Pedophile Priest Had More Victims: Detective, The Age, August 5, 2011

Pedophile Priest Had More Victims: Detective

The Age
August 5, 2011

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/pedophile-priest-had-more-victims-detective-20110805-1ieyu.html

Robert Charles Best. Photo: Ballarat Courier

IN almost 30 years in the police force, Kevin Carson has learned how to remain aloof from his work, to maintain a professional distance from those he investigates and their victims.

One case, however, has tested him.

Detective Sergeant Carson has spent much of the past decade investigating the crimes of one of this country's most vile pedophiles.

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In Melbourne on Monday he will see the result of his tireless and heartbreaking work when Robert Charles Best, 70, is sentenced to what is likely to amount to a life sentence.

But for Detective Sergeant Carson - and for the hundreds of victims of Best and others - there will be little satisfaction.

"He deserves to be jailed, but it won't give me any joy," Detective Sergeant Carson said.

"Should we jump up and down? I don't know. It's too sad."

Best has admitted 27 indecent assaults on 11 boys who attended schools at which he taught as a Christian Brother in Ballarat, at Box Hill in Melbourne and in Geelong.

He is already in jail serving four separate terms for indecent assaults against boys at his schools.

But many more people were damaged other than those whose names have appeared on the charge sheets.

Among them are 26 suicides, victims who were assaulted as boys by Best and his associates such as the convicted pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale.

Detective Sergeant Carson believes there are many more victims who haven't come forward.

"A lot of these boys - men now - waited until their parents died before they said anything," he said.

"They were too ashamed, or too concerned their parents would blame themselves."

He is also certain others will find it too difficult to cope with what Best and other clergy did to them.

Detective Sergeant Carson also feels a particular guilt of his own.

As he has investigated Best and his friends, he has questioned himself.

"When you have blokes the same age as me coming in here and crying their eyes out as they give their statements you know there are more important things than just me," he said.

"If we hadn't done the investigation we might not have uncovered what these blokes did.

"But there are times when I wonder about it all."

The anguish of one of Best's victims who suicided after talking to police is particularly haunting.

"I talked that kid into making a statement," Detective Sergeant Carson said.

"I said, 'We'll do something about this.' So who's responsible for his death, me or Best?

"Another fella said to me that as soon as his mum dies he's going to kill himself.

"I can't do anything about it. I'd rather see people live rather than me come along and take a statement from them and upsetting them more."

Then there are the families of the victims. Those who survive are elderly and have tremendous difficulty coming to terms with revelations their sons were too scared or too ashamed to make at the time of the crimes.

"Many of the parents I've spoken to just cry in front of me, mothers who couldn't believe something like this could happen," Detective Sergeant Carson said.

"It breaks their hearts."

Detective Sergeant Carson is somewhat constrained in what he can say about the Best case by the law and the rules of his job.

But sometimes his sense of right and wrong combined with the tragedy of what has happened in a church he once respected, make it too difficult to stay within those bounds.

"Best got convicted for earlier crimes last December and the church knew that," he said.

"Yet the Catholic Church spent millions of dollars on this bloke's defence in his latest trials and did nothing for the victims."

The man who says he was one a "fairly strong Catholic" does his best to be charitable in his view of the church he grew up in.

But he doesn't always succeed.

"So many people in the Catholic Church do so many good things, yet the hierarchy of the Catholic Church go and do all they can for this bloke knowing full well there are victims at three separate schools over an enormous period of time," he said.

"I can't cope with that.

"These days it's difficult for me to go into a church."

In Detective Sergeant Carson's mind there is little doubt Best and Ridsdale, and others, operated together in preying on boys, particularly at St Alipius primary school and St Patrick's College in Ballarat.

While Best taught at St Alipius, Ridsdale was the school chaplain and also shared a house with the then Father George Pell, now the Archbishop of Sydney and Australia's most senior Catholic cleric.

Asked what connection may have existed between Best and Ridsdale, Mr Carson said only that "you wouldn't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to work it out."

Cardinal Pell, who has never been implicated in Best's or Ridsdale's crimes, has denied any knowledge of what was going on.

"I lived there with him (Ridsdale) and there was not even a whisper," Cardinal Pell said on the eve of his swearing-in as archbishop of Melbourne in 1996.

His views on what has happened in the diocese where he grew up and was a priest are not divulged, although the present Bishop of Ballarat has been relatively frank.

Bishop Peter Connors described Ballarat as probably the worst diocese in Australia for sexual abuse, in a report in The Age in 2002.

For Kevin Carson, who has lived there all his life, there is at least one element of good fortune in having been a boy educated in a Catholic school in the town.

"I was a Catholic, one of nine kids," he said.

"We all went to St Columba's school in Ballarat. We were lucky.

"We got taught by the nuns."