During the 1950's, after his father died from a workplace accident, Rod and his seven brothers and sisters were made Wards of the State - distraught by grief, and fear, his mother couldn't cope or care for them.

Rod ended up at Bayswater Boys home in Melbourne's south-east. Bayswater was an institution run by the salvation army.

"They preached religion like it was going out of fashion and you were thrashed for anything you did wrong or they perceived you did wrong," Rod said.

Aged just 12, Rod was at the mercy of officers with a violent streak, who ruled with an iron fist. Some, paedophiles, were living and sleeping in the same dormitories. Not long after he arrived, Rod was raped.

Complaints to senior officers only brought vicious revenge bashings. Living in fear Rod eventually succumbed and followed orders.

"With all that they put on, you just block things out. I blocked everything out up until about eight years ago," Rod said.

After Fifty years, the memories are back to haunt the father of nine and while memory isn't always the most reliable thing, he's haunted by the unexplained disappearance of some of his young friends.

Rod claims they vanished after being disciplined and taken away by officers, never to be heard of again.

"One in particular who was carted off to the children's hospital was Speedy Whitmore and on the way back we were told by Francis that he jumped out of a train and hit a steel pylon and that we would never see him again. We assumed he was dead and to this day I don't know what happened to Speedy Whitmore," Rod said.

The thing is, no one does.

"Numerous other boys just seemed to vanish off the face of the earth. Where the hell they went, I have no idea but they would be escorted away somewhere and what happened from there on we have no idea," Rod said.

The "lost boys" as Rod calls them are Graham "Speedy" Whitmore, Ray Dewar and Micheal Paselcheck.

In 2006 Rod and his brothers won compensation from the Salvation Army for the sexual and physical abuse they suffered. More than 300 claims have now been made and it's set to cost the Salvo's millions of dollars.

But Rod's three friends aren't among them. Today Tonight's Investigation uncovered a Michael Paselcheck who'd been living in South Australia, but he's now dead, so we'll never know if he was the missing one.

There's no trace, anywhere, of the others.

What happened to those boys remains a mystery. The only people who have the power to solve it are at Salvation Army headquarters, but despite several requests, they refuse to be interviewed and they won't allow us to view their records.

It makes you wonder what the charity, respected by so many, is so desperate to hide.

Salvation Army records may reveal if the boys were collected from care and when. And while the Salvos were paid to provide the care, the boys were still Wards of the State, the responsibility of the State Government.

Requests for them to investigate claims these boys may have met with foul play remain unanswered.

"The State Government should know what happened to those boys, after all, they were the carers of those boys. If they vanished, who's going to answer that question; if they escaped, surely the State Government would know. There should be a report that they escaped that we are aware of and no sighting of them," Rod said.