LONDON — Former BBC star Jimmy Savile was one of Britain’s "most prolific" sex offenders, committing at least 214 sex crimes against victims aged as young as 8, police said Friday.

Investigators released a report cataloging more than 50 years of rapes and indecent assaults. It accused the late television and radio host of using his celebrity status to gain access to vulnerable children in hospitals, nightclubs and even a hospice for the terminally ill.

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Almost all the allegations have been made since Savile’s death in 2011, even though the offences date back as far as 1955.

The revelations have triggered a scandal in Britain and prompted a string of public inquiries into how some allegations were not properly investigated while Savile was alive.

"It is now clear that Savile was hiding in plain sight and using his celebrity status and fundraising activity to gain uncontrolled access to vulnerable people across six decades," the police-led report said. "For a variety of reasons the vast majority of his victims did not feel they could speak out and it’s apparent that some of the small number who did had their accounts dismissed by those in authority including parents and carers."

Savile, who raised an estimated $55 million for charity, achieved fame on BBC shows including "Top of the Pops" and "Jim'll Fix It." In 1990, he was given a knighthood by Britain's Queen Elizabeth and received a Papal Knighthood at the Vatican.

The offences span 28 police forces across the U.K. and the scale of his abuse is so vast that the report included a map and an index of the alleged locations.

The number of people Savile victimized "simply beggars belief," Peter Watt, co-author of the report [PDF link] and director of children’s charity NSPCC told ITV News.

"He is without doubt one of the most prolific sex offenders we have ever come across and every number represents a victim that will never get justice now he is dead. But with this report we can at least show his victims that they have been taken seriously and their suffering has been recognized."

In total, more than 450 have people have come forward to police with allegations of abuse involving Savile. Most but not all victims have been interviewed and to date 214 criminal offences have been formally recorded. They included 34 rapes or serious sexual assaults, according to the report. The last incident recorded occurred in 2009. His victims ranged in age from 8 to 47.

The report concluded:

“The details provided by the victims of his abuse paint the picture of a mainly opportunistic individual who used his celebrity status as a powerful tool to coerce or control them, preying on the vulnerable or star-struck for his sexual gratification. Sadly, this type of behavior is not uncommon in any society - sexual abuse, whether in street gangs, though trafficking or within families and institutions, often involves the use of powerful coercion, intimidation and manipulation to exploit the vulnerable."

In a separate development, Britain’s most senior prosecutor apologized to some of the women abused by Savile, revealing that police missed three chances to take him to trial while he was alive.

Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said police had been "unjustifiably cautious" investigation four allegations involving girls as young as 14 who said they were abused by Savile in the 1970s.

He said he hoped the organization’s internal review would prove to be a "watershed" moment in the handling of child abuse cases.

In a statement, he said:

"Many people feel that for sexual offences, where it is 'one person's word against another's' and there is no or little scientific or other evidence to support the allegation, no prosecution should be brought. But this is to ignore the reality of many sexual offences which, by their nature, do not usually take place in front of witnesses and result in no meaningful scientific evidence. Taking a cautious approach to all complainants, on the ground that some might be making a false allegation of a sexual offence, can have the consequence that a prosecution for a true complaint may not take place."

Related stories:

'A steep fall' for BBC as child sex abuse scandal rocks the UK

Jimmy Savile abuse scandal stuns Britain: a who's who primer

Report: Pop star arrested in connection with Savile abuse case

Paul McCartney's ex-wife said Thursday a voicemail that CNN talk-show host Piers Morgan boasted of hearing had been illegally hacked.

Morgan has consistently denied he authorized the use of phone-hacking in his days as a tabloid newspaper editor in Britain. He has not offered an explanation for how he came to hear the message left on Heather Mills' mobile phone.

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The accusation has dragged Morgan into a phone-hacking scandal which has damaged Rupert Murdoch's media empire and has had wide ramifications for the entire British press.

Giving evidence to an inquiry into British media ethics, Mills said she had left a house she shared with McCartney in early 2001 after they had had a row and turned her phone off.

The next morning she said she had received about 25 messages on her phone, all of which appeared to have been listened to, including one in which McCartney "sang a little ditty of one of his songs." She said she deleted the messages.

Later that day, a reporter called her to say he had heard the couple had argued and that McCartney had left a message in which he sang to her. This, she told the inquiry, could only have come from her phone being hacked.

The inquiry was told the unnamed reporter was a former employee from the Trinity Mirror Group though not from the Daily Mirror, one of the group's papers, which Morgan edited from 1995 to 2004.

Asked if she had ever made a recording of McCartney's call or had played it to Morgan herself, Mills said: "Never."

Mills, a former model who married McCartney in 2002 and divorced six years later, said Morgan, "a man that has written nothing but awful things about me for years," would have relished telling the inquiry if she had played a personal voicemail message to him.

Giving evidence in December, Morgan, who bragged about hearing the message in a newspaper column in 2006, refused to say who had played him the recorded message of the call, saying he was protecting a source.

Morgan left open the possibility that the voicemail had been played to him with Mills' approval, but Mills said Thursday that was impossible. "Never," she said. "Never ever."

Morgan also edited the now defunct News of the World tabloid at the center of the hacking scandal from 1994 to 1995, though his tenure was before the practice became rife. He has boasted that he knew about phone-hacking well before the scandal broke, but subsequently said he was referring to rumors.

Morgan has written in his diaries about a "little trick" for eavesdropping on voicemails that he heard of as early as 2001.

One former Mirror employer has told the inquiry hacking was widespread on the paper when Morgan was editor, and Trinity's chief executive has said some reporters might have secretly engaged in the practice.

The phone hacking scandal shook Britain's police, who were accused of failing to investigate allegations that Murdoch's News of the World tabloid had hacked into the phones of thousands of people, including celebrities and murder victims to get stories.

It was also an embarrassment for British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had hired a former News of the World editor as his spokesman.

Reuters, the Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this report.