Death of Brisbane Grammar School Teacher after Sex Abuse Claim Raises Questions over the Web As a Path of Justice

By David Murray
The Courier-Mail
October 17, 2015

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IN MAY, 2000, three police officers were shot in a pre-dawn ambush at Chermside in Brisbane’s north. Miraculously, the officers survived. But the aftermath would change hundreds more lives when it emerged the gunman, Nigel Parodi, had gone off the rails after being sexually abused as a student at elite private school Brisbane Grammar.

Parodi’s abuser was the school’s revered former counsellor, Kevin Lynch, and it soon emerged scores of other boys had fallen victim at Grammar and his subsequent workplace, St Paul’s School at Bald Hills.

Fifteen years later, another damaged man lashed out last week over events connected to the same two schools, again with deadly consequences. On this occasion the weapon used was not a rifle. It was a blog.

For some time a former unionist and talented Brisbane writer, Brenden Sheehan, had written a controversial blog under the pseudonym, Archie Butterfly. His prolific, take-no-prisoners posts gave his often scathing take on politics, sport and current affairs. But on Tuesday, October 6, Sheehan used the blog to publish a searing personal story of being drugged and sexually abused when he was a teenager.

His post followed a public announcement by The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that it would next month hold hearings into the abuse of children at Brisbane Grammar and St Paul’s from the 1970s to 1990s.