Was this woman murdered to cover up Cyril Smith's sex ring?

Carole Kasir ran a gay-friendly guest house in the late 1970s
and early 1980s where gay men could
meet in safety and privacy

We found him living in a shabby block of flats of the kind you don’t imagine exists in the genteel Thames-side suburb of Teddington.

Noel Coward was born a couple of streets away, but the tattooed man in a grubby vest did not belong to the same world as the composer of Mad Dogs And Englishmen.

David Issett was the epitome of a washed-up pub bruiser. Under a wrinkled dome covered with crew-cut white hair, his eyes were both calculating and evasive. What the f*** did we want,  going around asking questions about him and his family, he asked?

What we wanted, in fact, was to hear what the unpleasant Issett could tell us about his former lover, a woman called Carole Kasir, and the notorious gay brothel which she once ran in nearby Barnes.

And the reason? Over the past week, the Mail has serialised Labour MP Simon Danczuk’s chilling new book about the late Liberal politician Sir Cyril Smith. The book revealed Smith’s genuinely horrifying, decades-long reign of terror and sexual abuse involving scores of young, vulnerable boys — as well as the Establishment cover-up that kept his crimes hidden, which included the police, politicians and even MI5.

One of the revelations in the Danczuk book concerns Smith’s secret patronage of Elm Guest House. This was the business run in the late Seventies and early Eighties by David Issett’s friend Carole Kasir and her husband Haroon, in an elegant terrace property on Rock’s Lane, overlooking Barnes Common.  (more...)

Was this woman murdered to cover up Cyril Smith's sex ring?