Richard Rashke

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In March 1960, two students at Divine Word Seminary in East Troy, Wisconsin, discovered their 15-year-old classmate, Kenneth “Red” Rudnitski hanging from the clothes hook in a bathroom stall. The Janesville Wisconsin boy was barefoot and dressed in his pajamas. Wisconsin’s Walworth County botched its one-hour investigation into Red’s death. Although the manner, mode, and cause of death were highly suspicious, the county ruled Red’s death a suicide. The County Sheriff did not request an autopsy, and he did not advise the county prosecutor to open a suspicious death investigation. In reality, there was a clergy sexual predator at the school. His religious superior knew he was a serial sexual offender when he assigned him to the seminary high school. After Red’s body was discovered, the seminary, the religious order, and Walworth County covered up the crime. No one was ever charged with a crime. The book is based on interviews with former students and documents.

A Boy Named Red details the events leading up to Red’s death, the subsequent cover up, and the trauma endured by Red’s fellow students. The book asks and answers: Did Red commit suicide? If so why? Was Red murdered? If so where, why, by whom? The book concludes that Red was murdered by the pedophile.

The book also calls on the Wisconsin Attorney General to admit to the injustice, reopen the case of Kenneth Rudnitski, and give Red the autopsy Walworth County denied him by exhuming his body and allowing a forensic pathologist to examine his remains.

Richard Rashke is a playwright, screenwriter, and author of several groundbreaking non-fiction books, including Escape From Sobibor, The Killing of Karen Silkwood, and Useful Enemies. His books and plays have been published in thirteen foreign languages and have been the subject of movies for screen and television. His award-winning play Dear Esther has been produced every year since it premiered at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in1998. Mr. Rashke lives in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.