BRITAIN: The Hermit of Les Ecr

A new moon shone that Saturday night in March 1960 in St. Martin, a picturesque dot of a town on the coast of Jersey, largest of the bucolic Channel Islands. As the village slept, a silent intruder broke into a small cottage, abducted a 14-year-old girl from her ground-floor bedroom and led her to a nearby field, where he raped her and nearly strangled her by twisting a rope around her neck.

The girl's ordeal was only the latest in a series of similar horrors, and it sent waves of fear through the area. It was not long before those fears found a focus: brawny, broad-shouldered Alphonse Le Gastelois, a sometime woodworker and full-time eccentric who lived alone in a tumble-down St. Martin cottage. Le Gastelois had no friends. Most nights, he could be spotted in his baggy clothes, loping along St. Martin's roads and footpaths. What was he up to? "I love nature," he would say. "I listen to the sounds of the dark and the silence."

Soon Le Gastelois began hearing other sounds. As the months wore on, bringing five more unsolved sex crimes, suspicion turned to hostility and then violence. Le Gastelois was stoned and spat upon when he walked through the village. Hooligans tore his cottage apart. By the summer of 1961, he had had enough. He fled to a stony, wave-swept reef seven miles offshore known as Les Ecrehous (the Rocky Islets). On his barren refuge, no larger than a football field, he learned to subsist on lobster, crab and boiled sea lettuce, plus gifts brought by curiosity- seeking tourists. "Only by going away could I clear my name," he would tell them. "I was sure the terrible attacks would continue and my innocence would be recognized."

Uncle Ted. Le Gastelois was right on both counts. Nine more attacks occurred after his flight, bringing the total to 21, on young boys as well as girls. Last week, after more than a decade of terror, a three-judge Jersey court convicted a St. Martin building contractor, Edward Paisnel, on 13 counts of assault, rape and sodomy in six of the attacks. His sentence has not yet been determined.

It was not surprising that Paisnel, 46, a balding, mustached man, had escaped suspicion for so long. Though he fitted the few scraps of description offered by the victims—rough hands, a habit of softly muttering "Jesus"—Paisnel was a respected businessman, husband, and guardian of several foster children. Every year, "Uncle Ted" faithfully appeared at the local orphanage, dressed as Father Christmas, I! I to hand out sweets and toys.

On other occasions, it later developed, his costume was quite different. Last July police caught him in a stolen car. He was wearing a jacket studded with nails at the shoulders and on the lapels, and had with him a rubber mask, a woman's wig and several lengths of rope. "I belong to a religious secret society," he explained feebly. "I'm on my way to a sex orgy."