The abuse victim of pedophile Frank Houston, Brett Sengstock spent most of day two of the Brian Houston trial facing questions about his memory of key events about the disclosure of his ordeal.
Brian Houston is on trial for failure to report his father’s crimes to the police.
Defence barrister Phillip Bouten SC probed Sengstock’s memory, bringing up instances where his Royal Commission testimony differed from things he said at other times.
He began with a correction Sengstock made during his evidence at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2014. In his statement to the Royal Commission, Sengstock had said that a church meeting at which his mother disclosed his sexual abuse to two pastors, Barbara Taylor (his great aunt) and Kevin Mudford had occurred in 1999. But at the beginning of his evidence before the Commission he made a correction setting the date as 1998.
“It appears that you were able to identify the 3rd of November 1998, you were able to check the dates against your mother’s diaries?” Boulten asked. “Yes, that is what happened,” Sengstock responded.
Boulten took Sengstock through a close reading of the diaries. “Is that the entry, the entry that you read before you appeared before the Royal Commission that led you to change the date?” he said referring to one marked 4/11.
“I’ve no idea,” Sengstock responds. “But I don’t understand how the 3rd comes into it. I don’t know where this is going.”
“Forget about where this is going,” Boulten told the witness.
An entry marked 6/11 included “Brett got on the phone and abused me dreadfully … because I spilled my guts.” Sengstock agreed that he would have taken that diary entry into account when he changed the date.
Another entry dated 8/11 stated that pastor Barbara Taylor had rung Sengstock’s mother after visiting Brett. “Will Kevin tell anyone else? One wonders how I could have betrayed my son to such a person.” Asked about the entry Sengstock responded “I can’t recall. I have never seen that.”
Several times, Sengstock was asked to recall an event. Boulten then would compare his memory to a previous statement he had made.
So asked about his mother’s response to him telling her of the abuse aged 16, Sengstock responded “unfortunately she seemed very angry at me for opening my mouth up.”
Boulten then produced diary entries for 1994. In one for 31 May 1999 Sengstock’s mother wrote “Brett dropped the bombshell. Ps Houston molested him at Melody Street. Twenty-five years, Brett accused Phil and I of not supporting him.”
“This is news to me I don’t know where this has come from” Sengstock responded.
Boulten: “Looks like this is when you told your Mum for the first time. That’s not the way you remember it.”
Sengstock: “No.”
At the time of the diary entry, Sengstock was 32. Pressed he answered “I told her when I was 16. I will not change on that.”
Boulten returned to discrepancies in Sengstock’s Royal Commission statement. “Dates of events have always been a problem for you once you decide to go to the Royal Commission” Sengstock: “Yes.”
“The sequence of events have always been a problem for you?” Sengstock: “Yes.”
Sengstock agreed that he got the date of a meeting with Frank Houston at Redfern station wrong, and the timing of phone calls from Frank Houston wrong.
Asked when he had the meeting with Frank Houston at Thornleigh McDonalds (at which Frank Houston promised to pay him money) Sengstock replied “possibly November 1999.” He had told the Royal Commission “late 2000,” and the police, “May 31, 2000.”
“I am not entirely accurate about that,” he told the court.” “I can’t say that was exactly the date.”
“How come you are so adamant now?” Boulten asked. “What information are you basing your evidence on?”
Sengstock: “Information all over the internet.”
Boulten: “Have you been looking at the internet to get your dates right?”
Sengstock: “I haven’t actually.”
Boulten then turned to whether Sengstock had one or several conversations with Brian Houston. Sengstock maintains that there was only one conversation. “I called him. He did not call me.”
He denied a conversation referred to in notes by pastor Barbara Taylor. “That conversation does not ring a bell with me.
“I don’t think that conversation took place. I don’t remember that conversation at all.”
Sengstock denied that Brian Houston rang him and said “I know what my father did to you. He has confessed to me “ and “if anyone is going to the police it will be me.”
But asked who told him that Frank Houston had confessed, he had no clear memory. “It would have been in church. There was gossip everywhere.”
Sengstock rejected two assertions by defence counsel that are likely to be returned to later in this case. Boulten suggested that Brian Houston had not been staying at Sengstock’s home with his father Frank in 1970 when the first abuse occurred. “They were both there, he said.”
Boulten: Did Brian Houston say to him when the promised money failed to turn up “this is frustrating for me. I will have to talk to my father?” Sengstock said “no.”
But Sengstock, at the very end of his appearance, affirmed that Brian Houston did say “You tempted my father and it is your fault.”
Enter Pastor Barbara Taylor
Aged 90, Barbara Taylor was alert in the witness box, confident while acknowledging when she could not remember something. She did not raise an objection to giving evidence, which means she is at risk of self-incrimination of the same charge as Brian Houston. If she had objected to giving evidence magistrate Christofis would have granted her a certificate against prosecution.
Rose Hardingham who was her late husband’s sister’s daughter, was Brett Sengstock’s mother. “He was my Grand Nephew.”
The details of Sengstock’s mother’s disclosure were made clear.
Gareth Harrison, the Crown Prosecutor: “You had a discussion with Miss Hardingham?”
Taylor: “she told me something in confidence so I promised not to tell a soul. These days I say ‘I have to report something if it is a criminal matter. If you don’t want that, don’t tell me.’”
“She told me her son Brett had confided in her that when Frank Houston stayed with them in Coogee he crept into his [Brett’s] room and behaved inappropriately. I did not say anything until it all blew up.”
Asked what procedures the Assemblies of God had for dealing with child sexual assault, Barbara Taylor replied ”Frankly there was no procedure that I was aware of.”
Asked when she said something, Taylor said “Only when it blew up when an evangelist came and had a tent crusade and one Sunday night people were testifying about how sexual abuse had messed up their lives and Rose felt she had to tell the evangelist.”
The evangelist was Kevin “Mad Dog” Mudford. Asked to describe him she said he was a person whose life has been turned around by an encounter with Jesus.
Taylor was then taken through a detailed examination of her Royal Commission evidence – her timeline but not before she commented “the Royal Commission is a little blurred. I was a fish out of water, much as I feel here.”
She was frank about mixed motives. Describing how she and Kevin Medford had tried to get guidance on what she should do from pastor John McMartin who was a pastor for Mudford she volunteered “I was asked at the Royal Commission whether I was protecting my church. I’d have to say yes. Because I had nothing in writing. It was all hearsay.”
Describing an attempt by Mudford and her to meet Brett at his house in Michinbury, she described what happened as “anger”. Harrison: “Anger from who?” Taylor: ”Brett.”
“The man was very wounded. To pursue a conversation would have only wounded him more. I can still recall the expression on his face.”
Taylor answers showed a pastoral instinct, taking advice that she would have to let the victim determine the pace of anything that happened. She described what she now sees as a mistake, trying to get Sengtock and Frank Houston in the same room to achieve reconciliation.
In her notes she wrote, sarcastically, “amnesia’ about Frank Houston’s lack of response.
“I was trying to negotiate a meeting so he could seek forgiveness from Brett, so he could be healed inside. Because this family really loved Frank Houston.”
Quoting the Bible that judgement should begin at the house of God Taylor said “I think the church should have fixed it. I still do.”
Asked why she wrote, “If he goes to the church I will stand by him, if he does to the secular courts I will not.” Taylor responded “I meant that a court can bring justice, but not reconciliation. As a pastor, I am into reconciliation.”