'Woodland rapist' victim says genealogy website led police to alleged attacker
CBC
WARNING: This article contains graphic content and may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
He says he was only 10 when he led skeptical investigators to the location of semen left in a Toronto-area park after he was forced to perform sex acts on a stranger.
Thirty years later, the victim says police told him DNA proved crucial in the recent arrest of an alleged serial predator. It's a key detail that authorities have not shared publicly, decades after a series of attacks set off a sprawling manhunt.
"I was shaking when I received the call" about last month's arrest, the victim told CBC News in his first public comments about the ordeal. The now-39-year-old man's identity is covered by a court-ordered publication ban. CBC News confirmed his name through court records.
"I felt overwhelmed with joy, then sadness," he said, "as I started to recall the memories of that day."
Richard Neil, 64, was arrested in Toronto on March 3 in connection with that 1994 attack in Brampton, as well as two other assaults on children in Kitchener in 1993 and Oakville in 1995. He denies the charges.
Neil was charged with 20 counts, including kidnapping, sexual assault with a weapon and making child pornography. The allegations against him have not been proven in court.
Each of the three victims reported being lured to a wooded area, tied to a tree and assaulted. As a police task force hunted the attacker in the 1990s, the media dubbed the unidentified man the "woodland rapist."
Peel Regional Police recently said they suspect there may be more victims.
But the man who spoke to CBC News says, at first, investigators didn't believe his story.
"They accused me of making up what happened to me to get attention, not taking me seriously at all," he said in an email.
He said it was only after he indicated to investigators the precise location where the attack occurred in Brampton's Norton Place Park on Sept. 29, 1994, that their attitude began to change — if only "a little."
The day after the assault, he said, he "was able to effectively lead police to the exact spot where they took several soil samples to test for DNA and found a profile" of the attacker.
That same day, Peel police issued a news release asking for the public's help in finding the man responsible. Police said the boy was walking through the park "when he was approached by the suspect and lured to a nearby wooded area where he was sexually assaulted."
