A top police officer who secretly watched sex threesomes, abused partners and threatened to have a woman chopped up evaded detection by moving jobs, a hearing was told.
Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Boulter “slipped under the radar” after failing to disclose full information in vetting procedures.
The Crown Prosecution Service dropped an inquiry in 2012 but police say such a case would be treated differently now after the scandal over London armed officer PC Wayne Couzens who killed Sarah Everard in 2021.
Boulter, who joined up in 1999, was due to face a South Yorkshire misconduct hearing this week over seven charges relating to voyeurism, coercive control of partners, failure to disclose his gambling addiction, association with a crook and criminal investigations against him by two forces.
But the £60,000-a-year officer resigned on the eve of the hearing, sending his barrister to admit seven serious allegations on his behalf.
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John Beggs KC, for South Yorkshire Police, said it was “a story of repeated failures” by the force and Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire.
Boulter failed to disclose criminal inquiries against him during vetting when he left Northamptonshire to join Lincolnshire Police in 2015 and did the same in a switch to South Yorkshire.
The panel said the seven allegations amounted to gross misconduct and Boulter would have been dismissed if he had not resigned hours earlier.
Mr Beggs said one of six women involved claimed Boulter coerced her into threesomes that he would watch without consent. Another said he would spit in her face during sex and threatened that relatives would “chop her into little pieces and bury her in her back garden”.
She added: “For some reason, he had continued to slip under the radar.”
Northamptonshire began a voyeurism probe in 2012 and Lincolnshire’s investigation into coercive control and threats to kill was started in 2018 – but that force did not inform the CPS.
Mr Beggs said South Yorkshire’s vetting unit had access to and knew of the investigations yet within two years Boulter had been promoted to DCI.
Detective Sergeant Natalee Starbuck, of Northamptonshire, said: “Had the allegations been looked at today, some 12 years on, there would have been a very different outcome.”
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