The Guardian — A chance was missed to stop one of the world’s most prolific paedophilic teachers when he was caught in the act of drugging a child more than a decade before he was finally exposed.
William Vahey, a US history teacher on the international schools circuit, went on to attack at least 100 more children at schools in London, Jakarta and Caracas after he was reported to the administration at Jakarta international school for feeding an Oreo cookie apparently laced with a drug to an adolescent boy.
The boy’s mother told the Guardian that she reported Vahey after her son returned from an overnight stay at the teacher’s house in Indonesia while she and her husband had been away. The boy told her that after Vahey had given him a cookie he discovered a crushed blue substance in his teeth and then lost consciousness.
She said she told senior administrators, including the headmaster, about the incident. But the school took no significant action and Vahey remained in charge of school trips, which he exploited during his career to drug boys with laced cookies before molesting them.
Senior teachers at JIS while Vahey was there from 1992 to 2002 have said they received reports that Vahey slept with boys in tents on hiking trips, which boys found “weird”, and took boys who had fallen ill to his room overnight on excursions.
In 2009 Niall Nelson, headmaster while Vahey was at JIS, gave him a reference for a job at Southbank international school in London. The reference said: “I know of nothing in Bill’s background that would make him unsuitable for working with children.”
Nelson said he had not been told about the cookie but had been told that the boy had woken feeling drowsy and with his clothes in disarray. He said the boy’s mother had not made a formal complaint and there was nothing to suggest anything untoward had happened. He also said he had not heard of any other suspicious incidents and he gave the reference in good faith. Click for more: www.theguardian.com
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