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Marie had been walking home from primary school along the rail trail that cut through her neighbourhood, on the way to meet her older sister, when she happened to cross the path of William Howard Lewis.
That Lewis – one of the most dangerous sex predators in Victoria – could be found loitering there says a lot about how Victoria has failed, repeatedly, to protect the public, and our most vulnerable, from habitual sex offenders.
By that day in June 2024, Lewis had amassed 10 convictions for sex crimes, including a rape, four indecent assaults, multiple counts of public masturbation and the attempted sexual grooming of two 13-year-old girls.
He’d been jailed multiple times, sent for “containment” at Corella Place – the so-called “Village of the Damned” – for the most dangerous offenders, and received specialist sex offender treatment and counselling with zero effect.
Lewis had also been on Victoria’s Sex Offenders Register for more than 18 years — one of the earliest to be listed when it was created in 2004 in a bid to control known predators after they had served their sentence and were back living in the community.
The register was designed to put safety barriers around released sex offenders who were rated a continuing threat to the public, limiting their access to potential victims and requiring them to report their location, vehicles, online identities and any contact with minors or the vulnerable.
The job of monitoring these high-risk individuals was assigned to a specialist division inside Victoria Police.
Lewis was even subject to a special court order explicitly prohibiting any kind of contact with children after repeatedly breaching sex offender registration rules in the past.
Yet, there he was, seemingly free to sit on a park bench on a popular walking track waiting for potential victims to go by.
Lewis motioned to the nine-year-old. When Marie* cut a wide berth around him, Lewis dropped his pants and exposed himself. As she made a run for it, he grabbed the child, dragged her into the bushes and pulled her down on top of him. Marie kicked him in the groin and escaped.
Terrifying, traumatic – and it never should have happened. But it was not an isolated incident.
Lewis is just one of at least 60 sex predators The Age has identified committing sexual assaults, grooming and abusing children and manufacturing child abuse material while under the supervision of the Sex Offenders Register.
For the vast majority of these predators, it was the second or third time – or even more – that they had committed serious sex crimes.
Another 22 registered sex offenders have been caught trading extreme materials including videos of infant and child rape, torture, bestiality and acts of extreme degradation or committing serious breaches of their reporting conditions, including having unapproved contact with children.
It is a swath of destruction that has created scores of new victims – mainly children and the disabled – and traumatised family members who have been left to deal with the failure of the registration system to do what it promised – to be a “significant deterrent against reoffending”.
The litany of failures is shocking.
Bryce Robinson became a registered sex offender after being convicted of assaulting a four-year-old girl, a seven-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy over a six-month period in 2006. His conditions on the registry required him to report any future contact with children – which he didn’t.
Robinson was also placed on a special supervision order, which he violated multiple times. In 2016, he attempted to approach two children in a park, unsuccessfully, and then sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl in a playground.
Ben Morgan was required under his registration to tell police about any vehicle he had access to. Instead, he secretly bought a car that he used to cruise the streets, and was eventually discovered masturbating above a sleeping woman in her home in 2020, not even stopping after she woke and began screaming.
He’d already been previously convicted of breaching his reporting conditions, which were placed on him after a history of committing acts of stalking, indecent assault, and wilful and obscene exposure.
More than three dozen other offenders, who were all prohibited from using the internet to contact children, or required to report any contact with authorities, were later found soliciting children online for sexualised photographs, arranging meetings with underage victims or trading bespoke abuse materials inside secret online networks.
Others would fail to report that they were having in-person contact with children, posing as a “friendly uncle”, neighbour, or co-worker to members of the public who had no inkling of their past. Many of these cases ended in horrific instances of abuse in opportunistic attacks that police and justice authorities would only discover later, after the damage was done.
These cases – and dozens of others – represent only those registered sex offenders whose crimes were published by the courts since 2020, according to an analysis conducted by The Age.
Others, dating back another 16 years to the start of the register, have never been published by order of a judge to protect the identity of the offenders.
This was not how the system was supposed to work.
The best of intentions
“(The Sex Offenders Registration Act) evinces Victoria’s commitment to lead the fight against the insidious activities of paedophiles and other serious sex offenders.”
This was the clarion call of the Bracks Labor government when the sex offenders register was created in 2004, the proposed solution to the vexing problem of what to do with potentially dangerous sex offenders who’d finished prison sentences and were inevitably returning to the community.
“The purpose of the scheme is to provide police with up-to-date information on the whereabouts and details of sex offenders. This will enhance the ability of police to investigate sex offences and to proactively monitor individuals who may pose a risk to the community,” said André Haermeyer, the police and corrections minister at the time.
“The reporting requirements in this bill are rigorous. They will ensure that registered sex offenders are aware that they are being monitored by police, which will act as a significant deterrent against reoffending.”
Under the system, a person can be listed on the register for a term of eight years, 15 years or for life. Child abuse offences trigger automatic registration.
The designation means an offender released into the community after a prison sentence must disclose to specialist police their address, employment, identifying marks like scars and tattoos, vehicles, contact details and online identities, travel plans and any potential or actual contact with children.
‘I don’t really give two shits about this f—ing list, yeah. You can keep me on your list as much as you want.’
Dylan Woodstock, registered sex offender
Just how well the system works in practice is extremely difficult to determine by official measures.
Public data about its operation – and the successes and failures – is virtually non-existent because the legislation was written with a series of in-built secrecy provisions to protect the privacy, safety and rehabilitation prospects of the offenders.
One of the few glimpses into its internal workings was during a 2019 inquiry by the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office.
Then-police chief commissioner Graham Ashton claimed the system was working as intended, was “well resourced”, and the force was acting “beyond the act’s compliance requirements to establish comprehensive risk-based offender-management practices”.
“(We) have significant resources, both centrally and across the organisation, working hard to ensure that compliance rates remain very high.”
Ashton, in a letter to the Auditor-General’s Office, pointed to a recidivism rate of about 2.3 per cent for people on the register, which showed the police’s work was “having the desired impact”.
But it’s unclear how this figure was calculated given that of the 8280 people on the list in 2019, about 3850 offenders were in jail, interstate, deregistered or dead but were still counted in that total.
Victoria Police has declined to provide a current recidivism figure.
In an interview with The Age, the officer in charge of the sex offenders registration program, Detective Inspector Carla McIntyre, and head of the Offender Management Division, Superintendent Peter Brigham, said “much had changed” since the Auditor-General’s Office review to make the registration system even stronger.
“The legislation has been constantly updated. It’s amended nearly every year, and we’re constantly fine-tuning it and looking for extra things we can put in there (to improve compliance),” Brigham said.
Each offender is assigned a “compliance manager” who is a specially trained member of Victoria Police’s Sex Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Teams, and are supported by the Offender Management Division with units focussing on intelligence, risk and proactive targeting teams.
“The compliance managers are well aware of their history, their lifestyle, who they’re living with, etc. We monitor what is changing in their life, and what we know is a trigger for their offending – is that something that might provide us an opportunity to look at them again and look at what we can do to, again, not only meet the purpose of the Sex Offenders Registration Act but to prevent reoffending,” McIntyre said.
“There is this whole unit that exists, a whole division focusing on managing these offenders.”
The force has also created a series of “proactive targeting teams” that are regularly assessing the risk of offenders and conducting compliance checks, including unannounced visits.
“There’s the ability to surge, there’s an ability to prioritise quite quickly. No two cases are the same. It just shows you how complex these people are. The problems that they’ve got are really complex, which needs a complex solution,” McIntyre said.
“We really need to praise those people [victims] that are brave enough to come forward because it takes a lot of courage.”
Victoria Police is unable to discuss the specifics of operations due to the secrecy provisions of the legislation.
However, court records show investigators have set up numerous stings to catch sex offenders trawling for new victims or concealing their online activities.
During Rhys Wardle’s “intake” interview for the register, after he was released from prison in 2025, a search of his phone revealed he had already set up nine online accounts that were being used to chat with people of undetermined age, and a photo of his penis.
‘OK, if I’m a sex offender, then I’ll just be who I am.’
William Howard Lewis, a sex offender with a 30-year record of crimes
That sparked an investigation and the deployment of an undercover officer who posed as a 13-year-old girl online and led to his arrest after he sexually solicited her.
When Klynton Collins was suspected of violating the conditions of his registration to contact children, an officer posed online as a 14-year-old girl. He attempted to draw the fake child to a Melbourne hotel room with an offer of money for sex but was intercepted and arrested.
In 2021, an investigation into a single registered sex offender in Victoria sparked a nationwide taskforce that led to the identification of 117 other potential predators, many of them previously unknown.
“You wouldn’t want to be a registered sex offender if you knew the impact it would have on your life the first time,” Brigham said.
The exception or the rule?
While from a helicopter view, the registration system appears to be performing well, the outcomes detailed in court records shows there have been significant failings with habitual predators.
An Age analysis found that more than two-thirds of the 84 registered sex offenders who were sentenced for new crimes from 2020 to 2026 committed acts of serious sexual violence or grooming involving new victims.
More than half of these offenders were only caught as a result of tip-offs and reports made by victims after they had breached their reporting conditions – sometimes for months or even years.
Registered sex offender Nathan Davies, whose real name has been anonymised by order of a judge, was required to report any contact with children to police within 24 hours as part of his monitoring conditions.
Instead, he contacted 43 children through Facebook, soliciting or sending sexual chats or images to 18 before he was caught. When one child refused to participate, Davies threatened to rape her.
In less than six months, registered sex offender Alexander Sandford breached his reporting conditions 14 times, which saw his monitoring term increased from 15 years to life.
Nevertheless, he was caught with a huge cache of images of young children and babies being sexually abused, and spent the night in a home with access to a six-month-old baby without the knowledge of police.
Three current and former police sources, who have worked directly with the registry but are unable to be identified speaking about sensitive internal operations, say the system is overburdened and struggles to deal with the “worst of the worst”.
“You’re just trying to make sure that nothing happened on your watch because the impact is huge to a victim, but you’re just not resourced either in time to plan or time to execute proactive measures, particularly against the high-risk offenders,” said one former detective.
“It’s gotten so big that it’s almost like we’re setting ourselves up for failure – and that’s the way we felt.”
There were 4400 people on the register in 2012, the first year data was published by Victoria Police about its operation. That had soared to 11,150 by 2025.
The Victorian Auditor-General’s Office found that at the time of its 2019 report, one police officer could be responsible for anywhere from 26 to 94 registered sex offenders.
More than one in six offenders was deemed “high-risk”.
The size of the register has soared by 35 per cent since then.
Victoria Police has declined to comment on current staffing levels. The proactive targeting team had 21 members in 2019, according to the Auditor-General’s Office report.
“We’re stretched too thin. There’s too many people (on the register),” the police source said. “We’re still largely relying on public information to call in that suspicious behaviour.
“It gets to the point that when there’s a call-out for a sex crime, you’re just praying it’s not someone already on the register.”
Some offenders, meanwhile, have shown no concern about their registration status.
“Yeah, I understand it all. I don’t really give me [sic] two shits about this f—ing list, yeah. You can keep me on your list as much as you want,” offender Dylan Woodstock told police in 2024 after he was caught soliciting and sending sexual images to a child, and trading extreme material online.
Another, Kristian Ainsworth, dismissed concerns about getting caught, saying: “[I] probably would get away with it.”
The state government said it “will always stand with victim-survivors, and we will always hold offenders to account”.
“We have some of Australia’s toughest laws to monitor sexual offenders after they leave prison. This includes strict reporting obligations, intensive supervision, and serious penalties,” a spokesperson said.
“While we do not comment on individual cases, when offenders breach the law or reoffend, they are investigated, prosecuted, and brought back before the courts.”
Lewis, the man who dragged Marie into the bushes after amassing a 30-year record as a sex offender, is due to be released from prison as early as 2031.
“OK, if I’m a sex offender, then I’ll just be who I am,” he told his psychologist in a report tendered to court in his last sentencing.
Judge Michael Tinney was gloomy when he sent Lewis back to jail in 2025, calling him “a real menace”.
“You just keep offending irrespective of the presumed curbs placed on offending represented by your lifetime reporting obligations. You present a very large risk into the future, I am afraid, and that is irrespective of what I do to you.”
*Not their real name
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