Here is just a partial list of serial child sex offenders set free by the Canadian justice system
In 2011, Randall Hopley snatched three-year-old Kienan Hebert from his second floor bedroom in Sparwood, B.C. Only an all-out response by B.C. police convinced Hopley to surrender the child unharmed four days later.
Hopley had been hurting young children since early adolescence and had prior convictions for both the abduction and sexual assault of minors. Prior to Hebert’s abduction, Hopley was found to have built a “child lair” in the woods of the Crowsnest Pass. The room could be locked from the outside and contained sex toys, lotion and a pair of children’s pyjama pants altered to resemble a thong.
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Last week, Hopley was freed from prison into the Vancouver area, his precise whereabouts concealed for “privacy reasons.” A parole board decision precipitating the release noted Hopley still had little appreciation of the harm he had caused and was unable to “manage” his risk to others.
It would be comforting to think that Hopley’s case is a disturbing anomaly, but it’s not. Serial molesters, child torturers, child rapists, child pornographers and even child murderers are regularly freed from Canadian jails or spared prison time, despite real fears that they will offend again.
Last month, the National Post published a list of particularly brutal murderers who have been released from Canadian jails. Below, a not-at-all-comprehensive list of repeat child sex offenders set loose by the Canadian justice system, often with horrific consequences.
Whitmore has often been held up as the poster boy of a revolving-door justice system wholly unable to protect Canadian children from sexual abuse. Whitmore has been repeatedly abducting and raping children since 1989. Although he has often been arrested and convicted, he has been little deterred by sentences as short as a few months. In 1993, sex offences against four young boys got him just 16 months. Abducting and molesting an eight-year-old girl netted him another 56 months in jail. Getting arrested at a hotel room in 2000 with a 13-year-old boy got him a one year sentence. In 2002 he was caught with an abducted five-year-old and a “rape kit” that included zip ties, duct tape, KY lubricant and child pornography — this offence netted him only three years in jail. In 2006 came his most publicized crime yet; the abduction from prairie farms of two young boys that Whitmore kept chained in an abandoned Kipling, Saskatchewan farm house, raping both for days. Even with this crime, Whitmore has been eligible to seek parole since 2015. In 2016, one of the boys, Zach Miller, went public with his story in an attempt to provide hope to others who have been targeted by pedophiles — and ensure that Whitmore would never be free again. “I deal with night terrors every night. There’s nothing you can really do – I’ve learned just to let the emotions go. Just live through it,” he said. “I don’t want to see this happen to another family, to another child. But it just keeps happening.”
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The first obvious signs of Abrosimo as a public menace came during the serial harassment of an ex-girlfriend over a period of 12 years. He broke into the woman’s home and raped her in 1992, barraged her with constant phone calls, repeatedly broke no-contact orders and assaulted her again in 2002. In the meantime he was racking up a myriad of other criminal charges, including a 1996 shooting committed just two months after his release from jail for sexual assault. As his offences mounted, the parole board repeatedly demurred from returning him to jail, writing after the 1996 shooting that there is “little benefit of your reincarceration.” In 2004, Abrosimo handcuffed a sex trade worker before brutally beating and raping the woman. A few days later, he drove his van into two young girls cycling in Langley, B.C. As they lay sprawled on the ground, he abducted the youngest one, an 11-year-old, taped shut her eyes and mouth and then raped the child. At the time of both attacks Abrosimo was living in the Langley home of his mother. When he was handed an 18-year sentence for the crime, she tearfully told reporters, “I don’t think he needs to be put away that long.” She got her wish: As early as 2017, he was released into an Okanagan halfway house with relaxed curfew conditions. This came despite fervent pleas by victim’s families warning the parole board that Abrosimo had simply been coached by his parole officer to tell them what they wanted to hear.
Even in the soul-darkening world of prosecuting child abuse, Kunath’s case stood out. “This is, in my career, the most serious case of child abuse I’ve dealt with,” Crown prosecutor Jayme Williams said at the time of trial. In 2010, Kunath had tortured a six-week-old baby: He burned the baby’s feet with a lighter, tore the boy’s penis and repeatedly sodomized him with household objects. Doctors surmised that the child would suffer lifelong handicaps as a result of the mistreatment. At trial, Kunath’s main defence was that his torture of the infant was not sexually motivated, but was due to his anger at his girlfriend spending time with the baby’s biological father. In August, 2017 — not quite seven years after the crime — Kunath was released on day parole with the note that he had “showed regret.”
As a choirmaster at Anglican churches in Kingston and Victoria throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Gallienne had unfettered access to molest and sexually assault scores of young boys. One of his tricks was apparently to put his penis in the mouths of his young charges, telling them it would make them sing better. Although 19 of Gallienne’s victims have now come forward to police, he has received only negligible prison terms for the abuse. A 1990 conviction for the serial sexual abuse of 13 boys, two of whom later took their own lives, netted a sentence of only four and a half years — about four months per boy. Two more convictions came while he was in prison, but he was nevertheless released by October, 1994. By 2004, Gallienne was found to be leading another choir at Ottawa’s St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church. More convictions for historical sex offences arrived in both 2011 and 2016, but each time Gallienne was merely handed probation or house arrest. Just this month, he was found guilty of two more sex offences from the 1980s. “I just had so much rage and would lash out at anyone and everything,” one of his most recent accusers wrote in a victim impact statement quoted by the Kingston Whig-Standard. He ended the letter by wishing he could get Gallienne alone in a room to see “what I could do with the rage you’ve created.”
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Based in Edmonton, the Larsen brothers are twins who both share a lengthy history of sexually victimizing young children, as well as a track record of repeatedly regaining their freedom despite showing every sign of seeking to victimize more children. In 2009, Lyle was on probation for a prior sexual assault against a minor when he raped another minor at a party while photographing the crime. A later psychological assessment determined Lyle had sexually assaulted at least 19 others, some as young as four. Lyle was first released in 2013 and kept regaining release despite serious breaches in his release conditions, such as attempting to groom an 11-year-old with autism or being caught staring at children playing in an Edmonton wading pool on Canada Day. “The Edmonton Police Service has reasonable grounds to believe he will commit another sexual offence against someone under the age of 18,” read a public alert issued on his most recent releasein 2016. Cyle received a sentence of less than three years for luring a 10-year-old to his basement to sexually assault the girl. Here again, a string of early releases starting in 2012 resulted almost immediately in broken parole conditions, such as Cyle accessing child pornography online. After Cyle’s most recent release, in October, Edmonton Police similarly warned that he would be seeking to sexually exploit minors again “if given the chance.”
In 2002, Natomagan choked and sexually assaulted a sleeping 11-year-old girl, seriously injuring her in the attack. He had initially choked her to stop her screaming after breaking in to her home, but decided to rape her after realizing she was still breathing. The crime netted Natomagan a four year sentence. In 2008, he attacked and sexually assaulted a random 16-year-old girl in a Prince Albert, Sask. park. It was at this point that Saskatchewan prosecutors sought dangerous offender status for Natomagan — but the effort was struck down by a judge and later on appeal. “Mr. Natomagan’s offending is serious, but not as serious as the many other offenders declared to be dangerous in this jurisdiction and elsewhere,” read a 2012 decision by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal. In 2015, Natomagan was released into an Edmonton halfway house from which he quickly escaped. The next month, he abducted a 37-year-old female jogger in Edmonton, bound her with green painter’s tape, held a box cutter to her throat and raped her in a residential alley.
In a 2012 feature, the Hamilton Spectator described Cooper as “the country’s worst pedophile.” From 1967 to 1983, Cooper primarily targeted the step children from his two marriages. He not only groomed his five victims for entire childhoods packed with regular rape and sexual humiliation, but he severely physically abused them as well, employing torture instruments ranging from cattle prods to buggy whips. In one case, after a boy soiled his pants after being anally raped, Cooper forced him to eat his own feces in front of the other children. “You are a lowdown, mean, despicable, evil manifestation of a human being that preys on little children,” Judge Nick Borkovich said in a 1993 decision that sentenced Cooper to 30 years in prison — the harshest ever for a Canadian child abuser in modern times. Nevertheless, a combination of appeals and early release ensured that Cooper started getting out of jail as early as 2008. He has repeatedly breached his bail conditions, including inquiring about children’s programs at a community centre and striking up relationships that could again give him access to young children. Regardless, the releases continue, striking terror into the lives of Cooper’s former stepchildren. “I’m so worried he’s going to find me,” one told the Hamilton Spectator after Cooper was freed in 2015.
Thirteen-year-old Amanda Raymond died of a drug overdose at an all-night party of minors hosted by Watts, then 41, at a home on Somme Island near Cambridge, Ont. While Raymond was comatose but still alive, Watts had sexually assaulted her. Not only did Watts have a prior 1989 conviction for the forcible confinement of a 16-year-old girl, but a police search of the residence turned up a hidden camera and hundreds of naked photos of underage girls. Despite an attempted flight from justice that included Watts ramming police cruisers in pursuit, the terms of his conviction for manslaughter and sexual assault allowed him to get out of jail as early as 2015. In a pattern that is becoming familiar on this list, each release resulted almost immediately in recidivist behaviour, including possession of violent pornography and photos of high school aged girls. “The board is satisfied there is no appropriate program of supervision that can be established which would adequately protect society from your risk to reoffend,” the Parole Board of Canada wrote after one such breach in 2016. Regardless, the releases have continued, the most recent coming in January.
James holds the dubious distinction of being one of Canada’s most well-known child sex offenders. As coach of the WHL’s Swift Current Broncos in the 1980s and 1990s, James freely sexually abused young boys under his charge, some of whom, such as Theoren Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy, went on to NHL careers. Even as a lengthening list of former Swift Current players began to step forward to the police with abuse allegations starting in the late 1990s, James’ convictions have only netted a total combined sentence of about six years, in between which he had been granted legal pardons and gone on to coach other teams of young boys. “Canada is the Disneyland for pedophiles,” Fleury wrote in an outraged response to James getting full parole in 2016 after serving only four years in jail for hundreds of sex assaults. James’ case could be compared to that of former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, who molested hundreds of young American gymnasts under the guise of performing a routine medical examination. Except in Nassar’s case, he received a sentence of up to 175 years and will die in jail.
Gratton had a well-established history of child sexual predation with six known victims dating back nearly two decades. First caught and convicted in the early 1990s, he served only six years before regaining his freedom. Although registered as a long-term offender and required to check in regularly with a parole officer, none of these things were a barrier in 2008 to Gratton kidnapping, drugging and sexually abusing two little girls, aged seven and 10, snatched off the streets of Edmonton. His strategy was to pull up to unsupervised girls in a dark SUV, offer them puppies or ice cream and grab them when they got close. Police believe a province-wide Amber Alert may be all that scared Gratton into abandoning his spree after only two abductions. “I hate life,” one of the girls would say in a court statement. “I don’t see the point anymore. He took something away from me that night that I’ll never, ever be able to get back.”
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