Inside the St Kevin’s grooming scandal
The St Kevin’s College grooming scandal dominated headlines this week. But it was hardly a surprise for the boys who studied at the exclusive Toorak school four decades ago.
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It took St Kevin’s College more than 40 years to work out that their boys were better off without athletics coach Peter Kehoe.
In October 2013, they removed him from all their programs.
But the “Skevs” boys had been warning each other about Kehoe since the 1970s. They knew back then.
The Herald Sun has spoken to many students Kehoe coached over four decades, and they all describe him in similar terms.
Weird. Difficult to deal with. A disturbing fellow. An odd unit. Someone the kids didn’t want to be alone with. Someone to be avoided.
A St Kevin’s father now struggling to put three sons through the leafy Toorak school trained with Kehoe in the 1980s.
Another man whose son was coached by Kehoe in 2013 says: “My son heard him say once ‘I’ve got a boner’.”
One man who was trained by Kehoe in the 1970s says there was even “a decision to keep Kehoe away from the other aths teams, so they knew about him”.
“I am not saying Kehoe did anything, but he was a suspect person, even back then. He used to hang around the old white pavilion when the boys were having showers.
“I heard one mother tell him: ‘Piss off, I know what you are up to’.
“It was a lightbulb moment.”
This man insists: “They (the school) can’t say they didn’t know about him.”
Yet former St Kevin’s principal Stephen Russell did exactly that this week.
He insisted the school didn’t know about Kehoe until allegations he was grooming a student came to light in September, 2014.
But at least one senior staff member at the school knew of another allegation of inappropriate conduct by Kehoe towards a student from another school in 1986.
And yet he continued to support him.
In fact, both Russell and St Kevin’s head of sport Luke Travers even provided character references for Kehoe in 2015 when he was charged with one count of child grooming.
The grooming was bad enough, but the support St Kevin’s senior staff gave Kehoe rather than his 15-year-old schoolboy victim astonished many.
While his young victim faced a traumatic two-day grilling by Kehoe’s attack-dog barrister Robert Richter QC, Russell and Travers vouched for Kehoe’s otherwise unblemished record and history of service to the school.
When these things came out in an ABC expose this week, Russell wrote to St Kevin’s parents to once again vouch for Kehoe.
Although he said he regretted writing the reference for him, he told parents that Kehoe had no prior charges or “any student or parent complaint of a sexual misconduct nature”.
The references have angered so many past students who well remember the school’s dark history of institutional grooming by perverted teachers and priests.
It’s telling that the head of the athletics at St Kevin’s in Kehoe’s early coaching years was John Laidlaw.
Laidlaw was convicted in July 2019 of assaulting six boys between 1963 and 1984, including two St Kevin’s students.
The Catholic Church decided in 1973 that Laidlaw was unfit for his job because of a “serious indiscretion”, yet he continued teaching for another two decades.
During that time, he sexually assaulted five more boys.
As Kehoe’s athletics student from the 1970s says, “Someone made the decision to keep Kehoe from us but gave us John Laidlaw instead”.
“The hypocrisy and depths of my disappointment is bottomless, fathomless,” he says.
“These are awful people. They disappear very quietly to do the wrong thing to someone else.”
Indeed, St Kevin’s let Kehoe go quietly in 2013, which meant he was free to train students privately without the safeguards of the school setting.
It also meant he was free to be employed to coach students at not just one, but two other prestigious private schools before his conviction.
Kehoe’s employment prospects were helped by some old friends and contacts.
These included not only Russell and Travers, but people who helped him get jobs at Camberwell Grammar and Trinity Grammar.
It was an extraordinary amount of support for a man who, according to court documents, spent 2013 and 2014 grooming a 14-year-old boy.
Kehoe lasted less than two terms at Trinity and just one term at Camberwell Grammar.
Like St Kevin’s, both schools let him go quietly, allowing him to continue training students until April 2015.
The fallout from the whole sorry saga continues, claiming scalp after scalp at St Kevin’s and casting shade over other previously esteemed school leaders.
How could this have happened?
One young man thinks he knows.
He was a national athletics champion coached by Peter Kehoe a few years ago.
As with all people the Herald Sun spoke to for this story, he didn’t want his name used.
“I was 17 when Kehoe told me to lose weight,” he said.
“He was always going on about us all losing weight.
“I think it was a control thing.
“He’d use this to work out who he could control – then he might move on to other things.”
He said he “never got any sexual vibe from him” but does believe Kehoe “tried it on”.
“On one occasion he invited me to his home – he’d given me a running video and wanted me to drop it off at his house. I thought at the time, ‘nice try’.
“I didn’t go there.
“I wasn’t the right person.”
Kehoe also stayed so long at the school because he got results on the track.
As one parent said: “St Kevin’s has always been sick of playing second fiddle to Xavier College. The school wanted the results – it was all about academics and premierships.
“They wouldn’t look at Kehoe’s behaviour while kids were winning.”
Many people feel very betrayed.
The victim and those who supported him.
The dedicated band of teachers who’ve followed each revelation with horror.
The Old Boys reminded of the bad old days of the Christian Brothers.
The school mums worrying about how it’s affecting their kids in their candy stripe blazers.
They’re not just members of a school, they’re part of a multi-generation community which is now reeling in the glare of public condemnation.
As one source within the school said: “This should all have come to light years ago. Good people tried really hard to do the right thing.”
These good people, who wish they’d done more back then, are now faced with the task of rebuilding St Kevin’s, and bringing the school into a new progressive era.
As one past student says: “It won’t be easy, but it must be done, because the students deserve better than this.”
READ MORE:
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