By Gary Adshead
Victims of WA’s worst serial sex predator Dennis John McKenna are reeling after being told the child abuser could be released from prison in two months.
Department of Justice letters have been sent to a number of men preyed upon by McKenna, while they boarded as students at St Andrew’s Hostel in Katanning some time between 1975 and 1990.
Dennis McKenna leaves court in 2010. Credit: Aja Styles
“I am writing to offer you the opportunity to discuss any concerns or queries you may have about future contact with an offender,” the letter reads.
“The Prisoners Review Board is required to consider Mr McKenna for possible release on parole.
“I would like to speak with you regarding your thoughts on this matter. The offender’s date of parole eligibility is 17 November, 2024.
“Those notified of the parole date can now make a written submission to the department’s Victim offender Mediation Unit.
Since 1991, McKenna has been handed jail sentences on three occasions after police investigations highlighted more victims from his reign of terror as the hostel’s warden.
When combined, McKenna was sentenced to 22 years behind bars for 65 offences against 29 boys.
The most recent punishment came in 2013, when the now 79-year-old was convicted of a further 34 child sex crime offences.
Dennis McKenna on the day he was awarded Citizen of the Year in Katanning in January 1984.
His systemic abuse at the Katanning facility, used to accommodate the children of farming families attending the town’s high school, resulted in a 2012 inquiry and report titled St Andrew’s Hostel: How the System and Society Failed our Children.
But those who survived McKenna’s molestation never want to see him free again.
“He’s a rapist, he’s a paedophile, and there’s no way he should be let out,” survivor Michael Hilder told Radio 6PR.
“The feelings run so deep, if I saw him down the street again, I don’t know, I don’t know.
“This is something we’ve faced for 40 years, and it’s still going on … we were 12 and 13 and now here we are, I’m nearly 60, and it’s still in the memories, and these things still keep on coming up.”
Survivors of years of abuse at St Andrew’s recently won a hard-fought battle to convince the state government to demolish the abandoned buildings in the Great Southern town.
They will now fight to ensure McKenna stays behind bars, with Hilder claiming he was aware of 14 people from the hostel who had taken their own lives in the wake of McKenna’s abuse.
“It would be nice to think that we could have a group session with multiple victims and all have our say on why he shouldn’t be released because everyone’s got a different story,” Hilder said.
“We just don’t forget.”
Maggie Dawkins, a whistleblower and long-time advocate of the survivors, has prepared an eight-page submission arguing that McKenna’s abuse was responsible for several suicides.
“The prisoner may not have been tried for murder, but it is irrefutable that his offending has killed innocent young men who were sexually abused as children,” she wrote.
“I raise this serious issue with the board and ask that you consider the possible effect McKenna’s early release may have on his victims and their families. The board cannot, with absolute certainty, predict that McKenna’s early release will not cause a victim of this prisoner to take his life.”
Before his crimes were finally exposed, McKenna was so highly regarded in Katanning that he was made citizen of the year on one occasion.
“The prisoner has always had a cunning ability and ruthlessness to get whatever he wants,” Dawkins, the wife of former federal treasurer John Dawkins, wrote in her submission.
“McKenna wants to be released early. He will do whatever he can to achieve his desire. Don’t be hoodwinked. He has done it before.”
The department’s letter to those abused by McKenna warned that even if the paedophile is refused parole, his prison sentence completion date is November 17, 2026.
Support is available through Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636 and Lifeline on 13 11 14.