Marist Brother Left Diary on Desk Which Revealed Liaisons with Young Girl Royal Commission Told
By Janet Fife-Yeomans
WHEN Marist brother Gregory Sutton was caught lying about taking an after noon off school, a suspicious teacher looked in the diary he kept openly on his desk. “Picked up (girl). What an afternoon. She is magnificent,” the former assistant principal of Lismore’s St Carthage’s Primary School, Jan O’Grady, said she read in Sutton’s diary. His entry for the following day said: “I had a fight with (same girl) and we made up.” Ms O’Grady told the royal commission into child sex abuse yesterday that, when she rang the Catholic Education Office, they suggested Sutton should take a month off and then return to the school. She said she was furious, almost hysterical, and contacted the then director of Catholic Education for the Diocese of Lismore, John Kelly. It was only then that Sutton left the school. Ten years later, when Sutton was tracked down in the US and extradited to NSW, he pleaded guilty to 67 counts of child sexual assault, including having intercourse with the girl, then aged 10 or 11. He had been moved to St Carthage’s after leaving Marist College Canberra and St Thomas More School at Campbelltown, where he also abused girls and boys. A former head of Marist College, Brother Terry Heinrich, said he had never been told about Sutton’s history nor warned about Brother Kostka Chute, who was abusing dozens of young boys at the school while Brother Heinrich was principal. Brother Heinrich said he was only told about one incident of Brother Kostka fondling a boy’s genitals during a film night at the school, but it never crossed his mind that it was a criminal offence. He said Brother Kostka told him it was all a mistake in the dark. He said he would have called in the police if a brother had stabbed a pupil but not for something as “intimate” as an allegation like that against a brother. Instead, he told the provincial of the Marist Brothers in Australia. “It sounds like a cover-up, doesn’t it,” said Peter O’Brien, the barrister for one of the victims of Brother Kostka. “I don’t know what it sounds like but it’s certainly not a cover-up,” Brother Heinrich, now working in Cambodia, said. The commission is investigating how the Marist Brothers moved the two serial paedophiles around schools in the eastern states. The hearing continues.
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