Brothers allege fraud and $66m extortion on sex-abuse claims, by Ean Higgins, Geoffrey Luck, Australian (June 5, 2017)

A Catholic order of brothers in Quebec, Canada, has alleged that it was the victim of fraud and an attempted $66 million extortion at the hands of a Queensland convicted murderer and insurance scammer who mounted sexual abuse claims against Anglican Church Grammar School in Brisbane and a private international school in Japan.

Conrad Lord, a Montreal lawyer who acts for the Quebec chapter of the Brothers of Christian Instruction, known as the Mennaisians, was recently in Australia trying to encourage the Queensland Parole Board and other law enforcement authorities to investigate an extraordinary expedition that David Grant Mathiesen made to Tokyo three years ago while he was still on parole.

Mr Lord is expected to file a formal complaint to Queensland police alleging that Mathiesen engaged in “harassment using a computer”.

In 2014, Mathiesen sought and obtained apologies from the brothers, who were teachers and administrators at St Mary’s International School in Tokyo, which were meant to settle his claims.

However, he then demanded $66m in compensation and threatened to report them to the Japanese police.

Contacted at the weekend, Mathiesen, who lives in Brisbane where he and his wife own several up-market properties, maintained his claims that he had been sexually abused at St Mary’s when he was 11 years old and at the Brisbane school about 18 months later, and denied he had engaged in fraud or extortion.

Mathiesen is understood to be still on parole after having served 15 years of a life sentence for luring a woman from The Philippines to Australia in 1980, taking out a $400,000 life insurance policy on her, and drowning her in the early hours off a houseboat he had rented and anchored at Tippler’s Passage near South Stradbroke Island on Queensland’s southern coast.

In 2013, Mathiesen sent emails to the Mennaisian Brothers in Japan demanding the apologies for what he claimed was the sodomy perpetrated upon him in the school chapel by a brother about 50 years earlier.

Mathiesen had been a student at St Mary’s in the 1960s when his father had been an Australian diplomat in Tokyo.

Mathiesen wrote to the brothers in 2013 saying he was “prepared to discuss how to proceed without drawing considerable negative publicity to the school and the impact this will have on current students and their families”.

The brothers agreed to Mathiesen’s initial demands, in what they now say was a misguided and naive attempt to keep the matter quiet, and did not at first inform the school or the Japanese police.

On the advice of a Japanese lawyer, the order, including the alleged principal perpetrator, Brother Lawrence Guy Lambert, made the apologies.

In 2014, they read them out to him at a synagogue in Tokyo, witnessed by a rabbi because Mathiesen claimed he was in fact Jewish and had been eating a rollmop in the chapel at the time of the alleged rape because he did not eat lunch in the school cafeteria.

Brother Lawrence’s apology read in part: “The simple truth is that still today I cannot understand the fact that I raped you. It was the first time that I did that in my life, and I did not do that again.”

The brothers had paid Mathiesen $60,000 to make the trip from Australia with his family, and a document was drawn up agreeing that with these measures the matter would be closed.

Mathiesen then made a claim for compensation against the order valued at $66m, at which point the administrators of St Mary’s, who had by then become cognisant of the case, went to the Japanese police.

Mathiesen made claims at the time, supported by what he said was a written statement from his mother, that Brother Lawrence and his colleagues had been summoned to the Australian embassy in Tokyo by the ambassador, where Brother Lawrence was, the statement claimed, assaulted by embassy staff while his mother watched through a one-way mirror.

In a statement to The Australian, the Department of Foreign Affairs said “as the embassy staff allegedly involved in the incident at the time are no longer employees of the department, DFAT was unable to investigate allegations raised by Mr Mathiesen. The department provided the information it received on March 5, 2015, to the Australian Federal Police.”

Japanese police who investigated the matter told school authorities that no one-way mirror existed at the diplomatic mission.

The headmaster of St Mary’s, Saburo Kagei, told The Australian the school “has already commissioned an independently operated panel” on sexual abuse allegations, adding “their work is ongoing”.

In an interview with Montreal newspaper La Presse at the weekend, he said Mathiesen’s story of the alleged sexual assault was “a pure invention”.

He went along with the apology, he said, because the Japanese lawyer had said it would be the best way to bring the matter to a close, but “he was not there to defend me,” Brother Lawrence told La Presse.

Mr Lord is expected to file an official complaint to Queensland police claiming the alleged fraud and extortion began in their jurisdiction since Mathiesen sent the emails demanding apologies from the brothers from there.

Mr Lord told The Australian: “So the main thing here is … we have been the victim of a fraud. We have the right to file a complaint against him.

“We are just trying to find the proper way to make sure justice has been rendered, and that the proper authorities look over the case and take action against him. That’s our objective.”

At the weekend, Mr Lord added: “We are in contact with the parole board concerning Mathiesen. We are in contact with the Australian authorities.”

A legal opinion commissioned by Mr Lord from a Japanese lawyer in 2014 concluded that “Mr Mathiesen’s actions as described and complained above constitute the crime of attempted extortion against Brother Lawrence, the school, and the BOCI under articles 249 and 250 of the penal code.”

In a text message to The Australian, Mathiesen denied the claim. “SMIS and Lambert agreed in writing, orally and witnessed that I was sodomised,” Mathiesen — who said he was in Israel — texted. “There is a GOPRO recording,” he wrote.

Mathiesen is an old boy of Anglican Church Grammar, known as Churchie, in Brisbane, where several former students went to police in the early 2000s to level allegations of sexual abuse against former teacher Harry Wippell.

Wippell was acquitted of the first set of charges involving one former student, but died before the cases involving the other boys could be heard.

In his text to The Australian, Mathiesen wrote: “Churchie, Diocese and importantly Qld Police covert recorded interview confirm Harry Wippel (sic) assaulted (some students).

“He attempted to suicide when he heard of the recording. Admitted to Wesley Hospital after a suicide attempt. Child sex victims need protection.”

A source who had been close to Wippell said the teacher had not attempted suicide, and a transcript of court hearings do not indicate a covert recorded interview was made.

Mathiesen texted that he’d developed a “summer flu” in Haifa, and while he had originally intended to come back to Australia next week, he might in fact “come back a tad later in June”.

Mathiesen was convicted by a Brisbane court in 1981, when he was then 26, of engineering an elaborate plot that involved bringing Teresita Andalis, 21, to Australia under a domestic work scheme and at some point a promise of marriage, the taking out the life insurance policy on her for which he was the sole executor and beneficiary, and murdering her.

The Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, Phillip Aspinall, wrote to Mathiesen in September to say “the abuse you have reported ... and its long-lasting impact on your life are heartbreaking”.

A church spokesman said that while he was “unable to comment on this specific case … it would not be unusual for someone’s life to go off the rails as a result of child sexual abuse.”

A Queensland police spokesman said there was no record of a current complaint against Mathiesen.

A Queensland Corrective Services spokeswoman said while she could not discuss individual cases, “overseas travel for offenders on Queensland parole … is permitted only in exceptional circumstances for compassionate reasons”.

Queensland barrister and Churchie old boy Tony Morris QC, who has followed the Mathiesen case, agreed to meet Mr Lord when he visited Australia recently.

“His object is to create a case against Mathiesen which will demonstrate that he was blackmailing the brothers in Japan,” Mr Morris told The Australian.

At the Mennaisian retirement home in Trois-Rivieres, Brother Lawrence told La Presse he held no rancour towards Mathiesen.