Journalist's investigation keeps serial offender in prison after four men report assaults

Ros Astengo is a journalist in Gibraltar who writes about politics and social issues. In 2020, when the Parole Board recommended that Allan Grimson be moved to an open prison—a step toward his eventual release after serving more than two decades for murder—she found herself facing a choice that would reshape the trajectory of a case everyone thought was closed.

Grimson had been locked away since 2001 for the sexual abuse and murder of two young Navy men, Nicholas Wright and Sion Jenkins, both in their late teens and early twenties, killed in Portsmouth in the late 1990s. The sentencing judge had called him a serial killer in nature if not by number. But there was something else in the file that troubled Astengo as she began researching a book about another missing sailor, Simon Parkes, who had vanished in Gibraltar in 1986 when Grimson was there. During his original police interviews, Grimson had admitted to sexual contact with four other young men and boys—three sailors and a teenager. The Crown Prosecution Service had never charged him for those offences, reasoning that he was already facing a life sentence and would serve decades regardless.

Astengo was disturbed by what she found. Here was a man about to walk free, having never faced justice for a string of other assaults. She knew the risks. She was putting herself, as she later said, in the crosshairs of a dangerous man. But the alternative—remaining silent while a serial offender returned to the community—felt worse. "It would have been so easy for me to have just done nothing," she said. "But I thought to myself, how would I feel if as soon as they let him out he reoffended and harmed another young man."

She tracked down one of the four men Grimson had assaulted decades earlier. When they met, she found someone still carrying the weight of what had happened—angry, hurt, and only now, as an adult and a parent, beginning to understand that he had been groomed. Astengo told him he could file a fresh complaint. She warned him it would not be easy. He went to the police anyway. When initial inaction followed, Astengo contacted the child sexual abuse review panel, which examines allegations of non-recent offences. The panel agreed the case warranted re-examination. Detectives then tracked down the three other men. In February 2025, Grimson was charged.

The trial that followed, which lasted a month, became a window into how far the criminal justice system has moved. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was routine for serious sexual allegations to be dropped if a defendant already faced a lengthy sentence for more serious crimes. Now the state considers it its duty to pursue them. The case also illuminated a darker history: until the turn of the century, gay people could not serve openly in the armed forces, meaning some of Grimson's victims had stayed silent out of fear they would be discharged if their assaults became known.

Grimson's legal team argued that charging him now, a quarter-century later, was unfair—a tactic to keep him imprisoned and block his parole. They also attacked Astengo, suggesting she was motivated by profit from her forthcoming book. The prosecutor, John Price KC, urged the jury to disregard what he called conspiracy theories and reminded them that good journalism serves justice. On Monday, the jury found Grimson guilty of 13 sexual offences. Judge Dugdale described him as an extremely dangerous man in the 1990s and ordered reports to assess whether he remains a serious risk today. Sentencing is set for November.

Astengo said the defence's suggestion that she was chasing money was false. Every trip to the UK came out of her own pocket, taken as unpaid leave. She would make little, if anything, from her book. "For me, it was about justice and to prevent a serial offender from being released," she said. The four men who came forward were, in her words, incredibly brave. They had reopened wounds that had never fully healed, brought their trauma back into the light, and stood in court to be heard. Because they did, and because one journalist decided the public interest mattered more than her own safety, a man who thought he had escaped accountability will likely spend years more in prison.