Dancing with Demons

by Tim Watson-Munro

  After the separation, I became more involved with Carla. I had moved out of the family home in Surrey Hills and leased a two-bedroom apartment in Malvern. The kids would stay over and for the first time I gained insight to the pressures of parenting. I am a shithouse cook, I struggled with bathing them, cooking meals, driving them between addresses and maintaining my practice.

  Carla became increasingly involved in assisting me although it was not until a year or so later, after my divorce was finalised, that we commenced living together.

  Eventually we married in July 1991. By the time of the ceremony my father, who had travelled to Melbourne for the celebrations, had fallen seriously ill and was in hospital. We consequently had two ceremonies. The first, in his ward at the Austin Hospital, was attended by very close intimates. My dad, who was rapidly declining, was overjoyed. The second, which had been planned for months, occurred the following day. A lavish affair, I had organised string quartet musicians to herald our entrance. Vivaldi, flowers and merriment were in abundance, temporarily masking my deep fears for my father’s health. After a determined battle with pneumonia, he died exactly three weeks later.

  The sad loss of my father’s death was to an extent tempered by our daughter’s looming first birthday. Gabby – my third child and Carla’s first – was born in August 1990 and was aware from the instant of her birth. Peering inquisitively around the room I sensed a livewire was joining the family. Her brain was way ahead of her physical development. Anything her older siblings could do, she wanted to do, and better. During a later family skiing trip, Gabby was determined to keep up with her older siblings. It all came to tears when she lost control and faceplanted in the powdery snow. I bolted to her rescue, and skied down the slope with her kicking, cussing and punching me.

  Such was life between us for a fair while until Carla said, ‘You know why you two fight so much? She’s the mirror image of you.’

  The penny dropped. From that moment onwards I was more patient and understanding towards her.

  Our second daughter Laura was born in May 1993. A beautiful, sensitive child, I delighted in spending time with her. Even from an early age, she possessed an infectious sense of humour.

  By the time of Laura’s birth we had purchased a grand Federation home in Melbourne’s salubrious Toorak. It was the perfect environment to raise a large family.

  Sue would drop Jesse and Tom during the week and I would take them to school the following morning. In our own way, we all found a degree of stability and harmony. For a number of years I corralled, with a degree of success, my workaholic tendencies. During this time my marriage to Carla and my relationship with all of my children blossomed.

  The cases kept rolling in, we enjoyed family holidays – although sadly not always with all the children – and my media presence continued to grow. This was primarily because of the Hoddle Street case and also because I was good at providing the kind of ten-second grab that was considered essential for TV news.

  My anxiety as a father, however, became quite pronounced in the early ’90s when a number of young girls were abducted from their homes at night. The offender was dubbed Mr Cruel.

  Victorian Police asked me to profile the bloke, long before he became infamous. The police were concerned after a number of break-ins and rapes in the inner Melbourne suburbs. One involved the rape of an elderly nun. But it was the abduction of a young girl from her family home, after he had broken in and tied her parents, that made Mr Cruel headline news in 1988. He eventually freed the girl and she was discovered in the street clothed in garbage bags. I was given the brief. It chilled me to the core.

  The next abduction occurred less than two years later when another teenage girl was abducted from her home in the prestigious Melbourne suburb of Canterbury. I was again asked to profile the attacker’s behaviour. My prediction that the girl would be released proved to be correct. So, too, my prediction that he was becoming emboldened and that the next child may well be murdered. This occurred in 1991 when Karmein Chan was abducted. Her corpse was found the following year. Although some have argued there is insufficient evidence to categorically state Mr Cruel was responsible, I remain convinced he was the culprit.

  The personal impact of these abductions on me was enormous. I had young children, was privy to this man’s modus operandi and had a deep understanding of his highly disturbed, evil mind. He was also highly intelligent, meticulous to detail and yet to be caught. Indeed, he was never caught.

  Mr Cruel’s attacks had a broad impact on the Melbourne community. Collectively, young parents were suffering aspects of vicarious post-traumatic stress disorder. Dinner parties were cancelled, Carla and I were simply not prepared to risk being absent from the home at night. Similar anxiety was experienced and expressed by our friends. It was all fuelled by sensational headlines from the press.

  I came to realise the nature of my work was impacting on my psychological equilibrium. I found it increasingly difficult to relax at all, even when at home with the family.

  My solution, as always, was to take on more work. I realise now that this was a defence mechanism to offset my increasingly dark thoughts about the universe and humanity in general. How ironic that at a time when I should have been involved with my children to protect them, I created even greater barriers and distance through workaholism.

  THE CHILDREN OF GOD

  San Francisco has always held a special magic for me. It is an enchanted place that enjoys a spectacular natural beauty. Its soul is also captivating, acting as a seductive beacon for those who seek a tolerant understanding of their eccentricities and differentness. Little wonder that it became such a mecca for the free-spirited youth of the 1960s who, through the newfound liberation which the contraceptive pill had afforded, were able to break away from the rigidity and hypocrisy of the repressive 1950s.

  The brutal combination of free love and free peyote led to an explosion in people’s consciousness. Traditional values were fervently ditched in favour of ‘flower power’. Towards the end of the decade, however, much of the gloss of the hippie movement was fading, leaving in its wake an unfilled spiritual hole. Many were still seeking meaning in their lives.

  In 1968 Moses David was starting to make his presence felt in and about the enclaves of Huntington Beach, a small beachside town in southern California. His was a special form of religious magic, combining the teachings of the Bible with the free love lifestyle of the dwindling hippie movement. With his growing band of followers, Moses was running a slick Gospel outreach program trading as ‘Teens for Christ’.

  It was not until their influence started to be experienced on the east coast of the USA that a newspaper in New Jersey coined the description ‘The Children of God’. Within four years there were 130 Children of God communities established in no less than fifteen countries. Perhaps it was their revolutionary recruitment methods which accounted for this phenomenal success, or maybe they really were filling a large spiritual void through their outreaching. In any event things progressed swimmingly until about 1978 when Father David, as he had become known, declared a general dissolution of the movement. The organisation had become unmanageable and there was disquiet among the ranks. Three hundred community leaders were dismissed and about 2500 followers returned to secular life. All told, about one third of the membership left. The remainder opted to establish a new fellowship of autonomous communities while still maintaining some association with their founder.

  The new movement became known as the ‘Family of Love’. It was less authoritative and there were varying standards of conduct from community to community. Father David, however, continued to weave his special interpretations of the Gospel, complete with instructions on how to build up the recruit base. In essence this boiled down to an edict to ‘screw for Christ’. His writings became increasingly bizarre, as did the contortions of his logic to justify this method of witnessing and conversion.

  ‘God is love,’ he pronounced. The proof of this was available f
or all to witness in the Bible at 1 John 4:8. Jesus, he continued, personified God’s love for mankind. As a consequence, all Christian recipients of God’s love are duty bound to be living examples of the power of love. For the Bible tells you so. Citing Paul’s writings, and in particular Romans 7:4, Moses David suggested that Christians were not only free, but also obliged, to demonstrate God’s love to others through gratifying their sexual desires. It was held that by sleeping with potential converts, the recipient of this sexual pleasure would in all likelihood better accept God’s love for them.

  This became known as ‘flirty fishing’. Or as the mums and dads of Middle America saw it, ‘Hookers for Christ’, and the Family at once became the subject of renewed and intense scrutiny.

  In 1984 sexual relationships were banned with new members and the practice was unequivocally banned in 1987.

  My first introduction to the Family was in 1991.

  By that time, both the federal and state police often asked for my assistance in matters – sometimes these were requests to use hypnosis on witnesses to crimes to assist in their collection of forensic evidence. On other occasions the police would seek my input in compiling psychological profiles on undetected offenders. It hence came as no great surprise to me when I was contacted one frosty autumn morning by a senior officer with the Community Policing Squad.

  ‘Do ya know much about cults, Tim?’ he asked.

  Coincidentally, I did. A couple of years beforehand I had attended and addressed a conference of the California Psychological Association in San Francisco. During my stay I made contact with my old friend and babysitter, Evelyn Einstein, who had become nationally acclaimed in relation to her work involving cults. She had developed a thriving practice, which focused on deprogramming cult followers, in particular former Moonies. (A ‘Moonie’ was a member of The Unification Church, founded by Reverend Sun Myung Moon and established in the 1970s. He had claimed that he was chosen by Jesus to create pure families by arranging for strangers from divergent countries to marry in mass ceremonies. Although viewed by most as an object of ridicule, his powerful and insidious influence grew during this decade, resulting in thousands of vulnerable teenagers and adults being indoctrinated by the cult. During this time of high jinx and exploitation, the good reverend made billions of dollars.)

  Evelyn had described to me, in harrowing detail, the methods employed by cult leaders to recruit and then brainwash new members. Often the only salvation for these people was if their parents kidnapped them from the compound and took them to deprogrammers such as Evelyn. The process would involve days of breaking down the barriers and slowly returning the member to a sense of perspective and reality.

  By the sergeant’s account, the Family and all that they represented posed an immediate threat to the nation’s security. Apparently a former member had grown disenchanted with life inside a Family commune but his wife repeatedly refused to leave. With time, the friction between them escalated, culminating in a bitter separation. By his account, the Family then interfered with his contact with his children and sabotaged his attempts to reconcile with his wife. The distraught father had evidently filled the sergeant’s head with mind-blowing tales of sexual debauchery involving not only the adults within the group but also their children.

  My brief was simple: to assess all the members of the man’s family in order to test the reliability of the claims and to make a recommendation in relation to the children’s placement.

  There are many claims made in the case regarding the values and behaviour of the Family. The disenchanted father had alleged that at one time twelve children had shared the one bedroom. There were also allegations of communal showers for children, a lack of privacy and inappropriate sex education involving a classroom discussion on masturbation. It had been claimed that some children had witnessed adults engaged in sexual intercourse. It was further alleged that the children were at times exposed to harsh psychological punishment involving ‘Silence’ where, according to the father, other family members would ignore the child being so punished for weeks at a time. The Family’s kids were allegedly separated from their parents and placed in different ‘schooling’ houses according to age.

  Some of these behaviours had in fact been discussed in Father David’s epistles, using his own unique brand of logic when interpreting biblical passages. In order to justify adultery between consenting members, the Family relied heavily on scriptures. Father David encouraged it, citing, for example, 2 Corinthians 5:17 claiming that members were ‘new creatures in Christ’. His argument was that ‘to the pure, all things are pure’ (Titus 1:15) and that loving sexual relations between consenting adults as a consequence are not a sin in the eyes of God. Citing Galatians 5:14, 22, 23 – ‘thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ – he urged that the Mosaic Laws against fornication and adultery were thankfully not binding: ‘For the fruit of the spirit is love . . . against such, there is no law.’ On a more troubling note, he also questioned if it was evil and wrong for a mother or other caregiver to put a child to sleep by stroking his penis.

  Although I was described on my school enrolment form as being Church of England, in reality I had been raised in a secular home environment. My parents were both trained in science and my father was the ultimate empiricist: ‘If you can’t see, measure, or quantify it, then until proved otherwise it doesn’t exist.’ On reflection he was probably agnostic, because despite his occasionally scathing analysis of religious dogma, he left the door open for a conversion if these criteria were ever satisfied.

  Despite my own brief periods of spiritual awareness, I had developed a healthy scepticism of organised religion. I knew I would have to be more aware of my own prejudice during the case, and keep it to one side in order to maintain my objectivity. Initially, this was not easy. The father’s allegations were very serious and, at first blush, credible in the context of the extensive and wacky literature which Moses David had disseminated over the years. By the time I finished reading it prior to my first session with the kids, I had convinced myself that they would present to me as dangerous, manipulative automatons not dissimilar to the spooky little children portrayed in the classic movie Village of the Damned.

  I was to be sadly disappointed. The children were delightful. It took some time, however, for me to become convinced. The first time I met them, their answers to my gentle questions concerning their day-to-day activities had seemed too correct, seemingly well-rehearsed and with very little variation from child to child.

  ‘They’ve been brainwashed for sure,’ I excitedly reflected. I had neglected to consider the possibility that the children were highly suspicious of me and consequently nervous and guarded in their responses. And most people, when facing a tough and potentially life-changing interview, generally rehearse their answers to anticipated questions beforehand. This dawned on me some days after the initial interview.

  ‘Slow down, Doc,’ I chastised myself. I realised I was looking for evidence that would confirm the police case against them.

  At the next session we were all more relaxed and the children seemed to be more spontaneous in their interactions with me. The police were concerned that the children had been programmed to not only dislike their father but, more insidiously, to have completely surrendered their free will. If this was the case, they could easily have been trained as sexual slaves. The police were understandably troubled. I took the opportunity to observe the children in the company of each parent to test for any signs of Parent Alienation Syndrome (brainwashing a child against a parent) or programming.

  There was no evidence of brainwashing and, although by some measures the philosophy and lifestyle of the Family was at best eccentric, there was no indication to me that this was a cult, as claimed, nor did I discover one scintilla of evidence to support the serious claims of a sexual nature. My report said as much. The children were allowed to remain with their mother, with normal visitation rights to the father.

  Several months later, there we
re co-ordinated, simultaneous raids on their Melbourne and Sydney homes at the break of dawn. All of the children had been coerced into waiting buses manned by eager social and welfare workers and were then taken to various government locations. To add to the sense of drama and urgency, the media had been alerted prior to the raids occurring. Their choppers hovered above, in a scene more reminiscent of Vietnam than the outer suburbs of Melbourne. It made compelling television.

  The devastating scenes of frightened kids being dragged from their beds by well-intentioned, though in my view misguided, instruments of the state turned my stomach. I was bewildered. The report that I had compiled for the Victorian Police had been comprehensive and ultimately favourable to the Family. I had believed that it had put to bed many of the concerns that had been expressed by the authorities. I had naively assumed that was the end of the matter.

  The raid had been cunningly planned for a Friday. This was of vital strategic importance for the Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for the raids taking place. By 4 p.m. that day the courts would adjourn for the weekend. This would make it logistically far more difficult for lawyers who had been hastily briefed to act for the Family to ensure the kids could return home for the weekend. This in turn would allow their captors a clear two days to interrogate them in order to obtain damning evidence of abuse. At the time of the raids, all the government agencies had to go on was rumour and innuendo.

  Both sides meant business. In their desperation, the Family made contact with the Victorian Legal Aid Commission. This was at a time when governments took the right of all citizens to be equally represented at law seriously and adequate funds were always available to ensure this. The commission briefed Robert Richter QC, a formidable advocate. The government also clearly took their position seriously. They briefed Frank Costigan QC and a junior barrister, Ian Freckelton, to represent their case. At this point no one from the Victorian Police had made contact with me. I presumed that they were aware of the report I had prepared before. Some months later, I was peeved to learn my report had been ignored or perhaps buried. News of my report’s existence was, however, somehow leaked to the defence, causing some nervous paper shuffling at the Bar table.