AUSTRALIA
Sky News

A teacher and headmaster admitted to sexually abusing a student at a Hobart boys’ school but both left Australia before they were to be arrested, a royal commission has heard.

Former Tasmania police commissioner Richard McCreadie was a sex crime detective in Hobart in 1970 when a boy aged about 16 came to his police station to make a report against staff at The Hutchins School.

During a later interview, then-principal David Ralph Lawrence and music teacher Ronald Thomas admitted they had molested him, Mr McCreadie said.

Both men gave confessional statements and were to be arrested at a later time.

But when officers returned to the school to arrest them, Lawrence had left for the United Kingdom and Thomas for South Africa.