UK UK - Andrew Gosden, 14, Doncaster, South Yorks, 14 Sep 2007 #2

[Observe_dont_Absorb]

In September 1995, 65 year old convicted paedophile James Stewart was working as a Big Issue seller in Leicester Square.

Stewart lured a 15 year old boy (who had run away from his home in Essex that morning) to his house in Kilburn Lane, where he plied the boy with beer and whiskey, and subjected him to a brutal sex attack.

This is the same MO Dennis Nilsen used with young boys in the 80s, and what I suspect happened to Andrew. I suspect the killer or killers would have been caught if CCTV hadn't been ignored by police and wiped.

We will never know the number of missing and dead from crimes like this. Most especially in any case when these young men and women (children, in fact) were known as 'runaways' or 'troubled' or in and out of care / foster homes and lost track of.

Also anyone coming to London from another city before the days of mobile phones and CCTV, unless they had a tight knit caring family and maintained plenty of phone calls and letters could just disappear. Many people used to love the anonymity of London - if you asked people what made them come they'd say to get away from small town mentality and to feel free and to be anonymous, finding their home towns and villages boring, repressive, suffocating. It bites both ways, anonymity.