Fellow conspiracy realist.
Our classic episode for this evening is not suitable for all audiences. The Princess Royal Barracks deep Cut, more often known as the Deep Cut Barracks, was once upon a time the headquarters of the British Army's Royal Logistic Corps, and on paper everything was tickety boom. However, as we saw back in twenty twenty, there's a much darker side to the tail.
So the big question that we're tackling here is could there have been foul play for these four people to have died? Or a foul play is in did someone else kill them? Or is a foul play in that they were led to that place where they perhaps took their own lives.
Let's jump right in and find out.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of Iheartrading.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben.
We are joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. It's obvious to everybody listening today, whether or not you have been in the military, whether or not you have a friend or a loved one in the armed forces, that life in any country's military can be brutal,
and depending on where you enlist. Training itself, just the training part, just when you're becoming a soldier, can be especially taxing. It stretches individuals to their mental and physical limits, and sometimes it pushes them beyond those limits, with catastrophic consequences to follow. Today's episode is probably best framed as an introduction to a story that many of us in the US especially may not know. The reason I'm stressing that this is an introduction is because there is so
much to this rabbit hole. This is a warren of rabbit holes. And what we're going to do in this episode is the same thing we do with every show. We're going to give you the facts, We're going to tell you where it gets crazy. But we do want you to know that there is much, much, much more information out there, and we talked a little bit about this off air. We consider this an ongoing case. We'll call it the Deep Cut four. Here are the facts.
This story takes place in London, just outside of London, actually about an hour and a half drive southwest of the City of London, which is a place we've talked about before on this show. The city of London exists within London or Greater London. That's a whole episode in itself, but specifically we're going to the Deep Cut Barracks. It's known as Princess Royal Barracks Deep Cut. It's near Camberley, Surrey in England, and before nineteen ninety three it was also known as Blackdown Barracks.
Yeah, in nineteen hundred the Royal Engineers started to build several camps around this facility. It had originally been used as a training ground up until the late eighteen hundreds, but it didn't really have any formalized infrastructure until nineteen hundred.
The barracks went through a number of different changes, but after the story that we're going to dive in today took place, they were scheduled to be torn down and today you can see these barracks as the home to the Royal Logistic Corps Museum, which is a wing of the British military and also the Royal Logistics Core banned, which is where they're based and rehearse, and the Defense Logistics School is also there, and then twenty five training support regiments.
Back in twenty thirteen, as you would alluded to earlier there, the UK government announced official plans to close down the operation and to open the land upon which the compound stands for future housing developments. As we record right now, the current estimates project the barracks will be completely decommissioned and become a thing of the past by twenty twenty one. That means, of course that anything that any way that the physical location could have assisted in the investigation will
be full stop gone by next year. What do we mean when we say investigation, So in Deep Cut Barracks between nineteen ninety five in two thousand and two, young trainees began dying under what we would we would like the most diplomatic way to put it is mysterious circumstances. They all died from gunshot wounds and they were all privates,
Jeff Gray, Eryl, James Sean Benton, and James Collinson. Their deaths were all ruled suicides by the military, despite strong and continuing objections from friends family members, some government officials, and numerous experts. We're talking, you know, well journalists as well, but we're also talking pathologists, ballistics experts, coroners and so on.
So as early as two thousand and two, there were calls for an inquiry, and then, you know, one of the big problems the military was investigating in itself, and there were later police investigations along with reviews of army training procedures.
And then two years later, in two thousand and four, the government announced that a review of the situation occurring at Deepcut concluded that the deaths of these four privates were probably again here we go, probably self inflicted. It's a review that you can read right now. It was conducted by Nicholas Blake QC. It's available online. It's really
in depth, very very in depth. One thing we found in researching this episode is that the numerous inquiries that have occurred since the time of these deaths are so filled with information it becomes a bit difficult to navigate them. But we assure you that it is worth your time.
This specific one, performed by Nicholas Blake QC, focused on the problems that were occurring within the system itself, the organization of the military, and you know, really just the situation at deep Cut itself with regards to supervision and what the you know, the trainees were doing, how they were looked after, and what they had access to.
And I want to add here I have spent a lot of time reading.
Some very you know, very.
Important but very dry reports, and British legal writing is a different language. I think we were talking off Aaron
I was saying, British legal writing warps your mind. But the way it would be written in a report like this would be something more like an in depth analysis of what may accurately be described as the overall linguistic approach to the articulation of concepts in the British legal system, conducted by ben Bull and PCVA stuff they don't want you, no sub committee to iHeartMedia finds that numerous individuals have
encountered circumstances both deleatorious and circuitous, and they're going forward cognitive function a circumstance the trace to that which could also be called British legal writing c NX see appendix for at.
All like this is this is written? I feel like this is written.
You know, I don't want to accuse people of trying to make it illegible for the average person, but it's I think they shot themselves in the foot if they were going for accuracy.
Well, I mean, we've read contracts, you know, and we we have legal documents that come across our inboxes for various work things, and they're written pretty pedantic, hard to understand language that seems a little pointed at times where it's obviously meant to be. That's why you got to hire a lawyer, because you gotta have someone in the club who can like decipher this for the lay person. This is entirely some next level of.
That I would I would categorize that writing as maximum formality.
Yeah, And speaking of maximum formality, I have to say, like, for part of the research that I did into this topic, I watched this great BBC Panorama documentary. They've done covered a lot of interesting stuff over the years, like they did one on scientology that I quite enjoyed, and it's just a great series. It's been around for a long time.
But you know, we're talking about one particular barracks. We're also talking about the idea of systematic abuse, which is obviously very poignant right now with the stuff we're going through in our history as a country and as a human race. But we're not necessarily trying to damn the entire British military here. We are looking at a specific case, and the British military will deny that these things are systematic and that they do try to root out any
quote unquote bad actors in the system. But you know, for anyone who has served in the military, I know it can feel when people who have not served in the military are criticizing these structures that it can feel a little bit like, you know, how we're or you get off or something. But I feel like there are the researches here, the data is here, maybe not enough to apply it to the whole system, but it sure makes you think. And I think now's a great time to talk about these these deaths.
So let's jump back to that two thousand and four review conducted by Nicholas Blake QC. Within it, there are a lot of recommendations about what could be done better, perhaps, but again it's focused squarely on the system itself and the way the military is organized. If you look deeply into it, it shows that these four deaths which again
the report characterizes as self inflicted or suicide. It does say that many have occurred due to a number of dangerous contributing factors at specifically Deep Cut barracks.
Yeah, there are things like you'll see these observations, and then you'll also see if you if you fast forward to you know, page three hundred and forty or so, you'll see things. You'll see recommendations for how these could be fixed. The problems, according to the QC's report, QC stands for Queen's Counsel.
Think of it like a super lawyer.
The problems are things like lack of control over access to firearms in the barracks. They were very loose with that, poor supervision which I think we have specifics on later in the show, poor accommodation, lack of discipline and prevalent like Lord of the Fly style bullying, unofficial punishments, sexual harassment and abuse, running rampant, no real complaint mechanism, which is something we see in a lot of organizations, honestly,
and low quality instructors. The review, as you might imagine, did not satisfy the parents and loved ones of these four dead trainees. So the police conducted for other inquiries, for subsequent investigations. These have never been made public there somewhere, unless the evidence was destroyed, which is a possibility, but they've never been made public. And these parents believe their
children did not die from suicide. They believe their children were murdered and that the UK government was and is actively covering it up. So why do they think that we'll tell you after we're from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy.
We mentioned the names here, but let's explore the specific details of these deaths, and also these are the four known deaths. That doesn't mean there aren't more.
So first we have Jeff Gray, who's from London, seventeen years old. He was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head on September seventeenth, two thousand and one. It was officially internally ruled like within the military organization, ruled a suicide. Was on guard duty. And this is the thing. We talked about this a little bit off air, and Matt was kind of telling Paul about the story.
This was a very common kind of well, I'm gonna call it like a chore or like a duty, like a thing that everyone was expected to do and take turns. They were guarding in these wooded areas, the outskirts of the barracks all night long, very sleep deprived, and something that everyone was expected to do. He was on guard duty.
He had left his group to perform a maneuver they call prowler patrol, where you go on your own around the outskirts of the you know, just basically like, yeah, it's the kind of thing you see in like war movies, where someone you know, standing post and then every so often they go and walk around and make their rounds to make sure no one's lurking in the bushes or anything. So he did that. Anecdotal evidence that we've found suggests that someone else, it's entirely likely, in fact probable, that
someone else fired the shots that ended Jeff's life. There are four witnesses that have testified to seeing a figure running from the place where Private Gray's body was found. We've also found evidence in the research that suggests that someone moved his body.
Yeah, and we're going to talk more specifics about this stuff as we go on. For now, we're just going to tell you the basic details of these individuals. Another young soldier who died was named James Collinson. He was from Perth. He was also seventeen, like Jeff. He died on March twenty third, two thousand and two, from a single gunshot wound to his head while he was on guard duty. His body was found near a perimeter fence
there at the facility. And it just should be noted here that several of the areas of Deep Cup barracks have these very large perimeter fences where the guard duty essentially was performed near these fences.
Then there's the third case. We're jumping around a little bit in time here, but the third case is Cheryl James. She's eighteen, she was from Land Gulf Lne in Wales, and she was found dead from a single gunshot wound to the head on November twenty seventh, nineteen ninety five. Like those other two cases we've mentioned, she was on guard duty. Her body was found in the woods nearby her abandoned post.
Yeah, and Cheryl allegedly was the target of widespread sexual harassment by commanding officers, which is a culture that we've seen many many accounts of being kind of pervasive within Deep Cut, whether just in passing or potentially as a tool of control. There are various accounts of this. People deny these allegations, but I just I think it's important to mention that there's a lot of discussion about these things being very real by folks who have passed through this facility over the years.
And you know, I would also say, each one of these individuals is their own person. They were the own protagonist in their story. As we mentioned on this show a lot, and in some of these inquiries, the deep background on these folks it you know, there are complications in every person's life and that's you know, one of the major things that was looked at in these inquiries. So we again I am stressing, we are just giving you the absolute top down view at this moment on these people.
Yeah. Yeah.
The last of the deep cut four, by which we mean the acknowledged deaths in this ongoing investigation, was Sean Benton. Sean was twenty years old.
He was a local.
He's from Hastings, East Sussex. Benton died from five gunshot wounds to the chest after he was also on a guard duty assignment. After he was also on patrol of the perimeter. And he was, like some of the other cases on an unauthorized solo patrol. This occurred on June ninth,
nineteen ninety five. As we mentioned, military, the military internal investigation quickly and in their mind definitively said that all four had shot themselves with their own rifles while on guard duty, although the coroner at the time recorded a verdict of suicide in only one case.
Yeah, and just just a real quick add a detail to Sean, he is I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, guys, But the only one where we actually have a detailed suicide note that he left behind. There's an article that it's on the Daily Mail. It's you know, I know is a little bit of a kind of take it with a grain of salt at times, but this is a document that they published that they got a hold of.
It was this note where he claimed that he was being discharged from the army and that he couldn't cope with returning to civy street life, that all he ever wanted was a career in the army. And we'll come back to this, and there's definitely this is, in my opinion, by far, one of the more unusual cases of the of the four here. But Sean was characterized having had some history of psychological problems and potentially a history of depression. But we'll revisit that.
A little bit.
And yet he ended up with five gunshot wounds to the.
Chest, right.
But also we do have we do have what is being referred to as a suicide note from him, but there's some problems with that too.
Yeah, and each of these, each of these cases quickly becomes, I think, its own separate, distinct morass of conflicting information. Perhaps the one thing they have in common is an active cover up. But it's not our jump to it's not our job to tell you that. We just want to give you the facts of the matter. While while these events occurred decades ago, right, the multiple reports all indicate that, regardless of how these young privates died, Deep Cut itself was in the midst of a desperate and
quiet crisis. We have investigative journalists like Brian Cathcart who have found that the institution routinely exposed trainees to bullying, sex, and flagrant like ridiculous disregard for rules relating to firearms, like even more lackadaisical than a bunch of buddies who just get shotguns and go drinking beer and shooting at cans with their friends.
It was bad.
Additionally, the Ministry of Defense or MODS will refer to a moving Ford, has been accused of withholding, possibly even destroying evidence related to this case. We've got Jim Collinson, forty years old, the father of James, compared getting information you know, I mean, think about it like your child has died under mysterious circumstances. They're not you know, you know your child. You don't understand how could they do this?
Suicide is such a difficult thing in that way, and to not get any answers would just prolong that morning period. And you know, you expect that if the Ministry has nothing to hide, they would be forthcoming with information about the case. But apparently it was just not to be. Jim Collinson, again, the father of James, said getting information from the MOD was like getting blood from a stone.
There's a quote from him saying the MOD wouldn't come forward and explain what happened to our son that night. Then three days after his funeral, I phoned up a senior official at Deep Cut and asked him how the investigation was going. He replied, one body one gun. Draw your own conclusion. Yikes. I mean, come on, just let's have a little bit of bedside manner at the very least. And that seemed to have been their attitude overall. James was just just a number. This case closed. You know,
it's the same with the police. When they close a case or close a murder, they don't want to think about it ever again, they have moved on. There's no empathy, there's no room for empathy in these organizations. Sometimes it seems to be not to say that's the case for every officer, but it seems in general, this whole idea of emotionlessness is a big part of the military and these kinds of organizations. We've got another account for me.
I would just say that if a police officer dies, the investigation into that death, I would say, is far more rigorous than the death of a citizen would be, just because of the resources, internal resources that would be going into finding out what happened to a fellow officer.
And I think maybe what you're signaling here is that it feels as though if a member of the military, any military is killed or dead for any reason outside of wartime, outside of active engagement, then it feels as though the most the most strenuous things should be done, the most intense steps should be taken to find out exactly what happened. And maybe it seems as though we are not seeing that and did not see that.
The banality of evil rights most you know, So with institutions of this size, fiction often gets it wrong. It's not, as it is so rarely the case that there is some sort of antagonistic super villain who thinks I am the bad guy and I am doing evil things. A lot of times, it's just a person with a very narrowly defined scope of responsibility. And these investigations can become normalized. I say it all the time on this show. It
is disturbing how quickly things become normal. So, if you were investigating certain circumstances of horrible things like deaths day in day out, then what becomes the worst event in someone's entire life for other people becomes a Tuesday, you know, And that's not right, but it's what happens. There's desensitization. The parents have been vocal about this for decades. Des James is the father of Cheryl. James, said he brought up like the QC. He brought up the ongoing problems
with the system we're describing. He actually said, we believe the central issue is not how Cheryl died, but why her death was not thoroughly investigated at the time. I'm to your point, Matt. He said, any meaningful investigation into our daughter's death in nineteen ninety five was denied. The Army assumed or death was a suicide, and he says there's clear evidence to support that fact. Army documents that we have in our possession refer to our tragic suicide
once and that's the Army's quote. There tragic suicide on December fourteenth, nineteen ninety five, and that's one week before the coroner's court even convened an inquest, meaning the Army, before like an autopsy or a coroner's investigation occurred. The Army went ahead and just said it was self inflicted.
Yeah, and you know, I mean again, with suicide, there's so many it's obviously really triggering subject from many people. There's a lot that happens when something is ruled a suicide. So you know, for example, if someone has an insurance policy on themselves and they are they ca take their own lives, that's insurance policy doesn't pay out. Not to say there any of that's going into these decisions, but I'm just saying is it's a big deal to rule
something a suicide. It means something. So to just flippantly do that and just say case closed, it just it feels very irresponsible, and it feels like they're just looking out for the optics of it and trying to absolve themselves of any wrongdoing as quickly as possible.
Yeah, you know, there's some stuff I found about Jeff Gray that I took personally, to be honest with you, and his parents were more explicit. But we kept finding
more to this story. Every string we pulled, every puzzle piece we interlocked, led to another puzzle piece, another string of what appears to be a tremendously occulted web of ongoing problems here, because, as James also said that he had on record, there were no less than five other attempted suicides at Deep Cut and they just weren't externally reported. And then you mentioned earlier the panorama, the panorama video from BBC that appears to confirm some of this.
Right.
Yeah, they found a document that lists several additional suicide attempts, unsuccessful suicide attempts. I guess that's what an attempt is, uh, And it catalogs all of the various methods that were used by these cadets, including overdosing on acetam menafin or paracetamol. Isn't that that's what they call It's the same thing, right, so they call it in the UK, and also slitting
their own wrists. But in this document, there's no there's nothing that mentions any of the bullying, which I guess maybe wouldn't be the appropriate document for that to be listed. But it just there feels like there's a disconnect here. This doesn't feel like something that is normal or should be accepted.
Agreed, And we're going to get more into the bullying as we continue on here what that means and what it looks like today even or in the recent past. Let's move on to Jeff Gray. His parents, as you said, Ben, have been extremely explicit in their statements about their son's death. I have a quote here. We are of the opinion that there is a cover up surrounding Jeff's death, and
one of the major reasons for that. There are a lot of major reasons for that, But I guess one of the most surface puzzling things is something we already talked about. That Jeff was shot twice in the head. Proved it when the inquest was done into his death.
There is evidence suggesting that Jeff's body was moved after he was killed, and as we noted before earlier in this episode, that there were footsteps heard running away from the fence in the area where Jeff's body was found, that some intruders, some outside people were there that night, at least one they it seems like they may have waited over an hour to place Jeff's body in the area where it was originally found after he was killed elsewhere.
And to put it, to put it plainly, the specific quote from the parents of Jeff Gray and their statement is is this, we feel that the army has tried to make us believe some fairy tale where Jeff shot himself twice, hid for an hour, climbed over a fence a couple of times, then laid down and died. And hearing it presented that way, hearing it presented that way
cuts close because that you know, that's what happened. That appears to be the bare bone circumstances of the sequence of events that occurred from the time he was alive to the time he was found dead. Now it's I know a lot of us in the crowd are especially longtime listeners. When you've heard us discuss allegations of homicide framed a suicide, you already know this and we should
acknowledge it. People can and have, and sadly, in the future probably still will commit suicide via firearm and be able to shoot themselves under some circumstances more than once in the head or chest, but.
It is rare, to say the least.
We're going to examine more of this. We've alluded to a couple of things we're diving into here. After a word from our sponsors.
Give her back, we're going to talk a little bit about another inquest that was performed much later. It was released June third, twenty sixteen. It was performed by Brian Barker CB again Queen's Counsel. One was a specific inquest into the death of Eryl James, and we want to talk about some of the underlying conditions that were happening there at deep cut conditions that perhaps set up some of the younger people there, because again we're talking about
teenagers in a lot of this. To young adults, we're just gonna speak about the environment in which they were existing. So within this report, it was noted that in the field army, the usual ratio of corporals to soldiers or you know, just higher commanding officers to the to like privates and to lower ranking soldiers would generally be around one to eight to one to twelve. So one commander, twelve officers under that commander, one commander, eight officers under
that commander. And sometimes they call this when when a unit is holding or when it's a holding unit, so like a unit that's just kind of on standby. Essentially, it would be one commanding officer to twenty and generally maximum one to thirty would be appropriate. However, at deep cut, the ratio of a commanding officer to these lower ranking officers was rarely less than one to eighty and on
occasions up to two hundred. So imagine that in a teacher student ratio, I think a good way to look at it.
Imagine it's.
You can imagine those other ratios like one teacher to eight to twelve students. I mean that would be amazing. That would be very closely learning, having a lot of one on one interaction. One to twenty and thirty is probably about what you would see in a public school here in the United States, but one to eighty or two hundred is I just don't know how there's any real oversight there.
And also like how they's justification for that, you know. It's like, sure, you could say, well, I really like your analogy about schools, because I do think this is instruction, you know, I mean, it's not like arts and crafts, but it absolutely is. It requires instruction and training and the ability to have a little bit of one on
one time to some degree with individuals. And I know a lot of army exercises and drills happen on mass so maybe that doesn't apply, but it still just seems egregiously out of proportion, especially when you consider the access to firearms that you're talking about, and like, you know, the lack of oversight in that department.
You know, well, Dan just didn't even know what's going on at the barracks at any given time.
Mm hmm.
And this is so this is a crucial point because we're a lot of what we're talking about is how these were initially reported, and reports themselves. Investigations inherently require oversight and supervision, and that just wasn't occurring at the level it should have been occurring at these barracks. And it was not an isolated incident. It was not a one off bad Saturday when two people called out sick or something. This was ongoing, and it was ongoing for decades.
The environment there has been described by multiple accounts people who went through the training as dreadful, as brutal, as cruel, as horrific. I mentioned earlier that the banality of evil here, which holds true, always tells us that very few people think of themselves as an antagonist.
Right.
Everybody's their own main character. Everybody's the hero of the story. Why doesn't the rest of the world only love me? I couldn't do anything wrong. I have my reasons. But if there is a single human face we could put on this story as what most people would see as an antagonistic force, it would be one Sergeant Andrew Gavigan.
Yeah, Gavagan comes up time and time again. He was he testified in front of one of these inquests that took place a little bit later, but he is someone whose name constantly comes up among people that have passed through this facility, and not in a positive way at all. In fact, Eryl James's father in that Panorama documentary spoke of him in terms of boy, would I like to be alone in a room with this guy? I would
do what any father would do. And the reason is there are a lot of widespread allegations that not only was Gavagan kind of the ring master of a lot of these systematized bullying tactics to dehumanize, allegedly dehumanize and humiliate, kind of the idea of breaking down, you know, a a cadet and making them up stronger by breaking them or whatever, which you know, as we know, it doesn't always work like that. He is also accused of some
sexual misconduct with Cheryl. The allegation was that he invited her to these barracks or not invited if your commanding officer, he ordered her to these barracks in the undercover of night and then allegedly made some sexual advances. He has denied this multiple times, as he has characterized some of these bullying techniques as having been done quote in humor, So do with that what you will. Ben, You're the one who pointed that line out to me, and I was shocked.
Yeah, in twenty eighteen, he denied the deep cut abuse. We're jumping around in time here, but I think this I want to emphasize just how recent this ongoing investigation is. He says some disturbing stuff in the same quest. One of the things he says that the local news in the UK latched onto is he did something that a lot of abusers do, which is gaslighting, right, And this happens anywhere. It's not just something that happens in romantic relationships.
It happens at your job, it happens in your family, it happens all the time.
The predators are out there.
What he did, We're gonna tried and true tactic of abusers or people who have abusive tendencies is he simultaneously admitted that he was abusive, there was doing abusive things, while also diminishing and minimizing the valid claims of his victims, similar to like gaslighting.
In a way.
During this inquest, which is a legal affair, he said that he would refer to his outburst of temper by saying that was my twin brother. That was his joke about it. It wasn't me, it was by twin He told the people in the hearing at this inquest that it was all a good humor. The twin brother happened very rarely and it was controlled.
But that's the thing that Ben, That's what shocked me and blew me away that he was so brazen about this in front of an official inquiry, because it just confirms what the what these reports are about him by many of these folks again who have passed through the
deep cut barracks, this idea of his twin brother. He was characterized by many of the folks that I saw in the panoramic piece, who you know, knew him well as being a split personality, as having this this true Jekyll and Hyde kind of quality where he would just change on a dime into this other person.
Uh.
And the fact that he brought that up himself, I think is very very telling and very interesting as to the sense of like untouchability now being in a position of power like that, and how he felt.
I just want to point out here that sergeant I don't know how to pronounce a big Gavagan feels Remember that Sergeant Gavigan was a private at one time. Remember that he probably went through something very very similar I'm imagining.
I'm not trying to humanize him, absolutely not, But what I'm saying is he went through a system that probably did exactly what he is trying or was trying to do to the privates that he was then in charge of, And to me, it feels like a system that would just continue, as we've seen in other systematic abuse situations, where it becomes a line of people doing what they know and what they've been trained essentially to do.
I think that's a really good point, Matt. I was hoping, if you guys don't mind, can we talk a little bit about some of the allegations of some of the scenarios of systematic abuse and bullying. So I think we've sort of we've obviously hit on the fact that that these allegations took place, but I don't know that we've really gone into any specifics outside of some of the sexual harassment.
For anyone listening, especially if you are a survivor of abuse or if you were having to deal with people like this in your day to day life in any level, we do want to give a disclaimer. We are going to be discussing some explicit things, so please be forewarned.
Yeah, there are multiple.
Very specific allegations of violence of sexual abuse. Bullying really is a misnomer here. I think abuse is a much more accurate term.
Yeah. Some of them include things like hanging cadets out of windows by their ankles. There's an account that because of an infraction of some degree, whether not keeping your locker need or perhaps I think it was talking down or talking back to a commanding officer, that a cadet
was thrown out of a third story window. There was an account of a trench being dug and not being dug deep enough, and the cadet being asked to lay down in it, and then being dog piled on by commanding officers, one of which who stood on his back jumped on full force with two feet. And finally an account of a male cadet being staked down the article
in the sun firstus being pegged down. I guess that just means tied down, you know, prone on a field with legs spread, and then a land rover military vehicle being driven very quickly towards him between you know, with the tires driving between his leg coming dangerously close to you know, hitting him in the genital area.
So there's obviously some some pretty heinous things going on there. There were heinous things going on there at the Deep Cut barracks. And who's to say, you know, where these kinds of things are occurring in other places around the world where military training is being was taking place, or just in other places where there are young people learning. You know, we've seen allegations of all kinds of that type of abuse in colleges, in fraternities across the world.
It's rough stuff. It's really rough stuff, and it has deep psychological effects on the people who are experiencing it on both sides. Actually, so maybe this is a good time to tell people what has happened since since all of these events have occurred.
Yeah.
Yeah, we've laid out a number of the continuing claims here. The military was investigating itself. It was criticized, and rightly, I mean, how could it be impartial? The Ministry of Defense at the very least denied valuable information when it was most needed. And having waded through so much stuff on this case, I have to say it's pretty offensive to find that infamous lack of accountability phrase kept popping up, you know, the one mistakes were made. Note the beautiful,
insidious structure of the passive voice there. Someone made a mistake, says this kind of language, but not anyone specifically, and definitely not me the person writing it. Don't make me responsible for the consequences of my actions. Look, there's another important thing I want to hit. So there's a ballistic expert named Ken Swan.
He's independent.
He was working on behalf of surviving family members, and he is one of the reasons that the police have yet to release their four subsequent investigations, because he wrote to them and said, look, opinions, emotions aside, I did the math. This is my area of expertise. It is highly unlikely that any of these four people committed suicide. There's an interview with the Telegraph where he walks through
his efforts. He physically went to deep Cut barracks, went to every position where these four people encountered these fatal gunshots and attempted to reconstruct the wound patterns. What he found, if it is true, is damning.
He said, we have used some of the best shots in the British Army in my tests, but none has been able to recreate the same pattern at the distances these suicides were supposed to have taken place. In case of Sean Benton, the wounding pattern can only be achieved when firing at a range of fifteen feet. That does not point to suicide.
And he styles on them just a bit in a quote I really appreciated. He says, there is always the possibility that I may be wrong, but I will believe that when someone can forensically prove that I am wrong. Otherwise I will stand by my findings. If that's not enough, there's another revelation. A female private who served at Deep Cut admitted to police in one of their investigations that.
She ordered a colleague to shoot.
At one of the four soldiers who are still alleged to have committed suicide. She said that she told her colleague to fire at Private Sean Benton because she thought he had fired at her. That speaks to how lax the firearm regulation was in general there, I believe.
In her her.
Account to the detectives, she says, yeah, I told him, I told you a colleague mind of fire at Benton, but I wanted him to hit the legs. Benton, of course is the one who got shot five times in the chest. And it's bigger. This is one of the other important points that we found. This is bigger than
Deep Cut. There are multiple reports of suspicious deaths in the UK military, non combat deaths right, so they're not in the field, they're not in a armed conflict with an enemy force, and multiple parents and loved ones who disagree with the official findings. And just like the parents of the Deep Cut for these relatives are demanding answers, but they are often left unsatisfied with the results of
these investigations. We found two other deaths that are indirectly linked to Deep Cut, not saying this is all like some kind of Pepe Sylvia situation, but these deaths weren't considered part of the Deep Cut four because they didn't occur on the premises.
Yes. Private David Shipley, twenty years old from Barrow in Furnace found unconscious and faced down in an assault course pool in Germany on August seventeenth, two thousand and two, just days after he left from Deep Cut. Private Alison Croft, twenty two from Bradford was found hanged at Dalton Barracks in Abington, Oxfordshire, in October of two thousand and two, and although Croft had no official connection with deep Cut,
officers from the two barracks often socialized together. Not to overstate the case as that being some kind of connection or implying this some kind of suicide pact or something. It's just interesting and there's clearly more to the story than the official investigations have revealed that I think we can say with some degree of certainty.
Yeah, there are also other deaths within the military that should be looked at that aren't necessarily bullying, but perhaps would be considered extreme tactics of punishment that are doled
out sometimes in these areas, these barracks, these facilities. There's one that you can look to if you'd like, a private named Gavin Williams who died after experiencing what is called beasting b East i NG where essentially, as punishment you are made to exercise beyond the extent of what any soldier would normally do or any trainee would normally do. And he died as a result of this.
And we have to remember the point I don't think we hit here that I know all of our fellow listeners are thinking about during this exploration today. These are kids, these are these are teenagers, you know, they're They're put in an environment like you mentioned, Matt, that has a lot in common uh, hormonally and socially with things like fraternities or college days. So there's partying right and and partying alone. And like everybody who's ever been that age.
Uh, I ask you.
You don't have to tell us about it, but I ask you to think back to all the dumb stuff you did as a kid.
Uh.
And does that mean does that mean that you should have died?
It doesn't.
And and I think you know, to that point about diving into the full extent of these people's personal lives, I think sometimes investigation no, you know what, why couch it? I know sometimes that investigations can can use that that information as a kind of posthumous victim blaming, which is.
Reprehensible.
I mean that it's unclean, but it happens in multiple cases far beyond the deep cut four. I'm interested in hearing you guys ideas on this. I mean, do you think the UK and the US. I don't want to be unfair. The UK has a huge problem with their reports. We were talking about this a little bit off air.
They have a habit of, like reports on child abuse rings, have a series of inquests and very formal, official sounding language that lead nowhere, and the reports disappear and the evidence is gone, and they hope that the news cycle moves on. Do you guys think that there will be revelations on this Deep Cut four case or do you think it's going to be, you know, like Operation U Tree or something just consigned to history.
I don't know.
Well, if you think about the case of Cheryl, she died in ninety five and there was still stuff coming out in twenty sixteen, But there are these kinds of inquests that you're describing, where it's a deep background look at what was happening in her life up into the point when she allegedly committed suicide, looking at every minute detail of her personal life, the terrible things that had happened to her, the consequences of those things, how she
dealt with them, how other people and her family dealt with them, her personal relationships. To your point about you know, essentially using that information to victim blame, which I would say it absolutely has been seen to function in that way in the past. I just wonder how you guys would try and prove that someone committed suicide or not without looking at their past of you know, possibly self harm,
of suffering from depression, of their personal interpersonal relationships. I don't know how you would, at least after the fact, especially years after the fact, how you would be able to prove one way or.
The other if it was suicide if you didn't do that. Did we discuss Ben what you had mentioned off air about the five gunshot, wounds to the chest, the justification for that. That's the one that blew me away, and we said we were gonna come back to Sean and his suicide note and some of the weirdness surrounding that scenario. But wasn't it determined that it was an automatic blast or something like that, that the gun was an automatic mode and so it shot a spray of bullets at him.
Yeah, that's correct.
That was the official conclusion of one of the internal inquests or internal investigations.
Yeah. It's interesting because that story too, goes through a couple of different iterations when you read about it, where there's one version that says that he fired shots at another officer, and then that he was talked down, He was attempted to be talked down from, like, you know, taking his own life, and then he did it in view of another officer. And it's a little like you said, Ben, reading these documents can be very a little tricky. So I'm not quite sure if I was, if I'm interpreting
this correctly, but that that's what I saw. I don't know if you guys have had any other research materials about that case.
Well, the only thing I would bring up here would be potential motive for covering up a homicide within an army facility like that, And I think just it's worth a quick discussion here. Think about the pr blowback that would happen if soldiers under your care. As a commanding officer, you've got let's say eighty of these lower ranking soldiers under your care, you find out that there was a firefight between a couple of your students essentially they're basically students.
There's a physical firefight between your students and one of them died being shot five times. Would you, you know, report that officially, as in the students that I was meant to be looking after shot at each other and one of them killed another one, or would you try to make it look like a suicide. I'm not saying that that's definitely what happened. I'm not saying that that
is what would happen. I'm just saying that is a I would say, a possible motivation to want to make something like that look like a suicide and officially become a suicide.
Yeah. And you know, another interesting thing about his case is that there was a suicide note that was found, but there are some inconsistencies with that, and according to the note, this is what the note said to Sergeant gave again again that the kind of villainous figure that we've talked about. I'm sorry for what I'm doing, but I just can't accept being discharged. I'm too embarrassed to go home, and I don't want to be on Civvy Street, and I don't want to have a factory job. I
just wanted a career in the army. I know it's my fault for things I've done wrong. Only if I got a week's leave when I applied for things I could have been it could have been different. I could have calmed down instead of building problems up and then getting drunk and bursting into flames.
It's terrible to read.
So here we are and now now we're we pass this to you, fellow conspiracy realist. What do you think are these tragedies?
Yes? Absolutely? What is there a cover up of foot uh?
Do you, like the parents of these of these victims believe that to be the case? Or do you think it's you know, it's just a matter of tragedy and perhaps well intentioned incompetence on the part of some investigators, who are you know, of course themselves human and therefore fallible. Or are these deaths the result of enormous stress leading to suicidal acts? Or are some of these deaths homicide? If so, are these homicides in some way linked? And
perhaps most importantly, what happens next? It's twenty twenty and none of these have been solved to universal satisfaction. We would love to hear your thoughts. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on the other one Instagram.
Sorry, guys, yes, we're conspiracy stuff on most of those conspiracy stuff show on Instagram. Just mentioning here. As we said at the top of the show, there is a ton more that you can dig into with each one of these people's deaths, and we recommend you do that. If you feel so inclined, and if you find something that you feel needs to be brought to our attention and the rest of us listening, please send it our way.
One last important note here, it's something we endeavor to include at the end of any episode dealing with this content. Suicide is real. It is a real and serious thing. If you or a loved one are currently quarreling with or combating suicidal ideation, you are not alone. You are worth it. There are resources out there specifically for you. We like to recommend the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. It is available twenty four hours a day. Here is the
number one eight hundred two seven three eight two five five. Again, that's one eight hundred two seven three eight two five five.
Thanks Ben. I think that's that's a really important resource to have. If anyone out there knows anybody that's going through any of this stuff, I would also just say it's just be a be a resource yourself, if you know.
I mean, it's not always apparent, but if you see morning signs, especially with someone that's very close to you, just check on people and make sure they're doing okay, and just just try your best to be supportive and understanding, because sometimes people are suffering in silence and then they don't want anybody to know. But I think it's more meaningful than one might realize, you know, when someone sees you and really tries to connect in that way.
Yeah, the last thing I would put here is you can also go to Samaritans dot org s A M A r I a n S dot org, where you can talk to somebody three hundred and sixty five days a year, twenty four hours a day if you're in need to call them please.
And if you have thoughts on this episode or any of the topics covered, idiot, we would like to hear from you. You don't have to use social media if that's not your bag of badgers. We also have a number where you can call us twenty four hours a day and leave a message, especially with information on this or any other topic, if the spirit so moves you. We always like to give our own number out here.
Yeah, you can call us. Our number is one eight three three st d w y t K. You can leave a message. You got three minutes anything you want to say, We're here to listen to. If you don't want to do any of that stuff. You don't want social media, you don't want to call, but you do want to send us information, please send us a good old fashioned email.
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