Former Lake Alice nurse charged over ill-treatment of children dies aged 93
Dempsey Cockran in court in 2021.
Photo:
RNZ / Nate McKinnon
The only staff member at the notorious Lake Alice child and adolescent unit to face prosecution over the horrors at the Rangitīkei institution in the 1970s has died.
Dempsey Corkran, 93, died on Saturday 14 June, according to death notices that appeared in weekend newspapers.
The notices said the Marton man "died at home surrounded by his family", and his family thanked Marton district nurses and the Arohanui Hospice in Palmerston North. A private service has been held.
"His presence, guidance and wit will be missed by us all," the notices said.
Appearing in court under his full names, John Richard James Corkran, the former unit charge nurse faced eight charges of ill-treating children by injecting them with the paralysing drug paraldehyde.
He was due to face trial in Wellington in 2023, but in June that year the High Court
granted a permanent stay due to his failing health
.
Corkran first appeared in court in late 2021, then aged 89, at the conclusion of a third police investigation into the Lake Alice unit.
That investigation found there was also enough evidence to charge the unit's lead psychiatrist Dr Selwyn Leeks and one other staff member, but they were unfit for trial.
Leeks
died in early 2022
in Australia, aged 92.
Previous police investigations in the 1970s and 2000s did not result in charges.
Corkran faced - and pleaded not guilty to - eight charges of ill-treating children between 1974 and 1977, carrying maximum penalties of 10 years' jail.
Court documents said Corkran injected the boys with drugs for reasons including them running away; calling him a bastard; "being smart"; and because a boy was "enjoying himself too much, laughing and having jokes with friends".
When the prosecution was halted, survivors of the Lake Alice unit spoke about their disappointment that no one would ever face justice for what happened there - horrors the government now acknowledged amounted to torture.
Corkran did not appear at his later court hearings, but
was at his initial call
in the Whanganui District Court.
Outside he declined to comment to reporters, and his family grew angry as television cameras followed him along the street.
Corkran worked at Lake Alice from 1960 as a psychiatric nurse, becoming a charge nurse in 1968 and then in the child and adolescent unit, which opened in 1972, from 1974.
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