Unholy Trinity

by Denis Ryan

  I didn’t go looking for carnal knowledge offences; they came to me. That’s how it worked. They were often long and unpleasant investigations. But I kept them to myself. Trippy and I had learnt to go as far as we could with an investigation without involving Barritt in any way. But Barritt stood over the uniform boys, and whenever a complaint of this type was received, he’d grab it and run with it.

  ‘The statements received from the girls don’t need to go into this detail. It’s lurid,’ Hayes said. ‘Sex acts so explicitly detailed from young girl complainants . . . it makes me wonder what he’s up to.’

  I took a gulp of my wine. ‘Trippy and I found some photographs in his drawer.’

  I did not want to tell Joe how we’d got hold of a key. It wasn’t strictly honour bright.

  ‘Photos of kids. Young girls. Maybe 10 years of age. Stark bollocking naked.’

  ‘How many photos?’

  ‘Four or five,’ I replied.

  Joe remained silent for some time.

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. Not by the way he takes statements from teenage girls. There’s something quite unusual about that man. You’d better keep an eye on this bloke, Dinny.’

  There was nothing I could do about the photos. Trippy and I had virtually broken into Barritt’s desk drawer to find them. If it all came out, Barritt would have offered some improbable explanation to the powers that be and he would have been believed. We would have ended up in deeper shit than him.

  In August 1966, 260 of Mildura’s wealthiest and most influential people assembled for a formal dinner in the church parish hall. Ninety per cent of those who sat down to dinner were Catholics. I didn’t get a look in; my invitation must have been lost in the mail.

  There was cause for celebration. Father John Michael Joseph Day—parish priest, thief, empire builder, bricklayer for the Roman Catholic Church and prolific paedophile— was being promoted to dean.

  Among the 260 VIPs toasting Day’s rise up the ecclesiastical ladder was the Chief Commissioner of Police, Rupert Henry Arnold, whom his police colleagues called ‘Ram’s Head’—he was an unattractive man who possessed facial characteristics that were more sheep-like than human. He may as well have been called the Hurricane Lamp— dim and had to be carried.

  During Arnold’s seven years as chief commissioner, senior elements of the police were masterminding extortion rackets, virtually running the illegal abortion industry in Melbourne. The Kaye Abortion Inquiry of 1970 nailed some big names in the force, and three received long jail sentences—the chief of the Homicide Squad, Inspector Jack Ford; the head of the Traffic Branch, Superintendent Jack Mathews; and their bagman, Detective Constable Marty Jacobson. All their crimes had been committed under Arnold’s watch.

  Arnold wouldn’t have had a clue. He was too busy wagging a finger at the general populace about the scourge of juvenile crime, an obsession of his. When he got to his feet at Day’s celebratory dinner, he rambled on in a speech entitled, ‘Juvenile delinquency—its causes and curses’, summoning up spurious facts and figures that had those polishing off their chicken dinners jumping at shadows for the rest of their lives.

  Chief Commissioner Rupert Arnold was a droplet of ‘them’ in a sea of ‘us’. I’d been told he was a Freemason. No surprises there. It was a virtual prerequisite for the top job.

  Arnold had worked with Barritt in the Wireless Patrol in the late 1940s. They were good friends. It was largely through Barritt’s entreaties that such an esteemed member of the community had come all the way from Melbourne to speak to this august group. Barritt must have loved the cut of Arnold’s jib. He’d been running around Mildura locking up drunks and harassing kids. He even arrested and charged the president of the organising committee for the local kindergarten for holding a fund-raising raffle without a licence. But if he had to investigate any serious crime, Barritt was totally out of his depth.

  Joe Kearney, embezzler and rapist, was there, too, flicking his cigarette ash on to his dinner plate to adhere to the remnants of gravy he couldn’t wipe up with a slice of bread. He didn’t give a bugger about juvenile crime. He sloshed his whisky down before grabbing the eye of one of the children from St Joseph’s who acted as unpaid waiters.

  Bishop O’Collins had performed the service that moved Day one step closer to St Peter’s chair. O’Collins had known of Day’s paedophilia when Day was a priest in Apollo Bay, Beech Forest, Horsham and Ararat. When people complained O’Collins simply moved Day on to a new parish and let him loose on an unsuspecting community.

  And in Mildura Day was monstering kids with impunity and being promoted for it. None of the 260 citizens at the dinner knew the depths of the evil going on in their town. These dark secrets belonged with Day and were vigorously suppressed by his protectors, Barritt and Kearney. Day’s crimes were concealed under O’Collins’s stiff, four-cornered hat, the biretta, too. They compounded Day’s manifest felonies, his perverse sex crimes against children. O’Collins was an accessory before and after the fact.

  The kids of Mildura might have been troubled. There were some who got into a bit of minor crime. Kids will be kids, and every country town has a group of young troublemakers. Some of the young ones eventually settle down while the others will move on to more serious crimes if they’re not pulled up.

  There was a group of blokes like that in Mildura—a dozen or so blokes in their late teens and early twenties. They would knock off anything that wasn’t bolted to the floor. They might get into a bit of mischief at the pubs, get into a few fights, tear-arse around the streets in their cars. Like I say, every country town has them.

  I knew them all. Any sort of detective worth his salt would make a point of being on speaking terms with them. They weren’t fizzes or informers as such but they might give me some information every now and then, inadvertently more often than not. Most of what they told me was bullshit, but there was that little bit left over that was worth listening to. This mob of young blokes had similar résumés. They hated Barritt with a passion. That was understandable. Barritt must have booted a few up the arse at some stage, or locked them up for public drunkenness.

  This mob of local louts had one thing in common. They had all attended Sacred Heart Primary School when they were kids. Some had gone on to St Joseph’s College, while others had moved to the local high school. All had left school at a young age. One of them was John, known to be willing in a blue, but I got on well with him. As for the others, if I saw them out on the streets, I’d always stop them and have a yarn. They were of an age where they were a bit lost—caught in the nether world between adolescence and adulthood. Every single one of them hated John Day in a tangible, visceral fashion. Barritt I could understand, but why did they despise Day so much?

  In 1967 Michael was in first form at St Joseph’s. Every year the school put on a play. Even at such an early age, he had an aptitude for drama and the arts, and he was cast as Oliver in the play adapted from the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist.

  For weeks before the first performance, Michael wandered around at home with the script in his hand, practising his lines. In the lounge room, Jean and I gave him his prompts before he’d recite his lines. By the time the play went into full dress rehearsal, he had his lines down pat. There was an air of great excitement around our home before opening night. Michael was nervous but he was ready.

  I drove him down to St Joseph’s parish hall early, with Gavin sitting in the back. The play wasn’t due to start for an hour or so.

  When we arrived, Michael took off to get himself kitted up for his first major performance. Gavin and I took a seat in the middle of the hall. There was just a sprinkling of people in the seats—parents and siblings of the performers like Gavin and me. We had a while to wait before the play started. I looked around as the audience began to arrive, craning my neck.

  I turned all the way around to the very back of the hall and saw Kearney, Barritt and Day perched up on a long bench a few steps off the ground. They must have th
ought they were the best seats in the house, elevated above the rest of the seating in the hall.

  ‘Oh God,’ I thought and turned straight back, hoping they hadn’t spotted me.

  No such luck. Within minutes, I felt a tap on the shoulder and looked around to see Joe Kearney grinning back at me.

  ‘Dinny, you and your boy come up the back here with us,’ Kearney said.

  ‘We’re right here, thanks, Joe.’

  ‘Come on, Dinny. Take your boy up the back and he’ll be able to see everything better,’ Kearney insisted.

  I only got up because I didn’t want to cause a scene. I grabbed Gavin and followed Kearney to the back of the hall.

  ‘Evening, Father. G’day, Jim,’ I said, trying to disguise my reluctance at being among them. Barritt nodded and grunted in my general direction.

  ‘Good evening,’ Day replied. He hadn’t brought himself to utter my name since we’d had the stand-up blue in the presbytery five years earlier.

  Kearney went along and sat beside Barritt. I sat beside Gavin, who was wedged between me and Day.

  I was still shifting in my seat, getting comfortable, when I looked down and saw that Day had firmly clasped Gavin’s left hand in his. Although I knew Day was a reprobate, I had no idea of his perverse affection for children, but alarm bells were ringing at the sight of him smiling benignly while he held my boy’s hand. There was something innately unnatural about it. I didn’t know what. I just wanted it to stop. I got up and shifted along between Day and Gavin, then grabbed Day’s wrist firmly and pulled his hand away from my son’s.

  ‘Come and sit on the other side of me, Gavin,’ I said, gently directing him down along the bench away from Day. I locked eyes with Day. He stared back for a moment and gave a sickly smirk before turning away.

  I took the seat alongside Day. Funnily enough, he didn’t want to hold my hand.

  The play finally got underway not long afterwards. The five of us sat in silence throughout the performance. Michael did a great job. I was very proud of him. If he fluffed a line I didn’t notice.

  At the interval Day, Kearney and Barritt got up and walked off. They didn’t utter a word in our direction. I watched them make their way out of the hall. Gavin and I enjoyed the second half of the play a lot more once those bastards had gone.

  The more active Catholics in Mildura were aware of the strong association between Day, Kearney and Barritt. It had caused some consternation.

  By mid-1965, Jean and I had had enough of the old Housing Commission home we were living in—stinking hot in summer, freezing in winter. I’d purchased a two-hectare block in Morquong, just over the river, and planned to build on it.

  Ken Wright was a local real estate agent I had become friendly with. He went on to become a mayor of Mildura, then springboarded into the Victorian parliament. He was a National Party man and a good fellow. He told me that a property his parents had lived on was up for sale—six and a half hectares of mainly Valencia trees with the odd grapefruit tree, about twelve kilometres out of town on the way to Red Cliffs.

  Ken explained that the farm was not a going concern. I’d struggle to turn a dollar on it. The Valencia trees produced small fruit—not really good for anything but juicing. More out of curiosity than anything else, Jean and I went to take a look at it.

  We both fell in love with it straight away. We didn’t love the farm so much, as we knew it would barely give us a quid and might cost us a few. But the farmhouse—a sturdy old weatherboard that had been daubed in pale blue conite, with three bedrooms, a big farm kitchen and a verandah that swept around the back and front—was a perfect family home.

  I sold my block at Morquong, took a loan out with the E.S. & A. Bank and plonked down $27,000 in the brand new decimal currency.

  We moved to the farm in March 1966.

  As Ken had warned, the new place wasn’t worth a burnt crumpet as a commercial farm, but it didn’t take up a lot of my time. Contractors came in and sprayed once a year, and another contracting company looked after the picking.

  After a year of living on the property, I did the accounts and discovered that I’d made the princely sum of $1000 from the farm, about twenty dollars a week, enough to pay for the weekly groceries but not much else. I told Barritt about the move. I didn’t need his approval. The farm was not a business and I wasn’t breaking any regulations by owning it. I just thought I’d keep him in the loop.

  ‘I’ve got to have somewhere decent to live Jim,’ I told him, explaining why I was moving to Red Cliffs.

  Barritt just grunted. He made no suggestion that I was moonlighting on the farm. But he did have one request.

  ‘Whenever those bludging bastards come up from Melbourne, you make sure you fill their cars up with oranges.’

  Barritt was referring to the district detective inspector (DDI) and other police VIPs who might travel to Mildura from time to time.

  One of the inspectors at the time was Frank Holland. Frank and I went back to the days when we’d get on the drink at O’Connor’s in Melbourne. He’d taken a step or two up the ladder since Fred Russell had asked me to join the Catholic Mafia. Like Fred, Frank was a made man in the Catholic Mafia, a former inspector in Homicide and a senior in the Consorters.

  Frank was the banner carrier at the St Patrick’s Day march that wound its way through the Melbourne CBD, proudly singing Irish patriotic songs, like the angry, activist tune, ‘The Wearing of the Green’: ‘Where the cruel cross of England shall nevermore be seen, and where, please God, we’ll live and die still wearing of the green!’

  Every time Frank left Mildura, he left with a boot heaving with oranges and grapefruit. I didn’t mind this. They weren’t worth anything to me and it was a good idea to keep the DDI sweet.

  There were others. Eric Teese was another DDI who left Mildura with a boot-load of citrus fruits courtesy of my orchard. Another one was John ‘Baton Jack’ O’Connor, who eventually rose to the rank of assistant commissioner in the force.

  Our new home was only two kilometres from the township of Red Cliffs. We started going to mass at St Joseph’s Church at Red Cliffs. I’d still attend the Mildura church from time to time, but I saw less of Day after the move.

  Michael went to St Joseph’s College in Mildura, while the younger boys were at the Red Cliffs Catholic Primary School, an easy two-kilometre bike ride from home.

  After we settled in, I laid a cricket pitch in the backyard. I poured the concrete and laid some malthoid over the top of it, then strung some chicken wire around it. There’d often be five or ten boys having a net with my boys and I’d give them a few tips on the finer points of the game.

  I had played a couple of seasons with Mildura Manchester Unity Cricket Club when I first arrived in Mildura. It didn’t take me long to find a team. I was signed up the day I got to Mildura. Trippy had let it be known that I could play a bit, so the secretary of the club had popped around the day I got to Mildura to get my signature.

  So I needed Saturday afternoons off. I asked Barritt if he could swing it for me.

  ‘No worries,’ he said in a brief moment of helpfulness before he paused. ‘You are playing with Sacred Heart, I presume?’

  ‘No, I’m playing with Mildura MU.’

  ‘Well, you won’t be getting your Saturday afternoons off then,’ Barritt pronounced and strode off to his office.

  Bugger that and bugger him, I thought. I took my Saturday afternoons off in the cricket season. There were just the three of us in CIB anyway, including Barritt, and he was as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. Playing cricket didn’t mean I was away from the to and fro of police work.

  I remember being halfway through an over when the police van pulled up and a couple of uniform officers walked onto the field to tell me there had been a shooting. I bowled the last couple of balls, took my hat from the umpire and that was me gone for the rest of the day.

  Police work in a country town was like that. You couldn’t be sure what would happen at any give
n time. One minute all was quiet, save for a few outstanding minor matters. The next thing I’d be investigating a murder.

  A week or so before Christmas in 1966, I was in the CIB office and took a call from Jack Thomas, one of the uniform policemen at Merbein. He told me he had some information that a murder had been committed.

  I told Barritt what Thomas had told me. He was immediately dismissive.

  ‘Thomas doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He wouldn’t know if a tram was up him. And he’s a bloody Mason.’

  ‘Look, Jim,’ I told him while grabbing the keys to the CIB car, ‘I’m going over there anyway.’

  Thomas took me out to the banks of the river at Cowanna Bend just outside Merbein. I saw tyre tracks leading to the edge of a drop of three or four metres. A huge chunk of the embankment had been carved out. I interviewed a woman who lived in a shanty about forty metres away. She confirmed what Thomas had told me. She had seen two people, a man and a woman, push a station wagon into the river at dusk the day before.

  I went back to Merbein and rang the Search and Rescue Squad in Melbourne. That was not strictly my call. Police procedures dictated that only an inspector or someone higher up the ladder could make a decision like that. The Search and Rescue boys didn’t seem to mind and said they would be there the following day.

  I went back to the office and rang the head of Homicide, Frank Holland, my old mate and the recipient of a good portion of the fruits of my orchard. I told him that I’d called in the Search and Rescue boys to drag the river.

  ‘Dinny, you’ve broken every rule in the book,’ Frank told me. ‘I’ll back you but you’d better bloody well be right on this. I’ll send two of our blokes up. They’ll be there early in the morning. Put me on to Jim.’

  While Holland was on the phone to Barritt, I took the opportunity to ring the Wentworth police station across the river in New South Wales. The jurisdictional vagaries needed to be sorted. New South Wales owns the river. Victoria owns only its southern banks. If the murder had taken place in the river, it would have been a matter for the New South Wales police force. The officer at Wentworth told me there’d be two detectives and a forensic team brought down from Broken Hill to assist in the investigation and maybe take it over if it turned out to be one of theirs.