Trial and error

A FOSTER carer found not guilty of sexually abusing boys is demanding an inquiry into his case.

THERE is no reconciling the competing views about Tom Easling. According to the police and investigators for the South Australian Department for Families and Communities, he was too good to be true: not the kind, caring man he presented as but a pedophile who "hid in plain sight".

A Supreme Court jury, however, concluded otherwise. Last November, the former public servant, who moonlighted as a volunteer foster carer, was found not guilty of 20 counts of indecent assault and unlawful sexual intercourse involving eight of the 100-odd boys entrusted to him.

Easling, 50, received three years and three months' back pay and was reinstated to the state public service, but not to his old job as policy manager in the Office for Youth. He has not sought to regain his accreditation as a foster carer, which was revoked four years ago, before he was arrested by police in a dawn raid on his home.

Like so much of his former life, all that is history. Ten months on from his acquittal, Easling continues to draw his full salary while the Rann Labor Government dithers about giving him something to do. He seethes in his corner of the Adelaide Hills at what he regards as the monstrous injustice of his treatment.

His case does indeed raise some disturbing questions, not all of them to Easling's liking or those of his supporters agitating for a royalcommission.

Easling's successful legal defence, financed by a wealthy sibling who picked up the tab of nearly $2 million, with the lawyers' meter still running, turned on dismantling the departmental investigation that unearthed much of the evidence police relied on to charge him, then shredding the credibility of the complainants in court.

Easling insists he is entitled to call himself a wronged and innocent man. But that is not the way South Australia's combative Director of Public Prosecutions Stephen Pallaras QC sees it. "If I ever get any other case in which eight complainants make a complaint against an individual, I will prosecute that case," Pallaras says. "Because not only does my duty require me to do so but I would think that the community would expect me to do so."

Others involved in the investigations, some speaking for the first time of these events to The Australian, are equally unapologetic.

"I don't think he's got anything to complain about ... if you take him at his word, the system worked ... he was acquitted," one insider says.

Another declares: "Frankly, I think Tom Easling is the luckiest man in Adelaide."

Lucky? Well, Easling concedes he was fortunate to have the financial backing of his businessman brother, John, who bankrolled just about the best legal defence money could buy, headed by top-drawer Adelaide barrister Lindy Powell QC.

But he insists the case should never have got anywhere near the SA Supreme Court, costing him his job, after he was suspended from the public service, and his reputation.

The initial investigation by the Department for Families and Communities' special investigation unit - which made him its first target after being formed in early 2004 - was so flawed it tainted the subsequent work of the police and Pallaras's team, he says.

Powell was withering at his trial, arguing that the pattern of abuse outlined by most of the complainants, by then young men in their 20s, could be explained by the ham-fisted efforts of the special investigation unit to manufacture evidence against Easling that was picked up by the police.

"In short, the case against Mr Easling arises from highly improper and prejudicial techniques of investigation ... including suggesting answers to question ... off-the-record, unrecorded conversations and inducements to people that the investigators wanted to make these complaints," she says.

The common thread in the allegations of abuse, which the prosecution cited as evidence that he had become a foster carer in the late 1980s to groom boys for sex, had "been planted in the minds" of his purported victims. Referring to the likeness of most of their accounts, Powell told the jury: "Even if those similarities ... are real similarities, there is an innocent explanation as to why this is so ... those similarities can be readily and easilyunderstood by the process of the investigation itself."

Easling, for his part, says he was not the only victim. He was forced to cease contact with boys he could have helped, including two brothers in a long-term placement with him at the time of his arrest, and who were "like family". What happened to him sent a powerful message to other foster carers that, if baseless accusations were levelled against them, they would be thrown to the wolves.

"When all this started, a friend of mine, who is senior in child care, said people just couldn't get their heads around me ... you know, that I must be doing this work because there was something wrong with me ... that I must be pedophile because I was trying to help kids who needed a break," Easling says.

"What it says is that the whole system has become so destroying and adversarial I think it has become a really risky thing to be a carer, especially for single people like me."

SO let's rewind to where the story starts, when Easling, by his account, decided to make helping troubled and troublesome boys his mission in life.

Easling says he was inspired by an article in The Weekend Australian by Phillip Adams, describing how volunteers were working with homeless young people in Melbourne. "I could not believe in a country as wealthy as Australia there were kids living in squats or the streets," he remembers.

One thing led to another and by 1989, at the instigation of a social worker with whom he was dealing as a volunteer street worker, he had signed on to perform home foster care with state agency Families SA. Easling says nothing can be read into the fact that he housed only boys during the years to come: departmental policy precluded male carers from having girls in their homes, a point the prosecution conceded at his trial.

He struck up a dialogue with Adams, who approvingly reproduced some of Easling's letters, detailing his volunteer efforts, in this newspaper. Easling says more than 100 boys aged six to 16 came and went from his home until 2003 without a single complaint being lodged against him. Then one of his boys, with whom he had first come into contact in about 2000, began swapping notes with a female classmate at school.

This young man - we will call him Witness A - declined to speak to The Australian, as did most of the other complainants approached for this article. In 2002, when he was 15, he detailed in a note to his female friend how he had been sexually abused by a foster carer, whom he named as Easling. Witness A and his friend took no action at that point, other than to send Easling an abusive, anonymous email.

In September 2003, the young man was violently assaulted after school. (There is no suggestion that Easling had any prior knowledge or involvement in this.) Concerned for his welfare after he failed to show up for school after the attack, his female friend approached a school counsellor and revealed what he purported to have gone on with Easling. This was a matter of mandatory reporting to the authorities: the police were called.

The case was assigned to veteran detective Wally Conte, of the police child exploitation unit. In December 2003, he found there was no prospect of Easling being charged with a criminal offence due to the absence of corroborating evidence for Witness A's allegations. But within the Department for Families and Communities, the newly formed special investigation unit continued to dig. Caroline Keogh, a former social worker, later told the court that aspects of Easling's statement to police had rung alarm bells. The special investigation unit's job was to assess whether "on the balance of probabilities" abuse had occurred "because we had a different burden of proof to police", she said.

Easling doesn't have a problem with this. "It's standard procedure that once the police finish, the department checks to make sure you didn't get off on a technicality," he now says. His issue with the special investigation unit is how it went about the job.

The unit's then manager, Stephen Edgington, newly arrived from the Northern Territory police, co-ordinated a review of the file of every boy Easling had had in his care. A full-time investigative team was yet to be assembled for the unit, so two retired SA detectives, Jeffrey Oates and Clifford Boylon, were wheeled in on short-term contracts to do the legwork.

Their conduct was sharply contested at Easling's trial. According to the defence, the special investigation unit men went trawling for evidence against Easling, at times naming him as the target of their investigation to those they interviewed.

"On some occasions, I think I just said: 'We're investigating your placement with Mr Easling and we want to know if anything untoward happened,"' Boylon told the court.

Interviewed by this newspaper at his home, where he is recovering from surgery, he confirmed he had not worked since the Easling case. Boylon said he doubted "whether anything would be gained" by him speaking about it.

Much was made by the defence of the failure by the two ex-detectives to make or keep notes of off-the-record conversations with witnesses before a tape machine was switched on to record their allegations. Three of the eight young men who would give evidence against Easling did not, initially, have a bad word to say against him. One of them received a mobile phone, rent assistance, cash and other material help after changing his story; another wanted to know about compensation before he would go on the record.

Others were found, under cross-examination by the defence, to have claimed to have been abused by Easling in places and on dates that were demonstrably wrong.

Witness A, the complainant in five of the charges Easling faced, testified that they had become intimate when he was 13. According to the prosecution, the relationship would develop into a consensual sexual one between them, lasting several years.

Easling's alleged pattern of offending, the prosecution said, would play out with this boy and time and again with others he allegedly abused, all aged between 12 and 14. Typically, they were plied with cigarettes, alcohol and occasionally marijuana, the Crown said. Physical contact that began with tickling and hugging would take on a sinister dimension when Easling performed bedtime massages on the boys.

"For years, Tom Easling has been hiding in plain sight," prosecutor Mark Norman told the court. "He has been able to disguise whathe has been doing to these boys through foster care."

Easling flatly rejected these claims during his trial and continues to do so. He admits he would tickle and hug the boys and, yes, he performed massages, but only at their request and never inappropriately. "I would not have been a foster carer if kids had to be treated like lepers," he says.

One boy, when he was 13, was spotted in Easling's bed one morning by a social worker, who noted the incident. Easling says the incident was entirely innocent: the younger children sometimes got frightened or cold and climbed into bed with him, but he would never allow them to stay. On this occasion, according to Easling, the boy had been playing up, hiding, because he didn't want to be taken to another placement by the social worker.

"A normal person would expect you as a single bloke to take precautions to prevent allegations being made," Easling says. "That was certainly the case with me. The kids got the message about my bed: they were to keep off it."

Like the other complainants, Witness A struggled to deal with the gaping holes in his testimony exposed by the defence. At one point in the trial, Powell questioned how he and Easling could continually have had sex when other foster children in the tiny, two-bedroom cottage saw and heard nothing.

In another instance, Witness A described locking the bathroom for an encounter with Easling: there was no such catch on the door. He had amended his original statement after Easling was charged in July 2004, the court was told. Approached by The Australian, Witness A, now 21 and at university, declined to discuss this or any other aspect of his evidence. Another of Easling's accusers would only say: "I just want to move on."

ON November 23 last year, the Supreme Court jury, after 11 weeks of legal jousting at trial and a day's deliberation, entered its bombshell verdict: Easling was not guilty of all charges. (The jurors had already been directed by the judge to acquit him on two of the 20 counts.) From that moment, argument has raged in SA over what the jury decision meant. Easling, not unreasonably, says he entered the court with a presumption of innocence and that was upheld.

"They didn't just fail to prove the case, we proved these people were lying over and over again," he says.

Pallaras, who would not be interviewed for this article, last month conveyed a far narrower interpretation of the jury verdict. "Not guilty means the prosecution could not prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt," he told ABC radio presenter Matt Abraham. As for the allegation that investigators trawled for evidence against Easling, the DPP said: "All that they did ... was lead the complainants in their discussion of topics ... which is a perfectly proper way to conduct the investigation."

Hetty Johnston, the high-profile child protection activist from Brisbane, disagrees. While she accepts Pallaras's reasoning that the emergence of eight complainants was in itself a powerful reason to prosecute, Johnston thinks Easling has cause for complaint about the special unit's investigation, which was picked up by the police in mid-July 2004, about a fortnight before he was charged.

If investigators had, in the first instance, named him when approaching potential witnesses, the case deserved to be thrown out of court. "You can't do that," Johnston says. "It's a total disservice to the victims ... the outcome, I think, was right."

Pallaras is not alone in feeling the heat. Easling, with his millionaire brother's continuing support, refuses to let this case lie: in July, he petitioned Premier Mike Rann for a royal commission. SA Attorney-General Michael Atkinson is considering a report from Pallaras on the case as political support for a public inquiry grows, with former state Liberal leader Iain Evans leading the push.

Evans has secured support from his Opposition colleagues for the investigation Easling wants and from independents and minority parties in the state upper house. At the very least, the numbers are there to force a parliamentary inquiry into the affair.

Easling, for better or worse, isn't about to goaway.

Jamie Walker is The Australian's Adelaide bureau chief.