'I was a happy-go-lucky child, about nine or ten years old, without a care in the world,' Butch wrote of his life before the abuse began in one of several sworn statements he made last year. That no one in authority noticed what was happening to the child seems absurd. How a boy could be left alone with a convicted child sex offender inside a prison is hard enough to believe. He is pictured at the front of his home outside the prison when he was about 12īutch intends taking the State of Victoria to court seeking up to $4million in compensation if it does not grant him an ex-gratia payment for the appalling trauma inflicted upon him in childhood.
He has agreed to be photographed and tell his story but does not want his full name used.īutch intends taking the State of Victoria to court seeking up to $4million in compensation if it does not grant him an ex-gratia payment for the appalling trauma inflicted upon him in childhood. What Butch's father did not know was that while his son spent hours alone with Curtis, his after-school companion was repeatedly anally, orally and digitally raping him too.īutch, now 58 and with a teenage son of his own, suffered in silence for decades as he lived with the devastating impact of Curtis's depravity but is finally speaking up and demanding to be heard. The second-generation criminal and boys' home graduate could not read or write and was described in a police report as 'backward' and of 'very low intelligence'.
Most weekends and school holidays Butch was let through a gate to enter the jail's work yard and vegetable garden where he would meet up with inmate Bob Curtis.Ĭurtis, then aged in his late 20s, was considered a model inmate but had convictions for buggery, obscene exposure and indecent assault of children. The cheerful blond 10-year-old's father was a senior warder and his family lived just outside the stone walls of the mid 19th-Century HM Prison Beechworth. When 'Butch' was in primary school in Victoria's north-east in the early 1970s his best friend was a jailed paedophile and his playground was a prison. 'Butch' lived next to Beechworth prison and was repeatedly raped by an inmate who befriended him when he was ten years old