AUSTRALIA
The Age
July 28, 2014
Chris Johnston
Senior Writer for The Age
Guilt can be a heavy burden – and this seems to be the case with the latest chapter in the disturbing story of a senior Victorian sect leader now in jail on child sex charges.
Ten days ago Chris Chandler, 56, drove to Melbourne from his property on French Island, in Western Port. Then he went to the Melbourne Magistrates Court to hand himself in.
Chandler was a leader of the secretive Bible sect known as Friends and Workers, or the Two by Twos, who have 2000 Victorian members. He had already admitted his guilt in eight charges in a Gippsland court including unlawful indecent assaults, indecent assaults and gross indecency on three young female victims.
But Chandler baulked at his sentence of a year’s jail with a non-parole period of three months, telling his lawyers that while he was guilty, he wasn’t guilty to that extent.
But then something changed. He decided he wanted to go to jail. When he turned up at Melbourne’s central magistrates court to surrender – not the Morwell court his hearings had been held in, and not the one closest to his home – he hadn’t told the policeman who made the charges stick what he was about to do.
Sergeant Darren Eldridge of Moe police was surprised to hear Chandler had given up his fight. He had been working on the case for two years. ”We were assisted in different ways by a number of congregation members,” he said.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.