Former Canberra tennis coach John Walter Cattle found guilty of molesting girls
Former Forrest Tennis Club coach John Walter Cattle has been found guilty of historic child sex offences
Canberra Star
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Former Canberra junior tennis coach John Walter Cattle has been found guilty of historic sex offences against two girls in the 1980s.
An ACT Supreme Court jury on Friday afternoon found the long serving former coach at the Forrest Tennis Club guilty of one count of indecent assault and one count of committing an act of indecency.
The jury also acquitted Cattle two counts of indecency.
The offences related to two young girls who are both now grown women in their 40s.
The first victim was repeatedly molested by Cattle at the club in 1983 and 1984.
Cattle also committed a single act of indecency against a second victim on April 4, 1987, but that girl was left so distressed that her parents immediately complained to the club.
Cattle denied the allegations at the time but resigned, only to later return to his coaching role.
Cattle did not visibly react as the jury foreman delivered the verdicts.
Chief Justice Helen Murrell did not have Cattle locked up, and continued his bail so he could be assessed by a geriatrician ahead of sentencing proceedings.
If jailed, Cattle will be one of the oldest prisoners at Canberra’s notoriously violent, overcrowded jail, the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
Mr Cattle was also accused of showing his first victim a pornographic magazine, an act which he wasn’t charged with but which Crown Prosecutor Keegan Lee said showed his tendency to be sexually interested in young girls and his willingness to act on that interest.
Mr Lee said there was “no other reason why you would show a young girl a pornographic magazine other them to sexualise them”.
The guilty verdict against Cattle came despite an expert in “false memory” giving evidence in his defence in an apparent attempt to suggest the women could have recreated the memories of their abuse by combining snippets of true memories with imagined events based on presumptions about the past.
Chief Justice Murrell will sentence Cattle at a later date.