Jimmy savile abused me, and i was nearly killed... But school did not

The 52-year-old grandmother, who we are calling Sandra to protect her identity, has turned detective to help police investigating paedophile Savile’s attacks on children at the former

Duncroft Approved School for Girls in Staines, Middelesex. She has allowed the Sunday Express to publish a picture taken with Savile while he was grooming her. Today we reveal that a unit

has been set up by Surrey Police, named Operation Outreach, to examine allegations made by 13 people, most of whom were former pupils at Duncroft. When the Savile scandal broke, ­Sandra

successfully retrieved files relating to her time at Duncroft. Unable to work because of stress, she has spent weeks poring over thousands of pages, and is now ready to hand her distressing

dossier over to detectives. In 1973 she was a mixed-up young girl who had run away from home while struggling to deal with the break-up of her parents’ marriage. Despite not being criminally

minded or violent, she was sent to one of the toughest institutions in Britain. One document records a conversation about Sandra between her social worker and Duncroft’s headteacher,

Margaret Jones. It says: “She (Miss Jones) said that [Sandra] was a very disturbed child but not as difficult in her behaviour as a lot of the girls there. [Sandra] has been involved in a

fight with a very disturbed and violent girl who would have tried to kill her if she had been allowed to. Miss Jones said she thought it was significant that [Sandra] had been the victim.”

Sandra said: “I am still haunted by this unprovoked attack on me. The girl had me on the floor and was strangling me and banging my head. I thought I would die. “I was a just a shy,

emotionally upset teenage girl and I was put in this awful place with very disturbed girls, one of whom was capable of killing me. When I look at this now I get so angry because I should

never have been sent there.” The police were never informed of the violent incident. It was hardly surprising that against this backdrop Sandra was slightly star-struck when Jimmy Savile,

then a huge BBC celebrity, began visiting the school as a sort of unofficial helper. On January 31, 1974, Sandra wrote a letter to her social worker saying: “Guess who came to tea on Monday

21st January. Well then I’ll tell you his initials. JS. “He went around blessing everyone on the hand, which was very embarrassing and everyone went red, especially me as he nearly broke my

arm!!!” Within minutes Savile was showing her his Rolls-Royce and she adds in the letter: “It’s got blue velvet curtains all around the back and it’s fantastic.” It was in this Rolls-Royce

that Savile would later sexually assault her. He did not rape her. One note in a report says: “[Sandra] has been emotionally scarred by the incident.” However, other sentences are redacted.

Sandra said: “I got the documents from social services, but much of it was redacted for some reason. I can only assume it was done to protect some people.” The editor of the BBC’s flagship

Panorama programme said he cannot understand why he wasn’t given the chance to investigate Jimmy Savile after Newsnight abandoned its probe. Speaking last week at a conference at Liverpool

University, Tom Giles said his team would have had the time and resources to attempt to back up the allegations. Instead, ITV’s Exposure programme revealed Savile’s paedophile past. The

Pollard Review into the BBC’s handling of the Newsnight blunder said Panorama could still have ­“broken the Savile story”.