After a week of devastating revelations: Was this woman murdered to cover up Cyril Smith's sex ring?

• Carole Kasir ran a gay-friendly guesthouse in London during the 1970s and 1980s 

• VIP clients of the facility included Cyril Smith as well as MI5 officers and spy Anthony Blunt 

• Child welfare campaigners believed that children were abused in the guesthouse  

• Kasir kept logbooks and photographs of her VIP clients 

• Her body was found by several vials of insulin and an inquest determined suicide 

• But a new book claims that she may have been murdered to protect Cyril Smith

By Richard Pendlebury and Stephen Wright

Published: 01:27, 19 April 2014 | Updated: 02:00, 19 April 2014

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We found him living in a shabby block of flats of the kind you don’t imagine exists in the genteel Thames-side suburb of Teddington.

Noel Coward was born a couple of streets away, but the tattooed man in a grubby vest did not belong to the same world as the composer of Mad Dogs And Englishmen.

David Issett was the epitome of a washed-up pub bruiser. Under a wrinkled dome covered with crew-cut white hair, his eyes were both calculating and evasive. What the f*** did we want,  going around asking questions about him and his family, he asked? 

A new book on former Liberal MP Cyril Smith (pictured) asks whether Carole Kasir was murdered to cover up his paedophile past

What we wanted, in fact, was to hear what the unpleasant Issett could tell us about his former lover, a woman called Carole Kasir, and the notorious gay brothel which she once ran in nearby Barnes.

And the reason? Over the past week, the Mail has serialised Labour MP Simon Danczuk’s chilling new book about the late Liberal politician Sir Cyril Smith. The book revealed Smith’s genuinely horrifying, decades-long reign of terror and sexual abuse involving scores of young, vulnerable boys — as well as the Establishment cover-up that kept his crimes hidden, which included the police, politicians and even MI5.

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Carole Kasir (pictured) ran a gay-friendly guest house in the late 1970s and early 1980s where gay men could meet in safety and privacy

One of the revelations in the Danczuk book concerns Smith’s secret patronage of Elm Guest House. This was the business run in the late Seventies and early Eighties by David Issett’s friend Carole Kasir and her husband Haroon, in an elegant terrace property on Rock’s Lane, overlooking Barnes Common.

The guest house was advertised in the gay press of the time as a place where homosexual men could meet in safety and comfort to enjoy various facilities, including a sauna and solarium. One of the publications which reviewed it favourably was the newsletter of the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality.

The CGHE was campaigning for the lowering of the gay age of consent to 16. One of its chairmen was Ian Harvey, a junior Foreign Office minister who was forced to quit the government in 1958 after being caught having sex with a Coldstream guardsman in a London park. To men like him, Elm Guest House offered discretion.

But behind the guest house doors, commercial sex was also available, and there have been allegations that underage boys from at least one children’s home were made available there to paedophiles.

For several years, a list of alleged ‘VIP’ customers of the guest house has been circulated by child welfare campaigners. Among the names are a number of senior MPs, a high-ranking policeman, a leading tycoon, figures from the National Front and Sinn Fein, an official of the Royal Household, an MI5 officer, two pop stars and the traitorous Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

It is unlikely if we shall ever know for sure how many of these men even went near Rock’s Lane. But certainly one of those identified on the list was Sir Cyril Smith.

In his sparse living room, with the television blaring, David Issett also volunteered the politician’s name — as well as a claim which goes to the heart of another, potentially even more sinister, story of sex and Establishment cover-up.

‘Carole said she had a load of photographs of famous people doing stuff at the gay guest house,’ said Issett. ‘The name I remember is that of the fat man, Cyril Smith.

‘She said she kept them [the photos] in a strong box at the Royal Bank of Scotland branch in Richmond. She was once offered £20,000 for them, but she thought they were worth much more.’

Child welfare campaigners believe the guest house run by Ms Kasir had been used by paedophiles including the the late MP for Rochdale (pictured left)

What other public figures allegedly appeared in these photographs? We understand that detectives from Operation Fernbridge, which has been investigating allegations of child sex abuse, some of which are linked to Elm Guest House, ‘strongly believe’ that another politician — who subsequently rose to become a Cabinet minister — had abused an underage boy at Rock’s Lane.

His alleged victim, who is now an adult and lives abroad, initially indicated that he would give a statement to police, only to change his mind later.

Although the police obtained independent evidence of the specific abuse, it wasn’t enough to execute an arrest.

But what of the woman who appears to have been in possession of the darkest sexual secrets of so many powerful men? Carole Kasir cannot help us now, because she was found dead 24 years ago.

As we shall see, a number of people are convinced she was murdered for what she knew.

The activities at Elm Guest House came to a head in the spring of 1982 when, following a surveillance operation, police raided the property. The operation itself had an element of farce, as the Old Bailey later heard.

Two policemen were ‘undercover’ inside the guest house, one wearing a radio transmitter inside a fake plaster cast on his arm, which would be used to signal for the start of the raid. This was activated prematurely so that their colleagues only found seven customers instead of the dozens expected.

Cyril Smith was known to be one of the patrons of the Elm Guest House which overlooked Barnes Common

German-born Carole Kasir and her Indian husband Haroon were both arrested. A 17-year-old youth — then under the legal age of homosexual consent — who worked as a masseur on the site, was also detained but later released without charge.

He told Simon Danczuk that the 29st Cyril Smith was known at the guest house as ‘Tubby’, and had once got wedged fast in a bath. We understand that the former teenage masseur recently gave Operation Fernbridge police a statement in which he said he had ‘massaged’ Smith at least twice, worried that the massage table would collapse under his grotesque weight.

In May 1983, the Kasirs were convicted of keeping a disorderly house and having obscene videos, and were each fined and given suspended jail sentences. Interestingly, no charges relating to alleged paedophile offences were brought.

Some believe that the raid was launched to protect the powerful rather than the innocent boys who were allegedly abused at the house.

Chris Fay, a social worker who headed a child welfare charity, later claimed that the officers leading the raid were Special Branch — which worked alongside MI5 — rather than local officers.

‘Carole Kasir had logbooks, names, times, dates, even pictures of people who went in and out of Elm Guest House,’ he said. He has also claimed that she spoke to him about her stash of compromising VIP photographs.

Fay added that after the raid ‘[Carole Kasir] was held without charge for three days, and you don’t do that on a run-of the-mill vice raid. There was more to it than that.’

Whatever the truth behind the raid, it saw the end of the Elm Guest House. From then on, Carole Kasir’s life went downhill rapidly. Already a diabetic, she began drinking heavily, and that is how she came to meet David Issett, or so he claimed to us.

They met in a pub in Barnes one day as Carole sat at the bar. She told him he had ‘lovely eyes’ — one of the least credible claims in this story — and before long he had moved into her flat in nearby Carmichael Road.

She was estranged from her husband by then, said Issett, who says he was working at the time for a local man, a property owner known as ‘Patsy’ Puddles.

On Sunday morning, June 17, 1990, Carole Kasir, then 47, was found by a friend, in bed at the Carmichael Road flat. She was dead, with ‘numerous injections and phials of insulin’ lying about her. Two notes, addressed to Issett and indicating suicide, were discovered in the property.

A sad but predictable end to a squalid life, it seemed. But her  inquest that August was to  prove sensational.

Cyril Smith pictured with his mother Eva

A number of campaigners, including Chris Fay and a colleague of his called Mary Moss, were in attendance and brought up the allegations of organised child sex abuse at Elm Guest House.

Famous people were named by some of those campaigners attending the inquest — leading to stories in the Press linking an unidentified senior politician to a sex ring. It was also alleged during the hearing that before her death Kasir had been living in fear and felt she was being watched.

The local property owner ‘Patsy’ Puddles was identified at the inquest as one of those who had allegedly threatened her. His name had also appeared with Cyril Smith on the ‘VIP’ list of alleged customers at  Elm House.

The coroner decided that the ‘conspiracy allegations threw doubt on the accuracy of the suicide notes’, and adjourned the inquest for  further investigations.

Could Carole Kasir have been murdered?

In terms of the mechanics of her death, while an insulin overdose has been used as a means of suicide by diabetics (it causes a fatal drop in blood sugar), the administration of a lethal overdose by another person would be relatively easy in the case of an alcoholic diabetic in poor health such as Carole Kasir.

Certainly the coroner was concerned about the circumstances surrounding her death.

David Issett, who says he had split with Kasir some time before she died, admitted to us that he had been forced to attend as a witness when the inquest reconvened for a second hearing, ‘on pain of arrest’.

But neither he nor any others were able to throw any more light on the conspiracy allegations, and the coroner recorded a verdict of ‘suicide’, with the cause of death being an insulin overdose.

There the matter would have rested, but for tireless if not sometimes controversial campaigning by the likes of Chris Fay and Mary Moss.

Carole Kasir was believed to have held logbooks and compromising photographs of the VIP visitors to her guest house such as Cyril Smith (pictured)

The latter has said she believes Carole Kasir to have been murdered to shut her up about the famous people who visited Rock’s Lane. But then she also said she believed that Kasir knew nothing of the child sex abuse allegations that were connected to the guest house.

Who or what to believe? David Issett, who denied any wrongdoing, was interviewed twice last year by Operation Fernbridge officers and, he said, gave them a statement.

He told us: ‘They kept firing names of Carole’s friends at me to see if I knew them.’ He said his old boss ‘Patsy’ Puddles ‘might have known’ Carole, but vehemently denied Puddles would ever have been involved in child abuse. Puddles has been dead for a number of years.

Issett also rubbished the suggestion that Kasir said she was being watched in the time before she died. He said her eyesight was too poor for her to have noticed.

And yet when we visited the address where Kasir died, a former neighbour said that the police had, in fact, set up a secret surveillance post in one of the nearby flats, albeit some time before the death. The neighbour had understood it was because police believed Kasir was dealing drugs to children.

Police have searched for, but been unable to find, evidence of the existence of a stash of pictures of the rich and famous at Rock’s Lane.

It remains a ‘secret’ which Carole Kasir took to her grave, but one to which the Cyril Smith revelations have now lent a great deal more credibility.

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