The Victorian Police went after Pell from 2013 with their ‘Operation Tethering’. Nothing turned up until April or so 2014 after a funeral. I think it was not one of the accusations that are now ALL dismissed or dropped it was the only one that in the end broke through and secured the conviction.
The one complaint – that has Pell a convicted pedophile and 2 time child rapist in the sacristy of the Cathedral after Sunday Mass, in full regalia mind!- came from a longer process of being put in shape, and only became a ‘formal statement to the police at June 18, 2015. That is when the (now) only complainant gives his statement to SANO. Note this is over a year after the funeral of the heroin user who never made any complaint, and it was several months after the complainant talked of the issues to the Grieving Mother (GM).
What happened was that a 31 yr. old man died on April 8, 2014 of a heroin overdose without alleging any historical rape was committed against him or his friend and having told his own mother on 2 separate occasions that he had not been abused in any way at all. He did not tell of any abuse ever. He never brought such matters up with anyone despite a huge financial incentive for him to do so if it had happened.
We are to believe that 2 boys were supposedly raped and back singing without being missed by the rest of the choir, or dropping a note, let alone bursting out in tears. Pell is in jail awaiting sentencing. (he got 6 years for this crap).
ABC journo Milligan got her man!
Why was this GM and her ex husband (EX) approached by Vic. police from SANO?
According to Milligan, the GM was serving customers at work when she received a telephone call from a detective from Victoria police. … He wanted to know if her son had told her about anything that he’d borne witness to or experienced during his time at St Patrick’s or St Kevin’s….GM was shocked. And said ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about that one, you know, I have no knowledge,’” she remembers though on Milligan’s word, that Detectives from Taskforce SANO, then [despite ‘I have no knowledge’] came to take a statement from the GM that had no knowledge. GM said she was completely in the dark about what had happened. After the police went to see GM, they also visited her EX. “Nothing shocks me; I’ve seen a lot of stuff,” [EX] explains. “But that did shock me. But then, when I mulled it over, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, ‘That’s making sense.’” … Apparently the visit, which police only expected to take an hour, took five. EX gave the police the medical reports and other documentation about his son and signed a statement. [Yet he too knew nothing; so also had nothing relevent to say in any police statement. They were more than just fishing.
Something was the ‘that’ brought along by the Victorian Police that shocked him]. What was the THAT? It has to be information that could have only come from one source – the eventual complainant- that obviously was not at that point prepared to make a FORMAL statement.
Time moves on and GM says according to Milligan; ‘One evening, some time after the detectives took the statement [from her], the future complainant, happened to come by when GM was on the late shift. The shop was empty. She decided to have the conversation with him…. “I just asked him if I could ask him what happened… I didn’t want to bring back bad memories for him.”…But (the complainant) understood immediately. “He said, ‘No, no, ask me.’ I asked him if my son was a victim and he said, ‘Yes.’” The complainant then told her what he says happened with the archbishop.
Now remember; Milligan says…
The mother had asked her son. Not just once. … “I asked [him], I can’t remember the words I used, whether he was touched up, or played with, and [he] told me ‘no’.” The boy shrugged. She says shrugging was something her son would sometimes do when he didn’t want to talk about things. “I never said anything to anybody,” she says. “And then, again, after a while, I asked him and again he told me ‘no’.
BUT the future complainant;
“He told me that himself and [my son] used to play in the back of the church in the closed-off rooms,” she says….And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he [Pell] locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.” Milligan reports that (the complainant) still remembered the incident so clearly. Being picked up afterwards by his parents. Staring out the car window on the way home.’
The complainant told GM according to Milligan’s account, that her son’s funeral was the breaking point for him. It plunged him into despair and regret. His own mother was very concerned about his well being. He had not been coping since his friend’s death.
Milligan then reports ‘He decided that he had to come forward, he had to say something.’
But it was June 18, 2015: That the complainant gives his polished statement to SANO.
GM is NOT the very first to hear of the allegations from the eventual complainant months before he gives his formal statement to SANO he must have talked to the police already; the formal statement came later.
‘And um, they got sprung by Archbishop Pell and he locked the door and he made them perform oral sex.’ was what Milligan reported that a dead man’s mother was told by another 30 plus year old man 17 odd years after the event. Yet in later evidence the ‘door’ was not locked because the place was the sacristy and it has multiple doors. It is now a feature of this notorious case that the implausibility leapt further up the scale with the 2 boys oral rapes happening while anyone could walk in through multiple open doors. If a pedophile behaved like this he wouldn’t last very long. But that is not how the story started. It started in an explanation to a dead man’s mother that Pell locked the door. The police know there is a conflict in this.
Brennan says; ‘The complainant’s evidence related to events that occurred back in 1996 or 1997 when he was a 13-year-old choir boy at St Patrick’s Cathedral Melbourne. Most other witnesses had been choir boys, altar servers or Cathedral officials in 1996 when Pell first became archbishop of Melbourne. The complainant claimed that the first event, involving four charges, occurred after a solemn Sunday Mass celebrated by Pell in the second half of 1996. It was common ground between the prosecution and the defence that the dates to which these four charges must be attributed were 15 December 1996 or 22 December 1996. These were the dates on which the first and second solemn Sunday Masses were celebrated by Pell in the Cathedral after he had become archbishop in August 1996. The Cathedral had been undergoing renovations and thus was not used for Sunday Masses during earlier months of 1996.
The complainant said that he and another choir boy left the liturgical procession at the end of one Sunday Mass and went fossicking in the off-limits sacristy where they started swilling altar wine. The archbishop arrived unaccompanied, castigated them, and then, while fully robed in his copious liturgical vestments, proceeded to commit three vile sexual acts including oral penetration of the complainant. The complainant said that the sacristy door was wide open and altar servers were passing along the corridor. The complainant said that he and the other boy then returned to choir practice. The choir was making a Christmas recording at that time.’
Just remember that on July 16, 1996: Auxiliary Bishop George Pell is appointed Archbishop and we are to believe that 5 months later he is raping 2 boys after mass in the 1st or 2nd mass at the reopened repaired Cathedral and in his full regalia with the doors now wide open to boot! Then it’s off back to choir practice and none of the other members of the choir noticed a couple of ridiculously traumatised singers!
It is completely implausible for 2 children, 2 boys of 13 yrs to conceal such a traumatic attack and sing on like larks. That is what was supposed to have happened. No other member of the big choir (quite a few of them adults) spotted anything wrong at all. It was many years later when they were asked but no one recalled anything.
The one complainant had gone to the funeral having been contacted and invited by the dead man’s mother. Months later he dropped in on her and he told her a story, perhaps to comfort her who knows or cares. This complainant has been caught up in a web of accusations that only started after our only independent other witness had died. The one complainant said it was the funeral that pushed him over the top into outing Pell for the crimes he committed against them! Yet the only evidence we have is that he didn’t formally step forward till much later.
He just wanted justice according to Milligan.
Nevertheless, this started with a little story to a grieving mum about why her son went off the rails from an event behind locked doors!
This ‘pillar of his community’ entered his thirties without thinking to protect other 13 year old boys.
So one more point;
The heroin user in this story died having used since he was about 14 years of age and never once telling anyone that he was orally raped etc., WITH another witness of the same age who was also raped.
If it were true then this user had very strong evidence; almost an open and shut case for a trial against Pell and subsequent compensation from the church.
But this man who was obviously always desperate for money never sought to use this story as either an excuse for his lifestyle and some sympathy, or (most importantly) didn’t try to get hold of that bucket of money. He never once said Pell’s crazed attack ruined my life and never once expressed any fears for choirboys. He and his friend supposedly were raped side by side in full view of each other and could stand in court and tell the world the truth of the matter and a) get this ‘monster’ dealt with and b) protect other choirboys and c) get hold of a little matter of some compensation.
The Catholic church had been pumping out sums of money to victims of various pedophile priests and brothers for all these last 25 years or so. Significant sums have been paid to the victims so why not get some for yourself if you were so outrageously attacked by what has to be nothing but a mad man quite capable of doing it after every mass?
Why not protect all the other little boys over the course of the next 16 years?
It never happened is why.
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