by Denis Ryan
‘No, you’ve been instructed that you’re no longer part of this inquiry,’ he replied firmly.
I tried again the following day.
‘Mister O’Connor,’ I said, jumping in his path while he walked down the corridor towards Barritt’s office. ‘I would like you to reconsider this. I have the local knowledge. I have the trust of the community. I can guarantee that I can find a hundred or more of Day’s victims in this district alone. God only knows how many more we could find in his other parishes.’
‘You’ve been told once and so I’ll tell you one more time,’ O’Connor said, staring into my eyes. ‘You are not involved in this investigation. You’ve been issued a direct order and if you don’t obey it, you will be subject to disciplinary action.’
That was it. I was out. O’Connor didn’t mention the Day investigation to me again until he interviewed me in Melbourne a month later.
Just to prove a point, I obtained a further statement from another of Day’s victims, who had been sexually assaulted when he was 11 years of age. His statement refers to an episode in 1956, when he had been unfortunate enough to win the vaulting competition at Sacred Heart Primary School under the watchful eye of Day. His prize was a week away with Day, who sexually assaulted the boy in two separate incidents.
There would always be more evidence to obtain, and even after I left the force victims came forward to tell me their stories. Others came through the grapevine. There were dozens in Mildura, some from Apollo Bay, some from Day’s time at Horsham. Hundreds of victims in total, as I had thought.
The best thing I had done was to drag Day kicking and screaming out of the muck and into the light, with Barritt and Kearney following afterwards. People in Mildura were now willing to speak up. The great shame of it was that no one in authority was listening.
Day, Barritt and Kearney would all fall from grace but not one of them was ever brought to account in a courtroom— not Barritt, for his corruption and prior knowledge of Day’s outrages; not Kearney, for his fraud and his rape of a young woman; and not Day, the third and highest member of the unholy trinity, for his crimes against children. The triumvirate was collapsing, disintegrating at a rapid rate of knots.
Kearney was the first to go. He never got pulled up for raping that young woman in his office, but he left town in a hurry after his fraud came to the attention of the Crown Law Department in 1971. The court’s accounts were audited. Money was missing here, there and everywhere. He’d been threatened with a jail term if he didn’t move along and keep his mouth shut. I didn’t even know he was gone until someone told me he’d cleaned his desk out and was headed down to Melbourne. The last I heard he was pushing a pencil at the Springvale courthouse. Maybe he just kept his head down after his crimes in Mildura.
On 28 January 1972, O’Connor and Child met up with John Howden and the builder Terry Lynch at the Grand Hotel in Mildura. John and Terry sat waiting for O’Connor and Child, who turned up on the dot of five o’clock and bought a round of beers.
O’Connor spoke first. ‘We’re driving down now to see Bishop Mulkearns in Ballarat. We’re going to tell him to remove Day from Mildura or we’ll charge him.’
‘Day’s gone. He’s either out of Mildura or in jail,’ Child chipped in.
The two senior coppers finished their beers and took off. Howden and Lynch sat there, gobsmacked, but were happy that Day’s reign in Mildura was coming to an end.
But the burning question remained—why wouldn’t Day be charged immediately, or at the very least further inquiries made?
Later that day O’Connor and Child met with Bishop Ronald Mulkearns. With Joe Kearney out of action, the flow of information to the diocese came to a halt. Mulkearns hadn’t heard the latest development. He greeted O’Connor and Child with a haughty dismissal of the allegations against Day, assuming the whole dirty business had been resolved by Irwin and Barritt’s joke of an investigation. O’Connor told him there was more and proceeded to reel off the list of statements that I had obtained in December and January.
Mulkearns dropped his defence of Day. At least it was all over for the people of Mildura, and Day was summoned to appear before the bishop the following afternoon.
At mass on Sunday, 30 January, Monsignor John Day informed the congregation that he had offered his resignation to Bishop Mulkearns. It had been accepted, and Day would be leaving the parish within days. The congregation erupted into murmurs. Still divided, some believed Day had been poorly treated. Others were glad to see the back of him.
Barritt, too, was in plenty of strife. He was under an internal investigation for extorting money from the two blokes who had received the hot outboard motor and been told by Barritt to slip a hundred each into the Sacred Heart building fund.
Not that I knew any of this at the time. No one was talking to me. O’Connor, Child, Barritt and Irwin were all lying doggo. In Swan Hill, Superintendent Jack McPartland had been transferred back to Melbourne. His replacement, Superintendent Harry Duffy, had written to Chief Commissioner Reg Jackson recommending my transfer, but I didn’t know about that then either.
In the meantime, Irwin had pulled me up. He told me he had received an order from Jackson and I was forbidden to leave the district without Irwin’s permission. It was an unusual instruction to say the least. In fact, it was unheard of, and later, when I told senior police officers, they would shake their heads in disbelief.
There I was, not quite restricted to barracks but put on a short leash. Jackson was aware that I had obtained further statements and was making further inquiries. I was a loose cannon that had to be secured to the decks. But O’Connor was the architect. He was the master of political intrigue, and he knew exactly what had gone on. It was very messy, and only a cunning strategist like O’Connor could find a path through the mire. He had convinced Mulkearns that Day had to be removed. O’Connor also had to get rid of Barritt. After I’d knocked back O’Connor’s offer to give me Barritt’s job, I’d have to be cut adrift, too.
O’Connor’s scheme would spare the Catholic Church its precious reputation, but I suspect he was more interested in the good name of the Victoria Police force and, by extension, his own arse. If Day had been charged, it would expose Barritt and, if Barritt was exposed, then the entire Catholic Mafia was vulnerable. No, Day had to walk away. Barritt had to be transferred. Joe Kearney had to be pushed out. Kearney couldn’t be charged either, or the entire bucket of shit could come tumbling down on them all. Another transfer. Out of sight, out of mind.
Me? Well, O’Connor’s inducement hadn’t worked the first time around but O’Connor remained hopeful. The soft touch hadn’t worked, so now it was time for the blowtorch on my belly. O’Connor had no doubt I’d see the error of my ways, by hook or by crook.
It was the perfect solution. Protect the Catholic Church and establish a level of deniability around the senior ranks of the Victoria Police force. Two birds, one stone. That just left Day’s victims, and what voice did they have?
O’Connor’s report to Deputy Commissioner Jack Carmichael indicated that he had interviewed some of the twelve victims from whom I had obtained statements. I found only one victim who had been contacted by O’Connor. He told me that O’Connor had tried to stand over him, but he wouldn’t be intimidated and stuck by his story. Neither O’Connor nor Child had been within a bull’s roar of the other eleven victims. No interviews, no cursory inquiry. Not so much as a phone call.
On the day before he left the Mildura parish for the last time, Monsignor Day was seen down at the Mildura tip, among an acre of household detritus. He had a fire going and was flinging documents on to the flames. It was the 1972 equivalent of paper shredding. Every dirty, incriminating little piece of paper had to be destroyed.
He had outlived his welcome in Mildura but Monsignor Day was off the hook. He was driving down to Melbourne for a few weeks before heading overseas. He’d been given a world tour for his crimes—a trip to Chicago followed by a stint in Portugal for ‘cou
nselling’. All expenses paid.
When all the fuss died down, he’d head back to Victoria where he’d be sent to a new parish. Life for a disgraced priest wasn’t too bad after all.
8
A BRUSH WITH SCANDAL
In a time of universal deceit,
telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
GEORGE ORWELL, 1903–1950
The member for Midlands, Les Shilton, got to his feet in the lower house of the Victorian Parliament. It was question time in the Legislative Assembly. Shilton had been a senior detective at Seymour before becoming a Labor politician, elected to the parliament in 1970.
Hansard records that, on 7 March 1972, Shilton addressed a question to the then chief secretary and deputy premier, Rupert Hamer: ‘Will the Chief Secretary advise the House of the result of the investigation conducted quite recently by two senior officers into the police administration in Mildura.’
Hamer replied: ‘No doubt the honourable member is referring to the complaint alleged against one member of the Victoria Police force stationed at Mildura. This matter has been investigated by two senior officers of the force in accordance with the custom.’
An interjection from Opposition leader, Frank Wilkes, is recorded: ‘They were not very senior.’
‘They were fairly senior,’ Hamer responded. ‘They were the usual ones. I understand their report is before the Chief Commissioner at present. I have not seen it but I will inform the Honourable Member of the result as soon as I can.’
It’s interesting that Hamer was all over this so early, but then he would be. As chief secretary, a cabinet position that is now long gone, he was the state’s principal administrator and oversaw most of Victoria’s bureaucracy, including police matters. Like all smart politicians, he had a sixth sense for detecting scandal. And scandal was coming. As a senior member of the government, Hamer understood this. He’d already apprised himself of the rough facts of the case before Shilton had asked his question.
The premier, Sir Henry Bolte, had held the reins for eighteen years, but the 1970 election had been a close call for the Liberal government. People had grown tired of Bolte’s rough and tumble politics. Labor had been tipped to win the election but the left-wing faction of the party had stuffed it up. An internal dispute over funding for non-government schools had cost Wilkes the government.
The Liberal Party knew Bolte had to go, and a smooth transition had been lined up. Reluctantly, the hardliner Bolte was passing the baton to the moderate Hamer, who had made the move from the Legislative Council to the Legislative Assembly the year before. From the vegetables to the animals, so to speak. It had all been planned.
Hamer had been in parliament for fifteen years. He could sniff the wind. He knew this scandal had the power to bring the government down or see it slaughtered at the ballot box. A priest raping children, protected by elements of the police force—where would that end?
Despite O’Connor’s best efforts to smother the case and thwart the investigation into Day, there were some loose ends. And I was loose end number one.
Shilton was on my side. I’d been introduced to him by Alan Lind, the member for Dandenong. Jack Leary, a rusted-on Labor man and a committee member at the Working Man’s Club, teed it all up. Jack was the manager of the dried fruit packing sheds and one of the few people in Mildura who had offered me any support.
I travelled to Melbourne by train to meet Lind. I was still under orders not to leave the district, but I tippy-toed away. Lind then introduced me to Shilton, whose years of experience as a police officer ensured he would be my contact within parliament. He understood police procedures and the way a police officer thought. It was a good fit. We spoke for about an hour and Les took some notes.
I told him everything I knew. Day, Barritt, Kearney, Irwin, McPartland, O’Connor and Child. I told him about pulling up Day in St Kilda in 1956. I told him about the victims in Mildura, and how many other victims I thought there might have been. Even as a hardened ex-copper, Shilton struggled to comprehend the extent of it. That evening I left his office knowing that I had someone in my corner who could pack a punch.
I was on my own in Mildura, but I had to do something. I could have drip fed information to the media but I refused to do so. The meeting with Shilton had enabled me to get my story into the public arena. I wasn’t interested in turning it into a circus.
When Les asked his question in parliament on 7 March, Hamer was one short step ahead, but he knew that the Opposition had someone on the inside. I suppose the government would have understood it was me. It wouldn’t have been hard to work out the arithmetic on that one.
The government would have its quid pro quo. A few days after I returned to Mildura I was called into Irwin’s office.
‘I need you to be my driver on a licensing matter tomorrow. It’ll take all day.’
‘Now, hang on. I’m not a driver. I’ve got nothing to do with licensing matters. Why don’t you get one of the uniform branch to drive you?’
‘I’m issuing you with a direct order and I expect you to obey it. Do you understand?’
You’re a shifty bastard, Alby, I thought. What are you up to now?
‘All right. What time tomorrow?’
‘Eight-thirty on the dot,’ Irwin replied. That was all he had to say. He put his head down and stared rummaging through some papers on his desk. I got the message and marched off.
The following day, Irwin and I headed out of Mildura with me at the wheel. It was a blazing hot morning. The mercury would nudge 42 degrees later in the afternoon. I had hoped the excursion would thaw the iciness that had characterised our relationship for the previous six months, but every time I attempted to strike up a conversation Irwin sat silent and sullen next to me. Nothing doing. Permafrost.
We drove down the Calder Highway into Ouyen.
‘Where to now?’ I asked.
‘Keep driving,’ Irwin said.
That was all he said to me until we drove into the hamlet of Berriwillock—just a roadhouse with a town sign out the front.
‘Pull over in front of the store here,’ Irwin said.
I parked the unmarked police car alongside the roadhouse.
‘I’m going inside,’ Irwin said, getting out of the car. ‘You wait here.’
I waited, sweating like a bastard in the car. I considered getting out and going inside but thought I’d be better off playing Irwin’s game. So I waited a bit more, sweltering in the car, from time to time turning the engine on to get the air conditioning running. Three hours after I pulled up at the roadhouse, Irwin came out looking refreshed, fed and watered. He got back into the car.
‘Right. Back to Mildura,’ Irwin said.
‘I’ll stop at Ouyen and get something to eat and drink, if you don’t mind,’ I said.
It was past lunchtime. I was hungry and after sitting in the car in the hot sun all that time, I had a thirst that could be rendered in oil.
‘No,’ Irwin replied. ‘Drive straight through.’
I couldn’t be bothered arguing. I started the engine and turned the car around for the drive back to Mildura.
We got back just after five o’clock. I parked the car. Irwin went in his way, through the front door of the police station. I went through the CIB entrance.
I walked past Bill Brodie. He looked at me.
‘Don’t ask,’ I told him. ‘I’ve had a shit of a day.’
I made my way to my desk. Brodie came over.
‘Barritt’s down in Melbourne,’ Brodie said, almost in a whisper. ‘He flew down this morning. He’s meeting Under Secretary Dillon.’
I sighed. Before I could look up, Brodie had gone back to Barritt’s office. Within minutes I heard the CIB door close. He’d gone for the day.
I went to the tearoom and gulped down four glasses of water. I’d better look into this, I thought. I gave the Qantas booking office a call. They confirmed Barritt had left Mildura on the first flight to Melbourne that morning and was due to ret
urn later that night.
What had Barritt been up to, visiting Dillon? Sir John Vincent Dillon was a very powerful man. A devout Catholic, the under secretary was the most senior bureaucrat in the state. Maybe Brodie had the story wrong.
I rang Alan Lind down in Melbourne. Did he know of the meeting? He told me he would make a few discreet inquiries. He rang me back within an hour.
‘Your mate Barritt was with Dillon this afternoon,’ he told me.
It all made sense. Irwin had to get me out of the station for the day. That’s why I’d spent the day in the car on the verge of dehydration and heat exhaustion. Barritt had flown down to meet Dick Hamer’s right-hand man. If I had fed information to the Opposition, then the government needed some background on me.
Dillon could have asked anyone in the force—O’Connor, Jackson, Carmichael. Any of the bigwigs in Russell Street. Dillon knew that Barritt and I were at loggerheads. And he figured that if anyone was going to have dirt on me, it would be Barritt. The government was preparing my dossier. If this blew up, they could fling out shit sheets to the media. Not quite shooting the messenger, but loading the bullets and handing the gun to the press.
Not that they had much. Barritt was flailing about, trying to dig up some dirt. He regarded my amateur theatrical performances as an affectation. He put two and two together in his malicious addle-headed way and came up with five. He started telling anyone who cared to listen—and by this stage there weren’t many—that I was a homosexual. No doubt he imparted this to Dillon. I don’t know what Dillon would have made of the connection, but the fact that I was married with four children would have rendered the allegation unlikely.
Meanwhile, the puppet master ‘Baton Jack’ O’Connor had been busy. He and Child went to St James Presbytery in Elsternwick, a sort of halfway house for displaced priests, to interview Monsignor Day on 2 March. Day had been putting his feet up there while he prepared for his overseas jaunt.