This 60 year old man is six feet tall, with blue eyes. He’s passionate about gardening, computer programming and cooking. He’s a wee bit paunchy but active. He’s lonely and looking for friends, his online ad announces. He sounds like he could be someone’s Mr. McDreamy. Except, he’s left out a significant bit of background. Saul Betesh (inset) is one of Canada’s most infamous child sex killers, an imprisoned predator whose depraved crime shocked a generation.
Two Ontario mothers whose teenage daughters were the victims of violent crimes – one was raped and the other killed by a drunk driver – are outraged over their treatment by a supposedly victim-friendly federal bureaucracy. Corrections Canada refuses to allow the women to visit the prisons where the perpetrators are incarcerated until it drafts a national policy on the issue. Victims have routinely been allowed to tour penitentiaries across the country for more than a decade.
John Gallienne (inset), a relentless pedophile and former organist and choirmaster at an Anglican Church in Kingston, Ontario, has been given house arrest for his third set of convictions for sexually abusing young boys in his charge. Gallienne pleaded guilty in a Kingston courtroom Monday, June 6, to sex attacks decades ago on two former choirboys. He was first prosecuted for a 15-year campaign of sexual terror in 1990. Gallienne was convicted of abusing more than a dozen young boys, as young as eight. The latest charges were laid after former choirboys who did not come forward in 1990 went to police. The new convictions mean he’ll be stripped of a pardon he had obtained.
Sex killer John Lee Jr. believes that he should be freed from prison, even though experts still believe he poses a high risk to commit new, violent crimes. The Parole Board of Canada says Lee was “superficial, grandiose and lacking in insight” when he demanded release during his latest parole hearing, held March 25 this year at the medium-security prison in Ontario where Lee is serving his life sentence. The parole board refused to grant Lee (inset in 1986) any form of freedom, after concluding that he’s still too dangerous.
Police in Kingston, Ontario took extraordinary measures with the release from prison of an Internet sex predator considered one of the most prolific ever caught in Canada. A legal leash (read full document after jump) was slapped on Mark Bedford (inset) when he walked out of penitentiary a free man after three years behind bars. Bedford is forbidden from using a computer that can access the Internet, along with 22 other strict conditions.
Imprisoned child sex killer Saul Betesh says he’s prepared to bring on kidney failure by refusing to take insulin if federal prison authorities don’t acede to his demands, Cancrime has learned. Betesh has been in prison for more than 30 years, since he and two other men abducted, tortured, raped and murdered Toronto shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques (inset) in 1977. The crime sparked national outrage and led to a massive cleanup of the sex trade in Canada’s biggest city.
Killer Richard Joyce tried to hide his face from my camera and he refused to answer any questions as he shuffled into a Kingston, Ontario, courtroom today to make the surprise decision to abandon his faint hope application. As revealed in this previous post, Joyce now faces new charges related to the abduction and sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl 21 years ago, the year before he killed a Kingston woman during a gas bar robbery.
Science caught up to Richard Joyce, just as the imprisoned killer was about to go before a jury and plead for earlier freedom. Joyce, who is serving a life sentence for the 1991 murder of a gas bar operator in Kingston, Ontario, is expected to appear in a courtroom Friday morning to formally abandon his faint hope hearing that was scheduled to begin in two weeks, Cancrime has learned. In the afternoon, Kingston Police are expected to announce that they have charged Joyce in a 21-year-old unsolved sexual assault case involving a nine-year-old girl. The child was assaulted the year before Joyce and accomplice Terry Kennedy tortured and murdered Yvonne Rouleau, a 34-year-old mother of three.
Criminal defence lawyers Michael Edelson (inset) and his partner Vince Clifford took extraordinary precautions in the handling of the sensational sex-murder case of Russell Williams. I had a chance to interview the veteran Ottawa lawyers (full audio after the jump) who defended Williams, the former airbase commander who pleaded guilty to raping and murdering two women. The revelations from the lawyers form the core of this feature story that I wrote for Canadian Lawyer magazine.
James Giff (inset), an imprisoned killer who raped and stabbed to death a 16-year-old Smiths Falls girl 25 years ago, made a dramatic admission during a parole hearing this week. “He finally admitted that he gets aroused by the combination of violence and sex,” said Heidi Illingworth, who attended the hearing Wednesday at minimum-security Pittsburgh Institution in Kingston.
Video of the Shafia family, who have since been convicted of murdering four family members, as they arrived in court in October 2010, when their case was at the pre-trial motion stage. (click image above to play video)
Managers at medium-security Joyceville penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, bowed to a long list of inmate demands, including giving back control of spaces in the volatile prison where a race riot last year left one inmate near death (click image above to read the internal memo obtained by Cancrime). Management aceded to the demands of the inmates after they staged a one-week strike in which convicts refused to report to their prison jobs.
»Click here to read full post about last year's riot at Joyceville
»Click here to read about Josh Erdodi, the inmate who was savagely beaten during the riot
