Even hell is too good for depraved paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale
IF there is a hell, it's a place too good for Gerald Ridsdale. During his three-decade career of evil, he was every child’s worst nightmare — nothing was sacred, nowhere was safe, and no one was off limits.
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IF there is a hell, it's a place too good for Gerald Ridsdale.
During his three-decade career of evil, he was every child’s worst nightmare.
Everywhere he went, children feared him, because everywhere he went, he attacked them.
Nothing was sacred, nowhere was safe, and no one was off limits.
“I went haywire,” he later confessed.
He abused kids in church, during confession and on the altar. He abused them in their homes and in his. He abused boys, girls, friends and family.
Some victims were told it was God’s work.
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To others, Ridsdale admitted sinning, but said God would forgive him.
The same children that feared him sat at mass every Sunday with their parents who revered him. He was, after all, a man of the cloth.
Ridsdale has admitted abusing hundreds of children, but his official record shows a victim count of about 65.
Few were surprised when late last year he was charged with a string of new child sex crimes.
Twelve new victims emerged, prompted largely by publicity surrounding and investigations sparked by the child abuse royal commission.
But when he pleaded guilty to 23 new charges this week the depravity of his offending left many shocked.
A County Court judge, seasoned journalists, victims and their supporters were moved to tears.
For the first time, Ridsdale admitted raping children.
And for the first time, authorities revealed people outside the church didn’t just suspect his offending, but witnessed it first hand.
Among them, a Ballarat father who knowingly delivered his 8-year-old daughter to Ridsdale, her parish priest, to be raped.
Victims still question how he got away with it for so long.
“It is hard to imagine a man who has had a more devastating effect upon all of those who have had the misfortune of coming into contact with him,” prosecutor Jeremy McWilliams said this week.
County Court Judge Irene Lawson dubbed him the worst child sex predator in Victorian history.
Perhaps his only redeeming feature, the court heard, is that he has never contested a single one of more than 150 charges he’s faced.
He’s never called a witness a liar, and never made one prove their abuse in a courtroom.
That alone has made some wonder just how many more skeletons are in his closet.
Almost all of it might have been avoided.
Ridsdale told the child abuse royal commission church authorities knew even before he was ordained that he had a problem.
He’d offended while training to be a priest and then after his ordination made it his career with the church’s help.
“The first complaint that ever came in was in my first year as a priest … I drove a lad home to near Winchelsea, and while I was there, I remember going into his room and fondling him while he was showing me something in the cupboard.
“ … Then later the bishop called me in, Bishop O’Collins, and said there had been a complaint.
“And he said, ‘If this thing happens again, then you are off to the missions’,” he told the royal commission.
Bishop James O’Collins, his first bishop, moved him to Mildura where he worked as an assistant to criminal priest John Day.
It was the first of many moves during his three decades as a priest.
Each time he moved to a new town where people new nothing of his past, he’d run riot, then be moved on again.
He was the responsibility of disgraced bishop Ronald Mulkearns for almost his entire career, and it was Mulkearns who shuffled him around the Ballarat diocese that covers western Victoria.
Mulkearns sent him for counselling and threatened sacking him but did little else, despite knowing of his crimes.
When Mulkearns was told a young Paul Levey was living with Ridsdale in a presbytery in the 1980s, he turned a blind eye. The teen was raped daily.
When he was sent interstate, he bragged in letters home to Mulkearns of a close relationship with a young child.
At home, he molested family including David Ridsdale, who has revealed his evil uncle would molest him on the way to church.
When he was finally charged in 1993, Ridsdale pleaded guilty and was sent straight to prison. He’s never left.
Almost a quarter of a century later victims continue to come forward, while authorities expect more to emerge.
His legal aid lawyers argued this week he should be handed no further prison time for this week’s admissions, in a move that left victims outraged.
They say he should die breathing prison air. But even that’s too good for him.