THE boy was just 13 when he started at a Marist Brothers school in the Hunter and met his technical drawing teacher Brother Romuald, real name Francis Cable.
The abuse started when Cable asked the boy - whose widowed father struggled to raise him and his siblings - to stay behind after class. Cable put his hands inside the boy's underpants and fondled his genitals.
The incidents of abuse progressed to oral rape and eventually anal rape, which hurt the boy so much he screamed.
"The offender eventually stopped and told the boy to get out," Judge Peter Whitford said when sentencing Cable to 16 years jail on June 18, 2015, for crimes against 19 former students at Marist Brothers schools in Maitland, Hamilton and Pagewood between 1960 and 1974, when he was aged between 28 and 42.
A jury in a trial had found him guilty of nine counts of indecent assault and four counts of buggery relating to two students.
After those verdicts Cable pleaded guilty to a further 33 counts of indecent assault against 17 students.
"That night the victim's anus was bleeding," Judge Whitford said.
"His father bathed him and urged him not to tell anyone, for fear that they would not be believed in any event, and would be frustrated in getting the boy's younger siblings out of care."
Cable assaulted the boy twice more, despite being begged to stop.
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Francis William Cable, also known as Brother Romuald, dies in custody
The level of violence was not uncommon in Cable's crimes. While some were opportunistic, he also pursued numerous male teenage victims and subjected them to repeated assaults, sometimes in view of or close to others in the ocean, change rooms or classrooms.
At times he combined violence with expressed threats. Judge Whitford said at a beach excursion in the 1960s Cable orally raped a 12-year-old and pushed his thumbs into the boy's eye sockets to prevent him from biting.
"The offender said 'Don't you tell anyone or you will be locked up. They won't believe you, you have the mark of the devil on you and I need to get the devil out of you and that's how I have to do it.'"
Cable, 90, died on Monday. Following his 2015 sentencing he was charged with 14 offences against another five victims in 2017, but did not plead guilty until October 2018.
Judge Roy Ellis sentenced him in 2019 to a maximum of eight years in jail, with a non-parole period of five years.
He said the offences were perpetrated in environments that "engendered fear and hopelessness and offered little to no opportunity for escape" and for one victim "in a public place in circumstances likely to cause humiliation and embarrassment".
He said victims were "almost completely powerless to do anything".
Both judges noted Cable did not express any remorse.
Cable's overall sentence would have expired in March 2031 and the earliest he would have been eligible for parole was March 2026.
Recently he had pleaded not guilty to a number of indecent assaults against a young boy in the 1970s.
He last appeared in court on those matters in June and was listed to face a trial in Newcastle District Court in June 2023.
Clergy Abused Network chair Bob O'Toole said Cable was known for being cruel and "as far as brutality and sadism, he was up there".
"I know that Romuald was an extremely aggressive abuser, very physical, very blatant as well," Mr O'Toole said.
"You'll find in the Royal Commission case study into the Marist Brothers he intimidated his colleagues as well as students. He was a big fellow and I've sat with some of these fellows when they've given police statements and things and the aggression with which he perpetrated was extreme, so he's a little bit different from many of the others... [he was] often prepared to take advantage of the situation and not worry too much about the grooming stuff - just get straight into it.
"You can gauge the guy's brutality and disregard for people - at Bar Beach I believe he abused in front of other kids and that's all about control.
"Kids were frightened, feared him coming near them and he was parading himself around in the change rooms, that sort of stuff, so a complete disregard [for people and being caught]."
Mr O'Toole said while priests had a "broader" field to offend than Marist Brothers, the number of Cable's victims was "extreme" but unknown, because some hadn't come forward and he moved to so many schools.
"I'd be surprised if there was a hiatus [of abuse] between places," he said.
Detective Sergeant Kristi Faber from Strike Force Georgiana - which investigates historic child sexual abuse cases - said Cable was "very similar" to former St Pius X priest and teacher John Sidney Denham, who she considered one of the most "prolific" abusers.
"The number of survivors, the number of complainants we had come forward for both of them - he's a significant offender," Sergeant Faber said.
"It was a complaint against him that commenced the investigation into the brothers. Throughout our investigation police have witnessed the irrevocable damage Brother Romuald has caused within the local Catholic community and the greater Hunter region as a whole.
"The strength of those that came forward and of those families who supported this process should be commended."
Cable went to a Marist Brothers training facility in Mittagong and joined the order in 1952.
He taught at nine schools - including Marist Brothers Hamilton in 1959 and 1960, Marist Brothers Maitland in 1961, 1962 and 1963 and again at Hamilton from 1971 to the end of 1974 - before leaving the order in 1978.
He then taught in Canberra for a decade. Judge Whitford said while Cable's first offending may or not have been spontaneous, "the subsequent offending reflects a degree of pre-meditation, and a flagrant escalation to numerous other victims over an extended period of time".
"The audacity of the conduct... is, frankly, breathtaking. The circumstances of the offending seem at times to bespeak little concern about being detected and certainly no concern for the welfare, wellbeing and security of the victims.
"Many of the offences... involved cruelty, which included physical violence on occasions, and at times actual harm, all of which served to aggravate further the gross breaches of trust and authority and to involve additional demeaning and degradation of the vulnerable young victims."
He said all the victims were vulnerable due to their age and relationship to Cable.
"Some of them demonstrated additional vulnerabilities or emotional frailties arising from their particular domestic or other circumstances...he might have selected many of his victims on account of their particular frailties."
Judge Whitford said Cable's offending was "very serious" and had psychological and emotional consequences. "It is impossible to conceive that the offender had any motivation beyond his own sexual gratification.
He pursued this object, not in an isolated fashion, but over an extended period without any apparent regard to the childhood, innocence and future of each of the numerous victims."
