This moment has been almost 30 years coming.
Six women have finally seen justice.
The man that sexually assaulted them, that stole their innocence, is behind bars.
And now these six women who've been suffering in silence can finally meet each other for the first time in decades, to share stories and support.
Because it's not about him anymore, it's about them.
And after 30 years, Odette Visser isn't alone anymore.
"I've kept this secret since I was 10," she says.
"If I can just let it go, and I can push it out, maybe it will land at the feet of the one person who actually needs to take some responsibility."
That person is Stephen Mitchell.
Last year, the ABC revealed how Mitchell had systemically groomed and then sexually assaulted three junior rock-climbing champions in Canberra.
Since that story was published another three victims have come forward — Visser, another rock climber, and a sixth who he groomed while employed by ACT Policing as a youth worker.
On Monday, Mitchell was sentenced to 13 years and five months in jail, with a non-parole period of nine years, after pleading guilty to six counts of child sexual assault.
It's only now that the full horror of Mitchell's systemic abuse of six children over 14 years in Canberra can be revealed, and still there are questions to be answered about how a serial paedophile was able to slip through the cracks.
How did a police investigation of Mitchell in the early 2000s fail and allow him to keep offending? How did numerous institutions look away or refuse to see what was in front of them?
It's the story of a charming con man, a king of the kids who used his position as a youth worker and coach to assault children, ruining countless lives and leaving horrific psychological scars.
A man whose whole life was devoted to grooming kids so he could sexually assault them.
"It was his every waking moment," Visser says.
"I'm enraged," says Sophie Vivian, former climber and one of Mitchell's victims.
"I'm very angry at Stephen Mitchell, but I'm angrier at the climbing community, at Sport Climbing Australia, at the Australian Federal Police, at the Australian Institute of Sport, at the PCYC and all the other institutions."
When scorpions eat rock spiders
Cops have a tradition when they meet other cops – they exchange medallions of their unit's logo.
The ACT Policing's Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Team's (SACAT) logo is a silver scorpion on a black background.
Why? Because scorpions eat spiders.
Rock spiders is the pejorative term used to describe paedophiles in Australian prisons.
Mitchell is a rock spider and he'll be spending many years in jail.
The man who led the investigation against Mitchell is acting Sergeant Paul Calatzis of ACT Policing's SACAT.
He's not the TV detective type you'd expect to be putting criminals behind bars. He's softly spoken and unassuming. In his spare time, he likes to spin goat's wool.
"It's relaxing," he says.
But he's methodical and dogged. The investigation into Mitchell began in the middle of 2021 and continued until he pleaded guilty last November.
"I took this case home, and I worked on every spare moment I could," Calatzis says.
"I wrote the statement of facts — the first draft of it — in my living room at 3am.
"You don't want to walk away, knowing that you left something in the tank.
"You want to be able to go home at night saying you've done everything possible."
It began when a former gymnast on an Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) scholarship contacted ACT Police in June 2021.
"My acting sergeant came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Are you busy? I've got an ex-Commonwealth Games athlete coming in, she wants to talk about something that occurred in the 90s'," Calatzis says.
That former athlete — who we're calling Gymnast A — had been in a support group forum for former abused gymnasts where she met Vivian.
Vivian had told her how she had been groomed and sexually assaulted by Mitchell, and suddenly a light bulb went off — Mitchell had groomed her too. For years.
It began in 1994 when she was just 11 and living at the AIS on a scholarship.
"He was around those halls of residence all the time," Gymnast A told the ABC last year, noting he seemed to have free access to the athletes' living spaces.
"[He used to] frequently hang out with the gymnasts in the residence's recreation hall."
Mitchell wrote her letters and gave her gifts — stickers and personalised mementos like a necklace engraved with the nickname he'd given her.
"There is no doubt when I look back at the evidence that I've kept, that it's child grooming," she says.
Mitchell also used to watch her train at the Institute from the public gallery, where he would wave to her. But that ended when one of the Institute coaches asked the gymnast about the man in the balcony who was waving to them.
Visser remembers Mitchell talking about what had happened.
"He told me that a girl waved to him, and they took her behind a curtain, they yelled at her, and she came back crying," she says.
"He said it was because of him."
The AIS closed the public gallery shortly after the gymnast was quizzed, but denies the decision was linked to Mitchell.
Calatzis did some digging and found Mitchell had been employed part-time by the Institute of Sport from 1994 to 2002.
His role was a sports experience advisor. His job was taking tour groups of school children through the AIS. He ran some small sport programs and would drive the AIS bus that took kids in the residences to the local schools.
Calatzis discovered Mitchell had also held numerous other youth worker jobs around Canberra, while also coaching a troupe of young rock climbers for a decade.
He formed the view Mitchell could be a serial paedophile.
"So from that point, I held suspicion that an offence may have been occurring, there are other victims out there, he's had access to victims for decades," Calatzis says.
"At that point, I knew this had the potential to be quite a significant investigation."
'I loved the attention ... and I was petrified'
Visser has kept her story a secret for 29 years.
That's not unusual.
On average it takes about 23 years for victims of child sexual assault to reveal what's happened to them – sometimes it can be 40; sometimes the stories are never told.
When Visser speaks she does so in slow deliberate sentences, punctuated by long pauses. As the words emerge and become real, the gravity of what she's saying hits home.
Three decades later she can still shock herself with how much she was under Mitchell's spell.
What seemed normal to her at the time – an 11-year-old girl in a relationship with a man in his 30s — is still revealing itself to her three decades later as deeply wrong.
"It actually took me a long time, a really long time, to realise just how bad the situation was," she says.
It began in 1994, when Visser was about 10.
Mitchell had befriended her mother during a photography course and spent time with Visser and her family.
She remembers him taking her on a bike ride with a group of older children from the Erindale Youth Centre where he worked in Canberra's south.
It was very hot, and because she didn't have the strength of the others, Visser fell behind and Mitchell stayed with her.
"We went to the shops to get some fruit and I took my clothes off and ran under the sprinklers at the oval at Melrose High School," she says.
"That was a trust-building event for my parents. He looked after me."
The two began to spend more time together. Mitchell was well-connected and would take Visser wherever he went.
Because he was a youth worker, he was involved in numerous activities to do with kids.
"He was the organiser and kind of the leader of the activities, all the kids followed him," she says.
"But he took me along, which made me his special sidekick that always got looked after more than anyone else."
He took her to movies, restaurants and fireworks displays and her parents were happy that someone was looking after their daughter – one of four children.
"It was clear I was having a great time, I was taken care of," Visser says.
"He put in a lot of effort to make sure that he was trusted by them.
"The term's grooming."
Mitchell was putting in the groundwork on Visser and her parents at the same time he was grooming Gymnast A, and he was using the same techniques: giving Visser gifts, making her feel special.
"I adored him," she says.
"He treated me like I was the most special thing he'd ever come across and I believed that and ran with it. I loved the attention."
Before long, Visser began spending nights with Mitchell in the shed he lived in that was attached to the garage at the back of his mother's house in Canberra's Belconnen.
"My best recollection is that I would be 10 years old when I started staying in the shed with him," she says.
"It wasn't renovated, there was no carpet. There was no toilet. There was no television.
"It did have electricity and a single bed, but not a lot else."
That's when the sexual assaults began.
"That shed was cold and to make things worse, he really liked it cold," Visser recalls.
"He would put the fan on even in the middle of the Canberra winter because it meant we needed to go to bed.
"We'd sleep together the whole night in the single bed and there wasn't any space between us.
"He would hold me all night and press himself up against me."
She says he frequently gave her full-body massages.
"He would rub me and my private parts," she says.
"The massages were probably the most intimate and inappropriate thing that happened particularly when you remember that I was 10. It was just confusing.
"He hugged me all night, told me I was gorgeous and good. I loved the attention.
"And I was petrified."
As Visser moved on from primary school the assaults increased.
"In high school, it starts to get too appalling to contemplate," she says.
The two saw each other every day, even though Mitchell was now in his 30s and Visser had only just entered her teens.
"He would park a few streets away from my house and pick me up and either take me to school, or I wouldn't go (to school), and he would take me to work with him," she says.
"I missed a lot of school – but he managed to make a meeting with my year coordinator and convince her that he'd have all of the contact with the school, not the parents – and it happened."
Mitchell even bought Visser a Russian-style three-band wedding ring when she was 13.
"It meant we were together," she says.
"And because we did it in plain sight, nobody, nobody did anything."
Visser says the whole period has been a darkness between her and her family throughout her life.
"It's always been a sadness between my family and myself, we don't ever talk about when I was a teenager. All those years, it was like I was just dead," she says.
There was one red flag: Mitchell had a part-time job in the Erindale Youth Centre working after school hours with local kids.
He would pick Visser up from school each day and take her to his work at the youth centre.
"Everybody at the youth centre thought it was odd, but it was accepted for a period of time that we were just together every day," she says.
"He brought me there, and he took me home."
But in 1997, a new youth worker in the centre spoke up about Mitchell and Odette.
"She knew that it wasn't OK, it was against the rules — you're not supposed to spend time with the kids outside the centre," she says.
"She did warn him first.
"He told me I had to be more careful, we had to be more secretive.
"But we were never going to stop seeing each other and it only took a few days until he was let go and he lost his job."
Erindale didn't report Mitchell's sacking to the police.
Calatzis says at the time it would be regarded as "suspicious contact at best".
Losing the job was a blow, but Mitchell still had his other job at the Australian Institute of Sport, and he used that access to groom and assault more children.
'I was a lure and my climbing success allowed him to operate the way that he did'
By the late 1990s, rock climbing was moving from a fringe outdoor pursuit to a legitimate, albeit fledgling sport.
Mitchell wasn't a climber, but it was the sport he chose to masquerade in as an elite coach.
Vivian was the first girl he lured into the sport.
She had been an exceptionally talented gymnast – so good that she was accepted into the gymnastics program at the Australian Institute of Sport in 1991 when she was just seven.
But the experience was brutal.
She recalls being yelled at, humiliated and made to endure excruciating exercises.
She suffered painful injuries and endured physical, emotional, and psychological abuse.
"It was a horrible place," she says.
"It completely broke any love I had of the sport."
She left in 1995, a year after Mitchell began working at the Institute and while he was grooming gymnast A.
It's possible that Mitchell saw Vivian train before the public viewing gallery was closed.
By 1997, she was 12, at high school in Canberra and trying her hand at climbing.
As a former gymnast — agile, flexible, strong and fearless — rock climbing was an easy transition and she loved it.
"Climbing breaks all the rules," she says.
"You get from bottom to top however you can. You can fling your legs and arms about. It's very pure, it's very strong, it's just great, it's a great sport."
She won her first competitive event at an inter-school competition and suspects Mitchell saw her there and tracked her down.
Their first introduction was at the Belconnen Youth Centre.
He told her he'd worked at the Australian Institute of Sport where he'd spent a lot of time with gymnasts and had subsequently been training ex-gymnasts in rock climbing.
It wasn't true – he wasn't a coach. But he offered to take her under his wing and she accepted.
And for a child used to the brutality of gymnastics, Mitchell — with his grooming technique by now honed on Visser and Gymnast A — was a breath of fresh air.
"He treated me as though I was special," she says.
"He was very praising of me and my athletic ability, very hands-on, lots of hugs."
"There were lots of lollies, lots of fun."
Vivian soon excelled as a climber.
She won an Australian junior championship and by 1999 had won the junior X Games competition in Thailand, which at the time was the pinnacle of the sport.
But with the success came the pain: repeated sexual assaults over years.
"There was always a shadow over my achievements because of what was going on in the background," she says.
"So, although I was very proud of my climbing success, I don't know that I ever felt I was never able to hold that properly I suppose."
She doesn't have any of her many climbing medals — she threw them all into Lake Burley Griffin when her career was over.
And there's the guilt and sadness at being the unwitting pawn in his greater game.
"I started winning competitions very quickly and he used that success to present himself as legitimate, and he used my ability to bring more girls into the sport and to set himself up as a legitimate coach," she says.
"It's very hard to come to understand that I was a lure and my climbing success allowed him to operate the way that he did."
Calatzis explains it was all part of the show.
"The way Mitchell spoke about Sophie to other rock climbers or potential rock climbers — he used her in a sense that 'look what I can achieve'," he says.
He augmented Vivian's success with a con: that he was somehow connected to the Institute of Sport as a coach. Rock climbing wasn't an Institute sport and Mitchell wasn't an Institute coach, but he presented as one.
"I mean he walked around with the AIS logo on his chest the entire time, or the PCYC or various other things," Vivian says.
"He seemed to know everybody at the Australian Institute of Sport, seemed very well connected everywhere we went."
But Calatzis says it was a ruse that had subtle tells.
"He did wear an AIS branded jacket, which you could buy from any sort of souvenir shop," he says.
"The key point with that AIS jacket is he had ACT rock climbing embroidered on it.
"Rock climbing wasn't an Olympic sport. It wasn't trained at the AIS. It wasn't taught at the AIS.
"But what he presented himself as was very much I'm of this calibre."
And Mitchell made use of the Institute's facilities for his climbers.
With his access pass, he took them to areas out of limits to the general public: saunas and recovery pools.
Mitchell's crimes against Vivian include a number of times he assaulted her at the Australian Institute of Sport's Swimming complex in the late '90s.
The ABC asked the AIS a series of questions about Mitchell, the assault on the Institute's grounds, his employment at the Institute and the closure of the gymnastics public viewing gallery, but it declined to comment.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Australian Sports Commission which runs the Institute of Sport told the ABC: "Rock climbing was not an AIS program and Stephen Mitchell was never an AIS coach."
"The safety and wellbeing of athletes and children is central to everything the Australian Sports Commission does and is demonstrated in a range of measures," the spokesman said.
Outwardly it all looked legitimate.
"He had this delusion of grandeur, how he sold himself, how he sold his team was incredibly high. So it was no longer the ACT rock climbing squad, he called himself the Australian team, and he was the Australian rock climbing coach," Calatzis says.
"And so from a parent's perspective, you have someone who's approached you, who's promising you the world, promising your child the world, and it's hard to find fault in that."
It was all part of the grooming process.
"Mitchell was a very charismatic person, that if you did not know anything about him, you'd be friends with him. He's charming, he's personable, you could talk for hours with him," Calatzis says.
"And he wasn't just offering coaching, he was offering to pick them up from school to take them to appointments and grab them at dinner on the way home."
It's a feature of Mitchell that everyone remembers. He spent his entire life around children, taking them on trips, going camping, driving them to school, going to charity events, buying them gifts, takeaway – making them feel special.
"From my investigation, that was his entire life," Calatzis says.
"He committed his entire life to this offending."
And it worked.
'The coach is a god, and you can't say anything wrong against the coach'
More children joined the squad, including Jessie Orrell (nee Riley), in 1998 and Libby Hall the following year.
Both Orrell and Hall were former elite gymnasts: Orrell had won ACT junior titles and Hall – like Vivian – had trained at the AIS.
And both had experienced the same levels of emotional, physical and psychological abuse in gymnastics that forced them to give up the sport at a very young age, and try their hand at the new, exciting and seemingly friendlier sport of rock climbing.
It was as if Mitchell was deliberately targeting psychologically wounded children and created the perfect sport for them to excel in – a theory Vivian believes stands up.
She has a Master's degree in neurology and wrote a thesis on the effects of trauma on gymnasts.
"Gymnastics just makes you so incredibly vulnerable to sexual abuse," she says.
"You're used to being barely naked around grown adults who are touching you without your permission, who are hurting you.
"You're used to not speaking up, to holding it all in, and you're just groomed to stay silent and put up with it.
"So, the coach is a god, and you can't say anything wrong against the coach.
"And he knew that. That's why he preyed on gymnasts."
Visser remembers sitting in the car for hours on end in the AIS car park while Mitchell was inside.
"He talked about how he was helping the girls, taking them out of awful circumstances where they were being pushed way too hard by aggressive coaches in gymnastics, and that they'd all fallen in love with a new sport," she says.
"And he was really, really quite proud of himself for bringing everybody together."
'We'd been together on and off since I was 10'
It was around this time, when Visser was 16, that she and Mitchell stopped seeing each other.
"I was nearing the end of high school and I was starting to get interested in other boys," she says.
"I discussed with him about a particular boy that I liked. That really upset him.
"He started to get quite upset about me wanting to meet other boys and he drove me down to the lake, he wouldn't speak to me, he was crying."
They drifted apart and Visser admits she struggled to make sense of the bizarre power imbalance of a so-called "relationship" between a girl and a man in his 30s, who had repeatedly sexually assaulted her since she was 10.
"You know, I was 16, and I had an older man telling me he loved me," she says.
"We'd been together on and off since I was 10 and I still didn't understand that it was that wrong.
"I knew it was a secret, but I didn't understand how wrong it was."
The scars though, cut deep, and are still present 30 years later.
"Over the years, it's manifested itself in a lot of different ways. Sometimes sleeplessness. Poor relationships," she says.
"A lack of self-worth, a lot of avoidance and anxiety.
"It comes back when you least expect it — in moments that are supposed to be happy, I'm not happy."
During Mitchell's sentencing hearing, Visser told the ACT Supreme Court: "The insomnia and nightmares never end, meaning my mental health is literally under siege 24 hours a day.
"Everyday activities have always been hard for me and that makes me so angry. So angry that I am not the mother, the friend, or the partner that I want to be.
"When I taught myself to block my feelings of despair, I also blocked out fun, happiness, concentration, and creativity," she told the court.
'It affects you for years and years and years'
By the late 90s rock climbing was a consuming infatuation for Mitchell and his troupe of climbers.
"I was lucky enough to find rock climbing, which instantly was a passion for me," Hall says.
"And I knew as soon as I started, and I won my first ever competition, I wanted to be the best."
The group trained religiously, though without the strict discipline and punishment that came with gymnastics.
"Most of the time, it was six days a week for several hours a day," Hall says.
"Before school, after school, weekends. When we hit peak competition season, it was even more regular. And then we would go away on trips and training. So every second weekend I was away."
All the girls became junior Australian climbing champions. They all represented Australia overseas.
Hall was the brightest star. In 2005 she won the speed category at the world junior championships in Beijing.
She was appearing on TV and in magazines, getting sponsorship offers. It should have been a highlight of her life. Instead, it is a place of intense pain.
Mitchell sexually assaulted all three of his champion climbers.
In the case of Vivian and Hall, it happened multiple times over many years.
As with Visser, all three former climbers have established successful lives with loving partners, but for all of them, Mitchell's assaults have had a devastating impact.
Vivian says Mitchell sexually assaulted her both in Canberra and at interstate climbing trips, at the AIS swimming pool, and on one occasion, on a trip to compete at the X Games in the United States.
When she was still a child, she'd had enough and ran away from home, and as she put it, "went off the rails for 10 years".
"So, I left Canberra at 15 and found myself in Sydney on my own at that age, that's not a good place to be.
"It affects you for years and years and years and particularly in the aftermath."
She experienced more sexual assaults and found herself in violent relationships.
"Child sexual abuse destroys your ability to trust other people and it destroys your ability to believe in the love of other people," she says.
"That destroys relationships, and it can be brought back but it's a very long, hard road.
"Stephen Mitchell destroyed my life," Vivian said in her Victim Impact Statement.
Both Orrell and Hall tried to take their own lives.
"I don't get to look back and be proud of the successes that I had because there's so much darkness and trauma that comes with it," Hall says.
"I haven't apologised to that little girl and said I'm sorry for not protecting you.
"I will carry it for the rest of my life: what he did, how it makes me feel, what triggers me.
"It's never going to go away. I can accept it and I can forgive myself, but it's a life sentence of trauma."
Orrell chose not to speak to the ABC for this story because of the ongoing trauma.
A few years prior to her assault by Mitchell, she had been repeatedly sexually assaulted by another man – a masseuse named Les Williamson.
It took several years for Orrell to confide in her parents that she'd been assaulted by Williamson roughly once a week between 1998 and 2000.
Horrifyingly, the same thing had happened to her sister.
It is a parent's worst nightmare – a person they had trusted violated that trust and the innocence of two of their daughters.
Orrell's mother, Lee Riley, cries when she recalls that time.
"She was nine when it first started, and she didn't tell us until she was 11," Riley says.
The Rileys confided in Mitchell, who by now had worked his way into the family as a friend and confidant.
They had met him through his work with the Canberra PCYC where he took the kids for activities and on camping trips.
"He said he had two best friends who were detectives," Riley recalls.
"And he said, 'Let me contact my friends and I'll let you know'. He rang us straight back and said, 'Oh, you need to go to the sexual assault unit — contact them in Belconnen'."
Williamson was tried and found guilty. He spent two-and-a-half years in jail.
In 2001, Orrell was sexually assaulted by Mitchell.
By the time she was 13, Orrell had been sexually assaulted by two adult men.
The effects of those assaults have been devastating. Last year she spoke to the ABC about a lifetime of living with depression and anxiety, repeated trips to psychological institutions and an inability to stay in one place.
"She does struggle," Riley says.
"She's a very private person. It's affected her, it's affected her health. It's just something she has to deal with every day."
'I didn't want to upset him by coming forward'
It could have been stopped. In 2003, Riley noticed a change in her daughter's behaviour.
"She was very distracted," Riley says. "She cried a lot, was withdrawn."
And then it all came out.
"She just had an outburst and she said that she had been sexually abused by Mitch, the climbing coach," Riley says.
Three years after they'd reported the sexual assault by Williamson, mother and daughter were back at an ACT Policing station to make a report about Mitchell. They both gave statements.
"It's not nice at all," Riley says.
"It's hard to remember things, exact times and dates and it was super stressful for Jessie.
"To even tell us (was) so stressful, and then having to go and tell complete strangers is added stress."
Hall was called in for an interview, although she has no memory of it.
Her statement shows she didn't reveal that she had been assaulted by Mitchell.
The police also contacted Visser, who by now was 21.
It had been four years since she was last assaulted by Mitchell.
She was still struggling to comprehend the gravity of what happened and to a certain level still under his spell – a part of her wanted to protect him.
"I didn't want to upset him by coming forward," she says.
"I also just found the process incredibly difficult; the police do things a little bit better these days."
She may not have told them everything, but she did reveal she'd been sexually assaulted.
"I told the police then about us having massages and sleeping in the same bed; about him rubbing himself against me," she says.
One of the stranger features of this story is Mitchell's connections with ACT Policing – the community policing arm of the Australian Federal Police.
The links were many and varied.
Mitchell had a family member in the force.
He used to run gala days at the ACT Policing drivers' training track at Majura.
Visser remembers him taking her there and being given rides in the car.
And then in 2002, Mitchell successfully applied for a position as a full-time sport and recreation officer at the ACT PCYC in a position funded by ACT Policing.
It meant he was effectively a police employee.
That position gave him access to another of his victims, who's chosen to remain anonymous.
She is known only as E, and was assaulted by Mitchell from 2001 to 2004.
And because Mitchell was employed by ACT Policing, Orrell's case was handed to the forces' Professional Standards unit to investigate.
He was interviewed and immediately suspended from his job at the PCYC.
The Unit handed a brief of evidence to the ACT director of public prosecutions in the middle of 2004.
Around the same time Libby Hall's mother, Lee de Percy, found a note in her daughter's bag.
It was written by a child, who was a casual member of Mitchell's climbing group and read:
To Mitch,
get your self a cort (sic) person because I know what you do to girls or quit your job as a coach
p.s you (sic) going down and your (sic) in trouble
De Percy says she scanned the letter and sent it to the police, who subsequently interviewed her, but she says never contacted her again.
In August 2005, E gave a statement to the police about Mitchell.
The following month, Mitchell resigned from his ACT Policing job at the PCYC, and three months later, the DPP announced it wouldn't prosecute him.
That decision is an ongoing sore for Riley 20 years later.
"They said, 'No, we didn't have enough evidence'," she recalls.
"[The police said] it was only Jessie that was saying something happened. Nobody else said anything happened and that was it. There was nothing we could do about it.
"When you go to the police, then you would think they would believe you, but they don't.
"It happened. You can't take that back. Just we've never got an apology off the police, nothing, just never from them again."
Questions remain about the thoroughness of the 2003/04 investigation, which the ABC put to Detective Sergeant Mick Woodburn, the head of ACT Policing's SACAT, and Paul Calatzis' direct boss.
Woodburn says the evidence collected in 2003/04 "was collected to the standard that one would expect the evidence to be collected back then".
He says that evidence was used in the brief sent to the DPP last year, which resulted in the charges Mitchell eventually pleaded guilty to.
Asked whether he thought there was enough evidence collected in the previous investigation to warrant a prosecution, Woodburn replied: "It's very easy for me to make that determination, but I wasn't there.
"And it's 20 years later, our investigation methodology and to be fair, our culture and our mindset has changed significantly between those years and now."
That response hasn't satisfied Riley.
"I'd like to see the police investigated," she says.
"Yes, you weren't there, but somebody needs to investigate it.
"Because it happened, and it was all just swept under the carpet."
Woodburn couldn't say if there was any link between the failed investigation and Mitchell's resignation from ACT Policing.
He does say that if Mitchell's scenario happened today, given the current rules around reporting, the outcome would have been different.
"It simply wouldn't occur," he says.
"The information would have been before police and the structures would have been there around mandatory reporting requirements such that we would have had a much better understanding of exactly what Mitch was doing."
The tragedy of the failed 2004 investigation was that it enabled Mitchell to keep offending against Libby Hall, and another girl who came into Mitchell's climbing group, who also wants to remain anonymous.
'Whispers from parents and questions'
By the early 2000s climbing was becoming a more recognised sport in Australia.
In 2005, Sport Climbing Australia (SCA) was formed and remains the sports' governing body.
Mitchell was appointed Sport Development Officer.
But within two years Mitchell's close relationships with the girls in his teams were raising eyebrows by others in the sport.
By 2007, the new President of SCA, Steve Smith, had heard concerns about Mitchell from parents and other coaches.
"I kept hearing these stories from one source or another," Smith told the ABC last year.
"Whispers from parents and questions about things that just weren't quite making sense."
Mitchell was forced to quit his position and effectively left the sport.
Smith said he had preliminary discussion with NSW Police, but nothing came of it and Mitchell melted away.
The current Chair of Sport Climbing Australia, Philip Goebel, told the ABC the organisation doesn't have any records of concerns being raised about Mitchell's conduct, of any formal complaints being made, or how they may have been acted upon.
"The climbing community has been deeply affected by Stephen Mitchell's conduct and SCA is fully committed to cooperate in any way we can," Goebel says.
"Today, SCA has complaints and a member protection policy in place.
"We are determined to ensure our members are safe and seek in particular to be extremely vigilant towards child protection."
'My hope is that I get to let it go'
Mitchell could have remained at large if Gymnast A hadn't come forward to the police two years ago.
Her evidence set off the investigation, which allowed ACT Policing to arrest Mitchell in 2022.
Prior to that, he had been working for Home Affairs in Indonesia.
In order to get the job, he had to successfully apply for a high-level security clearance.
He was given a "Negative Vetting 1" clearance, which gives holders the right to access "secret" information and is one step below "top secret".
The ABC can now reveal the public servant was Mitchell.
Apart from the six child sex offences, Mitchell's pleaded guilty to giving false information to obtain the security clearance for Home Affairs and the Attorney-General's department. He'll be sentenced for that crime in August.
Mitchell's arrest and subsequent sentencing ends a decades-long ordeal for his victims.
The man who brought him to justice, Paul Calatzis, also has a sense of accomplishment and pride in an investigation that took more than a year, and that he literally took home with him.
He wants the world to know the police force has changed.
"We do want to listen," he says.
"Police officers do like to arrest people – it's what you're in the job to do."
Mitchell's sentencing isn't the end of the story.
Four of Mitchell's victims mentioned in this story — Visser, Vivian, Hall, and Orrell — are taking legal action against a number of institutions, including the Australian Institute of Sport, the Canberra PCYC, and the Australian Federal Police, as the body which then ran the ACT PCYC.
They didn't have to speak up, but each of the women felt compelled to tell their stories for various reasons: to be heard, to help others recover, and to do what they can to protect others from becoming victims in the first place.
"If these stories don't get out into the community, the community will continue to fail to act in the way it needs to, to understand the red flags and to stop events like this," Vivian says.
"So we can put a man in jail, but that's not going to stop the next man or woman from offending.
"The only way we're going to stop that is if we all have a much better awareness of what grooming looks like and what we can do, what we can say, who we can report to."
Hall says she is "a survivor in spite of what he's done".
"[I'm] proud of myself to have spoken up, been brave enough to tell my story," she says.
"Proud of who I am and I think that that's me forgiving my younger self as well, and saying sorry.
"So, I want to speak out because I want anyone to know if you've survived so far, just keep going."
For Visser, the hope is a simple but difficult one — to find happiness and peace.
"My hope is that I get to let it go," she says.
"I've kept this secret since I was 10, and I've kept the secret mainly for everybody else's comfort. More than my own.
"If I let it go, I put it out there, I just hope that there's room for anything else in life other than just carrying this around.
"I'm hoping that I'm going to make room for more happiness and peace."
