Girl buried tools in ‘problematic’ Shadow of Doubt case

A prosecutor was so concerned about the nature of allegations a young woman had made against her father that the police brief was sent to the NSW DPP.

Mother ‘Susan Johnson’, now serving a 16-year sentence for child abuse, in a case investigated in our chart-topping podcast Shadow of Doubt. Illustration: Emilia Tortorella

A prosecutor was so concerned about the “problematic” nature of torture and abuse allegations a young woman had made against her father that the police brief was sent to the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions to be reviewed.

The review was requested after a forensic analysis raised questions about a diary the young woman said she had kept as a 14 year-old, recording her father torturing her with tools and raping her repeatedly.

Police determined that the father was actually overseas on days when diary entries described him abusing his daughter on the family property.

A forensic document expert also determined that handwritten entries up to five days apart had been written at the same time.

But the DPP went ahead with the case, and the young woman’s parents were convicted on 86 counts of abuse and sentenced to lengthy jail terms.

The Australian’s Shadow Of Doubt podcast is investigating the parents’ claim that the case against them was based on their daughter’s unreliable false memories, which she recovered during several years of psychiatric treatment.

The couple’s daughter revealed the existence of the diary to police more than a year after she first made allegations of sexual assault against her father. The diary contained multiple entries she said she had written as a 14 year-old, recording her father torturing her with tools and sexually assaulting her in a shed next to the family home.

The diary also recorded her burying the tools on the property, and observing her father angrily searching for them one weekend.

But police determined that she was not at home that weekend, because she had been competing in an interstate sports competition.

Other diary entries detailed her father abusing her in the shed on multiple days when his immigration records showed he was overseas.

The diary also recorded the daughter’s participation in several sports competitions, but the dates were wrong by up to two months.

Daughter ‘Emily Johnson’.

Father ‘Martin Johnson’.

Police subsequently raided the couple’s rural property and found rusty tools buried in locations where the daughter told police she had hidden them years earlier.

Eight months after the raid, the prosecutor in charge of the case wrote a report to the Director of Public Prosecutions requesting a review of the evidence.

She told the lawyer representing the accused mother that aspects of the case were problematic, but she was not seeking to have it ‘no-billed’.

The father was subsequently charged with more than a hundred counts of abuse extending over 13 years.

The Australian has chosen not to name the family or identify dates on which events happened.

The father was convicted in the NSW District Court and sentenced to 48 years in prison, the longest jail term for child abuse ever imposed in Australia. The mother is serving a 16-year sentence.

They have both engaged lawyers to apply for a judicial review of their convictions, arguing that crucial evidence was never presented at their trial.

*The images used with this podcast investigation are for illustrative purposes only and bear no resemblance to the real people in this story, who cannot be identified for legal reasons.

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