THE TIP OF THE BRIMSTONE - PART 9
TIMELINE OF ABUSE – PART EIGHT
1993-4
I attended [DELETED] High School to have another go at Year Twelve. I
did much, much better. One of my teachers, Ms ‘Bartlet’, was frustrated at the
grade I got for English. She thought I should have received an A but the system
used to allocate grades favoured private schools over the public ones, so I got
downgraded. I admired her sense of honour and integrity, but it didn’t matter.
The grade I got, a B, demonstrated that my previous English teacher was wrong
when I was awarded a D and told it was the best I could expect because I just
wasn’t capable of doing better. Besides, anybody with even half a brain knows
the education system is a microcosm of our society and so utterly flawed and
corrupt that nothing anybody does is worth anything. The only reason I’d gone
back was to get better grades to have a chance at entering a Public Relations
Business Degree at university. I learned later that I needn’t have bothered; I
could have applied based on the fact I’d already done a year at university. At
the time my life lacked direction. All I’d ever wanted to be was a farmer like
my grandparents. I was supposed to take over ‘Edward’ and ‘Sharleen’s’ farm. I
didn’t know what I wanted to do then, still don’t, but a business degree had
the potential to open doors and provide some kind of direction. I was accepted
into QUT in Brisbane, Queensland. I’d applied to a university two-thousand
kilometres away because ‘Lilith’ had taken up stalking and harassing me. She’d
appear where I was staying or at the school. I had to explain the situation to
the teachers so they wouldn’t give her any information about me, and so they
knew what to expect from her. It was humiliating.
I contacted ‘Claud’ and asked if ‘Elizabeth’ and I could stay with him
for a while until ‘Elizabeth’ and I could find a place of our own. She had
applied to QUT to complete her Bachelor of Education there. ‘Claud’ had agreed.
I was actually hoping he might have changed his attitude and spending time with
him might result in something positive, that he might let me know who his other
children were. I had been living on my own for the last three years, with no
contact with my grandparents or siblings except for two, brief visits to
[DELETED]. At the time, I was desperately lonely and just wanted to know if I
had any chance of a normal life with brothers and or sisters who might speak to
me and be friends. It was a mistake. At first ‘Claud’ was really friendly. He
even took me out for dinner on my 21st birthday. It was the first one he had
ever attended, or even remembered. I never had a party. The only party I’d ever
had was my 16th, and his mother had organised that. ‘Elizabeth’ and I just went
to Pizza Hut with ‘Claud’. He gave me a computer. He used my Student Discount
to get a price reduction and then wrote it off on his taxes as a Business
Expense. It was to help me get my degree. ‘Claud’ said I had to get one because
he didn’t have one and it would help me run his business. His five year plan
was for “you put yourself through university so you can run my business while I
retire and live of the profits with some unacceptably young wife to satisfy my
every demand!” He wasn’t joking. He believes that I should repay him for
bringing me into this world. He finished his insane vision of the future with
the comment that “This computer makes up for the last twenty-one years of
neglect; now never speak of what happened in the past again.”
We’d only been there a few days by then, but that’s where things
changed. His usual manipulation and bullying to assert control began. He had
rules. Some of them were fair, others not so much. He didn’t require rent.
Instead, ‘Elizabeth’ and I were to clean the property he rented: toilets,
dishes, windows, carpets, bathrooms, everything. Every day. There were no
exceptions. ‘Elizabeth’ and I left [DELETED] to commute to classes every week
day, from six in the morning, and returned as late as ten at night. We were
unable to meet these demands. But there were others. ‘Claud’ had been dating a
woman called ‘Francine’ for years. She had two sons older than me: ‘Bret’ and
‘Frank’. ‘Bret’ kind of looked like ‘Claud’. But ‘Claud’ had been seeing
several other women behind her back. None of them knew about each other. When
he’d lived in [DELETED], ‘Claud’ claimed a woman he seduced, used for sex and
then ditched in a humiliating manner objected to the treatment. She found out
where he lived, showed up and kicked him in the nuts. He said he’d punched her
in the face, then dumped her unconscious body in her car with the help of his
neighbour, drove her car to the highway, and left her there. ‘Claud’ didn’t
like complications. That’s why he relocated so often. But he’d dumped
‘Francine’ to convince ‘Katrina’ to date him. She was 26. ‘Claud’ was 40. ‘Katrina’
had been divorced almost a year and had a two-year-old daughter. “Never mention
any of the women I’m seeing in front of the woman I’m with at any time,”
‘Claud’ had said. It was another condition of our staying with him.
‘Claud’ was insatiable. He was seeing a woman called ‘Roslyn’ while he
was seeing ‘Katrina’. He was also seeing another woman I never met at the same
time, and hitting on check-out girls in whatever store he wandered into. He’d
ask them out despite the fact many of them looked terrified or repulsed and
barely older than fifteen. When ‘Claud’ started making his final demands, I
decided it had been a mistake to try to get to know him better. “You have to
cheat on ‘Elizabeth’,” ‘Claud’ had told me one day while ‘Elizabeth’ was out,
“and then dump her in a humiliating manner.” He even provided some buck-toothed
floozy for me to do this. I was mortified. I said no. “You’re not married,”
‘Claud’ had snarled, “and if you can’t do as you’re told then you should find
somewhere else to live!” He had always been friendly to ‘Elizabeth’, but it had
just been an act. The manipulation and control had been gradual, but I suddenly
saw it for what it was. The mid-year Easter Break was approaching. ‘Elizabeth’
asked if we could go back to Victoria and see her mum. She was upset about
something. But when we came back, ‘Claud’ had left a note on the kitchen bench
telling us to get our things and get out. “You have not kept your side of the
bargain,” he had written, “you have not cleaned my house to the standards I
expect. You did not call me each day you were away for daily instructions.
Collect your things and get out. Don’t be there when I return and never contact
me again.”
It was a shock. I’d spent the first eighteen years of my life in
domestic-servitude being physically and psychologically abused only to suffer
it again after three years of trying to find my independence. It got worse when
‘Elizabeth’ and I tried to collect our few possessions. Most of them were gone.
The computer ‘Claud’ had given me for my birthday, the only gift he ever had,
was gone. All my university assignments and notes were on it, and ‘Elizabeth’s’
too. My writing portfolio from my second go at Year Twelve was gone. I searched
the house for them. I found the Port that had been put away for my 21st. It had
been set aside soon after I was born while ‘Claud’ had been a cop and he said
it had “fallen off the back of a truck.” I had wondered why it hadn’t broken
until I was eighteen before I realised he probably meant it was stolen. I
didn’t drink alcohol. ‘Claud’ did. He’d been drinking it. I found the 0.22 bolt
action 1907 Lithgow rifle I’d been given by ‘Bull’s’ father and had restored to
working order. I had been planning on giving it to ‘Lilith’s’ father for his
birthday. It had been in ‘Edward’s’ woolshed. There it was in ‘Claud’s’
cupboard. With it was a letter from ‘Lilith’.
‘Claud’ and ‘Lilith’ hadn’t been civil to one another my entire life,
but its content suggested they’d been communicating for the last few years. In
it ‘Lilith’ had written about her father’s birthday and how ‘Micha’s’ new
girlfriend, ‘Sarah’, was “a lovely girl”. This was a very different response to
how she had treated girls that had befriended me. ‘Lilith’ also wrote about the
importance of breaking up the relationship between me and ‘Elizabeth’ and “make
sure ‘Lee’ never returns”, responding to comments ‘Claud’ had made in his last
letter. ‘Lilith’ and ‘Claud’ were working together, for some unknown, insane
reason, to destroy my relationship with ‘Elizabeth’ and ensure that I never
came back to see any of my relatives. It made no sense. There was no reason for
this. They had never worked together to give me a safe and happy childhood.
Over the decades I have tried to get help to find answers but nobody cares.
Births, Deaths and Marriages responded to my request for answers about
‘Claud’s’ other children by telling me I had to get his permission, or that of
his other children (and as I told BD&M, I don’t know how many there might
be let alone who they are) before they’d let me know if there were any and
their names. You can see the catch-22 there and the utter stupidity of the
staff member that responded to my request. And all of this leaves me with a
sick feeling that there is something very, very sinister being concealed by
‘Claud’ and ‘Lilith’.
I never took my rifle or the port. What would I do with it? I’m sure the
rifle is worth something to a collector, but I didn’t know how to sell it. I never
even took the letter or note from ‘Claud’. The letter wasn’t mine and the note
from ‘Claud’ was so hateful and of no use at the time. I just left. I was in
shock. I suffered depression and dropped out of university. I couldn’t afford
it and rent too. I needed work. I wasn’t as lucky as ‘Elizabeth’. She got full
time work and I could only get casual hours and then nothing at all. I spent
most of my time sleeping. I just couldn’t see any point in life. I had decided
to stop writing to ‘Myshell’. We’d written to one another for the last seven
years. In her last letter she had spoken of how she was in control of her drug
habit, not it of her. I couldn’t help her. We were both lost. There was no
choice. ‘Maurisa’, her mother, had sent me a letter. ‘Claud’ had asked
‘Myshell’ for my address but only agreed to let her mother, ‘Claud’s’ sister,
send me his message. According to ‘Claud’, ‘Lilith’s’ mother ‘Sharleen’ was on
her death bed and I had to return immediately to say goodbye. It was a lie.
‘Sharleen’ was no sicker than she had been since she began to suffer from
dementia caused by the brain tumour. She would live another three years before
she fell ill and died. I had no way of knowing that though. I had no choice. I
ignored the letter and broke contact with ‘Myshell’, the only relative I had
that was still speaking to me. I abandoned my friend just to escape the hell
‘Claud’ and ‘Lilith’ had inflicted on me. ‘Elizabeth’ and I moved again to
prevent anybody tracking us down.
1995-7
A couple of years later, ‘Elizabeth’ and I moved to Sydney for work
for a few months but my five hour daily commute, sixty-hour work week (twenty
of which was unpaid overtime) and workplace bullying took its toll. One of the
[DELETED].stores, I think it was the Parramatta one, got raided by the police
after it was discovered some of the staff were using it as a cover to sell
drugs. Their sales were far better than other stores and that seemed to explain
why. ‘Dave Robson’ got threatened with the sack one day when he showed up five
minutes late and blood running down his face from a gash to the head. He’d been
mugged in the car park and got told he could see a doctor in his lunch break. I
got threatened with the sack after arriving with only five minutes to spare
before opening after trains were delayed in central due to a murder. And then I
had to put up with ‘Dave Hellrun’ (not sure of the spelling), a real fool of a
manager who boasted about fornicating with a fourteen year old girl while he
worked in England. “That’s illegal,” I said. “Not in my house,” he replied.
Then ‘Elizabeth’ and I were approached at a train station by a guy that spoke
about his time working as a butcher and then told us we could get a lot of
money if ‘Elizabeth’ prostituted herself. That was the last straw.
I’d put on fifteen kilos after leaving ‘Claud’s’ place and lost it all
in those four months in Sydney. I was desperately ill. ‘Elizabeth’ and I
returned to Brisbane. Then ‘Elizabeth’ announced that she was going overseas
for three months, and we’d get married when she came back. There was no
discussion. Two weeks later she left. I knew I’d never see her again, at least
not who she had been. I spent most of her absence sleeping. I couldn’t get
work. I couldn’t afford to run the car to go to interviews. I barely had enough
money to pay the rent and lived on the bare minimum of food to survive. I spent
a lot of time thinking about how I could just end it all if I killed myself.
‘Elizabeth’ called three months later. She was at the airport and wanted a
lift. And, “oh, yeah, I broke up with you three months ago, get over it.”
Desperate for any contact, I picked her up. She took off a couple of weeks
later, for a job in Mackay. She asked me to call her every second week and
she’d call me the odd weeks. She said she wanted to stay in touch. After the
fourth week, she never called. Her flat mate explained that she had shacked up
with a 48 year old married guy, on his yacht, while his wife was away. She had
never worked where she claimed. She had been trading sex for drugs. It was
weird because ‘Elizabeth’ had only ever had sex with me once every year in
the last four years of our six year relationship. I didn’t want to believe it.
The guy also said she owed them money and demanded I pay it.
Two months later, ‘Elizabeth’ showed up. She was engaged to the married
guy she had met two months earlier. She stank like she hadn’t bathed in weeks.
There were bruises all over her and she was clearly high. She said she was
going back to her mother’s place with her fiancé and then she was going back to
the UK for a couple of years. If her fiancé was still available, they’d get
married. She also claimed ‘Claud’ had tried to force himself on her all those
years ago, and that’s why she wanted to leave and eventually left me. She
didn’t want any of my relatives in her life. Then she stole most of my stuff
and left. I never saw her again. One of her former friends called and wrote to
me, telling me how upsetting it was to see what had happened to her, and apologising
for not believing me when I asked for their help. Now I was completely alone.
There were two options: suicide, or try to find a way to make a life and work
to get justice. I got work in the [DELETED] ABC-123 Childcare centre and
applied to get into QUT and complete a Bachelor of Education in Primary
Teaching.
1998+
I worked my way through university. I stacked shelves at Coles until the
workplace harassment by floor-management became too much. I had to leave the
job. The old frustration and desire to inflict violence to defend myself came
back and the situation caused me to suffer an anxiety attack while I was doing
teaching rounds. I contacted ‘Elizabeth’s’ mother to ask for half the money
‘Elizabeth’ got for our car, as promised. I had to go through small claims to
get it. Her mother called constantly to abuse me and demand I drop the claim.
Then some of ‘Elizabeth’s’ new friends called and threatened to send an ex-con
brother of theirs around to chop my fingers and toes off with an axe. The police
told me there was nothing they could do unless I got a recording of the threats
or they were carried out. I never complete the degree. I had two prac units to
go and transferred into Humanities to finish my degree. By then I was so
disillusioned I just did the bare minimum to pass. I never even attended
graduation and the paper to mark the occasion is still in the cardboard roll it
came in. I met a girl and got married while I was studying. After university I
never got any of the jobs I applied for; the degree was worthless. Instead, I
worked as a storeman, then an office clerk in the hope of getting better pay so
my wife and I could start a family. My employer was a fraud, though, and stole
wages from me and other staff as well as his employers and even the Queensland
Government. But the ATO botched the investigation into him for unpaid
Superannuation (they never even looked at the case and continued to tell me it
was ongoing for two years after it was closed), despite taking him to court
several times for failing to pay his taxes, and I ended up without a job or the
money owed. I got work at the RBH in Patient Support and worked weekends for
three years. The staff turnover rate due to workplace bullying and harassment,
and low staff morale, was shocking, but not as bad as the utter disinterest and
refusal of the authorities to investigate what was going on.
It was during that time that I witnessed some of the most horrific
injustices I have ever seen. The workplace bullying and harassment was bad enough,
but the indifference of staff toward patients (the “not my job” attitude) and
misuse of Power of Attorney by relatives to steal their parent’s estates and
assets was made even worse by the response that “nothing illegal has actually
occurred”. I had watched people misuse the law to circumvent justice my entire
life, but to have authorities defend the practice and both conceal and enable
such anti-social and evil acts made me decide to try to make contact with my
grandparents again. My wife and I were having our first child and I wanted to
know who I was related to in order to avoid any potential issues of inbreeding.
I tracked down several of ‘Claud’s’ relatives, but only ‘Myshell’ and ‘Clara’
responded to my requests for help. ‘George’ and ‘Elisa’, his parents, were
dead. ‘Elisa’ had died six months before I made contact, and ‘Claud’s’ father
‘George’ two and a half years earlier. Nobody in the family was really speaking
to one another. There’d been disputes over inheritance. ‘Claud’ had shown up
around 1999 and convinced his parents he had settled down and reconciled with
all his children. In fact, he claimed to be in regular contact with me. He had
a new girlfriend with him, a girl called ‘Lilyth’. She was 19. ‘Claud’ was 44
at the time. She was six years younger than me, younger than at least three of
‘Claud’s’ children and seven of his nieces. They spent a lot of time with
’Claud’s’ parents and even used IVF to produce a daughter they named ‘Charlet’,
after ‘Claud’s’ father’s only sibling, ‘Charles’, who died in his first year of
life. Over the years they convinced ‘Elisa’ to write a new Will, giving them a
larger share of inheritance, and cutting out ‘Lorenzo’, the son that had stayed
and worked for them for years in exchange for what he would one day inherit.
The situation became nasty.
‘Cate’, the eldest of ‘George’ and ‘Elisa’s’ children, moved in with her
husband ‘John’ to “care for” them, but ‘George’ soon got packed off to a
retirement home. Then ‘Cate’s’ husband died and ‘Elisa’ was moved into a
nursing home. ‘Lorenzo’ and his family moved in and changed locks, taking what
they wanted and throwing the rest into the ditch by the dairy. The lawyers
moved in as ‘Lorenzo’ tried to get what he had been promised, but ‘Claud’ had
rallied ‘Jeff’ and ‘Maurisa’ to his cause. ‘Lorenzo’ only got half of what had
been promised for the twenty plus years of unpaid work (milking and
maintenance) he did for his parents: the land, and not his share of the
estates. Two years after it happened, I found out that ‘Lorenzo’ had died a
year after his mother, around the time the dispute was settled. He had always
been a good man. He served as a Captain in the CFA of years and always looked
out for other people. He never wrote back to me when I asked him for help though.
‘Clara’ said her father wanted nothing to do with ‘Claud’ and, as his son,
nothing to do with me. That’s what ‘Claud’ does: he takes good people and uses
them, destroys their lives to satisfy his own greed. This ‘Lilyth’ now serves
in the role he had planned for me, and the one he planned for someone like her.
I doubt he actually loves her. I have grave concerns for his latest child,
‘Charlet’.
It’s weird that the authorities don’t care about what I have tried to
report. I have been trying to get help in this matter for six years now, and
first tried to report the abuse thirty years ago when I was twelve, then when I
was sixteen, and again when I was nineteen, all to no avail. Nobody knows what
happened to ‘Katrina’ and her child. ‘Claud’ left Queensland around the same
time a young woman [Tabbatha Hodge] went missing near where he had offices for
his business at the time, [DELETED]. That girl turned up in a car in a sewer
previously searched – which found nothing – during a dredge a year later. It
was suspicious. I know ‘Claud’ is more than capable of having done that. When I
last wrote to him, almost six years ago, ‘Claud’ referred to ‘Elizabeth’ as my
“special friend”, using such venom and hatred in his references to her, and
claiming she is still manipulating and controlling me (despite her leaving me
eleven years earlier) that I have begun to suspect she told the truth about
what he did to her. ‘Claud’ also referred to three of his nieces as “special”.
One is ‘Clara’, the eldest of ‘Lorenzo’s’ girls, who had broken up with her
[DELETED] boyfriend when we started writing again. She swore she was never
going to marry or have children. Another is ‘Myshell’, ‘Maurisa’s’ youngest,
who has lived with her girlfriend for many years and has also said she will
never marry or have children. At the age of 17 she developed problems with
drugs and her parents. The third is ‘Jas’, ‘Maurisa’s’ second, who left home at
17 to marry her 26 year-old Baptist Minister boyfriend. The eldest of
‘Maurisa’s’ children is ‘Dara’, who left home at 17 and also has problems with
her parents. ‘Claud’ use to visit ‘Maurisa’ and her children a lot. ‘Maurisa’
is submissive and complicit in whatever ‘Claud’ does. Again, without hard
evidence of suspicions, the authorities don’t give a shit.
Even if you have evidence, the bar just gets set higher and higher until
you fail and the matter can be ignored. I wonder if this is why Luke Batty was
allowed to be murdered, or how Robert Hughs and Rolf Harris got away with what
they did. Of course it was. On ‘Lilith’s’ side of the family, my efforts to
contact her father met with failure. I no longer had his address. I had
misplaced all the letters I had saved over the years so I had asked ‘Claud’ if
he could give it to me. ‘Claud’ had boasted in his emails that he had been in
regular contact with ‘Edward’, but he refused to help me. I made the mistake of
sending ‘Claud’ a photo of my first daughter to send ‘Edward’ and asked him not
to share it with anybody other than ‘Lilith’s’ father. ‘Claud’ refused and
promptly sent it to ‘Lilith’, who told ‘Edward’ I didn’t want him to see it.
‘Claud’s’ emails quickly descended into the same manipulative bullying he uses
to control people and I had to break contact again. He blamed me for everything
that had ever been done to me and went on to say that he had every right to
destroy the relationship between me and ‘Elizabeth’ because he didn’t think she
was right for me and that I should never be allowed near children. Given his
behaviour toward women and children, this was clearly projection.
I have tried to alert the authorities of several government agencies to
my concerns regarding ‘Claud’ but he seems to be well protected. Despite his
history and running businesses that are clearly internet scams or have a false
address for offices and are registered in Queensland but run from Victoria, and
present him as someone that is clearly not what he is, nobody cares. Simply
Google his name and he’s like a rash. Money donated to children’s charities.
Yet he never paid any child support for me or ‘Micha’. One business was clearly
a scam: [DELETED].com. The people recommending it ran similar businesses and
they all recommended each other’s version. “I’m not here to take your money,”
the site opened with. Yeah, he was. He always was. In it he boasted of a
six-figure income for years, and how his scheme allowed him to spend time with
his family and kids. All lies. It provide advice on conflict resolution to
create a happy work-home-life environment. Like he was an expert. [DELETED]
listed a place in [DELETED] where he has offices. There are no offices. It’s a
vacant paddock in farmland. Then there’s [DELETED] where he presents himself as
a devoted father and husband, offering parental advice like he’s a guru. It
provides him access to young women and children. And he does it while raising
the finger at the authorities. [DELETED] is rooted in the Latin for [DELETED],
[DELETED]. His business is literally ‘[to escape from parental
responsibilities]’. Not long after I tracked him down, emailed him, and failed
to let him manipulate, bully and control me, he had a huge photo of himself and
his latest child posted in the [DELETED] in which he mentioned me. He was
promoting himself. If someone wants to work with kids, like a teacher, they
have to undergo a background check. ‘Claud’ has managed to find a way around
this.
I’ve seen other photos of him and his latest child, ‘Charlet’. In one of
them, she was gripping her mother’s clothes, almost hiding from ‘Claud’ who was
seated on the other side of ‘Lilyth’. ‘Charlet’ looked terrified of him. I know
that look. I’ve seen it too many times before. I got a bad feeling when I saw
that photo. Over the years, those bad feelings have proven horribly accurate.
That girl is going to have a hard life. She’s in serious danger. She was
created using IVF. Apparently human life is now a commodity. How was he able to
access this service despite a history of fathering and abandoning children,
never paying child support? Why are there no background checks? I guess money
can get corrupt people whatever they want. And yeah, I know, “it’s not illegal,
just immoral.” That excuse is wearing thin. Our authorities make laws in
hindsight, always playing catch-up and using inquests to blame someone else or
make more excuses about why they didn’t act on what whistle-blowers and other
informants have tried to warn them about. In years to come, when the truth does
come out and the victims start to accrue, I look forward to providing my
efforts and the responses to the lawyers involved in the class action against
those who failed to investigate what I have tried to report for the last thirty
years. Everything that has and will happen because of this failure could have
been avoided. Somebody should have been asking the same questions I have been
asking. Why am I not allowed to know who I am related to? Why have ‘Lilith’ and
‘Claud’ worked so hard to destroy my relationships with relatives and girls who
befriended me? Why did ‘Claud’ relocate to Victoria after so many years in
Queensland? Why has nobody investigated what I tried to report for the last
thirty years? Why did so many people involved in ‘Lilith’s’ father’s Will make
sure I couldn’t correspond with him or even know he was ill, had died, what
happened, where he was buried or that they had submitted a Probate that
conflicted with what he had intended?
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