Going to Jail for a Crime You Didn't Commit

**Meshel Laurie** (0:00)
The following podcast contains accounts of child sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
This is Australian True Crime with Meshel Laurie. Award-winning journalist and author Neil Mercer joins us to discuss the nine wrongful convictions explored in his book, Falsely Convicted. This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created. The Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
I love the fact that you've opened the book with the story of Josephine Greensill. As a reader, it was really startling, beginning to the book, really unexpected. What made you choose this case to cover at all, let alone to kick the book off with?

**Neil Mercer** (0:49)
I think it was such an extraordinary case, the case of Josephine Greensill. I mean, look at it. She's in suburban Melbourne. She's 57 years old. She's a semi-retired school teacher. I doubt if she's ever had a parking ticket.
She's a fine upstanding citizen. Lunchtime, there's a knock on the door. She opens the door. There's three detectives. You're under arrest for being a child molester. I mean, that's the short way of telling the story.
She's just gobsmacked by this. I found her story to be so extraordinary that one minute, you can be living just a quiet, normal life in suburban Melbourne or wherever you are, and all of a sudden, it's turned completely upside down.

**Meshel Laurie** (1:43)
It seems impossible. Reading it, you think, no, that can't happen, Neil. That can't happen. You can't be a retired lady in your lounge room in Altoona Meadows and have this happen to you, and it's like a movie plot, but it did happen. And I mean, to put more context on it that's important later, is she's recently widowed, Josephine, right? Her husband has not long died. She's just coming to terms with that. She's living with her son.
And these are historical crimes that she's accused of.

**Neil Mercer** (2:15)
Oh, yes. The police say, she says to them at the door, what's it all about? And they say, well, you'll find out.
She is told she can get a lawyer if she wants one. But she sort of goes, well, you know, I haven't done anything wrong. And the only lawyer I know was the one who did my will. So he's probably not much help anyway.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:36)
Yeah.

**Neil Mercer** (2:37)
She goes to the police station. She answers every single question. And they say, oh, you're going to be accused or you're going to be charged with the sexual abuse of two of your students 30 years ago.
When they're eight year old boys and she's just going, this is not true. This has never happened.

**Meshel Laurie** (2:56)
Because of the nature of the accusation, you feel as though you can't say someone's made that up. Where we've taken a position as a society to believe accusers in these cases always, and which is trying to right many years of wrongs. We've just been through this long process with clergy and with other organizations in Australia.
It's difficult. I think the way that police treated her was probably the way we would expect sex offenders to be treated, which is not with much sympathy.

**Neil Mercer** (3:33)
Not a lot of sympathy at all. I totally agree with you. I think at that time, people went, all these allegations have been made. They're incredibly serious. Of course, they are. They're incredibly serious. If they're true, and in the vast majority of cases, they are. This is an exceptional case. After her police interview, in which she cooperates entirely. They charge her, she's fingerprinted.
It's just amazing. One minute she's in suburbia, the next minute she's in a police station, photographed, fingerprinted, and then she's appearing in court on, I think, 21 counts of sexual assault against these former students, who say that when they were eight years old, when she was their primary school teacher, she sexually assaulted them, not once, not twice, but on a number of occasions. But there was one particular occasion where they said that they'd had a sleepover at her home.
And that might seem a little unusual these days, but back then, it wasn't. She, Joe Greensill, knew the parents of both of these boys.
The boys were very excited, but they were sleeping out in a tent. It was in the backyard of her home. Her husband was at home. Her own children were at home. So there's nothing, I don't think there's anything unusual about that. But what is extraordinary, that it takes 30 years. And as we find out in this case, there's a lot of twists and turns, and collusion is at the center of it.