The Fox and His Quarry
By Dan Box
DETECTIVE Chief Inspector Peter Fox looks at the 14 people sitting in the public gallery of Newcastle Supreme Court, then leans over to his wife, Penny, and whispers: "Not much of an audience today." It is an unusual choice of words for the man at the centre of a state government inquiry into the alleged cover-up of child abuse within the Catholic Church. It is also a revealing choice. After months of hearings, which have uncovered evidence that known pedophile priests were able to move freely across Australia and abroad, how will Fox's performance be judged? The NSW Special Commission of Inquiry yesterday held its final public hearing, after being established as a direct result of an interview the policeman gave to the ABC's Lateline program last year. Its task has been to answer two specific claims Fox made on television; that he was "ordered to stand down" from the investigation into one pedophile priest, Denis McAlinden; and that church officials hindered police pursuing such crimes. In all, the inquiry is expected to cost more than $5 million and has involved more than 130 public and private hearings in which, at times, a score of lawyers has crowded the courtroom floor. Commissioner Margaret Cunneen SC is due to report next month. Yet, from the start, Fox has cast the entire process as a confrontation between himself and his employer. A day before his first public appearance in the witness box, he tweeted: "I'd rather be on my side this week than NSW Police." Strangely, for a witness, he continues to tweet, and not always accurately, from inside the courtroom itself, provoking criticism from Cunneen. "It is indecorous conduct, it is undignified conduct. Perhaps it would be better ... if your time was spent listening to the evidence than suggesting it improperly," she said. The detective also has built relationships with many in the press, sitting with reporters during hearings, exchanging text messages and, in their private conversations, accusing other senior police of being criminals themselves. These claims, like much of Fox's evidence to the inquiry, appear to be unsupported by the facts. A brief of evidence he claimed to have prepared about one Catholic bishop doesn't exist, the inquiry heard. A computer disk containing a witness statement he claimed to have sent to the NSW Ombudsman cannot be found within their files. A conversation in which he claimed another policeman warned him about a "Catholic mafia" within the police is comprehensively denied. "Evidence" he told Lateline had been destroyed by priests is not evidence at all. It was pornography, the inquiry heard, embarrassing but legal, and without a proven link to any crime. Yet, to his credit, if Fox had not gone on TV last November, there might never have been a national royal commission into institutional response to child sex abuse, announced four days later. After his interview, the media celebrated the whistleblower they called a "hero cop" and there was a tide of public anger demanding the government respond. Others, who have worked with him for years, use other words to describe the policeman. Just before Fox leans over to whisper to his wife during the inquiry hearing, one of his colleagues, Detective Chief Inspector Wayne Humphrey, gives evidence calling him a "zealot". "Some of the assertions that he made about what ... he'd done, were not true; yet he purported that they were. Those were the actions of a person, in my view, that is obsessed," Humphrey said. Zealot or not, what truth is there to Fox's suggestion of conspiracy within the church and NSW police? His claim that he was "ordered to stand down" from a police investigation into the alleged cover-up of McAlinden's crimes was inaccurate, the inquiry heard. Fox was never part of the strike force established to do this work. The first NSW Police heard about McAlinden was in 1999, the inquiry heard, when one of the priest's victims came forward, saying she had been raped as an 11-year-old girl. "I remember thinking that this wasn't right, but he was a holy man and he wouldn't do anything that wasn't right. After he finished, he fixed himself up and I got dressed and he took me home," her police statement reads. A warrant was issued for McAlinden's arrest, but he could not be found. A separate police investigation, relating to another victim, was launched in 2001 but again failed to locate the priest. Years later, in 2005, a routine review of outstanding warrants led police to discover an address for McAlinden in Western Australia. An unsuccessful attempt was made to extradite him to NSW. Fox was not directly involved in any of this work, the inquiry heard. The closest he came to the official investigation of McAlinden was an administrative role supervising the detective who issued the warrant for the priest's arrest. Instead, the inquiry heard, Fox privately pursued McAlinden, interviewing at least two abuse victims, but not telling his bosses what he was doing. The policeman subsequently leaked one of these witness statements to a local reporter, without the victim's consent, the inquiry heard. Years later, the inquiry heard, Fox accessed the internal computer records of the official investigation, changing them to list himself as the officer in charge. Under cross examination, he denied doing this so he could claim, in a subsequent report to his bosses, that he had been investigating the priest for a decade and should be included in the wider investigation of church child abuse. This internal report, which contains confidential information including the names of several victims, was also leaked by Fox to the press, the inquiry heard. In 2010, Newcastle police did establish a strike force, Lantle, to investigate the alleged cover-up of McAlinden's crimes. Fox was not included, the inquiry heard, as he worked in a different local police command, although both are in the NSW Hunter Valley region. As a result, the detective knew nothing of the strike force's operation, yet continued to brief at least one reporter it was not working, and publicly told the inquiry the investigation was "set up to fail". This, the inquiry heard, also was not correct. Certainly, the strike force was slow to get going, shunted between senior commanders and at one point suffering the loss of three officers on sick leave - not itself an uncommon result of police work. But, by the time Fox went on Lateline, the investigation had been completed and a brief of evidence had been sent to the office of the state's Director of Public Prosecutions to consider criminal charges. During the inquiry, an independent QC, Ian Lloyd, was asked to review the 12 volumes of evidence the police compiled. "In all my years of prosecuting crime, which is approaching 35, 37 years now, (it) was as thorough as I have ever seen," he said. Despite this evidence, Fox continues to have many supporters, including among the families of those abused by priests, who see him as a man of compassion and integrity. And, in fairness, the inquiry heard plenty of evidence supporting the thrust - if not all the details - of his separate claim that the church had failed to be open about crimes committed by its priests. It is this second part of the inquiry's hearings that fills the benches of the courtroom's public gallery, the largest numbers of people coming to see the former bishop of the diocese, Michael Malone. The bishop admits mistakes were made. He had been defensive about the issue of pedophile priests, he told the inquiry, because he wanted to protect the church from scandal. Across several days, the inquiry heard Malone "thought the church was being attacked by vulnerable people who were trying to embarrass it". He had since changed his mind and had "a lot of regrets about this whole matter", he said. Among the reasons for regret, the inquiry heard, were that church files contained documentary evidence that McAlinden was abusing children dating as far back as 1954. A 1976 letter to Malone's predecessor, Leo Clarke, who died in 2006, from another senior cleric states "Fr Mac has an inclination to interfere (touching only) with young girls. "He ... agreed that it was a condition that had been with him for many years. He feels no such inclination towards the mature female but towards the little ones only." McAlinden subsequently was allowed to move to a new parish, the inquiry heard. He also travelled freely to Papua New Guinea, The Philippines and WA, where, church officials knew, he was tried but not convicted of child abuse. At one point, after McAlinden had privately confessed his crimes, the diocese bought him a one-way ticket to Britain, where he continued to receive a pension paid from the Sick Clergy Fund. Malone told the inquiry "it did not occur" to him the priest might abuse children overseas. The inquiry heard McAlinden openly defied the church's attempts to deal with him internally: returning to Australia, continuing to work as a priest and refusing to co-operate when they tried to formally defrock him. Letters tendered to the inquiry show these attempts involved some of the most senior Catholics in the church today, as well as the Pope's representative in Canberra during the 1990s, archbishop Franco Brambilla, who died in 2003. Nor was McAlinden an isolated case, the inquiry heard. The most senior living Catholic to give public evidence, Brian Lucas, said he interviewed about 35 alleged pedophile priests during the 90s, convincing many to quietly resign. The current general secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Lucas did not report these men to police, he says, because their victims did not want police involved. Today, the inquiry heard, the Catholic Church did report such allegations of abuse. In 2005, a policeman finally caught up with McAlinden, carrying a warrant for his arrest from NSW Police. The priest, who had terminal cancer, "did not appear surprised ... and, if anything, appeared amused", the inquiry heard. "He ... appeared to have no interest or concern over what I was saying. He certainly did not express any remorse or make any admissions of guilt." McAlinden died in 2005 without being charged.
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