(AUSTRALIA)
Seven Network - 7news [Eveleigh, NSW Australia]
August 16, 2021
By Australian Associated Press
A priest caught by two children having sex with their mother decades ago is facing trial in Brisbane accused of indecent treatment of a six-year-old boy.
The boy and his sister confronted their mother – who died more than 20 years ago – and Terence Thomas Keliher from the doorway of the bedroom in about 1976, crown prosecutor Elizabeth Kelso said in her opening address to the jury on Monday.
“You’ll hear (during the trial) the defendant didn’t stop quite immediately,” she told the District Court jury.
The jury would hear the naked man stood up, faced the children and started masturbating before ejaculating onto the boy’s chest, Ms Kelso added.
She said the six-year-old crawled under the bed from where he heard his sister shouting and his mother telling her to shut up.
“When he came out from underneath the bed the defendant was still standing there … undressed,” Ms Kelso added.
Keliher smiled at the boy who ran out of the house to a nearby park.
Keliher, 84, told the court he first met the boy when visiting the house to give the family financial assistance, but had been in a sexual relationship with the mother for a few years before the alleged offence occurred.
He usually visited the house when the children were at school and their father at work, he said.
He told the court he was “shocked and ashamed” at being interrupted by the children, but agreed the boy had walked in on the pair engaging in sexual acts previously.
On the day of the alleged offence – a school day when Keliher expected only the mother to be home – the two were interrupted in the bedroom by the girl screaming at her mother, he told the court.
Keliher said he held his erect penis so “the semen would not escape” while getting off the bed, but then turned to get his clothes.
“As I turned, I let go of my penis and that’s when the semen splashed out,” he told the court.
He denied masturbating and deliberately ejaculating on the boy.
Keliher, who faces one count of indecent treatment of a child under the age of 12, admitted his “semen spurted out” on the boy and his sister.
But the 84-year-old said it occurred as he tried to put on trousers after being caught having sex in the children’s parents’ bedroom.
The trial continues before Brisbane District Court Judge William Everson.