Peter Hoysted is an author, columnist, and television producer. He co-wrote Shallow Graves in 2000 with Sydney based crime writer Paul Kidd, and was the producer and writer of Tough Nuts: Australia’s Hardest Criminals, a 16 part true crime series which screens on Foxtel’s Crime Investigation channel. Peter is an online columnist with The Australian, writing under the nom de plume Jack the Insider. Denis Ryan is the former Victorian Police officer who sought to bring the pedophile priest Monsignor John Day, to justice and break the nexus that extended police protection to the priest.

Unholy Trinity

The Hunt for the Paedophile Priest Monsignor John Day

By Denis Ryan, Peter Hoysted

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2013 Denis Ryan and Peter Hoysted
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74331-402-9

Contents

Authors’ note,
Foreword,
Prologue: An extraordinary coincidence,
1 On the beat,
2 Ditching the uniform,
3 The deep north,
4 Confessions,
5 Power without glory,
6 The Catholic Mafia,
7 The smother,
8 A brush with scandal,
9 Bloodied but unbowed,
Afterword,
Day and the darkness: three victims speak,
Acknowledgments,

CHAPTER 1

ON THE BEAT

Oh! What a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive. SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1771–1832

By 1956 I had been a copper for four years, having come to the job through a circuitous path. I’d always wanted to be a police officer but my parents wouldn’t let me join up in New South Wales, so I travelled around Australia, finding work where I could before I settled in Melbourne. My grandfather, Thomas, had served in the New South Wales police force and my great uncle, Tighe, had worked his way up the ladder in New South Wales to become a superintendent in the CIB.

At 175 centimetres, I was tall enough to join any force across the country, but my light, 68-kilogram frame was a problem. On the day I applied to join the Victoria Police force, I sat outside the depot and devoured two pounds of bananas in an effort to get my weight up to pass muster. I don’t know if the bananas helped, but the scales tipped in my favour and I was in.

Some shifts I found myself stuck at the station, helping out in the watch house, doing paperwork and being the face of the force as people came into the station with complaints. Sometimes I was on watch-house duties, processing the residents of the cells for the night.

The worst shifts had me stuck in what was called files and inquiries — following up motor licences and making inquiries with motor registration and other government departments. The hands on the clock would crawl. Often I looked up at the clock in the station and it seemed like the hands had gone backwards.

Files and inquiries also meant I had to get out on an old police bike to deliver summonses. The police bikes were as heavy as Sherman tanks, with a turning circle to match. As you might expect, I was rarely made welcome. A lot of doors were slammed in my face. It wasn’t what I had joined the police force for, but it was all part of being a uniformed police officer learning the ropes.

Each week I checked the noticeboard to see what shifts I’d been given. I preferred to work nights because, more often than not, that would have me out on the divisional van patrols. The divisional vans had radios and we were called in to attend crime scenes by D-24, the radio headquarters based at Russell Street. The divvy patrols could be exhilarating. We were called into anything and everything. Murders, burglaries, punch-ups — any sort of misbehaviour you could imagine.

The old blue Dodge divisional vans didn’t have heaters. The powers-that-be thought it might be too dangerous to have us in a van with the heater on. I guess they thought it would put us to sleep, and we might nod off while in pursuit of a speeding vehicle. I learnt pretty quickly to dress in layers when I was due to go out on divvy van patrol — two pairs of socks, two singlets and two vests underneath my police jumper and tunic to ward off the cold.

I had no such worries one balmy Melbourne night in March 1956. I had just my shirt and tunic on, and was out in Divisional Van 10 as it rolled down Wellington Street towards St Kilda Junction. I glanced at my watch. It was just past one. Only one more hour to go and I’d be back at the station, putting my feet up with a cuppa and a sandwich.

I looked across at Senior Constable Tom Jenkins. Tom’s face had aged more than its forty-two years. Three years in Changi prisoner-of-war camp will do that. While his face revealed the hardships he’d endured at the hands of Imperial Japan, his body had recovered its strength and power.

Tom’s eyes shifted along the road and into the distance, his left elbow dangling casually on the passenger door. He was an experienced copper and his eyes scanned the area looking for anything out of the ordinary. Tom had been working the St Kilda beat for years. He’d seen them come and go — the ‘gunnies’ and bludgers who ruled the working girls with violence and intimidation, the SPs and sly groggers, the rubber-neckers, the hoons and the hooligans, the desperate and the dangerous.

On my right sat the driver, Constable Clarrie Bell, aged 25, dark hair, well built, clean cut. He was only a year older than me. He’d been through the academy a year earlier and had six months’ service ahead of me.

Even in the dark, St Kilda looked like it could do with a lick of paint. The grand Edwardian houses paid for by a long gone gold rush now stood dilapidated. Many had been transformed into boarding houses offering cheap accommodation and anonymity for the itinerants who were drawn to St Kilda like moths to the flame.

The bay-side suburb is eight kilometres from Melbourne’s central business district, a twenty-minute trip by tram down St Kilda Road. It had once been a playground for the wealthy. There was the beach, the restaurants and clubs, and Luna Park on the Lower Esplanade, with its giant laughing face facade an open invitation to lovers and giggling children.

A depression and two world wars later and St Kilda had become a playground of a different type — Melbourne’s dedicated red light district and a magnet for night crawlers.

Wedged between my two colleagues, my job was lookout. The streets were quiet but I knew the reverie could be shattered in a heartbeat.

As a young uniformed officer at St Kilda, I was doing the hard yards in a tough school, but I was fortunate to be in such good company. My two colleagues were men to watch, admire and emulate. Tom Jenkins, in particular.

The van shuddered and jolted along towards the junction, a spaghetti bowl of roads that converged in St Kilda’s heart. In the headlights, I spotted the Ford Crestline crawling along the gutter, the gigantic frame weaving ever closer to the curb. Tom had spotted the car a second or two ahead of me, as usual.

‘What’s that crazy bastard doing?’ he said. On cue, Clarrie accelerated, pulling the divvy van alongside the metal monster.

Tom wound down his window and pointed at the driver. ‘Pull over.’

The driver was Hazel Hanrahan, a prostitute known to us all. She had a long criminal record, with a string of convictions for street offences. Her partner and pimp was Bobby Bull, the notorious gunman, painter and docker. The thought of Hazel Hanrahan lurching down the road in a big expensive American car set off the alarm bells for me. It was obvious the car wasn’t hers and she had some explaining to do. Hazel rolled the Ford along the curb before it finally came to rest. She waited in the car.

I clambered out of the car with Tom and Clarrie. I knew Hazel wasn’t violent but my heart was still pounding. This was what I had joined the force for — the adrenaline rush, the uncertainty of what could happen at any time on the streets.

I saw Hazel had a passenger so we all approached the car with caution. Hazel’s fellow traveller was Dot Renwick, the wife of Eric Renwick, another violent gunnie. Eric was a man who suffered no moral discomfort about putting his wife to work on the streets of St Kilda.

It was only when I got closer to the car that I realised there was a third person in the big Ford — a man, lying across the bench seat, his head resting in Hanrahan’s lap with his feet eased over Renwick.

Tom opened the passenger door and ordered the two women out of the car. Dot Renwick edged herself out from under the semiconscious man and made her way past me and on to the footpath. ‘Get a load of this,’ Tom said, gesturing to the inside of the car. ‘Now, this is one for the books.’

Peering into the vehicle, I noticed with a start that the man in a drunken stupor wore the black shirt and clerical collar of a priest. The man’s trousers and underpants were gathered around his ankles, and his dick was out for all the world to see. An empty sherry bottle had been discarded on the floor of the car.

Hazel Hanrahan’s general approach was one of unbridled hostility towards police but as Clarrie opened the driver’s side door, she stepped quickly and lightly out of the car. She didn’t want to spend the night in the lock-up.

‘He’s a regular. He lets us drive his car around,’ Hazel piped up.

The priest was paralytic. Four years on the beat had prepared me for many of humanity’s weaker moments but this was a new low. ‘What the bloody hell have I struck tonight?’ I thought.

Tom stepped in and shooed the two women away. Hazel and Dot wandered off down the road, cracking their wicked jokes and cackling raucously as they went.

‘I’ll drive him back to the station,’ Jenkins said, pointing to the drunken, semi-naked priest. ‘You follow me, Clarrie.’

Clarrie and I arrived back at the station in time to see Tom pull the big Ford into the kerb outside the station. The short drive back seemed to have sobered the priest up a bit. I could see him sitting up in the car, his head bobbing and jerking in silhouette in the passenger seat.

‘His name’s Father John Day,’ Tom told us. ‘Reckons he comes from Apollo Bay.’

Tom opened the passenger door and Father John Day of Apollo Bay staggered out of the car. I grabbed Day’s arm, helping Tom to walk the priest into the station and sit him down in a chair in the sergeant’s office. Day sat swaying in the chair, as drunk as a skunk.

Tom rang St Patrick’s Cathedral in East Melbourne and introduced himself. ‘We’ve got one of your priests here — Father John Day from Apollo Bay. We found him in a pretty ordinary state, drunk in his car in the company of prostitutes. I need you to send someone down to pick him up and get his car back here at the station.’

While we waited for the Cathedral to respond, Clarrie and I wandered into the sergeant’s room again. I’d never seen a priest in this condition before and I was drawn to him more out of curiosity than anything else.

Day didn’t utter a word to me and I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. But I looked at his face intently. He glared back at me with an almost comically pompous look on his face. He did not seem at all worried that he had been detained by police.

Tom yelled out to me to put the billy on, so I turned and left Day to his drunken ruminations.

Within twenty minutes two young priests made their way into the station. They were clearly ill at ease and keen to get Day back to the Cathedral. Clarrie and I stood in the foyer of the station, watching the priests walk gingerly past us. And then we heard Tom give Day the rounds of the kitchen.

‘If you are caught in this area again, whether you’ve got your pants on or not, you will be locked up, Father. Am I making myself clear to you, now?’ Jenkins thundered.

The two priests walked Day past us in the foyer, veering from side to side, eager to get him out of the station as quickly as they could.

With Day gone, I took my scheduled break in the lunchroom with Tom and Clarrie. I was bemused by Day’s behaviour and bewildered that he’d been released so casually for no other reason than the dog collar he wore around his neck.

‘Let’s just forget about what happened,’ Tom said.

‘Why didn’t we charge him?’ I replied.

‘It’s a waste of time,’ Clarrie chipped in.

‘Yep,’ Tom said nodding. ‘Look, Dinny, I’ve been around this force long enough to know that we don’t charge priests, short of a murder blue.’

I looked at him quizzically and he felt obliged to continue.

‘Even if we had charged him, the charges would have been knocked over. It would never get to court,’ Tom explained. ‘It’s best to let him go. Clarrie’s right. It would be a bloody waste of time charging that pisspot priest. Just let it go.’

But I could not let it go. If we’d pulled up any old Tom, Dick or Harry drunk, semi-naked and in the company of prostitutes in a car stuttering along the road, he would have been charged. Hazel and Dot had told us that this priest made a habit of visiting prostitutes in Melbourne. Day had been detained but would face no penalty. It troubled me.

Certainly, the image of the drunken priest with his dick out challenged my faith. I’d never seen a priest in that condition before but what bothered me most was that, as police officers, we were discriminating in his favour purely because he was a priest. For days afterwards, the incident gnawed away at me. Finally, I determined to broach the subject again with Tom Jenkins when the right opportunity arose.

Two weeks after we’d pulled Day up, I was on afternoon shift, working with Tom and another constable, Doug Park. We’d been out on patrol in the van. We pulled back to the station for a break. Doug had made himself scarce, and Tom and I were sitting in the lunchroom having a sandwich. It was time to bring up the Day business again.

‘You know that priest we pulled up a couple of weeks back?’ I asked.

‘The Vatican’s finest. Father John Day,’ Tom replied.

‘Tell me, what’s the drill when we lock up a priest?’

‘Dinny, we don’t lock them up. We let them go. Once you’ve been around for a while, you’ll start to learn that the Catholic Church carries a good deal more clout than the local church on the corner. It’s a political organisation. It has wrapped itself around every layer of government. This happens everywhere — all across Australia and probably all over the world, but nowhere does the Catholic Church have more power than it does in the Victoria Police force.’

‘So Day can do whatever he likes and he’ll never get pulled up for it?’

‘Short of a murder blue, he’ll walk away every time,’ Tom replied.

‘This priest is a disgrace. Can’t we make a complaint to the Cathedral?’

‘Dinny, nothing would happen to Day,’ Jenkins answered calmly. ‘But if you wanted to make a complaint to the Cathedral, even if you wanted to front Mannix himself, you’d find yourself as lonely as a bastard on Father’s Day. This goes all the way to the top. It’s not just the police. It’s the judges, the lawyers, the politicians.’

Tom took a sip of his tea. He could see that I was troubled by what he had told me.

‘Between you and me, I don’t agree with it. But there are forces at work here that are stronger than you and me, Dinny. I learnt early on in the job. Don’t pick fights you can’t win.’

* * *

The Victoria Police force ran along the old sectarian fault lines. Tom Jenkins was a Catholic like me. Clarrie Bell was a Protestant and a Freemason. The three of us were a microcosm of the Victoria Police force. We got on well and worked well together, but there was an almost imperceptible divide between Catholic and Protestant.

I’d made my allegiances known back at the police academy. I was in one of the three squads of twenty-five trainees. One morning we were all ordered to fall in for parade. A superintendent and two inspectors were present, watching over us.

Our drill instructor was First Constable Allen Coombes. He’d been a lieutenant colonel in the army and had seen action in Crete and Bougainville. He’d been awarded the Military Cross. After Crete he’d helped train the Second AIF in jungle warfare at Atherton in Queensland before they headed off to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. He was a powerfully built and imposing man. All the trainees were quietly terrified of him.

Coombes ordered us at ease and in his gravelly, stern voice ordered us to attend the St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral for the annual police service on the following Sunday.

I wasn’t an Anglican and I wasn’t going to go to an Anglican service. I came to attention. I took one step forward and one to the right and stamped my feet hard on the bitumen of the parade ground.

‘Sir!’ I screamed out.

‘Yes, Ryan. What is your complaint?’ Coombes barked.

‘Sir, I am a Catholic and I am forbidden by my faith to enter another church.’

Coombes, mouth agape for a moment, was stunned by my temerity.

‘Then you are excused on religious grounds,’ Coombes said, his brow furrowed.

With that, another trainee, Tom Atkinson, a young bloke from Warrnambool, stepped forward and meekly announced that he was a Catholic, too.

Coombes excused Tom from attending the Anglican service. He waited to see if there were any more hellions demanding religious freedom but there were none, and the parade was dismissed shortly afterwards.

I didn’t realise what a stir this had caused at the time. My religion was important to me. I may have been young and impulsive but all I thought I was doing was following the directions of the Church. I had no idea that my challenge to Coombes would filter through the police force in a brush fire of whispers and religious espionage that was the main game in the Victoria Police force at the time.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Unholy Trinity by Denis Ryan, Peter Hoysted. Copyright © 2013 Denis Ryan and Peter Hoysted. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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