Robert Arthur Selby Lowe: Inside the mind of a mild-mannered monster
Robert Arthur Selby Lowe was a husband, father, cricket coach and church elder. But behind the facade, he was devious, damaged and dangerous.
Andrew Rule
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The day after Cleo Smith was rescued in Western Australia, the man who abducted and killed Victorian girl Sheree Beasley died in jail, despised by everyone who’d known him.
Where does it begin, the tragic and terrible story of Sheree Beasley and Robert Arthur Selby Lowe?
The answer is: long before Sheree died by Lowe’s hands near Rosebud in 1991.
Like Jaidyn Leskie after her and Daniel Valerio before, Sheree was put in harm’s way by adults who should have known better.
But that’s also true for the man who murdered her, the mild-mannered monster who finally died last week in the comfortable corner of hell where Victoria exiles sex offenders from mainstream prisoners who’d kill them on sight.
Robert Arthur Selby Lowe was born into circumstances literally a world away from Sheree’s. He would become a husband, father, junior cricket coach and church elder. But behind the facade, he was devious, damaged and dangerous.
It doesn’t get much worse than what happened to Sheree, the six-year-old who was allowed to wander the streets in a way that worried neighbours and her grandparents. She was so obviously unsupervised she attracted the attention of Lowe, an incorrigible sexual deviate who’d seen her riding her little pink bike for hours around Rosebud.
Lowe’s long overdue death 10 days ago comes 30 years after the premeditated attack he had been working up to all his adult life … probably since he was himself molested in a British boarding school.
Lowe told many lies but what he told psychotherapist Margaret Hobbs about his childhood struck her as true. Although Lowe made her skin crawl, Hobbs believed he wasn’t a freak of nature — more the product of a fractured family with a dark secret.
Lowe’s sole surviving brother, Rick, died in New Zealand just last month, so the things Hobbs heard from the child killer can now be revealed frankly and fully.
If Lowe’s family weren’t already ashamed of him when they quit England for New Zealand in the late 1950s, they soon found that swapping hemispheres didn’t help.
The future paedophile, deviant, thief and child killer had shown signs of gross disturbance as a teenager. His death ends any chance of uncovering the complete truth about what twisted him so violently as a child.
It is not making excuses for Lowe to say that, as children, he and his brothers suffered heartless treatment — with sinister overtones.
When Lowe was eight, his businessman father Eric died, allegedly of a brain tumour. Despite his age, Robert was already in a junior boarding school. He was called out of the classroom to be told his father had died, then sent back to class as if nothing had happened.
A lifetime later he told Hobbs, whom he consulted under court orders, of those terrifying days.
Lowe was born in January 1937 at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England, middle son of three in a prosperous family with a vague royal connection. Each of the boys had “Selby” in their names. It was their mother’s family name, an old and famous one.
Joan Selby Lowe was the daughter of Robert E. Selby, a New Zealand businessman who’d served with distinction in the Boer War and World War I and followed his daughter “home” to England, where long obituaries were written when he died in 1954.
Lowe’s mother was related to Ronald Selby Wright, an eminent clergyman with a war record as a padre. Wright served as the Queen’s chaplain in Edinburgh, and influenced future UK prime minister Tony Blair at a Scottish boarding school. The man the Lowe boys called “Uncle Ronnie” was young Robert’s godfather and took an interest in him.
Lowe’s father Eric came from a business background and had run his own accountancy firm. He served in the Royal Air Force during the war but died almost immediately after getting home.
Eric Lowe supposedly died of a brain tumour. But his widow, Robert Lowe’s mother, quickly married Dr Peter McKinlay — the local police surgeon whose job it was to ascertain the cause of death in suspicious cases.
The implication was that Lowe’s mother and her lover were complicit in his father’s death.
One thing was clear. Merry widow Joan Selby Lowe was not interested in having her sons around to cramp her style. She sent them to boarding schools very young. After St Mary’s, Robert went to Sedburgh on the Scottish border, where his older brother Graeme had also gone.
At Sedburgh, Lowe told Hobbs, a housemaster sexually abused him. At the same time, he was angered by what he saw as police connivance in his father’s suspiciously convenient death.
In 1956, he stole a car and ran over a policeman. He gave Hobbs the impression that the family bought his way out of serious charges.
Then he spent a year in the army, which also ended badly. After he was discharged, there was more “trouble” and the family decided to move to New Zealand, Joan’s birthplace.
Big brother Graeme, a rugby player, keen sailor and “born leader”, sailed to New Zealand via the Caribbean after answering an advertisement for yacht crew.
Graeme would go on to be a giant of the meat industry, a multi-millionaire businessman and philanthropist. The youngest brother, Rick, was also successful in business.
Their mother’s husband, the former police surgeon, bought a practice at Levin, near Wellington. Robert Lowe boarded in Wellington, where he constantly loitered around public toilets.
After he was charged with indecent assault in 1959 he went, or was sent, to Auckland. Clearly, his family was embarrassed by him even before he was sentenced to six months jail in 1961, and convicted of wilful and obscene exposure in 1964. He was also convicted of theft.
About the time younger brother Rick became engaged, Robert was encouraged to take a one-way ticket to Australia. He arrived in 1967 and lived in boarding houses.
In 1969, he went to a Billy Graham “crusade” and then to Scots Church on Christmas Day. It was there he met Lorraine Sangster, a young woman brought up in a strict Exclusive Brethren sect she later said was “like the Amish”.
Lorraine, sheltered and naive, married Lowe in 1972. She did not understand why both Graeme and Rick Lowe declined to be their brother’s groomsmen.
It was the first warning for Lorraine that all was not what it seemed with the suave and well-spoken Englishman.
The multi-millionaire Graeme kept his distance from the family disgrace until it was clear Robert was in the frame for murdering Sheree Beasley. Graeme then flew in, interrogated his brother and bankrolled top defence lawyers to try to protect the family name.
Big brother’s mission was hopeless. As a detective recalls, Lowe’s barrister confided at a Christmas party that he usually got on well with clients but had taken a dislike to Lowe within five minutes.
The jury agreed. Lowe was finally convicted in 1994 with the help of a cop killer, Peter Reid, who had been sickened by the stories Lowe told him in jail.
Across the Tasman, his relatives pretended he didn’t exist.
When Graeme Lowe died in 2012, he was hailed as a giant of Kiwi industry, a white knight of philanthropy.
His son Andy Lowe said: “We have lost a great husband, father, mentor and friend. He has touched the lives of so many, from all walks of life.”
So did uncle Robert, the black sheep. He touched a lot of lives — and damaged them all.
Soon after the cell door slammed on Lowe, his godfather the eminent churchman Ronald “Uncle Ronnie” Selby Wright was buried with all the honours that come with his position. Including a marble bust.
But two years later, in 1997, the Sunday Times newspaper published detailed (but unprovable) allegations that Ronnie Selby Wright was a lifetime paedophile who groomed boys in the youth clubs he had so selflessly helped set up in poor parts of Edinburgh.
There were furious denials on Uncle Ronnie’s behalf from his friends in high places and low. But none of the apologists managed to bury the idea that Robert Lowe’s godfather was a cultivated version of the BBC’s in-house paedophile Jimmy Savile.
No one will ever know what he did to his godson. If anything.
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