.

She'd left home in Llangollen to start an army life.

During her basic training, there was no hint

of what was to follow at Deepcut.

'Keep going!'

Cheryl... It's like everything else,

she had to do it fast forward, you know?

There was no in-between.

She liked to do exciting things and I think the Forces

probably was the thing that offered that for her.

And it would be a safe place that she would be, you know,

taken care of.

At this checkpoint, Cheryl was on guard with a rifle.

It was against regulations for her to be there alone.

But those running Deepcut say they didn't know.

What happened next is a mystery, but one thing is clear.

Cheryl went into the woods

and was found dead with a single bullet wound to the head.

It was as if the world had just stopped.

And the first thing they said was that she'd taken her own life.

And I thought, this is...

This can't be right, this can't be Cheryl.

It's the wrong person. It's got to be.

And that's how it started.

From then on, we were kept in the dark about everything.

Military and Surrey police officers who went to the scene

quickly decided this was suicide.

Forensic evidence wasn't gathered, her gun wasn't tested

for fingerprints and potential witnesses weren't questioned.

The MoD told her parents that Cheryl was unhappy.

She wanted to leave the army and was torn between two boyfriends.

But her parents argued there was no hard evidence to back

the theory that she'd killed herself.

It's the first day of Cheryl's new inquest.

The media is gathering in Woking.

Her father, Des,

will spend the next two months in a hotel as the case is heard.

I didn't think today was the day to wear a red tie or a blue tie

or a green tie.

Today was the day to wear a black tie.

Symbolically, it's my last day of mourning.

We're not mourning any more now, we're fighting.

He believes this could be his last chance to get at the truth.

Yeah, that's where we are.

-'Are you ready to go?'

-I am indeed.

-HE CHUCKLES

-As ready as I'll ever be.

The inquest was always going to be high profile,

because it's taken the couple 20 years to force the MoD

and Surrey Police to answer for their actions.

Doreen was too ill to go to the inquest.

She's at home in Llanymynech in Montgomeryshire,

recovering from back surgery.

-'Do you wish Doreen was here with you?'

-Yeah, I do indeed, yeah.

She won't be blubbing, she's a lot stronger than me, I promise you.

So...

She... That's all she says is... Just, you know, be strong.

I think we have more support than people

thinking that we're just, you know...

..grieving parents that won't let go.

Deepcut is a former training camp in Surrey that's become

synonymous with scandal.

Cheryl was the second recruit to die of gunshot wounds in 1995.

Sean Benton died five months before her.

Then in 2001, Geoff Gray.

And in 2002, James Collinson.

According to the army, they all committed suicide.

Their families didn't believe that, though,

and the human rights group Liberty joined their fight.

This is a very, very important human rights case.

It's because there was a lack of independence and a lack

of rigour in the investigation of this young woman's death.

Liberty, who represent the Jameses,

say there was a deeply flawed investigation.

Surrey Police should have led the inquiry.

Instead, they let the military police do it

on the assumption of suicide.

Within three weeks, there was an inquest.

That inquest lasted less than one hour.

Barely any witnesses were called to attend.

Cheryl's medical records were not examined,

key witnesses were not called,

the family were left completely reeling and they were stonewalled.

The coroner at the first inquest returned an open verdict,

but a few weeks later, an army board of inquiry,

which didn't even involve Des and Doreen,

decided it was suicide after all.

The weekend before Cheryl died, she was meant to go home,

but phoned her mother instead to say she'd been put on guard duty.

There were no tears.

You know, I could only see...

I couldn't see what was going on, I could hear...

um, her voice, but you know, you hope you know your own child,

if they're distressed, you know there'll be a quiver or pauses.

But there was nothing like that.

Cheryl and her brother were adopted by the Jameses

when she was 17 months old.

Her parents say she grew into a bubbly, confident girl.

But the army and police have suggested that Cheryl might

have been affected by the suicide of her cousin a few years earlier.

And that she was unhappy.

It was a happy home and we enjoyed the children and, you know,

for people to make it look like an unhappy home, just because

it fits a point that they're trying to put over in this inquest,

you know, it's not fair.

After winning a second inquest at the High Court,

Cheryl's parents are asking this coroner, Judge Brian Barker,

to consider could she have been shot by someone else?

Or, if she took her own life,

could the culture at Deepcut have been a factor?

109 witnesses have been asked to give evidence,

and one of them was former recruit Gavin Trearty.

And here you are on a parade, this all looks very smart

-and everybody's well...

-Well-drilled.

A well-drilled line there, isn't it?

And that's after ten weeks.

He was going out with Cheryl's best friend at Deepcut

and he says Cheryl seemed happy.

She was less than shoulder-high to me,

so always looking up, smiley, curly hair...

Nice eyes. You know, just... It's all there, just, yeah, lovely.

Cheryl had two boyfriends.

Some witnesses told the inquest she was upset about her private life.

Another described her commenting

about how easy it would be to shoot herself.

Gavin saw Cheryl the night before she died.

I can't put Cheryl's state of mind and suicide together, you know?

They didn't...

Still, to now, it doesn't make sense to me,

that somebody who could be that bubbly the day before,

to do that the day after never sat right.

I, along with probably everybody else, just assumed that

they'd investigated it and that's what they'd come to, yeah.

You know, at 17, you're not going to start saying,

"But have you looked at this and have you looked at that?"

Do you think anyone really wanted to know what you had to say?

Oh, no, no, definitely not. No.

Military and civilian officers admitted there were flaws

in the original investigation.

One retired Surrey police inspector told the inquest if he was

asked to investigate again, he'd do things differently.

After the fourth death, that of James Collinson in 2002,

the families of the dead recruits

and the media were demanding to know what was going on at the camp.

Surrey Police began reinvestigating the deaths and it wasn't

until then that they interviewed Gavin about what he remembered.

The impression I got was that it was just to gather information

to build a picture, but we were told

it was still a suicide investigation.

No-one was being accused of anything or there was no

suspicious circumstances. It was as was.

So this wasn't an open inquiry,

exploring other avenues, other leads?

No, no. It was a suicide before and it was a suicide afterwards,

spoken as well, we never got the feeling of anything different.

At the latest inquest, the Surrey Police legal team said the

reinvestigation had been thorough, professional and open-minded.

But for two decades,

Cheryl's parents have never stopped wondering and challenging.

By asking questions about what had happened to Cheryl,

they'd also found more.

A lot more.

Including allegations of serious physical and sexual abuse

against other recruits.

Some told police they had been bullied and even raped by those

whose duty it was to supervise them and turn them into soldiers.

Over the years, calls for a public enquiry

into what happened at Deepcut have been rejected.

This coroner decided Cheryl's inquest wasn't the place

to hear the wider allegations of abuse either.

But those who say they suffered won't be silenced.

I remember standing there taking that photograph.

God, I look dead young.

I wanted to spend my whole life,

it just seemed my whole life was the Army.

And I didn't want anything else.

Janette Lang passed through Deepcut a few months

before Cheryl arrived in 1995.

The Army was going through big changes at the time.

Women were beginning to train

and serve alongside men for the first time in its history.

I was very fit. I worked hard.

In fact, I worked probably harder than most of the lads

because I had something to prove.

At Deepcut, there weren't enough instructors to look after

the hundreds of young trainees.

Janette says some NCOs abused their power

to have sex with recruits, strictly against Army rules.

There was girls that were consenting

and then there was the ones that didn't consent.

And their life was hell.

The NCOs in question, they were all walking around

like Cock of the North.

Like, during the daytime, they'd look at the girls as if to say,

"I know what you did last night

"and I know what you're going to get again tonight," kind of thing.

The girls'd all be crapping themselves.

While I was at that camp, I knew of a woman who was raped.

This NCO had been harassing her for a while.

One night he went in...

..to the room.

And we were all out.

Forced himself on her.

It changed her as a person obviously.

And not long after that, then she got posted out.

She says the rape allegation was never officially reported

to the Army or police, because her friend was too scared.

I know of lots of women who were sexually

and physically assaulted.

Myself included, more physically.

Mentally abused.

She says many felt there was nowhere to turn for support.

If you want to put in an official complaint,

then you'll go through the chain of command.

And the chain of command started with the NCOs who were doing

all the trouble in the first place, so...

that is basically where it started and ended.

For years the MoD denied

there was a problem with the culture at Deepcut.

Cheryl James's parents were told, when she died,

there was no bullying or disciplinary issues at the barracks.

And Janette says, 20 years ago, her parents had no idea either.

If my dad knew then...

..had any idea what had gone on in that camp,

I tell you, he would have gone to jail.

And that's the truth.

Cos my dad never brought me up to put up with that.

They've got away with everything.

They did what they did with them young girls.

And they've carried on as normal.

They've soldiered on as normal.

Stories like Janette's only began to emerge from Deepcut

during the reinvestigation by Surrey Police in 2002.

They traced hundreds of recruits who'd passed through Deepcut

since the mid-1990s and what they were told was disturbing.

There were scores of allegations

about serious sexual and physical abuse,

the sheer skill of which wasn't made public

until four years later when Nicholas Blake QC carried out a review.

So, what had Surrey Police done about it?

Well, they wouldn't say then and they won't say now.

And despite our repeated requests, they refused to tell us

if any of those accused have been questioned or prosecuted.

I think it's absolutely imperative that we get

to the truth of what has happened.

Bridgend MP Madeline Moon sits on the House of Commons

Defence Select Committee.

And she's been challenging the MoD over bullying

and the way it treats recruits for years.

She says it's time the police and Army

gave the full facts about Deepcut.

If they carried out a service enquiry,

I'd understand why they wouldn't explain that.

Because that, in a sense, would have been the right thing to do.

If, instead...

..all of that evidence was put in a box and put on a shelf

and walked away from...

..then justice hasn't been done.

To anyone.

It was a Labour government that commissioned the Blake Review.

The dossier contains allegations from the mid-'90s to 2002.

Rape, indecent assault and violent attacks are listed.

One woman claimed she was gang raped.

The review found clear evidence of foul abuse

and a failure to identify potential risks to recruits.

But it couldn't force witnesses to give evidence.

It wasn't a public enquiry.

And that, to Des James and to other families,

makes it a flawed document.

Do you regret that when the opportunity arose that

that wasn't made into a full public enquiry?

With the benefit of hindsight, they should...

There should have been a more open and more transparent investigation

of what happened at Deepcut.

Des and Doreen wanted to know was Cheryl being bullied or

sexually harassed and could that have driven her to suicide?

One shocking new allegation for her parents to endure

was that this man, former troop sergeant Andrew Gavaghan,

had ordered Cheryl to have sex with a fellow soldier.

Both the men vehemently denied it at the inquest.

Their accuser, Mark Beards, a former recruit,

was described by Surrey Police as a liar and a fantasist.

Former Sgt Gavaghan told the inquest he didn't know Cheryl

and had never bullied her.

And there's no conclusive evidence

anyone sexually abused her at Deepcut.

The base is still the home of the Royal Logistics Corps,

although the base is no longer used for training.

Much might have changed here, but the brigadier

now in charge of Army's personal services department, John Donnelly,

came to the inquest to make a dramatic admission.

Brigadier Donnelly apologised to the Jameses

for past failures at Deepcut.

He admitted that there hadn't been enough staff

to look after young recruits,

and that some NCOs had exceeded their powers

by handing out guard duty as a form of punishment.

He also admitted that Cheryl should never have been told

to go on guard duty alone with a weapon.

It broke the rules, and the risks hadn't been known at the time.

For that, he said, he was sorry.

It was a big moment for Des, who's waited years for answers.

I accepted and I shook hands with Brigadier Donnelly,

because I do think that he's trying very, very hard

to make the changes that are needed.

But, you know, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that they knew

everything that they knew on the first day of the inquest.

To allow them to apologise...

They knew ten years earlier in Blake,

so why have we spent ten years of MoD denial?

That's the question there.

But at the inquest, Des came in for criticism.

John Beggs, barrister for Surrey Police,

suggested that in criticising its reinvestigation in 2002,

he'd distracted the Force during its hunt for the killer

of schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

That's a really shocking statement.

I can...

SHE SIGHS

I cannot believe that someone could be so insensitive.

You can only say, "And if it was your child?

"What would you want to do?

"Would you want to fight and fight and fight again for justice?

"Of course you would."

Totally inappropriate.

Des has been asking questions about how his daughter died

for longer than she was alive.

In the hills above their home, there's solitude but no peace.

I do find the having time to just clear your head a bit, that helps.

I became obsessive, I needed to read every statement,

I needed to hear every testimony.

I couldn't miss anything and I'm still like that.

You're not going to have another chance to understand it,

so you'd better do a good job and don't make any excuses for not doing it, so...

He and Doreen took the agonising decision

to have Cheryl's body exhumed

in search for any remaining forensic clues.

The exhumation was horrific. Um...

You know, there's no doubting that,

and if it had been the other way round, Cheryl would have

done this for me and that gives me great consolation, you know?

I think she'll forgive me anything

as long as we get to the bottom of this.

Bullet fragments from the same kind of weapon as Cheryl's

were recovered from her remains.

Original postmortem photographs were re-examined.

Experts for the police and MoD said soot marks around the bullet wound

proved the gun was fired at very close range.

The position of her body and the gun, they said,

pointed to suicide, but her parents' expert disagreed.

Forensic pathologist Dr Derek Pounder told the coroner

that in his opinion, Cheryl could have been killed by someone else.

And in his view, the black marks surrounding the bullet wound

had been caused by either bruising or dirt and not soot,

suggesting, he said, that the gun hadn't been fired at close range

and that someone else's finger could have been on the trigger.

Cheryl didn't leave a suicide note.

So what was her frame of mind the morning she died?

This is Paul Wilkinson.

He was Cheryl's new boyfriend.

He told the inquest they'd had sex the night before,

at a party on the base.

Another former soldier, Andrew Carter, was there, too.

There's the male accommodation at the back.

-Into the far left-hand side, at the back.

-Here?

This is the first time he's returned to Deepcut in 20 years.

It's a place he remembers he was desperate to leave.

There was no feeling of safety in the camp.

And within a few days of being here, my healthy mind

told me back then that I needed to get out of the camp

as quickly as possible.

Now living in Germany, he returned to tell the inquest how Cheryl

propositioned him while she was having sex with Paul Wilkinson.

He was quite agitated with her proposal.

-He was a little bit annoyed.

-What did he say?

I can't...

If he mumbled something under his breath or it was maybe

something like...

"What was that supposed to be?"

Maybe very few words, more body language, if anything.

-Did they stop having sex?

-Yes.

And what happens next?

And then Cheryl asked me directly then if I could

accompany her downstairs to check if there was any NCOs there,

doing the patrols, doing any...

Was Cheryl coming on to you?

Yes.

And Wilkinson knew that?

Yes.

The next morning, Cheryl was on guard duty

when Paul Wilkinson went to look for her.

He told the inquest they spent about 40 minutes talking.

They didn't argue and she was fine when he left her.

The coroner ordered that Paul Wilkinson should be

treated as a witness, not as a suspect.

And when he gave evidence, Mr Wilkinson said that he had some

difficulty remembering the detail of what had happened that morning,

because he'd since suffered a rugby injury that affected his memory.

For Cheryl's parents,

that means there are questions that remain unanswered.

My heart goes out to them both.

They've been robbed. They've lost their daughter.

They have lost the last 20 years where they should be

having maybe grandchildren and they've had to spend time

reflecting and fighting on a daily basis now, for 20 years.

It's unfathomable.

No-one from the army wanted to be interviewed for our programme.

But we were told Cheryl's death has had a profound effect

on the way it views its duty of care to recruits.

OFSTED now independently inspects its training sites,

which were recently rated "Good" or "Excellent".

Because of what happened at Deepcut,

an ombudsman service was established to investigate

the handling of complaints from forces personnel.

Change might have begun, but it's not quick enough, say Liberty.

In order to access the ombudsman,

you have to go through the entire internal service complaints system

and it is interminable and bureaucratic,

such that I would feel...

Sometimes I feel my best advice is

don't bother complaining, because I do not doubt that the ombudsman,

when she gets her hands on the complaint,

will be able to conduct a rigorous and independent and fair investigation.

The problem is, by the time it's got to that point, the person making

the complaint is so ground down by it that they may have given up.

The new services ombudsman declined to give us an interview,

but she said she recognises

there has been a lack of confidence in the system.

However, substantial reforms are underway,

although it'll need more time to judge whether her powers go

far enough and whether the changes are effective or not.

Cheryl's inquest has caused many to reflect on their time at Deepcut.

Jeanette Lange, who wanted to serve her country,

never completed training at the barracks.

She was thrown out of the army for assaulting an NCO.

I attacked him because he attacked me first.

He pinned me up against the wall.

And then I blacked out after that.

I did everything that I suppose I shouldn't have done, as a girl.

I should have just put up with it(!)

But I didn't.

And I ended up getting kicked out because of it.

It ended her career.

But what about the soldiers who stand accused of

so many wrongs by so many former recruits?

People need to be made accountable for what they put us through.

They absolutely have to, because...

That's... You can't go through life

doing that to people and getting away with it.

You just can't.

The army says it can't comment

about allegations from former recruits.

It says they should report them to the police,

if they haven't already done so.

But Surrey Police refused to comment on any of the issues we've raised.

Madeline Moon is asking the Defence Secretary to demand

answers from the army and police about the dossier.

This is a time and a place in which we can go back and look

and find out what happened.

Are there still lessons we need to learn here?

Are there still people who, for goodness' sake,

might even still be serving,

that we need to look at their behaviour?

Well, aside from the lessons, there might also be

-just the straightforward matter of crimes that were committed...

-They did.

..that people have never been held to account for.

Are you saying we should deal with that?

Yes, I am.

After such a long, hard battle for the truth,

Cheryl's parents haven't found all the answers.

But they don't regret the fight.

I'm sure Cheryl was smiling at us.

That's all that keeps you going.

It's what any parent does. If it's your child, you fight till the end.

I'm hoping now that this will have made a pathway for those parents.

They need to know that there's some help out there, you know,

that they will get justice eventually.

On Friday, Des will return to the inquest for the verdict.

I've every respect for the judge and I think...

I think it's possible for us to acknowledge that

we've gone as far as we could go, given what we have.

While he doesn't know whether anyone will be held to account

for Cheryl's death, he doesn't want it to have been in vain.

My greatest hope of all is that somewhere in the midst of this,

a legacy can be identified for Cheryl, you know?

That they can say...

you know, that was created, that was caused because of Cheryl James.

That would be good.