Crime Seen (18 page)

There were many other sexual abuse allegations that could have been disclosed by other hockey players against James but those players chose not to come forward at that time. Sheldon wouldn’t betray the trust of any of his teammates who confided in him by publicly speaking of what he knew. In 1997, just a few months after the allegations were made, James pleaded guilty and received a three-and-a-half-year sentence for his hundreds of assaults on Sheldon and the other unnamed player. James went from being
Hockey News
magazine’s 1989 Man of the Year to the status of convicted child sex offender and banned from coaching hockey in Canada. He served only eighteen months of his sentence and completed his parole in 2000. (A few years later Canadians would again be outraged, not only with the news of more NHL players filing sexual assault charges against James, but also when they learned that after he had finished his sentence in relation to the hundreds of assaults on Sheldon and his teammate, James had quietly been given a pardon by the National Parole Board.)

At the end of his presentation that day to the packed conference room, Sheldon revealed what he regretted more than anything else his abuser had done to him. “He stole my love of hockey and I was never able to get that back,” An even longer standing ovation followed and for the first time that morning Sheldon smiled.

I kept in touch with Sheldon over the years and watched him journey to a very different place in his life. He gained momentum in his outspoken efforts to raise awareness of child sexual abuse, such as appearing before government committees in Canada and the US examining such issues as sexual abuse in organized sports, minimum penalties for sex offenders and eliminating pardons for sex offenders. Sheldon once told me, “We also need to have things in place to turn these victims’ lives around so that they don’t end up in our system.”

Sheldon went on to be voted Calgary’s Citizen of the Year and had a child advocacy centre named after him. Best of all he achieved success at keeping his substance abuse demons at bay. The last time I spoke to him he said, “I can tell a solution story now and not just the Sheldon story.” Whether speaking before cops in a conference room or in a parliamentary committee hearing room, Sheldon’s story made a difference. I still occasionally see him on television speaking out on the issues that are important to him. He seems a polished professional with lots of confidence and doesn’t speak with his head down anymore. It’s held high, as it should be.

CHRISTOPHER AND THE LAW

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

—Mother Teresa

JIM STEPHENSON ALWAYS TOOK THE LEAD
in telling the story. He’s had years of experience doing public speaking engagements and media interviews. On most occasions when Jim was speaking, his wife, Anna, was by his side. In years past, they would often be wearing buttons on their lapels with a picture of their eleven-year-old son, Christopher, in his hockey uniform and the slogan “Never again. The laws must change.”

Jim had spoken at an ICIAF conference as one of my “survivor” guest speakers and he and Anna and I had become friends. One morning I stopped in to see them at their Brampton home. As usual, the three of us sat around their kitchen table to visit. Anna made coffee and set a plate of scones and pastries in the middle of the table, pushing it just a little closer to my reach. We chatted about our families and their upcoming trip to visit their daughter, Amanda, who was born three years after Christopher. She was now married and living in Australia.

Our conversation drifted to the topic of Christopher and on this occasion Anna was the one to speak first about something that I had never privately heard them talk about before: the night of Friday, June 17, 1988. As she spoke, she occasionally shut her eyes, seeing it in her mind all over again.

“That night I went with Amanda and Christopher to the mall,” Anna said. “Christopher needed a haircut and we were getting some stuff for Father’s Day on the weekend. We did some shopping and then went to the hairdresser where we usually go. I asked the girl if she would have time to cut Christopher’s hair. It was about a quarter to nine so she said there wasn’t much time left before the mall would be closing at nine. She said if we came back tomorrow morning she would take him first thing. We agreed to do that.

“Right across the hall was a sewing centre. I needed some ribbon for Amanda’s dress for my brother’s wedding in a few weeks. She was in the wedding party. We had a lot of parcels from our shopping and it was a very tiny shop so I asked Christopher to wait at the door. Amanda came into the shop with me and the lady showed me where the ribbon was. I had my back to the door while I was looking. They didn’t have what I wanted so Amanda and I came back out to the hallway. Christopher was gone.”

The hairdresser next door was just closing up her shop and Anna asked if by chance Christopher was with her. She said he wasn’t but just a couple of minutes earlier she had seen him walking away with an older man. She said the man had his arm around him and that Christopher looked upset. Anna asked the hairdresser to call security and left Amanda with her while she ran and searched the hallways nearby. Within a few minutes security arrived and they called Peel Regional Police.

Anna said, “I was in such a panic. I had a gut feeling that something was really wrong. I was shaking and I remember thinking about that little boy, Adam Walsh. I thought this couldn’t be happening. I was kind of out of it as I know I kept repeating myself. The officer actually took my hand and asked me to tell him what clothes Christopher had on. When he touched my hand, even though it was just for a brief moment, it made me feel a bit better. I thought okay, everything is going to be okay and they will find Christopher.”

After giving a description of Christopher to the police officers who were on scene at the mall, Anna and Amanda were taken to the police station. Jim was contacted by police and met them there.

Anna said, “I always remember that night—Amanda and Christopher were arguing and I told them they better behave while we were shopping. To this day, I feel guilty that I yelled at both of them that night because they were fighting. And I feel so guilty that I left Christopher at the door. I still feel so guilty.” Anna stopped then and asked Jim for some tissues to wipe away her tears.

I wasn’t surprised that Jim immediately wanted to follow up on Anna’s comment. “I don’t know how many times I had taken the kids to a mall or plaza,” he said. “I’d take them to the toy section of the store and tell them to stay there and look at the toys. I’d go to menswear or the hardware section or whatever. I’d sometimes leave them for twenty minutes or a half hour. I’d come back and they’d be fine. Those were different days and different times.

“This was not the first time that Christopher had been missing in a shopping mall. When he was probably about four, maybe five, we had taken him to another mall. At some point in the evening I thought he was with Anna and she thought he was with me. It was near closing time when we realized he had wandered off. We walked around as the shoppers were going home and the crowd was getting smaller and smaller. Finally it was just Anna and I walking around looking for Christopher and we kept wondering where he could be. It never even occurred to us that someone would have taken him. Then we looked down the hallway and we saw this big security guard walking toward us with our little boy. We thanked the security guard and went home.”

The next day police released a composite drawing of the man after interviewing the hairdresser and also a young hockey player from Christopher’s minor league team who had seen them leaving the mall. Following the abduction’s being the top story on Saturday’s six o’clock news, two tips were received in the hunt for the white male, between fifty and sixty years of age, about five feet tall, thin, with grey hair and a bald spot. The physical description and police composite drawing were identified as looking like Joseph Fredericks, a forty-eight-year-old convicted pedophile and psychopath with a long history of violence and sexual offences against children. One of the tips was from a former roommate and the other came from his parole officer. Fredericks had spent over twenty years in a psychiatric hospital and had recently been released from a federal prison. Days earlier he had moved a second time since his release, to Brampton, and, because of some bureaucratic mix-ups with Corrections Canada, the local police had not been aware he was residing in their area.

Those tips led to Fredericks’ arrest at his home on Sunday morning and he was interviewed by Peel homicide officers Ron Bain and Len Favreau. A great amount of physical evidence of Christopher having been in the residence was found, and Fredericks confessed to killing the boy—and then took the detectives to Christopher’s body in a nearby field.

With Ron and Len still with Fredericks, other officers came to Jim and Anna’s home to tell them the worst-possible news: that Christopher had been murdered and that his body had been found. Jim and Anna would later learn that Christopher had been abducted at knifepoint by Fredericks. He was initially taken to a field near the mall and sexually assaulted. Fredericks then took Christopher to a room he had rented in the basement of a Brampton family’s home. They went in through a separate back entrance and he kept the boy bound in a downstairs room for almost twenty-four hours. The family was home upstairs throughout and never heard a thing. Christopher was beaten and sexually assaulted multiple times. Fredericks then walked him approximately seven kilometres to another field, and again sexually assaulted and then killed him. Christopher died from a cut to his left carotid artery.

Jim said, “Being told on the Sunday afternoon of Father’s Day, sitting in my living room, that Christopher was dead was the lowest point of my life.” Days later Jim found a hand-drawn picture in Christopher’s room that was his Father’s Day card.

Jim and Anna talked about how their religious faith and the strength of their relationship helped get them through the days that followed. Their lives with each other and eight-year-old Amanda were going to be forever changed by Christopher’s absence but they had to somehow go on. After a couple of weeks, Jim went back to coaching Christopher’s baseball team. At the end of the school year a few weeks later, he and Anna went to Christopher’s school to pick up his report card.

Fredericks’ murder trial took place in the fall of 1989. Because of all the case publicity, the trial venue was changed to Stratford, about 120 kilometres southwest of Brampton. During the trial Jim and Anna often met for dinner with the investigating officers, Ron and Len. One evening conversation stands out in their minds. It followed a particularly difficult day for them sitting in the court and listening to expert testimony from a psychiatrist. They were extremely frustrated with the testimony from the doctor who said everyone knew Fredericks was dangerous and yet he’d been let out of jail two-thirds of the way through his sentence. Jim said, “I still remember Len looked across the table at me and asked, ‘Mr. Stephenson, would you like to see things change?’ I expected that he would say that they and the Crown and the Attorney General would do what was necessary to make sure that this kind of release of dangerous people wouldn’t happen again. But instead, Len looked back at me, and I will never forget it, he said, ‘Well, if you want to see things change, Mr. Stephenson, you’re going to have to do it yourself. You’re going to have to be an advocate for change.’ ”

I’d had these same types of candid conversations with families in the past. A police officer, Crown attorney, advocacy group and all others with the best of intentions could lobby for change, but the face of a child and the first-hand story told by a family had by far the greatest impact and influence on government decision makers. To politicize the tragic loss of a loved one for the sake of a greater good was no easy decision for a family. It was exhausting, frustrating, expensive, and could take years to realize any success, if at all. And yet it was no surprise to me that Jim and Anna were up for it.

Fredericks was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for twenty-five years. He launched an appeal but it was never dealt with because Fredericks ended up being murdered by a fellow inmate.

An inquest into Christopher’s death was later called. It lasted five months. When the recommendations came out, it was time for the Stephensons’ personal advocacy efforts to officially begin.

Jim said, “I don’t think we really understood advocacy until after the inquest. As valid and substantial as the inquest recommendations were, they weren’t going to go anywhere unless somebody went forward with them. As I look back on it, we didn’t form an organization to address what broke down in the system. I wanted us to be a family that was speaking to the government representatives rather than to have it be the president of some organization. That was effective for us in the long run.

“The coolness of the justice system, particularly the federal justice system, was difficult to understand. They just seemed to be kind of cavalier. They didn’t even say they were sorry. I remember meeting with the minister of justice and I got really upset with him. He told us, ‘Unfortunately your son just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.’ I said, ‘No. You’re wrong. Christopher was at the right place at the right time. Joseph Fredericks was at the wrong place at the wrong time. That was an oversight of the corrections system.’

“The conversation didn’t go much further than that. But that was kind of typical of the way the federal government reacted to us. We didn’t ask for an apology for all the things that went wrong but it would have been nice to have. The most we got was a letter from the prime minister saying he was sorry about our tragic loss.”

One of the inquest jury’s seventy-one recommendations was urging the establishment of a national sex offender registry. After five years of inaction by the federal government, Ontario announced in 1999 that it would pursue its own provincial sex offender registry. When I heard the announcement I went to my boss and said that I wanted the OPP to take the lead in getting the registry set up. I offered my services to head up the effort. What was more, I knew the registry would be a perfect fit with what we were currently doing in BSS. The government approved the OPP taking the lead in researching, developing, maintaining and managing the new registry as part of BSS.