Child molester carried 10-year-old ‘like a bride,’ jury hears

By: Peter Edwards

A mother allowed a convicted child molester to carry her 10-year-old adopted daughter up the stairs of her home “like a bride,” a jury heard.

“Just imagine the turmoil going on inside that girl,” Crown attorney Paul Leishman told a jury in his closing remarks at the University Ave. courthouse on Friday.

The jury of six men and six women before Justice Gary Trotter is expected to begin deliberations early next week.

Leishman noted that the single mother promised to take care of the girl’s spiritual and physical needs when she adopted her as an 18-month-old from Eastern Europe.

The accused mother, now 60, cannot be named because it might identify her daughter, who is now 15.

She looked downward and made notes on a pad of paper as the jury heard the closing remarks by Leishman and her lawyer, Paula Rochman.

The mother once left the girl alone with one of the sex offenders for a week, court heard.

Rochman described the mother as a naïve and lonely person, with no true friends or family. She suggested that perhaps the mother was duped by the child sex offenders she brought into her household.

“She just sees everything in a good way,” Rochman told the jury. “Everything’s just good.”

Rochman noted that when the mother was interrogated by police, she asked them about job openings in the Toronto Police Service, as if she had a real chance at getting a job.

The mother appeared genuinely lonely when police officers left the interrogation room for a couple of minutes, Rochman continued. When the officers returned, she told them: “Don’t leave me again. I get lonely.”

“She is saying this to officers her are essentially accusing her of being a pimp to her daughter,” Rochman said.

The woman has pleaded not guilty to child abandonment, criminal negligence causing bodily harm, failing to provide the necessities of life, obstructing justice and sex assault when the girl was 9 and 10.

Court heard that the mother introduced her to an inmate, Douglas Mackenzie, who was in custody after being charged with child sex offences.

Mackenzie introduced the girl to two other inmates, Randolph Bartley and Gary Hoare, whom the mother knew to be in custody for child sex-related offences, Leishman said.