Unholy Trinity

by Denis Ryan

  Years later, I obtained a copy of the completed record of interview. Day denied everything, as I had expected. But there is a coolness and a certainty to his answers that told me he anticipated every question during that interview.

  Day was not issued with a caution at any time. Irwin virtually apologised for the inconvenience of asking Day questions about him raping kids.

  ‘As you know Monsignor, Irwin is my name, Inspector of Police, and my colleague is Senior Detective Barritt. I am making inquiries into allegations that have been levelled at you concerning acts of attempted buggery, gross indecency and indecent assaults committed on young people, boys and girls over a period of thirteen years from 1957. I intend asking you questions which I have prepared and I also intend recording your answers. Have you any objection to this procedure?’

  Of course Day had no objections. The interview was a charade. And Day’s best mate, Jim Barritt—the scourge of Mildura—sat across the table.

  Just three Catholics sitting in a room having a chat.

  After Irwin interviewed Day I handed him statements from two further victims, young boys who both alleged Day had indecently assaulted them and subjected them to acts of gross indecency while they were at St Joseph’s. Irwin snatched them out of my hand like I’d handed him yesterday’s sandwiches.

  When I was in the police force down in Melbourne, I’d come across my fair share of standover men. If anyone had told me then that I’d be threatened by a Catholic priest, I would have fallen over laughing, but that’s what happened in Mildura after I started investigating Day.

  In early December 1971 I was in the watch house having a chat with some of the uniform boys. Laurie McGrath, a senior constable, came in and told me that someone who wanted to talk to me was in his car outside.

  ‘Who is it, Laurie?’

  Either Laurie didn’t hear me or he pretended not to, so I made my way outside. There was Father Peter Taffe, sitting in his car, right out the front. I’d known Taffe around Sacred Heart. He’d been a priest at Mildura for three years or so, and on one occasion I’d had a beer with him at the Working Man’s Club.

  ‘Did you want to see me, Peter?’

  He leant over the passenger seat.

  ‘Drop the inquiry into Monsignor Day or you’ll be out of a job.’

  My hackles rose at a hundred miles an hour.

  ‘You can go and get fucked, pal.’

  He glared back at me briefly then gunned the motor and drove off.

  He was prophetic, I’ll give Father Taffe that, but when did the Roman Catholic Church start running protection rackets, and why did Father Taffe think the Church had some say over the hire and fire authority within the Victoria Police force?

  Mildura was abuzz with rumour and gossip. The Catholics were divided almost straight down the line. One half supported me, the other half would have been happy to see me burnt at the stake as a heretic. The non-Catholics in Mildura thought it reaffirmed their faith to see the parish priest, the recently anointed Monsignor Day, and his copper mate, Jim Barritt, face scandal and innuendo.

  It got to the point where I couldn’t walk down the street without someone making a passing comment to me— some were vindictive and vitriolic, others supportive and sympathetic.

  On one occasion I was walking down Langtree Avenue, along the strip of shops and past the chemist shop, Israel and Deacon. Frank Deacon, the local chemist, charged out of his store and fronted me.

  ‘I’ve a good mind to give you a bloody thumping, Ryan,’ he said, trying to look his most menacing. ‘Bringing disgrace on our Church.’

  He was my age. He was my height. He had a few more kilos on him than I did but I wasn’t overly troubled.

  ‘Grow up, Frank. I’ve had a hard enough time of it without you adding to the insanity,’ I said, trying to get past him.

  ‘I’m serious, Ryan. I’ll drop you.’

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. There was me in a desperate struggle with Barritt, Irwin and McPartland, not to mention Day, and now I was being fronted by the local chemist, looking for a blue. But my amusement only enraged him further. I knew he wasn’t a brawler, but he stuck his chest out a bit further just to show he was not going to back down. The next step was the tricky part for Frank. It was either throw a punch or back off. I gave him the choice.

  ‘You just bloody watch yourself, Ryan. That’s all I’m saying.’ And he made a strategic retreat back to his pharmacy.

  Thirteen days after Irwin and Barritt interviewed Day, Irwin prepared a report to Superintendent McPartland that effectively killed off the investigation. I didn’t know it at the time. No one told me. Irwin had smothered the case.

  I came across his report years later. It cited a bizarre example of a case of bestiality, allegedly committed in 1842 but not complained about until 1844, as a reason for not proceeding against Day. The judge had determined that the case should not proceed, given the length of time between the alleged offence and the time the complaint had been heard. How this was relevant to the by then seven complainants being indecently assaulted and raped by a priest is anybody’s guess.

  Irwin concluded his report with the words: ‘It is my recommendation that no further police action be taken in this matter.’

  A week later, McPartland followed suit, forwarding Irwin’s report to Reg Jackson, the Chief Commissioner, with a couple of his own remarks thrown in for good measure. McPartland agreed with Irwin that: ‘The persons who have made these allegations, so many years after the alleged incidents, may be regarded as accomplices, in need of corroboration.’ Bad enough to be raped by a priest: Jack McPartland thought the victims may have committed crimes in cahoots with Day.

  His report was a carbon copy of Irwin’s and the recommendations were the same. Kill the investigation. No further inquiries. No new evidence to be considered. Move along. Nothing to see here.

  But there was new evidence. On 8 December I interviewed a boy, a student at St Joseph’s, who alleged that Monsignor Day had indecently assaulted him in December 1970, when he had spent a night with Day in a motel room. Another boy was present but that boy’s father would not allow me to interview him.

  There were now three signed statements from current students at St Joseph’s College. I had to tell John Howden. I’d not spoken to him at all since he had alerted me to the first allegation against Day. I met him at the school and told him that eight victims of Day’s paedophilia had now come forward. All had attended St Joseph’s College.

  I also told him that Superintendent McPartland had ordered me off the case. But there was more bad news: with me off the case, Irwin had taken charge and Barritt had insinuated himself into the investigation. I told him that Day had been interviewed and while I hadn’t seen Day’s response, it was clear the interview had been a farrago.

  Howden was appalled. This had now become a serious duty of care issue for the senior master. But Howden had a bomb of his own to drop. A couple of weeks earlier, a nun and principal at Sacred Heart Primary School had come to him with a complaint. She had discovered that Joe Kearney was cooking the books: the government had been paying the salary of a teacher who didn’t exist. Day had signed off on all the accounts. The sister at Sacred Heart knew that Day was aware of the phantom teacher, too.

  Howden had raised the matter at a meeting of parishioners at the parish hall. Day had dismissed the accusations out of hand but it was impossible to walk away from the obvious fact that the Commonwealth was paying the salary of a teacher who did not exist into the school’s accounts. Day could play a straight bat to the parish at large, where he still had many supporters.

  Howden and a group of other senior parishioners decided to confront Day at the presbytery about the fraud, and try to determine where the money had gone. According to Howden, Day was at his ugliest at this meeting. He continued to deny and obfuscate, but Howden would not be placated. Day was backed into a corner.

  ‘I’ll see you in prison, Howden,’ Day snarled as the m
eeting concluded.

  No one ever did find out where the money had gone. No doubt some had found its way into the building fund and other accounts related to the parish, but a lot of the money must have simply ended up in the pockets of Day and Kearney. Howden told me that some of the parishioners were furious about the state of the parish’s accounts and one, or perhaps more, might have already taken the matter to the police.

  I knew nothing about it. If a complaint had been made, it had not come to me, which meant it was almost certainly in Barritt’s hands.

  There’s no doubt it was a serious matter, but in my mind it was trivial compared to Day’s crimes against children. The fraud was symptomatic of a wider problem—Day’s treatment of the parish and its people as goods and chattels for him to use, abuse and pervert without let or hindrance.

  The more momentous business at hand was to bring his sexual abuse to a halt.

  It was my suggestion that we write to the Bishop of Ballarat. Howden agreed. We presumed that a Catholic bishop would hold to moral and lawful principles, that he would regard these allegations with the utmost seriousness and provide some sort of protection to Mildura’s most vulnerable parishioners. We were naive.

  That evening Howden and I hammered out a letter on one of the school’s old typewriters. We agreed that Mulkearns had to be given as much information as possible, so we listed the names and the addresses of the victims, spelt out the nature of the allegations in detail and stated where the offences had occurred.

  We sought some action from the bishop. Perhaps a meeting with a delegation of the parish could be arranged. First and foremost we sought Day’s immediate removal from the parish. We both signed the letter and put it in the mail.

  It was a last resort. Even at this time, I had no idea of the extent of the forces acting against me and the lengths to which the Church would go to ensure that Day’s victims would never have the satisfaction of seeing him brought before the courts.

  Anyway, it was done. Bishop Mulkearns would now be aware of the allegations. Under Church or canon law, he had the power to act against Day. He had the power to remove Day from Mildura and, as a moral arbiter, he had the responsibility to act and assist police with their inquiries.

  I was being ingenuous. I am happy to admit that now, but the letter that Howden and I wrote was a simple and sincere attempt to get the bishop to intercede.

  It only took a week for me to discover how wrong I had been. Both Howden and I received a written response from Mulkearns. The audacity of it was breathtaking. Ronald Mulkearns—Bishop of Ballarat, a man who had been a senior cleric in the diocese for three or more years—wrote a strident defence of Day. He had been made aware that Day had been cleared by Irwin, Barritt and, later, McPartland. That was good enough for him.

  He failed to address the allegations made by the additional victims, and neither Barritt nor Irwin had raised these allegations in their interview with Day.

  Mulkearns mentioned that he had received a complaint ‘that Monsignor Day was misappropriating Parish funds’ but did not indicate what action he was taking, or if he even intended taking any.

  In regard to the sexual assaults, he relied on the findings of corrupt police. Barritt and Irwin had cleared Day, and now it was time for me to change my ways in a ‘demonstration of loyalty to [Day] at a time he has been subjected to very great embarrassment and strain’.

  I bristled as I read the letter. I was being told by a bishop that Irwin and Barritt had jumped on my investigation. My colleagues hadn’t said a word to me. Not a peep. Yet the lines of communication between Irwin, Barritt and Mulkearns were clearly open. There was active collusion between Irwin, Barritt and the Church.

  A week or so earlier, I was walking down past the courthouse when I saw Barritt and Kearney in the solicitor’s room, flipping through the statements I had given to Irwin. I could see them muttering away, their brows furrowed, thinking up some new scheme to clear Day. They were in heavy self-preservation mode. If Day went, they were gone, too.

  They saw me, a little too late, and turned around.

  As I had suspected, Kearney was the conduit between Barritt and Mulkearns. He and Day had driven down to see Mulkearns in Ballarat to respond to the charges outlined in the letter Howden and I had written. Kearney had taken Irwin’s confidential report, hot off the presses from Barritt. The report was not only confidential, it was also still winding its way to the chief commissioner’s office for consideration.

  Kearney and Day presented the bishop with the report that had summarily cleared Day. They put it all down to Howden hating Day and me despising Barritt. Nothing more than malicious gossip, My Lord. Like a hungry snapper, Mulkearns swallowed the nonsense whole.

  While I remained unaware of Jack McPartland putting his ‘Thus far and no further’ stamp on Irwin’s report, he had included with the usual caveat: ‘I recommend that in all the circumstances, the brief be considered by a competent legal authority to determine what action, if any, would be taken.’

  That meant it wasn’t over and Day had not been cleared, although it was obvious that Irwin and Barritt had washed their hands of the investigation and would not pursue it further. That seemed to be the way more senior police up the line would call it, too.

  It wasn’t over as far as I was concerned. If Mulkearns, Irwin, Barritt and McPartland thought this investigation was done and dusted, I had news for them.

  Not long after I had written the letter to Mulkearns, I received a call from an old mate in the social welfare office. Joe Kearney was in the frame for raping a single mother. My mate told me the woman had fled, having fought Kearney off and charged down onto Deakin Avenue, semi-naked, her blouse ripped open. She was hysterical and made her way across the road to the welfare office, where my mate and a female member of staff comforted her.

  My mate, John Noble, and the female staff member had both encouraged the woman to go to the police and report the incident, but she refused to. As Kearney oversaw her child maintenance payments and required her to visit his office in order to receive them, she was too frightened to make a complaint.

  I made some discreet inquiries with witnesses, who confirmed my mate’s account of the incident, but Kearney’s victim continued to refuse to make a complaint, so there was nothing I could do.

  In the two weeks before Christmas 1971, I obtained three further statements from past students at Sacred Heart Primary School, all alleging they had been indecently assaulted by Day when they were aged between 11 and 13.

  I was an experienced investigator but what struck me was the ease with which I could identify Day’s victims and also, for the most part, their willingness to come forward. By Christmas that year, I had eleven victims. I was convinced I could find many more.

  It has to be remembered that at that time no priest had been convicted of child sex offences in Victoria or even in Australia, as far as I can tell. That wouldn’t happen until 1978.

  I didn’t think to ask why no Catholic priest had ever found himself standing before a judge. Paedophile priests were not recognised at the time. The word ‘paedophilia’ was not known to me, nor was it in common use; it remained locked away in the obscurity of psychiatric jargon. Although the academics didn’t know it and it was not discussed in any public forum, Australia was experiencing an epidemic of paedophilia. The centre of the epidemic was the Ballarat diocese, and many of the crimes were attributable to Catholic priests like Day and Ridsdale, who were at the absolute nadir of depravity, leaving literally thousands of victims in their wake.

  What I did know was that I had a raving child sex offender who happened to be a monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church, and no one in the Church or the police force seemed to give two hoots about it. To me, on the scale of criminality, child sex offences were at least as serious as murder, perhaps even worse: their victims suffer pain and trauma and breaches of trust, and their lives are often dispatched to oblivion.

  I was alone and sailing in uncharted territory agains
t the express orders of the police force I served. I needed someone to share this with. There was no one in the office I could open up to. Barritt looked at me like I was the shit on his shoes. Bill Brodie, the police reservist, had brushed me off; he’d barely said a word to me since the investigation began.

  Harry Herbert’s replacement at the CIB was Graham McAllister, who had come up from Melbourne. On his second day in Mildura, I asked him if he wanted to join me for a drink at the Working Man’s Club. I knew he wasn’t the sort of bloke who’d say no to a beer. But he knocked me back all the same.

  ‘I’ve been told by senior officers in Melbourne not to discuss anything with you,’ he said. ‘Keep out of my way.’

  Nice to meet you, too, Graham.

  Jean bore the brunt of it. The CIB motto was ‘Never take your work home with you’, and I’d stuck by that religiously. I had established a divide between my work as a police officer and my life as a husband and father. But this was different. It was simply too big to keep under my hat. I told Jean what Day had been up to but I deliberately left out the specifics of the case. It would be too traumatic for her, and it was also part of what I considered to be an ongoing investigation. She knew of my antipathy towards Barritt, going back to my first day on duty in Mildura. I told her that Barritt was trying to shoot me down and that he was protecting this monster. Every senior copper in the district was lining up to do the same.

  It was a heavy burden to place on her. Perhaps I was selfish. There were things in Jean’s background that made Day’s sexual assaults and breaches of trust very difficult for her to process emotionally. She had never known who her father was. She couldn’t remember her mother. When she was an infant during the Depression, Jean had been offered in a newspaper advertisement. A husband and wife had taken her on, and she grew up in their family, never formally adopted, made to feel like a square peg in a round hole from day one.