Shadow of Doubt podcast plays Dad’s confession: I’m sick

Listen to Episode 5 now | After a year of silence, an angry daughter rings her Dad – and police are listening.

Father ‘Martin Johnson’ makes some stunning admissions in a secretly taped phone call, played in Episode 5 of our podcast Shadow of Doubt, live now. Illustration by Emilia Tortorella

The father at the centre of a controversial recovered memory child abuse case was secretly recorded by police admitting that he had ‘demons’ and a sickness in his head which he had consulted psychologists about.

But the father consistently denied ever molesting his children, and a five-week police surveillance operation failed to find any evidence supporting allegations of torture and extreme abuse which the man and his wife were later jailed over.

Episode 5 of The Australian’s Shadow Of Doubt podcast, live now, reveals details from the police telephone surveillance operation, which was carried out after two of their daughters approached police alleging abuse. The family cannot be identified for legal reasons.

One of the daughters, ‘Emily’, was in psychiatric care when she began experiencing dissociative flashbacks that her father had raped and tortured her from kindergarten to age 18, and that her mother had participated in the abuse.

Her sister ‘Sarah’ told police their father had sexually assaulted her when he was conducting massages as her sports coach.

Police began intercepting the couple’s telephone calls shortly before raiding their home and arresting the mother.

They also recorded a call from Sarah to her father in an attempt to secure admissions from him.

In this ‘pretext call’, Sarah accuses her father of violence, saying she once saw him drag her mother by the hair to a creek near the family home.

He replies: “I know, I know that, and that’s the sort of demons and the problems that I’ve had to face.”

‘Sarah Johnson’.

‘Emily Johnson’.

During the half-hour call, the father admits to striking his daughter with a broom handle and throwing Emily into a bush.

But when Sarah alleges that she became sexually aroused by his sports massages, he replies that he has no understanding of how that happened, and that it makes no sense to him.

“I’ve talked to so many different people about this, to get closure myself on this,” he says. “And I can’t. Maybe I was having issues in my head, in my subconscious – I don’t know … I cannot even remember a lot of those situations.”

Told by his daughter that he might be sick, he replies: “I agree that back then, I think there might have been something in my head that was sick.

“I agree -100%. I don’t disagree with you. I think I had an issue. I had a problem. I don’t understand it.

“I can’t understand it now. But I don’t have a problem now.”

But the father repeatedly denies during the call that he ever molested his daughters, saying “I never went near you girls. I never had time for you kids, you know that.”

In subsequent phone calls to his wife, the father was recorded saying “It’s all lies, it’s all just lies.”

During the five-week surveillance operation the parents, who sound perplexed in the calls, did not make any admissions or self-incriminating statements about the allegations of extreme abuse that later led to their jailing.

 

It is not clear if, or when, they realised their calls were being intercepted.

The father is currently serving a 48-year prison sentence, the longest jail term for child abuse in Australian history, and his wife is serving a 16-year sentence, after a jury convicted them on 86 charges.

The couple are preparing to seek a judicial for a review of their case, arguing that their convictions are based on false memories recovered during Emily’s psychiatric treatment.

Speaking from prison, the father has told the podcast that at the time police recorded the call with his daughter Sarah, he was completely unaware of the extreme nature of the allegations he and his wife were facing.

He says he knew his daughters were uncomfortable about the sports massages he had performed when he was their coach, and that his anger and controlling behaviour had caused problems in the family.

“I had no sexual interest in my daughters whatsoever,” he says.

“That was – that just did not exist. However, if I was inadvertently massaging and there was some, you know, it was arousing some feelings in the girls then I’m – I was guilty. I accept that.

“I’ve done the wrong thing. And that’s where this phone call was such a set up.”

He said he had not spoken to his daughters for more than a year at the time of the call, and decided not to dispute some of Sarah’s allegations – such as the alleged creek incident – in order to avoid arguing with her.

During their investigation, police learned that the father had been forced to resign from his job as a high school teacher in the 1980s after being accused of grooming and sexually assaulting female students. His daughter Emily began experiencing memories of abuse after learning about this past alleged offending.

*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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