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The Paedophile Suicides

When convicted Australian paedophile William Brown was found hanging in his candle-lit Bali cell in May 2004, it was yet another suicide in the long list of Australian men who have been accused, or convicted, of molesting or murdering minors.

The previous day, 52-year-old Brown – a Bali resident and a former member of the Australian Diplomatic Corps – had been sentenced by a Balinese court to 13 years’ imprisonment for sexually molesting two boys aged 13 and 15.

Saying that he had only expected four or five years’ jail – given that he did not physically assault the boys in any way – Brown had become outraged upon being sentenced and shouted ‘bastards, bastards’ at the public gallery and gritted his teeth for the cameras at the thought of the long prison years ahead.

Sometime before dawn on the first night into his sentence, Brown cut strips from his mattress, fashioned them into a crude rope and hanged himself from the metal bars in his cell’s ceiling. Prisoners on either side of his cell were reported to have heard nothing as he took his final step into oblivion.

On 27 June 1998, the hideously battered body of 68-year-old Francis Neville Arkell was found at his home in Wollongong. Mr Arkell was the former lord mayor of Wollongong and the sole surviving member of a notorious Wollongong paedophile ring that had operated for years until recently when the police closed in.

Mr Arkell was so unpopular in Wollongong that the local joke was that if the police were looking for witnesses all they had to do was open the local telephone book at any page and pick a name. At the time of his death Mr Arkell was on bail awaiting trial for drugging and raping two teenage boys.

The other three members of Arkell’s paedophile ring – which had preyed on young local boys for more than 20 years – were all dead. One, another former Wollongong mayor, Tony Bevan, had died of cancer in 1991.

Another Arkell associate, a local priest, Brother Michael Evans, was found dead in his car at Rockhampton, Queensland, in 1994, killed by carbon monoxide poisoning just as Royal Commission investigators were looking to question him about child sex allegations.

Another alleged member of the paedophile ring, former Wollongong councillor Brian William Tobin, 62, was also found gassed in his car in April 1996, as Royal Commission investigators were about to close in on him and ask him awkward questions about his activities.

Three months after Mr Arkell’s murder, 19-year-old Mark Mala Valera walked into the local police station and confessed to the murder and that of another man murdered in similar fashion two weeks before. Mara eventually went to prison for life with no parole.

Michael Laurance was without doubt Australia’s most evil paedophile.

His crimes were so appalling that they have been likened to those of England’s 1960s Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who tortured and murdered children and buried their bodies on the bleak Penistone Moors.

On Saturday, 29 September 1984, Laurance, a 34-year-old alcoholic drifter with a long record of child molesting, lured two boys, 12-year-old Mark Mott and 11-year-old Ralph Burns, into his boarding house in Griffith in the NSW Riverina district, as the boys made their way home from the Griffith Show.

Once inside Laurance tied the boys up and sexually molested them as he drowned them in his bath tub. He buried the boys’ bodies in the backyard and then dug them up, dumping them by a lake where they would be found three months later. No one connected Laurance to the boys’ deaths.

A year later Laurance abducted 8-year-old John Purtell and sexually assaulted the lad as he strangled him in the back of his car. When Laurance was caught police found hundreds of photos of naked boys at his house.

He was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment. At 8.40 am on 16 November 1995, Michael George Laurance was found hanging from the bars of the window of his cell at Lithgow Prison. No one shed a tear.