Community shocked by teacher's dark secret

Colin Salisbury-Smith

There wasn't enough tea to go around at Colin Salisbury-Smith's funeral but there was plenty of sympathy.

The teacher of 37 years would have been heartened by the depth and breadth of the gathering - students past and present, young women who had blossomed through taking part in the beauty pageants he organised, family and friends - and by the warm words of the many who spoke in the chapel at the Manukau Memorial Gardens Crematorium in Auckland that Thursday in May.

There could be no doubt Salisbury-Smith touched lives, was sensitive, passionate, ready to help.

What is also apparent is that many were unaware of the turmoil that had engulfed his life just before his death three days earlier on May 16.

Apart from a veiled comment that he'd chosen his own time, there was nothing to suggest he might have succumbed to anything other than the heart problem that had previously bothered him.

Some seem to have assumed his abrupt disappearance from school 12 days earlier was because of ill health.

In fact, Salisbury-Smith, 56, was suspended after being charged on May 4 with the sexual violation and indecent assault of a pupil at Brookby School in 1995 when he was principal and teacher of the senior classes.

Brookby school is on Auckland's rural south-eastern fringe and caters for new entrants right up to secondary school age. The boy says he was 10 and 11 when the alleged incidents occurred.

May 16 was a Monday. It was a traumatic day during a time of high anxiety for Salisbury-Smith.

He'd felt numb - dumbfounded, say friends and relatives - since police turned up almost two weeks earlier at the farmhouse he rented in the Bombay Hills and charged him with five sex offences against the boy.

That Monday he appeared, as required, at the Manukau District Court where his immediate objective was to keep his name suppressed and vary bail conditions so he could live with his niece Trish Harrison, her husband Phil, and their family on a farm near Raglan.

He succeeded, but the reality of what may have been ahead would have become abundantly clear that day.

If convicted, Judge David Harvey told him, "There is no doubt [your] name should be published and [you] will be sentenced to prison."

There was another bombshell. Someone else was claiming to have been abused during the 1970s, a pupil of Salisbury-Smith's at Hiona Intermediate, Masterton, aged about 12.

The police, who believed there might be other potential complainants, wanted name suppression lifted.

The relevant law regarding suppression includes the case of infamous paedophile and repeat offender Peter Liddell who, as a counsellor specialising in the problems of adolescents, also had daily contact with teenagers.

In Liddell's case, suppression was lifted only after he was convicted of sexually abusing several victims, resulting in many more coming forward.

Liddell is in prison, having been convicted of similar crimes committed after being released from his earlier sentence.

This discussion was in open court before an audience including defendants seated in the gallery waiting for their cases to be called.

Later, in the holding cells, Salisbury-Smith copped it. Says Trish Harrison: "He was in a suit and tie, well presented. You know what Monday in court is like - all the riff-raff from the weekend. They went through his pockets, pushed him around, called him a kiddie-f**ker".

"He came out of there pretty damn distraught. He said, 'I can't handle this. If I'm convicted and go inside, I'd be lucky if I came out alive'."

On the way to his rented Bombay Hills home, they stopped at the police station to complete bail formalities, then at The Warehouse for Salisbury-Smith to buy a skivvy.

The Harrisons, with Salisbury-Smith's lawyer, had tried to prepare him. The planned move to their farm was so they could lend support and to help him save for the legal bills.

For whatever reason, he couldn't muster the spirit to fight.

Phil Harrison: "I'd never seen anyone so down. I said to him, 'You will be like this for a week or two and then you will get bloody angry, and then it will become business and you will be able to deal with it'.

"He never got angry. He never got out of that sadness. You have to get over that shock before you can move forward. I think the lawyer saw that and that's why he tried to jolt him out of it by saying, 'Look, this could be 20 years of your life'."

At her uncle's home that afternoon, as Trish Harrison organised a removal company to shift his belongings, she tried to shake her uncle from his despondency.

"C'mon," she told him, "you'll be down with us on the farm by Friday."

It may be that he'd already formed his own plan. A couple of days earlier, Salisbury-Smith asked a neighbour and his landlord, Jim Wood, if they would pray for him. They did, all three together.

"Maybe Col thought there was only one way out," says Wood.

The Harrisons reject any suggestion that Salisbury-Smith had a secret life.

They say he was "open and honest", including about his living situation. At the time of his death, he had been living for some years with a 19-year-old he'd met through school.

"[X] and I do not have a sexual relationship," he had told them.

Trish Harrison says her uncle was a softie, a person who would buy gifts he could least afford (a herd of cows was his sole asset of value), and pay household bills for those he judged more needy; someone who helped the lost, who was happiest gardening, breeding rare cats, running his beloved pageants or acting.

He had appeared in adverts and in support roles in Shortland Street and a documentary about the Rainbow Warrior.

It was his selflessness, she believes, that prompted him to foster another boy who lived with him for a time.

The Harrisons, who are tidying his affairs, have letters Salisbury-Smith kept from grateful parents whose children he'd helped, and from his local MP and the mayor attesting to his passion for teaching and the way he ran Brookby School.

The latter are dated October and November 1995 - the year from which the sexual violation charges arose.

It was around this time that Salisbury-Smith decided to leave teaching. How hard he pursued a career change is unclear, but he wound up back in the classroom, this time at the South Auckland intermediate school where he met X.

X, who was 12, was warring with his own teacher and parents. Salisbury-Smith took him under his wing. The boy was a talented skateboarder and Salisbury-Smith would accompany him to skateboard parks.

He introduced the boy to golf, involved him in the beauty pageants and in recent years they moved in together. It's behaviour ripe for conjecture.

"That's the problem," says Phil Harrison, "people can misread it."

To the Harrisons it was no more than the innocent actions of a caring man. To those who work with paedophiles it may look like "grooming" - a term for the process by which abusers befriend their victims.

Either way, kids flocked to him like Robert Browning's Pied Piper.

Salisbury-Smith and X told everyone they were no more than "mates". But the Weekend Herald has learned that X told police after Salisbury-Smith's death their relationship became sexual for a period after he turned 16.

Even the boy whose complaint led to charges being laid against Salisbury-Smith describes him as a "real nice guy".

"Everybody thought he was great," he told the Weekend Herald. "It's weird that he can be that good and yet [do what he did to me].

"He was a real friendly guy. He was good with kids. He would invite kids over to his house and it wasn't a big thing. I don't know how it began that I would go over to his house alone ... how it went from, like, being a friend to doing that [sexual acts]."

Salisbury-Smith involved him in the pageants too, giving him jobs such as handing roses to the girls.

"At the time I didn't think I was being abused or anything, I just thought he was my friend."

Salisbury-Smith, who is survived by three adult children from his former marriage, began a relationship with the boy's mother and they lived for a while as a family. That relationship produced a boy, now aged 7.

The complainant has certain distinct memories - at Salisbury-Smith's home, in a paddock, in a forest - on which the charges were based, but says they are not an exhaustive list.

The two most serious charges carried maximum sentences of 20 years' jail.

The complainant says he lied when his father first asked if Salisbury-Smith had touched him.

He thinks the abuse may have been ongoing and says that for a long time he felt terribly conflicted.

Salisbury-Smith had told him he would go to jail if others found out.

"It was kind of like he made me believe everybody else thought it wasn't okay but that really it was okay."

It was as though their relationship was special, "like a love thing".

Salisbury-Smith was 46, the school principal and 36 years older than the boy. When his father raised the subject again a few years ago, the boy opened up to him and last year went to the police.

"I wanted him [Salisbury-Smith] to obviously have some type of punishment. The only thing holding me back would be the process, having to tell people about it, the embarrassment of that."

News of Salisbury-Smith's death left him feeling "a little bit mad, because he got out of it so easy. Everyone is going to just think of him as the nice guy he seemed to be".

That was brought home by an email the complainant received from a friend offering her condolences after Salisbury-Smith's death.

"Obviously, she didn't know," he says. "It's kind of weird to think about. If you heard it as a rumour you would think 'no, he would be the last person' [to be an abuser]."

That's the view of the Harrisons, who are unhappy that Salisbury-Smith's reputation is being sullied. To them, he is a victim of his dedication to young people; his death simply "a bloody waste".

The Harrisons, who say they were confident of the truth emerging through the court process, relate Salisbury-Smith's allegation that the complainant's mother put the boy up to it as retribution for him withdrawing childcare payments for their 7-year-old son.

It's a story Salisbury-Smith also told Wood, the landlord. But the police consider it is contradicted by the facts: the boy made his complaint before the payments were stopped.

As Judge Harvey noted when he lifted suppression of Salisbury-Smith's name, the public could never know the truth because the process by which society weighed evidence and passed judgment was curtailed by Salisbury-Smith's death.

Those who knew him will have to rely on their impressions of the man. The "fabulous guy" the Harrisons and others remember; the complex man who harboured a secret that the complainant says he knew, that the Masterton boy claims to have known, that maybe X knew too.

With no defendant to proceed against, charges were withdrawn. But for the sake of completion, says Counties-Manukau crime manager Detective Inspector Steve Rutherford, statements will be taken if anyone else comes forward.

- additional reporting, John Andrews