Sins of the Brothers, Canberra Times, June 28, 2008

Sins of the Brothers

Canberra Times
June 28, 2008

http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/news/local/news/news-features/sins-of-the-brothers/799661.aspx

It's 7.30 on a cold winter morning, and the first of Canberra's Marist College students are filtering in to the Pearce school. A 12-year-old boy makes his way towards the monastery, where the school's resident brothers live.

The brothers' residence is strictly out of bounds to all students at all times. About 20 rothers live here at any given time in the dormitory-style accommodation. Although located on the school premises, between the secondary and primary buildings, the monastery is their home, and students are promptly ushered away if they even loiter near it.

But this boy has special permission it's his job to wake up Brother Kostka Chute. Most people would use an alarm clock, but Brother Kostka prefers one of his Year 7s to greet him first thing in the morning. It seems unusual, staff think, but then Brother Kostka does have a special bond with the boys. There's nothing sinister, right?

It would take more than 20 years after this boy innocently knocked on Kostka's door for the truth to emerge that Kostka was a paedophile, and that he molested some of his victims almost all of them Year 7 boys who passed through his classrooms in that very dormitory where students were supposedly forbidden from attending.

Was that boy molested? How many boys were tasked with waking Kostka up during his 17 years at the school? Did the other brothers know the boy was even there?

Perhaps the most important question that remains unanswered by the school and Marist Brothers, however, is whether any staff at the school knew, or ought to have known, that Kostka was preying on boys, prior to his arrest in January this year.

The gross violation of the boys' innocence and trust would eventually cost Kostka his freedom. On Monday he was sentenced to two years' jail, followed by 12 months' weekend detention. By now, after five days behind bars, he has no doubt resigned himself to the fact that he will spend the next two years in a NSW prison for his sins.

It doesn't sound like much for what he pleaded guilty to last month: molesting six boys between 1985 and 1989, when they were aged between 12 and 16, some of them on a daily basis over a school year, amounting to a token total of 19 counts of acts of indecency. But at 76, and suffering a long list of ailments almost as long as his newly-acquired criminal record, two years in jail will take their toll.

Kostka is adjusting to life in prison, according to Marist Brothers spokesman Brother Alexis Turton, who was head of the Marist Brothers in 1993 when he flew to Canberra to meet with a victim, and then removed Kostka from the school. Turton says Kostka remains a brother in the order, and his future is a matter for consideration of the Governing Council of the Brothers.

Throughout the court proceedings numerous references were made to Kostka's requests for treatment that were not granted until 2001, when he entered a program funded by the Catholic Church to treat brothers and priests who have "psychosexual disorders". It was not clear when he first sought treatment, but a comment in a psychiatrist's report suggested it was well before December 1993, when Marist Brothers concedes it removed Kostka from the school and ordered he never work with children after an allegation was made to the highest level.

Dr Chris Canaris's report says, "I note also a recurring theme in [Kostka's] history; specifically, that he asked for help and he received none until very late in the piece. These factors, sadly, contributed substantially to his history of offending behaviour."

Kostka's trail of child abuse appears to have extended well beyond the six boys he pleaded guilty to molesting. Three civil claims have already been lodged in the ACT Supreme Court against the school, represented by the Marist Brothers Trustees, and an additional 22 are ready to be filed. Most of these relate to Kostka. Two relate to a former colleague of his, lay teacher Paul Lyons, who committed suicide in 2000 shortly after he was charged with molesting a student in 1989 at Daramalan College, in Dickson, where he taught next (three claims relating to Lyons' time at Daramalan have already been filed). Five of the 22 claims relate to alleged victims who say they were molested by both Kostka and Lyons an unfortunate coincidence, or a coordinated, cunning scheme in which they worked together to identify the vulnerable?

Almost all of the several former colleagues of Kostka and Lyons contacted by The Canberra Times denied any knowledge of their predatory behaviour. Few had even questioned Kostka's unusually close relationship with the Year 7 students at the time. But some did. As one former teacher recalls, some staff were aware of the boy Kostka had hand-picked to be his alarm clock.

"We always thought it was a bit odd that he always had boys waiting outside his office, it was too much," the teacher, who taught at the school between 1976 (the year Kostka started) and 1987, says. He asked not to be named, as he still lives in Canberra and is involved in teaching.

"There were some students who appeared too close to him. They had open access to his office, it was odd behaviour. A few of the staff had their suspicions. I wasn't totally shocked by the news reports [of his arrest]."

Suspicions were one thing, but nothing strong enough for him to act, back then at least. In hindsight, and in the wake of greater awareness among schools and the clergy about the potential for child abuse, the former Year 9 teacher admits he would act now if he saw the same thing. It was Kostka himself who told him one morning about the Year 7 boy who had woken him up. Kostka was cursing the boy's name, half-jokingly, explaining he was late to work because the boy had been late in attending his dorm. Other staff were well aware of this habit too. "That was a conversation I'd had with staff members, we thought it wasn't right. If I'd seen something more concrete I would have said something myself."

John William Chute was born on June 13, 1932, the youngest of 10 children, along with his twin sister. He grew up in the northern NSW town of Coraki, a small farming town that sits where the Richmond and Wilson rivers meet. His father died when John Chute, as Kostka was known before he took his religious name, was nine years old. Already he was on the path towards a Catholic lifestyle, attending the local Catholic primary school. When he was about 10 or 11 he befriended a Marist brother whom he grew to admire.

At age 1112, perhaps inspired by his Marist Brother mentor, Kostka left his mother and siblings to attend a Marist Brothers "juniorate" (a boarding school where boys were prepared to be brothers) in Mittagong, in the NSW Southern Highlands. By all accounts it was an unusually young age, even then, to attend a juniorate. Here his life was to change irreversibly.

According to Kostka's conversations with his psychiatrist, shortly after his arrival at the juniorate an older boy, aged 15 or 16, started sexually abusing him. The older boy would attend Kostka's dormitory at night, hop into bed with him and touch his genitals. This went on for several years and only stopped when Kostka was 14, when his molester was expelled.

Between the ages of 14 and 17, Kostka was abused by two other older boys. One would get Kostka to sit on his lap and rub his penis against Kostka. Another would fondle Kostka's genitals.

At age 18, Kostka became a novice, and after 18 months, without any formal teaching qualifications, he was sent to his first school to teach. Over the next 24 years, before arriving in Canberra, he taught at 11 Marist Brothers schools in NSW, including Marist Primary in Queanbeyan (here he taught Paul Lyons and his brother Ray Lyons, who also taught at Marist and Daramalan, and remains a good friend of Kostka's). It's not known whether he molested any boys at these schools.

Not only was the alleged abuse of Kostka at the hands of older boys almost identical in nature to that which Kostka would inflict on his victims 30 years later, so was Kostka's response at the time.

"He felt confused and did not complain," Kostka's solicitor Greg Walsh told the court in sentencing submissions to Justice Malcolm Gray. "He was comforted that someone had taken an interest in him, though he probably knew it was wrong ... He now believes this abuse had a profound effect upon him."

One victim, that Kostka pleaded guilty to molesting throughout 1986, when he was in Year 8, says he had also been molested by Lyons that same year. He never reported it to the school because Kostka had threatened him with expulsion if he did, and later in life he tried unsuccessfully to forget it.

"You just put it in the back of your mind for your whole life, and every now and then you get a flashback of Kostka and Lyons, and you just try to put it away where it was, buried deep in your mind."

It was only in July last year, when a story in The Canberra Times called for Lyons' Marist victims to come forward, that he went to police. "I saw Lyons on the front page, and it was like 20 years of my life just flew back at my face, and I thought, 'Now is the time to talk about it'."

Back in 1986 Kostka taught Year 7 and Lyons Year 8. It's tempting to conclude that Kostka would feed victims to Lyons as they progressed to the next grade, but this victim says he never heard one talk about the other in that context. Looking back, though, he suspects the paedophile pair did cooperate to some degree.

"It was Kostka at the start, Lyons in the middle part of the year, and Lyons at the end again. Reading about things now it seems that they were quite close as well, they did a lot of stuff together."

The victim, now in his mid-30s, is convinced some staff and brothers at the school knew about Kostka's molesting. It was too indiscrete not to notice, and many of the students even saw him fondling fellow students in class.

"He would come up behind someone in the class and put his hand down there, and only a few students would see, but it was quite obvious. Nobody would say anything, but then at the break people would start talking about it. And I guess that's when rumours started to fly of 'Be careful of Brother Kostka, don't get caught in his office because he'll touch you up'. At the time I didn't know it was wrong, that's just how it was."

Victims say that towards Kostka's later years his abuse was more brazen and frequent. His office was a popular place to abuse the children, luring them in with the promise of warmth on a cold winter's day, or a video they could watch in the lunch break.

By the early 1990s, Kostka's molesting was "common knowledge" among most students, especially the older boys. One teacher, who does not wish to be named, says she was frequently asked by students, "Does Brother Kostka bum-f--k?"

Lyons, similarly, became more indiscrete the longer he got away with abusing boys. While several former students now allege they were molested by Lyons at Marist College during his 12 years there that ended in 1987, many more alleged victims from Daramalan have emerged. At Daramalan, Lyons allegedly ran rampant for more than a decade, luring students to his home and on shooting trips with the promise of food, alcohol and guns until his arrest, confession and suicide in late 2000.

Conspiracy theories abound about whether Marist College knew or suspected Lyons was molesting students. One of his alleged Daramalan victims suspects Marist did know, and is angry the school did nothing more than off-load him to Daramalan. He says he was molested in 1989 during what he thought was going to be a shooting trip with Lyons one weekend. After Lyons had fondled him, he took him to McDonald's and then they went back to Lyons's flat in Queanbeyan. Although an isolated incident, the wounds of the betrayal are still fresh in his mind.

"You're constantly checking yourself, because you're expected to [be a paedophile too]. Even changing your son's nappy becomes an extraordinarily traumatic affair," he says.

Kostka's admission of guilt, and Lyons' admission to Queanbeyan police in November 2000 during a recorded interview that he had molested a 15-year-old student in 1989, are but one hurdle that has been cleared in the path towards compensation for their alleged Marist College victims. As solicitor Jason Parkinson, who is representing the alleged victims, says, it needs to be shown that the school knew or ought to have known about Kostka's and Lyons' abuse.

Parkinson's allegations go further. In the civil claims already lodged with the courts, he outlines what can be only described as a paedophile ring at the school decades of covering up child molesters, including Kostka, and of giving alleged victims and their parents who did come forward false assurances their complaints would be taken seriously.

Even without the civil claims there is already substantial material to support inferences that all was not right at Marist College in the 1970s and 1980s. Kostka was not the first Marist College brother to be convicted of molesting a student. A little-known fact is that in 1996 Brother Peter Spratt pleaded guilty in Cooma Local Court to two counts of molesting a 14-year-old boy from the school. The incidents occurred in 1979 at a Marist Brothers residence at Wategoes Beach, Byron Bay, and at a holiday centre in Jindabyne, NSW.

Spratt was placed on a $2000, two-year good-behaviour bond. It's unclear when he left the school, but he was long gone by the time he was charged.

When combined with what we know about Kostka and Lyons, there would have been three child molesters at the Canberra school working side by side in 1979.

Among the allegations in the statements of claim is that in about 1979, the mother of a child at the school complained to the headmaster that Kostka was showing pornography to students in class, taking children into his office and having them sit on his lap, and masturbating under his cassock in class. The mother asked that Kostka be removed from the school, but was allegedly told by the headmaster at the time that "he was aware of Brother Kostka's behaviour as [she] described", and he had informed the provincial (the head of the Marist Brothers organisation in the region) of Brother Kostka's behaviour.

Another claim is that in 1970 the parents of an alleged victim informed the school headmaster that another brother had forced their son to sit on his lap and touched the child's genitals.

The road to compensation won't be a smooth one. Parkinson would be well served by the golden bullet that enabled him to settle two civil claims a couple of years ago against Daramalan College relating to Lyons: former teachers willing to testify that they knew Lyons was behaving inappropriately, and that they had reported it to the principal without any action taken.

One such teacher, Terry O'Brien, says that he and another teacher, Peter Cuzner, told one principal that they believed Lyons's practices of taking students home was inappropriate. The principal, Father Bob Irwin, called a staff meeting and told staff that the school did not allow unauthorised extracurricular activities with students, but when Irwin left for another school the following year, it's believed Lyons reverted to his old ways, if indeed he had ever stopped.

O'Brien says he regrets not doing more, but had no knowledge of Lyons molesting boys to justify anything more than bringing what he perceived to be unprofessional conduct to the principal's attention.

"My disappointment is that I was concerned, I passed it on and the authorities [at the school] did not act quick enough for my satisfaction," O'Brien, who retired from teaching in 1999, says. "I wish I had done something more at the time, but at the time it was not criminal, if it had been criminal I would have gone to the police directly."

The Marist College victims are crying out for staff and brothers at the school to come clean with what they know, so that they can get at least financial compensation for what they endured.

For others, it is believed to be too late, with at least five suicides of boys in the past 15 years attributed by family, friends or former classmates to suspected sex abuse by Kostka and Lyons. As for Kostka, victims feel some sympathy for him, in light of the sexual abuse he almost certainly suffered at the hands of the order he dedicated his life to.

One victim says, "I've got far more compassion for Brother Kostka than I do for the school. With Kostka I accept that he was abused, and he could have a mental condition.

"But then there was a systematic covering up by senior people in charge of thousands of students over a large period of time, and that's unconscionable."