Saturday, January 23, 2016

Sex offender’s parole bid raises questions about Canada’s handling of serial pedophiles


WHITEWOOD, SASK.—The Miller farm is the kind of old-timey place where passersby are welcomed by a highway sign selling fresh eggs and cucumbers.

Inside the front gate, they meet Lyle or Pam, a sturdy Albertan couple who bought this 640-acre patch of rolling Saskatchewan farmland in 2002 with the dream of raising their children and a Doctor Dolittle-esque menagerie of pigs, horses, sheep and goats.

It was to this prairie idyll, about 175 kilometres east of Regina, that Peter Robert Whitmore, one of Canada’s most notorious child sex offenders, arrived in 2006 to abduct and sexually assault the Millers’ 10-year-old son, Zach.

Whitmore, convicted of sexual offences and breach of conditions involving 11 children, is now eligible for parole from a life sentence for crimes against Zach and another boy that a judge described as “repulsive and sickening.”

“How could the government let this happen?” asks Zach.

He is 20 now, grown-up with a job but terrorized by nightmares and haunted by the evil Whitmore brought into his young life. This is his first public interview since his abduction.

“(How can they let him) do what he did to me to other children? Have their lives ruined? Have their families ruined?”  (more...)


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