Indecent assault accused 'curious' about girls

A former Exclusive Brethren church member facing charges of indecently assaulting young girls says he put his hand up the nightie of a young Nelson girl and touched her through her underwear because he was "curious".

"I was curious about what young girls looked like and what they were like," Clive Allen Petrie, 74, said in the Nelson District Court yesterday.

Petrie, of Wakatu, Nelson, faces nine charges of indecently assaulting girls under 12 years old and one charge of inducing a young girl to do an indecent act on him. A charge of indecent assault and a charge of inducing a girl under 12 to do an indecent act were yesterday withdrawn by the Crown.

Petrie has admitted one charge of indecent assault on a girl under 12 at her Nelson home. The victim, now aged 56, alleges Petrie assaulted her more than once.

The Crown alleges Petrie indecently assaulted four girls in total. It alleges the offending occurred in Nelson and Motueka in the 1950s and 1960s, with a further lot of offending, against the fourth alleged victim, now aged 31, in the Stoke area in the 1980s. The girls were different ages, but all were aged between five and nine when Petrie allegedly assaulted them.

Two sisters, now aged 54 and 63, say Petrie touched them indecently while they were away from other adults on the Motueka farm they grew up on. The fourth alleged victim said when she was five or six she sometimes stayed with Petrie and his wife in his Wakatu house and sometimes slept in the same bed as them. She remembered waking up once with Petrie's hands touching her and her hand down his pyjama pants when she slept in their bed.

Petrie told his lawyer, Robert Lithgow, QC, yesterday that he had been made to leave the church after it discovered he had indecently assaulted the girl in the 1950s. He was allowed back in after a month.

He said touching the girl that way was a "vile thing to do" and he didn't know why he did it.

At the time he was 23 or so, but didn't know anything about sex or women, he said.

Petrie was adamant he had only indecently assaulted a girl on that one occasion and told Crown prosecutor Glen Marshall that this had satisfied his curiosity.

He said he loved the fourth alleged victim too much to do anything harmful to her, and described her as "sweet". "We treated her like a daughter."

Ethel Petrie, whom Petrie married when he was 29, also gave evidence yesterday.

She said the fourth girl was never allowed to sleep in the same bed as them. On occasions the girl fell asleep in the bed, she was moved back to her own bed when Petrie went to bed.

She said she could not imagine Petrie being able to touch the girl in her bed without her knowing.

In his closing submissions, Mr Marshall told the jury of nine women and three men that the similarities between the four women's stories supported the allegations.

Each woman had spoken about events occurring to them when they were aged five to nine, and each of them talked about Petrie touching their vagina.

Mr Marshall said Petrie's explanation that he had touched the girl out of curiosity was "just ridiculous" and that over the years Petrie had had an obsession with young girls.

Many people led sheltered lives but they did not, when they were 24, decide to embark on a "journey of curiosity" by lifting a young girl's nightie and touching her, he said.

In closing, Mr Lithgow said the two sisters' stories were too similar, even though the events happened 10 years apart, and that it was difficult to believe they had not spoken to each other.

It would have been easy for those women to have their memories poisoned by people who remembered that Petrie had once been thrown out of the church for an indecent assault.

He told the jury just because Petrie admitted one indecent assault did not mean the other alleged cases were true.

"What I ask you to do on behalf of Clive Petrie is to find that he's told you the truth and to find him not guilty of all the charges."

Judge Tony Zohrab was to sum up the case today.

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