Kevin Chesham — Biographical Background

Kevin Chesham was born at Enfield Lock on 15 August 1953. When he joined the Army (Royal Electrical Engineers) on 21 April 1975 to facilitate his desire to train as a modern pentathlete which involved  pistol shooting, épée fencing, 216 yards (200 metres) freestyle swimming, show jumping, and a 3 280.8399 yards (3 kilometres) cross-country run, I saw almost nothing of him (having had accidental contact at Finchley two years earlier). In August of that year he became a novice modern pentathlete, and was based at the Army training camp in Berlin from April 1980. He told people who knew him, including me, that he joined the Army on the proviso that he would not have to fight — claiming to his commanding officer, Major Gordon Lyons, that he was a pacifist and a Buddhist — and that he would need to be served a special diet of strictly vegetarian food for which he was apparently given an allowance. He expected everyone to believe that the British Army would accept him on these conditions. The very idea that the Army would sign up someone who would not to fight is risible, but he nevertheless insisted to those he knew that this was a price the Army paid in order to get him as a full-time athlete on their modern pentathlon team. My problem with his story is that he is not a pacifist, and, moreover, in my experience never has been one. I know something about Buddhism and have friends who are Buddhists. Everything I know about about Chesham down the years informs me that he could not possibly be in practical terms a Buddhist.

He left the Army on 21 April 1981.

It was during his Army career that he met and married his first wife, Cyrena, a Roman Catholic whose parish priest, I was told by them both, refused to provide a church ceremony due to Chesham not being a Christian. I met Cyrena (seen above wearing spectacles with me, my wife and Chesham) on three occasions, the last of which when she came to our wedding reception. I found her pleasant. She can also be seen in the picture below at that wedding reception she attended with Chesham in 1987. By this point, he was practically unrecognisable (see above photograph where his normally small frame had gained considerable bulk) due to increasing his weight massively with the probable help of what many suspected at the time to be anabolic steriods. Alongside his flashy American car with its personalised number plates (which registration identity bearing his initials cost him two thousand pounds on itself) can be seen my wife and I next to Cyrena with my mother on the far left. The young boy leaning on Chesham's expensive vehicle is the son of my dear friend and resident of Highgate, Diana. Sadly, she is now deceased. Chesham was one of those who attended her funeral, held in Finchley on 16 January 2004, which I conducted in tandem with Father Hubert Condron, a Roman Catholic priest from St Joseph's Church, Highgate, London.

Kevin Chesham was and still is a self-proclaimed vegetarian who lives on powdered protein drinks and cereal bars. I sensed in him a man committed to a regimen of discipline and determination that I empathised with and understood. He was an outsider with no real friends, and I have always gone out of my way to befriend the friendless wherever and whenever I can. Though appearing to be introverted and unnoticed within a group of people, he nonetheless enjoyed the limelight if the opportunity presented itself and on occasions was prone to showing off, but these occasions grew less frequent as the years rolled by and he felt overshadowed by those he came into contact with in London. When I first knew him, however, he was always ready for a photo-opportunity which might bring him his fifteen minutes' worth of fame, but it never did come along. In those early days, he was part of a team of runners that included myself. He also had a strong interest in martial arts and on some occasions we trained together in a freestyle form of wing chun kung fu, sometimes using weapons, eg nunchaku; though his personal preference was Kyokushin karate, and in March 1975 he attained his black belt in that martial arts' discipline.

Above is what Kevin Chesham normally looked like. On the surface, I found him ostensibly loyal and hardworking, but quiet waters run deep and there was another side to Chesham that was not quite so appealing, as I and others would eventually discover. I never really felt I knew him. Nobody did, and some would say as much.

He possessed a cold, detached and decidedly insensitive side that could have devastating consequences on those effected. There are so many anecdotes I could draw upon, but I shall content myself with just a couple. There was the occasion when he visited Finchley open air swimming pool years after having worked there and spoke out loud in a totally inappropriate, jocular and hurtful manner about his former boss, Alan Hime, who had been the area supervisor of every pool in the borough until he died of a heart attack a week prior to Chesham's visit. The deceased man's daughter, Jane Hime, a swimmer for the national team, was standing nearby as we chatted at the entrance to the large leisure area and its fifty metres Olympic pool surrounded by trees. She obviously heard every word. I could not believe Chesham's incredible insensitivity. Her father had been an athlete in the 1948 Olympics. When I heard what this man standing next to me blurted out about the late Alan Hime I did not know where to put my face, but he just shrugged it off. I wanted to apologise to Jane for having to suffer such callous and unimaginably inconsiderate remarks, but felt it might make matters worse and walked away in disgust, totally ashamed of Chesham.

Another occasion was around the time of my mother's funeral in 1992 when Kevin Chesham visited unannounced and was taken into a room full of funerary blooms and wreaths. Anyone could tell that I was really out of sorts and down, which is out of character for me, but Chesham joked and laughed as if nothing had happened and everything was normal. He did not bother to enquire about the floral tributes and sympathy cards strewn about the place. I daresay he did not care. It was as if his emotions and sensitivity were completely shut off and that, had it been spelled out for him, he still would not have acted any differently because his own agenda always predominated and at that time he was seeking my help. This usually meant my signature on something, eg a reference for a job he was seeking etc. After some refreshment and what passed for him as "normal conversation," he eventually departed without offering any condolences either then or later when he was appraised.

I had noticed long before — in the 1970s, in fact — that Chesham would appear to be listening attentively, but contribute almost nothing when a group of people were in conversation. Yet when alone with him, or perhaps with just one or two others present, he would talk inappropriately behind people's backs, always with cold detachment. He seemed to take pleasure in what struck me as being unkind and frequently cruel behaviour. Perhaps I should have noticed the warning signs earlier on, but I was seeing next to nothing of him in the latter part of the 1970s and probably no more than three or four times throughout the whole of the next decade. The period when I was most in contact was when we trained as part of a team of distance runners from 1973 to 1975 on Hampstead Heath and the surrounding area. He was quite aggresive and competitive, always wanting to be at the head of the field even though it was not a race. These were training sessions, which I was doing it for fitness, as were most of the others. He has recently claimed that I was the coach, but I was not. I was just a member of the running team, and he was by far the best runner whom we all struggled to keep up with. When we returned from a marathon or half-marathon to a member of the team's home in Highgate, after recovering and freshening up, we ate a roast dinner with all the trimmings. Chesham, the so-called vegan/vegetarian, always consumed what was on offer, which invariably included meat or fowl. He did not drink alcohol, however, because he dislikes the taste, but he would clean his plate containing massive amounts of of meat and then he would ask for a second helping. This, of course, was hypocritical. There was no shortage of hypocrisy where he is concerned.

As well as working for local council pools, he was now also employed at night as a club bouncer with excellent remuneration. This entailed some rather unsavoury and violent behaviour on his part, which he admitted he was not proud of when we discussed this aspect of his career, but the increase in income allowed him to buy a house, start a body-building franchise with a shop in Wembley, and, of course, run an expensive American car with personalised number plates; plus own the largest plasma screen television on the market. It was all about making an impression with material acquisitions and a physique to match, and he was never friendlier toward me and my wife than at this time. It was an illusion, however, that would predictably dissolve away.

Kevin Chesham's fortunes changed soon after Cyrena told him on 24 May 1992 that "during the course of working at the shop she had met someone and had formed a relationship" which had been "ongoing for some three months." She departed the next day (May 25th) after they had been together sixteen years. The business was divided equally between them, and it was not long before his side of the enterprise failed.

It was also not too long before he met and married Beverley Mason who insisted on retaining her maiden name "Mason" after they were wed. Just like the marriage to Cyrena, I was not invited to this second marriage. From this point things gradually went from bad to worse and every decision they took proved disastrous during the subsequent period. They possessed most of the books I had written — though instinctively I did not offer From Satan To Christ — which decision proved fortuitous. Yet I somehow doubt he managed to read The Highgate Vampire because years later, after seeing a television documentary I had made about the Highgate case for the Discovery Channel, his nose was clearly put out of joint because a close acquaintance of mine was included. At a reunion dinner party he asked: "What was he doing in it?" It was quite implicit that Chesham wished he had been in the documentary himself, and, moreover, had also been paid a fee. We had to explain to him that Keith Maclean and his girlfriend at the time were heavily involved at the inception f the case whereas Chesham had nothing whatsoever to do with it. I did not even know him when the incidents were occurring at Highgate Cemetery, and certainly did not discuss anything with him because he showed no interest. My helping Keith's girlfriend is how I came to know Keith from a time when Chesham would have only been around sixteen-years-old. These signs of resentment over matters that did not merit any resentment would increase over the last handful of years we remained in contact.

Kevin Chesham and Beverley Mason asked to visit Glastonbury with my wife and I, and we all drove down to this most sacred Christian shrine in England on a beautiful summer's day on 20 June 1993. A regular visitor to the small Somerset town, I was looking to purchase a suitable base in view of my connection with the town. They were shown the Abbey ruins, but when it came to the High Street where people and pilgrims were very much in evidence, Chehsam grew extremely irritable and wanted to leave as soon as possible. He was fine while he was not in contact with other people, but the moment he was among the throng he turned rather ugly. He became irritated again when we stopped at a petrol station for fuel on the way home to the outskirts of London where my wife and I resided at that time, and Basildon in Essex where Chesham and Mason lived. We thought his unprovoked irritability was a side effect of him using anabolic steriods. I should stress that he was always all right with me and mine and only evinced hostility toward strangers. What struck me most about that day was his "Jekyll and Hyde" personality. This was our only visit to the place with him.

Five months later on 17 November 1993, whilst training at his body-building gym in Essex, Chehsam had a stroke and was incapacitated for some considerable time. At first he could not walk or talk and was unconscious for a week. It took him twelve months to recover his speech and ability to walk. If he had been using anabolic steriods before, he now ceased and shrunk back to the size I remembered him from the 1970s. A period of introspection followed while his appearance fluctuated and sometimes he seemed like an old man while at other times he appeared in good shape. Occasionally the conversation would turn to growth hormones. I cannot say he ever used these, but he changed radically from one visit to the next, and his stroke had caused a personality change which was not fully realised for some time due to him emigrating tentatively to New Zealand. The person who eventually returned to these shores, however, was not the same person who left them.

His second wife, Beverley Mason, was a teacher and I was often asked to write references for her and Chesham when either of them applied for new employment. She relied on my reference when she became a head teacher, but these positions never seemed to last long before another job was being sought somewhere else. I would receive telephone calls from prospective employers asking for character references after they had received my written one. She would take highly paid jobs in Arab counties, eg Kuwait, where she worked as a private teacher. They lived for a while in Cairo, Egypt, due to the high income her teaching attracted, but these places were ultimately undesirable and they next opted to emigrate to New Zealand because for them it most resembled how Great Britain used to be before it became a multi-racial, multicultural country with fast growing immigration. One of Mason's main topics of conversation was the predominance of non-white faces in most classes she taught in England, and how this was unacceptable in her's and her husband's opinion.

They sold their house in Basildon and left these shores for the other side of the world where life was not exactly as they had hoped or imagined. They did not like the New Zealanders' sense of humour and felt they would never fit in, or be accepted. While in that country, however, Chesham made the acquaintance of Satanist and neo-Nazi Kerry Bolton with whom he would remain thereafter in correspondence. He read Bolton's works and was clearly impressed by them. I made it absolutely clear to him when he informed me about this that I regarded Kerry Bolton to be an agent of darkness who should be avoided at all costs.

Chesham and Mason returned to an England where property prices had soared, and where they could only eventually afford a small terrace dwelling with a one hundred percent mortgage which, after the worst recession in history, plummeted in value, swiftly rendering them into such negative equity that they were obliged to rent their property out to tenants and live in something much less salubrious themselves. Chesham found it difficult to get employment, believing his age to be the barrier, and this added one more topic to his conversation, which was usually about his sporting activities or his distaste for a certain person living in London's Muswell Hill whom on occasion I had to constrain him from wanting to physically attack. This person was the same man whom he and his wife would nevertheless join forces with to cause me, my wife and friends harm after a poisonous brew of envy, resentment and paranoia reached fever pitch in their increasingly disturbed minds. It became obvious from halfway through the first decade of the twenty-first century that undue suspicion, distrust and fear were now manifesting. We did not enjoy their company from this point, but they were also in touch with a friend of ours who kept them informed of reunion dinner parties and they just seemed to invite themselves along. Nobody else, however, seemed bothered whether they were present or not.

They were always willing to take a gamble, but they were not willing to accept the consequences when their recklessness resulted in disaster. I have never been a gambler and have worked hard to get to where I am now. Yet I detected no small degree of hostility from them, and this would evince itself in their detachment from the group, early departure and failure to interact in conversation.

They were also having problems in their marriage which was a curious one from the start. They each held at least two jobs and at times worked in separate countries. Consequently, they saw next to nothing of each other. Chesham worked shifts while Mason taught privately, having previously been a regular teacher. Her work had concentrated on sporting activities in Brentford. When not in Spain allegedly coaching triathletes, Chesham worked as a pool attendant at the Gloucester Park Stadium, Basildon, Essex. Beverley Mason even took holidays abroad without her husband. It was all most curious, and not how most people would envisage a marriage. On various occasions when visiting us, they each confirmed to my wife and I that they were members of the BNP and had attended BNP functions in Essex. Whether this precluded Mason remaining in formal teaching I do not know, but their membership of this political party probably effected their employment prospects when that organisation's membership list was published on the internet after it had been hacked.

Chesham and Mason had professed a dislike of children, and would leave early when children were present at one of our reunion dinner parties, as seen in the above picture showing my wife (left), a friend of ours with her infant and Beverley Mason at the rear of the group. Something happened, however, to change Mason's mind about children and latterly she decided she wanted to have a baby of her own, as told by her to my wife. Chesham clearly still did not want any children. The very idea was anathema to him. Hence, according to what was said to my wife, this caused some friction in their relationship which was always a curious one from the beginning.

On every occasion they visited us, my wife and I went out of our way to give them a good time in familiar company from the past and vegan food specially purchased and cooked for them by my wife. They were often given some of this cuisine to take home with them, as none of the other guests were interested in vegan or vegetarian food. They were always treated with consideration and generosity. Yet on their last three visits something had obviously changed. They totally lacked humour, acted suspiciously, and were nervous. I should add that in all the time I knew Kevin Chesham I was not once invited to his home, much less to join him for something to eat at his table. One of the first things the pair of them did after meeting David Farrant was to invite him into their home. They took food to him when they visited his attic bedsitting room, and even had him over for Christmas dinner.

The Essex couple executed their plan in the fullness of time — after they had entered into collusion with a variety of pusillanimous characters, one with criminal convictions for threatening people with black magic for which he was jailed for two years, and malicious vandalism plus grave desecration for which he was further sentenced to another two years imprisonment; a man, moreover, whom they knew for a fact had waged a vendetta against me and mine for almost half a century. But, of course, that is what attracted them to him. Yet they are worse than him, or any of my enemies. When David Farrant died in April 2019, I stated how much easier it was to forgive an enemy than a disloyal "friend." I had Chesham in mind. I tried to repair the schism with my former enemy. I have no desire whatsoever to have any contact with my former "friend" whose betrayal is akin to that of Judas.