Oregonian Newspaper Special Investigation
Oregonian expose affirms child abuse in child jails, foster homes; cover up, terrorism by state agents protected, no remedy only retaliation for victims in corrupted courts with pedophile judges who protect the abusers.....

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A Voice for Children
avo...@mtangel.net
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Date: Sun, 19 Sep 2004

Now we see it now we stop this.  Time for prosecution and accountability

Full disclosure now from every agency.  Stop the new juvenile child jail being built in Marion County to terrorize more children .... 

We have to restore courts of Judicial Due Process where these criminals will be prosecuted and not protected, the evidence covered up.  Expose and prosecute pedophile judges, attorneys, caseworkers, foster resources, all state agents who are terrorizing children.  Thank God the Oregonian is FINALLY EXPOSING this evidence of abuse in the agencies that in the courts is undisputed, yet covered up.

We have to stop this whole abuse industry in Oregon preying on our children for profit.  If no one is charged with a crime the state cannot intervene into family issues and private people.  Often it  is an assessment that seizes these children or the families go to these offices for "help".  Juveniles who are incarcerated have no constitutional process at all, admitted at this time in the Senate committee meetings.  Unlike adults, who are charged and sentenced for a specific period of time, the juvenile cases are INDEFINITE in the statutes.... and the children are kept for YEARS, unable to extricate themselves from the system, their parents tied up in compelled contracts and terror tactics by state defense attorneys, unable also to control their children after the state intervenes. 

A jury in Marion County, where this hospital is, found the presiding JUDGE PAUL LIPSCOMB, judge TERRY LEGGERT, judge GREG WEST, judge PAMELA ABERNETHY, judge JOSEPH OCHOA, judge JOSEPH GUIMOND, judge DON DICKEY, judge CONNIE HAAS, DA DALE PENN, SHERIFF RAUL RAMIREZ, DA DEP WILLIAM HOWELL, and others to be PEDOPHILES and PROTECTING PEDOPHILES and child abuse through their offices of TRUST.

The Maine Study in l993 pointed to this criminal abuse in the system, yet Governor JOHN KITZHABER FURTHERED THE PROGRAMS ALONG WITH CURRENT GOVERNOR TED KULONGOSKI, ALL PROTECTING CRIMINALS WHEN THEY ARE CAUGHT, TO AVOID LIABILITY TO THE STATE, NO REDRESS OR REMEDY FOR THE VICTIMS, OFTEN RETALIATION AND FURTHER ABUSE, SOMETIMES MURDER.

This expose now affirms what the court record already establishes.  HOW MANY MORE CHILDREN HAVE TO BE TORTURED BEFORE YOU ACT TO STOP THIS ?  Please go to our website and put "child jails" and "juvenile abuse" and "pedophile DA's" and other terms and read alot more about what they are doing NOW....  Reports from ten years ago are not enough.  This has to all open up NOW, at state and federal levels and the People SEE the terrifiying danger we are all in...

REMEMBER that the president right now and Congress, Gordon Smith here in Oregon, have just passed TWO mental "health" bills containing orders to make everyone, every child, every pregnant mother, be subjected to their evaluations and thrown into these hell on earth nightmares....  They have just set it up for ALL of us next.....

We will post part 2 when it comes out.
Pamela Gaston
www.avoiceforchildren.com

BETRAYING A FRAGILE TRUST    Pt. 1

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/1095...

Betraying a fragile trust
Oregonian Newspaper Special Investigation

Some Oregon State Hospital caretakers have sexually abused mentally ill children, preying on patients in a ward still at risk because of systemic security failures

Sunday, September 19, 2004

MICHELLE ROBERTS

SALEM -- The children sent to the Oregon State Hospital's Ward 40 for treatment were a danger to themselves or others. Some arrived in straitjackets. Many were depressed and suicidal. Others had begun to hear the shouts of schizophrenia.

They were among the state's most vulnerable residents -- troubled young people whose families could not afford private care or whose insurance had run out. The hospital's Child and Adolescent Treatment Program was supposed to quell their mental illnesses and shelter them from harm.

But an investigation by The Oregonian shows that hospital staff in positions of trust sexually abused as many as a dozen children, according to internal hospital records, police reports, court documents and interviews with witnesses.

Hospital officials and their supervisors in state government did little to stop the abuses, which occurred between 1989 and 1994. Supervisors and others on the ward failed to report the offenses when they were detected, allowing predators to attack additional victims. The hospital repeatedly failed to report suspected sexual abuse immediately to police and child welfare workers, as required by state law.

In the years since, the hospital has taken limited steps to prevent abuse.

It did not begin conducting background checks on employees until 1991, and then reviewed only the histories of new hires. It has yet to install surveillance cameras, which are standard in comparable facilities elsewhere. And it has routinely ignored its own procedures, which require independent investigations of sex abuse allegations reported to Oregon State Police.

State officials said their records identify only three patients who were victims of sexual abuse on Ward 40 in the past 18 years. But The Oregonian found credible reports of nine additional abuse victims from police files, court documents and eyewitness accounts. Some never came to the hospital's attention. Others were reported but examined only cursorily.

"I was sent to the hospital because I tried to kill myself," said Kelly Darcey, who was molested repeatedly at age 15 by a ward employee. "I was in far worse shape when they discharged me."

The Oregonian does not identify victims of sex crimes. However, some of the women who were abused as children on Ward 40 have asked that their first or full names be published because they want the abuse brought to light.

Records and interviews with administrators and those who committed the abuse noted that the hospital's procedures and design problems -- most of which still exist -- offered pedophiles numerous opportunities.

Ward 40, which still houses about 20 young patients, is located in a century-old building full of blind corners and hidden spaces with no high-tech equipment to detect or deter abuse.

Stanley Mazur-Hart, the hospital superintendent from 1991 until last fall, blamed "budget constraints" and acknowledged "there is far better monitoring technology available than that which OSH has."

Administrators and state officials failed to recognize the pattern of abuse, even though it occurred on a small ward with no more than 60 patients ranging in age from 5 to 18. Over the years, a succession of unit directors, psychiatrists and nurses supervised the ward but the responsibility for what happened there and elsewhere in the hospital rested on the superintendent. The first significant abuse case -- a psychiatric aide accused of having sex with multiple girls in the late 1980s -- was closely followed by four more credible reports that male employees molested female patients. In the mid-1990s, the state paid two women more than $1 million for abuses they suffered while patients on Ward 40.

Yet little changed.

No administrators from the hospital or the Department of Human Services, which oversees it, were disciplined or fired.

State officials say some abuse by employees is inevitable at psychiatric facilities such as Oregon State Hospital. "We never had the perception that the hospital was an institution beyond reproach," said Barry Kast, an assistant DHS director. Kast said he did not see the cases as part of a larger pattern.

The children's stories have never been told, in part because hospital executives and state officials have fought to keep them from the public.

In one case, the state paid an additional $50,000 to secure the silence of a victim whose attorney was poised to hold a news conference on the Marion County Courthouse steps. A lawyer in the office of then-Attorney General Ted Kulongoski told a judge in a closed-door hearing that the secrecy was needed to protect the hospital from political attack by the Legislature.

The scope of sexual abuse at the hospital was brought to light by The Oregonian's examination of records and interviews with more than 50 current and former patients and employees.

Records relating to the abuse of patients on Ward 40 are largely confidential under state and federal privacy laws. As part of a lawsuit, the state turned over to an attorney for one of the victims a detailed accounting of sex abuse allegations involving child patients from 1986 to 1995.

Those records, which were supposed to remain sealed, were inadvertently placed in public files at the Marion County Courthouse. They included police reports, medical records, internal hospital documents, transcripts of closed court hearings and personnel files.

State officials denied repeated requests for comparable records for the years since 1995, making it difficult to assess whether patients continue to be molested.

State records, however, show that the hospital is not following its procedures for investigating abuse. In the past four years, state police have received reports of 10 allegations of sexual abuse involving Ward 40 staff, none of which resulted in criminal charges.

DHS officials acknowledged that seven of those cases were never reported to them, even though the hospital is required by law to inform the agency's Office of Investigation and Training of all suspected abuse. Such agency investigations are crucial, identifying problems so the hospital can change policies or discipline abusive employees before their actions rise to the level of crimes.

Eva Kutas, the chief DHS investigator of possible abuse, said failure to notify her office highlights flaws in the reporting system and raises questions about the safety of the children on Ward 40.

"If the state police don't investigate, we still need to," she said. "That's the only way we can keep track of what's happening there."

The documented cases of sexual abuse spanned the administrations of Govs. Neil Goldschmidt, Barbara Roberts and John Kitzhaber. All three said they did not know what was happening on Ward 40.

"That's an issue that should have come straight to the top so we could make sure it stopped," Kitzhaber said. "I don't know why it didn't. Obviously, it should have."

Roberts told The Oregonian: "Never did anyone ever talk to me about sex abuse cases at the hospital. Had I known, I would have responded immediately. For me, there would not have been any tolerance."

"A collection of suffering"

Since 1976, hundreds of mentally ill children have been sent to live behind the brick walls of McKenzie Hall, a two-story fortress that houses Ward 40 on the northwest edge of Oregon State Hospital's 148-acre campus.

Ward 40 is one of the few places in the state that serves emotionally disturbed children ages 14 to 18. Many are wards of the state.

Former patients describe Ward 40 as intimidating and lonely, absent color and love. Children screamed for their mothers as "The Price Is Right" droned on the day-room television. So many kids were on suicide watch that the corridor was lined with their mattresses at night so staff could keep an eye on them.

"The best way to describe it is a collection of suffering," Kutas said.

Children often arrive at Ward 40 expecting to stay a month or two. Yet many languish hundreds of days, sometimes years, at taxpayer expense -- $30,700 per child per month today. Their illnesses make it difficult, if not impossible, to place them elsewhere. Families that visit are the exception, not the rule.

As a result, many children are reared by doctors and psychiatric aides in a place where razor wire divides the playground from an exercise lot for criminally insane adults.

Across the nation, states are moving from institutionalizing mentally ill children to creating smaller, homelike facilities that are cheaper and more effective.

A significant amount of the therapy at Ward 40 is administered by psychiatric aides who hold the title of mental health therapist. Although they can be hired with only a few days of certified nurse's assistant training, they conduct therapy sessions and plan patient schedules. Many have no college background in psychology. All the cases The Oregonian examined involved workers at this level.

Until two years ago, Ward 40 accepted children as young as 5. Today, it is set aside for teenagers, with younger children sent to the private Parry Center in Portland, which contracts with the state.

Mazur-Hart, superintendent when the younger children were transferred, acknowledged at the time that an institutional setting "isn't a proper home for children." Records obtained by The Oregonian dramatically illustrate that point.

One year, one man, six girls

One of the employees whose background supervisors did not check was Michael Paul Hake. A drug user who served jail time in 1978 in Idaho for delivery of a controlled substance, Hake began work in 1984 in the state hospital kitchen.

Three months later, he passed a certified nurse's assistant test and began to work in an adult unit. In 1987, he moved to Ward 40.

In the span of a year, in the dormitory, in a space beneath steps, behind thick-trunked trees that shade the hospital campus, Hake may have sexually abused as many as six girls in his care, according to records and interviews.

In August 1988, Hake's supervisors gave him a verbal warning for "spending an excessive amount of time with four of the female patients," according to hospital documents.

The next month, an outside social worker called the hospital to report a suspected sexual relationship between Hake and a 17-year-old girl who had been discharged from Ward 40 four days earlier. Hake had left his wife and two children and moved into the girl's subsidized Mill City apartment, the social worker reported.

Hospital records say he also invited a 16-year-old patient named Angela to that apartment for sex, sliding a key into her pants pocket. Police records state that hospital staff confiscated the key.

State laws passed in 1975 require "mandatory reporters" -- including doctors, teachers, social workers and mental health professionals -- to inform police and child-protective services immediately of suspected sexual abuse. Although hospital officials considered the alleged abuse of the 17-year-old plausible enough to launch an internal review and eventually fire Hake, there is no indication they called police.

Several Ward 40 girls attended classes at Chemeketa Community College and were allowed to leave hospital grounds unaccompanied. Hake, when he was their case manager, arranged many of their schedules.

Days after his firing, Hake approached Angela at a bus stop near the college on Oct. 7, 1988, she later told police. He told her he wanted to show her his new car. When she walked close, a second man pulled her inside the car and Hake drove to a nearby house, she said.

Angela, who weighed 79 pounds, told detectives that the men carried her into the basement and took turns holding her down as they raped and sodomized her.

"Mike then told me that if I tell anybody about this, they will do the same thing to me again and they will kill me," she said. Hospital records show she arrived back at McKenzie Hall without her textbooks, disheveled, dirty and distraught.

Nearly two weeks passed before a hospital official called state police, the agency's records show, after Angela drew a picture of two men raping her, labeling one of the figures "Mike Hake." She did not know who the other man was. A subsequent rape exam showed significant injury.

The criminal investigation took more than a year because Angela was so traumatized. For months, she lay silent, tied to a restraint bed and fed through a nasal tube. During that time, Hake worked in a Salem nursing home less than a mile away.

A Marion County grand jury indicted Hake for first-degree rape, sodomy and kidnapping in Angela's assault. But a June 1991 trial resulted in a hung jury.

Rather than retry the case, prosecutors allowed Hake to plead no contest to one count of first-degree criminal mistreatment of the girl with whom he shared an apartment, and had married, shortly before his rape trial. Hake never went to prison. He was sentenced to five years' probation, ordered to have no contact with Angela, to participate in a sex offender treatment program and surrender his nurse's assistant license.

Hake, who now lives in Idaho, did not respond to a written request for an interview.

The hospital did not change its procedures as a result of the Hake case. Nor did it investigate on its own whether Hake had abused others on Ward 40.

Confidential records of the criminal inquiry obtained by The Oregonian, as well as interviews with former patients, suggest there was much to examine.

In October 1989, as police investigated the attack on Angela, a 14-year-old patient came forward to say she, too, had been abused by Hake when she was 12.

"I have nightmares about what happened to me," she told authorities at the time. "I dream that Mike comes in and sits down beside me and starts touching me. I'm afraid to go to school."

An internal hospital memo contained in the police file shows that hospital staff decided not to investigate further for fear of interfering with the girl's psychiatric treatment.

Another teenage patient fled the hospital after learning Hake was a suspect in Angela's rape, police reports state. The girl had told Angela and other patients that she and Hake had had sexual intercourse on the ward. She was named in police records as a possible victim, but officers said they couldn't find her and never interviewed her.

The girl's mother, located recently by The Oregonian, said her daughter came home pregnant several weeks after fleeing the hospital. "She told us Michael Hake was the father," the woman said, adding that she helped her daughter get an abortion.

The former patient, now married and living in another state, declined to discuss the matter, saying she had "moved on."

Maureen Greiner, another former patient, also was mentioned in police and court records as a possible victim.

Her parents said recently that their daughter, a devout Roman Catholic, confided "something major," to a priest who visited her on the ward. The priest urged the Greiners to remove her from the hospital immediately. Lynne Greiner said she and her husband were afraid to take their depressed daughter home.

"I had these little funny feelings," she said. But "I put things aside because, after all, this is the Oregon State Hospital. We trusted because we didn't know what else to do."

Greiner said she was never told that one of her daughter's caregivers was under investigation for rape. "Why were we never told? Why? Why?" she asked, her voice shaking.

Another teenage patient, Jennifer Borgelin, told others that Hake had molested her, too.

Borgelin's mother, Kathy Czupofski, said, "I always believed deep in my heart that something happened to her there. When she came out of there, she was different. Instead of being helped, I believe they ruined her."

All that happened to Maureen Greiner and Jennifer Borgelin will never be known. Both committed suicide in the early 1990s, shortly after their discharge from Ward 40.

Slow to investigate

In April 1990, a 17-year-old patient complained that a psychiatric aide, Ronnie Roy LaCross, had grabbed her breast during a full body hug -- and that it wasn't the first time.

"This is the one I actually told someone about," the patient told staff. The Hake investigation was under way and records show that the hospital was slow to investigate another incident. Police were not called.

Two months later, after the girl turned 18, the hospital began an internal inquiry. The patient told hospital and DHS investigators that she "didn't feel safe here anymore" and that LaCross "shouldn't be working here."

A report called her "very credible" but noted "there has been some pressure by the staff for (her) to accept the fact that she may have wrongly perceived Ron's actions." At the same time, investigators called LaCross' accounts "inconsistent."

Another patient told investigators she felt uncomfortable around LaCross and had told him to stop hugging her.

George Bachik, then hospital superintendent, determined that abuse could not be substantiated.

"Perhaps and indeed in the process of hugging, with whatever clumsiness, unintentional contact may occur and events may be consequently misinterpreted," Bachik's report said. "No disciplinary action will be taken."

But state records show that at least one official recognized the warning signs on Ward 40. Kutas, who had been asked to help investigate the case, expressed concern about improper physical contact between staff and patients.

"I think this subject would be important in a program where you undoubtedly have a number of patients with sexual/physical abuse in their past and where not only trust building, but how people are touched, is important," she wrote in a memo.

Bachik subsequently ordered a review of the "practice of staff/patient hugging," hospital documents state.

It is unclear whether policies changed.

What is certain is that abuse did not stop.

Poem speaks of trust

Kelly Darcey was admitted to the hospital on June 15, 1990; she had suffered years of sexual abuse and had tried to kill herself. Within days of her admittance, the 15-year-old was molested by LaCross.

LaCross volunteered to be with Darcey one-on-one when she was on suicide watch. During these times, she later told detectives, he told her he wanted to make love to her, fondling her, exposing himself and asking her to do the same. Once, he put his wedding ring on her finger and promised to divorce his wife when Darcey was released.

On July 10, 1990, Darcey typed a poem she said was about LaCross on the Ward 40 computer:

It's gone again. . . hard-earned trust, You took it away by your excruciating lust.

A nurse found LaCross alone with Darcey 31/2 months later in the staff break room. Alarmed because of the earlier allegation against LaCross, the nurse alerted his supervisor, Stephen Brakebill.

Brakebill and the nurse confronted LaCross, who put up no argument, records show. He signed a contract agreeing to limit one-on-one contact with female patients to those on his caseload, which Darcey was not.

Brakebill kept handwritten notes on LaCross' adherence to the work plan.

"Observed playing game with female resident in the day room appropriately!"

Brakebill noted Dec. 24, 1990. "Doing an excellent job!" said an entry five weeks later.

But LaCross, who worked swing shift, was continuing to sexually abuse Darcey. Twice in one month, he wrote in Darcey's chart that he had engaged in 10-minute "struggle holds" with her.

"When I was in struggle holds," Darcey later testified in court, "he put my hand right on his privates."

On Valentine's Day 1991, a day before Brakebill observed "No problems!" with LaCross' behavior, the psychiatric aide, in violation of hospital policy, gave Darcey a red and white teddy bear with a plastic tag that said, "I love you."

Records show that staff confiscated the tag when Darcey used it to carve bloody wounds on her arms.

About a month later, two teenage patients demanded that staff stop LaCross from abusing Darcey. But hospital officials failed to take action.

The hospital waited almost three days before calling her caseworker at the state's children's services agency. The hospital did not inform police as required by law. After pestering the hospital for two days to report the suspected abuse, the caseworker called state police herself, records show.

Five months later, Mazur-Hart, the hospital superintendent, ruled that Darcey's allegations were true. LaCross, who spent several months on paid leave, was eventually fired and convicted of second-degree sexual assault.

The girl who made the first complaint about LaCross more than a year earlier was named as an "additional victim" in police reports in the Darcey case.

She told police that besides fondling her breast, LaCross had sex with her three times on the ward. LaCross was never charged in that case.

In 1992, Darcey sued state and hospital supervisors and LaCross, alleging she had been sent to Ward 40 despite "a pre-existing pattern" of sex abuse against young patients. A jury awarded her $530,000.

Today, LaCross lives in a nursing home in Washington state. He declined to comment.

Playing politics, buying silence

In 1991, the Oregon State Hospital adopted new rules for tracking suspected abuse of patients. The superintendent was to be notified immediately of any allegations. He was required to forward cases to DHS for independent examination but retained the power to ultimately decide whether abuse had occurred. Mazur-Hart said the change was prompted by the Ward 40 cases and patient abuse elsewhere in the hospital.

The new policy, however, was not always followed.

Mary Kay Gonzales was admitted to the state hospital in 1989 when she was 12. She lived in state care more than six years. By the time she was 18, she had been molested by two employees.

One was her longtime psychiatric aide on Ward 40, David Conner, 32 years her senior. The second, Brigham Clifton, worked at Dammasch State Hospital in Wilsonville, where Gonzales was committed for mutilating herself after Conner rejected her.

Records show hospital staff did not immediately report their suspected abuse of Gonzales in either case. In fact, Mazur-Hart never contacted DHS to investigate Conner until Greg Smith, the Salem lawyer who won Kelly Darcey's case, threatened to sue on Gonzales' behalf in 1995 -- more than two years after the alleged abuse on Ward 40 occurred.

Mazur-Hart eventually ruled that Gonzales had been sexually violated by both workers. But when her lawsuit went to trial, state attorneys tried to discredit her. In court papers, an assistant attorney general referred to her "bizarre mental abnormality" and said she was "extraordinarily manipulative."

Several days after the trial began, the attorney general's office, then directed by current Gov. Ted Kulongoski, agreed to settle the case for $300,000, records show. The state kicked in another $50,000 for a confidentiality clause to ensure that Gonzales never talk publicly about the outcome of the case.

Discussions -- which revealed the settlement amount -- would never have become public, but a transcript of a closed court hearing that should have been sealed was instead filed with other public records in the case.

Public court documents state that a Marion County Circuit judge had ordered the settlement sealed because "privacy interests of plaintiff . . . outweigh the public's interest."

But the transcript shows another reason why the state sought privacy: to protect the reputation of hospital administrators.

"We made it clear that we were buying confidentiality from the plaintiffs," Assistant Attorney General John McCulloch Jr. told the judge. "The real damage to the defendants is hardly calculable. I don't know how to put a dollar sign on the political aspect. What's somebody going to say in the next legislative session about Dr. Mazur-Hart and how he runs his ship out there?"

Smith said McCulloch offered the additional $50,000 after he said he was planning to hold a news conference on the courthouse steps, an interpretation McCulloch accepted in a recent interview.

Kulongoski declined repeated requests for interviews but released the following statement: "The Oregon Department of Justice annually handles thousands of legal matters, both civil and criminal. As the Attorney General, my role was to oversee the attorneys who represented the state in these legal matters. I have no recollection of the facts or circumstances of this specific legal matter that occurred nearly a decade ago."

Potential underreporting

Hospital officials say that serious abuse on Ward 40 is a thing of the past. But Kutas, the chief DHS investigator, said she thinks there has been underreporting of abuse that makes it impossible to know its full extent. "I have concerns," she said, "about whether we're hearing about everything at the hospital."

For a three-year period ending in 2000, Kutas said, her office received no reports of alleged sex abuse on Ward 40 from Mazur-Hart, who resigned last fall amid controversy about an escape by a forensics patient and a neglect case on an adult ward.

Kutas was taken aback to learn that her office had no record of seven allegations of child sex abuse by Ward 40 staff that were reported to state police in the past four years.

A database kept by her office shows the last case the hospital substantiated as sex abuse on Ward 40 was in 1996, when a male staff member was discovered staring at girls in various states of undress.

In the eight years since, only three other accusations have been reported to DHS, including a former patient's allegation in 2000 of being raped as a child by a Ward 40 aide and a complaint by two former patients in 2002 that another worker had had sex with them on the ward.

State police and DHS administrators in charge of the hospital refused to release records of the incidents that were not reported to Kutas, citing privacy concerns for the patients.

Mazur-Hart, who now makes nearly $80,000 a year studying problems in the state's mental health system for DHS, declined repeated interview requests.

He agreed to answer questions in writing, defending the hospital's handling of child sex abuse allegations during his 12-year tenure. "At times the conduct of a few staff was very wrong," he wrote. "When aware of this, we took strong action to stop it and prevent any future recurrence."

A former worker who has since been convicted of attacking young boys, however, said the hospital was a pedophile's dream.

In a letter to The Oregonian, Frank Milligan detailed a litany of oversight problems at the hospital, including "far too many blind corners" and a "lack of cameras or even simple surveillance equipment."

"Should a staff member be so inclined, he/she need only wait for an emergency situation, or a patient to act out and draw the attention of the other staff, to take advantage of the chaos and slip away with a victim," he wrote. "Just as disturbing is the fact that I worked side-by-side with psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers and not one of them ever suspected that a man who, since the age of 13, had gruesome fantasies about kidnapping, raping, mutilating and murdering young boys, was standing right next to them. One would think that at least one of them might have detected something."

Milligan, who worked on Ward 40 as a psychiatric aide from 1994 to 1997, wrote that he groomed a 10-year-old boy on Ward 40 by "plying him with things such as extra privileges, compliments and a soda pop." He said the boy was "both needy and passive -- two traits that all pedophiles look for in a victim."

A law enforcement official told The Oregonian that police strongly suspect that Milligan victimized at least one mentally ill boy on Ward 40 but could not bring charges because the child was afraid to talk.

In 2000, Milligan was convicted of abducting a 10-year-old boy from a Dallas park. He raped and strangled the boy, slashed his throat and left him for dead. The boy survived. Milligan is serving a 36-year prison term.

At the time of the attack, Milligan worked as a counselor at MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn. He also was out on bail in a sexual assault case of an 11-year-old boy in Seaside. Milligan had met that boy through a Ward 40 staff member, whose daughter ran a Salem foster home where the boy lived.

The hospital did not try to determine whether Milligan, by then one of the state's most notorious pedophiles, had abused patients on the children's ward.

Kutas said she wanted to investigate but lacked the authority unless invited by the superintendent.

That invitation never came.

Reporter Kim Christensen and news researchers Margie Gultry and Kathleen Blythe contributed to this report.

Michelle Roberts:
503-294-5041;
mich...@news.oregonian.com

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