For many years, hunting for prey was the singular pursuit of the owners of Lochdhu Lodge. The 48-room gothic mansion in northern Caithness was designed as a plaything of the nobility, where the wealthy elite of Victorian society would go to indulge their passion for bloodsports.
They would do so surrounded by a sense of solitude almost unrivalled by the peace and tranquillity of their Highland retreat. Remote scarcely begins to describe its location deep in the heart of the Flow Country, Britain’s last untouched wilderness; even today, it takes an age to get there down a 14-mile private driveway.
Being so far from prying eyes has similarly suited the current proprietor, betting millionaire Kevin Booth, albeit his desire for privacy stems from a far more sinister place.
For years, Booth lured women – mostly young, vulnerable and foreign – to this isolated lair where he has subjected them to violent and degrading attacks, some of which were described by a sheriff as ‘utterly harrowing’.
Much of the abuse was meted out in the form of so-called punishment beatings for supposed transgressions of Booth’s own twisted set of house rules. Much of it took place in an underground dungeon specially created in the cellars of the B-listed mansion by Booth to gratify his sexual perversions.
Court papers stated this subterranean chamber, accessed via a trapdoor and a 200ft-long curved concrete tunnel, contained ‘an empty coffin, life-size ancient Egyptian figures and a metal bench’ to which Booth, who is obsessed by Egyptology, handcuffed his victims before thrashing them mercilessly.
On other occasions he would travel the world trawling for victims he could beat with a variety of implements, including canes, wooden brushes, riding crops and belts, and with such ferocity that it would draw blood. All the while, he would film their screams of pain and terror for his own private collection. Detectives would later recover 341 such ‘home videos’.
Now, two recent court cases, including a landmark legal ruling, have exposed the horrifying scale of the danger posed by Booth’s shameful depravity.
Kevin Booth lured women – mostly young, vulnerable and foreign – to Lochdhu Lodge and subjected them to violent and degrading attacks
Indeed, so seriously do police and prosecutors consider his predatory instincts that they sought – and won – the first-ever worldwide travel ban against a named individual in Scottish legal history, preventing the wealthy businessman from setting foot abroad in a bid to curb his abusive behaviour.
The court ruling said the 65-year-old had carried out ‘a systematic course of conduct of acts of human trafficking and exploitation’ over many years.
Sheriff Neil Wilson’s judgment mentions more than one video shot in Booth’s dungeon, including an 18-minute-long film of a ‘young black woman’ handcuffed to a ‘red-and-black metal contraption’ crying hysterically and writhing in agony as Booth tells her to ‘pray for the strength to take it properly’. This, the sheriff concludes, ‘appears to be nothing other than torture’.
Worryingly, the judgment also mentions Booth having applied ‘financial pressure’ on a woman to withdraw a rape allegation in Ireland.
Whether the ban succeeds in protecting women from the torturer’s clutches remains to be seen. Last month, Booth was convicted of attempting to induce one of his housekeepers into engaging in sexual acts against her will in exchange for cash. He will be sentenced on that matter later this month.
Together, the cases have reinforced fears about Booth’s willingness to exploit any legal loophole he can to satisfy his savage urges.
His long history of offending, which already stretches back more than three decades, begs the unpalatable question – will it be enough to hold the ‘Beast of Lochdhu Lodge’ at bay?
As one former partner, Tammy Conner, who claims she suffered years of abuse at his hands, put it: ‘One of these days he is really going to hurt someone and they are going to end up dead or are going to kill themselves. He just seems to get away with things because he is rich.’
Police sought – and won – the first-ever worldwide travel ban for a named individual in Scottish legal history against Booth
Booth is undoubtedly wealthy. Obsessed with horseracing from an early age, the former maths teacher’s uncanny ability to spot a winner combined with his arithmetical prowess allowed him to cash in on a racing tipster service he founded in the 1990s.
By then, though, his brutal nature had come to the attention of UK law enforcement following complaints about the treatment of children aged between 11 and 15 at a private boarding school he founded with his Malaysian first wife, Nancy.
As headmaster of £900-a-term Greybrooks, in Newbiggin, on the Northumbrian coast north of Newcastle, he would punish the slightest transgression by pupils with horsewhips, bamboo canes and an 18in ruler. Stories of the strict regime at the school, run from a church hall and two terrace homes, filtered back to parents who soon began to complain about their children’s rough treatment.
The council eventually took the ten boarders – eight boys and two girls from Nigeria, Malaysia and India – into care and the school was closed, while Booth was charged with common assault but fled to India while awaiting trial. Once there, he set up a similar school, advertising for pupils as far afield as Botswana in southern Africa, which were flagged up by concerned British diplomats.
On his return to the UK, in 1994, he was convicted at Newcastle Crown Court of five charges of common assault against children and another of failing to surrender to bail. At his trial it emerged he told one mother that she was ‘mollycoddling’ her 13-year-old daughter when she complained about the thrashings. The court heard he initially told police he had hit some 12 and 13-year-olds ‘to promote and safeguard the children’s welfare’.
Prosecutors said his chastisement was of a level ‘inappropriate not only in this day and age but in any day and age’. Booth escaped prison but was handed a three-month suspended sentence. He gave up teaching, but not his fondness for the cane.
His career took a new course after Booth made a name for himself as a leading racing tipster.
His business, Isiris Racing, earned him millions as he emailed tips to punters for an annual fee of up to £1,500. He boasted of counting MPs and at least one Royal among his clientele.
His former partner, Tammy Conner, has alleged she was caned and whipped by Booth for four years from the age of 16
A glimpse into his overweening egoism emerged in one 1997 interview, when he declared: ‘I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I am probably the greatest racing tipster the world has ever known. That’s why my salary is in seven figures. What I do is inspired – it’s hard to put into words.’
By the late 1990s, he was dividing his time between his mansion near Keighley, Yorkshire, his office in the grounds of stately Broughton Hall in Yorkshire, and his newly purchased holiday getaway, Lochdhu Lodge.
The mansion was originally built for Liberal MP and landowner, Sir John George Tollemache Sinclair, an ancestor of Lib Dem peer Lord Thurso, and remained in the family for almost a century.
In the 1940s and 1950s, it was used as a hotel for exclusive hunting parties and a hideaway for the great and good, boasting guests of such stature as wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill.
Booth spent £150,000 on renovations, adding a swimming pool and sporting complex, and for a time, he was even hailed a local hero after forcing Royal Mail to reverse a decision to stop regular postal deliveries to the scattered community of Altnabreac.
Booth once described Lochdhu as like living in a ‘fairytale castle out of Disney World’. It’s a view few of his victims would share with most who crossed his path reporting something closer to a nightmare.
In 2001, Booth was finally jailed for two years after he was convicted of indecently assaulting his 27-year-old Brazilian au pair in his Yorkshire office within days of starting her job.
Bradford Crown Court heard the woman had been recruited over the internet to look after his two young children, but Booth swiftly reverted to type, threatening to horsewhip her if she refused to have sex with him.
He showed her a video of himself beating a young African woman on her bare buttocks to convince her that he would follow through with his threats.
The woman, who feared she was going to be raped, was taken to Bradford police station by Booth’s secretary, who found her in a petrified state.
Others have since come forward with similarly distressing and near-identical accounts of Booth’s violent predilections.
His former partner, Tammy Conner, has alleged she was caned and whipped by Booth for four years from the age of 16.
Ms Conner, now 44, said she first met him after spotting an advert in her local paper in 1997 that read: ‘Models required for race meetings.’ She was one of several teenage girls who were driven to race meetings in England and Scotland and plied with alcohol.
Ms Conner said in a BBC interview: ‘Then he’d suddenly try and kiss you or something. If you said no, he’d say you had a punishment; my punishment was 20 lashes with a cane.’
She alleged she was led to a sofa bed in Booth’s office and noticed a video camera on his desk, which recorded the beating. She said: ‘Every time he hit me, I had to say, “Please sir” or “Thank you, sir”.’
She claimed Booth was doing this with all the girls at work. ‘We were 16. We were kids. He effectively groomed us all,’ she said.
She and Booth, who have three grown-up children together, separated in 2016 but maintained contact and Ms Conner did not report Booth to authorities.
That year, however, she was convicted of a breach of the peace against him, although she was later admonished. Booth dismissed his former partner’s accusations about his behaviour as laughable and insisted he had been the victim of domestic abuse and ‘coercive and controlling behaviour’ at her hands.
Whatever the truth of that, he had already moved on to other targets. In early 2018, a European woman was taken on as a maid by Booth. She told the BBC she was soon summoned to his office where he demanded a sexual massage, telling her: ‘If you do this, you will get more pay.’
She agreed to the request because she needed the money, but later she was presented with a new contract of employment which stated she could be ‘punished’ if she did something wrong.
Her first ‘offence’ was serving a chicken dinner that he didn’t like.
Her punishment was being smacked ‘really hard’ on the bottom with a brush. ‘I could not sit for a couple of days, she said. She chose to speak out to save others from ‘that horrible man’ and reported Booth to police in 2019.
They searched Lochdhu Lodge, but the evidence they gathered was apparently insufficient to secure a criminal conviction and proceedings against him were discontinued in March 2021.
Nevertheless, there was deep disquiet about the disturbing content of the videos. Most appeared to have been filmed in foreign hotel rooms in South Africa, Dubai, Sri Lanka and the Philippines – beyond easy reach of UK law enforcement – but at least two were labelled as having taken place in Booth’s cellar.
Earlier this year, Wick Sheriff Court heard a civil action raised by Scotland’s most senior police officer, the then-Chief Constable Iain Livingstone, against Booth seeking to tether his movements in a bid to minimise his contact with potential victims.
In February, Sheriff Wilson granted a Trafficking and Exploitation Risk Order for a period of five years, which required Booth to surrender his passport to prevent him travelling abroad.
The sheriff said there was evidence Booth had targeted economically vulnerable women with messages that ‘explicitly mentioned payment for submitting to beatings’.
Sheriff Wilson imposed draconian measures, including a requirement for Booth to inform police 14 days before hiring any female employees with officers notified in advance of any female visitors to his home. Police were also granted powers to carry out welfare checks at his home to check on the safety of any staff.
None of the women beaten in the videos gave evidence in the civil case.
But in his judgment, Sheriff Wilson said that from 1998 to at least December 2022 Booth had ‘engaged in a consistent course of conduct of recruiting women, both from the UK and abroad, for the purposes of isolating them, either at Lochdhu Lodge or elsewhere far from their homes, and thereafter submitting them to violent beatings and forcing them, through threats of violence, to perform sexual acts on him’.
Last month, in a stark reminder of the threat he poses, Booth appeared at Wick Sheriff Court and denied repeatedly offering a housekeeper money for sexual massages in 2022.
Sheriff Principal Eilidh MacDonald found Booth guilty of the charge under the Sexual Offences Scotland Act after the court heard his 38-year-old victim had secretly recorded damning conversations on her phone in October and November that year.
His sentence was deferred until November 25 and he was placed on the sex offenders register.
For now, Booth remains at his lodge overlooking Loch Dhu – the ‘black lake’ in Gaelic.
Only his dark soul knows whether his hunt for quarry is finally at an end.
