Kate Kyriacou is sitting across from me in a spare room in a side corner of The Courier-Mail newsroom in Bowen Hills, Brisbane. Pinned to the wall outside is a complex web of names and locations of cults and their leaders across Queensland and New South Wales that formed part of her research for Prayed Upon, an investigative series and podcast exploring Australian cults, their members, and those who left and have spoken out. Kate is an experienced crime reporter and while the cults that form part of her investigation – Children of God Australian Anglican Catholic Mission, among others – are not considered illegal, some former members believe these communities are examples of coercive control on a group scale. I ask her: where does one draw the line between a freely exercised lifestyle choice and a problematic, coercive cult?
“That was very difficult, actually, because I certainly did not want to be responsible for calling people out on living an alternative lifestyle,” Kate tells me. “But the more we looked into it, the more concerning some of the behaviour and some of the allegations were. One of the things that we found really interesting when we went to the government and asked them about home schooling, and what were the regulations around home schooling is that it didn’t appear to be very highly regulated at all.” Cult survivors spoke about domestic violence, children not being educated, and financial control by cult leaders. “That’s a difference to me. Alternative lifestyles are absolutely fine. Taking away someone’s choices is when it becomes a cult.”
Kate Kyriacou is the Crime and Courts Editor for The Courier-Mail in Brisbane.
Is there a purpose to these investigations beyond the reporting of facts? “To me there is,” Kate says. “There doesn’t necessarily have to be in journalism, sometimes you’re just telling a story…But I don’t like to go to all this trouble without a goal.” Kate’s goal for the investigation? Push for a debate on whether coercive control legislation should be applied to take in cult-like groups. “One former cult member told us … half the cults will be wiped out tomorrow, if there was actually (coercive control law) enforcement on the leaders.” Kate also pushed for child victims of sexual abuse involved in the Children of God cult – now rebranded as Family International, a common move by these cults – to be included in the National Redress Scheme arising from the Royal Commission into Child Abuse in Institutions. The NSW government volunteered as a third-party to compensate victims, but victims from the rest of Australia can’t access redress. Kate’s efforts in contacting jurisdictions around Australia led to assurances that if survivors submitted applications, they would be heard. “That was really great to get that sort of reassurance to these people that if they were to fill out this horrific application form detailing the abuse they suffered as children that there’ll be listened to.”
Kate is deliberate about her language in the way only a seasoned crime reporter could be – she knows her words are important, particularly when dealing with vulnerable people like cult survivors. “The best feedback we got from this whole project was the survivors that we spoke to, were happy with it,” she says. To tell these stories well is “a real learning curve” involving mistakes along the way. “Every time you speak to somebody, you learn something new about how you should do your job.” Talk to your colleagues, come with good intentions, and do the best you can, Kate says.
When I ask Kate if she plans on meeting any police sources today, she laughs. “I think it’s important for journalists to not talk about sources. And I think, I mean, sure it’s part of every journalist’s job – but you have to be very careful to protect the people who you talk to.” Journalists talk to people for many reasons, and journalists must constantly balance the public’s right to know information with making sure their stories don’t interference with serious police investigations. “You need to be a good communicator,” Kate says. “You have to communicate, even if it means talking with the media section of the Queensland Police Service.” She admits it is sometimes difficult to know whether the information she’s putting as a journalist is for better or not – hence why communication is important.
Kate found journalism through her love of reading books and writing and stumbled into a job as a crime reporter by chance. “In high school, English was my favourite subject. And I wanted to be able to do a job where I could write all the time. And to me, that job was journalism.” After uni she got a job at a country newspaper in Mildura, only to find the police reporter had gone on holidays. “I really enjoyed it, and I know that’s a weird way to phrase writing about really confronting topics. But to me, it’s one of those jobs where you feel like you can often help with something, even if it’s in a small way.” She recalls writing road safety stories in Mildura after reporting on horror crashes. “You really hope that one day someone reads them, and it makes them feel differently about how they drive on the roads.”
The Sting: The Undercover Operation That Caught Daniel Morcombe’s Killer is a masterclass in investigative journalism.
Which leads us to death knocks, the industry term for when a journalist seeks out the family of a person who has died to interview them for a story. Kate has done hundreds of them over her career and says its “really heavy thing” for her to tell their stories. “When we have new journos start here, they often are really, really uncomfortable with the idea of approaching families when someone has died…it’s obviously a really difficult thing to do.” Kate’s experience is that “some of the most incredible, powerful, important stories I’ve ever told, are a result of that.” Death knocks give families a chance to share more about a person who has died, and “often people do want to talk, because they want people to know about the person that they loved.” She recalls knocking on the door of the home an 18-year-old boy who had died in a car crash in Mildura. The house was set up for the boy’s 18th birthday party, with streamers, balloons, and presents all set out. “And of course, he wasn’t coming home, so it was just horrific…It’s incredibly important for me to tell that story in the right way…And even though it’s a very difficult thing to do. You just never know what people want to say.”
The case that affected Kate more than all the others is the domestic violence murder of Glennis Haywood. “Her story is a real example of when people say: ‘why doesn’t she just leave?’ And it’s never as simple as that.” Haywood had left her husband Neil after a long, abusive relationship in which Neil would tie her to naked to the clothesline and beat her – “he was an absolute predator”, says Kate. Glennis snuck away with the help of her friends at the weekly Weight Watchers meeting her husband allowed her to attend. She was in hiding with a new partner when her son Matthew contacted her wanting to reconnect over dinner. “That was him luring her out of hiding,” Kate explains. “He set her up so that she was murdered by Neil…He was arrested after some time, they found her body…he buried her in a septic tank.” Neil was arrested after a siege with police and then committed suicide in prison. Matthew, the son, was convicted over his role in the murder. “I think about Glennis all the time, because she tried so hard to safely leave…I just felt sad about Glennis’s story because she tried to get away. And it was her son who lured her out and betrayed her. Like, what an incredible betrayal of a woman who only ever tried to protect you. So yeah…People are complicated.”
I take up that thread – how has Kate’s view of people changed reporting on such horrific crimes for so long? “I think you have a real awareness of what people can do. And that people can be very evil, or people have a mental illness and not understand their actions, or they can be a sociopath, and very much understand their actions.” But then there’s the flipside: people can be good, too. “I’ve met so many police officers who have gone so above and beyond to solve a crime,” Kate says. She mentions Loyyd and Sue Clarke, the parents of another domestic violence victim, Hannah Clarke. “You’re lucky that you meet the good people and not just hear about the bad people, because otherwise I think it would be too much.”
There’s so much more I could write about our interview – you’ll have to listen to the episode for her full description of the fascinating police investigation that led to the arrest of Daniel Morcombe’s killer – but I’ll end the story here, with Kate’s explanation of why she’s still a crime journalist two decades on: “I think people need to know what happens in the world. And people need to know what other people are capable of. I don’t think you need to drown in that information. But how can we fix things if we sort of bury our heads in the sand over them?”