My sisters’ memories of abuse destroyed our Dad’s life

Listen to Episode 4 now | Their recovered memories of sexual abuse destroyed their family, but two WA sisters ultimately reconciled with the father they said abused her.

Episode 4 of our gripping podcast investigation about memory and justice is live now. Illustration by Emilia Tortorella.

A retired school headmaster who narrowly avoided jail in one of the first ‘repressed memory’ sexual abuse cases in Australia never fully recovered from the ordeal of being publicly accused of torturing and raping his daughters, his son has revealed.

The Australian’s Shadow of Doubt podcast this week reveals previously unreported facts about a case that caused sensational headlines 30 years ago, when two sisters in Western Australia accused their father of sexual abuse and torture extending over 20 years.

At their father’s trial, the sisters acknowledged that they had no memory of the abuse until they began consulting counsellors in their 20s and recovered repressed memories of their father, brother uncles and grandfather abusing them, sometimes in occult ceremonies.

In an interview for the podcast, their brother, ‘Kevin’, reveals that in the years after his father’s acquittal, his sisters reconciled with their parents despite the horrific allegations they had made in court.

“My mother …. said it was incredible, like old times – they laughed and joked and so forth together,” Kevin recalls. “But … when anything about the court case was raised, they wouldn’t talk about it. It was like the elephant in the room.”

One of the sisters is now a psychotherapist specialising in trauma and dissociation.

The sisters cannot be named for legal reasons, and they declined to speak to the podcast about the case, which was held in the WA Supreme Court in 1994.

The jury acquitted their father on 15 charges and failed to reach a verdict on the remaining 27.

‘Martin Johnson’, who is serving a record sentence for child abuse in a case documented for our investigative podcast Shadow of Doubt. Illustration by Emilia Tortorella

‘Kevin’ is a doctor, and said that even after his father’s acquittal, he feared that he himself would be charged, because one of his sisters had accused him of performing a crude pregnancy termination on her in a pine forest when she was 18.

He said the case had caused some of his parents’ friends to cut them off, and his father had been permanently affected by it in the final years of his life.

“I know in the retirement village they were in, my dad just felt very uneasy about walking outdoors, before he became bed-bound,” he said. “And my mum would say that … a lot of nights he’d be crying out in his sleep and saying things – pleading his innocence.

“She said he had bad dreams where he was obviously reliving the court case and the accusations and so forth and protesting in his sleep.”

Kevin said that when his father died in 2014, at the age of 85, all five of his children were at his bedside, and attended his funeral.

But during the funeral ceremony, no mention was made of the court case that had changed the family’s life 20 years earlier.

Shadow of Doubt is a podcast investigating the jailing of a NSW husband and wife whose daughter accused them of abusing and torturing her from the age of five to 18.

The parents are seeking a review of their convictions, arguing that their daughter’s allegations were based on false memories recovered during six years of psychiatric treatment.

But the podcast has unearthed dramatic twists, including prior grooming allegations against the father, the presence in the family home of a suspected pedophile and wildly varying recollections of events from friends and family.

The father is serving a 48-year sentence, the longest for child sexual abuse in Australian history.

*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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