AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 27 August 2014)
Australia’s Melbourne Catholic archdiocese recruited and trained a priest, Father Jack Gubbels, whose big interest was in “befriending” boys. The Melbourne diocesan authorities soon transferred him “on loan” to far-north Queensland, out of the reach of the Victoria Police. Eventually Gubbels took sick leave and worked as a bus driver in Queensland — until some of his Melbourne victims contacted Broken Rites.
Broken Rites advised these Melbourne victims to contact a unit of detectives in the Victoria Police.
On 18 August 1995, a Victoria Police detective went to Queensland, seeking to interview Father Jack William Gubbels on the Gold Coast about child-sex sex offences that he had allegedly committed in Melbourne. According to the police, Gubbels (then aged 49) refused to co-operate with them. A few hours later that day, Gubbels was found dead in his bed in his home at Helensville on the Gold Coast. As result, being dead, he could no longer be taken to court to be charged with the sex offences.
The Victoria Police had wanted to interview Gubbels about a complaint from Springvale, a suburb in Melbourne’s south-east. The police had obtained a written, signed and sworn statement from a Springvale man (“Basil”), stating that, when he was a 13-year-old altar boy at St Joseph’s parish there in 1977, he had been indecently assaulted by Gubbels.
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