Trying to numb the pain
‘I never seen hell until I came to Mount Cashel’
Derrick Stanley said he was so disturbed by memories brought forward by the film “The Boys of St. Vincent,” that he put his head through a TV set. The National Film Board film was inspired by the Mount Cashel Orphanage sex abuse scandal in St. John’s.
Derrick Stanley said he was so disturbed by memories brought forward by the film “The Boys of St. Vincent,” that he put his head through a TV set.
The National Film Board film was inspired by the Mount Cashel Orphanage sex abuse scandal in St. John’s.
“My head was all bandaged up and my face was like a monster,” he said of the damage.
Stanley had not spoken out before about the abuse he claims he suffered there in the 1970s.
Since he was interviewed by The Telegram for this story, he has been put in touch with a lawyer, as an Aug. 1 deadline looms for civil claims against the Christian Brothers organization and its entities.
In the 1980s, Stanley said he was told an old perjury charge made him ineligible to give evidence against his alleged abuser, Brother David Burton, a dorm supervisor.
And so he has kept it pretty much to himself ever since.
“I didn’t want to bring up my past — everything in the past. I didn’t bother coming forward,” he said over coffee.
“But I didn’t tell my parents why I ran away and all this. I ran away a few times and the police always brings me back. … Last time I ran away I went to the boys’ home and stayed there until I was 16.”
Stanley said as a boy he had surgery to repair a hole in his heart and was never treated as a normal child.
He said his siblings were split up and he wound up in the orphanage.
Stanley alleges that Brother Joseph Burke left him to drown in the swimming pool there.
“I didn’t know how to swim. He put me on his back and brought me down the deep end and left me there,” he said, mimicking the sound “bloop, bloop, bloop” and pointing downwards to illustrate his struggle.
“I went down the fourth time and there was a guy who was taking care of the pool cleaning up around. … He seen what went on. He jumped in the pool and got me out and saved my life.”
Criminal indecent assault charges against Burke were quashed and he got an absolute discharge for a physical assault charge.
Stanley said Burton — who was convicted in the past, but also made a confession that was not prosecuted — touched his privates many times.
“They picked out the weakest that can’t fight back,” he said of the Christian Brothers who were abusive. Many years ago, Stanley said he robbed a female taxi driver and cut her face. He did time in Springhill, N.S., but has since been pardoned.
“I was on the heavy drugs — acid, marijuana, black hash, black oil. I didn’t do cocaine. I popped pills, trying to snort them up me nose,” he said of his past. I took me glasses (and) used it for brass knuckles and I cut her.”
But he said he was sorry for what he did, expressed it in court and his record is now clean. Stanley said he received some counselling after being parolled to a halfway house and that helped him straighten up.
But the 47-year-old has worked a succession of jobs and still can’t keep one.
“I tried to commit suicide and everything when I saw it on TV,” he said of the “Boys of St. Vincent.”
“I tried to hang myself in the closet. I tried to cut my wrists, because the pain hurt and I didn’t want anyone else to know.”
Stanley said he didn’t get far in school and has poor literacy skills.
“Give me a newspaper and I can’t tell you what happened,” he said.
But Stanley also said there was a kind man at Mount Cashel — Brother T.I. Murphy, who treated him well, offering candy and milk with no hidden agenda.
Another survivor Billy Earle echoed those sentiments, saying Murphy was the best, along with other good brothers, like Butsy Moore, Johnny Shaw and Harry French.
“With all the publicity the bad side of Mount Cashel generated over the years, I feel it is easy to forget the good that was done there,” Earle said.
“Mount Cashel was more than a small group of bad brothers who tarnished the reputation of a good and valuable organization. It was a 100-year-old institution that helped thousands of children and their families and produced many good men.”
Gerard Boland’s criminal record is 57 pages long.
“It’s as thick as a Downhomer,” he said in a telephone interview from the Bishop’s Falls correctional facility where he is incarcerated until next spring — or this fall if he can get parole.
He figures he’s spent much of the last 30 years in jail and 99 per cent of the convictions, he said, are the result of alcohol-fuelled anger. There are assaults, breaches of conditions, impaired driving, causing disturbances, utter- ing threats and mischief among the pages that have defined his life.
Boland said he was sexually abused by Brother Edward English in the 1970s.
English was convicted in the 1990s of assault-related offences against former residents of the orphanage.
After Boland’s mother got sick, he and his brothers were placed in Mount Cashel.
“If I could honestly say, the truth of it is Mount Cashel, it f--king ruined my life,” he said, breaking down.
“A lot of boys went through abuse in Mount Cashel and went on with their lives. God love them. How they done it? Good family support or something.
“Jesus Christ, I thought we had it hard in Lamaline. I mean I never seen hell until I came to Mount Cashel orphanage. That’s for f--king sure.” Boland said his father was a heavy drinker. “When I seen my father being the way he was — hitting us and pushing my mother around, I said to myself, ‘There’s no f--king way in the world I’m going to be like him,’” he said.
He took his first drink at around age 18.