The Prescott Child Abuse Case

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The Prescott Child Abuse Case

Postby American Dream » Tue Jul 22, 2008 12:23 am

Tipping The First Domino: The Investigation Begins

The revelations that sparked the largest, most complex sexual abuse investigation in Canadian history were shocking in their brutality. They opened the door to an unprecedented number of cases of child sexual abuse, which while less bizarre, were no less repugnant.

In August 1989, a little girl of seven told social workers that she and her two younger siblings had been subjected to sexual abuse by groups of adults dressed in gowns and masks, during activities she called "monster games in the basement". She said they had also been submerged in water, confined beneath floorboards and forced to eat and drink 'yucky juice". As well, the adults had terrorized the children with guns and knives and videotaped them in the course of the assaults.


We knew from when our initial investigation commenced that
it was going to be of greater magnitude than anything we had
ever done before. But we had no idea it would develop into
the magnitude that it did.

Matthew Hayes, Prescott Chief of Police

The social workers hearing these stories were alarmed and disturbed. For Pam Gummer, team leader at the Prescott office of Family and Children's Services of Leeds-Grenville (FCS), the impact of that first interview was devastating. Even after many years investigating child abuse, Gummer says she had 'never heard anything even remotely comparable before."

That was not all. The little girl went on to say that three young cousins had also been victimized in the basement games. More horrific tales emerged of bondage, disfigurement, the killing of animals and the alleged murder of a baby named Joshua. It was clear to FCS staff that this was not a routine or isolated case of child sexual abuse.

"So much of what I was hearing was so bizarre and emotional, I found myself in some respects backing away," says Gummer. "I was saying we need to corroborate this, we should be very cautious." Within a month they had their corroboration. "We had physical evidence, medical evidence. They were able to describe the places where they were abused, and we went there and we found what the kids said we would find," she says.

By October 1989, the local police had been called in and seven adults were under investigation. The Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services had also been alerted and provided $200,000 for a specialized team within Family and Children's Services to investigate what was presented as a family system in which sexual abuse had gone on for generations.

Rocci Pagnello, supervisor of the Prescott FCS team at the time, points out that the Ministry lost no time in making funds available for the child welfare investigation. "Without that support," he recalls, "I don't think we would have gotten off the ground."

The Ministry of the Solicitor General was also responsive. Brockville's Crown Attorney freed up two officers, Detective Rick Robins of the Ontario Provincial Police and Constable Gary Sluytman of the Prescott Police to conduct the criminal side of the investigation. The criminal investigation became known as Project Jericho and continues to operate to this day. The police named it Project Jericho in honour of the baby named Joshua who was alleged to have been killed. "Joshua led the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down," says Robins, alluding to the Bible story. 1

Pam Gummer, along with social workers Maureen McDougall and Marg McDade-Bowers from Family and Children's Services, formed the core child welfare investigative team called the Child Abuse Project. By late November 1989, the joint investigation had uncovered numerous new cases of sexual abuse. When questioned by the police, a man known to associate with the initial family investigated admitted to abusing 13 more children and named several other individuals he had witnessed sexually abusing children.

After this, Pam Gummer says "the investigation split somewhat" - with part of the team probing allegations of abuse inside the original family system and part of the team focusing on the new allegations of abuse by persons outside the family When interviewed, all but two of the 13 children reported being abused by more than one person.

It was at this point that the investigation really began to snowball. The number of victims and perpetrators began to mount steadily. Family and Children's Services was unprepared for the magnitude and scope of what was to follow. Gummer remembers this as a "really scary period" because there were no guidelines on how to conduct an investigation in which so many of the victims and perpetrators were linked to each other. Most of the available literature was based on the American experience and wasn't very helpful. No one in Canada had ever dealt with such a case before.



There was nothing to guide us. There was nothing to pull out
that said: this is step one, this is step two.

Pam Gummer, team leader, Child Abuse Project,
Family and Children's Services


Extra funding allowed the team to seek out needed expertise and receive training. They consulted with experts like John Yuille, a forensic psychologist and specialist in assessing the credibility of children's allegations from British Columbia as well as David Wolfe and Ross Dawson from the Institute for the Prevention of Child Abuse in Toronto.

The Crown Attorney who prosecuted the case, Desmond McGarry, says that everybody involved was forging new ground. The prosecution was unlike any that he had ever been involved in, he says, "because of its complexity the number of people, the number of accused involved, the number of children involved, and all the interconnections."

McGarry was initially called in to advise the police on the investigation surrounding the murder of baby Joshua. 2 Because of his expertise in the area of child abuse - he is one of a select group of Ontario Crown Attorneys designated child abuse specialists - and the fact that the number of prosecutions connected with the case threatened to swamp the local Crown Attorney's office, he was eventually appointed as special Crown prosecutor to work exclusively on the case.

By March 1990, the group that was to work closely together on the joint investigation was firmly in place and located in a waterfront building in Prescott. Pam Gummer and Rocci Pagnello of Family and Children's Services were assisted by four other child protection staff and a lawyer, Jennifer Blishen, hired by the agency to prepare their cases for child protection hearings. Rick Robins and Gary Sluytman of Project Jericho were joined by Constables Andy Teeple and Isobel McVey. Detective-Inspector Lyle McCharies was brought in to oversee the police end of the investigation for the Ontario Provincial Police. Janet Lee later became part of the group as Victim/ Witness Assistance Coordinator.


More at:

http://www.healthunit.org/carekids/jericho/STORY.htm
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Postby pepsified thinker » Tue Jul 22, 2008 9:03 am

More from the site AD linked to:

October 1994 The total number of child victims had increased to 162 and the number of perpetrators to 119. Sixty-five persons had been charged with 376 offences. After 45 completed trials the conviction rate was 91%. Nineteen cases were still before the courts.


and

...Although the first disclosures seemed to point in this direction, Gummer stresses that the investigators "never labelled the case ritual abuse per se, because the term is so ambiguous."

Several years earlier, two little girls in Hamilton had made allegations of sexual abuse with ritualistic overtones eerily similar to those in Prescott. There had also been a comparable case in Oshawa. Although criminal charges were never laid in either case, the children were removed from their homes and allegations of satanism became the focus of the child protection hearings in both cases. This sidetracked the court, unnecessarily prolonging the trials and left the children's fate in limbo for two and a half and four and a half years respectively. ...


In that first quote, the number of kids involved is staggering--but also, the fact that (from other parts of the story) there were trials that resulted in convictions and, apparently, the usual cover-up/denial didn't seem to kick in. Or did it? Does anyone who knows more about this have info on that aspect?

Regarding the second snippet, there's a lot to unpack--not labeling the case as RA, the other, earlier reports, and the statement about allegation of satanism somehow being counter-productive.

But mostly I'm wondering how it is that I've never heard of this case? I'd think it was 'up there' with the McMartin Pre-school case and the the Presidio case. I've read Rig Int pretty much daily, though not with a particular focus on stories like this, and this doesn't ring a bell. Is it so widely known that people don't need to 'go over' in detail, so I missed passing references, or is it, somehow, only now surfacing in the wider awareness of places like Rig Int?
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Postby Pierre d'Achoppement » Tue Jul 22, 2008 9:18 am

I found this:

SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT PROJECT JERICHO

January 2004

Canadian newspaper editorialists and television commentators are suddenly able to acknowledge that accusations of child abuse are occasionally false. This newfound objectivity comes after two Saskatchewan men, John Popowich and Richard Klassen, won lawsuits against officials who accused them, in two separate investigations, of being ritual child abusers.

For Richard Klassen, the fight to clear his name drove him to the brink of madness. To him, of course, it seemed like the authorities were the ones who were insane. Klassen was caught up in a wave of ritual abuse accusations that swept the continent fifteen years ago. Hundreds of people were accused of molesting children, sacrificing animals, infanticide, and conducting satanic rites.

We cannot close the door on this twisted chapter in our legal history without revisiting Canada's largest ritual abuse investigation, which started in the town of Prescott, Ontario in 1989. Here was a small community in which social workers, police and prosecutors claimed to find 119 pedophiles engaged in a multi-family, multi-generational orgy of child molestation. 275 children and adults were declared to be victims, 42 children were taken from their homes and 28 were eventually made wards of the crown. Social worker Pam Gummer, who helped coordinate the investigation, later said that "[Prescott] is not a unique situation in terms of abuse," as though almost any town the investigators cared to examine might yield up the same results.

The Prescott investigation started with three children, whom journalist Judy Steed called Lucy, Freddy and Joey in her 1994 book about child abuse, Our Little Secret. Lucy was the oldest at seven and her younger brothers were barely verbal. There is no question that the children were neglected by their mother. It's also a fact that children are more likely to be abused by a live-in boyfriend than by their birth father, and the common-law husband, Billy Elliott, was father to none of the children. The house was a pigsty and the family was being supervised by Child Protective Services. The authorities were right to intervene with this family. But in this case, they took a bad situation and turned it into a nightmare.

Lucy, Freddy and Joey were apprehended and placed in a succession of foster homes. Their third set of foster parents reported that the children were telling bizarre stories of sexual abuse, of strange rites in the basement with groups of adults "dressed in gowns and masks," of being given "yucky juice" to drink, of animal sacrifice, of digging up skeletons from the cemetery, being threatened with guns and knives and being sexually assaulted and videotaped. Steed wrote that the police found "evidence" to corroborate the charges. Whatever the evidence was, it was not videotape. No videotape evidence was ever presented. The only evidence Steed actually mentions is that that Lucy claimed to be abused in the basement and lo and behold, investigators found a crawl space under the house and animal bones in the backyard.

Over a period of months, the accusations bloomed to include the murder of a baby named Joshua. The police found no evidence that Joshua ever existed, but the investigation into the charges was called Project Jericho in his honor. As the investigation progressed, Billy Elliott's relatives and acquaintances also came under suspicion. According to Steed, the accused could be described as hillbillies or "white trash." Many were uneducated, poor, on welfare and of below-average intelligence. One man was pulled off the street for questioning because neighbors pointed him out a weirdo who was always hanging around. Cecil Miller was retarded, illiterate and slightly crazy. He cracked the case wide open for the Prescott investigators -- he admitted to abusing 17 children and he named other adult abusers. Another mentally handicapped man was described as "easily manipulated." He was one of those who pled guilty.

Because the abuse had supposedly persisted for generations, some persons were identified as both perpetrators and victims. So how did a perpetrator fare in court if he did not also claim victimhood? And how could he claim victimhood without accusing others? One young mother said she accused her own parents because that's what the police and social workers wanted to hear. They had apprehended her son, whom she desperately wanted to get back.

One of the accused committed suicide. The web of accusations and counter-accusations grew to ensnare hundreds of people. Entire families were decimated. It's as though a slum clearance project was conducted with social workers instead of bulldozers. Bulldozers would have been kinder.

Many adults were sentenced to prison while the children were sentenced to counselling. In her book, Steed describes the interactions of the therapists with the children. One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry while reading this section. In one passage, a little boy is told to make a cardboard suit of armour while the therapist feeds him psychobabble, as though a young child could possibly understand the metaphorical meaning of "armour" and "boundaries." "You got hurt," she tells him, "and you needed armour to protect you but now it's getting heavy and rusty..."

While the Prescott investigators pitted one family member against another, California's McMartin day care case disintegrated as the jury realized that the children had been improperly questioned and pressured into making absurd accusations. Even as the police were excavating backyards in the search for baby Joshua, researchers such as Dr. Maggie Bruck of McGill University were doing ground-breaking research into the suggestibility of young children. There was ample evidence to conclude that mass molestation cases must be viewed with suspicion.

While it's possible that some genuine pedophiles were caught in the Project Jericho dragnet, a reappraisal of the case would demonstrate that the investigators wreaked needless harm and wasted millions of tax dollars. The television program The Fifth Estate did much to bring to light the absurd injustice of the Klassen case -- will no one do the same for Prescott? It is reprehensible that no legal or governmental body, nor professional association, nor investigative journalist has re-evaluated Project Jericho in light of today's hard-won wisdom.


from: http://members.shaw.ca/imaginarycrimes/prescott.htm

Is above site pro-pedo?

The story is remarkably similar to the Mineola daycare post couple of weeks ago.
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Postby sunny » Tue Jul 22, 2008 10:22 am

Yes of course Pierre, these allegations are always false.

Thank you AD. I'm with you pepsified, I can't believe we've never heard of this case. I found myself feeling profoundly grateful to the people who investigated and prosecuted these monsters.
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