by Denis Ryan
Like most parents, Jean and I became a taxi service on weekends. The boys played badminton, table tennis and soccer. Michael and Martin played cricket. Gavin played basketball. Anthony was into weightlifting.
They were all strong swimmers. Michael and Martin, who also suffered from asthma, started swimming, as we were told it was a good activity for asthmatics. Michael became the captain of the swimming team at Red Cliffs. Their health improved through swimming, and their asthma attacks became less frequent. The doctors in Mildura still cautioned me that neither Michael nor Martin was cleared of asthma. A shift to a different climate, especially one that didn’t afford a welter of sports and activities like swimming, might still put them at risk.
I got to know the parents of the other kids who were training at the pool. We’d get together for a barbecue most Saturday nights. We were enjoying a meal and a few beers at the Staintons’ home on one of these evenings when Gwen Stainton asked me if I was interested in getting into the thespian caper with the local theatre group, the Red Cliffs Players. I wasn’t keen at first, but Gwen is a very persuasive person and before I knew it I was ready for my theatrical debut in a play called The Young Wife. I was terrified but Gwen and the other cast members put me at ease. We performed to a full house, and once the nerves were out of the way, I enjoyed it.
When a one-act play festival came up, the Red Cliffs Players entered a play called A Nun’s Story. I played the bishop, the lead role. I needed a costume, but I wasn’t going to go to Ballarat and knock on the Cathedral door and ask the bishop if I could borrow his. I didn’t want to front the presbytery in Mildura out of the blue, either.
A few days shy of the festival, I spoke to Barritt in the office. I explained that I was playing a bishop in a play and was looking for assistance with the costume.
‘He’s not a bishop—yet,’ Barritt replied.
‘It won’t matter. Ninety-nine per cent of the audience won’t know the difference,’ I said. ‘Can you ask him?’
I didn’t want to go and see Day. I was hoping Barritt would collect the clothes from Day and all I’d have to do was grab them off him at the station.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Barritt said, with a smile.
But there was no dodging Day. The following day Barritt told me to call into the presbytery later that morning. Day was waiting for me outside the presbytery with his freshly dry-cleaned cassock and the biretta. Day had a grin from ear to ear when I collected them from him. He barely said a word to me and I merely muttered something about returning them to him on the following Monday.
I wore the cassock and the biretta that Saturday night. I am not too modest to say that the play was a hit with the audience. I didn’t check Day’s cassock for stains. I had no reason to. It was perfectly clean, superficially at least, but it was stained all right, deeply soiled by his rape of children, and by his remorseless theft and fraud.
Day was a psychopath. I have no doubt about that now. His grandiosity was the first and most obvious sign; his remorseless sexual attacks on children were another; and his unabashed theft of parishioners’ money—many of whom were struggling to make ends meet—a third.
Day lived well. He always had a new car. He’d tell people that his sister had bought it for him. He was good at establishing an alibi. He used to tell people that his family had money. I found out later that his family was dirt poor. Back when he was at his first parish, Colac, he used to run the school canteen, where he helped himself to the money. When the school brought up the fact that the canteen was trading at a significant loss, he claimed that he could not bring himself to accept money from little kids for ice creams and soft drinks. It was all bullshit. Day took more than money from kids. He stole their innocence and their prospects.
He had a couple of sisters and I chased them up many years later. One sister lived in the modest Williamstown home. His other sister lived in Killarney, a little village just outside Warrnambool. I checked out the house, an old stone dwelling that looked like it had only just been hooked up to electricity. There was no money in Day’s family. Every cent he had came either from the small stipend he received from the diocese or the money he stole or extorted.
He had no compunction, no capacity for empathy. And he was left to run roughshod over the people he was supposed to serve. Bishop O’Collins knew. He’d heard the complaints about Day’s behaviour from parishioners. Some of the complaints had been made directly to police. Nothing was done. Day, decked out in all his religious finery, was a much-valued member of the Ballarat diocese. He brought what others could not—money. And so what if he had a predilection towards raping and assaulting children? That could all be swept away.
At worst, O’Collins would tell Day to pack his bags and move on to another parish and another unsuspecting community, where he would be free to do as he pleased. The likelihood of Day getting his marching orders from Mildura, however, was becoming more remote by the moment. Day was firmly ensconced, with the vast edifice of the new church built for the glorification of the Church. This man, this priest, this psychopath was virtually unstoppable.
While Day was raping kids, Barritt would be belting some poor bloke and dumping him bleeding on the side of the road, while Kearney was leering at and sexually assaulting young women in his office.
These were the men who ran Mildura in the 1960s, and their power was almost unlimited.
6
THE CATHOLIC MAFIA
Truth exists, only lies are invented.
GEORGES BRAQUE, 1882–1963
On 1 May 1971 James Patrick O’Collins retired as bishop of the Ballarat diocese. He had been a bishop for forty-one years, thirty of those at Ballarat.
Somewhere in a locked drawer in O’Collins’s office sat Crimen Sollicitationis—the 1962 papal instruction on how a bishop must handle the perverse business of priests soliciting parishioners for sex—gathering dust. O’Collins knew it back to front. When a complaint was made against Ridsdale or Day or any other paedophile priest, he knew what to do. But O’Collins had been Day’s protector and facilitator, and he had done the same with Father Gerald Ridsdale. Whenever the cries of outrage and violation became too loud, O’Collins simply moved the men on to new parishes where they could molest and rape a new flock of innocent children.
O’Collins lived to a fine old age. He died in 1983, just five months short of his ninety-second birthday. Bishops, like popes, often tend to live long lives. Perhaps this is due to living in comfort and splendour, never having to worry about paying the mortgage or the rent. Perhaps, too, the good Lord isn’t eager for them to join him.
O’Collins was replaced by Ronald Austin Mulkearns. Ordained a bishop in 1968, Mulkearns was given the title of Bishop of Cululi, a now defunct diocese in Tunisia. He had no diocesan authority; it was an appointment in name only. Essentially Mulkearns remained in Ballarat as coadjutor bishop from 1968 until O’Collins retired and handed him the episcopal ring.
Mulkearns was a tall, solidly built man with a head of thick, dark hair, greying at the sides. He walked with a rigid, precise gait. He was also an exacting man, aloof and authoritative, who spoke with a studied deliberation, as if his words carried more gravity than that of a mere mortal.
I’ve met other bishops, for whom a firm handshake was considered a perfectly acceptable greeting. Not Bishop Ronald Mulkearns. When I met him he deftly stuck his down-turned hand out at me. I’m not sure why but I puckered up and kissed his ring. There you go. A thousand old jokes revived in that one moment. But that was the way Mulkearns was— full of old Church conceit. Bow to me, boy!
While he was happy to demand a kiss on the episcopal ring from passers-by, he didn’t lift a finger to stop Ridsdale and Day abusing children. The more I got to know him, the more I realised that it wasn’t inertia or ineptitude. Like O’Collins, Mulkearns was just following orders. The Nuremburg Defence. If a priest was raping kids, it reflected poorly on the Church, all the way up to the Vatican. Move the priest on and consign the vic
tims to earthly oblivion.
If the police intervened, stare them down. If one copper could not be stared down, the Catholic Mafia within the police force would come to the rescue. It was a perfect situation. Flawless. And it had been going on for decades.
Until I came along and buggered up their cosy little conspiracy.
I’ll be honest. If they had been drink-driving or shoplifting offences, if priests had broken into houses and knocked off TVs, I probably would have walked away, under pressure from the Church and the shadowy group within the police force that went all the way to the assistant commissioner. But priests were raping kids and I would not let that go.
As the winter chill fell on Mildura in 1971, all I knew was that Day was a priest as well as a brothel-creeper and arrogant bastard who picked parishioners’ pockets at Sunday mass and frequented prostitutes in Melbourne.
By this time my professional relationship with Barritt had become totally dysfunctional. I’d developed a manner of communicating with him that at least kept me sane. I’d never discuss real crime or any ongoing investigation with him. I’d stick to gossip, something he revelled in. If I heard of a bit of a fracas at a pub, I’d let him know. Usually, he was the one with the rumours.
‘Ah, there’s drunks comin’ out of the Grand,’ he’d say, with a gleam in his eye. It seemed that was all he was interested in talking to me about anyway.
Barritt held the world record in locking up drunks. He’d wade in and clear a pub in twenty minutes, filling our lockup in one fell swoop, as if by osmosis. I’d seen him arrest men who hadn’t touched a drop for public drunkenness.
I was at my desk on a Wednesday morning. Barritt was out of the office up to God knows what. The previous Saturday my team, St Kilda, had been beaten by Hawthorn in the Aussie Rules grand final down in Melbourne. It was a roughhouse affair and people in Mildura were still talking about it. I copped a bit of ribbing around the station but I pretended not to care—I was a Rugby League follower and a St George man, really. What hurt more was that the Dragons had gone down 16–10 to their old foes, Souths, in the Sydney Rugby League grand final the weekend before.
The phone rang and I grabbed it.
‘It’s John Howden here, Denis.’
Howden was the senior master at St Joseph’s College. I’d met him once at the Working Man’s Club. He had a reputation for being a very fine teacher and an asset to the school. A strong, thickset bloke in his late thirties with wavy dark hair, he was a tough Aussie Rules footballer who’d won the medal in the local comp. Even then he was fit and strong, with a prominent jaw that underlined his strength.
‘I need you to come up to the college,’ Howden told me. ‘There is a matter I wish to discuss.’
‘All right. I can be up there within the hour.’
I was about to put the phone down when I heard Howden say, ‘Don’t let Jim Barritt know I’ve called. I’ll explain when you get here.’
I told Bill Brodie I was heading out but gave no details about where I was going.
I knocked once on Howden’s office door in the bowels of the school and the door swung open immediately. Howden was standing there with a tall, elderly nun. He introduced her to me as Sister Pancratius, a teaching principal at the school. The sister offered a firm, curt greeting, standing as straight as the flagpole in the schoolyard.
Howden and Pancratius looked at each other before Howden cleared his throat and spoke.
‘The mother of one of our students has made a complaint that Monsignor John Day has indecently assaulted her daughter on a number of occasions.’
I was taken aback. I thought I knew Day’s history as well as anyone. Prostitutes, yes. Did his depravity now extend to forcing himself upon schoolgirls?
Sister Pancratius waited for silence to fall before she spoke up.
‘I have known about Monsignor Day’s behaviour for some time now. It runs contrary to my vows of silence to say this to you, and I will never repeat what I have said from this moment forward,’ she said. There was a sad resolve in her words. It was clear that she would consign her admission into the deep recesses of her mind and would never consider it again.
‘I am pleased to meet you, Detective Ryan,’ the sister said, and with that she walked past me and out of Howden’s office, closing the door firmly behind her.
Howden then told me the girl’s name and recounted her allegations. Day had touched her breasts while she was washing his car.
‘I’ll have to make a formal inquiry into these allegations,’ I told him. ‘I’ll need to take statements from the girl and her mother. When can I see them?’
Howden made a call to the girl’s mother. It was agreed that I would visit them at their home and conduct the interview there the following day.
‘I wanted to speak to you. Not Barritt,’ Howden told me. ‘Barritt has a very close association with Monsignor Day. I fear the complaint would have gone nowhere.’
‘What goes on here will not be shared with Barritt,’ I said. ‘I’ll conduct the investigation myself and I’ll keep in touch with you. This will stay between you and me until my inquiries have concluded.’
I thought, what the hell is going on here? My boss had a collection of child pornography in his desk. I had the circuit magistrate telling me that Barritt was obtaining statements from young women that were lurid to the point of obscenity I had Day’s behaviour at St Kilda years before, and both Barritt’s and Day’s lies about Day at Apollo Bay.
The following day, I drove out to the girl’s house. I could have taken a policewoman with me but I thought that would be unwise—it would place that officer under huge pressure. If one word of this got to Barritt, the investigation was over.
I met the mother first. She was a devout Catholic who had been involved in various groups and committees associated with Sacred Heart. She gave a statement that she signed in my presence, stating her daughter had informed her that she had been indecently assaulted by Day on a number of occasions.
The young girl, a boarder at the school for a number of years, then provided me with a statement alleging that Day had fondled her breast when he took her for a drive in his car. Another boarder was always present. The two girls would sit with Day on the front bench seat of his big car. He would put his arm around her while driving the car and touch her breast, tapping her nipple with his fingers to induce a sexual response. She said that this had occurred on five separate occasions. She had been 12 years of age when these offences occurred.
Both mother and daughter confirmed they had reported these incidents to Sister Euphemia, a nun and teacher at the school, shortly after they had occurred.
I wondered why the mother had not come to me at the time the offences occurred, and why she had sat on these allegations for so long. But it’s easy to judge from a distance. Day was the tyrant; Barritt, the thug; and Kearney, the conman. The trinity was indestructible, seemingly immune to the challenges offered by a mother and daughter.
The mother understood that the Catholic Church would come down hard on them. Stories of shame and scandal would be circulated, false allegations made, and their lives opened up to a scrutiny that few could survive—a whispering campaign that would cast them adrift in this closed community. What hope did they have?
None.
As sexual assaults on minors go, what the mother and daughter had alleged was at the low end of the scale. I certainly don’t mean to trivialise the offences Day committed against this young girl. She was hurt and damaged by the experience; she would be for many years.
The daughter also told me a story she had heard from one of her classmates. Day had insinuated himself on the girl on the drive home from Melbourne.
The following day I obtained a statement from this girl, who was in her leaving year at school at the time. She alleged that Day had indecently assaulted her when she was in grade six at Sacred Heart. She and four other girls had gone with Day and two nuns to see The Sound of Music in Melbourne. Day’s car was packed—seven p
assengers in all, with him in the driver’s seat. On the drive home, Day had asked the young girl to get in the front seat between him and the two nuns.
He told the 12-year-old girl to put her head in his lap while he drove. At various times on the long drive through the Mallee, he forced her head in to his groin, where she felt his erection beneath his trousers. It was night and the interior of the car was dark, but Day was so brazen as to do this in the presence of the two nuns—one of whom sat no more than half a metre away from him.
Sister Pancratius, the school principal who had withdrawn into silence, had implicitly acknowledged that there were more victims of Monsignor John Day in and around the school.
There was Day and the prostitutes. There were the photos in Barritt’s desk drawer. There was Day, Barritt and Kearney meeting regularly at the presbytery, thick as thieves. The local yobbos, the louts of the town, all detested Day, yet they’d had almost nothing to do with him for years. And now two girls had come forward. I didn’t have enough to charge Day with at that time; the statements from the girls were uncorroborated. I needed to establish Day’s pattern of behaviour. It was time to do a bit of digging into the monsignor.
There were a lot of unanswered questions. It was as if I was starting to piece a jigsaw together without knowing what the end result would look like, but with each piece the image before me grew darker and darker.
There was no point in going back to the school at this stage; that would only get back to Day. Then next thing I’d have Barritt on my back, and that would have been the end of it.
My next stop was to pay a visit to the local ne’er-do-wells, the young blokes in Mildura on whom Barritt and Day had continually waged war. These blokes, now in their twenties, had all attended Sacred Heart School. That would be a good start.