Joan Clayton was sitting on the veranda at her villa, overlooking the
beautiful Atlantic under a clear blue sky, when her son showed her an
article that would destroy her holiday – and Joan’s life as she knew it.
She had arrived in Lanzarote just days earlier with her
husband, Bill Carney, looking forward to a two-week break from the
demands of running their busy guest house in Scotland.
Joan was hoping
to relax, sunbathe and have a chance to plan with Bill their imminent
retirement to the rolling Cotswolds in England.
Then her adult
son Paul rang her mobile, sounding upset and urgent.
He said he had to
talk to her and left his own holiday on the Spanish mainland to meet
Joan in Lanzarote.
He immediately sent her husband away, asking to speak to her alone.
She knew something had to be wrong but she could never have imagined the
revolting news that he would share.
‘While Bill went off for a
walk, Paul opened the laptop and told me he had something to show me,’
Joan told the Irish Mail on Sunday. ‘He said he wished I didn’t have to
read it but said it was his duty as my son to do what he was about to
do.
‘He went online and called up a newspaper article about the
Murphy Report, which, at the time, I’d never heard of. I still wish I
never had heard of the Murphy Report.’
It was there that Joan read
for the first time that her husband had been cast out of the Roman
Catholic Church following dozens of complaints about his abuse of
juveniles.
The Murphy Report labelled Carney a ‘serial sex
abuser’ and, in a damning 40 pages, chronicled how he was linked to at
least 32 complaints and suspicions of abuse.
‘I read about
what Bill was supposed to have done and I just felt physically sick,’
said Joan. ‘I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I couldn’t believe
this was the same Bill – my Bill – doing all these vile, awful things to
these poor young boys.
‘When Bill returned, I couldn’t look at
him, let alone speak to him, so I asked Paul to deal with it. Paul and
Bill went for a long walk together and spoke privately for some time but
I’m unsure of exactly what was said.
‘I was too upset, confused,
emotional and, yes, cross, to talk to Bill then so, when they got back
to the villa, I told Paul I needed to get away and try to get my head
around what I’d read about my husband.
‘I just didn’t know what to think at that stage but I knew there was no way I wanted to share a bed with him that night.’
Joan
knew Bill had once been a priest, drummed out of the Catholic Church,
he’d always told her, because of his drinking.
His alcoholism had
gripped him so tightly, he’d explained, that when parishioners could no
longer decipher his increasingly incoherent sermons, their complaints
grew so loud and frequent that he was expelled.
So he’d said.
But now, in the winter sun in the early afternoon at their luxurious villa, Joan was learning a different truth.
The
Murphy Report, compiled by Judge Yvonne Murphy on how the Dublin
archdiocese handled sex abuse complaints against its clergy, identified
the former Father Carney as a paedophile.
In fact, it was his assaults
on two altar boys that had led to his expulsion 30 years earlier.
Not that he admitted it, even when confronted with the evidence on that winter’s afternoon in November 2009.
‘He
told me the report was a pack of lies,’ Joan said from the
Gloucestershire home where she once believed she would share the rest of
her days with Carney.
There is no denying, however, that during his time as a priest in
Dublin, Carney pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault and he
was given probation.
Six families were paid compensation by the Catholic
Church and, in 1992, Carney was defrocked after church authorities
convicted him under canon law of child sex abuse.
However, the sexual predator refused to leave the parish house where he lived until the Church paid him €35,000.
A
psychiatric assessment of Carney included in the Murphy Report
describes the former priest as having a ‘psychopathic personality
disorder’.
More worryingly, the assessment states that the former
priest’s ‘refusal to acknowledge his paedophilia means the prognosis for
a cure is bleak’.
And Carney still refused to acknowledge his
guilt to his wife in Lanzarote – and stayed on the island while she
returned to Scotland to put their affairs in order and separate their
lives.
She told for the first time of her relationship with the disgraced priest, whom she still calls ‘my Bill’.
She
described how they met in 1995 at what she described as a ‘grab a
granny’ singles night at the Golden Valley Hotel in Cheltenham, about 15
miles from her home.
Divorced six years earlier from the father
of her three grown-up sons, Joan went along to the disco with a group of
female friends. ‘Bill was with a few of his mates and we got chatting,’
said the former nurse.
‘He had a nice way about him. He was very gentlemanly and he seemed kind and gentle with it.
‘He told me he was running a pub for a friend of his, the Prince Arthur in Gloucester. It’s a Pizza Hut now.
‘He was on soft drinks but he bought me a glass or two of wine and we had a few dances. I liked him.
‘At
the end of the night, he asked me for my phone number and I gave it to
him without hesitation because I wanted to see him again and get to know
him.’
But getting to know Carney wasn’t going to be
straightforward.
It would be almost two years – by which time they were
living together – before Carney told her he was once a priest.
Even when
he revealed his ecclesiastical past, he concealed the reason for his
defrocking.
‘He said he’d been asked to go away and beat his drink problems,’ she
said. ‘He told me he was a chronic alcoholic and that the people in
church for his services were no longer able to understand what he was
saying because he was slurring his words so badly.
‘But he said he’d conquered the disease and that he hadn’t had a drink for 30 years. I never saw him touch a drop of alcohol.
‘I
was full of admiration for what he’d achieved in beating alcoholism and
I fell in love with him very quickly. He was the most adorable,
good-hearted man.’
Their relationship soon grew serious and, in
the late 1990s, the couple moved to St Andrews in Scotland, where they
bought an eight-bedroom guesthouse overlooking the sea. In 2004, they
married.
‘It was hard work but we had the most wonderful time. We
put our hearts and souls into making the business a success and enjoyed
the rewards.
‘At the end of every season, we’d have a nice
holiday, which is why we were in Lanzarote. We were preparing to retire
at the time. I was almost 70 and we decided we’d worked hard enough for
too long. We put the guesthouse on the market and planned to move back
to this house here in Northleach, the town where I was brought up and
had spent so much of my life. We’d gone on holiday to recharge our batteries and discuss our retirement plans in detail.’
But
those discussions never happened.
Instead, Joan endured harrowing
discussions with her family about how the life she’d planned with her
husband could never be.
On the night she learned the awful truth,
Joan moved out of the villa she and Carney were sharing, then left him
alone on the island.
‘Paul took me to a hotel and the next day,
we got a flight home and I went to Scotland on my own to wait for Bill,
who I hoped would soon come home and tell me it was all a terrible
misunderstanding and prove to me he wasn’t the person who described in
this report.’
But Carney was in no hurry to return to Britain.
Instead, he remained
in Lanzarote for a year, leaving his wife to handle the sale of the
guesthouse and furniture.
Two months after Paul confronted Carney
in Lanzarote, Joan began divorce proceedings and now lives alone in the
neat, detached home in Northleach.
She says she still loves the former
priest and will carry him in her heart ‘until the day I die’ – but her
family insisted she could no longer be his wife.
‘It caused
absolute hell in my family. I’ve got three sons and they wanted me to
have nothing more to do with Bill. They told me the best thing – the
only thing – I was to walk away. And my mother, who is 88, sat
me down and said: ‘If you go back to Bill after this, you’ll have to
leave the country because you’ll be hounded for ever more here and
you’ll be married to a man your family detest.
‘I suppose I had to choose between Bill and my entire family. He
made the decision easier because for a whole year after I first saw the
report, he’d left me to sort out all our joint responsibilities, like
selling up the guesthouse and sorting our possessions out. I
literally didn’t hear from him for a whole year. He just stayed in
Lanzarote and didn’t give a damn about how I was feeling or what I was
going through back in Britain – and I was going through hell. I thought he was incredibly selfish for that.’
Eventually,
towards the end of 2010, he returned to Britain and agreed to meet Joan
in Morecambe on the Lancashire coast, where she was on a break, on a
bitterly cold winter’s day.
‘He looked much the same, a little older and a little sadder maybe, but he was still my Bill – the Bill I loved.
‘I
asked him to tell me the truth about what I’d read in the report and he
looked me in the eyes and said it was a pack of lies. He said that even
though he’d been a useless drunk at the time, he’d have remembered if
he’d done what the report said he’d done. He denied the assaults
and he insisted he had never been interested in young boys in that way.
Certainly, in all the years I knew him, he never once showed any sign
that he was into boys, young or old. We had a normal, full, loving
relationship, emotionally and, yes, physically. I believed him
100% because I loved him and trusted him and because I didn’t believe
the man I loved could ever be capable of the things he was accused of. I
still believe him, to this day.’
Her head won out over her heart,
however, and by the time they met again she was resolute in her
decision to end their relationship. I’d already made up my mind
that there was no way back and I’d left him for good,’ she said. ‘But I
wanted to have that last meeting so I could look him in the eye and ask
him what had happened all those years ago. We were standing on the beach in our coats against a wintry breeze. We
chatted for an hour or two and we had one last hug as we stood on the
beach, then I left for my hotel alone. I didn’t look back.’
The
guesthouse sold for £450,000 (€525,000) and Joan agreed to give Carney
£100,000 (€116,000) in cash while she kept the remainder to pay off the
mortgage on the house where she now lives.
The gold band Carney
gave her on their wedding day has been sold on eBay for £30 and every
photograph of him burnt by her sons.