PREDATOR AT THE PULPIT

SEX ABUSE SURVIVOR SHARES TRAUMA Years of abuse by a Catholic priest ruined Kathleen Walsh’s life and the worst part was no one believed her. CHRIS MCMAHON reports

“THEY knew and they did nothing. The Catholic Church knew about what happened to me. I was 11 years old, I told them and they did nothing.”

Kathleen Walsh was your typical 11-year-old Mount Isa girl. She loved Irish dancing, softball, swimming and playing the piano and was surrounded with friends.

She was a happy girl, bright and bubbly, someone who had lofty plans for her life, the kind of plans only a pre-teen, who isn’t wise to the world around them, can have.

She looks back at that time in her life with a deep sadness. She imagines a life of endless opportunity, one of what could have been. The possibilities were endless.

But this life would never eventuate. Her world would be torn apart by a predator who had her in his sights. By a man she should have been able to trust.

A man of God.

This man was a predator, one who would later be considered one of the most prolific paedophiles in Queensland’s history.

Father Neville Creen came to Mount Isa in 1973 after a stint in Charters Towers.

He was the newest priest to come to the northwest Queensland mining town, where faith was king.

The lives of Catholic families like the Walshes revolved around the church, school and sport.

It was the perfect place for a predator who wore the cloth. He could ingratiate himself into the community, into the lives of children. He could groom them and then molest them.

Ms Walsh was a 10-year-old student at St Joseph’s Primary School. Neville Creen was the priest who delivered sermons, took confession and was seen throughout the mining town as a community leader.

The grooming and abuse began as a hug that lingered a little too long. A hand brushing across the 10 and then 11-year-old’s chest or bottom, before Ms Walsh’s life irrevocably changed forever while on a school camp.

“He took advantage of Mum being away in Grade 6 and making it seem like he was caring. Then he started in Grade 7, before the camp, he was touching me on the outside of my clothes. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know how to verbalise, especially back then, kids were seen and not heard,” Ms Walsh tells the Townsville Bulletin, the first time she has spoken about her abuse publicly.

The little girl who loved writing had lost track of time, she’d been out for too long. By the time she got to the shower block of the school camp on the outskirts of Mount Isa, she was alone.

She was only there a matter of minutes before she turned to see Creen standing behind her masturbating. Creen touched her chest and tried to force her to touch him.

Scared, this little girl mustered up courage from an unknown place and kicked the priest between the legs. When he dropped to the ground, she kicked him again.

It was 1977, she was 11 years old, running from the shower to find an adult to tell what had happened. Behind her on the ground, Creen yelled “bitch”.

“I told a nun at the camp. I told her. I told her because I wanted to go home from the camp. She was angry at me. I felt sick, I’d been acting up, because he had been grooming me, I didn’t know at the time, but it had been going on for 12 months. I was in Grade 6, I was 10 turning 11.

“She was angry at me. I know she knew something was wrong, she was demanding to know what was wrong and I didn’t want to say, I just wanted her to get my dad and take me home.

“She was in the kitchen and she was hammering at me to tell her the truth and I basically said: ‘Creen attacked me in the shower block.’

“For a moment, I can still see her, she looked shocked that I actually said it. She recognised the truth in it, there was no doubt they knew. Immediately she began blaming me, said I was late going for the shower, I’d been writing. I didn’t know we had to go and have our showers. I was late going into the showers, I was on my own, isolated. She blamed me for being late.

“I think she was shocked that I had the audacity to say it. The look on her face was ... she went really red. She was a tiny woman, but everyone was terrified of her, she was a fiery nun. She was mean. I don’t know whether I blurted it out because of what he had done, or I was in shock. I just needed her to stop, get my dad and get me home.”

Her dad came to the camp and picked her up. On the drive home, Ms Walsh told her father what had happened.

“We were probably halfway home and my dad said: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Dad wasn’t someone who said a lot of words, very to the point.

“I told him I was sick, but he knew I was lying. I said Creen hurt me in the showers, he’d walked into the showers and hurt me.

“He was rageful, but contained. He was trying to calm me. We got home and he told Mum. He was a man of God, she’d said, she said a man of God doesn’t do that. And she was right, a man of God wouldn’t do that. No man should do it.

“Dad left the house and was gone for a long time and when he came back he had red knuckles.”

Ms Walsh would run into this reaction time and time and time again. People couldn’t or wouldn’t believe that a priest would abuse a child. To this day, her family still doesn’t recognise the abuse, even after Creen pleaded guilty to molesting her in court.

“I wasn’t quiet about it either. I went to a teacher, I went to the principal, both were nuns, I told them outright that he had attacked me in the showers.

“I told them I was naked in the showers and I turned around and he was there, exposed. There was no shock, they weren’t shocked with what they heard. Your reaction would be different.”

For the next five years, Ms Walsh would suffer in silence at the hands of Creen, the predator who was so brazen with his offending that he abused other children in confessionals, in swimming pools, in the company of other people. He knew no one would believe a man of God would hurt an innocent child.

How wrong they were.

It would take Ms Walsh decades to come forward to make a complaint against Creen. In total she told police about six occasions she was abused at the hands of Neville Creen. She tells the Bulletin that barely scratched the surface of the horrific five-year period of abuse.

Creen pleaded guilty to six offences against Ms Walsh in November last year. The first being the incident at the school camp. Another two counts relate to Creen touching her on the outside of her clothes. A fourth count happened in a friend’s swimming pool. Creen put his hand under her togs and penetrated her with a finger.

At this point Ms Walsh, fearing any contact with Creen, took drastic steps to stay away from the monster, including eating glass mixed with ice cream so she didn’t have to go to school.

When she was in Year 8, Creen again penetrated Ms Walsh with a finger when she was collecting a musical instrument from the nunnery. This was count five.

Trying to escape from Creen, Ms Walsh fled Mount Isa to Townsville, where she was living with her sister and going to school.

I told her (a nun) because I wanted to go home from the camp. She was angry at me. I felt sick, I’d been acting up, because he had been grooming me

Her life was returning to some form of normalcy.

That all changed when she walked into school to see the predator standing in the foyer.

The man she had tried to escape had tracked her down.

Creen told Ms Walsh that he was taking her and a number of other girls out for dinner that night, that her own mother had said it was OK. Her mother knew about the abuse but didn’t believe her daughter. When Ms Walsh rang and asked her mother, she told her she had to go to dinner with her abuser to sort out what her mother called a “misunderstanding”.

After dinner Creen took the girls to the top of Castle Hill. Here, he would sneak up on an isolated 16-year-old Ms Walsh and once again, he would assault her like he had several times before.

“What happened at Castle Hill shocked me. Every other time, I knew it was coming, but at the hill, I’d gone to another part of the hill, he was with other girls, I was shocked, I wasn’t ready for it, I didn’t hear him.”

To escape her abuser, Ms Walsh left

Townsville and the hope of an education behind her and went back to Mount Isa. At 16, she was lost.

“I think I went back to Mount Isa because every day after that I was in shock. I also had a lot of anger. I remember sitting in mass in Mount Isa and thinking he (a new priest in town) might do something.

“I felt Creen was going to keep doing in Townsville what he had been doing in Mount Isa.

“I asked to speak to the priest. He knew I was dating this boy, he’d seen us at mass together. The conversation started about dating and boys, then I just said ‘ something needs to be done about Creen’. I told him that he attacked me.

“I told him and he made the reference that I was in a relationship, that I had a boyfriend … he said ‘you’re obviously very advanced’. He went on to say that Creen was a good man and that these things shouldn’t be said and if anything happened, then I instigated it.

“He sat there as I spoke and there was no shock. They knew what he was doing to kids. They knew why he was sent away from Mount Isa.”

Even as an adult, the threat of not being believed hovered over her, like a dark cloud.

Ms Walsh didn’t speak about what happened to her for decades, it became a toxic secret that slowly ate away at her. In 2001, detectives called Ms Walsh and asked if she’d been abused by Creen as a child.

“I couldn’t come forward at the time, I couldn’t, but I told him that he should believe anything that anyone tells you about Creen. This was 2001.

“Up until then, my head never stopped with what had happened, I don’t think it’s ever out of your head, but it never comes out of your mouth, you never verbalise it. 1981 was when he attacked me at Castle Hill. That’s 20 years. I remember sitting at home, just heartbroken.”

Then in 2009, when the priest she told when she was 16 was in Townsville, Ms Walsh decided to confront him again.

“I walked into the church, I stood there, looking at the notices, pamphlets. He came out to me and asked how I was going. I told him I’d like to make an appointment to see him. We booked in, I went over there and sat down. He asked how I was, I said I was going OK. We made small talk.”

The priest brought up a relationship Ms Walsh was in at the time, just like when she was 16.

“I asked him if it was OK for priests to abuse kids, to be with kids, after he made a remark about a relationship I was in. He glared at me.

“Then he said: ‘I welcome anybody back to my church, anyone is welcome in my flock, even prostitutes.’ I picked up my handbag and walked out.

“Still the blame is on the victim. At that point why doesn’t he probe me further? If he knows nothing, why didn’t he say: ‘ What are you talking about?’ Why didn’t he say: ‘If you know something, we need to report this.’ There was nothing like that. I was 44. I thought 1977 to 2009, nothing has changed.”

It wasn’t until the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that Ms Walsh spoke up again.

“The Royal Commission started and I used to watch that like it was someone watching a Netflix series. I would sit there and comments would be made and I’d be talking at the TV.

“I watched the morning of the broadcast of the Royal Commission findings and what the rulings were.

One of the rulings was, every institution had to give an apology, if you asked for an apology, they had to give one. I got up off my chair, went over and rang the Townsville Diocese and said I wanted my apology. That’s how it all started.”

Soon after that phone call Ms Walsh was in contact with the Townsville Child Protection Investigation Unit. After an initial meeting at her home, police interviewed her at a local police station. Then she had to go back for another meeting.

“I was in knots. You want to speak, but you’re terrified. So the second time, I’m driving out there and I’m bargaining with myself, saying ‘if I go through the last set of lights, then I see it through to the end’.

“Every set of lights I did that. And if I went through the last set of lights, then I see this through to the end, but if I turn around and go home, I have to leave it alone forever. I just couldn’t cope with trying again. I remember wanting to be sick at the second last set of lights.

“My dad and I one day had a meat pie and chocolate milk. It was comforting. At 9.30am I was at the shop opposite Stuart Police Station buying a chocolate milk and a meat pie. I realised I was sick of being silent.

“A meat pie and a chocolate milk wasn’t going to cut it anymore. I sat in the car outside the station. Then I sat on a chair outside the police station. I had to go through the door. I went up to the counter and asked for Nicole (the lead detective on the case), told them who I was.

“You don’t want to come forward because you’ve been told your whole life you’re a liar. I can’t explain that feeling, but it had me in knots.

“I buckled in, I didn’t care how long it took, I thought ‘this time I’m dealing with it, I’m going to hold everyone accountable’.”

On July 23, 2020 Ms Walsh got a phone call from prosecutors saying that Creen was going to plead guilty to the six charges, including five counts of indecent treatment of a child and one count of sexual assault.

“Relief didn’t come until October 13 when I was watching on video the charges being read out and he says guilty each time out in Mount Isa. I cried with each ‘guilty’. When it got to the Castle Hill charge, I held my breath – it was the sexual assault charge. He said ‘guilty’ and I sobbed.”

On November 17, 2020, Creen was sentenced to three months in prison. He’s out already. Three months in jail for a lifetime of pain.

But Ms Walsh was seen and she was believed. And now she’s coming forward to let others know they’re not alone.

“It’s important to personalise this. We hear paedophiles are caught, it’s all sanitised, it’s sterile. People don’t really have to face it until a survivor or victim puts their face up.

“Nothing changes, nothing will change unless survivors put themselves on the line. I don’t want this happening to my granddaughter, I don’t want this happening to anyone’s child.

“The church still isn’t taking responsibility. They talk the talk, but talk is cheap. I want change.”

And the battle isn’t over for Ms Walsh, she wants legislation change, she wants those who were told about her abuse to be held accountable. They could have helped her, they could have helped other kids.

“I want my apology from the priest I told not once, but twice. I want them to say they are sorry.

“I want that person to hear about t my life. And for me to be able to say: : ‘I went to you in 1981 and it was 20 0 more years before he was caught and convicted.’ I want him to think about all those years and all those other victims. It’s not about me, it’s about those other kids.”

Ms Walsh (pictured) believes recent additions to legislation that can hold bystanders accountable should be retrospective to include cases like hers.

“It’s time we dealt with the bystanders, these people were accessories to this abuse. Bystanders know and they turn a blind eye and children were abused that shouldn’t have been abused. They had the power to stop it long before they did and they didn’t even do it then.

“I sat in the sentencing hearing for Creen and I could have gone home and it was all over. But I learned the other victim was abused in 1981 and yet I’d come forward to two nuns in 1977.

“I hope for legislation change. The bystander laws now have it that they can now be charged. That’s all well and good for people who h are guilty from when the laws came in, but there are a lot of bystanders before then.

“That’s when all the institutionalised abuse happened. If it’s good enough to charge the perpetrators from 40 years ago, why aren’t we charging these bystanders? They knew and they’re just as guilty, more so in my eyes.

“They had the power to stop and they didn’t.” it