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Francis Erich Bischof, LVO, QPM (12 October 1904 – 28 August 1979) was the Queensland Police Commissioner in Australia from January 1958 until his resignation, on 13 February 1969, amidst allegations of corruption.

Bischof operated clinics for difficult children at his office, which attempted to illustrate to potentially wayward children the error of their ways, during the 1950s–1960s. However, it was also a way for Bischof to have access to the hundreds of young children who did. Margaret Fels, a housewife from Eight Mile Plains, had an affair with Bischof. Journalist Matthew Condon, in his book Jacks and Jokers, reported that two of her sons alleged that Bischof had sexually assaulted them, and they believed that he may have also assaulted a third, deceased, sibling.

Below are from the book:

In the late 1950s one of the Fels boys, Geoff, had come to the attention of police for a silly teenage prank – he’d lifted some hubcaps off a car. Mary had taken her son to see Commissioner Bischof, who famously held ‘clinics’ every Saturday at his office headquarters at North Quay. There, he set wayward boys and girls onto the straight and narrow, proffering his firm, fatherly advice that would steer the children towards a clean-living and morally correct life.

According to Ross Fels, in the late 1950s Bischof – his mother’s lover – sexually assaulted him. In addition, in the early 1960s, older brother Dennis Fels was instructed to go to one of Bischof’s Saturday morning clinics.

He’d already been once or twice before. This time he refused. ‘He just wasn’t going to go, come hell or high water,’ remembers Ross Fels. ‘When he had to go back this time he disappeared. He was terrified about having to go back into that bloody place.’ Dennis vanished on a Friday night and was found on the family farm on the Sunday evening. He would later allege that he refused to be in the Commissioner’s company because Bischof had been ‘feeling him up’ at the sessions.

Dennis would not escape Bischof’s wrath. The police tailed him, harassed and provoked him. In the end and years later, he was forced to leave Queensland. ‘Our family was screwed over by the police,’ Ross Fels says.

‘What happened to me with Bischof when I was six, I thought nothing of it. It meant nothing to me. Well, not nothing. He scratched my genitals. But years later I started talking to my brothers …’ Then there was the older boy Geoff. Just before his death, decades later, Ross sat with him and they had a long talk. They discussed Bischof. ‘When we spoke about it, Geoff just cried,’ says Ross Fels. ‘A grown, adult man. He cried.

The scandal of the Commissioner and Mary Margaret Fels had never been what it appeared. It was not about a woman who had fallen for the charms of the ‘Big Fella’, and been scorned by his rejection of her years later. Was it in fact the story of a man – the most powerful police officer in the State – who had set up these Saturday morning clinics not for the benefit of troubled children and their parents, but as an arrangement to trawl for vulnerable kids and satisfy Bischof’s sexual proclivities? How many other children had Bischof laid his hands on, and how many other families were left destroyed in his wake?