British paedophile Douglas Slade’s victims in the Philippines still waiting for justice
- Slade abused young boys in the Philippines for decades and repeatedly paid his way out of trouble.
- Now, in a landmark ruling, he has been ordered by the British High Court to pay US$162,000 in compensation
The boys running around the neighbourhood in grubby shorts and flip-flops called it the “magic door” – a plain metal gate in the garden wall of a friendly foreign businessman, whose incongruously grand two-storey home stood opposite their primary school in Angeles City, in the Philippines.
From a wicker chair on his first-floor balcony, overlooking the school’s playground, the British businessman would shout greetings to passing youngsters as they filed out of class in the afternoons, throwing down sweets and bars of chocolate, enticing selected boys into his house with the promise of money and more treats.
Children would queue excitedly outside the property’s perimeter wall until the grey-haired, obese white man shuffled downstairs and appeared at the gate, which opened only from the inside, and ushered in three or four boys at a time. What lay inside, however, was anything but magical. Rather, it was the stuff of nightmares – horrors that haunt those boys to this day.
Over a period of almost 10 years at that address alone, he abused scores of children, brazenly paying off police and victims, donating money to the school to stifle any threat of prosecution before the determined work of a child welfare group finally saw him arrested and deported to Britain, in 2015. Then, in December last year, in a landmark ruling with implications for foreign sex offenders across Southeast Asia, he was ordered by the High Court in London to pay £127,000 (US$162,350) in compensation to five of the boys lured into his house in Angeles City and abused.
But in a series of interviews with the victims and their families, as well as investigators who helped snare one of the most prolific and remorseless paedophiles of modern times, Post Magazine has discovered that justice has been unforgivably slow to arrive, and the victims have received only a fraction of the compensation they were awarded.
The man behind the “magic door” was Douglas Slade, now 78, and the most cursory of online searches by anyone concerned would have identified him as a danger to children from the moment he arrived in the neighbourhood.
