WARNING: CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE AND DETAILS OF CHILD ABUSE
On the heels of the Abuse in Care Royal Commission’s case study report released Thursday, one of Lake Alice’s longest-suffering victims emerges, and makes bombshell claims. David Williams reports.
We’ll call him Eyebrows Ed.
When the menacing 62-year-old Aucklander talks, his head slightly lowered, he looks up at you through his eyebrows.
He has lived rough and done it tough. In 2003, he suffered a heart attack and died, but was brought back to life. He’s spent more than a decade in jail, mainly for assaults and burglaries.
Today, he has to avoid stress or he starts getting chest pains.
It was his time at the notorious Lake Alice psychiatric hospital – first in the child and adolescent unit, and then as an adult – that set the course of his life.
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A scar on his forehead is a reminder of when his father beat him with a softball bat, when he was six.
He says a lump on the back of his head comes from being hit by Lake Alice’s infamous child psychiatrist, Dr Selwyn Leeks, who, accompanied by a group of nurses, assaulted him in Palmerston North and took him back to the hospital, when he was aged 14 or 15.
“It’s fucking sore, even today.”
Like others who have spoken publicly before the Abuse in Care Royal Commission, dredging up the worst moments of their lives, Ed, while supposedly being cared for by the state, was punished with electric shocks and painful injections of paraldehyde.
In all, he thinks he was shocked 40 times.
But his claims go further. He’s convinced some children at Lake Alice were killed, and their bodies disposed of in the lake. Claims of children being killed there were also brought up in testimony, under oath, at the Royal Commission, which will make its final recommendations next year.
It was May 1973, when Ed was 12, that he was first admitted to Lake Alice, a psychiatric facility for children and adults located near Whanganui.
“They bundled me in a car when I was at Epuni Boys’ Home and we were driving for about four hours – four or five hours – and I ended up there,” Ed says at his rented Auckland house, about 20 minutes from the city centre.
They didn’t say why, or what was at the other end.
Ed met Dr Leeks – who died in January this year, aged 92 – on his first day. “And I got a dose of his so-called ‘therapy’,” he says, bending his fingers into quote marks.
That’s Lake Alice shorthand for electric shock treatment, or more properly electro-shock convulsive therapy, or ECT. It’s like “getting smacked in the head with a sledge hammer”, Ed says. “And you saw stars as well.”
Soon after, “they stuck a needle in my arse and threw me in a room”. Ed’s referring to another punishment dressed up as treatment – painful injections of paraldehyde. To complete the triumvirate of punishments, he stayed in seclusion for the first four days.
Should Ed have been admitted to Lake Alice psychiatric hospital?
“No, I wasn’t even meant to be there.”
His Ministry of Social Development file appears to back that up.
“He is not suffering any mental illness.” – Syd Pugmire
Leeks – who put Ed on the mood-stabilising agent lithium, to which he responded “excellently”, his notes say – diagnosed him with a character disorder.
In 1974, after another stint at Lake Alice, Ed was diagnosed with “behaviour disorder of childhood” and “explosive character disorder”.
Over the next few years, he bounced from Epuni Boys Home, in Lower Hutt, back to Lake Alice, and was then sent to Hokio Beach School, a Social Welfare home for boys near Levin, and, again, back to Lake Alice.
In 1976, district psychologist David Page took a different line, saying he needed help. Page said Ed would benefit from a work experience course at secondary level.
“He needs much help and this should be individual, with reading and general development. If this area could be developed much of his more aggressive anti-social behaviour would diminish for he could express himself in another form.”
A court-ordered assessment a year later, written by Dr Syd Pugmire, superintendent of Lake Alice, said: “He is not suffering any mental illness and his foolish behaviour is entirely due to his low intelligence.”
In 1985, psychiatrist Stephanie Du Fresne, wrote in a letter to Lake Alice’s Dr Gary Seifert-Jones: “He has no psychiatric illness and it is difficult to tell how much his personality disorder is a response to his borderline mental handicap and many years of institutionalisation.
“In the absence of a psychiatric disorder I can see no rationale for giving him medication.”
Ed’s final discharge from Lake Alice was in September 1986, aged 25, more than 13 years after he was first admitted. He’d been subjected to years of shock treatment, debilitating paraldehyde injections, and being prescribed powerful psychotic drugs.
Lake Alice psychiatrist Noel Fernando said in Ed’s discharge report: “He is not suffering from a formal psychiatric disorder, he has a personality disorder with moderate mental retardation.”
Ed felt powerless in Lake Alice. The social welfare department could do anything they like with you, he says.
Did he wonder why he was there? “Yeah, but they wouldn’t tell me.”
How did Lake Alice change him? “Well, it made me want to get the fuckers, anyway, one way or another. I still want to.”
Ed clarifies later he’s not talking about physical violence: “I got better things to do than beat the shit out of someone.”
Hundreds of children went through the adolescent unit at Lake Alice. Most arrived from Department of Social Welfare homes, which were rife with abuse.
A majority were never diagnosed with a mental illness, making them so-called informal patients. Because they did not fall under the Mental Health Act they couldn’t be held or treated against their will.
They were treated against their will, of course, and, as noted by the United Nations Committee Against Torture, historic allegations of torture have been undisputed by the state.
Chained like a dog
Like so many of these tragic stories, Ed’s starts with an alcoholic father who beat his wife and kids.
“The old man didn’t like me for some reason he used to beat the crap out of me,” Ed says.
“He used to chain me outside like I was a dog. Chain around the neck. Just a pair of shorts on, and chained me to a fence post.”
Ed pulls up his beanie and points to a scar on his forehead – from being hit, when he was six, with a softball bat wielded by his father.
“I’ve got a worse temper than he has,” he growls.
Inevitably, the police and the Department of Social Welfare stepped in, and the children were put into state care.
During a stint at Epuni Boys’ Home, in Lower Hutt, Ed’s habit of biting staff and other boys earned him the nickname “Dracula”. (Ed knows nothing about this.)
It was also his state-forced introduction to psychiatric drugs, being prescribed the benzodiazepine drug Valium, commonly used to treat anxiety or sleep problems. He was 12.
Ed remembers running away from Epuni. “I’d go up over the fire break into Wellington.”
What was it like in social welfare care?
“I wouldn’t wish the way they treated me on anybody – not even my worst enemy. That gives you some clue.”
He performed poorly at school and was described by Department of Social Welfare psychologist, Graeme Paris as “educationally retarded”. The file notes aggressive behaviour, exhibitionist tendencies and sexual incidents. There was consideration of placing him in a residential school in Christchurch.
Instead he was sent to Lake Alice.
“They always come back muddy, and the only mud around there is over by the lake.” – Eyebrows Ed
Back in present-day Auckland, Ed suggests there were deaths at Lake Alice – which is not surprising, in itself – but he suspects foul play was involved.
“People used to disappear,” he says. He’d go to sleep with a child in the bed beside him but the next day they’d gone.
He’s also convinced there are bodies in the lake.
How does he know that? “Because every so often the screws would disappear for a few hours. They always come back muddy, and the only mud around there is over by the lake.”
Asked about this again, he says when he was 13 he was taken to a forested area near the lake by a nurse, where he saw a wooden boat parked on a trailer with a “body” in it.
There were other sudden, unexplained deaths: An adult patient hanging from a tree in an orchard; a Māori patient who escaped a locked adult villa and drowned in a pool; and another man who, after having a seizure, was beaten by nurses, and, Ed claims, later died.
It’s not the first time the deaths at Lake Alice have been raised.
In his testimony to the Royal Commission, survivor Malcolm Richards described how the trolley with electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) equipment was wheeled down a line of patients.
“Every so often a nurse would cover a person up and say, ‘Oh well, they didn’t make it, too bad.”
They meant they’d died having ECT.
Richards told the Commission: “I was told if ECT goes wrong there have been children die and they just bury them out in the vege patch.”
Rangi Wickliffe, another Lake Alice survivor, said at many institutions – including Lake Alice, and Hokio Boys Home – “children had gone missing, never returned”. Kids ran away, never to be seen again.
Questions weren’t asked: “We were incarcerated in those places, and we were on a need-to-know basis.”
In recent years, deaths in state care have sparked international headlines.
In Ireland, a landmark report released last year estimated more than 9000 babies and children died in church-run institutions for pregnant, unmarried women.
Meanwhile, a special interlocutor helping Canadian communities investigating unmarked graves at former residential school sites for First Nations peoples is exploring the possibility of establishing a special tribunal.
Given the evidence from overseas, we asked Wickliffe if deaths in state care were covered up in this country. Wickliffe says he didn’t witnessed anything personally, but he’d been told it happened – he’s just not sure where.
He puts it down to hearsay. “When I say hearsay, when it continues over a period of years it could be looked upon as the real deal.”
Newsroom asked police how many claims of deaths at Lake Alice they have fielded from former patients, and what investigations, if any, have been carried out on-site to check their veracity. The Police Media Centre said it wasn’t information it had to hand and our request was being considered under the Official Information Act.
The Abuse in Care Royal Commission provided this anonymised statement: “The Royal Commission is not able to provide any information in response to your queries ahead of the forthcoming release of the Lake Alice case study report.”
A place of constant fear
Back to Eyebrows Ed. His abuse at Lake Alice was also financial, he claims.
When he was 14, Ed was left about $15,000 from his dead father’s estate but the hospital’s welfare officer effectively stole it from him.
“She made me sign some forms,” he says. “So she got the benefit of that.”
He adds: “She said sign it or you’re gonna get it.”
History tells us threats in Lake Alice weren't idle.
Ed says Lake Alice was a place of “constant fear”. How did he survive? “I had no choice.”
He didn’t have a chance to fight off the nurses: “I was only a fucking short-arse little prick; skinny as.”
Staff seemed to enjoy the punishment: “The more pain they dish out, the better they get off on it.”
What was Ed’s impression of Leeks? “He was a fucking nutter, in no uncertain terms. The fucking patients were more sane than the fucking staff members. They should have been in there, not us.”
Lake Alice was a terrible place of punishment and torture. It was a “shithole”, Ed says.
“Oh, you’ve got no fucking idea. You got no fucking idea.”
Government agencies had no right to treat children like he was treated, he says.
“Fucking Child Youth and Family – bunch of fucking hypocrites. They say we treasure people, children and stuff? Bullshit. It’s all to do with this,” he says, rubbing his thumb across his fore finger.
“The almighty fucking dollar. Fuck I’m angry.”
The state hasn’t served him well. He’s had no help, either financially or psychologically. He says his benefit in 1985 was more than it is today. “Mind you, everything in this house I own.”
He has little faith the Royal Commission will change much. “The Government are full of shit.”
Of potential compensation, he says. “I’ll be lucky if I get jack squat.”
What does he want now?
“I want a formal apology from those fuckers, and I’m not going to rest until I fucking get it.”
He pauses for a second, then delivers his conclusion without the hint of a smile.
“I want it in writing. And one of those fuckers can hand-deliver it to me.”
Where to get help:
Safe to Talk national helpline 0800 044 334 or www.safetotalk.nz
Women's Refuge (For women and children) - 0800 733 843.
Shine (For men and women) - free call 0508-744-633 between 9am and 11pm.
1737, Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for mental health support from a trained counsellor
What's Up – 0800 942 8787 (for 5–18 year olds). Phone counselling is available Monday to Friday, midday–11pm and weekends, 3pm–11pm. Online chat is available 7pm–10pm daily.
Kidsline – 0800 54 37 54 for people up to 18 years old. Open 24/7.
Youthline – 0800 376 633, free text 234, email talk@youthline.co.nz, or find online chat and other support options here.
National Rape Crisis helpline: 0800 88 33 00
If you or someone else is in immediate danger call 111.
