Sexual Predator at Catholic School Showed Abused Boy Corpse to Force Him Into Silence

The Royal Commission of Inquiry streamed hearings focusing on abuse cases that occurred at three Catholic institutions in Christchurch - the Marylands School, the St Joseph's orphanage, and the Hebron Trust.

An investigation into recurring sex abuse in religious schools in New Zealand has revealed that one of the victims was shown a dead man as a threat.

In his testimony, Donald Ku, a former student of the Marylands School, stated he had been abused by convicted child sex predator Brother Bernard McGrath (who is now serving 33 years in an Australian prison) for four years.

"After a while, I started to just adapt to the sexual things that happened at Marylands. I was also threatened by Brother McGrath to keep quiet about what was going on. Once he took me to the hospital morgue and showed me a corpse as a way of silencing me", he said.

Steven Long, who is also an abuse survivor, said he too was threatened by the predator.

"Once Brother McGrath made me strip naked and clean out one of the coffins...he then flipped me up, slammed the coffin lid down on me…he lifted the lid, grabbed me around the throat and said, 'This is where you're going to end up' if I said anything about his abuse".

Of the 42 priests at Marylands, 21 had abuse complaints against them, according to the commission. At least 144 people who attended the facility reported abuse, and in total, 1,686 cases of abuse were reported in 87 days of a public hearing.

According to an interim report, published over a year ago, up to 250,000 children and teens were abused, physically or sexually, in the country's educational institutions from the 1960s to the early 2000s.