Labyrinths of horror

Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Murder, a Conspiracy of Silence and a Search for Justice

Christine Kenneally, Hachette

***** (5 stars)

How do you investigate a cold case that has been actively concealed by the oldest institution in the world? How do you investigate 10,000 cold cases? These are the questions award-winning Australian-American journalist and author Christine Kenneally asked herself when she realised she had just stumbled through the door of what was to become a decade-long investigation into the horrific, hidden history of 20th-century orphanages. It was a labyrinthine investigation that was to yield an award-winning BuzzFeed article, but didn’t stop there, as she reveals in her third book, Ghosts of the Orphanage: A Story of Murder, a Conspiracy of Silence and a Search for Justice. “As I dug further, asked more questions and met more people,” says Kenneally, “my experience was a sensation of it ballooning, expanding, ramifying out over and over and over.”

Indeed, Ghosts of the Orphanage reads at one level like a vast and utterly engrossing detective story as Kenneally takes her readers alongside her while peeling back the layers of secrecy shrouding an “invisible archipelago” of institutions — run mainly, but not always, by the Catholic Church — that stretched across the western world for most of the 20th century. And as she writes in its pages, “this archipelago comprised the 20th-century orphanage system through which millions of children passed and from which relatively few records remain”. At another, it is a harrowing story of unspeakable suffering and downright sadism that centres mainly, but not totally, around testimonies of survivors of one Catholic orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, where children were dangled over stairwells, tossed out of windows, locked in water tanks and closets for days, forced to eat their own vomit and, indeed, murdered. Kenneally goes to extraordinary lengths to verify these testimonies and reveal how emblematic they are of the wider global story. And as harrowing as this superbly written narrative is, it is also a poignant testament to human resilience and heroism.

This particular Vermont orphanage became “a kind of ground zero” of the global orphanage system for Kenneally because, thanks to many of its former inhabitants who in the 1990s found the strength to speak out on behalf of fellow orphans who had not survived, she was able to track down remnants of evidence that remained from their efforts. Her book also gives a potent voice to the small group of lawyers and journalists who “had risked their reputations, family life and mental health to stand up to the Church Goliath” in the latter years of that decade. All their efforts had failed. Unlike many other western countries, the US had, by then, held no large-scale government inquiries into institutional sex abuse, let alone physical abuse or deaths. And of those countries which had, only Canada had begun to investigate the stories of dead or missing children in institutional care. Kenneally was determined to do the same. “The more I listened to the stories of physical abuse and began to understand what it was like in these places, I realised the death stories could not be put aside. So it was very important to me to do what had not been done in the 1990s, which was to take their stories seriously and find ways to validate and verify them.”

The realisation that she had stumbled into this vast labyrinth struck Kenneally just as she was finishing her much-acclaimed, award-winning second work of non-fiction, The Invisible History of the Human Race. Her interest in orphanages had been kindled at an archivists' conference in Brisbane, Australia, in 2012, where archivists reported receiving so many requests from ex-orphanage residents for help in accessing their records, they’d begun to feel it was a human rights issue. After speaking to former residents of Australian orphanages, she wrote of their quest for records and horrific past experiences for Australian magazine The Monthly that year. “I just sort of stuck with the story; I stayed in touch with people, started talking to more.”  

Later, in the wake of the 2002 Spotlight investigation by the Boston Globe, which blew open the story of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, she pitched the orphanage story to BuzzFeed News in 2014, gaining its support for what was initially a one-year contract. “At that point I widened the scope to try to see the global picture and also to understand the American story. It was clear to me that the place of American history in the context of global history needed to be told. I just went deeper and deeply into the labyrinth because it was so much more invisible and so much harder to dig out than the Australian story.” 

Published in 2018 and titled We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage, that BuzzFeed News article consumed another four years of her life. But this searing exposé of physical and sexual abuse and, indeed, murder at the Vermont orphanage not only garnered her a Deadline Award and several award short-listings, it triggered global headlines and was viewed 6-million times in six months. It also prompted local and state authorities to launch a task force to investigate its accounts of horrific abuse by survivors, with the deaths and murders they reported. Significantly too, says Kenneally, “it triggered social and legal change in Vermont”. In 2019 the statute of limitations on civil actions for childhood sexual abuse was repealed and a year later a group of persistent survivors successfully lobbied their legislature so that the statute of limitations in childhood physical abuse was repealed. The Vermont repeal was not only total, it was completely retroactive as well. That hasn’t happened before in the US so that’s absolutely revolutionary.”

Even then, she wasn’t about to quit exposing the dark criminal heart of this system. “There was just so much more to tell,” says Kenneally. “In the wake of the BuzzFeed News story, I got lots of e-mails from people who had either been in an orphanage or whose parents had been in an orphanage, and just the sense of shock, recognition and validation that they’d had to see a story that was like the story that had been handed down in their family. And I wanted to outline the shape of the whole archipelago across the world, all these orphanages in all these countries, all the ways they were similar, all the ways the church is still trying to silence people. That felt incredibly important to me.”

Kenneally also reveals in the book how, in 2016, years after survivors and their lawyers’ quest for justice in the courts had failed, and years after the Spotlight investigation, she came into possession of transcripts of secret church tribunals, which revealed that of the eight chaplains at St Joseph’s orphanage from the mid-1930s to 1974 when it closed, six were known by the church to be paedophiles. “And that’s not counting all the nuns and the lay workers; a number of the nuns were accused not just of physical abuse and emotional cruelty, but sexual abuse as well.”

Of the many shocking revelations contained in this enormous tapestry of suffering, the way the church has — and still is — attempting to maintain a wall of silence around its crimes remains the most disturbing. For as she declares in Ghosts of the Orphanage, this institution “is one of, if not the most formidable entities in the world”, and if she learnt anything from all of the survivors she spoke with and their experiences she writes, “it was this: if you want to take on a 2,000-year-old monster, you’re going to have to play a long game”.

CHRISTINE KENNEALLY ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HER

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright. Wright, an investigative reporter for the New Yorker, essentially tells the history of Scientology and follows the key figures from the beginning — from the founder through to the current leader of the church and individuals in it who have left throughout time. Because this story and the one I was writing had similarities — they’re stories about massive institutions that exert a lot of mind control over individuals — I went to Going Clear to see how he used the mechanics of storytelling to solve some of the problems I was facing. I could tell he must have faced some of the same questions I was and I could tell how he’d answered those questions essentially by what he’d written. 

Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children by Jason Berry. This was published in 1992, a decade before the Spotlight investigation started the cascade. So Berry was the first person to investigate and expose the corruption of the Catholic Church in 1992. The moral courage that kept him going is such an incredible inspiration to me. 

How to Write: Advice and Reflections by Richard Rhodes. He wrote the blurb for the back of my book. To get that feedback from him was humbling because throughout the writing of my book I leant heavily on How to Write. Whenever I felt lost or I didn’t know how to resolve the structural or characterological problems I was facing, I went back to his book. It is a clear and compelling book about how to write non-fiction. I love it. I love reading about writing anyway, but his book is the one I go back to the most.

Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror by Judith Herman. She was one of the pioneering psychiatrists in the 1990s who wrote about how the ways in which children and women experience trauma in situations of family violence are the same as the trauma soldiers experience when returning from war. Before Herman, there was this idea that what soldiers felt was real, but women and children were just making a fuss; that what they felt wasn't an actual treatable trauma condition. Her book is eloquent on the topic of trauma and the ways in which people experience damage, and also how they can come out of it. Some of the descriptions of people and behaviours from her book I recognise in people I was talking to, so it was completely invaluable to me. It contained within it so much of what I needed to know.

Orphans of the Living: Growing up in ‘Care’ in Twentieth Century Australia by Joanna Penglase. Penglase is one of the co-founders of Care Leavers Australia Network, or Clan, the Australian activist body that formed in 2000. She had grown up in care and ended up doing a PhD and then writing this book.

I can’t say for sure, but I suspect this is the first book globally that tried to study 20th- century institutionalised care and tried to write not just an overview of it, but incorporate the experience of the children who had been in care.

She is probably the first and most important historian of institutional care. When I was finding it hard to integrate the historian's perspective with the children's experience, I looked to her for guidance. Her value was that she was such a skilled and reliable witness of that world.