“File on 4” – “Reynhard Sinaga: Britain's Most Prolific
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BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4 TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “REYNHARD SINAGA: BRITAIN’S MOST PROLIFIC RAPIST” CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 3rd November 2020 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 8th November 2020 1700 - 1740 REPORTER: Hayley Hassall PRODUCER: Sally Abrahams EDITOR: Carl Johnston PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6336LH0 - 1 - THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. “FILE ON 4” Transmission: Tuesday 3rd November 2020 Repeat: Sunday 8th November 2020 Producer: Sally Abrahams Reporter: Hayley Hassall Editor: Carl Johnston ACTUALITY IN MANCHESTER EXTRACT FROM PHONE CALL RECORDING CALL HANDLER: Police emergency. MAN: Hello, I just, I think some guy has tried to rape me after he took me to his house and I didn’t want to. He forced me to go to his house and then he raped me. CALL HANDLER: Where are you now? ORR: You would never feel unsafe if you met him on a street to speak to him, like you could easily believe that he has been a good Samaritan, that he’s helped you out. He looked very much like any other student that you might meet on the street. CALL HANDLER: Right, this guy who you’ve met, have you just met him tonight? - 2 - MAN: Yeah, I met him last night, I think. I was drinking and he ended up, I think he forced, he slipped me something, like I don’t know, and now, in the morning, he’s like on top of me, like, trying to you know what. LISA: You can’t underestimate the impact that this news had on men, and some have unfortunately wanted to take their own lives. CALL HANDLER: I’m going to get an officer to where you are now. Are you okay to wait there while we get an officer to you? MAN: Yes, yes as long as it’s soon. ALI: In my 20-year career, I’ve never come across anything like this case before. It’s completely unprecedented. This has been the biggest serial rape case in UK judicial history. ACTUALITY OF SIRENS HASSALL: I’m on Albert Square in Manchester’s city centre. Towering above me is the impressive gothic town hall – Manchester’s beating heart. Princess Street is the artery that takes you south east from here – it runs past lots of busy bars, shops and restaurants, then alongside Chinatown before you reach the city’s famous gay village. It’s an area that’s also home to thousands of students. Among them – from 2007 until 2017 – was postgraduate Reynhard Sinaga from Indonesia. SARAH: Rey was cheerful, calm, very engaging, very charismatic. Anyone who met him would say that. HASSALL: In 2008, Sarah met Reynhard Sinaga when she was a postgraduate at the University of Manchester. He was studying for a Masters degree. Sarah isn’t her real name, but she’d only talk to me if we agreed not to identify her, so an actor is speaking her words. - 3 - SARAH: I knew him when he first came to Manchester as a student. I was part of a group of friends he had, but I wasn’t close friends. When I was with them, Rey was never actively cruising, looking to pick up someone. He had a lot of attention from gay guys. He had no problem flirting. He was never seen as a party guy that goes crazy on nights out. He was very normal, engaging, friendly. Rey was quite vain. He spent a lot of attention on how he looked, the clothes he wore. His exotic looks made him stand out in a good way in the gay community. I don’t think he’d have any problem to meet any gay guy in a natural way if he wanted to have sex or whatever. But he liked more manly men. That’s his type. HASSALL: The eldest son of a wealthy businessman, Reynhard Sinaga was born into a conservative Christian family in Sumatra in 1983. Like the rest of Indonesia, it’s an island where being gay is taboo, so Sinaga was forced to keep his sexuality a secret. And when he arrived in Manchester in 2007, he was free to embrace the lifestyle he’d always craved. SARAH: He liked Manchester. It was a way to be out of the closet in some ways because his family are practising Christians. He said his family didn’t know he was gay. But anyone, within a minute of talking with him, would know he was gay. I think his family is in denial. HASSALL: What do you know about his family? SARAH: I met them when they came to visit. They didn’t speak much English. He was very formal towards his family. He’s the oldest of his siblings and that has a weight within the tribe system, the weight of his family name. He didn’t want to go back to Indonesia, so studying was the easiest way for him to keep staying here and live as a student. HASSALL: Sinaga’s wealthy father was able to help fund his son’s lifestyle from afar, but he also held several part-time jobs which he fitted in around his studies - one of them, working in a bar in Manchester’s gay village, where he’s still remembered. - 4 - MARIA: Very charming, very smiley, always aiming to please and a very sweet boy on the surface. HASSALL: And how was he at his job? MARIA: Very good. He was up there with probably top employees that we’ve had. A really nice guy. He’d do his job and he’d go home, then turn up for his shift the next time. He was very polite. His English was very, very good. Even when talking, he spoke a lot with his eyes and his smile, so, you know, that’s quite nerving that somebody could almost like suck people in. He was honest, he was efficient, so yeah, I was horrified. HASSALL: Sinaga lived here in a small flat in Montana House. It’s a modern, red-brick multistorey building on Princess Street. When he moved here in 2007, I was living just around the corner. I’d walk past here most days on my way to work as a young producer at the BBC on Oxford Road. By day, Sinaga would be studying in his flat - but in the evenings, he had other plans. ROBERT: I met him in a takeaway. It was at the end of a night out. I was just looking to charge my phone. I asked the takeaway person whether I could charge my phone, and he overheard me and he was like, ‘I’ve got a flat around the corner to charge it there if you want - it’s only like five minutes’ walk away, not even that.’ So, I thought, yeah, I don’t mind doing that. HASSALL: This is Robert - again, not his real name. Like so many others in this harrowing story, he doesn’t want to be identified, but he was happy to tell us what happened to him, providing we kept him anonymous. After a night out clubbing with friends in 2016, he headed home via a takeaway, which is where he met Sinaga. Can you describe him for me? ROBERT: He was only a slim, scrawny guy. You know, I thought I could handle myself if anything happened. And then I went back there, he seemed nice enough, so I put my phone on charge. His flat looked just like your average uni accommodation. It looked like quite a nice flat, decent location. There was nothing which - 5 - ROBERT cont: made you think, you know, like he had something going on. It was just like your average student flat. He started offering me a few drinks and stuff and I said no to them all, HASSALL: What kind of drink did he try to offer you? ROBERT: I mean, he had a wide selection, so he was catering for whatever I would have wanted, but just the fact that I didn’t want to drink anything, and he’s not someone I would socialise with or sit down with, like, and have a drink with. But yeah, yeah pretty much he had everything. HASSALL: So, you said no. Did he try to persuade you to have one? ROBERT: Yeah, he asked if I wanted another drink. Then I thought, that’s a bit weird. Why would I want different choices of drink, you know what I mean? HASSALL: After about 15 minutes, with his phone charged to just 5%, Robert made his excuses and left the flat. He took down Sinaga’s number and added him to his contacts, giving him the name ‘Creepy Ray.’ He told him he might get back in touch, but he never did. He didn’t know it then, but Robert had a narrow escape. MUSIC HASSALL: Police believe Sinaga spiked his victims’ drinks with so-called date rape drugs like GHB - readily available on the streets of Manchester or online. Toxicologist, Dr Simon Elliott. ELLIOTT: GHB was designed originally as a medicine for anaesthesia, and then into the late 1990s and 2000, it had gained a reputation as a potential so-called date rape drug, due to the fact that it can cause sedation and sleep in people who take it. - 6 - HASSALL: How does it work? ELLIOTT: So, essentially it works in the brain and it acts a little bit like alcohol, but if you take too much GHB, you can actually be very sleepy, so it can actively affect your sedation and actually cause people to be unconscious.