Parents’ worst nightmare: daycare pedophiles

It’s hard to imagine a scenario more horrendous than what a small town on the NSW mid-north coast is going through.

Police arrest childcare worker Timothy Luke Doyle. Picture: Nathan Edwards

The phrase “a parent’s worst nightmare” is probably overused, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario more horrendous than what a small town on the NSW mid-north coast is going through.

Earlier this year, investigators started contacting parents with the life-changing news that they suspected their children had been sexually abused by a former childcare worker, and that the abuse had been recorded.

Sixteen children from the one daycare centre are now alleged to be victims.

“We feel absolutely devastated something like this could happen here,” says the mother of one of those children, a boy who was three years old when the abuse is alleged to have happened.

Now she and the other parents and extended families made privy to the shocking allegations are struggling to live with the pain. They may never sleep easy, or trust, again.

The town is so small, with only two childcare centres, that The Weekend Australian is not naming it to protect alleged victims.

The alleged abuser, Timothy Luke Doyle, was a young, fun and seemingly caring man whom police allege was part of a global pedophile ring accused of producing and trading child abuse images and videos over the internet.

Now five years old, the woman’s son either cannot ­remember or can’t verbalise what is alleged to have happened to him two years ago, but police say he was indecently assaulted on the childcare centre’s premises and it was recorded.

Like many other parents in the town, she’s demanding to know how an accused pedophile managed to infiltrate the facility and carry out his alleged crimes without anyone noticing.

Rationally, the mother of four knows it was not her fault, but she is still consumed by feelings of guilt and regret that she did not pick up on any signs her son was being abused at the time of the ­alleged incidents in 2018.

“When we first found out about what had happened from detectives, for the first two weeks, me and my husband, we were just in complete shock,” she says.

“My husband was always a bit suspicious of the childcare worker; there was something about him that he thought was a bit off.”

At the time, she dismissed those tugs of suspicion as being down to stereotypes and outdated notions about a man working in childcare.

“I didn’t listen and he was right — and now I have to live with that,” she says. “But our son wasn’t the only one: there were 16 kids at the centre it happened to.

“We trusted them with our kids and they had a duty of care and should have known what was going on. It just doesn’t make any sense that he could have got to so many of our kids and no one ­noticed anything.”

Reign of terror

Doyle, could spend the rest of his life in prison. The 27-year-old has been charged with 303 offences ­relating to the sexual abuse of 30 children, including the 16 from the childcare centre, along with the production, possession and distribution of child abuse material.

His thick file in the Port Macquarie Local Court shows he is ­accused of an 18-month reign of terror at the childcare centre, along with other offences dating back to 2011 and continuing until his arrest.

The abuse at the childcare centre is alleged to have occurred between June 2017 and the end of November 2018, the victims appearing to be primarily boys aged between one and five.

Charges allege indecent assaults of the children and the filming of sex acts, all somehow carried out at a childcare centre as other staff worked nearby.

One charge is for the alleged rape of a four-year-old boy in the town.

Foul abuse is alleged to have continued after he left the centre.

At Doonside in western Sydney, Doyle is accused of sexually touching an 11-month-old baby boy in 2019.

Other offences are alleged to have occurred in Sydney’s Bidwell, and in Parkes, Old Bar, Kendall and Taree.

He was babysitting one child, and is alleged to have solicited child abuse material from another.

Doyle was arrested in Kendall, about 30 minutes’ drive south of Port Macquarie, in June with his boyfriend, Steven Garrad, who is facing 123 charges and has been accused of abusing children in his partner’s care.

At the time of the arrest, several young children were at the house.

The men were identified and arrested as part of Operation Arkstone, a major investigation led by the Australian Federal Police and supported by state police forces and US Homeland Security Investiga­tions.

The AFP revealed this week that the investigation had resulted in 14 arrests in NSW, Western Australia and Queensland on 828 charges.

It started with a simple cyber tip. In February, the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children passed information to the AFP-led Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation suggesting an Australian man was uploading child abuse material online. When police swooped on the suspected offender on the NSW central coast the same month, they checked his online devices.

His phone is alleged to have contained evidence of a network of men sharing images on a social media platform.

It snowballed to more arrests, exposing alleged abuse at the childcare centre.

A Sydney volunteer soccer coach was among other men ­arrested, accused of using his ­position and familial networks to abuse seven children.

Arkstone investigators have sent a further 146 referrals to global law enforcement agencies after identifying links through online forums to offenders in Europe, Asia, the US, Canada and New Zealand. Three men have been ­arrested in the US.

Investigators say it is the most significant child abuse operation to date to be led by the AFP, but there will be more big wins for the ACCCE, launched in September 2018 and already developing an international reputation as a centre of excellence in the crime type.

National co-ordination

Based at a purpose-built facility in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley, its ­investigators and victim identification experts are waging a war against sex offenders.

The investigators are out­numbered but are making huge strides.

Queensland was chosen at the location for the centre almost certainly because of the presence of one of the world’s leading units in fighting online child abuse, the Queensland Police Service’s Task Force Argos.

Nine members of Argos are now stationed in the ACCCE building, working with federal colleagues to build the skills required to take on sometimes sophisticated tech-educated offenders, and ultimately to remove children from harm. These include detective Jon Rouse, seconded to the AFP as a superintendent to help co-ordinate operations at the ACCCE, and world-renowned ­victim identification expert Paul Griffiths.

The idea of the ACCCE is to provide much-needed national co-ordination in combating a borderless crime, where the ­offenders and victims can be anywhere, in Australia or across the world.

The ultimate aim is to embed people from every state and territory and from international agencies such as the US HSI and FBI, to raise investigative capability.

The key pillars are covert online investigations, victim identification, triage of cybertips, intel, prevention and research.

Covert investigations involve the infiltration of pedophile networks on both the publicly accessible clearnet and anonymous dark web to unmask offenders.

These investigations can sometimes be protracted, taking months or years to pay off.

Argos, for instance, has taken over and run some of the world’s biggest child abuse forums on the dark web, in extraordinary undercover operations that have led to offenders being locked up around the world and their victims being rescued.

Investigators say the ACCCE building is now home to the largest and most skilled victim identification team in the world.

These experts trawl through videos and photographs for telltale signs and distinguishing features that give away a location or an identity.

Birthmarks, pieces of carpet, barcodes on boxes; any number of small details can lead skilled officers to the doors of offenders. This would have played an important role in the Arkstone investigation.

The ACCCE also sifts through thousands of cybertips as they come in to decide which are the most urgent.

Police inundated

More than 33,600 reports of online child sex abuse were forwarded to Australian police by the NCMEC last year.

There are many challenges. At the ACCCE, there is growing alarm that some of their best leads for hunting child sex offenders are about to dry up as a result of the expansion of end-to-end encryption, which prevents any third party from viewing communications.

This means fewer tips like those that led to Operation Arkstone.

Australian authorities have been publicly shaming tech giants over the issue. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton last month said Facebook — by moving to expand end-to-end encryption by default across all its platforms, including Messenger and Instagram — was starving investigators of referrals that had previously led to children being removed from harm.

Arkstone highlights just how vital these tips are, and the importance of doing more than simply ­arresting offenders for possession of child abuse material.

“It consistently happens across the country — our police go through doors, they make arrests, they find child abuse material and they move onto the next case,” one investigator says.

“It’s rare that they dig down and look at who they’re talking to, their networks.

“It’s not the fault of the police. They’re inundated. They have so much other work on that they don’t have time.”

Global ring

In Arkstone, investigators looked beyond possession charges with each offender. “That’s the model. These ­people are networked; if you don’t look for it you won’t find it.”

Doyle and Garrad are understood to have been living in Ken­dall when three-year-old William Tyrrell vanished during a visit to his foster grandmother’s house in the town in 2014.

When police swooped on the men, they brought ground-penetrating radar equipment capable of searching for a body, but NSW police this week said there was no connection between them and William’s disappearance.

The daycare centre where Doyle worked is in a different, nearby town.

At first glance, with its wide tree-lined streets and hardworking blue-collar workers, it seems an unlikely hub for an alleged global pedophile ring … but perhaps its strong working-class roots were part of its allure: for many local families, both parents need to work to provide for young, growing families.

They are employed largely at the local meatworks and as nurses at the nearby hospital; their long, gruelling hours precipitate a high demand for long daycare services by its two childcare centres and trusted babysitters.

The mother of one of the alleged victims said Doyle had been well-known among parents in the community for both: working at one of those centres and caring for a number of local children outside his general work hours, before abruptly vanishing around the time of his alleged crimes in 2018.

“One minute, he was everywhere and everyone knew him; the next thing, he had just dis­appeared,” she says.

“We didn’t think too much about it at the time but now we do wonder if someone caught him out and told police or if he just decided he had to move on.”

Business as usual

Despite the large number of families affected by Doyle’s alleged crimes in the region, she said many of them felt quite isolated in a town in which everyone generally knew everyone else: “The police have been really good about telling us what is going on but they want to keep us separated so we don’t even know how many families are affect­ed from the centre, let alone the town.

“Every time you see another parent with a kid around, you wonder if they are going through the same thing as you. It’s been really difficult.”

She and husband immediately removed their son from the childcare centre where the alleged abuse took place after being contacted by detectives, but their work commitments meant they needed to enrol him in the town’s other daycare facility out of necessity.

“We were just so upset with the management and felt they had destroyed our trust.”

The director who runs the other centre in town said word had quickly filtered through the community about Doyle’s alleged crimes but demand for childcare in the town seemed to have remained high at both centres.

“Everyone knows what happened … It’s disgusting anyone could even think about taking advantage of vulnerable children that way — it’s sickening.

“The real question everyone is asking is how this was able to happen without anyone detecting it? Where was the supervision?”

A former school friend who stayed in touch with Doyle said he had been a bullied pupil who she regarded as being “nice and gentle … I never would of expected him to do something like this,” she said.

Staff at the childcare centre that employed Doyle have been told not to talk about his time there but this week it was business as usual, with dozens of young children in brightly coloured bucket hats populating its playground.

Several parents who rely on the centre for daycare contacted by The Weekend Australian preferred not to discuss the global pedophile ring’s alleged connection to the facility.

Police said all the families of all victims had been contacted.