Clarence Osborne

Clarence Osborne (1927-1979) was a boylover which probably holds the world record of having had sexual contacts with more than 2500 boys.

Osborne, born and grew up in the city of Brisbane, Australia. He worked as a professional reporter in the courts and then in the parliamentary reporting bureau. From the mid fifties to the mid seventies, he continuously had sexual relations with a great number of adolescent boys (90% of them were between thirteen and twenty) in his hometown Brisbane. Most of these were one-time sexual encounters but some developed to full-fledged relationships that lasted for years, and into the adulthood. Osborne also recorded in detail these sexual encounters along with the physical characteristics of 2500 young males he had met. His house became a big repository of sexual information consisting of thousands photographs, filing cards and over 8 kilometers of tape-recordings containing conversations between himself and the boys.

In late 1979, Osborne transferred part of his collection to journalist Paul Wilson fearing that the Commonwealth Police Force would come and arrest him because the customs department had confiscated a pornographic movie. Much of this information became the basis of Wilson’s book The man they called a monster (1981). The raid in his house that ensued gave him much negative publicity in the Australian press. Yet, according to the police, none of the thousands of boys ever complained to anyone over the two decades, and did not even come forward when they were reassured that they would see their files destroyed and therefore would not have to worry about the threat of blackmail. More than 25 years later police officials still note that

"The amazing thing is that with all of these documented victims, many of them later confirmed, the police had never received any complaints on Osborne."

Osborne was never arrested and the authorities did not have the chance to conduct a trial as he committed suicide in his car.

Further reading

Paul Wilson, The man they called a monster: sexual experiences between men and boys (North Ryde, New South Wales: Cassell, 1981)