It took more than 40 years before Alison Ruby felt able to tell police about the man who had peeled off her school tights and stolen her childhood.
Ruby told detectives that, from the age of 12, an antique dealer named Richard Craig had regularly enticed her into his home during the school day to rape her in his bed.
When she walked into Aylesbury police station in 2019, she never imagined that court delays would mean she was forced to wait a further five years for a trial – or that Craig would not live long enough to make it into the dock.
Ruby had been introduced to Craig by his younger brother, Tony Craig, a sports car salesman who lived next door to a schoolfriend, Justine Clareboets, in the village of Stone, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.
Tony Craig groomed the girls from the age of nine and 10, luring them over his fence with exotic pets and money for the local shop. As time went on, he took them to his brother’s house in Aylesbury, where the brothers abused them while watching pornography.
“They made us feel like it was normal,” Ruby said, waiving her right to anonymity to speak out about the justice system. “Obviously we were groomed. The pair of them were very clever.”
On 1 November this year, Tony Craig, by then 74, was jailed for 21 years for the rape and sexual abuse of Ruby and her schoolfriend when they were children in the late 1970s and early 80s.
Richard Craig should have stood trial alongside his brother but he did not live long enough.
Sentencing Tony Craig, Judge Sheridan said he also faced culpability for introducing his victims to his brother. Though the brother himself never stood trial, the judge’s remarks made clear that the women’s testimony about Richard Craig had been believed.
Ruby said: “I used to skive off school, go around his [Richard Craig’s] house, and he’d lay me on his bed, take my tights and knickers off and have sex with me. And I’d just lay there.”
At first, justice seemed to move relatively quickly. Richard Craig was charged jointly with his brother in 2020 for a catalogue of sexual crimes.
But Ruby, 56, was unaware of the crisis unfolding in the courts as she waited for the brothers’ trial. The pandemic delayed the initial hearing and that was just the beginning. No courtroom was available for the first trial date in February 2022 and another set for November that year was cancelled because of the barristers’ strike.
As time dragged on, key witnesses started to disappear. An ex-husband who Ruby had disclosed the abuse to died and other traumatised witnesses melted away, no longer willing to take part.
In April last year, Ruby was in hospital helping a friend through cancer treatment when she got a call from a detective. Richard Craig had died of a heart attack.
“I was angry that he’d got away with it because the process had taken so long,” she said. “If they’d have done it sooner, he would have at least been punished for a little while. He got away scot-free.”
Richard Craig had denied the charges but the one consolation after he died was that his brother, who had first groomed and abused Ruby, and who was Justine Clareboets’s primary abuser, would still stand trial.
Then in September last year, weeks before his trial was due to start, Tony Craig made an application to the court. He claimed he now had dementia and was unfit to stand.
Days later, it emerged that no judge was available and the trial was delayed for another year. It looked like justice might never happen.
Ruby said: “You think, ‘Oh, my God, when is this ever going to end?’ It’s bad enough having to sit in a room and talk to a stranger for five hours on a video and tell them a lot of personal things, without having to wait to actually go to court and be delayed by not just a week or so, but by a year. That happened twice.”
In September this year, as the trial approached, she and Clareboets got a call to say it was being postponed for several more weeks.
Clareboets, who has also waived her right to anonymity, said: “It made me feel like it wasn’t worthy of being dealt with, that it was so unimportant, it could just drag on for this amount of time. It made me feel like I was, in a way, making a fuss, because no one was prepared to deal with it really effectively.
“Because they were on bail and they weren’t taking up prison space, it was deemed as less of a priority.”
When Ruby heard about the final delay, she very nearly pulled out altogether. “I said if this happens again, I’m not doing it. I’ve had enough now, because you prepare yourself as much as you can, and then for them to say: ‘no, it’s not happening’ – you’ve got to start all over again.”
Collette Parker, the investigating officer on the case at Thames Valley police, was horrified by the constant court setbacks and their impact on the women. “The delays were hideous,” she said. “I did feel it had huge repercussions for the victims who were trying to move on with their lives.”
Parker was the one breaking the news of all the delays and, after eight years specialising in child abuse investigations, the stress of supporting victims through relentless court setbacks pushed her to leave the unit and work elsewhere. “It all got too much,” she said.
Tony Craig’s attempt to claim in court that dementia made him unfit to stand trial was one of the hardest updates for Parker to convey. If he was found to be mentally unfit to plead then he would be unlikely to face a prison sentence, even if a jury found that he had committed the crimes.
Clareboets said: “I was really worried that I would have gone through it all, waited all of this time and everything, that it was just going to be cut off, and there’d have been no justice at all, really.”
While the court considered the medical evidence presented by Craig, he travelled to the Philippines. In a pre-trial hearing, he made detailed notes and passed them to his barrister.
The judge saw it for what it was, saying in his summing up that Craig’s argument that he was mentally impaired showed he was prepared to con – and that the jury had seen through this.
After a two-week trial in October, a jury at Aylesbury crown court returned a unanimous verdict, finding Craig guilty of 13 counts of rape and sexual abuse against Clareboets, Ruby and another victim.
Signs of their attacker’s paedophilia had long been hiding in plain sight. In 1995, he and his wife had advertised in the Times that they wanted to start a paradise island community where “children could roam free”.
A Channel 4 documentary was made about the scheme, following Craig and his wife and son as they went to Panama and tried to recruit families to put in £150,000 to buy a remote island with him.
Over a recruitment tea in a British garden, one of the mothers could be heard saying: “In a safe, caring community, I mean you know your child is going to be well looked after.”
The documentary ends with the discovery that Craig had recently stood trial, accused of sexually abusing a child. Though he was acquitted in that case, his paradise island plan collapsed.
When the documentary came out in 1996, Ruby and Clareboets remember being horrified. But it was not until Clareboets’s father was terminally ill in 2019 that she felt able to go to the police. Soon Ruby was speaking to officers too.
Clareboets, now 56, had been scared that her father would hear of it and get himself in trouble. “I think he would’ve probably murdered him or something like that,” she said. Her father’s mortality was also a reminder that her abuser would not live forever.
“He was a similar age to Mr Craig and I just thought he could possibly die and go unpunished. I always intended to do it, it’s just the time was never right.”
But once she reported him, she had no idea of the long wait that lay before her. “It’s just been such torture because it’s gone on so long and I’ve geared myself up for so many different trials, and we’ve almost got there and then to be deflated,” she said.
Five years later, the women have one of their attackers in prison, but they are still bearing the scars of the process. Ruby said: “Five years is a long time to take out of your life. It’s the thinking about it for all that time. It’s bad enough I’ve had it for the last 40-odd years without that adding to it.”
A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said the government inherited a system in crisis but is committed to delivering swifter justice.
For Clareboets, the waiting has only added to the damage done by Tony Craig. “I’ve had weeks, really, of building myself up, psyching myself up, getting my head space right, and then, to be let down every time. That’s been really difficult.
“And obviously talking about it time and time again, and the more I talk about it, the more things I would remember. And it’s just been everything: sleepless nights, anxiety, all sorts of things.”
Clareboets cannot help wondering what the last four years might have been like if the trial had happened within a year. “I could have had maybe four more years of my life as happier years,” she said. “Instead I feel like I’ve had four torturous years full of anxiety and uncertainty.”
