The Monster's abuse and a prosecution caught in the memory wars

Thursday, 15 July 2021

Gloria Masters is a well-dressed, well-spoken woman in her late 50s with a CV that includes corporate training, dispute resolution and mediation work for local government and major corporates.

She’s also the author of a self-published memoir, On Angels’ Wings, in which she alleges a dreadful childhood in suburban Auckland of the 1960s, featuring the most horrific, sadistic sexual abuse, suffered at the hands of a father she calls only The Monster. It’s a painful read; one I could consume only in small chunks, skim reading over the very worst of it.

The details are too graphic and harrowing to be repeated here. But Masters says that, from the age of three until she was 16, her paedophile father orchestrated almost continual abuse, perpetrated both by him and others. She says he sold her to a paedophile ring, a gang, and a K Rd sex club. She alleges another relative facilitated the abuse (including procuring a series of illegal abortions), while others simply ignored it. Deprived of any human protector, the titular angels are the ones she thought she saw when her father nailed her into an apple crate as a small child for some imagined infraction.

“I am just so lucky to be alive, there were many times I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she tells Stuff.

Yet, nobody has ever been prosecuted for the offences she details. And while Masters hopes publication of a book that took several years and seven drafts to write might prompt some offenders to confess, she accepts it’s most likely nobody will ever go before the courts over what happened to her.

The long odds of conviction

It would undoubtedly be one of the worst cases of childhood sexual abuse ever documented in this country. Are Masters’ extraordinary allegations credible? How significant is it that they rely on recovered memories? And why will her abusers almost certainly evade justice?

Sexual offences are much harder to prosecute than many other crimes, explains a serving sexual offences detective, who asked not to be identified because police cannot talk to the media without permission. “Most people don’t talk about abuse. Only 15 per cent of people even tell anyone about it in the first place, let alone come forward to the police, and then the cases we are able to prosecute are whittled down from that as well,” the detective says.

Police weigh the prospect of a conviction against the continued trauma for the victim of giving evidence. The detective says under the Solicitor-General’s guidelines, police need a “reasonable prospect of gaining a conviction” before proceeding. “So it has to be at least 50-50 – we can’t just prosecute someone and take it through on a wing and a prayer. Personally, I don’t think it’s fair to put a victim through that. I had one who spent two and a half days on the stand. It’s really not fair to have someone put through that if it is never going to get home anyway.”

Prosecuting historical sexual offending comes with even bigger hurdles. Sometimes, says the detective, such cases are easier to prosecute, because people’s loyalties have shifted over time, but many are much harder – witnesses have died, documents destroyed, memories faded.

In Masters’ case, the worst of the abuse stopped at 11, when her local priests told her mother to remove her from her father’s care because she caught him in bed with another woman (which therefore made him unsuitable as an ‘adulterer’). “It saved my life,” she says.

Instead, the abuse was then limited to weekend visits to her father, and stopped entirely at 16 when she was able to refuse to see her father any more.

Masters describes life from 16 to 32 as a “f…… nightmare”. She had suppressed the suffering, but was deeply damaged and “attracted to terrible situations and people”.

But she says it wasn’t till the age of 32 that she recalled the abuse, went into therapy, and reported it to police. Before then, she says, she had “complete amnesia – I didn’t remember it at all.”

Cases such as Masters’ are even harder for investigators. The recollection of previously forgotten childhood abuse has been hotly debated by academics since the 1980s – a dispute often called the ‘memory wars’. Opinion cleaves into two fiercely opposed camps: those who say it is entirely unproven, and the construct of therapists, and those who say such recovered memory could be better called dissociative amnesia, and is a proven condition dating back to soldiers who blocked out their war experiences.

Police are left treading a careful path. The serving detective says they don’t have a fixed line on recovered memory cases.

“Each case on its own merits,” the detective says. “You can’t say don’t touch them at all. … You need to be careful, but if you feel the evidence is there, you look at prosecuting it.”

Retired British policeman Ian Tyler, who helped run the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, says he wouldn’t present recovered memories in court because a good defence lawyer could produce expert witnesses to undermine the testimony - but he would use them as an avenue to find more tangible evidence. “If you try to introduce it to court on a recovered memory, the defence will rip it apart,” he says.

While police never took action in Masters’ case, she has only praise for them. She remains in contact with the police officer who she claims “walked into my house 20 years ago and said, ‘I know the truth when I see it, I am so sorry we just don’t have enough”.

Stuff spoke to that now-retired senior policeman who led the investigation some 26 years ago. He also spoke on condition of anonymity as he is still a government employee. Masters’ case was one of the earliest in New Zealand to rely on recovered memory, he says, and there was a “lot of stigma attached” and a “lot of dangers” to such evidence.

“It was one of the most unusual and sad cases I’ve had to investigate,” he says, with the perspective of 30 years investigating major crimes. “That case was an extreme, the allegations were something new to me.”

He says it was a difficult investigation, because of the time that had elapsed, the inability to find corroborating evidence, and the added complexity of the complaints being principally against family members – a family which closed ranks against Masters.

Like the serving detective, the retired policeman says he was always conscious of the emotional toll of court on victims and the level of proof needed. “Sometimes, to get it over the threshold is very difficult,” he says. “No prosecution was ever commenced… I am not saying she is right or wrong, but she put forward her case, and it has been extensively investigated but that benchmark that is required, it doesn’t meet that threshold. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, it means the evidence to support it overall falls short and there are so many cases like that.”

He says Masters “seemed genuine” and explains that he always prosecuted those he felt had made false complaints. He did not contemplate that action in this case.

A childhood friend says she never met Masters’ parents, nor visited the house, despite Masters often staying over at her place. “I was devastated to know that after she had sleepovers, that’s what she was going home to.” When Masters opened up to her many years later, a memory from when they were both aged 14 came back – Masters had told her some men were making a movie with her and they all got drunk. “It seemed such a weird thing. I forgot about it, and years later when she began talking about it, that came straight back into my mind.”

For Waikato University professor Dr Maryanne Garry, an expert in memory, there’s no proof that recovered memory is real, and she says it is “dangerous” to rely on it in court without supporting evidence.

There was “precisely zero evidence” that recovered memory was reliable, she says, and such memory tended to be a collection of snippets of images, thoughts and feelings, far from the evidentiary standard of an “organised, detailed … logical, repeatable” memory.

Garry says there was a trend in the 1990s of “well-meaning’’ therapists guiding clients towards recovered memories of childhood abuse. The theory of recovered memory worked on an unproven assumption that it worked differently to other memory – somehow preserved separately, completely forgotten, then re-accessed later without it degrading at all, a theory she was “exceedingly sceptical” of. “The research doesn’t support any kind of idea that traumatic memories function more reliably and are protected from distortion,” she said.

Garry said most memory was unreliable, faded over time, and there were even cases where people had come to believe almost impossible things had actually happened to them.

The counter view comes from experienced psychologist Dr Suzanne Blackwell, who earlier this year co-authored a literature review on the issue which concluded that “there is strong clinical and empirical support for the phenomenon of recovered memory”.

Those include several studies of proven cases of abuse where percentages as high as 68 per cent of victims had at least temporarily forgotten their experiences. Blackwell’s paper said while most victims of trauma do continuously remember what happened to them, others forget – at least in part, or for periods of time – before memories re-emerge with “relevant cues”. Those memories, like any others, can be “accurate, inaccurate, or a mixture of both”.

This debate will lead some to conclude Masters’ book is actually fiction. “Well, what an imagination, eh?” she says, drily. “I don’t want money, I don’t need fame. I am being genuine with you that my purpose is to shine light on this so that other people can feel they can speak.

“I have no problem challenging any arsehole who wants to give me s… about this because I stand on my truth.”

Masters clearly believes it happened. She’s intelligent, explains herself clearly, is charming, funny, a good conversationalist. And she has no obvious motive to lie.

“I am not a victim, I am a survivor, I am not angry or resentful,” she says. “I have forgiven everyone, not for their sake, but for mine. If I hold on to that, and I used to, what do you reckon happens if you hold on to such hatred and anger?”

Finding her voice

Masters says she didn’t endure everything simply to work in the corporate world, and that her life’s work now is to “help people find their voice”.

Her manuscript was rejected by every major publisher she showed it to. Unbowed, she self-published, holding a small launch party at an Albany restaurant and selling copies through her own website.

“I always knew I would write this book,” she says, “but I think for most of my life I have been shut down and told to shut up and threatened, and lost people when I dared to speak about it.

“My purpose is to help other people,” she says, “to shine a light on this darkness so that people can find a voice… [Everyone] admits this is hugely under-reported. Most adult survivors of this are still living in shame.”

Look, she says, at the body language of those giving evidence at the Royal Commission into Abuse in State Care: slumped shoulders, lowered gazes. She has learned to stand tall. “In my mid-50s, I began feeling a bit more confident in who I am and I thought ‘actually, shame doesn’t belong to me, it belongs to those animals’.”

Masters says among the book’s early readers, it has already prompted people a couple of degrees removed to speak up about their own childhood abuse. “This is what I want,” she says. “There are so many of us out there. Doesn’t that just send shivers down your spine? … What if I said of 10 of your male friends, four of them would have suffered this?”

She has been careful not to name or identify any of her abusers and won’t give me further details of their identities; she has legally changed her own name.

In part, she says, she was advised to keep her alleged abusers, and even the name of the gang and the sex club anonymous for her own safety, and also for the risk of defamation action. But she doesn’t expect any confrontation from those she accuses – paedophiles, she says, are “gutless, weak people”.

Masters’ father is dead, and it seems likely many of her other alleged abusers will be too. But she harbours hope that some of those accused in the book, such as those she alleges pack-raped her, will come forward to confess their guilt.

The retired cop says it is still possible the book could change something. “If someone in that network comes forward to provide the missing piece of the jigsaw, it may tilt the balance.”