AUSTRALIA
The Australian
AUGUST 22, 2014
ONE of Australia’s worst child sex offenders, pedophile priest John Sidney Denham, has told a court he was a “proud, self-indulgent, self-obsessive person”, who destroyed peoples’ lives.
Denham, a former Catholic priest and schoolteacher, was giving evidence at a sentencing hearing in Sydney after pleading guilty to 25 charges relating to offences against 20 victims. He has asked the judge to take a further 23 charges into account.
The 71-year-old has previously been convicted of abusing a further 39 young boys in the St Pius X Catholic High School in the NSW Hunter Valley between 1968 and 1986.
Wearing his prison greens, Denham told the court he is currently in protective custody in Goulburn jail, where he shares a yard with other child abusers and murderers.
“There are three or four there that I know of, sexual offenders. In the yard there are six ex-policemen, two ex-priests … then there are the people who threw their wives off balconies,” he said.
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