The social effervescence that was in the United Kingdom on the day of the wedding of Lady Di and Prince Carlos diluted the news that a child disappeared that day.
Vishal Mehrotra
vanished in the twilight of an absolutely festive day.
It was after the royal procession had finished, an event that both the eight-year-old boy and his seven-year-old sister Manta watched from a vantage point near Fleet Street.
That July 29, 1981, at the end of the procession, both were left in charge of their nanny.
Her father had gone to sleep and they were still lucid.
Vishal was 8 years old when he disappeared.
Photo: Channel 4
As the crowd dispersed, it occurred to Mehrotra to go buy her sister a gift at a candy store a few meters from her house.
For that she asked her caretaker for a special concession.
The babysitter let him out with the promise that she would always watch over him, but in the blink of an eye, like a magic trick,
Vishal disappeared
.
Seven months later, the boy's remains were found in Alder Copse, near the town of Rogate.
Today, more than 40 years later,
his death continues without finding answers
.
Her body was found seven months after the royal wedding.
Photo: Channel 4
abuse at school
A less forceful theory was put forward by
Ben Hulme
, Vishal's best friend who stayed at the boy's house the night before he disappeared.
Both went to St. James Elementary together, of which Hulme does not have fond memories.
For him, it would not be crazy to think that the disappearance of his friend had to do with what was going on at his school.
Ben said that the teachers they had were abusive and cruel.
“I think there was a lot going on at school that shouldn't have been going on,” he slipped.
Hulme revealed that he often heard about abusive teachers and confessed that he experienced firsthand the abuse of a teacher who liked to see him bathe when no one was around.
Carlos and Diana were married on July 29, 1981. Photo: POOL / AFP
The grandmother who saw it
The documentary
In the Footsteps of Killers
, which in one of its episodes deals with Vishal's story, offers the testimony of
Paige Exelby
, a relative of a grandmother who claims to have seen Vishal with a mysterious man on a train on their wedding day real.
At that time, the grandmother called the police but no one came to question her.
The woman finished tying up the loose ends a few years later, when she saw in the newspaper the portrait of the man she had seen accompanying the child.
Vishal's photo was in the newspapers at the time.
Photo: Channel 4
The photograph of this person was there because it was nothing more and nothing less than a member of the
Dirty Dozen
pedophile gang , led by
Sidney Cooke
.
pedophile gang
The strongest theory, which was analyzed in the aforementioned documentary by
Emilia Fox
and Professor
David Wilson
, points directly to Cooke, a ferocious criminal who is now 95 years old and is still in prison.
Fox and Wilson highlighted a number of links between Vishal's murder and the Dirty Dozen's murder of 14-year-old Jason Swift in 1985.
Sidney Cooke is 95 years old and still in prison serving two life sentences.
The evidence that we are trying to show is that the boy could have been a victim of Cooke mainly for two reasons:
because the criminal wrote the word "Goodwood" in his diary on the day of the royal wedding and because there was a carnival near the place where they found Vishal's body
.
The Dirty Dozen leader used to have a booth at fairgrounds in the area and had already used his role there to commit another crime.
Cooke was mentioned by The Guardian as "Britain's most notorious pedophile".
He is currently serving two life sentences in prison, having been the leader of a pedophile ring suspected of murdering up to twenty children in the '70s and '80s.
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