Shadow of Doubt podcast: Journalist Richard Guilliatt on the case he can’t forget

Richard Guilliatt, the journalist who documented the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1990s and exposed cancer fraudster Belle Gibson, is back with a new investigation into a case that brings back memories.

NSW father ‘Martin Johnson’ is serving a 48-year sentence for child sexual abuse, in a case now being examined by investigative journalist Richard Guilliatt for our new podcast Shadow of Doubt. Illustration by Emilia Tortorella

Nearly 30 years ago, NSW police arrested a married couple from Sydney’s northern suburbs after their 18 year-old daughter alleged she had suffered 13 years of sadistic sexual abuse involving multiple adults, extreme violence and strange rituals in which blood was extracted from her body.

As a news reporter covering that story, I watched the prosecution case slowly disintegrate as it became clear the allegations were based on the young woman’s unreliable “suppressed memories”, elicited by a counsellor. A magistrate eventually threw out the charges after the couple’s other children admitted they had fabricated implausible stories of abuse – some against their elderly grandmother – under pressure from counsellors or police to support their sister.

Decades later, the memory of that case came back when reports surfaced of a NSW couple charged with unspeakable acts of depravity against their 18 year-old daughter, who had been undergoing counselling when she recalled being tortured and abused for 13 years in the family home. Her psychiatrist testified that the young woman had “blocked out” the memories throughout her entire childhood.

The similarities were striking, although there was one telling difference: the parents in this recent case were in jail serving long sentences, after a jury found them guilty on nearly every one of the 86 charges they faced. Today they still vehemently proclaim their innocence, supported by two of their children.

Finding out more about this extraordinary case would prove extremely difficult. The family’s identity was suppressed, as it is in all child sexual abuse cases, and the media were denied access to any material from the trial other than a prosecution summary.

In 2017 I wrote a feature about the case for this newspaper, but the complete files from the case were locked away in lawyers’ offices until last year, when the convicted couple’s final appeal was rejected by the High Court.

Journalist Richard Guilliatt.

Shadow of Doubt is live now.

Last year those files, stored in dozens of boxes and plastic crates, were made available to The Australian by the family. Their contents, along with the testimony of dozens of people who watched the case unfold, reveal a story that is significantly different from the one heard by the jury – as will be outlined over the next eight weeks in the Shadow Of Doubt podcast.

Child abuse cases are enormously difficult, especially when they involve families, and they can be traumatic even for the police and welfare workers involved. There is an understandable revulsion about paedophilia and a desire to seek justice for its victims which has to be balanced by careful police investigation and the rights of the accused.

 

The case that collapsed in the 1990s was a cautionary example: after it ended, the mother and grandmother were awarded $165,000 compensation for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. The judge who awarded that compensation criticised police for ignoring obvious inconsistencies in the allegations, concealing evidence and failing to pursue basic lines of inquiry with friends, neighbours, relatives and other witnesses.

The detective in charge, it transpired, had himself suffered physical abuse as a child and was consulting a counsellor, who thought he had become “over involved” in the case. By the time the parents launched their compensation claim, the detective was living in a de facto relationship with the daughter whose memories had sparked the investigation.

 

Cases such as this prompted prosecutors and professional counselling organisations to issue warnings in the 1990s about the risks of relying on memories recovered through therapy. But in recent years there has been a strong push from victim advocacy organisations such as Blue Knot Foundation to accept such memories as reliable, a stance which the Royal Commission into institutional abuse also adopted.

The Shadow Of Doubt podcast will explore those issues as it investigates what lessons have been learned over recent decades in this contentious area of mental health and the law.

 *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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