James Rennie impressed almost everyone he met. Outwardly intelligent, articulate and successful, an influential lobbyist who advised Scottish parliamentarians on youth policy, he rose to the height of his profession and was invited to receptions where he met the Queen and Tony Blair.
In reality he was a man who had allowed “his profound interest in the sexual abuse of children to engulf his entire life,” the prosecutors at his trial said. “His mind [was] polluted by deviant sexual compulsion.”
Yesterday Rennie, the former chief executive of LGBT Youth Scotland and a former president of Heriot-Watt University Students Association, was sentenced to life at the High Court in Edinburgh for a catalogue of sexual offences dating back to 2004.
The litany of horrific charges against him included the sexual abuse of a baby, the possession and manufacture of abusive images and conspiracy to commit sexual assault on children. Rennie, 38, was guilty on all counts.
His accomplice, Neil Strachan, 41, a convicted sex offender, also received a life sentence. Among his collection of more than 7,000 brutal images and films was an image of himself and a child that horrified the trial judge, Lord Bannatyne. “[The image] would shock to the core any right-minded person who has had to see it,” he said.
Rennie was singled out for particular condemnation by the judge for “the colossal betrayal of trust”. The principal victim of his abuse was “Child F”, the infant son of his old friends. The couple cannot be identified, but in interviews with The Times they described their horror on discovering that the man who over more than 10 years had been one of their closest, most trusted confidants — who had shared their lives, and was always available for babysitting duties — had abused that trust.
Seasoned investigators were taken aback by the scale of his duplicity. The couple told the court that they had trusted Rennie implicitly because he had stood beside them at “the most difficult and vulnerable times in their lives”. After years of the closest ties he would become a favourite “uncle” to their little boy.
Rennie began his abuse when the baby was three months old and continued for four years, boasting about his activities over the internet to seven other members of his paedophile gang while hiding behind the online alias of kplover99. (“KP stands for kids porn — my attempt at humour,” Rennie told officers.) The boy would later require a battery of medical and psychological examinations, including a test for HIV/Aids, which left him in confusion and his parents in abject despair.
It proved just as easy for Rennie to betray his political ideals. In public life he campaigned against “homophobic bullying” in schools. He cut an impressive figure when, in 2000, he was called to the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood to advise the Local Government Committee on “ethical standards in public life”. He commented on equality issues and debated the controversy surrounding the promotion of homosexuality in schools. Invitations to Downing Street and the Royal Garden Party followed.
Many close to the case have expressed revulsion at the profound breach of trust behind Rennie’s behaviour. Child F’s father told The Times that he took another view. “I see Rennie as somebody who I thought I knew, but actually I didn’t know that person at all,” he said. “That person is someone I once spent a lot of time with, a face I know and recognise because we shared experiences together. But he was actually an outrageous and disgusting monster.
“He had a job and a suit and went to work and bought Ikea sofas and shopped in Sainsbury’s, all the usual stuff. But it was just a façade. That’s how I rationalise it. I never saw this as a betrayal. I think, ‘You weren’t my friend at all. You just pretended to be to suit your own ends.’
“He was just a skin and a shell. Underneath, that person was not in any shape or form a person I knew. He is an inhuman and amoral monster.”
Rennie was born in Beauly, Inverness-shire, and brought up in northern Scotland. His defence team claimed that he had been sexually abused as a child. He certainly spent a largely unhappy adolescence at Charleston High School in Inverness, where he struggled to come to terms with his sexuality.
Later he made attempts to stay in touch with former classmates and placed a boastful entry on the school’s Friendsreunited website: “Now the Chief Executive of a national youth charity, currently the chair of my professional peer grouping — the National Voluntary Youth Organisations’ Chief Officer’s Group.”
At university Rennie is recalled by former friends as someone who was quiet at first, but soon more confident. He came out as gay and enjoyed his times around Edinburgh’s “Pink Triangle”, the gay-friendly district close to the city centre. On campus he is remembered chiefly as a political animal, a consummate “operator” who had no obvious party loyalty.
A former activist from Heriot-Watt said that Rennie grew to love the prestige of office after his election to a sabbatical post in 1993. “He enjoyed the power, the contact, the presence it brought,” said the former student, who asked not to be named. “Rennie was shrewd, much shrewder than your average campus politician. He read and outmanoeuvred people. He would be beaten in argument occasionally, but he would never forgive someone who had got the better of him.”
After graduation Rennie trained as a physics teacher at Moray House college in Edinburgh and qualified in 1995, but he later gave up on the idea. Instead, after a few months on the dole, he took a job at the Stonewall Youth Project in Edinburgh, which campaigned for homosexual causes, quickly rising to become its project co-ordinator. In 2003, when the organisation was reborn as LGBT Youth Scotland, Rennie was installed as chief executive, on a salary of £40,000.
A woman health worker who made friends with Rennie early in his career remembered him then as a “charismatic, funny guy ... you could have lots of friends round for a dinner party and he would make them laugh”. With success, however, Rennie became more distant.
“There was a real power play about him in the last couple of years. I would chat about my job and what I was doing, but he would always have a better story,” the woman said. “He’d say, ‘I’ve done this, I’ve done that’. There was always something more.
“You know how you hug your friends when you say goodbye? Before he disappeared [on remand] I was thinking ‘I can't remember the last time I hugged you, Jamie’.”
For all his outward respectibility, Rennie was sunk in depravity. One sordid sideline was to write his telephone number on toilet walls, begging for sexual encounters with adult strangers. From at least as early as 2000 he was exchanging images of child abuse and plotting attacks of his own.
Police could prove no “contact abuse” before 2004 but the record of his fantasies and boasts — recorded in MSN messenger logs — convinced detectives that he had already offended against young boys before he began his attacks on Child F.
In particular, the toxic nature of his relationship with Strachan, which began in the summer of 2004, was recorded on e-mail messages retrieved by police from Microsoft headquarters in San Jose, California. These clearly demonstrated that Rennie was accustomed to offending, but in the everyday world around him he lacked the opportunity to meet like-minded men.
The internet made that contact possible. When he encountered Strachan on a website notorious for its paedophile content, Rennie could scarcely contain himself. Here was a co-conspirator who could help him to indulge his desire to move away from looking at images or films of abuse to actually participate. Chilling messages from August 17 and 18, 2004, reveal that first online meeting, and point to its consequences a few days later.
“I am in edinburgh and have some access to a baby boy if you are near me? where r u ?,” Rennie wrote in his first message. The next day he took the relationship on. “We def need to meet, if it works out i would like to share my b with u, as this is much hotter than solitary. I might have the b this weekend if you are interested?”
They met three days later, on a day when Child F was found to have been in Rennie’s care. Police would find e-mail fragments on a hard disk drive which showed that Rennie’s kplover99 account was accessed from Strachan’s computer on that day. The most likely conclusion was that the men had met to abuse Child F.
The two remained close. Shortly after the new year Strachan sent Rennie a photograph that became known in court as “the Hogmanay image”. It showed a man assaulting an infant. Another photograph showed Strachan abusing the baby’s elder sibling, who was asleep. Rennie’s response? “Cool — Was that you in the pic?”
The conspiracy was brought tumbling down by Strachan’s carelessness. He mistakenly sent a work computer to be serviced while it still contained images and videos of abuse, complete with messaging and e-mail chat logs. When this data was analysed by police it not only condemned Strachan but revealed Rennie’s alter ego, kplover99, a ruthless, predatory paedophile.
It took six more weeks to unmask Rennie, who was arrested on December 16, 2007, at his flat in Edinburgh. Police initially struggled to identify the boy, but hours later an officer finally arrived at his home with horrific news for his parents. The life sentence for Child F’s family had just begun.
