Former Retta Dixon residents seek fresh probe into pedophile

By Amos Aikman
Australian
October 01, 2014

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/in-depth/former-retta-dixon-residents-seek-fresh-probe-into-pedophile/story-fngburq5-1227076524934

Former Retta Dixon Home residents Sue Roman, left, and Sandra Kitching, right, ask Darwin police officer Senior Sergeant Antony Deutrom to lay fresh charges against a convicted pedophile.

FORMER residents of a Darwin missionary home where Stolen Generation and other children were allegedly viciously sexually abused will try for the third time to get justice by asking police to lay fresh charges against one of their accused tormentors, convicted pedophile Donald Henderson.

A small group, including people who recently gave evidence to Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, left hearings in Darwin this morning and marched to a nearby police station, where they asked officers to take statements reopen investigations.

The commission has heard graphic accounts from former residents who say they were beaten, chained and raped by some of the missionaries who ran the Retta Dixon Home inside Darwin’s Bagot Aboriginal reserve between 1946 and 1980.

Mr Henderson was twice prosecuted for allegedly sexually abusing children at the RDH, first in 1975 and then again in 2002. At one stage he faced more than 80 charges, but both cases collapsed before they got to trial. In 1984 he pleaded guilty to two counts of indecently assaulting young boys at a Darwin swimming pool.

Sue Roman, a former resident of the RDH who has supported those giving evidence to the commission, said she thought that, given evidence the commission has heard, Mr Henderson should have been arrested already.

“I’m just so surprised that he has been able to live in society,” she said. “It’s just wrong — he shouldn’t be there getting away with it; he needs to be locked up.”

Senior Sergeant Antony Deutrom, who received the group led by Ms Roman, promised to make an appointment for them to give statements to officers from the NT Police sex crimes unit.

The commission heard that Mr Henderson, 78, was still alive but in poor health, living somewhere in Queensland.

A week and a half of hearings in Darwin came to an end this morning. The commission will now consider the evidence, before taking submissions from all parties in November.