By Sarah McPhee and Amber Schultz
Warning: Graphic content
The brother of one of Australia’s worst killers has been jailed for 18 years after admitting to decades of child sexual abuse.
Former youth worker Neville Joseph Roughan, also known as Neville Joseph Knight, pleaded guilty in September to 28 charges, including multiple counts of sexual intercourse with a child, against 11 victims. The offending occurred between the late 1960s and early 2000s in Sydney and across NSW.
Neville Roughan, the brother of murderer and mutilator Katherine Knight, pleaded guilty to dozens of charges.
Roughan’s sister Katherine Knight was the first Australian woman sentenced to life in prison without parole for the murder of her partner John Price, whom she stabbed to death and skinned at their Aberdeen home in the Hunter region in 2000.
Knight cut off Price’s head and boiled it in a pot before slicing off pieces of his buttocks, baking them, and serving them with vegetables on dinner plates.
“The last minutes of his life must have been a time of abject terror for him, as they were a time of utter enjoyment for her,” Justice Barry O’Keefe said as he sentenced Knight in 2001.
John Price and Katherine Knight.
Roughan, 74, appeared via video link on Wednesday for his sentencing in Downing Centre District Court, wearing prison greens and a large gold crucifix necklace, which he held at times. He also hung or shook his head and wiped his eyes with a tissue.
As the court heard Roughan was eligible for a 20 per cent discount on sentence following his guilty pleas, a man in the public gallery yelled out: “You’re a f---ing dead man, I’m going to have you killed” before storming out.
Judge Timothy Gartelmann said the offender met his victims through youth centres, including a PCYC, where he helped train boys in boxing as a teenager, became a youth worker and set up his own centre as a director.
The court previously heard Roughan told an Indigenous child victim, “You’re black, I’m white, no one will ever believe you,” and another victim, “You can’t tell anybody, no one would believe you, this is our little secret”.
Summarising the facts, the judge said Roughan sexually assaulted the first victim on “an almost daily basis”. The court heard Roughan apologised, and was seeking “redemption and forgiveness because he did not want to die and go to hell”, but “told the victim he still could not tell anyone”.
In a lawfully recorded conversation in November 2021, he “made admissions” to sexually assaulting the victim and “said he knew it was wrong, but did not think it was as the victim allowed him to do it”.
On a camping trip with his second victim, Roughan said he wanted to hunt for fish “like black fellas in the old days”, and they would “have to be naked”.
Neville Roughan was sentenced in Sydney on Wednesday.
The court heard another victim was seven when he asked Roughan for food at a youth centre. Roughan drove the boy to a fast-food outlet and sexually assaulted him in his van, offering money when he resisted.
On a separate occasion, Roughan “put a $20 note in his underwear and told [the victim] to get it”, the facts state.
The judge said another one of Roughan’s victims suffered a serious injury as a teenager and was visited in hospital by the offender, but the sexual acts continued after the victim arrived home.
Roughan was arrested in 2021.
Reading a victim impact statement in court last month, one survivor said the abuse endured when he was a child had invaded his life “like a cancer”, and his mother remembered him turning from a “perfectly normal child … to a young man filled with hate and anger”.
“All of the men in my life who should have protected me never did ... the accused groomed and isolated me ... this man broke all the rules of nature,” the victim said.
The offender grasped his crucifix necklace as the victim detailed how his life had been derailed.
“You can sit there and grab that cross, mate, but where you’re going, it ain’t going to help you,” the victim said.
Gartelmann said the impact statements disclosed each victim was suffering fear and anxiety, a sense of guilt and shame, loss of trust, and psychological harm.
He said Roughan was “visibly wracked with guilt” when the statements were read and found he was remorseful.
The court heard Roughan suffers from physical and mental health problems, including dementia.
The judge said Roughan’s “conduct must be denounced” and jailed him for 18 years with a non-parole period of 10 years. Due to time served, he will be eligible for parole in 2031.
If you or anyone you know needs help, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 (and see lifeline.org.au), 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732), the National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service on 1800 211 028 or Kids Helpline on 1800 551 800.
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