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Matthew, verse 19:12.

"So there are eunuchs who have been eunuchs from birth

and there are eunuchs

who have been made eunuchs by other people.

And there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs

because of the kingdom of heaven."

When this happened back in 1985,

one of the newspapers said it was the ugliest

of all crimes in the most beautiful of all countries.

Emyr Owen is part of the folklore of the area almost,

it's a notorious case.

Servant of God had become the servant of Satan.

Seasoned news editors would ring back

and ask, did this really happen?

And it did happen.

To my horror, I saw human penis and scrotum.

Reverend Owen answered, I cut them off

in a chapel before burial.

So the outcomes of these personality assessments

are really interesting because it gives us an opportunity

to understand how Emyr thought of himself.

He certainly does refer to good Emyr

and bad Emyr, but I think this has more

of a theological foundation than a psychiatric one.

By writing something in the Bible,

he was actually proving to the world

that he was in fact God.

The judge, Mr. Justice Evans

stated the sentence must reflect the horror

and revulsion of any right-minded person.

Emyr Owen, he said, had abused the trust of the living

and dishonored the dead.

Once it became known

that a program had been made about Emyr Owen,

there was outrage.

My sense about that interview was that it was filmed

through a homophobic lens.

I feel he was basically a man

who was born at the wrong time.

He and I probably had very similar upbringings.

We grew up in Welsh speaking communities.

The chapel was very important.

Sermons that would certainly be very wrong

would often be very terrifying.

For a young gay man,

it would've been a very difficult environment indeed.

Yeah, it's a desperately sad story

of somebody whose sense

of inadequacy was reinforced by the culture around them.

He had to repress his nature, his sexuality

and I feel that that combined with his religion

drove him mad.

The case was said to have generated horror

and revulsion in Towyn, exaggerated by ill informed rumors

that spread through the town.

The house he found body parts pickled in jars

and the story went from there.

So growing up, I'd obviously heard of this story

and as friends we'd all talk about it,

but over time it kind of developed in some kind of myth

because it was all just swept under one big,

massive Welsh carpet.

Nobody knew exactly what was true, what was not.

And nobody's ever tried to sit down

and figure out exactly what happened

in the life of Emyr Owen until now.

Towyn was a seaside resort.

It was a close knit rural Welsh community.

Lovely place to bring up your children.

Kind of place you can go to bed at night

and leave your doors open.

There wasn't much crime in Towyn back then.

Maybe a drunk farmer driving home from the pub,

but maybe a fight on the local square on a Saturday night.

But when something serious did happen,

there was only one man for the job,

Detective Constable Gwyn Roberts.

Over the years, I don't know whether it was a sixth sense

or what, I always seemed to be

at the right place at the right time.

I had a number of cases,

one of which stands out from all the others.

I think the person who comes out of this

with the greatest credit

is Detective Constable Gwyn Roberts.

He is one officer you wouldn't like to be interviewed by,

shall we say, if you were in the wrong,

I think his nickname we have for Gwyn was Rubberneck.

I hope he doesn't mind me calling him that now.

Emyr's downfall started with some poison pen letters.

Some of them were awful,

but a lot of them were quite amusing in a terrible way.

You could say Emyr was made for Twitter.

Anonymous letters were being received

by various individuals in the Towyn area,

Colwin Bay, the first two

that were received related to possible tax evasion.

Another was on the personal character of the recipient.

There were swear words

and things that I would not repeat on camera.

Do you want me to translate that?

One day I received the letter

and it was very unpleasant letter to tell you the truth.

And it was about some radio talk I gave,

but something I said, it must have upset whoever it was,

it had a threatening tone and you could feel the poison.

It was a very nasty feeling.

My mother, who was alive then was very upset at the time,

decided the family that the best thing would be

and the trouble thing to do was take the letter

to the police and have them look into it.

One morning, superintendent Davis called me to his office

and asked me if I could collect these letters

from the office as concerned and look into the matter.

I initially examined the letters

and in each one there was a very unique letter T.

This to me indicated that the author

would have been educated in the 1920s

or thirties as I had visions of my grandparents writing,

which was not dissimilar.

I am a graphologist, not a forensic scientist.

So I'm not looking at this.

I'm not examining the ink that was used.

I'm not dating it.

I'm looking at the personality of the writer

behind the handwriting.

The first thing that strikes me

about these anonymous letters

is it's obviously a very heavy pressure.

So this person was under a lot of stress,

but there's a lot of physicality there as well,

which could mean a very strong sexuality there.

This is stress, but it also indicates a fervor,

sort of zealousness to the character.

And indeed there are indications here

that he was very religious

or indeed he had very firm convictions.

Quite often I can tell

by looking at the handwriting if somebody is gay

or not, it's not obvious.

But there are other sexual things going on.

The lower zone, if we look at the letter Y,

is rather stunted compared to the rest of the handwriting.

And the lower zone is to do with physicality and sexuality.

I would say this man

felt as though he was sexually inadequate,

"And may Hitler live evermore

and death by burning reach your door."

And in fact, Hitler live evermore is bigger than the rest.

He's screaming out for attention, this is somebody

who's obviously raving about something.

But the style of the writing also suggests

that he's emotionally out of control.

The wobble and the shake is more evident

on the Swastika than it is on the main text.

So maybe his state of mind

actually was even more confused

when he drew the Swastika.

Or maybe he was actually more excited about doing it.

Looking at this, I can see

that he's lifted his pen several times from the page

when he's drawn it,

is it because actually he's confused

as to what a swastika looks like?

Or is he in a confused state of mind

when he actually wrote it?

Couldn't draw attention to himself

because they were anonymous letters.

But I'm sure they gave him some kind of a feeling of power.

He was above them in a way.

It's almost as if he saw himself

as above the physical

and almost as a godlike character himself.

So by writing something in the Bible, he was actually

proving to the world that he was in fact God.

One evening I decided to go to see a member

of the chapel being accepted into the fold.

This farmer produced a New Testament.

I took it from him and opened the front cover

where there was an inscription

accepting him into the chapel.

The letter T leapt out at me.

It was an eureka moment

and I knew immediately he was the Reverend Emyr Owen,

a 62-year-old who lived alone in Towyn.

I duly made inquiries about him as I had no idea

who he was, nor indeed of his appearance.

I obtained his telephone number

and made repeated calls to the house

in the coming days.

With no reply.

But on the 22nd of December,

I remember it was a Saturday night, I phoned yet again.

Hello, Towyn, 710 214.

Hello, is that Bill Johns?

No, this is the Reverend Owen.

Please accept my apologies, it's the wrong number.

Yeah, thank you.

I darted over to Towyn.

I picked up police officer PC Phil Edwards.

I was very young in service,

quieter, a lot quieter than Gwyn.

But again, many people would be a lot quieter than Gwyn.

But I think because of the seriousness of the allegations,

shall we say, I think Gwyn wanted somebody there as well.

Together we went down to close,

the house of the Reverend Owen.

Everything that was said

that night is written down here in this police report

word for word.

And it's like a script.

It's genuinely like a script to a film.

Are you Emyr Owen?

Yes.

The Reverend Emyr Owen.

Yes.

And in front of me stood the man

slightly over five foot tall.

And as soon as he saw Gwyn,

I could see the fear in his eyes.

We are police officers.

May we come in.

In English please.

PC Edwards doesn't speak Welsh.

Come in.

This all happened in a very

predominantly Welsh speaking area.

And even though Emyr and Gwyn

were first language Welsh speakers,

what would usually happen in these situations

if there was a third person there who didn't speak Welsh,

or if it was official police business,

everyone would just speak English.

Take a seat.

It's really weird when two first language Welsh speakers

have to speak English together.

It is just weird.

Is this your handwriting on the envelope?

Yes, why?

I'm making inquiries as to the sending

of anonymous letters to various people about the area.

Oh, I know nothing about that.

I told him, would you have a look at the New Testament?

And I produced to him the Testament

handed to me by the farmer.

Is this your handwriting on the cover?

Yes, he replied.

I told him, it is my belief that you are responsible

for writing these letters.

And I named a number other recipients.

You are not obliged to say anything

unless you wish to do so.

Whatever you say may be put in writing

and given in evidence.

His reply to that.

Good Lord, strike me dead,

I have never written such letters, never.

You are a man of the cloth.

You should know better than to say such things.

God strike me dead.

Gwyn told me after he said to him, Welsh, stand in front

of the sofa so you can have a soft landing

when you are struck down.

Reverend Owen, you are lying to me.

No.

I'm now in a position whereby I'm asking you why

you wrote these letters and not, did you write them?

Yes.

Yeah, I wrote all those letters.

I can't tell you why, I was ill at the time.

I wish I'd had a pound coin

every time someone had told me they were ill at the time

after being caught.

I am now arresting you for threatening the life

of you are not obliged to say anything

unless you wish to do so.

Whatever you say may be put in writing

and given in evidence.

Do you understand what I've just told you?

Yes.

Reverend Owen,

are you a homosexual?

They turned up to ask him about some letters.

And the next question is, are you a homosexual?

And what does it matter?

It's 1984, it's not illegal.

Where did that come from?

Yes.

Do you have any dirty books?

Then the next question is, do you have any dirty books?

Well, again, do you have a warrant?

How is this relevant to the letters?

Where does this question come from?

Where does this line of questioning come from?

You know the type I mean, pornographic.

Heavens no, nothing like that.

Would you mind if I take a look about the house?

Where'd you keep your books and your writing paper?

I'll show you, upstairs.

Follow me, I'll take you up.

Why did he search the house?

I mean, up to this point, all he knew

was this is the man that wrote those letters.

Now the horrible letters, but just letters nontheless.

So yeah, why did he search the house?

I walked behind him up the stairs

and I noticed he had one yellow sock on one foot

and a green one on the other.

When we reached the top of the steps,

I asked him, what have you, other than chapel books?

And he said, other books have collected over the years.

I opened an attic cupboard

and within that cupboard I found dozens

and dozens of nude male magazines,

comics, and detective magazines.

There were books on cannibalism,

human sacrifices, bizarre sexual acts, torture,

erotica, sexual deviation,

and dozens of stomach churning topics.

And he turned to Emyr, he said, you dirty bastard.

There was a bookshelf then, I removed all the books

and to my astonishment, concealed behind these books

with three boxes of photographic slides,

each marked with male names.

There were 71 slides.

I opened one box at random

and viewed the slide.

To my horror, I saw human penis and scrotum.

Ooh, this is big stuff.

What's going on here?

Postmortem.

How did these slides

come into your possession?

And who carried out these postmortems?

I told him I've attended scores

of postmortems of the years.

Never have I seen a pathologist

sever the genitals from her body.

I find it highly irregular

that you should be in possession of such things.

Postmortem.

His hands and knees were literally shaking

as he paced the two steps towards the door of the room

and back again before blurting out, I cut them off.

I asked him, how on earth do you do that?

And where did all this take place?

Reverend Owen answered,

in a chapel before burial, I used a knife,

bent down alongside the bookcase

and picked up a shoebox and handed it to me.

I peered inside, find a length of cord, handcuffs,

kitchen knife, bread knife, screwdriver,

razor, syringe, hair clippers, forceps,

two pairs of dental tooth extractors and nasal forceps.

I must now take possession of these

and the other things from this house.

You've been present while I found the magazines,

the books and the other things.

We shall now put them in the boot

of the car and take you to.

Yes.

What will happen then, will I be kept there?

'Cause I have Christmas cards and presents and things to do.

What about tomorrow?

I'm preaching in courage in the morning.

Now I do have a favorite quote from the police report.

In all the craziness that's in this,

this is the most Welsh line

you will ever hear in your life.

In all probability.

And in light of what we have found here,

I don't think there's the slightest chance

of you preaching in tomorrow morning.

Accompanied by PC Edwards,

I put the reverend Owen in my car

and drove him to Dolgellau Police Station.

En route to the police station,

Reverend Owen told me in Welsh.

Could you repeat that in English for the benefit

of PC Edwards, he does not speak Welsh.

This is a burden of my shoulder, I'm glad it's all over.

I don't know what it came over me.

It's been stopped before anything worse happened.

The police knew very little about Emyr

in just his public face, the minister, respectable.

But when I started researching,

the first thing I received,

more or less were the psychological reports.

And they were fascinating and sad

and complicated and there's a lot more

to learn about Emyr.

This report is based

upon two lengthy interviews.

Good to see you again.

At HM Remand Center, Risley.

Please take a seat.

Owen is a somewhat puny individual

whose muscular development is poor.

So I think we'll just continue where we left off.

But whose physical health is reasonable.

He certainly does refer to good Emyr and bad Emyr,

but I think this has more

of a theological foundation than a psychiatric one.

He went to work in the slate quarries when he was 16.

But in view of the fact that most of his life,

and I quote his own words, has been influenced by scripture

and religion, he always wanted to be a minister.

I understand this church is now known

as the Presbyterian Church of Wales,

but the mere use of the word Calvinism suggests to me

that the theological training of its pastors

was based on the teaching of John Calvin.

That is to say the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine

of predestination and the genuine existence of Satan.

I'm sure he believed that at one level, at any rate,

that he was amongst the condemned,

that he was going to be going to everlasting.

And the fact that his father was killed in a fire,

in an accident which involved a fire,

I think can only have added to that.

It must have been an awful concoction

going on in his head as a young man growing up.

During his medical reports, Emyr states

that it was poverty that pushed his father

to move to Australia when Emyr is only four years old.

And the original plan was that his father would go out first

and settle there, and then that his mother

and Emyr would join afterwards.

Well, all I can remember is seeing Emyr

and his mother walking along the street in Blaina,

arm in arm, which struck me at the time

as a very strange thing to happen.

It didn't happen.

Young men didn't walk with their mothers along the streets,

let alone arm in arm.

I think Emyr Owen,

although he was a generation before me,

he and I probably had very similar upbringings.

We grew up in Welsh speaking communities.

The chapel was very important.

The chapel was the Presbyterian Church of Wales,

which is actually a form of Methodism

that's influenced by Calvin.

And so my theological upbringing, if you like then

was fairly fundamentalist and evangelical.

The great emphasis on sin, great emphasis

on you are either good or you were bad.

The old way of life was still very evident,

still very much dominated, I suppose

by this ultimately very Calvinist form

of Christianity with its emphasis on original sin,

sermons that would certainly be very long,

would often be very terrifying.

So I think for a young gay man,

it would've been a very difficult environment indeed.

He would've had no way

of understanding his sexuality

in the context of that place at that time.

And it cannot have been easy for him.

Naming what you think you are

or what you believe you are is very important

because it gives you a handle

on trying to understand it.

And one of the things I found very interesting

was that in the Welsh language,

I didn't have any language

to talk about my experience about being gay.

And I think a generation before as well,

homosexuality was much more hidden.

It had to be much more hidden

because it was against the law.

By 1967, the laws had been relaxed

and people were at least talking about it

when I was an adolescent,

and perhaps in Emyr's time,

those conversations weren't able to happen.

There were generational differences between Emyr and I

but I think that there was a huge similarity as well.

He described no close relationships

with others, including his mother.

His main memory of his father

came from his mother's description

of his painful and suffering death.

So if we were to assess Emyr today,

the bulk of the assessment would closely mirror

what Ann Scott Fordham did back in 1985.

And what Ann found

was that Emyr was a highly insecure individual.

That he was hypochondriacal, anxious,

prone to guilt, resentment,

and had high levels of psychological inadequacy.

So the outcomes of these personality assessments

are really interesting because it gives us an opportunity

to understand Emyr's traits, how Emyr thought of himself,

how he understood himself,

almost kind of reverse engineering,

wondering how these traits might have developed.

Well, Emyr, I will not speak to you

in any great length tonight.

We shall have a few words

and go into greater detail tomorrow.

First of all, I'm at a loss to understand

why you have done these things.

You're now talking to Emyr Owen, minister,

there is also Emyr the Rouge.

I had no control over him.

He would descend like something black into my head

and I would do these things.

How many times have you done these things?

Three times, only three times, you've been to my house

and you've found the slides.

Together there's three bodies that I've done.

And I said, can you think of anything

that may have sparked you off

into acting in the way you have done?

And surprisingly, he said, I worked

for a while in the Oakley quarry at

before going into the ministry,

the men there pulled down my trousers at lunchtime.

Few of us can resist

the sight of men digging a hole

or the hole itself for that matter.

Well, here in the shadow of Snowden is one 1400 feet deep,

but no ordinary hole,

this is the world's largest slate quarry.

This report

is based upon two lengthy interviews

with the defendant at HM Remand Center, Risley.

He states that whilst working at the quarry,

there were episodes of mutual masturbation

between himself and others.

And he first became aware at about this time

that he might have homosexual leanings.

Of course, during this period, if he were

to act on those leanings under the Criminal Law

Amendment Act of 1885,

the act that famously sends Oscar Wilde

to prison, he would be breaking the law.

Whilst working at the quarry,

he was the bit of a lot of teasing about his short stature,

immature appearance,

and what seemed to be an initiation right

for all new employees, the pulling down of trousers

and the fondling of genitals by workmates.

During my research, I've never come across any evidence

that suggests that this was a practice

of any sort in any of the slate quarries of North Wales.

In the reports by Dr. Spry, we learn

about some of Emyr's early childhood experiences.

So interestingly in this assessment

he described his childhood as a moderately happy one,

having an average number of friends

in the middle of the class in terms of popularity.

During his psychological report, Emyr describes himself

as a misfit, that he never truly fitted in

with his peers or his coworkers.

Emyr is so motivated to manage the way

that he comes across to people

that his account naturally varies

from one person to another.

It is difficult

to give a detailed chronological account

of the Reverend Owen's homosexual development

because his account is fluctuating

and at times contradictory and evasive.

His story changes with the telling, new material emerging

and earlier material being denied.

He gives different accounts to different interviewers.

He is rather like a chameleon.

Emyr, by throwing this accusation

of the mutual masturbation or the initiation ceremony,

is he in some way seeking revenge, maybe on the type

of people and the community that never truly accepted him?

Another episode which the Reverend Owen remembers

and is probably of relevance was when he failed his medical

for the army, being described as not having

the body of a man,

a reference to the size of his genitals.

The fact that he was turned down for National Service

during the war, I'm sure affected him as well

because it I suspect, caused him

to question his manliness

and the way that he associated that with his sexuality.

His interest in physically big, strong men,

I think is a factor here as well, that I'm sure he felt

he didn't live up to particular ideal of male beauty.

And that would've perhaps caused him

to question himself even further.

A single child brought up in a small town

in a fatherless home by two religious women who treated him

and had expectations of him different from his peers

must have some relevance.

So something that's evident in the witness statement

that was provided by the police

is Emyr's sensitivity to how the police

were making sense of his behavior.

And we've just got some circumstantial evidence

to support that.

He's keen to know what other people think of him.

So he asks one of the police officers,

but you must feel something towards me

after the things that I've done.

What do you think of me?

This is Detective Officer Gwyn Roberts

interviewing the Reverend Emyr Owen

on December the 23rd, 1984 at 15:00 hours precisely.

Reverend Owen.

I'm glad to get it off my mind.

I've had nobody to talk to about it.

I will be inviting you

to make a written statement at a later stage,

but now I would like to clear up a few details

regarding the bodies

and a little more detail

about how everything came about to happen.

It's quite simple, really, something came over me

and I only wish I'd done something about it at the time.

I was just thinking after you left me last night.

The whole thing is like a nightmare.

I feel it's always been a bad dream.

You must have thought to me something like the devil

after finding out what I'd done.

It's not for me to comment,

I'm only doing a job of work here.

But you must have feelings about me

after finding out,

what do you think of me?

Well, you're either a very sick man

or you're a monster.

Emyr was a young man who was religious.

He was gay and well, you can imagine at that time

and place he felt tremendous guilt.

He was bullied and basically sexually abused at the quarry.

He was refused national service

because, you know, dreadful quote,

he didn't have the body of a man.

So what was a man like Emyr to do?

He joined the ministry.

I remember one of his colleagues telling me,

somebody who worked with him

in the quarry telling me he had the shock of his life

when he heard Emyr was going to be a minister.

We know that human beings respond to guilt

by trying to compensate for it sometimes.

It's possible that this guilt would've served

as motivation for Emyr to pursue his religious interests,

to give him a structure to understand himself.

And it's also possible on top of that,

that religion may have given him

a way of assuaging that guilt,

a way of making up

or compensating for what he perceived

to be his sin, his sexuality.

I was lucky enough to gain a scholarship

to go and study for the ministry in California.

And one of the things that I came

to understand when I was in seminary

was that there were many, certainly amongst

the Roman Catholic students, there were many

people candidating for the ministry

and studying theology who were gay men.

And over a few glasses of wine, you might talk

and sometimes you'd come to an understanding

that actually their own motivation

for going into the priesthood was twofold.

One, that they could hide behind the priesthood

because people don't imagine priests

to be sexual human beings.

And the other was that in that funny

psychosexual confusion that they have in their brains,

if they became a priest,

it would put them all right with God,

even though they were a homosexual man.

My connection with Emyr goes back a long, long time

because his first pastorate

was just outside Lampeter

in two little villages called Llangybi and.

And he was very popular and an excellent preacher.

He had the gift of the gab.

He was from Ffestiniog

and he had that kind of proper,

lovely Welsh, unusual to us.

Again, his accent was unusual.

Everything was unusual about him.

A young minister and also outgoing

and gregarious

and used to enjoy being with youngsters

around town on a Saturday night,

which I don't think many ministers anywhere in Wales

would've been doing that in 1952 or 53.

They all said, everybody that I talked to

said that he was a very, very good preacher.

That he had a way with words

and very good with members of the congregation as well.

If anybody was ill, he was always there

to talk to them and went out visiting his members.

After four years, he'd left

he found the rural area unstimulating in his words,

and he obtained a ministry in Coventry.

We don't know much about Emyr's personal life

from his time in Coventry.

The few things that we do know, he was arrested

for impuning outside a public toilet and fined five pounds.

And there was also an incident

in the cinema when he was spoken to by police.

But no charges were laid.

The other thing we know comes from Dr. James Higgins,

his psychiatric reports.

So this is a report by Dr. James Higgins.

And this is what he had to say

about Emyr's time in Coventry.

Only when he got to Coventry

that he actively expressed his homosexual interests.

Interests which were not in homosexual individuals,

but a much more narrower preoccupation with penises.

As a result of his interest in photography,

he would take photographs of the genitals

of himself and other men.

He had also developed sado-masochistic interests.

He had become preoccupied with suffering

and collected books on this topic

and embellished photographs

he had taken all photographs he had cut from magazines

with images of flagellation, physical cruelty and bondage.

So at this time, the parallels

between Emyr's public life

and private life were just getting further

and further apart.

Emyr got a new ministry in Liverpool

and not just a new ministry,

it was considered the ministry

at Princess Road in Liverpool.

And this was a huge boost for Emyr's career.

The church in Princess Road

was a tremendous church in every way.

It was built in 1865.

It was built to be the largest

non-conformist church in the whole of Liverpool.

So at this time in his life, his career was flying.

His congregation loved him.

And at home in his private life, he had loads of porn.

He was loving life.

I moved to Liverpool in 1968

and of course my near neighbor in Liverpool,

south Liverpool was Emyr Owen.

And I had come to Heathfield Road, Presbyterian Church

of Wales, three miles up the road near Penny Lane.

So we were now neighbors,

Emyr Owen, intellectual, but he was a great preacher.

And the elders of that church must have gone for him,

not because of his intellect,

but because of his preaching prowess.

By all accounts, his congregation in Liverpool loved him.

He was kind.

He looked after his congregation, caring.

Nobody had a bad word to say about him.

His private life, I did some research,

but there was nothing really I could find.

The only thing I did find was a report

from the Liverpool Echo that his future partner,

Leslie Ashley, had been beaten up in the streets.

And although it's a very plain court report,

I think we can infer from the way it was written

that we are looking at gay bashing basically.

If you realized you were homosexual,

there would be very few opportunities

to explore that with another person, very few.

And you certainly wouldn't do it in your own community

because you would be afraid of being discovered.

So you might take a bus

or take a train to the nearest large town,

there was a very famous cruising area

along the Mersey Promenade

in Liverpool, Otterspool promenade.

One had to be very careful

that you weren't actually arrested for impuning,

for actually approaching somebody

whom you thought might be interested.

You could find yourself having a complaint made against you

and people could be sent to prison or fined heavily.

And it was very unsatisfying because it was very fleeting.

It was sometimes in a stinking public toilet

because in those days, where did homosexual people meet?

There were no places for people to meet.

If you went there, yes, there was a possibility

that you might find casual sex.

There was a possibility you'd get picked up by the police

because of pretty policing.

Sarg.

Gay bashing used to go in phases, really.

You'd have periods when people went out to beat up gay men.

They would go to these cruising areas,

but there was a very strong possibility

that he'd be beaten up by a gang.

I think their lives

were a very sad reflection of a society

that needed to keep some sense of order

around sexual behavior

that actually is in truth really quite messy.

But the order that needed to be kept was that celibacy

and singleness, fidelity in marriage.

And that's what keeps society together.

And of course we know that that's not true.

And for many heterosexual people, they found themselves

able to drift in and outta that without too many problems.

But homosexual people kept it under wraps

and probably as compared with my life,

lived many miserable lives.

A society gets the homosexual people it deserves.

And when a society is very repressive,

then the homosexual people

that emerge from a very repressive society

are very repressed people.

And they do things in the shadows

and their behavior is secretive

and they themselves become people

who live duplicate lives because they have to.

And society looks at those people then

and says, yeah, homosexuals, they're not nice people

and they tend to be criminals

or they tend to be immoral

and society has created that.

Hello?

Hello.

In October, 1968,

every Tuesday night when I was out,

the phone would ring in our house,

my wife would answer the phone

and there'd be someone breathing down the phone.

Whenever there wasn't a meeting

around Christmas

and I would be home then on a Tuesday night,

there'd be no phone call.

So this went on from October

to the new year.

So I was getting concerned.

As elder, I had a judge.

So I told him and he said, leave it to me.

I'll have a word with the police.

So the end of June, the police came through

and he said, we've caught him.

I said, can you tell me who he is?

No 'cause you would be very, very upset.

Do I know him then?

Yes you do, now makes me think who he was,

I can't put the blame on anybody.

But that was a very disturbing event.

And that went on for six months

after I arrived in Liverpool.

It was a real, you know,

to say why you have come here,

there's no room for you in Liverpool.

And that was a disturbing occurrence

which I haven't told anybody till today,

except my own family.

So his time in Liverpool was still this double life.

His career was still going fantastic,

but in his private life by now, it wasn't just porn,

it was starting to turn a corner

and started to become some really nasty stuff.

And he was really distressing people.

But one positive that did happen in Liverpool,

of course, is where he met Leslie and Emris.

Emyr Owen was in a very close friendship

with two other males,

namely Leslie, who was a court clerk in Liverpool

and an organist by the name of Emris.

Emyr Owen would spend much

of his leisure time in their company.

And one could say that they were a threesome.

All of Emry's friends knew Emris

because Emris was a Welsh speaker.

So he'd mixed with the Welsh community, Liverpool,

but Leslie didn't speak Welsh, so nobody who he was

because he didn't mix in the same circles.

He had one great friend who was a member

of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Liverpool.

Emris was everything to Emyr,

but he used to come along with Emyr to the lectures

we would see them on occasions like that,

on a concert or something.

They would be invited then

after the lecture to the chapel house

or to a house of some member for the meal.

And I think he was a great asset to him.

He was a very good organist.

He played for the Welsh Church in Central Hall,

in Renshaw Street in Liverpool.

But he was a nice lad.

Very caring.

He didn't say anything to anybody,

but you just saw them together.

And it was after his imprisonment

that we knew for certain

that they were more than just friends.

I heard a rumor from the free church council

that Emyr Owen was in trouble

with his homosexual activities.

The police had been in touch

with the Free church council leaders

and that they'd come to an agreement of saying, well,

you either got to make sure that he goes from here

or we are going to prosecute him.

So Emyr was asked to move on

and a ministry was found for him in

which I guess people thought would have less temptation.

And now that they were now a couple,

or I guess a threesome, Emeris and Leslie went with him.

Anybody who had that tendency where,

well, they were really persecuted

and they had a terrible time.

And I really regret attitude

of people like myself in those days.

You know, we didn't know many gay people at the time

'cause they lived in fear

and, you know, three men living together.

You know, it was unheard of.

I was a sergeant in Caernarfon

and moved to Caernarfon in 1982.

Our next door neighbors

were three gentlemen living together.

One, Emyr Owen was a minister, Emris,

he was retired, he was a big chapel goer

and the other one was an Englishman.

They lived normal lives on the surface anyway,

but Emyr, there was something funny about Emyr.

He didn't appear to be the usual minister.

He'd be away most of the week, come home at weekends.

He'd be cutting the lawn wearing very short shorts.

His car was parked outside, small car,

but he had a motive of a serpent on the car

was unusual for a man.

But they cause no bother at all, they were sociable.

I got nothing to say against

either of the three gentlemen.

They were good neighbors.

Sadly, they weren't accepted in Liverpool,

they weren't accepted in Begelet or Towyn,

but in Caernarfon they seemed to have found some semblance

of a happy life together.

Emyr said later

that these were in fact the happiest years of his life,

but sadly they weren't to last.

It was Christmas, I was a member of the golf club.

The captain was the local police inspector

and he had a phone call in the clubhouse

and the look on his face,

disbelieving look on his face.

And he kept turning towards me and he went back on the phone

and turned towards me again.

Well, of course I asked him what was going on

and he said, I can't tell you,

but be at Towyn Magistrates Courts tomorrow.

I received a call at about before nine o'clock

in the morning from police contact,

and he said, Derek, you'd better get in your car

and drive to Towyn

because there's a story coming up in court this morning

and you're not going to believe it.

All I can tell you, he said,

it's about a chapel minister on very unusual charges.

I remember the Clark saying to us,

please treat this very sensitively.

It's going to ruin Christmas in Towyn.

He would take home the severed body parts

where he would experiments with them.

And bizarrely enough this would be done

at the breakfast table in the belief

that an erection could be caused.

He would inject the penis with boiling water

and these body parts would remain in the house

for several days before he discarded them.

Burning one, feeding one to the seagulls

and throwing a third into the sea.

I would question his mental condition

in acting in such a bizarre way.

At your request,

I visited hm Remand Center Risley,

to interview the Reverend Emyr Owen

on January the 24th, 1985.

I could find no convincing evidence

that he suffers from any form

of mental disorder within the meaning of that act.

In discussing his sexual interest,

the Reverend Owen interlard many religious

and particularly biblical themes, principally Leviticus.

He talks of the suffering of mankind as a whole,

his own emotional suffering

and an interest in suffering per se.

The compulsion he experienced

to mutilate the corpses,

he said, came from a verse from Leviticus,

three times shall thou give unto the Lord flesh from flesh.

He was unsure as to the authenticity of this verse

and considered that he may well have been the author.

He said that after he had committed these acts

of mutilation, he had avenged God

and did not to repeat them.

During the course of the investigation,

I had occasion to search Emyr Owen's house.

I found tape recordings.

Whilst committing these offenses

on the corpses in his care,

he was giving detailed information

as to what he was doing from one second to another.

The manner in which he was speaking on these tapes

appeared to me that he was totally detached

from what he was doing.

It was as if he was commentating on someone else doing it.

He told me that his house, which he always referred to

as the mans, had this been closer to the chapel,

that he would have taken a corpse home with him.

Understanding

the Reverend Owen's psychopathology

has been bedeviled by a number of factors

as regards the most abstract, philosophical

and theological aspect of suffering.

The Reverend Owen gives a complicated, difficult to follow

and not particularly convincing account,

intermingling the fate and suffering of humanity,

of Christ and of himself,

a guilty, secretive, lonely, overworked,

imposed upon unhappy, morbidly preoccupied,

homosexual clergyman.

Only if one were to know him over a very long period

might one come to understand him

and perhaps one might then still not,

as his psychopathology is so bizarre.

I put the television on and the News at Six came on

and I had a shock and I shouted

for the wife to come and have a look.

And there entering the court in was Emyr Owen,

I next door neighbor, a minister.

Well, I had a shock.

And then I had another shock after

when the wife brought the meal for us,

there was sausages and baked beans.

Well that's the last thing I wanted

to read was sausage on the plate.

But that's besides the point.

Well, I spent Christmas morning, 1984

sending the story to all the national newspapers

that included the Sun, the Mirror, the Mail, the Express.

They all used the story.

The case was said to have generated horror

and revulsion Towyn.

Exaggerated by ill-informed rumors

that spread through the town,

congregations faced hastily revised Christmas services,

but reacted more in sorrow than in anger

as they came to terms with the knowledge

that their former minister had a bizarre

and unsuspected side to his character.

The feeling of the population in Towyn

was somewhat mixed.

In particular, the older generation,

who were clearly on his side,

they were in denial of what he had done.

And I recall coming out

of Towyn magistrate's court on occasion

of the first hearing when he was remanded,

one elderly woman saying to me in Welsh.

Meaning, have you no shame.

Emyr Owen came into the dock,

but the charges were not read in court.

And afterwards we had a word with a clerk

and said, well, could you tell us what the charges are?

They weren't sure what to charge him with.

There wasn't an actual offense of cutting body parts.

So I think that they decided on criminal damage to a body.

It's really difficult

to actually identify any charges at all

that relate to things that he did

to the bodies as opposed to, of course,

the incident with the letter as well,

which is a different matter.

So what we see when we go through

the different documentation is that those three iterations

of charges that the police

and the CPS together try to bring,

the first related to criminal damage.

And the problem with that is that criminal damage

depends on there being property

and there's no property in a body.

So whilst when someone dies, they'll be an executor

who has duties in relation to the body.

They don't actually own the body,

they're just legally obliged

to dispose of it in particular ways.

After that, they then went to this idea

of fronting public decency.

That isn't an offense,

but there is an offense of outraging public decency,

and I presume that that's what they were intending.

The problem with using outraging public decency

is that the offense really does hinge

on the idea of publicness.

It's central to the offense.

And Owen's offenses, one can assume

that they were carried out in a private place,

perhaps at a morgue or a chapel,

and that they weren't ever likely to be witnessed

by someone else.

And for public distance, it has to be able

to be witnessed these two people.

So what we then see

is that charge being crossed out

and being replaced with mutilating a corpse.

But that offense has never been known to criminal law

either before Owen's case or after Owen's case.

Now my understanding is that when that got passed up

to the Crown Court, the defense did raise an objection

to that and asked for the charges

to be dismissed on the basis that the offense didn't exist.

But the trial judge said that he was happy

for the charges to carry on.

And at that point, Owen pleaded guilty

and therefore there was no trial for us to find out about

what exactly this offense consisted of.

When the case came to the Crown Court,

the prosecution made a point of not putting a date

to any of the charges so that obviously

the victims couldn't be identified.

I was proud of being a local journalist

that I did not release any information

on the bodies, who they were.

I didn't release the times, the names or anything.

And that was after the meeting

with the clerk to the magistrates.

And his words were, we have a duty

to protect the public, and I agreed with it.

At the time, the police decided not to tell

any of the families which bodies had been mutilated.

I think personally that would've been a mistake.

Quite a lot of families from Towyn

where left in limbo,

not knowing if their dearest one

was one of the victims.

Emyr Owen was the minister who married me

and my wife in 1981,

he also married my father.

He was responsable for that service.

It was a worry for a time,

but we never heard anything from the police

that my father's body was one bodies

that had been interfered with.

And so I assumed therefore, that no news was good news

and so wasn't unduely worried

that that had happened to my father's body.

They were families who'd been married by Emyr Owen.

There were families who had children who'd been baptized

by Emyr Owen and it hurt them

and they obviously wanted to do something about it,

and they wanted to wipe him clean of their history.

And that's what happened.

They organized a new minister.

They organized the children to be baptized again.

And I get that.

A senior psychiatrist told the court there was no evidence

of mental illness or disorder,

but the minister had great guilt about his homosexuality

and a conflict of belief could have led

to his bizarre behavior.

Emyr Owen, who spent Christmas in a remand center,

will spend Easter in jail.

The presbytery in Liverpool asked me

if I would go up to Lancaster

on a regular basis to represent the church

for Emyr to understand

that the church was not abandoning him,

and that I as a Welsh speaking chaplain

may be able to offer something to him

that was more than the prison chaplain in Lancaster,

who was not a Welsh speaker, was able to offer.

I remember speaking with my brother,

who is a doctor and saying,

I don't think this man should even be in prison.

My first visit with Emyr was only weeks after his trial.

The person that I met

in Lancaster Prison was a very shriveled up,

diminished character.

I think he was totally cowed by the whole process

of the trial and the awful press coverage.

I mean the tabloid press in the whole

of the United Kingdom made some pretty dreadful stories up

about what had happened.

I have this medical report from 1984

from William Lawson,

who was the senior medical officer at Risley Remand.

"Imprisonment would not in my opinion

serve any useful purpose.

He is engraved out as to whether he will ever be forgiven.

His life is certainly ruined

in that not only has his living gone,

but his reputation as well.

It is not as if he would not serve a prison sentence,

but I do not think

that any temporal punishment

could ever inflict such emotional pain

as the spiritual ordeal which he has undergone

and is still undergoing since the detection

of these offenses.

I feel that Owen's guilt can only be relieved

and his eventual peace of mind restored by prayer

and his belief in the power of prayer."

I think we recited the Lord's Prayer

on our first visit together.

But that's all.

He just wanted to speak Welsh.

There was something about being able

to speak in his mother tongue that was comforting.

I think it's dreadful, dreadful that Emyr

was sent to prison, who was helped by that?

He should have been given some treatment, some compassion.

There was no need for a prison sentence.

A few weeks following Emyr Owen's sentence,

his friend Leslie was found dead in toilet.

Leslie, the English gentleman,

he died suddenly in the toilet in Caernarfon.

Unfortunate place for him to die,

but it was purely a heart attack.

He wasn't ever any undue purposes.

We had to go and break the news now to Emris.

I went in with a policeman colleague and broke the news

and oh, Emris was very, very upset, very upset naturally,

but it was rather difficult, not very nice,

but for it to happen so soon after Emyr,

I dunno if that had any consequences

on the health of Leslie, I don't know.

So after a year

and four months, Emyr was released from prison

and who was there to meet him, of course, but Emris,

I think Emyr was so lucky to have EMS in his life.

He stuck with him, he met him from prison

and when Emyr was released, they moved in together

and stayed with each other for the rest of their lives.

And really, it's the one positive shining bit

of love in this sad, sad tale.

You'd think that a disgraced minister who's been to prison

for doing the stuff that he did,

would try to keep some sort of low profile

after coming out, but not Emyr.

What did Emyr do?

He went on telly.

It began quite by chance.

I was filming in 1992.

Gwyn Roberts spotted me.

We'd worked together in the past in our respective roles

as policemen and a journalist.

Gwyn came over and with no preamble,

he asked me point blank,

why don't you make a program about the Reverend Emyr?

We started filming the sequence

of Emyr Owen taking his lap dog,

the cuddly but vicious Dinkybell.

Emyr Owen, he certainly wasn't tall.

In fact, he apparently always wore Cuban heels

to try and enhance his height.

Emyr Owen made no secret at the fact that he was gay.

And quite unbelievably, he told me

on camera that it was his feelings

of guilt about his sexuality

that had led him

to commit these incredible offenses.

The idea that the male sexual organ

is the source of sin does have its roots

in Christian theology.

There's no doubt about that.

The idea that it must be removed

is a step well away from that.

What he said in the interview he had with Vaughn Hughes

doesn't stand up to any biblical testimony.

I mean, that was just a weird theory of his

that you go to heaven

without your sexual penis.

And so that is not true at all.

I think that at one level, he's trying to make excuses

for himself that he can't escape

this all powerful

and overpowering force that is his sexuality.

Perhaps he couldn't, but that's maybe his tragedy.

My sense about that interview was that it was filmed

through a homophobic lens.

There was an underlying assumption throughout that film

that homosexuality was bad,

that homosexual people were bad

and that homosexuality was wrong.

Did he possibly believe

that appearing on television

would be not just an act of personal catharsis,

but that it would somehow explain

and justify to the public what he'd done

did none of those things, of course.

Emyr felt that the male sexual organ

was the cause of his troubles.

It was what would stop him

and other people ascending to heaven.

This isn't an uncommon belief.

It's been held by various groups

of people down the centuries,

perhaps the biggest group were known as the Skoptsys.

And they believed that Jesus himself was castrated

and that it was the road to purity the road to heaven.

They called themselves White Doves.

And as recently as the 1990s,

there were a small enclave of Skoptsys living in Latvia.

At one time there were as many

as 100,000 of them.

But sadly and inevitably, I guess, they did die out.

There have been many, many cases

of people mutilating themselves

and they cite Matthew 19:12,

and I'll read the quote to you now

from the King James Bible.

"For there are some Eunuchs

which were born so from their mother's womb.

It's not common.

But there is some evidence within the scientific literature,

within the medical literature

where genital self-mutilation has been recorded.

Very religious men who come to understand themselves

as homosexual and that their homosexuality

is so unacceptable to them,

that the focus of their anxiety and fear

and self disgust gets focused on the genitals

because it's the genitals that behave in a way

that they don't want them to behave.

I can well see how the process

of transference could lead somebody away

from mutilating their own genitals,

to mutilating the genitals of a dead body.

One is able to release that anxiety

and self disgust in a way

that whilst is abhorrent, isn't actually doing harm,

although it's doing a different kind of harm, of course,

'cause it's harming the relatives

and so on and so forth.

Reverend Emyr Owen died at his Pendrin Bay home

on the 25th of January, 2001 at the age of 78 years.

Why did he do what he did?

Emyr Owen knows why,

and obviously he's taken that to his grave.

I understand one side of Emyr

that all the homophobia against him

or the pressure of society at that time

against somebody that was different.

I get that, but there's loads of gay people

and not all of them do this.

A saying comes to mind,

nawt as queer as folk.

If he'd been treated with kindness

and understood more,

everything could have been so different for him.

I think we can charge the Wales in which Emyr

grew up with not having the means

to help somebody who was deeply troubled.

And this after all was a society

that claimed to be deeply Christian.

I feel for this wretched man.

I cannot imagine the things that were going on in his head

that drove him to do this.

But there we are.

People can behave very oddly,

and I think the important thing is to understand.

Understand before we condemn.

One of the things that I'm left with,

just on a human level, listening to Emyr's story

is the pain that he was cutting for so long

and the burden of what he perceived to be his guilt.

It's unlikely that we'll ever come across a story

quite like Emyr's again, because society

is now in a different place

and although potentially imperfect still,

some attitudes have potentially changed for the better.

No, he wasn't mentally ill,

he was extremely cunning, untruthful

and a sexual deviant.

Worse offenses are committed

every day against the living.

To try and explain this I think you need a psychiatrist

and a psychologist and a theologian

and many, many others.

Presbyterian church has never seen

anybody like him before him.

And we hopefully that, they'll never see

anybody again like him.

To most of us, from most of his life,

he was a very good Emyr.

But there was also a shadowy Emyr,

an Emyr which lived in darkness without the gospel light.

I think you must have in him what I would call lot of evil.

One of the things that I would like people

to go away thinking about

is that whilst what Emyr Owen did is unexcusable

and is despicable, if we allow ourselves

to think that that was the work of the devil

and the work of a bad man,

we avoid thinking about what kind of society are we

that a man like Emyr emerges from?