Paedophile priest committed abuse in the 'safety' of another clergyman's home, survivor says

By Charlotte King
ABC Ballarat
September 18, 2019

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-19/paedophile-priests-in-melbourne-safe-house-survivor-says/11523794

Deon Cameron says he was abused by a priest in the Gardenvale presbytery in 1991.

Deon Cameron was 14 and living in Penshurst, Victoria, when Paul David Ryan first started grooming him.

The St James Gardenvale presbytery, where Deon Cameron says he was abused in 1991.

Paul David Ryan and Ronald Pickering are at the centre of allegations around a historic Catholic paedophile network in Victoria.

The royal commission heard testimony in Ballarat.

Colin Ryan says his work investigating priests revealed a "club" of known offenders.

More evidence has come to light that paedophile priests working in the Melbourne and Ballarat Catholic dioceses operated in an organised network that included a suburban 'safe house'.

Deon Cameron was in his final year of high school when he travelled from his family home at Penshurst, in Victoria's west, to stay at a church residence in Melbourne to visit his mother in hospital.

It was 1991, and Mr Cameron's parish priest, Paul David Ryan — who had routinely assaulted Mr Cameron since he was 15 — had offered to put him up at the presbytery in a leafy suburb in the city's south-east.

"He had a room set up for me but didn't actually have me spend time in that room," Mr Cameron, now 45, said.

"I think I spent one night in that room out of the two that we were there.

"It didn't really feel normal, but I was trying to normalise it — that's constantly what I was trying to do in this situation, when it was anything but normal.

"The most difficult thing had already occurred and over a period of time it's almost a numbing effect — the grooming just continued on."

The residence, the St James presbytery at Gardenvale, was the home and workplace of an old friend of Ryan's, Ronald Pickering.

Both priests are named in a statement of claim that is due to be lodged in the Victorian Supreme Court this week.

Lawyers for a 57-year-old man allege he was sexually assaulted as a child by multiple clergymen across Melbourne.

In some instances, legal firm Arnold Thomas and Becker has alleged the offending priests took advantage of the same victim in the knowledge that other clergymen were doing the same.

The claim argues for exemplary damages to be paid on the part of multiple defendants, including the Archdiocese of Melbourne and the Diocese of Ballarat.

Mr Cameron said during his stay at Gardenvale there were two or three other men at the residence who he understood to be priests.

In other circumstances, at restaurants or movies, Ryan would introduce Mr Cameron as his nephew — but at Gardenvale, he said, there was no pretence.

"I haven't been in a situation like that since, where you sort of feel that there's a little bit of a clique," Mr Cameron said.

"There weren't a lot of questions.

"It was sort of like there was a strange welcome there.

"[Ryan] was safe — there was a friendship, a safety amongst them, because they knew each other a little more intimately than other people he would let into his life.

"Whenever I think back, I just think it was like a den of thieves."

Also present at the property was a housekeeper, who Mr Cameron said Ryan was noticeably prickly with.

"He thought she was a busybody and didn't like that, because he was very private," Mr Cameron said.

"I think she had probably a strong vibe that it was not a normal situation."

Two years later, Pickering, who had resided in the Gardenvale presbytery for more than a decade, fled the country.

Monsignor Gerald Cudmore, then Vicar General, later told the church's insurance arm the priest left "without warning".

"I got the word from Bishop Pell," Monsignor Cudmore told the church investigators.

"And he said, 'I think you had better go down to Gardenvale, I have heard that Pickering's gone'.'"

The Vicar General said he got the call "during the night" and arrived at the St James parish the next day to find Pickering's stunned housekeeper.

"She was still trying to pull it all together," Monsignor Cudmore told the investigators.

"But she implied the police were on his tail.

"In that context she said something like, 'I told him he shouldn't have taken those boys upstairs'."

Monsignor Cudmore never followed up on the housekeeper's statement.

She eventually followed Pickering to England.

Mr Cameron is unclear on the identities of the men he saw at Gardenvale, but church records confirm Pickering, then parish priest, resided there at the time.

Questioned during a private hearing at the royal commission in 2015, Ryan described Pickering as a "mentor" who he had known for decades, and admitted that he had lived with the older priest "on and off" on a number of occasions.

"Did boys come to the houses that you lived with him for the purposes of sexual contact with either you or him?" Counsel Assisting Gail Furness asked.

"Not with me," Ryan replied.

"I'm not sure about him."

"Did you share boys at the time you were living with him?" Ms Furness asked.

"No," Ryan said.

Pickering was also Ryan's confessor, but Ryan told the commission he did not speak with Father Pickering about whether the priest shared his own sexual attraction to teenage boys, despite there being what Ms Furness described as a "procession of adolescent boys coming to the house".

"You told him of sexual activity you'd had with adolescent males?" Ms Furness asked.

"Yes," Ryan said.

As the exchange continued, Ryan indicated there was a mutual agreement between them.

"The reason he was your confessor and that you lived with him from time to time was because you had that in common with him and it was a matter you discussed, isn't that right?" Ms Furness asked.

"I think that would be the way of summing it up, yes," Ryan said.

"He would have understood where I was coming from on that."

"And you understood where he was coming from?" Ms Furness asked.

"Yes, I think so," Ryan said.

Ryan also made reference to Gerald Ridsdale, one of the country's most notorious paedophiles, in his testimony.

"I didn't have a great deal to do with Gerry, as such," Ryan said.

"His behaviours came out of the blue, except at one stage — and I was in Ararat by then — he made some sort of … approach, some sort of comment.

"He obviously knew about me and my behaviours.

"He knew I'd been removed from Penshurst, for example.

"He insinuated, but also an insinuation, you know — I got the impression that he wanted me to join him and others doing these sorts of things and it just repelled me."

Colin Ryan was the lead detective in Warrnambool in the early 2000s when Deon Cameron made a complaint to police about the abuse he suffered as a teenager.

Mr Ryan issued the bishop's office in Ballarat with a search warrant and said he left with a "grocery box" full of files on Ryan.

"It's evident that there was an association between a number of the priests," the former detective said.

"Whether you'd call it some type of club — one could describe it as that.

"There was, in fact, a letter contained in the file from one Gerald Ridsdale, to [former Ballarat bishop Ronald] Mulkearns in support of Paul David Ryan.

"Based on that statement, by what Ridsdale said, you'd have to ask the question — what other priests were already in that club?

"We have Ryan associating with Pickering, with Ridsdale — it shows a course and conduct with association and motives around these priests acting in concert together."

Former detective Colin Ryan brought the Penshurst matter involving Mr Cameron to court, and Paul David Ryan was convicted of offences against two victims in 2006.

The 70-year-old former priest was again convicted for separate historic sex offences against three more boys from rural towns in Victoria's west earlier this year and sentenced to another term of imprisonment.

The now-retired detective said he never had the chance to bring a criminal case against multiple priests.

"The evidence that I have seen in my time as a detective — I haven't been able to show that," he said.

"The priests that I've investigated — you investigate them individually, you identify the offences that they had done — and you charge them appropriately.

"[But] it's evident that there's liaison, close association between a range of these offenders."

Pickering died having never been charged or laicised and was buried in 2009 on a remote Scottish island, home to a monastery of Redemptorist monks.

The church paid a bursary to the disgraced priest for almost a decade after he fled the country — although the payments were eventually cut off by former archbishop Denis Hart.

The Melbourne Archdiocese's independent commissioner for investigating child sexual abuse complaints, Peter O'Callaghan, wrote to the Bishop of Aberdeen to confirm the death.

The Scottish bishop said the funeral had been arranged by "a lady who had been looking after Ronald Pickering in England in recent years", and that she had "forbidden" the religious leader who presided over the burial to inform Melbourne.

"Father Pickering was a notorious paedophile," Mr O'Callaghan wrote back in 2009.

"Fortunately there has been no publicity of the death … had there been it would have revived the ire of at least some of his victims."

The Melbourne Archdiocese maintained during the royal commission that it was not aware of a police investigation into Pickering until 1997.

The inquiry found Melbourne's Archbishop, Frank Little, had been aware of complaints that Pickering "constantly had boys in the presbytery and in his bedroom" from December 1978.

"He did nothing to protect children within the archdiocese from Father Pickering," the commissioners found.

A police document from 2013 that was tendered to the royal commission has linked the suicides of four of his victims to his offending over several decades.

The St James presbytery still stands tall in Gardenvale, but the stone church beside it, set alight by an unknown arsonist in 2015, is a gutted ruin.

The parish community, and the priest who has inherited the disaster, had no doubt that the motive was linked to Pickering's crimes.

"We have to remember the past," Father Martin Dixon said.

"And we have to remember the cause of it burning down.

"And we build the church, for the future."

Deon Cameron said he became ill when he thought about the idea that the Gardenvale presbytery was used as a safe house for at least two paedophile priests.

"It makes me feel really sick," he said.

"It's a strange feeling.

"There's a strange camaraderie there — and it's not healthy."