Unholy Trinity

by Denis Ryan

  Following examination of this extensive statement by former Assistant Commissioner O’Connor, I am completely satisfied with the conduct of the investigation into the Day matter and that Denis Ryan resigned from Victoria Police of his own accord.

  I also attach for your records a copy of earlier advice to you dated 7th April 1998 from former deputy Commissioner O’Loughlin regarding the Ryan matter.

  The undated letter received by Russell Savage’s office in September 2006 was signed by the then Chief Commissioner of the Victoria Police force, Ms Christine Nixon. The letter stands as the final official hurrah in this whole ugly episode.

  Russell Savage was an independent member of the Victorian parliament’s lower house seat of Mildura. He was elected in 1996 and held the seat for ten years. After the 1999 state election, he and two other independent MPs held the balance of power. The three agreed to support Labor and endorsed Steve Bracks as premier.

  Born in Victoria, Savage had spent three years as a police officer in London’s Metropolitan Police. He returned home and joined the Victoria Police force in 1970. He became a senior sergeant, and was stationed at Mildura in the 1970s and ’80s.

  Not long after he was elected to parliament, I spoke with Russell in his office. I told him the whole story—about the Day investigation, Barritt, and Irwin and O’Connor’s cover up. About a year later, Russell contacted me and said he would like to help out in some way or another. He started stirring the pot.

  On 6 August 2006, Russell Savage got to his feet in the Victorian Legislative Assembly and spoke of the miscarriages of justice suffered by Day’s victims, and me, too, as the man who dedicated himself to bringing Day to justice. Russell requested the then police minister, Tim Holding, to instruct the police to hold an inquiry into the cover up.

  Christine Nixon replied to Holding’s request in a letter sent directly to Russell Savage. Never mind that she got my rank wrong in that shambolic letter, referring to me as Detective Senior Sergeant Constable Denis Ryan—a rank that doesn’t exist—or that she misspelt Harvey Child’s name.

  Nixon relied solely on a sworn statement from Assistant Commissioner ‘Baton Jack’ O’Connor. She states that he interviewed nine of the twelve victims from whom I had taken statements in the course of my investigation into Day. That was the full extent of the inquiry as far as I can make out. Nixon sought and obtained a sworn statement from O’Connor: by the date of Nixon’s letter he was an 89-year-old man who had retired from the police force twenty-four years before.

  I have not seen O’Connor’s statement. I don’t know if it was the one he made in 1972 when he put the smother on, or if he was called out of retirement to provide his recollections. The statement to which Nixon refers was not made publicly available. What I can say is that I spoke to seven of the victims after Savage passed this letter on to me, and after my inquiries only one had been interviewed by O’Connor and his sidekick, Harvey Child. That was in Melbourne in 1972. This victim confirmed he had been interviewed by O’Connor and Child and told me he had confirmed the allegations he had made in his original statement almost word for word.

  The other six had not been approached at all, but when I spoke to them, they all stood by their allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of Day.

  The victims I had been unable to contact had either left the Mildura area or moved on to another plane. I knew some had met a grisly fate.

  O’Connor had eaten at my house. We had got drunk as louts together. I came to learn that he was an ardent and bigoted Catholic—a man of deeply embedded prejudices. Nixon’s letter indicates that, thirty-four years later, the Victoria Police force continued to believe the lie of O’Connor’s investigation.

  When he put the smother on, O’Connor was a chief superintendent. He failed to live up to his boast made to me one drunken afternoon many years ago that he would make chief commissioner. But ‘Baton Jack’ O’Connor got close. O’Connor retired from the force as an assistant commissioner.

  My guess is that Christine Nixon—the first woman police commissioner in Australia—was mushroomed by O’Connor: kept in the dark and fed bullshit. And O’Connor was a master bullshit artist.

  In 2006 I received another letter from Russell Savage. Russell attached a letter from Bill Hager, a retired police officer who had been stationed at Edenhope, in the Wimmera near the South Australian border, in the mid-1970s. Hager wrote that in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1976, he had pulled over a local priest. Hager wrote that when the priest refused a breath test, he was arrested and taken into custody. Hager and a Constable Schulz prepared a brief of evidence for divisional headquarters in Hamilton and sent it to the attention of an inspector there. The brief got to Superintendent Pat Cashin, an ardent Catholic and a former inspector at Mildura during my time there. Cashin jumped on the drink-drive charge, but Hager was not prepared to let it go.

  Hager was put through the wringer, just as I had been. He was marched into Chief Commissioner Jackson’s office where Jackson and the then Deputy Commissioner Ron Braybrook, his judge and jury, threatened him with a transfer if he persisted in charging the priest. But Hager remained adamant that he would not drop the charges.

  Ultimately Hager was shanghaied out of Edenhope. He ended up taking a posting at Nagambie in central Victoria for his ‘own peace of mind’. The priest was never prosecuted. Hager learnt through the grapevine that, due to his heavy drinking, the priest was continually transferred from parish to parish within the Ballarat diocese.

  Hager’s letter described a running joke among police officers in the Hamilton district at the time that Cashin ‘had an extraneous appointment to the Bishop to protect priests from prosecution’. The Catholic Mafia was alive and bringing influence to bear in 1976.

  There have been changes, most for the good, and I expect the bad old days of sectarianism in the force are long past, and not before time.

  The Roman Catholic Church has been forced to confront its demons. Apologies have been made. The then pope, Pope Benedict XVI, apologised. All the Church’s senior clerics, archbishops and bishops have offered apologies of one type or another. But what are they apologising for?

  The apologies take the form of expressions of sorrow and regret for aberrant priests disgracing themselves and causing hurt and pain among parishioners. What is not acknowledged is that the Church has covered up the crimes of priests like Day. The cover up simply increased the offending, because Day and his ilk understood that they could rape children and never have to face the consequences. The effect of the cover up was to create an epidemic of paedophilia in Australia, and its epicentre was the Ballarat diocese.

  Nowhere in Australia, and as far as I can determine nowhere on earth, has this epidemic of paedophilia been as pronounced or as gravely damaging as it was in the Ballarat diocese. There is not a country town in western Victoria that has not been affected by it. Towns like Colac, Horsham, Stawell, Ararat, Apollo Bay, Mildura and Ballarat itself now bear the scars, the pain and the trauma of decades of abuse perpetrated by paedophile priests.

  The epidemic of paedophilia was driven by paedophile priests, and the worst of them all was Monsignor John Day, who died unrepentant and unpunished. Convicted paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale has acknowledged that his victims number in the hundreds. Ridsdale was convicted of rape, buggery and indecent assault of boys in Bacchus Marsh, Ballarat, Warrnambool, Edenhope, Horsham and Mortlake over two decades.

  By my reckoning, Day was much worse. He had been an active paedophile within the same diocese for forty-eight years, committing his crimes against children without let or hindrance. And in Mildura, Day was protected and cosseted by Barritt, a corrupt police detective, and Kearney, a supplicant with a vicious criminal streak. Day’s power in this community was almost absolute. He wielded the power of life and death in Mildura for thirteen years.

  Many of his victims cannot come forward. Some have committed suicide—at least seven by my count—others have descended into alcoholism and drug abuse
. Some remain so deeply traumatised that they are unable to acknowledge the crimes perpetrated upon them. These young lives were rent asunder; their emotional development was halted, their love of school and education abruptly curtailed.

  Today, the Sacred Heart Church in Mildura looks more like a cathedral than a parish church, and its vastness is due almost entirely to Monsignor Day’s extortion of money from local people.

  Day’s name appears in a publication to commemorate the centenary of the Catholic Church in Mildura. He is praised for his work in extending the old church into its present glory and purchasing land around it. In the penultimate paragraph, the only acknowledgment of Day’s depravity appears as a laughable euphemism: ‘Later extreme hurt, pain and disappointment caused by some aspects of Father Day’s life surfaced amongst Mildura parishioners.’

  What has not been acknowledged is that the Church has covered up the crimes of paedophile priests like Day and Ridsdale and, in doing so, increased exponentially the number of victims and offences against them.

  The Roman Catholic Church in Australia has installed its Towards Healing process. It is an opportunity for victims to be compensated and for apologies to be made. No doubt the money has been welcomed by some, but all of Day’s victims would acknowledge that money on its own cannot properly resolve the sins of the past.

  All of the victims I have spoken to have been left deeply dissatisfied with Towards Healing. Compensation bought silence. If a victim took the cheque, they had to sign a nondisclosure guarantee. This meant their experiences would continue as dirty secrets. For some the money only plunged them further into darkness—alcoholism, drug and gambling addictions.

  In the United States the cost of litigation has bankrupted entire dioceses, with the cost of each victim’s claim averaging $1 million. In Australia, the Towards Healing process has cost the Church a good deal less. I have spoken to a number of victims. Their payments have varied but they seem infinitesimal compared to the suffering they have endured: $25,000 here, $40,000 there. Sometimes more. Sometimes less.

  Certainly by US standards, the compensation figures are miserable amounts.

  Sometimes the money has been more of a curse than a blessing. Many victims have been deeply traumatised by Day’s abuse and have lived lives of financial and intellectual poverty. Placing a relatively large amount of money in their hands has not always been in the best interests of their health and welfare. Some successful claimants have withdrawn into alcoholic or narcotic fogs until the money runs out, only to emerge with minds even more troubled. Others have engaged in almighty and pointless binges, never to emerge.

  Peter Connors was installed as Bishop of the Ballarat diocese in 1997, ending Mulkearns’s twenty-six years as bishop of Ballarat. In 2006, Bishop Connors asked if he could come and see me. I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect but I agreed. He drove up to my home in Red Cliffs in one of the diocesan cars. Unlike his predecessor, Bishop Connors did not demand that I kiss his episcopal ring. Instead he extended his hand. I shook it and looked him in the eye.

  ‘Call me Peter,’ he said. I gather the main purpose of his visit was to tell me the bad news that I was not eligible for compensation under Towards Healing. I was not a victim as such, he explained. I nodded.

  ‘So what can you tell me about Day?’ I asked.

  ‘I believe he was a serious offender,’ Connors replied.

  ‘Have you had many applying for compensation through Towards Healing as a result of Day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would there be a hundred?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Mildura?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘More than a hundred?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did many of the victims suffer buggery?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The others were sexual assaults and acts of gross indecency?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I didn’t want the question and answer to continue. I had heard enough. I told him to leave. I wasn’t rude but I was brusque. I thanked Connors for visiting me and for being honest. We shook hands and he left.

  I regret being abrupt with him now. Bishop Connors at least did his best to deal with the matters that had been left to him—the weeping sores of the Ballarat diocese.

  Apologies and guilt money will only take people so far. Those who covered up for these criminal priests need to be brought to book. Though many have passed on, others remain who have said nothing and have done nothing that would add to our knowledge and thus our understanding of how this behaviour was allowed to occur.

  Just as thousands of child sex offences have been committed, a substantial body of evidence also exists to indicate the concealing of crimes or persuading people not to give evidence about a crime, conspiracies, perversion of the course of justice, and of priests and bishops being accessories before and after the fact. The men who committed these crimes, some of them senior clerics, need to feel the full force of the law. And those who have shuffled off this mortal coil should not be spared their share of opprobrium just because they’re not here to listen to it.

  In 2012, when the Victoria Police force put its submission to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into child abuse by religious and other organisations, describing it as exhaustively researched over more than sixty years, it laid the overwhelming share of the blame at the feet of the Roman Catholic Church. The submission indicated that the Church had never referred any complaint directly to the police and that it had been unco-operative with police.

  When Deputy Commissioner Graham Ashton gave evidence at the parliamentary inquiry on 19 October 2012, he rounded on the Catholic Church and its failure to assist police: ‘Examples of the historic activities include transferring alleged offenders to other parishes or schools within Victoria, interstate or overseas, permitting international trips to undergo spiritual formation amidst child sexual abuse allegations.’

  It might be that, when it comes to investigating Catholic priests, the Victoria Police force is now squeaky clean. I wouldn’t know. I’ve been out of the job too long. But it was going on when I was a copper and it was still going on after I left.

  It is sometimes said that one of the primary reasons for the existence of paedophile priests is the vow of chastity that a priest takes, resulting in an overt act of sexual repression that bubbles away in the human libido, only to find expression in paedophilia. The theory goes that if you take away the vow of chastity, the problem will largely be solved. This is a gross oversimplification. Had priests engaged in consensual sex with other adults, we would not be so concerned, and they would have committed no crime under the law of the land.

  The reality is that a paedophile priest like Day committed crimes against children because he could. Day held power over children and understood that he could commit acts of gross indecency, sexual assault, buggery and rape on children with impunity. Kids feared him. Day’s victims were threatened and bullied into trembling, silent compliance.

  The Roman Catholic Church’s response to this sad episode in Australian history was invariably directed at avoiding damage to its reputation. The unwillingness or the inability of the Church to confront its paedophile priests and assist in bringing them before the courts has been the major contributing factor to this epidemic of paedophilia in post-war Australia.

  AFTERWORD

  A royal commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.

  MICHAEL FOOT, 1913–2010

  Now we have a royal commission. I welcome it. When it was announced in November 2012, I jumped for joy.

  I am glad that the commission will not just investigate the Catholic Church but all organisations, religious or otherwise, and investigate the criminal sexual abuse of children and why they systematically failed to respond. The Roman Catholic Church does not have a monopoly on this appalling conduct but it is clear that it has been the principal perpetrator.

  The commissioners face enormous challenges. The scale of institutional child sex abuse in
this country is virtually without precedent anywhere in the world. The commissioners’ primary objective will be to learn as much as they can from victims and to direct governments, both state and federal, to create systems that will not fail children.

  The victims of paedophiles like Monsignor John Day should have the opportunity to tell their stories to the commission. There are thousands of victims and their voices must be heard. But the victims need more. They need to see the wheels of justice turn in the right direction. Where possible, the victims need to see their tormentors in the dock.

  The commission should investigate how an organisation like the Roman Catholic Church can allow its own laws to override the laws of the land and why, when the Church sees conflict between canon law and Australian law, canon law is assumed to take precedence.

  Most importantly, a royal commission should examine the effectiveness of police in investigating allegations of institutional child sex abuse. There is too much evidence indicating that elements of the police across Australia have failed to investigate these matters properly. My story might fall into the category of the worst example of police collusion with child sex offenders. In 1958 I locked up a Methodist minister who got thirteen years for raping and abusing boys in his care. Yet it was another twenty years before the first Catholic priest was convicted of child sex offences in Victoria, and another fifteen before Ridsdale became the second Catholic priest to find his way into the courts for sex offences against children.

  The obstructionism of the Church goes only part of the way to explaining why there were no convictions recorded against Catholic priests for child sex offending when clearly there was so much offending going on. I can attest to the fact that an element within the Victoria Police force existed between the 1950s and 1970s and that its primary purpose was to ensure that Catholic priests who committed offences did not have their days in court. I was asked to join it. I was told that this group took its instructions ‘from the Cathedral’. I can also confirm this group’s ruthless efficiency in achieving its aims. I am living proof of it. It has become the story of my life.