A victims nightmare in the ‘care’ of the Salvation Army

AUSTRALIA
Newcastle Herald

By JOANNE McCARTHY July 19, 2014

RAHAM Rundle was seven when he became a number, in the quiet outside a storeroom at a Salvation Army boys home in the Adelaide Hills.

44. It was the number he would carry for eight years.

The only witness was a Salvation Army sergeant, a man who, nearly 50 years later, would scream hysterically after a jury convicted him of violently raping four boys at the home, including the child known as 44.

Sergeant William Keith Ellis was 27 on Rundle’s first day at Eden Park boys home in 1960.

Rundle was a bewildered child taken to Eden Park by his father on the promise of a two or three week ‘‘holiday’’ with other children, after problems with his stepmother.

When his father left that day ‘‘he tapped me on the head, walked to his truck and started it up, and he didn’t look at me again’’.

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