Serial paedophile, Christian Brother and former Warrnambool teacher Robert Charles Best was described this week by some of his victims as a mentally deranged sadist.
At Best’s pre-sentence hearing, the men who were young boys when Best assaulted them bravely put their horrors into words, telling a Victorian court how their lives had been destroyed by the man who was supposed to be guiding them through their childhood.
“This bastard robbed me of a normal life and the simple pleasures that come with it,” one victim said.
Another told him he was an evil coward.
“And above all else, you are guilty,” he said.
While their outpourings marked the end of criminal proceedings against Best, thanks to civil actions soon to be launched, it won’t be the last chance they have to confront the monster whose crimes spanned at least 20 years.
Best pleaded guilty in May this year to 27 charges, including aggravated buggery and aggravated indecent assault, against 11 boys who attended St Alipius primary school at Ballarat, St Leo’s Christian Brothers College at Box Hill and St Joseph’s College in Geelong.
The charges Best has admitted are only a sample of those he has faced over the past 15 years, a period littered with dozens of atrocities and some odd coincidences. Since 1996, six juries have convicted Best, 70, of sexual assaults against young boys.
Throughout the entire process, Best, with the support of the Catholic Church, has made his victims’ agonising ordeal even more excruciating.
His most recent case concerns assaults he committed between 1969 and 1988.
Originally he faced 43 charges relating to offences against 14 boys, all of which were brought as one case.
But Best instructed his lawyers, including a Queen’s Counsel paid for by the church, to apply to the court to have them heard individually.
This tactic meant each of the juries considered the various charges without any knowledge of any of Best’s previous trials or verdicts. Neither could they be made aware of the cases to come.
By the time he pleaded guilty in 2011, guilty verdicts against Best had been piling up. The first of them came in 1996 when he faced eight charges alleging sexual assaults against five pupils from St Alipius.
A jury found him guilty on one of the counts and he received a nine-month suspended sentence. The case encouraged other victims — by this time men — to come forward and in 1998 Brother Bobby was back in court.
This time the jury found him guilty on six counts involving boys aged nine and 11 and he was sentenced to 24 months’ jail.
Best served only three months of that sentence after being granted a re-trial which didn’t go ahead.
Before that, the church removed him from teaching for 12 months during which time he went to the same Christian Brothers home in Melbourne where notorious paedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale was sent after he was charged with sexual assaults against boys.
The presence of Best and Ridsdale in the same home isn’t the only coincidence in their cases. When Best taught at St Alipius, Father Ridsdale was the school chaplain. When Ridsdale appeared in court on the sex charges, his designated support person was George Pell, then a bishop and now a cardinal and Australia’s most senior Catholic cleric.
Cardinal Pell was in Ballarat at the same time Ridsdale and Best were associated with St Alipius.
Following his year away from schoolboys, Best was appointed principal of the primary school at St Leo’s where he taught for 10 years before moving to St Joseph’s.
The 27 charges to which he has pleaded guilty involve students from all three schools. Among those charges he has admitted are some of the most heinous acts conceivable.
At St Alipius in 1969 Best, who had a reputation for callous physical violence toward his students, called a nine-year-old grade-three boy to his office.
Aware of the brother’s fondness for belting the boys, the nervous child entered and was immediately — but temporarily — put at ease.
“
It’s all right,” Best told him, “I just want to talk to you.”
According to unchallenged testimony before the court, he then told the nine-year-old to take his pants off, and he raped him. The court heard that after being buggered by Best, the boy thought he was going to die and blacked out.
Soon after he told another teacher, Brother Fitzgerald, what Best had done. Brother Fitzgerald responded by beating him until he changed his story.
The boy found he couldn’t tell his parents about the assaults, so he went to a priest who told him to tell no one else “or I’ll f...ing kill you”.
Now in his 50s, the victim wept throughout the telling of his story in the County Court in Melbourne this week.
Five more of Best’s victims struggled through their victim impact statements, telling Judge Roy Punshon how Best had destroyed their lives.
Some of them turned to confront the man who has admitted everything they have claimed, while he gazed at a spot somewhere above the judge’s head.
Judge Punshon has been asked by the prosecution to sentence Best to 16 years’ jail, a term that should keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. But the legal moves won’t end there.
Lawyer Vivian Waller, of Waller Legal, will bring a civil action against Best under the Sentencing Act in which she will claim, on behalf of his victims, damages for pain and suffering.
Dr Waller is also mounting a second civil case against Best and the Christian Brothers movement seeking compensation and financial assistance for his victims.
Best taught at the Christian Brothers’ College (now part of Emmanuel College) in Warrnambool between 1989 and 1994. None of the charges he faced were Warrnambool based. - AAP
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