‘World’s worst foster mother’: Global hunt for British woman who handcuffed seven-year-old girl to a chair and starved a six-month baby amid police fears she was linked to paedophile ring in Philippines

A British woman believed to be linked to a paedophile ring for sex tourists in the Philippines is on the run from police after abused children as young as six months old were found living in squalor in her home.

Lilian May Thomson, 66, has fled her remote rural home in Subic Bay, and is suspected of escaping overseas using a second passport or hiding in the Philippines despite warrants for her arrest.

Now child protection campaigners have called for an international search for Thomson who they believe may have vital evidence about a major paedophile ring that peddles children for sex tourists in the sleazy Barrio Barretto red light area of Olongapo in Subic Bay.

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Scottish-born Thomson, dubbed the ‘world’s worst foster mother by investigators’, was arrested in July 2014 when law officers and social workers went to her ramshackle tin-roofed home in remote countryside and found five Filipino children, including a malnourished baby boy aged six months and a girl of seven who was kept tied to a chair.

Hard-drinking Thomson – who has several aliases and is known locally as Sherry Zimmer – allegedly hurled abuse at the investigators, threatening them, and bizarrely threw a ceremonial spear at them after grabbing the half-naked children and shutting herself inside the house.

The children were taken to hospital where examinations concluded two girls aged seven, a girl aged six and a boy aged seven had all suffered sexual abuse.

The boy later told how a male visitor to the house sexually abused him and took naked photographs of him.

In interviews with psychologists, the girls – who like the other children appear to have been allowed to live with Thomson by poverty-stricken local families – described being taken to parties in Barrio Barretto where they say they were molested by men they called ‘uncle’.

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Despite the children’s evidence, Thomson was cleared of charges of child abuse and illegal detention and released in the middle of 2015 after spending almost a year in custody.

She was cleared after her defence lawyers argued her home was raided without a search warrant and evidence of abuse such as the girl found tied to the chair was not admissible because of the ‘unlawful entry’ by the officials.

Her lawyers interviewed the children’s parents who later gave statements claiming they gave their permission for their children to live with Thomson and that they were treated well by her and not illegally detained.

Police attempted to re-arrest her on two warrants for assaulting officers but have been unable to trace her. Court officials in nearby Olongapo confirmed Thomson was now considered a fugitive and would be arrested on sight.

MailOnline visited Thomson’s home and found it abandoned with rows of empty brandy bottles outside and a sign next to the back door apparently directed at the children in her care reads: ‘No Whining’. Thomson’s abandoned car was parked outside and had been stripped.

Two local families said they had been hired to guard the property but knew nothing of Thomson’s whereabouts.

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‘We thought she was still in jail,’ one woman said. ‘We have been asked to guard the house until she gets out.’

Thomson, a mother of two, is originally from Dunfermline in Scotland and lived in the US for some years and has both American and British passports.

She appears to have had a succession of young children and babies living with her since moving to the Philippines in 2001.

She claimed she decided to set up a children’s charity called the Scott Foundation to care for underprivileged children in the Philippines after the death of her younger son, but the foundation is unregistered and Thomson has no childcare qualifications.

Her arrest came after the three children, one of them half-naked, wandered into a girls’ home near Thomson’s house, run by children’s charity, the Preda Foundation, in July 2014.
A Preda therapist spoke to the two girls and was shocked to discover they did not know their real names and only knew their nicknames.

They also had no idea why they were being kept at Thomson’s house and how long they had been there.
Preda alerted social welfare and National Bureau of Investigation officers who then raided the house and removed the five children inside. All five of the children are currently still in care.

Father Shay Cullen, a Catholic missionary who started the Preda Foundation to fight child sex abuse and exploitation more than 40 years ago, said he believed Thomson may have knowingly or unknowingly been manipulated by a paedophile ring.

‘The little boy testified very clearly using anatomical dolls that a man took pictures of him naked in the shower and abused him,’ he said. ‘The abuse of children by sex tourists is a huge industry and she is the key to finding the big players involved in this.’

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Father Shay said he hoped international law enforcement agencies would help re-arrest Thomson if she had fled the Philippines so that any link with a paedophile ring could be properly investigated.

Thomson was made to surrender her U.S. passport after her arrest but may have left the Philippines using her British passport, he suggested.

He added: ‘The children in this case have suffered terribly but they have not had any justice yet and that is what we want to see.’

Barrio Barretto in Subic Bay, where the U.S. once had a major naval base, is notorious for underage prostitution and has dozens of mostly American-owned bars popular with western sex tourists.

International children’s charity UNICEF estimates that 100,000 children a year, mostly from poor families, are forced into the sex industry in southeast Asia.

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