Top private school ‘chose to ignore abuse’
Numerous complaints were made about a former Dilworth teacher over 50 years, writes
Half a century ago, an organist at Dilworth School walked into a small side room of the school’s empty chapel.
The choir had just finished practice and a choirboy was in the room where the hymn books and robes were kept.
What happened next lasted just a few seconds but was the start of a decades-long story. The boy, 15, said the organist, Leonard Cave, approached him wordlessly, pushed him against the wall and grabbed his crotch.
The boy pulled away, swore at Cave and went straight to the Dilworth headmaster at the time, Peter Parr.
“[The headmaster] said something like, ‘Thanks for telling me,’” the former student told the Auckland High Court last week.
“That was it, it was never mentioned again between us.”
There is no evidence that the school took any action, or referred it to police. And it would not be the last time. Dilworth’s failure to intervene “set the stage for things to come”, a jury at the High Court heard.
Cave was accused of abusing four more students at Dilworth and one student at St Paul’s Collegiate in Hamilton over several decades.
Some of the victims, who cannot be named, told no one and had no witnesses to the crime.
But those who did report the abuse to the school found their complaint went nowhere, the court heard. On at least one occasion, the school was accused of covering it up.
Cave was not held fully accountable until 50 years after that assault in the room beside the chapel.
On Wednesday, he was found guilty by a jury of indecent assault, indecency between males, inducing an indecent act, supplying cannabis and LSD, and sexual violation. The jury found him not guilty on one count of indecent assault.
In all, 12 people associated with Dilworth School have been charged over sexual offending between the 1970s and 2000s. Three of the accused have died, and another three have been convicted.
Cave’s case was the first to go to trial. And the evidence heard in the High Court over six days provided some insight into the way Dilworth and authorities responded to allegations of sexual abuse against students.
Former students who were now in their 50s and 60s took the stand or appeared via video link from around the country and overseas. One was cross-examined at 1am from their home country. Cave, 75, spent most of the trial looking down in the dock or closing his eyes. He passed notes to his lawyer. At one electric moment, he locked eyes with one of the complainants as they sat down in the stand.
Cave left his role as a tutor and organist at Dilworth in 1971 to travel abroad, soon after the first instance of abuse.
He was rehired several years after
and later became head of the music department, a prestigious role.
“He had long hair, played music, a little bit more flamboyant than some of the other teachers,” one of his former students recalled.
Cave didn’t mind students swearing in his music classes and he had a crass sense of humour, they said.
The victims were poor, rural boys transplanted to the city. Most of the students at Dilworth were from single-parent families in the regions.
Following the wishes of founder and wealthy land speculator James Dilworth, the school gave them a fully funded, elite education and boarding.
“Dilworth is like an island oasis,” Crown prosecutor Jacob Barry told the court. “Children are plucked from a difficult life, to strive here.”
He added: “Yet someone like Cave has taken advantage of this.”
The music teacher’s friendships with the complainants gradually grew more inappropriate. He showed them pornography, smuggled beer into his office in his briefcase to share with them, and confided with them about his and his wife’s sex life.
He invited students to spend a weekend at his Waiheke Island bach — an exciting proposal for kids who usually whiled away their weekends at the boarding house.
Defence lawyer Warren Pyke said these trips to a private bach near Onetangi Beach were innocent. Two witnesses told the jury that nothing untoward happened to them while staying there.
But four of the accused said they were sexually abused at the bach after being plied with spirits or beer.
Cave’s offending against the boys was strikingly similar, Barry said.
“He was prepared to use his positions at schools to form relationships with teenage boys, took those relationships beyond the school environment and used disinhibiting substances to induce sexual behaviour.
“He had an interest in young, adolescent males and acted upon them in private settings.”
The first three boys returned from Waiheke to the city and never told a soul. But the fourth boy to visit Waiheke had a point of difference: he had friends who lived on the island.
The former student, now aged in his 50s, told the court of being forced into oral sex by Cave after drinking heavily at a nearby pub and at the bach. He eventually broke free, hurriedly dressed and dashed out the door, walking quickly away from the property in the middle of the night.
Cave chased him down the street in bare feet. The man said he ran to the pub where they had been earlier in the evening and ordered a taxi.
The taxi took him to a friend’s property at Little Oneroa Beach where he revealed to them he had been assaulted.
His mother, who met him at the ferry in downtown Auckland the next day, reported the assault to the headmaster at the time, Murray Wilton. Cave resigned from the school soon after, but was not referred to police or prevented from teaching again.
After Cave’s resignation, Dilworth was accused of attempting to silence his victims.
A former student who was abused said that he was approached by a senior staff member in the school’s rear car park, soon after Cave resigned. The staff member told him “what a great guy Mr Cave was”, the complainant said.
The student was asked if the conversation with the staff member influenced his decision not to make a complaint against Cave.
“Possibly,” he said.
The man’s sister went further, telling the court the family felt it was a cover-up.
“He was called [to the car park] and told he was never to mention it again,” she said. “The school knew about it and chose to ignore it.”
Reached by email, the senior staff member declined to comment about the allegations made in court. Wilton, the headmaster, could not be contacted. And Parr, who was in charge during Cave’s first instance of abuse, died in January 2020.
Cave later found employment as a music teacher at St Paul’s Collegiate, where the sixth sexual abuse complaint emerged. The former student did not report the abuse to the school or authorities at the time, but eventually made a complaint to police in 2012. Police began an investigation and spoke to Cave but did not lay charges.
It was another eight years before police finally caught up with Cave, charging him as part of Operation Beverly in 2020. The operation followed an internal inquiry by the school after it was alerted to historic abuse by a former student.
The passage of time between Cave’s alleged assaults and the trial formed a key part of his defence. How could the jury depend on 40- to 50-year-old memories, some of which were clouded by heavy alcohol consumption at the time?
“Those are just a tissue of lies, are they not?” Pyke said to one witness about his account of abuse.
The complainants and witnesses stood by their accounts. One said that though his memory of events surrounding his assault was hazy, his recollection of the abuse itself was “lucid”.
“There are things that happen in your life that stay with you,” another witness said, his voice shaking. “I can recall exactly where I was and who I was with during events like Princess Diana’s death and the 9/11 attacks. This is one of those things that stayed with me.”
Dilworth Trust Board chairman Aaron Snodgrass apologised to the victims and admitted that the school’s policies in the past “did not adequately ensure the safety of our students”. The school was now holding a further, independent inquiry into historic abuse and designing a redress system.
It was not just the school which was grappling with guilt over its past actions.
Parents and the victims themselves spoke of the shame they carried for decades.
The mother of the boy who fled his abuser at Waiheke quietly told the court last week that she never went to police herself.
“It was a long time ago and I just wanted to make sure that there were no repercussions for my son,” she said.
“Forty years on, I regret that.” The failure to halt Cave’s offending weighed heavily on the choirboy in the chapel, now in his 60s, who spoke to police as part of Operation Beverly.
In the stand, head bowed and face drawn, he said he had struggled with depression and alcoholism throughout his life.
If he had spoken up earlier, maybe other victims would have been spared, he said.
“I felt responsible, in part.”
There are things that happen in your life that stay with you. I can recall exactly where I was and who I was with during events like Princess Diana’s death and the 9/11 attacks. This is one of those things that stayed with me.
Witness