Teacher tortured women in underground sex bunker with trapdoor and chilling bench
Trapped, tortured and terrified, former headteacher Kevin Booth lured his victims from the UK and abroad to his remote house in the far north of Scotland where he beat them and forced them to perform sex acts.
Police have now secured a travel ban preventing him from leaving the country for the next five years, but what happened to the women he tortured?
Booth regularly travelled abroad and recruited economically vulnerable women from countries like South Africa, Dubai, Sri Lanka and the Philippines paying for them to travel to Lochdhu Lodge in Altnabreac, Caithness, where he would isolate them and use them for his own sadistic pleasure.
For nearly 25 years, from 1998 to December 2022 he would exploit them and subject them to prolonged ‘punishment beatings’ and force them into sex acts, Wick Sheriff Court heard.
His sickening behaviour only came to light in July 2023 when a former employee made a complaint to Police Scotland about Booth’s conduct towards her when she was employed by him at the lodge between June and December 2022. The court judgement found Booth pressured her into providing him with “sexual services” but it wasn’t the only horrific crime he was found guilty of.
The court was told how, inside the lodge, a trapdoor gives way to a 60m-long concrete tunnel leading to an underground ‘chamber’ containing life-size ancient Egyptian figures and a metal bench. The women would be restrained on the metal bench and whipped with implements including canes, wooden brushes, riding crops and belts ‘causing them obvious extreme distress and pain’.
Booth filmed his attacks, including one 18-minute video of a terrified woman who tried to escape but was unable to do so in scenes described as being “nothing other than torture.” In a rare move, Police Scotland launched a civil action seeking a travel ban because they were unable to monitor Booth’s trafficking and exploitation of women when he was abroad.
Sheriff Wilson passed the travel ban order – the first in Scottish legal history – meaning Booth must surrender his passport and notify police 14 days before hiring any female employee. He must also let the police know in advance about any females visiting his property and officers will now have the power to carry out unannounced welfare checks.
Sheriff Wilson said: ‘The evidence of Mr Booth’s egregious conduct, as presented in court, was, at times, utterly harrowing. The graphic video footage, combined with the context and background provided by supporting documentary evidence in various forms, was redolent of a level of cruelty and depravity which, whilst extreme, one can only hope is rare. These assaults are videoed by the defender. A consistent feature of these assaults is that the defender takes pleasure in assaulting his victims.’
Booth has previously been charged with assaulting children in his care at a school in 1991 and left the UK in an attempt to evade justice, but later returned. In 1994 he was convicted after a trial at Newcastle Crown Court of five charges of assaulting children and a further charge of failing to surrender to bail.
He was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. And in 2002, Booth was convicted following a trial at Bradford Crown Court of indecently assaulting his Brazilian au pair and was sentenced to two years in jail.
Get email updates with the day’s biggest stories