The Killing of Sister McCormack by Anne Henderson

Author:Anne Henderson [Anne Henderson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780730492146
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

‘Apocryphal,’ he says, when I put to him the story of the killer taking communion.

I am on one side of the sitting room in Father Leo Donnelly’s parish house next to my husband and Leo faces us from a seat opposite. Standing on the roof of the house later, we scan the shacks of the squatter suburb alongside, next to an anthropological dig, a dust bowl fenced off probably to stop further invasions from people looking for space to live. Among these people Father Leo spreads the Gospel. His parishioners face a more complex brutality in their tin and mud homes – electricity pinched from the main line, shanty houses dangerously unsafe, a lack of proper amenities while government after government collapses in a heap of corruption – than the single event, however tragic, that we – a well-heeled pair of visitors from Sydney – are interested in.

There is a lengthy silence emphasising the gulf between us. Father Donnelly, I have been told, is rather deaf. But he had heard my question and I watch his eyes as he registers what I am implying.

Leo’s edginess does not abate. It comes and goes in surges. Back in Sydney, I send him emails to check things I had read relating to the case for I know Leo is contemptuous of journalists who do not check hearsay before publishing. But at one stage it obviously all gets too much for him and I receive an exasperated plea to let it all rest. He is obviously fed up with hearing what he would probably have described as bullshit. So I stop the emails, telling him to ‘go in peace’. This is late in 2000.

So it takes a degree of temerity to start up another round of emails come the New Year after a bundle of documents arrive from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra. Early in 2001 I succeed in obtaining, through freedom of information in the Department of Foreign Affairs, the papers relating to the Irene McCormack case. Among these are notes of conversations and meetings held in Lima at the US and Canadian embassies within days of the murders. Some of the notes made at the US embassy in Lima, copies of which had been sent to the Australian ambassador in Brazilia, do not add up. There was no Australian embassy in Lima in 1991 so the US and Canadian embassies had assisted the Australians in their enquiries, those well-meant but futile attempts to get at the truth. I could imagine the confusion surrounding personal and public reports of the killings on 21 May 1991. No doubt much of the data was anecdotal and often muddled. But I needed to check it.

However, asking Leo to verify or refute some of the accounts of what was supposed to have taken place on that day in Huasahuasi – matters written as fact in government documents – sends him wild with paranoia and his email in reply is near hysterical. It shakes me and leaves me contemplating how far Peru had to go to escape its era of terror.

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