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Dennis McGookin was not so convinced about the salutary effect. Back in London, he informed the Foreign Office that the island needed to be properly policed. Britain was not prepared to fund a full-time police officer for a community of a few dozen people. Instead, it decided to recruit a community constable to travel to Pitcairn periodically and train the local officer.
In 1997 Gail Cox, who had been with Kent Police for 17 years, was selected for the job. Cox was easygoing and gregarious; she had worked in the traffic section, in schools liaison and on general patrol duties. The Daily Telegraph newspaper, which interviewed her before she left, reported that she was ‘a practised hand at dealing with pub brawls and squabbles between neighbours’, and ‘highly regarded for her ability to defuse situations before they turn nasty’. Cox told the paper that ‘if the line needs to be drawn, it will be drawn, and I am not frightened to draw it’. Those words were to prove prophetic.
Leon Salt, the Auckland-based Commissioner, accompanied Gail Cox to the island and introduced her to the locals. ‘I put on this jokey persona, and they seemed to like that,’ she told me when I met her in Auckland in 2006. ‘They were very accepting of me. I became part of the community.’
Cox spent 12 weeks on Pitcairn, and established a good rapport with the islanders—perhaps too good. ‘A lot of people are romanced by the place, and I fell for it,’ she says. ‘I saw the community through rose-coloured glasses. I thought it was this really idyllic place, and everybody was really nice.’
The Englishwoman was not scheduled to go back to the island until 1999. Between her visits, Pitcairn underwent some changes. A new Deputy Governor, Karen Wolstenholme, was appointed. Wolstenholme took more interest in the place than some previous incumbents, and visited soon after taking up her post. Another fresh face was Sheils Carnihan, a forthright Scot brought up in New Zealand, who started teaching at the school in early 1998.
Carnihan and her husband, Daniel, had been attracted by the idea of living in such an isolated spot. But they found life on the island numbingly ordinary. ‘All the stuff we were told about it being such a wonderful, caring place turned out to be rubbish,’ she told me in 2005. ‘There’s no real community spirit. And it’s not exotic: it’s like any small town. The only difference is you can’t escape.’
From the start, the teacher had a nagging sense that something was ‘not quite right’ with the children. Six- to eight-year-olds in her class talked about boyfriends and girlfriends in a way that seemed, to her, precocious. When Carnihan’s own family got to Adamstown, a boy slightly younger than her 11-year-old daughter, Hannah, told the girl, ‘You’re mine.’ Another boy said the same thing to Carnihan’s other daughter, nine-year-old Adie.
About halfway through her two-year posting, she overheard a snippet of conversation between two schoolgirls, aged 11 and 13, who were sitting on a verandah outside the classroom. ‘You’ll be 12 next week, you know you’ll be old enough for it?’ the older pupil asked her friend.
From what she had seen and heard, Sheils Carnihan already suspected that girls on Pitcairn were considered ‘fair game’ once they turned 12. This little exchange seemed to confirm that. ‘I was appalled,’ she says. ‘The older girl knew her friend would be expected to have sex. She was making sure she understood what her birthday meant.’
Carnihan was particularly worried about two 13-year-old girls, Belinda and Karen, who seemed extremely troubled. They would ‘talk about sexual things and then giggle and be secretive, or make quite blunt sexual comments’, she says. Soon after the teacher’s family arrived, Belinda jumped onto Daniel’s knee and snuggled up to him in a suggestive fashion.
Once Carnihan had occasion to reprimand Karen for bullying, and the girl’s emotional reaction startled her. ‘She was really angry with me, she was crying and told me that I didn’t understand. She said I didn’t know what it was like to be made to be friends with someone or else they would beat me up.’ Perturbed by these incidents, she confided in Meralda Warren, the police officer, and in the Seventh-day Adventist pastor, John Chan, the only other outsider. Meralda, she says, dismissed her concerns, while Chan’s response was that ‘the morals [on Pitcairn] are quite loose, but you don’t do anything about these things’.
During Sheils Carnihan’s stay, Chan, an Australian, was succeeded by a South African-born pastor, Neville Tosen. Before long, Tosen came to share her unease. ‘But we didn’t know what to do about it,’ she says. ‘We didn’t have any evidence. It was just a gut feeling. And we didn’t feel we could ask the girls yet.’
Even as Carnihan agonised about what to do, her own daughters were forming friendships that would be crucial to this case. Hannah and Adie got to know Belinda and Karen, as well as other girls, and went on camping trips with them around the island. During those trips, the adolescents shared their secrets.
Just as for the Carnihans, Pitcairn was not what Neville Tosen had expected. Brought up on tales of a beacon of faith in the Pacific, he had been looking forward to ministering to a community of committed Adventists. However, when he arrived in late 1998 with his wife, Rhonda, he discovered that only a few people went to church—and they were not exactly glowing advertisements for the religion they professed to practise. Tosen was dismayed to learn that adultery was rife, and that churchgoers were also involved in dubious financial dealings. He delivered a few blunt sermons, ‘and we weren’t too popular as a result’, he says. ‘No one had ever told Church members to pull their socks up before. It caused quite a stir. But nothing changed.’
One islander warned him, ‘There’s more to come.’ And Tosen feared that he knew what the man meant. ‘I’ve been a teacher most of my life, and we immediately picked up mood swings,’ he says. ‘One day a certain student will be friendly to you, the next day totally withdrawn. It took me three months. I said, “Wait a minute, these kids are being abused.” When I tried to talk about it, everyone just clammed up, including the kids themselves.’
He and Carnihan agreed to keep a careful eye on the situation; meanwhile, Tosen examined the birth records that were kept in the island secretary’s office. They revealed a pattern: most Pitcairn women had their first child between 12 and 15. The pastor, who spoke to me at his home in Queensland in 2005, raised the subject at a meeting of the island council. One councillor, Tom Christian, who had four daughters, replied, ‘The age of consent has always been 12, and it’s never hurt them.’ Neville Tosen, who had worked all over the Pacific, says, ‘I remember getting quite hot and saying that even the Kanakas of Western Guinea had 16 as an age of consent. Tom got very angry. He called me a racist, and accused me of interfering in island politics.’
Tosen went on, ‘Steve [Christian] also spoke up, saying it was their Tahitian culture and sometimes the girls couldn’t even wait until they were 12. Everyone else at the meeting was very quiet, including Jay, who was mayor then. The only person who supported me was Brenda [Steve’s sister]. She said, “Any man that does that to a 12-year-old deserves to be knackered.”’
When Gail Cox returned to Pitcairn in October 1999 to conduct her second block of training, she found a community at war with itself. Things were very different from her first visit, and she was different, too. Dennis McGookin, her boss, had instructed her to be a police officer, not the islanders’ friend.
The first problem she had to deal with was theft, particularly of government property, which she discovered was widespread and had been going on for years. Diesel fuel was siphoned off into quad bike tanks; timber, roofing iron and fuse boxes vanished as soon as they were unloaded at the wharf; cement for the slipway ended up as a swimming pool in someone’s garden. Electrical equipment and a computer had been stolen. People jokingly referred to one Adamstown home, which was built entirely from pilfered materials, as ‘Government House’. ‘They don’t see it as stealing,’ one outsider told me later. ‘In their minds, everything that arrives on the island is Pitcairn property.’
British officials ordered the policewoman to crack down. She questioned all of the islanders, and nearly everyone, even the elderly folk, owned up to something. One man confessed to stealing NZ$20,000 (£7,500) from the co-operative store. At the suggestion of diplomats in Wellington, Cox offered the locals an amnesty, which they accepted. ‘But they weren’t happy with me challenging them like that,’ she says.
Six weeks or so after Gail Cox returned, Sheils Carnihan’s two-year posting was up. Two days before the family left, 13-year-old Hannah spoke to her mother, disclosing the explosive information that Belinda and Karen, her friends on the island, had confided months earlier. Both girls, allegedly, had been sexually assaulted by Randy Christian, the burly 25-year-old who was Steve’s middle son. Carnihan straight away told Gail Cox, who notified British diplomats in Wellington as well as the Commissioner, Leon Salt.
According to Hannah, Belinda, in particular, was ‘dying to tell’ her mother about Randy, but could not summon up the courage. She even begged her friends to speak to her mother on her behalf, and wrote her a letter, which she then burnt. Belinda was anxious about damaging the friendship between her family and Randy’s, and was sure her mother would not believe her. Hannah told Sheils, ‘She wanted to write to her mum saying what had happened, and that she wanted it to stop. I mean, if her mum knew, maybe it would.’ To which Neville Tosen comments, ‘How the mother didn’t already know about it—I’ve never answered that question. Because from my rather limited access to the girl, I was aware that she’d been interfered with.’
Gail Cox was supposed to leave in late November, on the same ship as the Carnihans, but agreed to stay on longer to deal with the fallout from the thieving revelations. By chance, then, she was still on Pitcairn when Ricky Quinn, a visitor from New Zealand, turned up.
The step-grandson of Vula Young, one of Pitcairn’s matriarchs, Quinn struck Pitcairn like a tropical storm. A good-looking 23-year-old, he had past convictions for possession of LSD, morphine and heroin, which, to the local teenagers, gave him an exciting aura of danger. Quinn had brought with him a stash of marijuana, and he slotted straight in with the minority of islanders who formed the ‘drinking crowd’.
A visiting policewoman on the alert; a handsome newcomer with drugs in his pocket; young girls tired of being preyed upon and itching to talk. All the elements were in place. Now all that was needed was the spark.
The drinkers got together most Friday nights. Two weeks before Christmas, Pawl Warren had a party. Most of the young people on the island attended. They stole some alcohol from their parents, and also some Valium tablets.
Gail Cox was still awake at 1.10 a.m. when Dave Brown, one of the partygoers, knocked on her door. ‘There’s trouble at Pawl’s house,’ Dave announced. At Pawl’s, Cox found several frightened and sobbing youngsters, who admitted that they had been drinking. The police officer went on to Belinda’s house, where Belinda and Karen had taken refuge; once inside, she got the feeling that Belinda wanted to tell her something. But when Cox tried to speak to her, the teenager’s mother stood up and blocked out her husband, who was lying behind her. ‘Not now,’ she mouthed.
Belinda’s mother took Cox aside and told her what the two 15-year-olds, both very distressed, had confided in her. They had been sexually assaulted by Ricky Quinn—and also, in the past, as Hannah had signalled, by Randy Christian. (A third girl, 12-year-old Francesca, had accused Quinn of similar behaviour.)
At 3 a.m. Gail Cox telephoned Dennis McGookin. It was Saturday daytime in England, and he was on his way to watch his favourite rugby team, Gillingham. Cox explained that she needed a specially trained officer to take a complaint from a child. ‘I knew that wasn’t practicable,’ he told me over a pub lunch in Kent in 2005. ‘I told her to take down a detailed statement, making sure an adult was present, and then fax that over to me.’
Cox also emailed Leon Salt to inform him about the weekend’s events, including the allegations against Randy. As I later found out, Salt’s response was swift. ‘If we dig into this, we’ll open a right can of worms, and we’ll have every man on Pitcairn locked up for life,’ he warned her.
* (#ulink_4e0e1744-ba5a-5173-9bfd-722b5a54c5f4)The names of all victims in this book have been changed.
CHAPTER 4 No amnesty (#ulink_aa51f399-f800-5c7a-9f7d-b0b3a051dcf3)
The morning after Pawl Warren’s party, Gail Cox had an uproar on her hands. Ricky Quinn had admitted to assaulting Belinda and having under-age sex with Karen, and the Pitcairn community was furious with him. Cox had to intervene to prevent Karen’s father from attacking him, and Quinn was so afraid for his safety that Cox installed him in the schoolhouse.
The islanders appeared disgusted by the New Zealander’s behaviour. Yet within a few days, public opinion had swung in his favour. Brenda Christian, Steve’s sister, told Cox that some of the locals were saying ‘the girls had asked for it’. Olive Christian’s sister, Yvonne Brown, who was visiting Pitcairn, claimed that Quinn was being ‘treated disgracefully’.
Now the community turned against Gail Cox. Only Brenda Christian and her husband, Mike Lupton-Christian, supported her. The others—as well as resenting an outsider ‘interfering’ in their business—regarded Ricky Quinn as an extremely hard worker and therefore ‘above the law’. Moreover, news had spread that the girls were accusing local men of similar offences—and who knew where that would lead? It was the start of the community resistance that was to characterise the sexual abuse case for years to come.
Despite opposition, Cox was determined to prosecute Quinn, and she scheduled a trial for ten days after the party. In the interim, she found herself undermined by the locals. On one occasion she agreed that Quinn could go home with Meralda Warren, the island police officer, and work with her on her wooden carvings. She was incensed to learn that he had spent several hours with Meralda’s brother, Jay, the magistrate who would be deciding Quinn’s fate, and had also gone fishing with another Pitcairner.
Jay, meanwhile, telephoned Quinn’s father, Richard, in New Zealand and, according to Richard, informed him that he was ‘looking after Ricky’. It subsequently emerged that Jay was hoping to buy a cheap motorbike that Quinn planned to import.
At his trial, Quinn surprised Gail Cox by denying the indecent assault against Belinda that he had earlier admitted. She discovered afterwards that he had acted on advice from Meralda, who knew that Cox was unwilling to call Belinda as a witness. Forced to drop the charge, the policewoman was livid: Meralda had betrayed her confidence and ‘perverted the course of justice’, she says. (Meralda denies it.) The complaint by Francesca had been dropped, at her parents’ request. Quinn pleaded guilty to ‘unlawful carnal knowledge’ in respect of Karen, and was sentenced by Jay to 100 days in prison. As pre-arranged between Cox and British officials, the Governor, Martin Williams, then ordered him to be deported and remitted his sentence. In essence, he was let off.
A few days later, just before Christmas, the young New Zealander left on a ship, carrying two letters addressed to his parents—one from Meralda, the other from Yvonne Brown. Meralda apologised to Richard and Diane Quinn ‘for this whole mess’, saying their son had been ‘a great asset to our island’, and it was ‘our loss that he is leaving’. Yvonne wrote, ‘We have a British policewoman here and boy is she a “pig” … the policewoman blew everything out of proportion.’
Commissioner Leon Salt wrote to Meralda and Jay, admonishing them for unprofessional conduct. He asked Jay, ‘If it is so difficult bringing a case against an outsider, how on earth could a case be brought against a local?’ Of Meralda he inquired, ‘How can we have any confidence that the law is being upheld on Pitcairn?’
With Ricky Quinn gone, Gail Cox was finally able to address the other matter that had arisen from Pawl Warren’s party: the allegations against Randy Christian. And there was a second man in the picture. Belinda had approached Cox three days after the party to divulge that Randy’s younger brother, Shawn, had also raped her. The Englishwoman urged her to let her mother know. Belinda said, ‘Thank you for believing me.’
Cox informed Salt about the development relating to Shawn, and Salt phoned Randy and Shawn’s father, Steve. ‘Tell the boys to get a lawyer,’ he told him.
Belinda’s friend, Karen, had already left Pitcairn for New Zealand, where she would be finishing her schooling, as many local teenagers did at 15. Before departing, she had spoken to Gail Cox informally about one relatively minor assault by Randy. Cox had the strong sense that she had more to tell; however, that was all Karen would say—and she was desperate to get off the island.
Belinda had plenty to say, but she found it difficult to say it. It took her four hours to describe the first time she was raped, at the age of ten, and seven hours to recount all the incidents involving Randy and Shawn—including one where they allegedly raped her in tandem. That was the episode that was hardest to talk about. ‘She was so halting, it was painful,’ Cox told me much later in an Auckland café, speaking for the first and only time about her role in the case.
Never before in her career had the Kent constable interviewed a rape victim. Her investigative experience was limited to traffic accidents. But she was compassionate and sensible. She took an ‘old-fashioned statement’, making sure to record every detail. Then she asked Belinda and her mother to read the statement through and sign it. ‘Those boys should hang for what they’ve done to my daughter,’ her mother declared.
Belinda’s father, though, feared for his family. ‘I don’t like this,’ he told Cox.
She replied, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’ll be trouble.’
He was correct. Belinda’s allegations against Steve Christian’s sons would blow the island community apart.
Cox sent the statement to Dennis McGookin in England in January 2000. Her work was over, but it would be another three weeks before she could get off the island. She was almost friendless in a hostile community—a fact that had become plain on New Year’s Eve, when she stayed in, but someone, apparently assuming she would ring the bell in the square at midnight, had rigged up a surprise for her. One of the locals, Dennis Christian, took her place, and a load of fish oil and guts fell on his head.
Soon after midnight, as the fireworks went off, Cox heard an intruder trying to get in through her office window. They did not succeed, for she had taken to locking her doors and windows, after a document had disappeared. That person, presumably, had expected her to be in the square.
The community made it almost impossible for her to do her job. Jay refused to hold a council meeting to discuss policing, saying he was too busy. Meralda sabotaged her plans to stage a mock court case, as a training exercise. With black humour, Gail Cox told Leon Salt that she would ‘need to wear a stab-proof vest’ for the rest of her stay.
The night before she left, Cox went to see the pastor, Neville Tosen, and his wife, Rhonda. ‘She put her head down and cried,’ Tosen told me later, ‘and said she was sorry she’d ever come to this such and such island, and she was never coming back.’
Cox says that, after that second visit, ‘I felt dead inside … emotionally numb. I really loved that community and I cared about them. I felt so disappointed, so deeply betrayed.’
Two months later, in April, Belinda followed her off the island. Since making her statement, Belinda’s situation had been uncomfortable, to say the least; now police learnt that Randy Christian, who had been living on and off on Norfolk Island, was intending to return. There were fears that she might not be safe once he was back, so Leon Salt made clandestine arrangements to book her on a ship to New Zealand. Belinda’s father was bitterly opposed to the events she had set in train. As he said goodbye to her at the jetty, he told her, ‘It’ll be your fault if the islanders are arrested and the island breaks apart. If you go ahead with this, you’ll never be able to come back to Pitcairn and you’ll be out of this family.’
In Auckland, Belinda was re-interviewed on video by Karen Vaughan, the Wellington detective with child abuse expertise. The British Governor, Martin Williams, told the Foreign Office that she and her mother were adamant that they wanted charges brought. However, he forecast, ‘Their determination could waver, as the family of the alleged perpetrators is very high in Pitcairn’s informal pecking order.’
In Wellington and London, British officials were finally giving Pitcairn their undivided attention. Although they only had Belinda’s and Karen’s allegations so far, they seemed to recognise straight away that these hinted at a wider problem.
Martin Williams wrote to his superiors at the Foreign Office in London, ‘I have no doubt that these are not unique cases. It is far more likely that they are a continuation of a pattern that has been going on for 200 years … If we now launch charges against the two suspects, this may well kindle feuds and resentments about similar cases which have occurred over the years … about which … nothing has ever been done.’
It was clear that, notwithstanding this apparent inaction in the past, something had to be done now. A prosecution, however, would entail massive expense, and the logistics were almost unthinkable. As for a court case, with all the attendant publicity, it would be highly divisive, and potentially devastating, for the community.
Nevertheless, the allegations had to be investigated, and Kent Police agreed to take on the new inquiry. It would be funded by the Foreign Office, with detectives reporting to a Pitcairn Public Prosecutor, soon to be appointed. By April 2000 Peter George, who had worked on the 1996 Shawn Christian case, and Robert Vinson, a high-flying detective inspector in his 30s, were in Australia. Operation Unique was under way.
In Newcastle, 100 miles north of Sydney, the pair interviewed Shawn Christian, who was living there with his Australian partner; three days later, they flew to Norfolk Island to question his brother, Randy. Both men denied raping Belinda, but each of them admitted to having under-age sex with another woman, Catherine, who had moved to Auckland—and so began a domino effect.
In New Zealand, on their way home, George and Vinson decided to call on Catherine. They knocked on her door at about 8 p.m. What Catherine had to say took them aback. As Robert Vinson recalls it, she told them, ‘I can’t help you with what you’re investigating, but I was raped myself when I was ten, by [Belinda’s] father.’
Catherine gave detectives a lengthy statement, listing a number of Pitcairn men who she said had assaulted her during her childhood. She added that this was ‘a common thing on Pitcairn’, remarking, ‘You won’t get a girl reaching the age of 12 that’s still a virgin.’ Although the islanders all knew it went on, she said, it was seen as ‘part of life’, and no one complained about it.
According to Peter George, by now a detective inspector, that statement ‘changed the whole course of it’. Back in the UK, he and Vinson told senior officials that a broader inquiry was needed. The reaction was lukewarm. In Wellington, the worry of Karen Wolstenholme, the Deputy Governor, was that a prosecution might fail and the island would become ungovernable. Britain was also apprehensive about likely criticism of its supervision of the territory. Wolstenholme warned in a memo, ‘Pitcairn has a great deal of followers internationally and however the investigation proceeds I think we can expect negative publicity and condemnation for our actions.’
Ultimately, the Foreign Office had no choice: Catherine’s allegations were too serious to disregard. The parameters of the wider inquiry were set. George and Vinson would trace every woman who had grown up on Pitcairn since 1980. Leon Salt, the Commissioner, gave them names and addresses. There were 20 women in all.
Salt, although helpful, was gravely concerned. In his view, the criminal behaviour was ‘a cultural issue’, he told Wolstenholme, probably involving ‘most males on the island’ and ‘going back many generations’. If the men were brought to trial, he prophesied, ‘the inevitable outcome will be the collapse of the community … and its abandonment of the island’. Families, he said, ‘would have great difficulty co-existing … Healing differences between families would be impossible.’
The Governor’s legal adviser proposed a radical solution: a general amnesty, conditional on offenders admitting their guilt. Karen Wolstenholme was among those who welcomed the idea, describing the situation as ‘partly of our own making’. She commented that it was ‘not altogether surprising if the community does not see the laws as applicable to them’. However, a decision was about to be taken over diplomats’ and lawyers’ heads.
Baroness Patricia Scotland, the British minister responsible for the Overseas Territories, had been following developments in the Pitcairn case closely. In May 2000 Governor Williams met with Scotland in London. He reported back that she wished the legal process to take its course, ‘no matter the cost or the implications for Pitcairn’s future’. ‘No question of an amnesty,’ Williams’ hurriedly faxed note to Wolstenholme concluded, with those words underlined.
In August 2000 Peter George and Robert Vinson, the detectives assigned to Operation Unique, returned to the Antipodes to start tracing the 20 women on their list: most of them lived in Australia or New Zealand, with a few in Britain and the United States. Accompanied by two New Zealand detectives, Karen Vaughan, the sharp-witted willowy blonde with child abuse expertise, and Paula Feast, police worked at a hectic pace—flying into a city, hiring a car and often just turning up on people’s doorsteps. Yet ‘every door we knocked on,’ George told me, ‘we got the same response … Every Pitcairn girl, and I mean every single one, a 100 per cent hit, had been a victim of sexual abuse to varying degrees.’ Vinson remembers, ‘We got disclosure after disclosure. It was staggering. It was like opening the floodgates for some of these women.’
The victims, by then in their late teens to late 40s, described incidents covering the whole gamut of abuse, from relatively minor assaults to violent rape. Some recalled blighted childhoods during which they were targeted by half a dozen or more Pitcairn men. The majority named more than one offender. In numerous instances, the abuse had started when they were three to five years old.
Most had kept their experiences to themselves, confiding in no one, not even their husbands. Now their husbands were hearing for the first time about the horrors of growing up as a girl on Pitcairn. Reliving it all was traumatic for the women, some of whom went into long-term counselling after telling their stories. Relationships and families were placed under enormous strain.
The first group of women told detectives about older victims, including friends and relatives, who had also been abused. Abandoning their 20-year time limit, police interviewed those women too, drawing a new line at 1960; before then, the relevant sexual offences law did not apply on the island.
By the end of the investigation, 31 victims—including two men—had spoken to police, naming 30 offenders, 27 of them native Pitcairners. Nearly every island male from the past three generations had been implicated; almost a third of those named were dead. Among the outsiders alleged to have taken part was a New Zealand teacher posted to Pitcairn in the 1960s, Albert Reeves.
Nearly a dozen women had made accusations against brothers, uncles or first cousins. But incest was not the only reason why Operation Unique at an early stage became, in Robert Vinson’s words, ‘very messy’. With every victim who was tracked down, the connections between those involved grew ever more excruciatingly tangled.
Belinda and Karen had been the first to disclose abuse. Next police spoke to Catherine, who claimed that Belinda’s father had raped her. Detectives then questioned a woman called Gillian, who—as well as recounting her own experiences—suggested that they contact two sisters, Geraldine and Rita. The pair told police that they had been raped as little girls. Their assailant, they said, was Gillian’s father.
Gillian’s uncle was allegedly an offender also, and so was her grandfather. Her first cousin was a victim. So was a relation of Geraldine’s and Rita’s. Their brother was said to be an abuser.
As the layers of secrecy that had enclosed Pitcairn for decades were peeled away, a picture emerged of almost systematic abuse. Many families allegedly contained both offenders and victims. How would those families cope with the fallout?
News travels fast along Pitcairn’s ‘coconut grapevine’. Just from the engine noise, the islanders can identify the driver of any quad bike that passes their house. They claim to know what everyone else is up to, at any hour of the day or night. ‘The jungle drum of Pitcairn is unbelievable,’ says Mary Maple, a former teacher on the island.
The grapevine extends across New Zealand, Australia and Norfolk Island, and during 2000 it buzzed with stories of English police questioning Pitcairn women. So when Peter George and Robert Vinson arrived at Pitcairn aboard a 48-foot yacht in September, no one was in any doubt as to why they had come.
After interviewing the island women, detectives were questioning the men. They had already spoken to suspects in New Zealand and Australia. Now it was the turn of those who lived on Pitcairn. Vinson and George set up video-recording equipment at the Lodge, where they were staying, and invited the men in one by one. While they were questioning Dave Brown, Len’s son and Olive’s brother, the power went off. Dave obligingly helped them to start up the generator, enabling them to resume his interview.
Despite the circumstances of their visit, the two Englishmen were received hospitably. ‘We were greeted with open arms, even by the accused,’ says Peter George, who recalls people ‘bringing us fish and freshly baked cakes … It was surreal.’
Beneath the surface, though, the community was in turmoil. When police began to ask questions, ‘everyone got the fright of their lives’, says Neville Tosen, the pastor. ‘Some of the men were quite clear that they were going to go to jail. They started cutting firewood for their mothers and wives, laying in stocks for a long period. They thought they were going to be taken off the island.’
Terry Young, who had promised his father, Sam, on his deathbed that he would look after his mother, Vula, was especially anxious. So was Dave. ‘I’m in trouble, no question,’ Dave told several people. ‘I’m going to jail … They’re going to lock me up and throw away the key.’ Even men who were not under scrutiny were alarmed. One older islander told an outsider, ‘They [the police] are going back 20 years. If they went back further, there’d be others.’
Elderly women who depended on their sons saw their whole future at risk, says Neville Tosen. ‘One mother was telling her son to come clean. Another was beside herself with worry. She said, “The police have come, and they’re going to take my boy away and hang him.”’
While Tosen had long had his suspicions, he was appalled to find out the scale of the alleged abuse. Above all, he was at a loss to comprehend how the older women, the mothers and grandmothers, could have allowed it to happen. It seemed obvious to him that they must have known. He and Rhonda spoke to the matriarchs. ‘We said to them, “Where were you when this was going on? You’re the elders of the island, surely you must be unhappy?” And they replied that nothing had changed. One of the grandmothers said, “We all went through it, it’s part of life on Pitcairn.” She said she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.’
The couple were feeling increasingly isolated. The communal satellite phone never seemed to be working when Tosen tried to reach Adventist regional headquarters. ‘We couldn’t get a message out of Pitcairn,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t even contact our kids. I also wrote letters to the Church administration, saying I was concerned about things on the island. They never arrived.’
Accompanying police on their visit was Eva Learner, an English social worker, who was sent out to support the locals and assess the impact of the investigation. In a report to the Foreign Office, Learner said that the men were ‘in [a] distinct state of shock and fear … very weepy … depressed and withdrawn’. Within the wider community, she encountered ‘general disbelief … about the nature and extent of the alleged abuse’: the islanders could not grasp ‘why the matters being investigated were of concern … or how they might be damaging to young women and children’. Mothers, Learner wrote, ‘professed difficulty in understanding that this had happened to their daughters’.
When the police departed, the locals thanked them. ‘They thought we were going to go away and never come back,’ says Peter George. Six months later, in March 2001, some of the team returned for more interviews; in October that year they visited yet again. By then, according to Karen Vaughan, who went on the two latter occasions, ‘it was clear they wished we’d go away … They thought we’d go there once and then realise how difficult, logistically, it was to pursue. The men just thought they could get away with it.’
By mid-2001 police had finished their inquiries and built up an extensive file of evidence. But Leon Salt was deeply sceptical, and predicted that they would get no further. Salt, who had opposed a prosecution from the outset, told detectives, ‘The women may speak to you, they may give you statements, but you’ll never get them to go to court and give evidence. You’ll never get the Pitcairners to testify against each other.’
Now that I was on the island, with the trials starting shortly, I was about to find out whether or not he was right.
CHAPTER 5 The fiefdom and its leader (#ulink_886df091-e6b7-54c3-8cdd-20d4ab079d74)
It was Tuesday morning, which meant that Pitcairn’s one shop, situated on the main road, a couple of banana groves down from the square, was open for business. But you had to be quick, for it would be closed by 9 a.m.—and if you missed it, you had to wait until Thursday, when it opened for another solitary hour of trading.
The small shop was crowded, although probably no more than a dozen people were browsing the dusty shelves, stacked with tins of lambs’ tongues and condensed milk. Olive Christian, a grandson on her hip, was inspecting bottles of bleach, while her mother-in-law, Dobrey, chatted animatedly in Pitkern to another elderly islander. Olive’s son, Randy, and several other men who were about to go on trial stood around, laughing loudly at some private joke. They were mostly barefoot, and carried fishing knives in their belts. As Claire and I roamed the aisles, a figure in a baggy grey T-shirt leant over a freezer of meat. ‘We don’t like reporters here,’ said Dave Brown, with a half-smile.
Short and stocky, with a bushy moustache, Dave was charged with 16 offences, including indecent assault and gross indecency with a child. But, like the other defendants, he was free on bail, and for now he was just gassing with his mates.
Behind the till, entering purchases in tattered account books labelled simply ‘Dobrey’ or ‘Olive’, was Darralyn Griffiths, née Warren. Darralyn had withdrawn from the case, claiming that she had been coerced into giving a statement; it was common knowledge, however, that she and Dave had had an ‘affair’ that began when he was 34 and she was 13. It had prompted many a sly wink at the time, although not from Dave’s wife, Lea, or Darralyn’s mother, Carol, whose main objection had been that Dave was married.
Also open that morning, again for the blink of an eye, was the minuscule post office, presided over by Dennis Christian. Dennis, the postmaster, was charged with three sexual assaults. Considerably more forthcoming than Dave, he explained to us politely that Pitcairn’s once booming stamp business was in decline. ‘Hardly anyone mails any more,’ he said. ‘Everyone jumps on the internet nowadays.’
The library, too, had unlocked its door for an hour, revealing a closet-sized space and shelves piled haphazardly with Bounty-related books, airport novels and travel guides. All could be borrowed indefinitely, without risk of a fine. Next door, the island secretary, Betty Christian, was sweeping out her office, which had another picture of the Queen on the wall. Outside, a few of the older women were swapping gossip on the wooden bench, which was known as the ‘bus shelter’.
I had now met, or at least laid eyes on, all seven of the Pitcairn-based defendants: Randy Christian and Jay Warren on the longboat; Steve Christian in the pink bulldozer; Dave Brown at the shop; Dennis Christian at the post office; and Len Brown, our next-door neighbour, in his garden. The seventh man was Terry Young, who lived near the store with his mother, Vula. I had passed him in the main road, a large, lumbering figure. Terry was charged with one rape and seven indecent assaults.
Within two or three days of landing, we knew who was who among the 40 or so Pitcairn residents. (Half a dozen were away.) And they, of course, knew who we were: six despised reporters tramping around their island. We could not have avoided the locals if we had tried. Every time we stepped out, we bumped into them; often as we walked along the dirt tracks, they would overtake us on the quad bikes that they hopped on even for short trips. I was never sure whether to wave: it seemed rude not to, but sometimes the only response was an icy stare.
Not everyone was unfriendly. Outside the medical centre, I met a chatty, baby-faced Englishman: Mike Lupton-Christian, who is married to Brenda Christian, Steve’s sister. Mike and Brenda had met in England, and had moved to the island in 1999 with her son from a previous marriage, Andrew. Mike, who had added Brenda’s surname to his, appeared to be well suited to Pitcairn life. A former manager of retail and leisure services for the British military, he had a practical nature and was not afraid to get his hands dirty. But his attempts to muck in had so far been frustrated.
