AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
June 19, 2014
David Ellery
Reporter for The Canberra Times.
The Marist Brothers made no attempt to locate Gregory Sutton’s other victims after Canadian psychotherapists told them in 1990 he had possibly abused multiple children, a royal commission has heard.
Brother Alexis Turton, the then head of the order who has been accused of shipping Sutton out of the country on August 18, 1989, to foil a police investigation, is adamant he was aware of only one victim at the time.
“Certainly with today’s wisdom we would have done things differently,” he told Thursday’s hearing of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Another former Marist Brother, Denis Doherty, has previously told the commission that he told his superiors of concerns about Sutton decades before his crimes were exposed.
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Mr Doherty’s lawyer, Timothy Kernaghan, put it to Brother Alexis on Thursday that he had committed a criminal act.
“Do you think today that your decisions of how to deal with the matter in August 1989 and in the times that followed amounted to you concealing the commission of a serious crime upon a child?” he asked.
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