Darren Carvill is now known to the world for serial fraud and embezzlement with multiple convictions and is now serving a three year prison sentence for fraud. He’s ruined himself sufficiently over his career that I don’t think he counts as a private individual anymore and I no longer have to respect the privacy of my weirdo former maths teacher.

Mr Carvill was one of the worst teachers I ever had. He started as my school as a newly qualified teaching graduate and was one of those people who loved maths, and became a teacher to pay the bills. He told us that he had been disciplined at university for poor attendance because he hadn’t turned up to any of his lectures because they didn’t have anything to teach him. He was clearly very good at maths, and terrible at teaching. He also blatantly played favourites in class and would spend large portions of lessons sitting on a table talking to the popular girls with his back to everyone else. He was the worst.

When Mr Carvill left our school, he told us it was because he couldn’t afford Essex and so was moving to Kent. And he left at the end of the summer term along with a bunch of other teachers.  And that was that.

For about eighteen months, when suddenly word went round school like wildfire that Mr Carvill was on trial for kidnapping and having sex with a Year 9.

I know who this Year 9 was, we all did, but I never spoke to her or her friends about it. It was obviously beyond mortifying for her and I found the rumour mill deeply dissatisfying. So I attended the trial.

Over three days sitting in Chelmsford Crown Court, I got to experience the criminal justice system and how it worked. There was a jury, judges with wigs, evidence being laid out step by step, cross-examination of Mr Carvill, the only witness. It was super interesting and contributed to my nascent interest in law.

My school was not impressed that I skipped school to attend the trial of their former employee and I had to have a meeting with the Deputy Head. It was legal to leave school at 16 at the time so she had no way of stopping me. But it became apparent in that meeting that she thought I was personally reporting the trial to the press. I had to explain that there was actually a reporter sitting next to me in the public gallery. Not the only one learning about how the court system worked that day!

 

When this is now only the third worst hit for your name on Google…
  • Kent Online, January 2006, Sacked teacher: I didn’t have sex with pupil
  • There is also an article from the Chelmsford Chronicle which is not available online and I have a physical copy of that I clipped at the time and will, at some point, upload.

 

Mr Carvill was convicted of abduction but not of having sex with the Year 9. He freely admitted he had taken her ice skating and for a walk in a field, but denied absolutely that he had had any sexual contact with her. It did seem rather unlikely from the evidence, and having missed the day of the trial in which she had given evidence remotely, I believed then that the girl had made that up under pressure from her mother, who was also employed at the school. It seemed to me that this was the story of a schoolgirl crush that Mr Carvill had handled utterly irresponsibly and had spiralled out of control.

Now he’s all over the papers for stealing money to hire sex workers to make him “feel better”, I’m not so sure about that.

I went to his sentencing hearing as well. Hilariously, there was only one bench outside the courtroom and I had turned up 45 minutes early – and so had the defendant. And so, although I sat down and pretended to read my book, I had to spend 45 minutes hearing Darren Carvill, his sister, and his lawyer, talking about how he had a bright future in accountancy and this was all some terrible misunderstanding caused by a silly girl wanting attention.

At the hearing, Mr Carvill’s lawyer said that he was committing never to teach again and that he was going to work in accountancy. The judge issued a suspended prison sentence, court costs and said that he was unable to put him on the sex offenders’ register. And that was that. I kept an eye on the news and his Facebook account, but seemingly he had genuinely gone off to a quiet life as an accountant.

Until 2019.

It turned out that Mr Carvill had indeed sought a quiet life as an accountant, but didn’t want a quiet life at all. Feeling miserable and sorry for himself, he had started embezzling funds from his employer, a Mr Clutch franchise, to pay for escorts and parties. Realising he was about to be caught during an audit, he stole as much as he could access and blew it all in one weekend. Eventually he was caught and sent to prison for two and a half years. He ultimately stole £262,000, none of which he paid back.

I was attending the wedding of a high school friend a few days after and seemingly everyone had already found out. Who knew Mr Carvill had it in him?

The pandemic took our minds off petty matters but I roughly remembered when his sentence was likely to end and I posted to Facebook in December 2021:

 

 

Mr Carvill’s Facebook went dark and I googled him occasionally but I genuinely thought this had to had been a wake-up moment for him, and we wouldn’t hear about him again.

Until 2024. Another wildfire.

[Can I please acknowledge the legwork done by Kent Online to gather this information was blatantly appropriated and reprinted as an “exclusive” by the Daily Mail. Spending the day at a succession of tedious court hearings is often the only way to find out about these kinds of news stories which I don’t see the Daily Mail funding journalists to do and this is why we need to support local news outlets. I subscribe to my local paper and you should too.]

 

After getting out of prison in June 2021, Darren Carvill had changed his name to his mother’s maiden name, Medhurst, and gone to live with his parents in Kent. He got a job as a financial assistant for 360Travel Ltd without disclosing his history. He then embezzled £76,000 from them, and when caught, blamed his father’s recent passing, and his mother’s decline from dementia.

He was caught by 360TravelLtd due to his increasingly erratic behaviour, and the police were called. He was released on bail pending an investigation, and while under police investigation for fraud, got a job at a Holiday Inn where he talked his way into once again being in a financial role and stole £13,000 from them which he spent in another “weekend of madness” in June 2023 after managers found out he had lied about his history and had set up a meeting to prove his identity.

He went on the run and was finally caught a month later lying face-down drunk on a verge by the police. He told them he did it because he was trying to “make himself feel better”.

 

He was finally convicted in 2024 and sent to prison for another three years. He was working at a Toby Carvery who, for some inexplicable reason, put in a character reference for him during sentencing that he was a “valued and supported” restaurant shift supervisor.  Presumably they hadn’t yet decided to move him to finance.

I decided to write this article because Kent Online, the local paper who covered all of this, evidently had someone at the sentencing hearing who reported in their article that Mr Carvill had 57 prior convictions, of which 52 were for fraud, covering almost his entire adult life. They managed to pull up a conviction that we had known nothing about that he had received a suspended prison sentence in 2011 for embezzling money from a travel company. Totting these up from what we know from this media coverage:

  • 2005: 2 counts of abducting a child – Chelmsford Crown Court – suspended prison sentence, community service and court costs
  • 2008: 34 counts of unspecified “financial dishonesty” – Maidstone Crown Court – suspended prison sentence
  • 2019: 18 counts of financial fraud – Maidstone Crown Court – 2 1/2 years prison sentence
  • 2024: 3 counts of financial fraud – Maidstone Crown Court – 3 years prison sentence

I am posting this here because I noticed that 2+34+28 is not 57, and there are 3 counts missing from this which are not part of the cited previous 52 convictions for fraud. I am unclear if this is misreported and the journalist had added the 3 most recent convictions to this total and just miscalculated. I also know that Mr Carvill was acquitted of 2 counts of statutory rape.

But it does also seem to me at this point pretty unlikely with this history that Mr Carvill managed to go 11 years without committing any crimes at all, and I will leave this here in anticipation of Mr Carvill’s release, when he will no doubt immediately try to return to his life of crime. His parents are deceased, he was evicted from his family home, and I can only assume that he has no contact with his remaining family given he reported he was homeless at the time of his last arrest. Journos are going to google him, and I hope they will find this article and be able to clear this up question.

As that fourteen year old who had to learn maths from the worst maths teacher in the world, I have been following these stories with astonishment that Mr Carvill apparently has such charm, and compelling lawyers, that he has now committed the same financial fraud three times using the same methods and the same motives, and still has people making statements to court that he’s a good man, really.

For businesses running background checks: if you employ Darren Carvill/Medhurst, he will work hard, he will get on with his colleagues, he will display his maths talent, he will transfer to your financial department and then he will rob you. Even while he’s on bail for fraud. Even while he is on trial. To make himself feel better.  You have been warned.