In short:
William Alexander Allen admitted in a 1973 job application form that he had been convicted of indecency charges relating to two students during a previous teaching stint.
Despite this declaration, the Victorian Education Department re-employed Allen, who taught in government schools from 1973 until his retirement in 1982.
What’s next?
Survivors of Allen’s abuse will have the chance to tell their stories as part of a Victorian government truth-telling process.
A “psychopathic” paedophile, who later boasted of sexually abusing 2,000 boys, was employed as a Victorian Education Department school teacher despite declaring in a 1970s job application form that he was a convicted child abuser.
Warning: This story contains discussion of child sexual abuse and suicide.
According to documents seen by ABC Investigations, William Alexander Allen was employed for close to a decade as a Victorian Education Department high school music teacher despite admitting in a 1973 job application form that he’d been convicted in 1966 of sexually abusing two of his students during a previous stint of employment as a government school teacher.
Allen taught at Sunshine Technical School and St Albans Technical School between 1965 and 1966 before being convicted in November 1966 of indecency charges relating to one male and one female student. By his own admission, Allen was sentenced to three years of probation.
Allen’s first term of employment with the Victorian Education Department was terminated in April 1966, but seven years after his criminal conviction, Allen was somehow re-hired by the Victorian Education Department under a different employee identification number.
Allen, who in the mid-1980s achieved infamy when he boasted during a television interview that he was a lifelong paedophile who’d abused 2,000 boys, taught at Albert Park High School between June 1973 and September 1975, then at Templestowe High School between September 1975 and his retirement in May 1982.
Survivors have told ABC Investigations that Allen was sexually abusing his students until the year of his retirement.
In addition to his 1966 child abuse conviction, Allen had been medically discharged from the Australian Army in the 1940s on the grounds that he suffered from a “psychopathic personality”.
A survivor of abuse confirmed to ABC Investigations that the Victorian Education Department settled one civil litigation claim related to Allen in the mid-1990s and that other survivors are currently in the process of suing the department for their abuse by Allen.
‘Allen devoted his entire adult life to paedophilia’
William Allen first came to public attention in 1983, when “Australian Paedophile Support Group” meetings convened by Allen and other paedophiles were infiltrated by detectives from Victoria Police’s Delta Taskforce child protection unit.
As a result of Delta’s Operation Rockspider, Allen and seven other alleged sex offenders — including another government school teacher subsequently convicted of abusing students — were arrested during a raid of a house in Melbourne’s Clifton Hill.
Amid the media storm that followed, an arcane charge of “conspiring to corrupt public morals” was thrown out of Melbourne’s Supreme Court, but individual prosecutions of some offenders were more successful.
In June 1985, in Melbourne’s Supreme Court, William Allen pleaded guilty to eight acts of sexual penetration of an 11-year-old boy and two counts of procuring a minor for sex.
Initially handed a five-year good behaviour bond, Allen appeared on Channel Nine’s Willesee program and boasted of abusing 2,000 boys — crimes he claimed to have documented in a 344-page autobiography.
Allen’s lenient sentence was appealed by Victoria’s director of public prosecutions. With jail time looming, 64-year-old Allen died by suicide during a court adjournment in September 1985.
In a coronial inquest deposition seen by ABC Investigations, a Victoria Police detective wrote that Allen “would kill himself rather than go to gaol” and be prevented from abusing children.
“Allen had great admiration for paedophiles who had become martyrs for the cause,” the deposition continued.
“In Allen’s autobiography, he stated he would die a boy lover and obviously saw himself as a martyr for the paedophile cause.”
“If [the autobiography] is accepted it appears that Allen devoted his entire adult life to paedophilia … In recent years Allen became a prominent activist in the gay community for paedophile rights. He was a prolific article writer to a wide range of gay magazines and was the convenor of a paedophile forum and workshop at Latrobe University in September, 1983.”
“Allen had clearly stated his objectives as a paedophile, both in his literature and at public meetings. The objectives were total acceptance of paedophiles by the general community and the abolition of laws preventing child sex.”
The deposition also stated that during a search of Allen’s St Kilda apartment following his arrest in 1983, Victoria Police detectives found evidence that Allen planned to bring a World Vision “foster” child to Australia for the purposes of sexual abuse.
“Allen had arranged visas and airline tickets for this purpose,” the deposition said. “Allen during recent years had fostered three young boys through World Vision all of whom he had sexually assaulted on various trips to the Philippines.”
‘We failed to keep these children safe’
Allen will be among scores of sexually abusive former Victorian Education Department teachers whose assaults on students will be examined during the Victorian government’s recently-announced truth-telling process for state school abuse survivors.
In June, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan announced the $48 million truth-telling process for and acknowledged the state’s “serious and systematic” failure to protect government school students from sexual abuse.
The process, likely to run between late 2024 and 2026, is the government’s response to the board of inquiry into historical child sexual abuse at Beaumaris Primary School and certain other government schools, which reported its findings in March after six months of hearings.
“We failed to keep these children safe,” Ms Allan said.
“We failed to listen when they spoke out. We failed to act to ensure that it did not happen again.
“As the board of inquiry’s report put so plainly, it was a failure that was both serious and systematic.
“What should have been a happy place became a place of horror for these victim-survivors.”