OPERATION PLANGERE
I am ashamed and embarrassed and deeply hurt by what I have been investigating these last few years.
Kevin Carson, Ballarat detective
If, as they say, an ordinary city has six degrees of separation, Ballarat has one or two. And hence, Wayne Brennan, a chippie by trade, was known around the traps by Rob Walsh, also a carpenter. And of course, both of them as children knew George Pell. Walsh was also involved in Operation Plangere—the report that has been used to discredit those that seek to highlight the extent of the child abuse problem in the Victorian Catholic Church and thus a weapon used by those who feel that Pell has been unfairly vilified. In the history wars battled in the Catholic Church over the child abuse question, Operation Plangere has allowed some commentators to say that the entire basis for the Victorian Inquiry into Child Abuse was flawed. And that at least part of the basis for the Royal Commission was flawed. But Operation Plangere’s report is seriously and curiously deficient. Not just that; Wayne Brennan’s suicide is not the only case in it with a link to Pell.
Walsh attended St Alipius at Ballarat East in the seventies with his brothers, Noel and Damien, and his cousin Martin. Rob Walsh is the only one left alive. Damien Walsh hanged himself in March 2010 just as his abuser, Brother Robert Best, was committed to trial. Noel Walsh died after wrapping his car around a lamppost in 1984 in what is, accurately and yet euphemistically referred to as a ‘single vehicle collision’. ‘Do you want to know how Martin died?’ Walsh asks me. I reply yes, on the proviso that it is not going to upset him to tell me. It does upset him, it sends him into wracking sobs, but he really wants to tell the story. ‘He put a shotgun in his mouth in the bath,’ Walsh says, his voice choking. ‘The policeman lifted him out of the bath, his b–brain fell out. That policeman resigned from the job that day.’ Martin was twenty-two.
Rob Walsh was a victim of Ridsdale and Best and he testified at two of their criminal trials. He reckons he could go back to give evidence against Edward Dowlan too, if it wasn’t so bloody painful. It took ten years and he’s had enough. He’ll let that particular sleeping dog lie.
Walsh graduated from primary school at St Alipius and never managed to get to secondary. Being under-educated, a child victim of two predator clergymen and the only St Alipius boy of four in his family who made it past his mid-40s has left Walsh at sea. ‘I’m desolate,’ he tells me. ‘I’m behind in my rent, divorced, you name it, I’ve had the lot of it … I’ll never be able to run my own building company now—I know that. I’ll never reach my full potential … Some days I just shake my head and go, “Why me? Why did I go to that school?”’ But mostly, Walsh just keeps his head down and tries to keep going. He fires off emails to anyone who’ll read them, phones anyone who’ll listen, about the injustice of the treatment of victims of religious paedophiles—the fact ‘those bastards’ have spent far more defending legal claims than on helping survivors. ‘You keep standing,’ he says. ‘In my heart I know I’m doing the right thing.’
Walsh was one of the people who really pushed Detective Sergeant Kevin Carson to look into the suicides of St Alipius. Apart from his brother and cousin, he also had information on some of the others. But just like the Brennan family, Walsh heard not a peep from the detectives on Operation Plangere. ‘They have never spoken to me,’ Walsh says. ‘And I find it bewildering. I find it just gut-wrenching.’ What was going on, I wondered, with Operation Plangere? Why didn’t the detectives pick up the phone?
Walsh also knows a bit about a bloke called Peter Curran. Curran was his mate and another St Alipius boy, who went on to secondary at St Patrick’s in the era of Dowlan. Curran’s is another name on the Operation Plangere list that has its links to Pell—not that that link seems to have been explored, if it was known, by the Plangere detectives. It’s another Pell story that has so far slipped under the carpet of public scrutiny. Walsh says that some time after he first made his police statement to Carson about his own abuse, he went over to his old school mate Curran’s place. He was shocked at what his friend told him.
I have Curran’s handwritten statement, written for Broken Rites, about the, as he called it, ‘Pedophyle Ring’ at St Alipius and the abuse that he suffered at the hands of Ridsdale, Dowlan and Brother Gerald Leo Fitzgerald, who died in 1987. ‘Hope they buried the Bastard face down so he can’t dig his way out,’ Curran writes of Fitzgerald. ‘If you didn’t kiss him [on the lips] you were guaranteed anything from six to a dozen cracks across the arse next day right on nine o’clock, with a splintered feather duster.’
That’s in the very mild section of the statement. It goes into scarifying detail about what happened to Curran when, from the age of eight onwards, he and his mate ‘Macka’ moved from the junior school run by the Sisters of Mercy to the St Alipius boys’ school up the road. ‘Macka’, he later writes, is Philip McAteer, a St Alipius boy who, like Curran, had the misfortune of moving on to St Pat’s, where he would share a class with Wayne Brennan. And for poor old Macka, life just became too much. As Curran writes, McAteer ‘put 5 gallons of petrol, made himself a giant Mollotoff Cocktail, blew his car and himself away at the White Swan Reservoir here at Invermay Ballarat. This kid was [Ted Dowlan’s] number one boy. Fatherless as Phil was, he was a sitting duck.’
McAteer, who was by the time of his death a diagnosed schizophrenic, is also in the Operation Plangere report, colour-coded yellow for suicide. But in the ‘Confirmed Childhood Sexual Assault?’ column, it says ‘No. Nil Link identified [to death].’ I don’t think I’ve met a single survivor from Ballarat who doesn’t bring up Phil McAteer. His story is legend. For all the saddest reasons. In Operation Plangere, he’s one of those guys that fell through the cracks of, what was it? Incompetence? On a more cynical reading, it looks like a whitewash.
The treatment of Curran in the report is just as jaw-dropping. I have spoken to his wife, Colleen, and his eldest son, Blake—an upstanding young man who is a teacher and father of two—and neither of them has been contacted by a single detective from Operation Plangere or anyone else from Victoria Police, bar Carson.
Running through this entire family history was the undercurrent of Pell. Blake became so angered during Pell’s evidence in Rome, he decided to put in a Freedom of Information application to Victoria Police to find out more about his dad’s story. He asked for all documents pertaining to the abuse by Ridsdale, Best and Dowlan. The only one he got back was a heavily redacted document on Dowlan and some details about his father’s death. Why he never received documents relating to Ridsdale or Best is unclear—Best’s latest criminal trial was still being completed, but how that affected a young guy wanting to know about his dad’s death is a mystery. What he did receive was page after page of whited-out documents. What, if anything, did it say about Pell? The documents refer to a ‘third party’ but the FOI officer writes to Blake that that information is not relevant to the scope of his question.
The chaotic life and strange death of Peter Francis Curran neatly exemplifies how the Operation Plangere report’s statistical analysis of cause and effect in relation to the suicides got it spectacularly wrong. Or at least, that it was spectacularly misleading. It shows how the headline that only one suicide of the forty-three that Carson had heard about had been caused by sexual abuse was an insult to everyone involved. Significantly, Curran also had, in his latter years, a lot to say about Pell. His story about Pell is well-told in survivor circles. Like Wayne Brennan, what Curran told his friends directly contradicts the Cardinal’s sworn evidence in the Royal Commission about his knowledge of abuse. But Curran died before any of it was made public. And what he had to say became another one of Ballarat’s dirty little secrets.
Photographs from when his four children were growing up show Curran was a thin and wiry man with large and distracted brown eyes, skin suntanned by hours of outdoor labour, dark hair worn in a short mullet. Curran had been, by all accounts, a sweet guy, the type who would ‘do anything for anyone’ and who worked at the local McCain factory as a forklift driver. ‘He could have been so much more than he was,’ his wife, Colleen, said. ‘He was a very smart bloke.’ But by the time of his death on 6 September 2004, Curran had become an alcoholic mess of a man wracked with childhood pain. He died seven weeks after he suffered multiple stab wounds to his torso. But that nicely colour-coded chart that Operation Plangere kindly provides describes his death as ‘natural causes’. The chart confirms ‘yes’ to possible childhood sexual assault, but says there is merely a ‘possible link indicated’ between his childhood and his death. It seems astonishing to describe Curran’s situation in such a way.
What happened to Curran is spelled out in a police report obtained by Blake in 2016. It says that about 3.30 a.m. on a Friday in July 2004, Curran was in bed. After persistent knocking at his door he opened the door and was met by a man who stabbed him in the chest, then said, ‘Sorry mate, wrong house’, pulled out the knife and left. Curran says he stayed at home for the next four days waiting for the wounds to heal, before going to hospital the following Tuesday.
The 3-page police report records that the case was reported up the line to Superintendent Paul Murnane—who ran Ballarat Local Area Command and was, incidentally, to retire to go to work for the Catholic Church’s Towards Healing program. Murnane had, much to the suspicion of Ballarat’s survivor community, also been, as a serving police member, on the Church’s euphemistically titled Special Issues Committee. Mortlake teacher Ann Ryan describes him, in police uniform, meeting her in a church carpark with a priest when she called on the committee to come to Mortlake to investigate. Her request was refused and she wrote to Murnane expressing her ‘grave concerns’.
Curran remained in hospital and his health deteriorated. A week after the stabbing, detectives reported that his story about the incident changed somewhat. This time, there were two men at the door, one with a baseball bat. By the following Wednesday, the detectives say Curran now said that the pair were wearing balaclavas. Curran was at this point gravely ill and internally bleeding. He was, in other words, delirious.
Almost two weeks after the stabbing, police began to suspect that Curran had in fact stabbed himself. They discovered that Curran had been ‘totally drunk’ the night the stabbing occurred—not a surprise as he was a raging alcoholic. Shortly before Curran died, the matter was handed to the homicide squad, but the investigators had concluded by this point that because of the change in Curran’s story, the stab wounds were self-inflicted ‘in a drunken state in his home’ and effectively, this was a suicide. Foul play had been written off.
Curran was just forty-three and left behind four children aged from seven to twenty-one. In light of this bizarre series of events, it is frankly astonishing that Operation Plangere colour-coded his death as ‘natural causes’. His death certificate, given to me by Colleen, certainly does not. Under ‘Cause of Death’, it says ‘Cerebral and respiratory failure unascertained in a person with cirrhosis who suffered a hemopneumothorax [essentially, air and blood in the chest cavity] following a stab wound to the chest’.
While the Coroner investigated the strange nature of his death, there was no inquest. Colleen has no idea why.
It is chilling to read the contemporaneous twenty pages of handwritten notes provided to Blake under Freedom of Information about the police investigation into his father’s death. And not, mind you, because they reveal much about what went on. Quite the opposite. It is chilling because virtually all twenty pages are blanked out with redactions marked ‘not relevant’. Not relevant, the FOI people at Victoria Police have determined, to the son of a man who is trying to work out what happened to his dad when he died twelve years ago and what the detectives who were investigating knew. Surely, given this was in policing terms ancient history, Blake had the right to know.
There are other reasons to be concerned about the paucity of information in the Curran file presented by Victoria Police to Blake and why Blake decided to get the file in the first place. They concern Pell. Because well before he died, Curran had told a number of people that Pell was aware of his abuse by Ridsdale. Blake had grown up with the story about Pell. And Blake wanted to know what police knew about that.
One of the people Curran told was Rob Walsh. ‘George Pell always said it was a spur of the moment thing that he walked into court with Gerald Ridsdale,’ Walsh says of the famous pictures of Pell by Ridsdale’s side as he walked into court in 1993 for his first tranche of convictions for abusing children. ‘If Peter Curran was alive today, it would be totally different. We would all know that it was not.’
Walsh suspects there was a lot more to the relationship between Ridsdale and Pell than Pell has ever been willing to fess up to. Walsh was a friend of Curran’s from St Alipius and had, like the other survivors, admired Curran’s early willingness to go public with what had happened to him and other children at the school at a time when most survivors still felt too scarred or too shameful to come forward. Walsh was devastated when Curran died in 2004. ‘He hated George Pell’s guts,’ Walsh says of his friend. ‘He hated him from that incident at St Alipius.’
That incident, Walsh says, was described to him by Curran only shortly before his death. Walsh says Curran told him that on one occasion when he was being sexually abused at St Alipius by Ridsdale, ‘George Pell was present’—that is, that Pell came in and interrupted them.
Stephen Woods knew Curran from St Alipius. Like Curran, Woods was also a survivor of Best and Ridsdale. Woods and Curran were pretty much the first survivors to really go public in Ballarat, back when people like Andrew Collins and Peter Blenkiron were still running successful businesses and suppressing the very thought of what they had been through. Woods says that Curran told him on ‘multiple’ occasions that when he was being raped by Ridsdale in the presbytery at St Alipius, Pell had seen it, but did nothing about it. ‘The thing that really upset him about Pell was that he felt that Pell had put his ambition before protecting kids.’ Woods says Curran told him the story on many occasions and it was always the same.
Curran went much further than just telling survivor mates. Before his death, Curran did an interview with the Channel Nine current affairs program 60 Minutes. In the interview, which was filmed in shadow, Curran was called ‘Derek’ to protect his family’s identity. In that interview, Curran again said that in the aftermath of a rape by Ridsdale, Pell had walked past the open doorway of the presbytery and had seen what was going on.
The segment was eventually pulled for legal reasons—at the time, there was far less information about Pell in the public domain and the allegations contained in the interview were risky. The program did not have the same access to documents that I have been able to gather and the fact that the complainant was speaking anonymously was problematic.
Colleen says that her husband told her on several occasions that Pell knew about the abuse. ‘He said, “Pell’s not innocent in this”,’ Colleen tells me. He was particularly angry when Pell accompanied Ridsdale into court in Warrnambool. ‘He said he knew, he definitely knew, and I believed him,’ she says.
Colleen is committed to the truth being exposed and would have been very willing to speak to detectives from Operation Plangere. The detective I spoke to from Operation Plangere confirmed that he and his colleagues had been given a policy from above that they were not to contact any family of the deceased, ‘because there was so much emotion involved in it all’. ‘Many of the people had passed away a long time ago and it was thought the families wouldn’t be receptive to police coming to drag it all out. We did not want to drag these families through the mud again and that’s the reason why we didn’t contact any of the families,’ the former detective says.
On face value, it makes sense. But upon closer analysis, aren’t those the sort of conversations that police have to have all the time? It is no doubt a difficult thing to broach, but in the case of child sexual abuse, if you don’t speak to the families—the people most likely to have had the conversation with a person who may not have reported to police for very compelling reasons—how can you find out the truth? I haven’t spoken to a single relative or spouse of a suicide victim who wouldn’t have spoken to the police.
On Carson’s original investigation, the Plangere detective says that there were ‘not too many suicides that we could attribute wholly and solely to the fact that these people had been abused’.
‘A lot of them went off the rails and turned to alcohol and drugs, as people who are abused do … Most of these kids were certainly abused. It’s like a sliding doors moment—once it happens, you go off on a path they would not have gone on. I reckon a hundred per cent of them, it was a contributing factor. But we could not say that the abuse contributed a hundred per cent. Hardly any of them left suicide notes and those that did, didn’t mention their abuse.’
It seems a strange and high bar to require the child sexual abuse to have been 100 per cent to blame for an adult suicide when there is decades of research to show that as the detective himself noted, the abuse often sets a person off on a dysfunctional trajectory which culminates, tragically, in suicide.
He said the widely held view at the time was that ‘Kevin Carson had gone off half-cocked and said too much about it to the press’. ‘It caused a lot of angst in the police force. Kevin Carson opened a can of worms,’ the detective says. ‘Kevin Carson was a great investigator of child sexual assaults in Ballarat, he just bit off more than he could chew. My impression is that he said something he shouldn’t have said.
‘Management got sick and tired of the whole thing—they told him to just leave it to others,’ the detective said. ‘I don’t think that was done well.’
I ask him if he thinks that there was some other conspiracy at play there—some collusion by members of the Ballarat policing hierarchy with the Church, as is believed by many survivors in the Ballarat community.
‘It’s hard to say,’ the detective replies, acknowledging that sort of thing had happened with Detective Denis Ryan, who investigated Monsignor Day in Mildura and was thwarted by corrupt Catholic police. ‘I think they [Victoria Police management] just wanted it to go away. They knew they would have to put a lot of resources into it and I don’t think they wanted to.’
He says that he and the other detectives on Operation Plangere were ‘banned from talking to [Carson] in the end’. ‘We would go up there to Ballarat to speak to him and his supervisors would tell us “he’s gone home”—we went up many times and they would always say we couldn’t speak to him. You can read into that what you want. We just couldn’t get to him. I think they just wanted it to go away, they wanted it to disappear.’ Carson was wounded at hearing of this treatment.
Two months after a redacted form of the report quietly appeared on the Royal Commission website, it was discovered by The Australian. Badged ‘EXCLUSIVE’, the story was splashed across page one of the newspaper. ‘Police in false claim on child-abuse suicides’, it said. The article was critical of Victoria Police and of Carson’s work.
‘Despite knowing for more than two years that the figure was grossly wrong,’ The Australian wrote of the number of suicides listed in Carson’s report, ‘the force has never publicly corrected it, regardless of the enormous damage it has caused the church.’
‘Rather than scores of people committing suicide due to church-related sex abuse, Operation Plangere could substantiate only one firm case,’ The Australian wrote. There were several suicides of people who might have suffered sexual abuse, but these could not be verified by police reports and several cases where the suicides were not abuse-related,’ the story said.
‘The police operation into Sergeant Carson’s claims found that 16 people on his list of 43 could be confirmed as committing suicide … The analysis of Sergeant Carson’s work … was damning … There are significant limitations to the data supplied by Detective Sergeant Carson.’ An editorial in the same newspaper accused the force, via Carson, of ‘shameful distortions’ and ‘incompetence’.
Carson was gutted. ‘Unfortunately, it is far too easy for people to sit in offices such as The Australian newspaper office … and question my integrity alleging I had fabricated a number of suicides,’ he wrote in a later submission to the Royal Commission.
‘From behind a computer you don’t see the mother’s tears. You don’t see the partners devastated, raising children as a single parent without their father. You don’t see men crying because they can’t hold their children, unable to hug them, unable to bathe their own children. You don’t make it up!!!’
To be fair to The Australian, it was just reporting an internal data report which slammed the initial work of Victoria Police and appeared to point to incompetence. The redacted report on the Royal Commission website didn’t have the names of the suicides, and therefore the clues that the picture was far, far more complicated than Plangere would have it. The journalist would have trusted that it was a competent piece of policing.
But Carson took it, unsurprisingly, as a personal affront after the years of painful and emotionally exhausting work he had done on behalf of his community. Carson was also livid when Francis Sullivan, lay CEO of the Catholic Church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council, wrote on the group’s website: ‘The Royal Commission processes and all that surrounds it are traumatic enough for survivors without false and misleading claims dressed up as official reports inaccurately amplifying the horrors,’ wrote Sullivan, who wondered if this was a sort of ‘get the Catholics’ exercise.
Carson responded in his submission to the Royal Commission:
Above all the most disappointing part is Mr Sullivan has sat before this Royal Commission and listened to victim after victim tell their horrific stories, talk about suicides and premature deaths, and hear stories recanted of half a class of students now being deceased. To suggest that the premature deaths which I initially sought to be referred to the Coroner for investigation were fabricated, is extremely disappointing.
Carson wrote an impassioned letter to Sullivan and the pair met. Sullivan realised that the story was not as it initially had seemed.
I have never met Carson nor had I spoken to him before his correspondence fell into my hands from another source. The point about all of it is that the ‘false story’ of the suicides has been used by many to champion the view that the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, particularly in Ballarat and Melbourne, was overstated.
It has been used by the defenders of Pell, even when he later faced allegations himself that were aired in my story on the ABC 7.30 program. Shortly before he took the top job, Victoria Police Commissioner Graham Ashton had gone in to bat for Carson in the Victorian parliamentary inquiry in 2014. He also made the claim that not a single victim had been referred to Victoria Police by Pell’s Melbourne Response. The Melbourne Response Special Commissioner Peter O’Callaghan, QC, gave detailed evidence saying that was not true—and citing the number of people that had been referred.
So when the Plangere report leaked out, the Pell defenders sprung into action. News Limited columnist Miranda Devine, a friend of Pell’s, said Ashton had ‘form when it comes to Pell, for whom he has barely concealed antipathy. His force has been slammed for failing to investigate complaints of child sexual abuse and for telling untruths to a parliamentary inquiry, including a wildly exaggerated claim about suicides, in an effort to offload blame on to the church.’
Andrew Bolt, who exclusively interviewed Pell in Rome, described Carson’s report as ‘vastly overstating the suicides’, and the story of it in The Age as a ‘stunning slander by the police’. Both Bolt and Devine argued that if the police could get it so wrong on suicides, they could easily get it wrong on allegations against Pell.
Now, all of that would be true were it not for the fact that Operation Plangere presented as a complete whitewash. What, in reality, Victoria Police tells me it was, was an attempt to not upset families of a bunch of guys who died a long time ago when it would be very difficult to establish on any measure exactly what caused them to take their lives. It seemed like a pointless and unnecessarily distressing exercise. But in the process, the report unwittingly undermined the force’s new commissioner and the police case against Pell.