Survivor speaks out for The Lost Boys of Lake Alice
Sunday, 27 June 2021
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING
A 10-year-old boy taken to Lake Alice psychiatric hospital was raped, subjected to electric shocks, and told his parents didn’t love him. He talks to Jimmy Ellingham.
Rangi Wickliffe would stand in the dock as judges jailed him for his latest crime. No remorse, they would say. No empathy for his victims.
Wickliffe recalls: “You had judges say to me: ‘You broke the sanctity, the privacy, of someone's home. You come to court here, and you're more concerned about what's for lunch.’
“‘You've got no empathy or remorse towards your victims.’
“I'm laughing at it. Why should I? You do that to a child.”
**READ MORE:
* Police close to conclusion in latest Lake Alice torture investigation
* Lake Alice staff member did not see abuse, torture or punishment
* Lake Alice staff restrained children during electric shock therapy to avoid dislocated joints
**
As a child, Wickliffe was in state care for 10 years, from the age of 6, living in boys’ homes, where he was abused.
That included the now 59-year-old’s time in Lake Alice, a psychiatric institution near Marton in Rangitīkei, in 1972 and 1973. While there, he was raped, subjected to electro-convulsive therapy and told his parents didn’t love him.
From boys’ homes Wickliffe followed his mates into gangs, joining the Rebel Outcasts, which later morphed into the Rebels MC Onehunga.
He’d grown tough and learnt how to survive, making a career as a criminal, a full-time burglar. But that’s when he wasn’t in jail – until 2016, his last release, he spent 36 years behind bars.
He says he was angry and vengeful because of what happened to him in so-called state care.
When arrested, he’d tell lawyers and judges about that, but he says they didn’t listen. They just saw a heavily tattooed man with a history of burglary and violence convictions.
“They chased me all my life with this piece of paper, criminal history, and smashed it in the face. They put me in jail for 36 years with that … In my mind I'm thinking: ‘Why are you having a go at me? Look what you did.’ ”
After what happened as a child, prison was a walk in the park – including solitary confinement at Auckland Prison’s maximum security wing, designed to break inmates. All of that was easy compared with life as a state ward, compared with Lake Alice.
Earlier this month, Wickliffe told the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, sitting in Auckland, about the institution’s child and adolescent unit.
“My name is Rangi Wickliffe. I have been raped. I have been sodomised. The little boy inside me has spoken,” he said as he finished his evidence, which he gave without reading notes.
He says summoning that terrified little boy from inside was tough, and in the weeks leading up to the hearing he would often panic, power vomit and struggle to breathe, such was the trauma of reliving his experience.
He was raped by adult patients, strangled if he struggled, and given electro-convulsive treatment for childhood transgressions. He had no mental illness, just behavioural problems.
He and the other children would live in fear of psychiatrist Dr Selwyn Leeks and his team, and the threat of the shocks made him wet and defecate himself. Children would hold each other and whimper and scream as Leeks’ Volkswagon pulled up.
Last week, Wickliffe spoke to Stuff from his Waitārere Beach home, where he has a quiet life fishing and keeping his and his neighbour’s properties tidy.
He lives with his partner, Dawn, who he met 40 years ago – his first love. They had a son, but Wickliffe was lost to his life of crime until they got back together in recent years.
Wickcliffe supports the Royal Commission’s work, but isn’t interested in pursuing Leeks, who he says would be a sacrificial lamb for the state.
Leeks, 92, is living in Australia and suffers from a range of health problems. Police are expected to announce shortly if they’ll charge him or other staff as a result of their most recent investigation.
Instead, Wickliffe wants to see change in how New Zealand incarcerates people. Boys in youth residential care facilities learn to hate authority and are treated like prisoners. No wonder they fall into crime, he says.
Adults are thrown in jail for property crimes or fraud, at huge cost. And once inside there are programmes for offenders, but none to help victims – and the Department of Corrections estimates three-quarters of men behind bars are victims of abuse.
Wickliffe’s broken the cycle thanks to Wellington’s Special Circumstances Court, where offenders are “humanised and treated like a human being”, and given the support they require. “They made me feel like they actually cared, and they do care.”
He remembers the men he calls The Lost Boys of Lake Alice. They’re Wickliffe’s friends from his time in institutions.
“Two of these boys lay beside me and got raped with me. Another one of these boys lay beside me and was electrocuted in my presence on his genitals.
“All of them are now capital offenders and one, the one that got it on his genitals … he was convicted for child molesting.
“These are The Lost Boys of Lake Alice. There's lots of them that are locked up in prisons. They may not ever see their freedom again. It actually breaks my heart. I got to run into them. The terrified little boy was still in their eyes. That's sad.”
Wickliffe wants what happened to him never to be repeated, for his grandsons and great-grandsons. “I need to tell my story. As horrendous and horrific as it is, it had to be told. It’s about standing up and telling people why I took that destructive path.”
The Royal Commission inquiry is expected to wrap up its hearing into the Lake Alice unit this week.