by Denis Ryan
UNHOLY
TRINITY
The hunt for the paedophile priest
Monsignor John Day
DENIS RYAN and PETER HOYSTED
First published in 2013
Copyright © Denis Ryan and Peter Hoysted 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available
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ISBN 978 1 74331 402 9
eISBN 978 1 74343 261 7
Set in 12.5/17 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Australia
This book is dedicated to the victims of Monsignor John Day
AUTHORS’ NOTE
No doubt some will say that this book reveals a streak of anti-Catholicism—a pernicious attack on the faith and a certain sign of the deeply embedded prejudices of its authors. However, it is the authors’ belief that the Roman Catholic Church is fundamentally a force for good in this world.
Yet in this story lies a tale of almost unimaginable depravity committed by one of the Church’s foot soldiers. That Monsignor John Day, the priest discussed in this book, was a prolific criminal and Australia’s worst sex offender is indisputable. What is not known and must be understood is that Day could only have plumbed these sordid depths with the active collusion of members of the Roman Catholic Church and elements of the Victoria Police force. The default setting for both institutions was to protect the image and reputation of the Roman Catholic Church, and to be dismissive of Day’s sins, without regard for his victims. By their collusion, these institutions unleashed a psychopath on unsuspecting communities—a psychopath who could offend at will and without fear of the consequences. Even when his behaviour became widely known, Day was merely placed into temporary exile, and his crimes hushed up before he could return to prey yet again on children.
This book is called Unholy Trinity because, while Day raped and assaulted children alone, his evil could only have continued with the support of an active conspiracy involving police and the legal system. In Mildura in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the other members of the triumvirate were a senior detective, James Barritt, and a clerk of the courts, Joseph Kearney. These three men rode roughshod over Mildura for thirteen years. Any attempt to bring a member of the triumvirate to justice was met with fearful retribution from the other two. They created an almost unshakeable structure that allowed the three men to pervert the course of justice and intimidate the community with impunity.
More widely, elements of the Victoria Police force would be called on to do their duty—not to the citizenry they served but, in the words of a police detective who tried to recruit Denis Ryan into this shadowy group, ‘to defend the Cathedral’. In the force’s black humour, it became known as ‘the Catholic Mafia’. It is hard to understand why these policemen took the directions they did and perverted the course of justice for the sake of themselves and their religion. What these police officers did was, in itself, criminal. The fact is that there were no consequences for the perpetrators of these crimes within the force because the perpetrators were also the investigators.
The evidence of complicity at senior levels of the Church hierarchy is overpowering. It has broken not only the criminal law codes but also its own canon law. The crimes committed by Monsignor John Day were not only a state felony but also a mortal sin, according to the Church’s own teachings. It is hoped that this book will make people question why the Church sanctioned sexual crimes against its children by some of its priests. These crimes involve the most disgusting and sickening acts against children.
Finally, we would like to point out that we have protected the identity of many of Day’s victims by not giving their real names, and also by changing some of their personal details.
DENIS RYAN AND PETER HOYSTED
FOREWORD
This is a saga of intrigue, stupidity, incomprehensible behaviour and heroism.
More particularly it is the story of the stoical bravery of Denis Ryan in the face of a trinity of resistance from his own department, the Catholic Church and his own generally apathetic community.
It raises the moral issue of a church that demands unquestioning obedience from its clergy and adherents; the status and validity of canon law over the civil code; and the preservation of the reputation, and moral authority, of the Church against the interest, and welfare, of the victims of a paedophile priest.
It questions the logic, morality and judgment of transferring an offending priest into a similar professional environment with his sexual proclivities unsupervised, thereby providing a further occasion to offend. This in the pious expectation that the reformative would run some natural course and God’s servant would be restored to virtue.
Denis Ryan is a very courageous and determined man. In his career as a police officer he never wavered from the strongly held belief that no person is above, or beyond, the law. His veneration of this maxim cost Denis his career, his marriage and his faith.
An exemplary and practising Catholic, he first encountered his nemesis John Day in disgraceful circumstances in the streets of St Kilda in 1956. This first meeting was a test of his belief in the universal goodness of all clergy and all things Catholic, and in the above stated maxim. It was a rude awakening for the young, conflicted constable.
How the paths of the two men collided in spectacular fashion many years after the St Kilda meeting, and how others became enmeshed in this complex and squalid story, is the stuff of fiction.
Yet it is no fiction. This story is the true and honest account of one man’s frustration and eventual despair as he tried to bring a cruel and malicious man to appropriate justice.
It is a story that examines the culpability of high-ranking police officers, who should have known better; people of God who acted covertly, reprehensibly and unlawfully, to protect one priest and the status of the Church and in doing so wreaked untold damage to its cause.
And it is a story of the specific damage and distress that these so-called men of the law and of God caused their respective institutions in their attempts to cover up the rot at their core.
More importantly, perhaps, it is a story that, while specifically dealing with this one incident, gives rise to all sorts of questions about the extent of the rot and the damage caused throughout the wider community.
Denis Ryan was also damaged as a result of this harrowing and brutal saga. In his eighty-second year now, he is a man around which the demons of stress and panic hover closely. He has suffered immensely over the decades because he knows that in the thwarting of his investigation, greater suffering was caused to those much more vulnerable and defenceless than he.
Denis Ryan emerges untarnished from this harrowing saga. We should all be grateful to this brave and persistent man, who by his revelations has contributed to making us better people and the world a better place. In the words of Robert F. Kennedy in his eulogy to Martin Luther King Jr: ‘To tame the savageness of man
and make gentle the life of this world.’
BRYAN HARDING
Chief Superintendent Victoria Police (Ret.)
Secretary Victoria Police Association (former)
February 2013
CONTENTS
Authors’ note
Foreword
Prologue: An extraordinary coincidence
1 On the beat
2 Ditching the uniform
3 The deep north
4 Confessions
5 Power without glory
6 The Catholic Mafia
7 The smother
8 A brush with scandal
9 Bloodied but unbowed
Afterword
Day and the darkness: three victims speak
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE:
AN EXTRAORDINARY COINCIDENCE
They have learned nothing
and forgotten nothing.
TALLEYRAND, 1754–1838
I’m Dinny Ryan and I have just turned 81 years of age.
God only knows how the events described in this book happened. Were they preordained? I am a man of unwavering faith in my God, so I have to believe that I was destined to clash with the paedophile priest, Monsignor John Day.
Others will call it a matter of coincidence. If that’s the case, it was an extraordinary one.
I collided with Monsignor John Day twice. The first time was on the streets of St Kilda in inner city Melbourne when I was in the company of two fellow uniform police officers. Day—drunk to the eyeballs, his cock out—was with a couple of well known prostitutes from the area. That was in 1956. I was barely out of the academy. The second time was in 1971, when I was a detective stationed in Mildura, in north-west Victoria on the Murray River. I’d conducted an investigation into Day’s paedophilia. I found witnesses and obtained statements from his victims. I had him banged to rights. But on both occasions Day walked away.
John Michael Joseph Day was already a priest when I was born in 1931. He had made his way through the Corpus Christi College in Werribee, a shining edifice for the future priesthood established by that great defender of the Catholic faith, Archbishop Daniel Mannix. At the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse, Professor Des Cahill from RMIT prepared a submission that revealed that, of the 378 priests who graduated from Corpus Christi between 1940 and 1966, 14 have been convicted of child sexual abuse and 4 more, who have since gone to meet their God, were also abusers. By my rough arithmetic that’s 1 in 20—about forty times the number of sex offenders in the general community.
Day isn’t included in these statistics, because he graduated from Corpus Christi in 1927. He was assigned to his first parish, Colac, near Geelong, in 1936, having spent the preceding years as a young priest at Ballarat East. Day rarely moved out of the Ballarat diocese from that time on. The diocese stretches from Portland in the south-west through to Bacchus Marsh and north through Ballarat and Bendigo all the way up to Mildura, excepting Geelong and Melbourne.
After Colac, Day was sent to Ararat, then Horsham, Beech Forest and Apollo Bay before being dispatched to Mildura. There he spent fifteen years, standing over the community, helping himself to parishioners’ money, committing complex fraud and wantonly raping children. While I wouldn’t learn of his crimes until 1971, I have since discovered that Day was an active paedophile throughout most, if not all, of his priestly existence. He preyed on hundreds of victims and committed thousands of offences.
Day and I grew up worlds apart. He was born in Warrnambool twenty-seven years before me. I was born in Sydney and raised in a household that took an even view of religion. My mother, Emily, was a Seventh Day Adventist. My father, Francis, had endured the worst humanity had to offer on the fields of Flanders. He was on the front lines in the Somme for a year and a half before a bomb exploded in his trench, the shrapnel tearing his knee apart. He didn’t have much truck with religion after that.
Life was hard for the family in Depression-era Australia and my mother turned to the nuns at St Finbar’s in Sans Souci for support. The nuns were kind to her and as a result I was raised a Catholic. Even though I would learn that some priests behaved disgracefully and some criminally, I have remained a Roman Catholic and I will die a Roman Catholic.
I served as a detective in the Victoria Police force for sixteen years. By the time I transferred to Mildura, I’d investigated and charged murderers, rapists, vicious gunmen. I’d been shot at, stabbed and on one occasion even kidnapped by the Melbourne hoodlum, Harry ‘The Horse’ Gribbin. But I’d never come across anything like the situation I found in Mildura—Monsignor John Day, the parish priest, was at the centre of an evil that defied human understanding.
That a man, let alone a priest and, in Day’s case, a monsignor (a colonel in the Catholic army) could commit crimes of such violence against children challenged my faith and cost me the job I loved. This man used his office as a means of enforcing his sexual perversity on young children. He raped, sodomised and committed acts of gross indecency on children as young as eight.
For the victims, it was not just the pain of rape and sexual assault. These children were deeply traumatised, their lives set on a road to oblivion. There were suicides and lives lost in reckless abandon; other children were dispatched to a living hell of trauma and sorrow.
As a spiritual adviser to his flock, Day was able to wield his perverse influence. He imposed himself upon parents who believed him to be a man beyond mortal sin. The children he raped kept their silence. He threatened and bullied them into submission. They understood the power he held over them, knowing they would not be believed.
It did not occur to the vast majority of people, be they parishioners or those out of the spiritual reach of the Church, that a Catholic priest would behave in this way. I suppose it was just too difficult to contemplate. At first, I did not believe it either and, when I did, I found it almost impossible to comprehend.
Day’s victims were easy to find, though they were often reluctant to speak, at least at first. They felt a victim’s shame of the crimes perpetrated upon them, and dreaded someone uncovering Day’s dark secrets. They understood the power of the Catholic Church and that they were powerless to challenge it. They felt alone.
The allegations of sexual assaults and rape against Day became known to me by increment. First one victim, then another and then more came forward until I had the evidence to charge him. These people had courage—that rarest of commodities in today’s world. Sometimes their parents had rejected their accusations, adding to their injuries with their own beatings. Other victims who had told their parents were not believed. Most had remained silent.
When I explained to them the magnitude of Day’s depravity and how his crimes threatened to turn more lives on end, the victims understood that this creature’s crimes must come to an end and that he must be brought to justice. Ultimately, twelve people provided signed statements detailing rape and abuse at the hands of Day.
As a police officer, I had been given a bird’s eye view of the dark side of the human spirit. I had investigated child sex offenders previously and put them away. But the detail provided in the statements gave me an ugly view of these offences. I could see Day preying on these children. I could envisage him touching, fondling and raping these kids. I felt their terror at the realisation of what was happening to them. My blood boiled.
I flirted with the thought of fronting Day on the steps of the presbytery and belting him around the head with a lump of four by two. I was capable of it—I had belted plenty of crooks. And he was a crook, but much worse than the standover men and violent bastards I had encountered in Melbourne.
My real interest—and some have described it as an obsession—was to bring Day to account for his manifest cruelties and the lives that he had effectively destroyed.
The Catholic Church weighed heavily over many of our lives and it brooked no argument. The Church is two thousand years old and the oldest manifestation of Christianity, but in many ways it
behaves like a cult, with its charismatic leadership and forced disconnection for followers who have been judged to have strayed from the path. Its authority pervades from cradle to grave.
The Catholic education system in Australia has made a unique contribution to the intellectual and academic life of the nation. Yet at a spiritual level it has churned out proselytes—many with a zealot’s gleam in their eyes. These people have emerged in positions of authority—in government, in the judicial system, in all levels of bureaucracy and in the police. These people—some of them great, most of them good—preferred not to contemplate that the Church’s gatekeepers—its parish priests—could commit these crimes against children. Whether it was through fear or other forms of control, Catholics could not see the wood for the trees.
In some cases, they did know and chose to do nothing or, in the most egregious cases, they acted as the Church’s foot soldiers, protecting priests like Day from examination.
Day believed that he had been ordained by a superior power to be the supervisor of our morals, but he was a man without the first semblance of morality. He may have joined the Church despite his unconstrained sexual perversions, or perhaps because of them. What he knew implicitly was that the authority that came with being a priest verged on the absolute; his crimes against children were unlikely to be exposed.
While Day acted out his depravities on his own, he did so under the protection of the Catholic Church. Bishop James Patrick O’Collins had been Day’s mentor within the Ballarat diocese, one that unleashed an epidemic of paedophilia—more often than not from Day and Gerald Ridsdale, a self-confessed child rapist and paedophile priest.
Ridsdale raped and assaulted hundreds of victims in western Victoria. Whenever the allegations started heaping up against him, the Church simply transferred him. In the 1970s and 1980s he committed thousands of crimes against children across Australia and around the world. In 1994 he was convicted of numerous counts of buggery, indecent assault and gross indecency, and sentenced to eighteen years in prison. As more victims came forward, he faced additional charges, and in 2006 he pleaded guilty to further counts of buggery and sexual assault. His non-parole sentence was extended by four years in 2006.