Unholy Trinity

by Denis Ryan

  Fishy walked past us on his way out the door.

  ‘I told you someone else would trouser it,’ he said, with a smirk on his face.

  As detectives we worked hard and often investigated the lowest forms of human conduct. There were no counsellors to help us through some of the ugly and grim crimes we witnessed. More often than not our counselling sessions took place in pubs where we’d drink ourselves to oblivion, shake the cobwebs out the next day and be back at work on time, every time.

  It was that way for many who worked in the criminal justice system. I remember drinking at the Celtic Club until the wee hours on a number of occasions. If you’d scanned the crowded bar there you would have found judges, lawyers and other coppers all on the sauce. There was a certain recklessness to it that made me believe that they, like me, were drinking to forget.

  When I transferred to Mordialloc in 1958, the CIB branch—me, Detective Senior Constable Milton ‘Mitch’ Mitchell and Detective Sergeant Ray Child—made a habit of going to the local RSL. It was six o’clock closing in Victoria back then, and we knew that if we ever knocked off late, we could always get a beer at the local RSL.

  The six o’clock closing law was stupidity itself. It was Australia’s version of the Volstead Act. The United States had prohibition but in Australia we had the six o’clock swill to appease the temperance societies and wowsers. Unlike prohibition in the States, which ended in 1933, six o’clock closing remained in place for fifty years in Victoria until 1966.

  We always paid for our grog but the president was happy to keep the taps on for us. We weren’t the only ones in there having a surreptitious beer or three. Other members of the club enjoyed the hospitality, too, despite the fact that the club was unlicensed after six o’clock.

  I got to know the president of the club pretty well. He was a leading figure in the local area, and was well respected. He’d held officer’s rank in the army in World War II.

  One of the members of the club told me he had heard that the president was ‘having it on’ with a particular boy in the community. The boy was known to locals as being ‘a bit slow’. I spoke to the boy’s parents to gain their trust then arranged an interview with the young lad. I discovered he had a mild intellectual disability. He had difficulty gathering and articulating his thoughts, but after an exhausting interview for both of us, the boy provided me with a lengthy statement, detailing anal rape and a myriad of other sexual offences he had suffered over many years at the hands of the president of Mordialloc RSL.

  I interviewed the president who, after he was presented with the evidence against him, confessed to his crimes. He was charged and went before the courts. Despite glowing references from other stalwarts of the community, he received a six-year jail sentence.

  Around the same time, Mitch and I investigated a complaint that had been made against the Methodist minister at Cheltenham. The minister was also a scout leader in the area. The complaint was that he had performed bizarre rituals on young boys initiated into the scouts. The scouts would be stripped off, covered in oil and tied to a post in the scout hall. The minister would then proceed to assault and rape the young boys.

  Mitch and I interviewed him. It was Mitch’s case and I assisted. The minister was charged with a raft of child sex offences, including buggery and gross indecency. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to thirteen years in prison.

  I presumed every police officer in Victoria held the same view of child sex offences. I would learn that I was wrong.

  There is a myth in Australian society today that sex offences against children were rarely, if ever, pursued by police. My own experiences debunk that. When information came forward, police pursued crimes against children with purpose.

  In my time as a police officer and detective, I charged many men with sexual crimes against children, from snow dropping—the theft of girls’ underwear from backyard clothes lines—all the way to rape and buggery, as did all the detectives I knew.

  These crimes scandalised even hardened police officers. They certainly shocked me, but no matter how appalling the crimes were and how revolted we may have felt, I would not be deterred from pursuing the perpetrators, no matter who they were or what status they enjoyed in the community.

  I wasn’t evangelistic about it. I just saw it as my duty.

  The Mordialloc RSL president was a military officer and a combat veteran, but the high esteem the community held him in afforded him no protection from the dispensation of justice.

  The Methodist minister represented a religious organisation that had hundreds of thousands of followers across Australia, some of them in the police force, others in positions of authority. Yet he, too, felt the full force of the law when his crimes against children came to the attention of police.

  Fred Russell was a detective sergeant in the early 1960s. He would go on to be the head of the CIB in Victoria in the late 1970s. He was a suave man, tall and powerfully built, with a head of thick brown hair that he kept slicked back and parted neatly on the left. He had the air of a Hollywood actor.

  Fred and I had played cricket together with the Russell Street side. I kept wickets and Fred bowled more than handy medium pace. I used to annoy him by coming up to the stumps when he bowled. Like all medium pace bowlers, Fred thought he was a yard or two quicker than he was.

  He was of more senior rank than me but, with our shared experiences on the cricket field, we regarded each other as friends. He also knew, as other senior coppers who were Catholics knew, that I was a Catholic, too.

  The Hotel Spencer, in West Melbourne, was one of our haunts. It was a ramshackle tavern that provided a basic meal and a beer to travellers and a select group of CIB detectives—ninety-nine per cent of whom were Catholics. We never referred to the pub by its name. To us, it was O’Connor’s—named after its amiable publican who, being Irish and Catholic, liked a drink more than most. Some of my colleagues referred to the pub as ‘the Green Door’, an obtuse reference to its Irish Catholic clientele.

  Leo O’Connor was a good publican. Despite the number of beers he poured into himself on a regular basis, he always maintained his good humour.

  The place would be fit to burst on St Patrick’s Day.

  One afternoon I was part of a group of detectives enjoying a beer at O’Connor’s. To this day I’m not sure why, because I was a junior detective of lowly rank, but I seemed to get on well with more senior detectives. I’d often have a drink with others higher up the ladder. I was standing around with a glass in hand with Detective Sergeant Jack Hague, Detective Inspector Frank Holland, Detective Chief Inspector Kevin Carton and Detective Chief Inspector Bill Mooney. And Detective Sergeant Fred Russell was making up the shout.

  Fred pulled me aside in between beers. He and I wandered to a dark corner of the pub before he stopped and scanned the room.

  ‘Look, Dinny, what I’m about to tell you is in the strictest confidence.’

  I nodded my consent.

  ‘I don’t know if you know this but there is a group of us who, at the request of the Cathedral, look into instances where priests have been charged with offences to see if we can have these matters dropped or dismissed so the Church’s good name will not be brought into disrepute.’

  Fred paused and looked at me intently before continuing with his spiel. ‘We know your strong belief. We’d like to invite you to join us. You should give this some consideration and let me know as soon as you can.’

  No names were mentioned, but it was clear that the requests had come from the highest echelons of the Catholic Church in Melbourne.

  I thought of Tommy Jenkins’s warning after we’d dragged Day back to the station three years earlier: ‘There’s no point in charging the priest, Dinny,’ Jenkins had said then. ‘We’d be ostracised by the Catholics within the force if we tried to charge him.’

  And here I was at O’Connor’s presented with one of the faces that would have knocked the charges over and sent me to Coventry to boot. It was obvious to me
that Fred Russell and this group were engaging in multiple conspiracies to pervert the course of justice.

  I did not appreciate the extent of it at the time. I presumed the group that Fred had asked me to join was involved in relatively minor matters—misdemeanours, traffic offences, drink driving and so forth. The sorts of crimes that were of no profound criminality but would necessarily bring embarrassment to the Church. I didn’t like it and I didn’t want a bar of it, but I had no idea that this conspiracy would include protecting paedophile priests.

  Nevertheless, I was genuinely taken aback. I stumbled out an awkward reply, saying I’d get back to him in a couple of days.

  I met up with Fred a couple of days later and told him I wasn’t interested in joining this shadowy group. He took my rejection in a matter of fact way. He certainly didn’t seem put out.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Fair enough. It’s your decision.’

  Fred Russell was an intelligent and astute fellow. But he did have a dark chamber tucked away in the corner of his soul that forced him to completely lose his way as a policeman. His allegiance to the Catholic Church trespassed deeply into the bounds of his duties.

  He had not told me who else was in this group. I did not know who they might have been but they, like Fred, took their orders, in part at least, from St Patrick’s Cathedral. These men suffered from a distorted sense of loyalty to the Church. And that misguided loyalty drove them to ignore their oath to the police force and to the people of Victoria they purported to serve.

  For its part, the Church unashamedly corrupted these men in the pursuit of its own interests.

  Catholics made up about half the Victoria Police force. For the overwhelming majority of police officers in Victoria, religion and the performance of their duties were never in conflict. But at the extremes, there were the Protestants who had entered the secretive and clannish world of Freemasonry who advanced their own, and the Catholics like Fred Russell who did likewise.

  I continued to practise my faith. I went to mass every Sunday at St Brigid’s in Mordialloc. The parish priest there was Father Jim. He was Irish born and carried the strong brogue of the Emerald Isle. He wasn’t a drinker but he smoked like a chimney, often extinguishing one cigarette and lighting another in one effortless movement. He was a decent man, a good priest with a boisterous sense of humour.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re a Catholic or a Protestant,’ Father Jim would often pronounce. ‘Just as long as you’re Irish.’

  One day he invited me up to the presbytery for a cup of coffee. We had met up there on many occasions. We often sat and sipped coffee and discussed how I was getting on in the police force and the Church in general.

  I had expected nothing more than just another convivial chat, but in the middle of our conversation, Father Jim trailed off, paused and leaned forward in his chair. He looked at me with an earnestness that I had never seen on his face before.

  ‘Do you know that a priest was caught by the police down at Chelsea Beach exposing himself to young girls?’

  He paused again.

  ‘Somehow this priest was not charged. Dinny, if something similar arises in the course of your duties, I want you to charge the offending priest. These things must stop.’

  I thought, ‘Shit, another one.’ My mind went back to Day in the front seat of his car. And then back to the corner of the bar at O’Connor’s where Fred Russell had spoken to me in whispers about joining the clandestine group. It seemed like Fred Russell’s group had been at work. I don’t know if Fred was involved. There’s no reason to believe he may have been, but I was able to do the basic arithmetic.

  It was just as Tom Jenkins had told me after we grabbed Day—there was nothing I could do about it. I just kept my head down and got on with my work. I loved the police force. I enjoyed locking up crooks.

  I lived with my young family in Aspendale, a bayside suburb on the southern fringes of Melbourne, closer to the southern extremities of the city at Frankston than to the Melbourne CBD. Our home, a modest three-bedroom weatherboard in a cul-de-sac, was a kilometre or so from Mordialloc police station. More often than not, I would walk to work. We didn’t own a car. We didn’t have a phone. We had a close connection with our neighbours, who were happy to have a police officer living in the street.

  I’d often work a sixty-hour week. This left Jean with most of the work to do at home, raising and caring for the children. She took it all in her stride. She was a perfect policeman’s wife. Even if I got home full after a night on the tiles, there was never a harsh word between us. She understood that I had to let off a bit of steam from time to time.

  The house was less than a kilometre from the beach and, in Melbourne’s cool winters, in particular, the westerlies would whip off the water and cast a big chill over the suburb. Our three children—Michael, 6, Martin, 3, and Gavin, 2—were kept rugged up in the winter months.

  One night in early February 1962, Jean and I were woken by the sound of Michael’s laboured breathing. We raced into his bedroom to see him going blue in the face. I immediately thought it was an asthma attack. Michael had no history of asthma but somehow I knew what the problem was. Jean stayed with him while I threw on a few clothes and dashed off to the public phone box outside the Aspendale shops, about 500 metres away.

  I rang the family doctor, De Coursey Shaw. By the time I got home he had arrived at the house. Shaw was in his dressing gown, having dashed out of his house as quickly as he could.

  We both went inside. Michael was lying on his side while Jean gently stroked his hair. Michael’s face was a deathly grey. He did not appear to be breathing.

  Shaw told Jean and me to get Michael to sit up. I held Michael with my right hand on his back, propping him up. The doctor went to his medical bag and pulled out a syringe with a very long needle.

  Within seconds Shaw was ready and moved quickly over to Michael. The needle punctured the top of Michael’s shoulder and Shaw slowly pushed it down, searching for his heart. Satisfied that he had found it, he pushed down on the plunger, sending a dose of adrenaline into Michael’s heart. Within seconds, Michael’s colour returned and he began to breathe. Shaw told me to keep Michael sitting up for several minutes. He began breathing normally.

  The doctor stayed for an hour or more before leaving, declaring Michael was on the improve.

  Jean and I stayed up most of the night, taking it in turns to grab a few minutes sleep here and there. We were both emotionally drained from the experience. Jean wept openly in the kitchen, and I held and comforted her.

  Shaw returned the following morning. He told Jean and me that Michael had made a full recovery but the asthma attack could be the first of many, and that one day an attack might prove fatal. Little was known about asthma, Shaw told us. There were no medications to treat it beyond a few old wives’ remedies. About the only thing he could recommend was that Michael would be better off in a dry, warm climate. The cold winters at Aspendale were doing Michael no good. We would have to move.

  After Shaw left, I rang Ray Child and told him what had happened. He told me to take the day off, then come in and see him the following day. It left me a day to think.

  I’d spent three months in Brisbane two years before, sent up there on what was known as interchange, where detectives would swap and work in different jurisdictions. I’d worked with the Consorting Squad up in Queensland, often working the racetracks at Doomben, Eagle Farm and Beaudesert. A lot of Victorian crooks travelled to Queensland for a break or to get their noses into trouble north of the Tweed. I enjoyed my time there. I liked Brisbane and the local police looked after me very well.

  A month or so before Michael’s asthma attack, I’d been seconded to work with a young officer from the Commonwealth police. At the time, the Commonwealth police was headed by Victorian detective, Ernie ‘The Harp’ Craig. The young Commonwealth copper told me that The Harp was looking for Victorian detectives to recruit for what would become the Australian Federal Police. Victor
ian detectives were sought after because they were trained in a dedicated school that didn’t exist elsewhere in Australia. The young officer asked if I was interested. I was pretty happy where I was, so I knocked him back.

  ‘Are you sure, mate? If you sign on, you’ll be promoted straight away to detective sergeant.’

  I told him I’d think about it but I really wasn’t keen.

  On the strength of that exchange, I’d received a call from one of The Harp’s underlings, who told me there was a position in Brisbane if I wanted it. I declined the offer but my son’s asthma forced me to reconsider it.

  By the time I saw Ray the following day, I’d almost made up my mind to go to Brisbane. I told Ray that I was thinking of moving on. He got straight on the phone to Alfie Carruthers, the CIB detective inspector for the area.

  Alfie told Ray that he’d speak to Hugh Clugston, a superintendent and boss of the CIB. The wheels were in motion. Within a couple of hours, Hugh got back to me and told me that a vacancy was coming up in Mildura. The job was mine if I wanted it.

  ‘Stay with us, Dinny. Don’t go moving interstate,’ Clugston told me.

  The job of CIB detective in Mildura was listed in Police Orders, a weekly newsletter that listed all the promotions, vacancies and appointments. I decided to go for it. Within a fortnight, I had the job and was on my way to Mildura with my family.

  Jean was apprehensive about leaving Melbourne. She’d grown up in Melbourne and lived there all her life. Her mother and sister were there. She didn’t want to leave.

  Neither of us had been to Mildura. It was as far as you could go in Victoria without leaving the state—an outpost of the force and a vast region which bordered New South Wales and South Australia to oversee.

  I didn’t want to leave either. I was grateful to be staying in the Victoria Police force but I was a city detective. It was my environment. The transfer also meant that any prospect of promotion had ceased.