AUSTRALIA
Daily Mail (UK)
By AUSTRALIAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 19:55 EST, 19 June 2014
A mysterious memo about “Frater Bart”, an email from a lawyer suggesting a pedophile brother be kept under wraps after doing time and a sudden journey to Canada.
All three surfaced at a royal commission hearing into how the Marist Brothers Australia handled child sex abuse allegations against two men who over decades molested children at schools in the ACT, Queensland and NSW.
Below the surface is the devastation of victims.
The commission sitting in Canberra this week heard first from survivors. There were the victims of Gregory Sutton, jailed for 12 years in 1996 after pleading guilty to 67 charges of sexually assaulting 15 different children, and those who as children fell foul of predator John Chute, known as Brother Kosta, who was sentenced to six years’ jail in 2008.
The mysterious memo was revealed when Brother Alexis Turton – who has been vice-provincial and provincial, and until 2012 head of the order’s professional standards office – entered the witness box.
The confidential memo for the attention of church lawyers detailed Sutton’s history with the order back to 1974 – when he was grooming and molesting boys at a north Queensland primary school – up to August 18, 1989, when Turton sent him to a Canadian therapy centre.
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