A number of high profile individuals have been named in a police complaint about the withholding of evidence of crimes committed against children at the Lake Alice psychiatric hospital. Aaron Smale reports.
Five victims of the Lake Alice adolescent unit have filed a criminal complaint with police, alleging that a number of high profile individuals have conspired to defeat the course of justice because they were responsible for withholding evidence from police investigations.
The complaint alleges that at least 17 individuals were “in possession of, or were aware of evidence of crimes committed by employees of the state against the children of Lake Alice” but that they “deliberately failed to provide all relevant information to police investigations or failed to instruct others to provide that evidence to the police.”
The complaint names politicians, senior public servants and members of the legal fraternity.
The complaint is made by Leoni McInroe, Tyrone Marks, Rangi Wickliffe, Alf Ratima and Hake Halo.
“Justice was denied to the children of Lake Alice because of deliberate delays and withholding of evidence from the police over decades. We are asking that those responsible for these delays and obstruction be held accountable. The police, by their own admission, failed in their duties on numerous occasions to properly investigate the crimes committed at Lake Alice. We expect the police to thoroughly carry out their duties in investigating this complaint,” the complaint says.
The complaint refers to a statement given to the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care by Appeal Court Judge David Collins, who assisted a group of Lake Alice victims in civil litigation in 2002. In the statement Collins said that he believes Dr Selwyn Leeks, who was in charge of the adolescent unit at Lake Alice, had engaged in criminal offending.
Collins stated that: “Both Sir Rodney (Gallen) and I discussed Dr Leeks’ role in the Unit and we were both certain that if police had seen the records that had been made available to us in confidence then the prosecuting authorities would have agreed with our conclusion.”
The late Sir Rodney Gallen was a high court judge who had been involved in investigating Lake Alice and wrote an unsolicited and highly critical report on his findings. Both Collins and Gallen had spoken to dozens of victims and had examined numerous documents related to the case.
The complaint by Lake Alice survivors alleges that the evidence Sir Rodney and David Collins had seen was not made fully available to police in investigations in 2002 and 2020. The latter investigation found that there was enough evidence to prosecute Dr Leeks and other staff but they were either dead or in ill-health.
"Dr Leeks and his staff weren't prosecuted because the prosecuting authorities did not have access to all of the evidence that Justices Collins and Gallen had seen. Those responsible for handing over that evidence to prosecuting authorities - the named individuals among them - did not give that evidence over. By failing to hand over that evidence to prosecuting authorities they were conspiring to defeat the course of justice and are accessories after the fact to those crimes."
The crimes included in the complaint include ill-treatment of children; rape; sexual assault; torture; unlawful detention; assault; grievous bodily harm; and slavery.
The criminal complaint cites Section 71(1) of the Crimes Act, which states: “An accessory after the fact to an offence is one who, knowing any person to have been a party to the offence, receives, comforts, or assists that person or tampers with or actively suppresses any evidence against him or her, in order to enable him or her to escape after arrest or to avoid arrest or conviction.”
The complaint also asked that police investigate whether there was political interference in the police investigation that commenced in 2002 after around 34 victims made criminal complaints.
The complaint states: “Detective Superintendent Larry Reid was initially put in charge of the 2002 investigation into the Lake Alice case. In his written evidence to the Royal Commission Reid states that: ‘I didn't assign any officers to investigate the Lake Alice complaints. This was because the instruction I received was for me to conduct the inquiry around more pressing work.’”
The criminal complaint says that as a result “there were no evidential interviews conducted with the victims who had made the complaints and he (Reid) did not assign any police officers to investigate the complaints. A later internal inquiry by police in 2018 found that the sexual abuse allegations had not been investigated.”
“Mr Reid was an extremely senior police officer, so there can only have been a couple of people who were senior to him that could have instructed him.”
The Lake Alice adolescent unit was run by Dr Selwyn Leeks from 1972 to 1978 and approximately 300 children went through during that period. Lake Alice hospital was a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane and children were regularly exposed to dangerous adult patients. Among the documents the criminal complaint quotes is one that shows authorities knew children were being put in an adult villa with dangerous patients and they were being raped.
Lake Alice has been the subject of numerous inquiries both at the time and in the decades since, particularly around the use of electric shocks as punishment. But in 2020 the UN found New Zealand was in breach of the Convention Against Torture because it had failed to properly investigate the allegations. The police opened another criminal investigation, the third, and found that there was enough evidence to prosecute Dr Leeks and others but most were either dead or too unwell to face charges. Police apologised to Lake Alice victims at the Royal Commission for the failures in the 2002 investigation.
