"Worst Rapist" at Salvos Was Eventually Sacked ... for Sleeping with His Fiance

By Janet Fife-Yeomans
The Telegraph
January 30, 2014

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/worst-rapist-at-salvos-was-eventually-sacked-for-sleeping-with-his-fiance/story-fni0cx4q-1226814208650

Charity clothing bins at the Salvation Army Central Coast Headquarters in Central Coast Highway, Erina. Source: News Limited

The worst sex fiend in the Salvation Army was dismissed not for raping young boys - but because he had slept with his fiance.

The hypocrisy of the Salvos has been exposed at the royal commission into child sex abuse when, despite leaving a trail of abused young boys in the 50s, 60s and 70s at four Salvation Army homes, Captain Lawrence Wilson was recommended for promotion to major in 1982.

One of Wilson's victims at Bexley Boys' Home in Sydney, now aged 52, broke down in the witness box yesterday, unable to read his statement.

"My life was not too bad until I met Captain Wilson," the man, a miner, had written.

"The sexual attacks on myself are still the hardest thing to deal with. One day you are a boy, then the next you are a shell walking around.

"I have been back to Bexley Boys' Home looking for what I lost, but where do you start?"

The commission is looking into how the Salvation Army totally mismanaged sexual and physical abuse of boys at four of its homes - Bexley, The Gill at Goulburn and Riverview Training Farm and the home in Indooroopilly known as Akira.

The commission has heard that Wilson, who died in 2008 aged 72, was the worst of four Salvation Army officers identified as sex offenders.

Children at a children's home in Bexley, which was tendered to the Royal Commission as part of the public hearing. Source: NewsComAu

However the only time he was sacked from the Salvos was in 1961, after already having raped young boys at Riverview and Indooroopilly. The reason given was for "engaging in sexual relations with his then fiance."

He then became a child welfare officer with the NSW Child Welfare Department where he was severely reprimanded for violence towards the young people as well as caught out lying about having "medical experience."

But the Salvos had him back in January 1966, with his wife. Wilson was later appointed manager at The Gill and then at Bexley.

The miner, known by the pseudonym FV, is the first of the boys from Bexley to give chilling evidence about life there.

He and his two sisters and brother ended up in homes after their father died and their mother had a breakdown.

He said that on the first night at Bexley, his younger brother, aged about 11, was raped by another boy. A month later, FV said he was called into Wilson's office and raped when he was 14.