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WARNING: This article contains graphic content and may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
As police drove him to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, the 10-year-old boy kept asking if they were nearly there.
“My stomach’s turning,” he told the two officers, as he lay in the back of the vehicle.
Thirty-two years after the child was tied to a tree and sexually assaulted, an audio recording of his September 1994 interview with police was played for the jury Monday at the trial of his alleged attacker.
Richard Neil has pleaded not guilty to 17 charges related to the incident, as well as two other similar past attacks on an eight-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. The list of allegations includes kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and administering a stupefying drug.
The three attacks in southern Ontario parks between 1992 and 1995 confounded investigators for three decades. Advances in DNA technology — including investigative genetic genealogy — finally helped police link the three crime scenes to Neil, a prosecutor told the jury Monday in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Brampton, Ont.
Richard Neil has pleaded not guilty to the 17 charges he’s facing, including kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm and administering a stupefying drug. (Peel Regional Police)
Neil, now 67, was arrested in 2024.
The court heard the former postal worker doesn’t dispute what happened to the three children, but insists he wasn’t involved.
“He did a lot of rude things to me,” the 10-year-old boy told Peel Regional Police about the unidentified attacker in 1994.
The victim, whose identity is covered by a publication ban, recounted saying hello to a stranger in Brampton’s Norton Place Park after school that day. They struck up a conversation. The man claimed he had lost his wallet with $900 inside.
The boy said the pair walked around the park and chatted on a bench, until the man’s mood suddenly soured, ostensibly accusing the boy of stealing his wallet.
“He tied my foot to the tree … so I couldn’t get away,” the boy is heard telling police on the audio tape.
He described a series of lurid acts carried out by the man in a wooded area of the park, including urination, oral sex and anal penetration.
“It hurt,” the boy told police.
After the attacker got away, the boy ran out of the woods, exiting near a branch of the Royal Canadian Legion adjacent to the park.
Witness David Kilpatrick, left, told a court in Brampton, Ont., how he spotted a young boy running shirtless out of the city’s Norton Place Park on Sept. 29, 1994. Crown attorney Shazin Karim, centre, questions Kilpatrick at the trial of the accused attacker, Richard Neil, right, on Monday. (Pam Davies/CBC)Witness recalls seeing boy run from park
David Kilpatrick, now a 71-year-old retiree, testified Monday about stopping at the Legion that evening to have a beer and play a round of pool.
Everything changed when he spotted the child wearing only his pants.
“I see this young boy coming out of the woods … shirt in hand, screaming, so I knew something was wrong,” Kilpatrick told the court.
“You have to call my mom,” he said the boy urged him. “I’ve been attacked.”
Kilpatrick said the boy provided a basic description of the attacker: a white man with black hair, wearing a grey track suit.
He ran the boy into the Legion, told the bartender to call 911 and rushed into the woods himself to find the assailant, to no avail.
Kilpatrick fought back tears Monday as he spoke from the witness box. He said he promised the 10-year-old that day he would find his attacker.
“I was wound up like a clock,” he told the court. “Still am, just talking about it now.”
DNA tied 3 assaults to 1 man: Crown
That evening, the boy led investigators to the spot where he’d been attacked. DNA recovered from the Brampton park — as well as semen and men’s underwear worn as a mask, each found separately at the scenes of two other assaults — proved crucial in linking the three incidents to one man, Crown attorney Shazin Karim told the jury.
In the first attack at Kitchener’s Idlewood Park on Aug. 21, 1992, a boy said he’d been lured away from his sister and a friend by a man who promised to show him dozens of bicycles in a wooded area, Karim said.
Karim, centre, gives the Crown’s opening address to the jury Monday in Brampton, Ont., at the trial of Neil, seen seated at far right in this court sketch. (Pam Davies/CBC)
She told the jury the assailant held a pocket knife and threatened to kill the eight-year-old “if he said a word.”
On Aug. 31, 1995, at Oakville’s Wildwood Park, a girl out walking her dog was approached by a man who threatened her with what appeared to be a loaded gun, Karim told the court in her opening statement. She said the 15-year-old cried as the man set up a video camera to record the assault.