‘There was also the guy from up at St Paul’s school …’
‘Kevin John Lynch?’ I asked.
Lynch, a Brisbane paedophile who had preyed on pupils at Brisbane Grammar School and later St Paul’s school at Bald Hills, was a school counsellor before he was arrested and charged on several counts of child sexual assault. He, too, had gassed himself to death in 1997 before his case went to trial.
‘Yep, that’s it. He was in there.’
Smith said he counted at least 120 names on the ‘Associates’ list. He said they included members of the legal fraternity, teachers, academics and even Queensland police officers. ‘I stopped counting at 120 and there were still more cards,’ he said. ‘He had an exceptional network around Australia and if you look at the cards it looked like he was feeding them and they were feeding him. I mean holy shit, he must have been a great court reporter … he just seemed to record everything that was going on …’
Smith said while the bulk of ‘Associates’ names were local, there were others from across the country on file. ‘There were two sort of things – there were the index cards and then on top of the index cards, there was a paper list,’ he said. ‘He had all their index cards in one of his drawers, and they had their names, most of them seemed to have post office boxes, they didn’t seem, from the ones I remember … most of them were just PO boxes around the place. I don’t remember too many actual home addresses or that sort of thing, but he had … underneath all this information about them, that’s where he had, you know – the date and something sent, something received, something sent, something received and all that sort of stuff in the cards underneath.
‘Some of them had a few cards stapled together, too, it wasn’t just one card, so obviously he’d had some sort of relationship going with some of them for a while.
‘When you looked at the paper list, he had them grouped in cities or in areas and that’s where … most of them were based around the capital cities like Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne.’
Officer Smith said that after four or so weeks of going through the Howard-Osborne files, there seemed a sudden urgency and a degree of panic among his superiors. ‘As we started going through this stuff they started to realise what we had and it was more, “Hurry up, we need you to do this … stay out of this, stay out of that … don’t go near that pile,”’ Smith recalled.
‘And it just went like that until the day that we were in the room … and some Special Branch bloke turned up and told us that … Special Branch was taking it over.
‘And we said, “Huh?”, and he said, “Yep, it’s been decided from up high”. It was implied that they could make better use of this material … so it was all going to be bundled up, taken to the Special Branch … and they would use it as they saw fit.’
Both Smith and his partner returned to their suburban station. But Smith couldn’t let it go. He’d seen the files. He’d done the maths. More than 2500 victims. He believed it was incumbent upon him to try and contact as many of them as possible and make sure they were okay, to check on their welfare. He rang his superior at the JAB and said if they weren’t going to go after the paedophiles then what about looking after some of the kids?
‘This guy interfered with massive numbers, I mean, you know, what sort of psychological damage would that have done?’
It was soon after that call that Smith was threatened. ‘They threatened my family and that was it, I caved,’ he said. ‘My police partner and I talked about it later, but then we stopped talking about it as well. Seriously, it has ripped me apart; it broke up my marriage, you know I mean you just can’t talk to people because I was always terrified that if I talked to someone and they knew about it, it would put their lives in danger.’
Officer Smith has never been able to understand Howard-Osborne’s suicide. ‘Why would he kill himself?’ he puzzled. ‘He seriously thought he was not doing the wrong thing, and also I can’t help but think that in the back of his mind he would think, “Well hold on, I’ve got all these lists of associates, all me mates, they’ll look after me.” What’s the sense in having all those friends if they’re not going to help you out in a time of need?’
Smith reflected that for all intents and purposes the files had disappeared off the face of the earth and would likely never surface again. ‘I can understand why a lot of blokes who were involved in this don’t want to talk about it because they don’t want to bring it back up. They don’t want to admit to anyone, particularly themselves, that they may have done something that is just reprehensible. That’s what I think of myself. I am just so ashamed of what I did by not standing up to these people.’
The Envelope
Every universe has its black holes, spaces where light cannot escape. I learned, over the years, that the Three Crooked Kings story was no different. There were black holes in the timeline of this narrative, and with the forward progress of each minute, each day, each year, any form of satisfactory explanation was left further and further behind, possibly beyond reach.
To my mind, the most prominent unresolved events during that era were the supposed drug overdose of Shirley Brifman in March 1972; the true mechanics behind the Whiskey Au Go Go fire in 1973; and the gassing death of Clarence Henry Howard-Osborne, in his car in the garage of his house at Eyre Street, Mount Gravatt.
Had Howard-Osborne suicided? Or had the suicide been on the orders of police who knew what was in his extensive files – most notably, a list of local and interstate paedophiles who were in concert with his activities? That information was extraordinarily powerful, and if put in the wrong hands could have at the very least destroyed hundreds of distinguished careers.
But how was it possible to press your face against the window of a moment in time like this, a quiet suburban death in the early hours of the morning almost 40 years ago? Who found the body? When did the police arrive, and who were they? Who searched the house and took away Howard-Osborne’s files? And where were the files now, these elusive documents, these records of more than 2500 boys abused and photographed by Howard-Osborne and his fellow paedophiles, 10,000 photographs, kilometres of secretly recorded conversations, and the index cards and lists exposing his co-conspirators?
Time had moved so far on from that singular moment on 12 September 1979, that it was only a smudge in history.
Then, just as I was at the point of abandoning the historic case, my investigative leads seemingly exhausted, an Eyre Street neighbour told me that Howard-Osborne had left his entire worldly belongings – his house, car, photographic equipment, furniture, everything – to that kindly boy who used to mow his lawn and look after his budgerigars all those years earlier.
With a little luck, I eventually found the beneficiary to Howard-Osborne’s estate and he and his wife agreed to speak to me briefly on the telephone on the condition of the strictest anonymity.
Would I finally be able to bring some clarity to that death, and the impact of his ‘life’s work’, the lost files that continue to reverberate into the present?
In the conversation that followed I initially spoke with the wife, who relayed my questions to her husband with hearing difficulties. ‘I’ve been looking into Clarrie for years now,’ I said. ‘And it’s been exhausting but … it has obviously led me to you and your husband just in relation to the mystery of that night that Clarence Howard-Osborne killed himself.’
‘Well, you’ve got a few facts wrong in your story you had in the Courier-Mail a few weeks back …’ the wife said.
I told her I’d be happy to correct any errors if she could offer factual details.
‘Well, what are you trying to find out?’ asked the wife.
I explained that I had been researching Howard-Osborne’s life, from his birth in 1918, through the war years and into his career as a court reporter, but also his other life, with the thousands of boys, and the records he compiled. I asked them about their friend
ship with Howard-Osborne: ‘Why do you think Howard-Osborne befriended you?’
‘We were very close friends with Clarrie, he was like family to us … he adopted us because he had turned his back on his family,’ she said. The wife said Howard-Osborne had rejected the Mormon Church ‘and hence he was excommunicated by them’.
I said I was aware that Howard-Osborne’s parents had divorced in the 1930s or 40s, which was slightly unusual for the time. And that he had a problematic relationship with his mother. But he had twin sisters who he loved.
‘Never spoke about them,’ she said. ‘Did he ever have contact with his twin sisters?’ she asked her husband. ‘One of them … so, yeah.’
The wife explained how her husband had mown Howard-Osborne’s lawn for him when he was a kid, ‘because his mum and dad couldn’t afford to give him pocket money… he used to go and mow Clarrie’s yard and … he used to look after Clarrie’s budgies for him and help him with those.
‘And then he [Howard-Osborne] just became like part of the family … he was just sort of always there, in the sense [that] if we had family functions or anything. We had him at our wedding. He watched our kids grow up until he passed away, and this is where some of the photos I believe … according to stories I’ve read over the time … even baby photos among them, well they’re probably photos of our kids, which we were always present when he took photos. So … we’re just having a tough time accepting that he’s this major crime figure from around the world.’
I asked them about his studio in the backyard. ‘Did he develop his own pictures?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘So, one of those little sheds [in the backyard] was just like a developing dark room or something like that?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, he had one shed for developing his photos but the rest were all bird cages.’
‘Okay, and did he have gym equipment? Someone said he had gym equipment … he was very fit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Was he a lonely man?’ I asked, trying to get a sense of Howard-Osborne’s character.
‘Wouldn’t say lonely … he always led a solitary type of a life but, yeah, he had girlfriends … I don’t know … we sort of never talked about why his … was he engaged at one stage? Because that strand of pearls he’d given me, I had a feeling he had bought for one of his girlfriends and they split up, yeah. How can I put this … he did have a lot of interests, like he worked full-time, long hours, with his court reporting and Hansard and that, and then when he went over to parliament …’
I remarked that he was considered a great court reporter.
‘Yes, oh, he was brilliant,’ the wife said.
‘So he had a big brain, obviously.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘And did your husband or you … did he entertain you in his house?’
‘No, we used to go in to visit him if we were over that way, or he’d come out here for meals every so often after we were married and moved out here …’
‘Did you ever see his files, these so-called files that he kept?’
‘I didn’t, but my husband did I believe …’ The wife related the question to her husband, ‘You saw Clarrie’s files?’ I heard her ask her husband. ‘Yes,’ she said to me, ‘some of them.’
I asked them if Howard-Osborne had kept files as long as he knew them, at least stretching back into the 1950s.
‘Nothing ever got thrown out but he was planning on using all of the information he’d gleaned in conjunction with other people around the world, not in that sense, but just with the development side of things … he had doctors,’ the wife said. ‘Didn’t he have? He had a doctor over in the Continent somewhere that was very interested in all of his findings.’
I asked them if they thought Howard-Osborne at any point feared he was going to be arrested for his activities.
‘No … he wanted it all to go to the fellow overseas apparently … because of the time and the effort that he had put into it over the years.’
‘I’m told he was a HAM radio expert?’
‘He did HAM radio for a little while.’
She said Howard-Osborne was also a huge fan of CB radio, and used to talk to people from all over the world. One neighbour said Howard-Osborne would get on his radio late at night and simultaneously play his classical music at high volume, prompting numerous complaints over the years.
‘Do you remember if Clarrie ramped up security on his house in that last year before he passed away?’
‘Not as far as I know …’
‘And do you remember the last time you saw him prior to
12 September 1979?’
‘Oh, it would have only been a matter of days, probably.’
‘And there was nothing different about him that you could tell, or was he just the same old Clarrie?’
‘We didn’t pick anything different with him. Yeah, it was only that last couple of days when the police picked him up because of that woman in the park.’
‘Do you remember how he came to the attention of the police?’
‘Yeah, well, he loved taking photos and as far as I know he was in the park at Mt Gravatt there taking photos … I can’t imagine they would have been anything untoward being in public … and the mother got upset … that is what my understanding of it is.’
‘The mother telephoned the police to complain about Howard-Osborne?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we don’t know the details behind all of that, it’s too long ago and we’ve sort of buried a lot of these memories.’
This was yet another version of events surrounding how Clarence Howard-Osborne originally came to the attention of police. Criminologist Paul Wilson said in his book on Howard-Osborne – The Man They Called a Monster – that a suburban mother had overheard her son telling a friend that a man called Clarrie had photographed him naked, and that mother in turn told a friend who happened to be married to a police officer, and a sting was put in place to catch Howard-Osborne in the act. Another story had Howard-Osborne picking up the son of a senior Queensland public servant and attracting police attention that way. Now we had him being reported in a public park.
‘The night that he died, he’d been into the police that day, hadn’t he?’ the wife asked her husband. ‘Yes, as far as we know, they had contacted him. We didn’t know how, why or whatever.’
I asked if they knew who found Howard-Osborne at his house that morning.
‘Well, Clarrie did ring us about … oh, two or three o’clock in the morning …’
‘Do you remember what he said to you?’
‘I don’t remember word for word, he just rang to say goodbye and told us what he was going to do. And don’t try and stop him and yeah … we just said goodbye.’
‘What was your first reaction to that?’
‘Well, we just both sat and cried for a while and then I eventually, or a little while later, rang Holland Park Police Station … and told them what was happening and they virtually said, “Well, we’re not running a baby service, a child minding service …” So about five o’clock in the morning [her husband] went in and the milkman had just found him … he’d just rung the police. And the police arrived while [her husband] was there.’
I asked if Howard-Osborne had given any indication as to why he might have wanted to kill himself.
‘He just knew … the way his records would be misconstrued,’ she said. ‘Which as it turns out [was] spot on … He just knew how they would be taken and they wouldn’t have seen the value in them and that was what he was concerned about most, that they would … [Her husband] was supposed to send them all overseas to this doctor, but once the police arrived that was it and also there was … yeah, there was an envelope up in one of his cupboards – we’d never ever seen the contents of [it] – but over the years he’d always said, if anything happens to me, grab that because that ha
d stuff in it, information in it that could hang a lot of people in parliament and police …’
The wife said unfortunately her husband couldn’t get into the house in Eyre Street to get the envelope before the police got there.
‘Had Clarrie told your husband about that [the envelope] sometime earlier?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, we’d known about the existence of that file for quite a few years.’
‘And Clarrie never explained about the importance or the gravity of that particular file in the envelope?’
‘No, he didn’t want to get us involved in the sense of if we didn’t know what was in it there’s nothing could be done against us so he never ever told us … just that if anything ever happened to him to grab it and make our own decision what to do with it …’
‘Over the years, have you made a supposition as to why that would have been a dangerous document?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ the wife said. ‘Once it all settled we just sort of … seeing as we couldn’t get hold of it we figured, well, the police have got it. But who was in it or what was in it, we never knew.’
‘It was just in a cupboard in the house?’
‘Yeah, in the top of one of his cupboards in the house, in his lounge room.’
‘I wonder why he didn’t destroy it before he died?’ I queried.
‘Maybe he was counting on [her husband] getting there and collecting it. I don’t know what was going through his mind.’
The envelope possibly contained the infamous ‘list’ that had moved about through history, been sighted by at least two Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB) police in late 1979 and again in late 1980, before disappearing. Did it make its way into the safe of Police Commissioner Terry Lewis, before he was stood down and then dismissed in the late 1980s, as some people had theorised over the years? Was the list a part of the documents that I had heard about as I was writing All Fall Down, the ones that had come into the possession of police chaplain Walter Ogle, also in the 1980s, before it was lost once more, perhaps for all time?
Little Fish Are Sweet Page 23