Before he was commissioned by the Independent on Sunday to report on allegations of abuse in North Wales, Nelson had already written articles for the Independent as a freelance. In particular, he had reported on Tŷ Mawr, a community home in Gwent. These articles, which appeared in the Independent in May 1991, suggested that a harsh and uncaring regime was driving young boys to self-harm and suicide. An inquiry later commissioned by Gwent County Council, and undertaken by Gareth Williams QC, came to the conclusion that this view of Tŷ Mawr was unjustified.
By the time the report was published, however, Nelson had already been sent to North Wales. Partly because he had no time to conduct a thorough inquiry himself, he made extensive use of Alison Taylor and Darren Laverty as sources and placed great reliance on what they told him.
When the reference to Gordon Anglesea in his article of December 1991 resulted in a libel writ, Nelson was sent back to North Wales to see if he could find evidence to substantiate the libel. He eventually found two highly suggestible and deeply damaged young men, Mark Humphreys and Steven Messham, to whom he showed photographs of Anglesea, and who made a series of increasingly grave allegations against him.
When the libel trial took place in London in November and December of 1994, Humphreys and Messham appeared as witnesses for the defendants but Nelson never appeared himself to face cross-examination. He apparently continued to believe in the allegations made to him by Humphreys and Messham even after evidence of the untruthfulness of these allegations had emerged.
When Mark Humphreys committed suicide in 1995, Nelson wrote an article in the Observer in which he repeated Humphreys’s allegations against Howarth as though they were true, even though Humphreys had not even been at Bryn Estyn for most of the time he claimed that Howarth was abusing him there.
By the time Nelson had become a staff reporter on the Observer where he later became the paper’s Scotland editor. After a spell editing the Scottish edition of the Sunday Times, he moved to London in 2003 to head the papers ‘Insight’ team.
The Secret of Bryn Estyn 