by Denis Ryan
Day and Ridsdale were the worst sex criminals this nation has seen. They were able to commit their crimes because the diocese chose to obfuscate, frustrate and obstruct any attempt to have them brought to justice. They were free to commit their abominations because they had the active protection of their bishop.
When complaints against paedophile priests became too loud, Bishop O’Collins moved them on to new districts and new parishes, where Day and Ridsdale, in particular, were able to commit their crimes again. And even though O’Collins knew that Day had raped children in Apollo Bay in the 1950s, he didn’t move Day away from angry and disillusioned parishioners and into anonymity. He nurtured and sponsored him, transferred and promoted him, sending him to Mildura, where he was promoted to dean then finally monsignor. When O’Collins retired in 1971, Bishop Ronald Mulkearns replaced him as bishop for the Ballarat diocese.
I admit to many failings in my life. As a detective investigating Day, naivety was one of them, at least at first. I did not anticipate the lengths to which the Catholic Church would go to cover up for one of its own. But as the evidence against Day mounted, I informed Mulkearns. He knew that I had victims’ statements. He knew that I had a case against his paedophile priest. But the bishop dismissed the allegations with a haughty wave of his hand. Mulkearns advised that Day had been interviewed by the police and Day’s denials were considered enough. The victims were ignored, their pain dismissed as the slander of mischief-makers. And Day was free to continue raping children in Mildura.
But it wasn’t just the Church that allowed paedophile priests like Day to continue their sordid conduct unchecked. I later found that a group of police officers, known as the Catholic Mafia, actively suppressed investigations into paedophile priests. Although these officers nominally reported to the chief commissioner, they really owed their allegiance to St Patrick’s Cathedral.
Back in the 1960s, two detectives in Brunswick had investigated a priest from the Don Bosco Youth Centre in Sydney Road for child sex offences. I knew one of the detectives well. He told me many years later that he had arrested the priest, and was in the process of placing him in the watch house, when along came Detective Chief Inspector Jim Rosengren, a senior CIB detective based at Russell Street in Melbourne. Rosengren asked one of the detectives what was going on. The detective explained that they were in the process of charging the priest with a string of child sex offences, including buggery. Rosengren, a strident Catholic, told the two detectives that he would take over the investigation. The two detectives were shocked and not a little annoyed by the intrusion. When they queried Rosengren, he said: ‘I’m taking over and that’s a fucking order.’
And that was that. Nothing ever came of it. The priest was not charged, and was free to go on and commit further crimes against children.
I wondered how it was that Rosengren found himself in that place and at that time. I can only guess that he had been tipped off, either by the Church or by other police at the Brunswick station.
There are many other examples—some not of collusion but of a reluctance to pursue charges against priests. Many senior coppers knew they would be hard against it trying to get a priest to court.
There was Bill Hower, a detective senior constable, who had spent twenty years in the Homicide Squad. He was a decent bloke. In the 1960s, after his tenure in Homicide, he ended up in Horsham, where Day had once been the parish priest. Many years after my battle against Day, the Catholic Church and the coppers who protected him reached a climax, Bill rang me. ‘You’ve got more guts than me, Dinny,’ he told me. ‘I copped some of this when I got to Horsham but I didn’t follow it up.’
Hower was referring to a number of complaints he had received of child sexual abuse perpetrated by Day. Bill had arrived at Horsham after Day had been moved on. He regretted not pursuing Day, but believed that somewhere along the line the Catholic Mafia would intervene and make Bill an offer he could not refuse.
Another case involved Col Mooney, a detective sergeant at Bendigo in 1975. Col had received information that Gerald Ridsdale had sexually abused a young boy living in the area. Mooney’s investigations were stymied when the parents of the boy refused to allow him to be interviewed by police. Col took his concerns to the Catholic hierarchy. The result was that Ridsdale was simply moved along to another parish, where he would prey upon a new group of unsuspecting children.
I always thought I was a city copper. I enjoyed investigating serious crime. I relished the thrill of the hunt. If I’d had a choice I wouldn’t have sought a transfer to Mildura to become a country copper. But that decision was more or less made for me.
When I got to Mildura in 1962, I had to make a go of it, because I knew I’d be there for a long time. On my first day on duty in the town, I was shown around by the senior detective in Mildura, an especially bullish sergeant and devout Roman Catholic called Jim Barritt.
Barritt was a hulking man. No amount of warning could have prepared me for meeting him in person. He was 185 centimetres tall and 140 kilograms. His head was huge. A shearer’s cook could have squeezed Barritt’s head into the pot and made enough soup for the entire shearing season, and still have had plenty left for the dogs afterwards. Standing alongside him, I felt like David to his Goliath. The only problem was I didn’t have a slingshot.
Just one day into the job at Mildura, I had Barritt yelling and ranting in my ears, defending Day and belittling me.
Welcome to Mildura, I thought. This is going to be fun.
It wasn’t, but at least I’m still alive to tell the tale.
1
ON THE BEAT
Oh! What a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive.
SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1771–1832
By 1956 I had been a copper for four years, having come to the job through a circuitous path. I’d always wanted to be a police officer but my parents wouldn’t let me join up in New South Wales, so I travelled around Australia, finding work where I could before I settled in Melbourne. My grandfather, Thomas, had served in the New South Wales police force and my great uncle, Tighe, had worked his way up the ladder in New South Wales to become a superintendent in the CIB.
At 175 centimetres, I was tall enough to join any force across the country, but my light, 68-kilogram frame was a problem. On the day I applied to join the Victoria Police force, I sat outside the depot and devoured two pounds of bananas in an effort to get my weight up to pass muster. I don’t know if the bananas helped, but the scales tipped in my favour and I was in.
Some shifts I found myself stuck at the station, helping out in the watch house, doing paperwork and being the face of the force as people came into the station with complaints. Sometimes I was on watch-house duties, processing the residents of the cells for the night.
The worst shifts had me stuck in what was called files and inquiries—following up motor licences and making inquiries with motor registration and other government departments. The hands on the clock would crawl. Often I looked up at the clock in the station and it seemed like the hands had gone backwards.
Files and inquiries also meant I had to get out on an old police bike to deliver summonses. The police bikes were as heavy as Sherman tanks, with a turning circle to match. As you might expect, I was rarely made welcome. A lot of doors were slammed in my face. It wasn’t what I had joined the police force for, but it was all part of being a uniformed police officer learning the ropes.
Each week I checked the noticeboard to see what shifts I’d been given. I preferred to work nights because, more often than not, that would have me out on the divisional van patrols. The divisional vans had radios and we were called in to attend crime scenes by D-24, the radio headquarters based at Russell Street. The divvy patrols could be exhilarating. We were called into anything and everything. Murders, burglaries, punch-ups—any sort of misbehaviour you could imagine.
The old blue Dodge divisional vans didn’t have heaters. The powers-that-be thought it might be too
dangerous to have us in a van with the heater on. I guess they thought it would put us to sleep, and we might nod off while in pursuit of a speeding vehicle. I learnt pretty quickly to dress in layers when I was due to go out on divvy van patrol—two pairs of socks, two singlets and two vests underneath my police jumper and tunic to ward off the cold.
I had no such worries one balmy Melbourne night in March 1956. I had just my shirt and tunic on, and was out in Divisional Van 10 as it rolled down Wellington Street towards St Kilda Junction. I glanced at my watch. It was just past one. Only one more hour to go and I’d be back at the station, putting my feet up with a cuppa and a sandwich.
I looked across at Senior Constable Tom Jenkins. Tom’s face had aged more than its forty-two years. Three years in Changi prisoner-of-war camp will do that. While his face revealed the hardships he’d endured at the hands of Imperial Japan, his body had recovered its strength and power.
Tom’s eyes shifted along the road and into the distance, his left elbow dangling casually on the passenger door. He was an experienced copper and his eyes scanned the area looking for anything out of the ordinary. Tom had been working the St Kilda beat for years. He’d seen them come and go—the ‘gunnies’ and bludgers who ruled the working girls with violence and intimidation, the SPs and sly groggers, the rubber-neckers, the hoons and the hooligans, the desperate and the dangerous.
On my right sat the driver, Constable Clarrie Bell, aged 25, dark hair, well built, clean cut. He was only a year older than me. He’d been through the academy a year earlier and had six months’ service ahead of me.
Even in the dark, St Kilda looked like it could do with a lick of paint. The grand Edwardian houses paid for by a long gone gold rush now stood dilapidated. Many had been transformed into boarding houses offering cheap accommodation and anonymity for the itinerants who were drawn to St Kilda like moths to the flame.
The bay-side suburb is eight kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district, a twenty-minute trip by tram down St Kilda Road. It had once been a playground for the wealthy. There was the beach, the restaurants and clubs, and Luna Park on the Lower Esplanade, with its giant laughing face facade an open invitation to lovers and giggling children.
A depression and two world wars later and St Kilda had become a playground of a different type—Melbourne’s dedicated red light district and a magnet for night crawlers.
Wedged between my two colleagues, my job was lookout. The streets were quiet but I knew the reverie could be shattered in a heartbeat.
As a young uniformed officer at St Kilda, I was doing the hard yards in a tough school, but I was fortunate to be in such good company. My two colleagues were men to watch, admire and emulate. Tom Jenkins, in particular.
The van shuddered and jolted along towards the junction, a spaghetti bowl of roads that converged in St Kilda’s heart. In the headlights, I spotted the Ford Crestline crawling along the gutter, the gigantic frame weaving ever closer to the curb. Tom had spotted the car a second or two ahead of me, as usual.
‘What’s that crazy bastard doing?’ he said. On cue, Clarrie accelerated, pulling the divvy van alongside the metal monster.
Tom wound down his window and pointed at the driver. ‘Pull over.’
The driver was Hazel Hanrahan, a prostitute known to us all. She had a long criminal record, with a string of convictions for street offences. Her partner and pimp was Bobby Bull, the notorious gunman, painter and docker. The thought of Hazel Hanrahan lurching down the road in a big expensive American car set off the alarm bells for me. It was obvious the car wasn’t hers and she had some explaining to do. Hazel rolled the Ford along the curb before it finally came to rest. She waited in the car.
I clambered out of the car with Tom and Clarrie. I knew Hazel wasn’t violent but my heart was still pounding. This was what I had joined the force for—the adrenaline rush, the uncertainty of what could happen at any time on the streets.
I saw Hazel had a passenger so we all approached the car with caution. Hazel’s fellow traveller was Dot Renwick, the wife of Eric Renwick, another violent gunnie. Eric was a man who suffered no moral discomfort about putting his wife to work on the streets of St Kilda.
It was only when I got closer to the car that I realised there was a third person in the big Ford—a man, lying across the bench seat, his head resting in Hanrahan’s lap with his feet eased over Renwick.
Tom opened the passenger door and ordered the two women out of the car. Dot Renwick edged herself out from under the semiconscious man and made her way past me and on to the footpath. ‘Get a load of this,’ Tom said, gesturing to the inside of the car. ‘Now, this is one for the books.’
Peering into the vehicle, I noticed with a start that the man in a drunken stupor wore the black shirt and clerical collar of a priest. The man’s trousers and underpants were gathered around his ankles, and his dick was out for all the world to see. An empty sherry bottle had been discarded on the floor of the car.
Hazel Hanrahan’s general approach was one of unbridled hostility towards police but as Clarrie opened the driver’s side door, she stepped quickly and lightly out of the car. She didn’t want to spend the night in the lock-up.
‘He’s a regular. He lets us drive his car around,’ Hazel piped up.
The priest was paralytic. Four years on the beat had prepared me for many of humanity’s weaker moments but this was a new low. ‘What the bloody hell have I struck tonight?’ I thought.
Tom stepped in and shooed the two women away. Hazel and Dot wandered off down the road, cracking their wicked jokes and cackling raucously as they went.
‘I’ll drive him back to the station,’ Jenkins said, pointing to the drunken, semi-naked priest. ‘You follow me, Clarrie.’
Clarrie and I arrived back at the station in time to see Tom pull the big Ford into the kerb outside the station. The short drive back seemed to have sobered the priest up a bit. I could see him sitting up in the car, his head bobbing and jerking in silhouette in the passenger seat.
‘His name’s Father John Day,’ Tom told us. ‘Reckons he comes from Apollo Bay.’
Tom opened the passenger door and Father John Day of Apollo Bay staggered out of the car. I grabbed Day’s arm, helping Tom to walk the priest into the station and sit him down in a chair in the sergeant’s office. Day sat swaying in the chair, as drunk as a skunk.
Tom rang St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne and introduced himself. ‘We’ve got one of your priests here— Father John Day from Apollo Bay. We found him in a pretty ordinary state, drunk in his car in the company of prostitutes. I need you to send someone down to pick him up and get his car back here at the station.’
While we waited for the Cathedral to respond, Clarrie and I wandered into the sergeant’s room again. I’d never seen a priest in this condition before and I was drawn to him more out of curiosity than anything else.
Day didn’t utter a word to me and I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. But I looked at his face intently. He glared back at me with an almost comically pompous look on his face. He did not seem at all worried that he had been detained by police.
Tom yelled out to me to put the billy on, so I turned and left Day to his drunken ruminations.
Within twenty minutes two young priests made their way into the station. They were clearly ill at ease and keen to get Day back to the Cathedral. Clarrie and I stood in the foyer of the station, watching the priests walk gingerly past us. And then we heard Tom give Day the rounds of the kitchen.
‘If you are caught in this area again, whether you’ve got your pants on or not, you will be locked up, Father. Am I making myself clear to you, now?’ Jenkins thundered.
The two priests walked Day past us in the foyer, veering from side to side, eager to get him out of the station as quickly as they could.
With Day gone, I took my scheduled break in the lunchroom with Tom and Clarrie. I was bemused by Day’s behaviour and bewildered that he’d been released so casually
for no other reason than the dog collar he wore around his neck.
‘Let’s just forget about what happened,’ Tom said.
‘Why didn’t we charge him?’ I replied.
‘It’s a waste of time,’ Clarrie chipped in.
‘Yep,’ Tom said nodding. ‘Look, Dinny, I’ve been around this force long enough to know that we don’t charge priests, short of a murder blue.’
I looked at him quizzically and he felt obliged to continue.
‘Even if we had charged him, the charges would have been knocked over. It would never get to court,’ Tom explained. ‘It’s best to let him go. Clarrie’s right. It would be a bloody waste of time charging that pisspot priest. Just let it go.’
But I could not let it go. If we’d pulled up any old Tom, Dick or Harry drunk, semi-naked and in the company of prostitutes in a car stuttering along the road, he would have been charged. Hazel and Dot had told us that this priest made a habit of visiting prostitutes in Melbourne. Day had been detained but would face no penalty. It troubled me.
Certainly, the image of the drunken priest with his dick out challenged my faith. I’d never seen a priest in that condition before but what bothered me most was that, as police officers, we were discriminating in his favour purely because he was a priest. For days afterwards, the incident gnawed away at me. Finally, I determined to broach the subject again with Tom Jenkins when the right opportunity arose.
Two weeks after we’d pulled Day up, I was on afternoon shift, working with Tom and another constable, Doug Park. We’d been out on patrol in the van. We pulled back to the station for a break. Doug had made himself scarce, and Tom and I were sitting in the lunchroom having a sandwich. It was time to bring up the Day business again.