WARNING: This story contains details of sexual assaults against children.
For thirty years, this brutal cold case puzzled investigators.
An unknown assailant had violently restrained three children, aged eight and younger, in parks across southern Ontario from 1992 to 1995. He sexually assaulted each child and managed to escape every time.
In a Brampton court on Monday, prosecutors explained to a jury how DNA evidence has now connected all the attacks to Richard Neil, who is currently 67 years old.
As Neil’s trial began, Crown attorney Shazin Karim described the attacks in unsettling detail – involving urination and anal penetration – and discussed how they were reported to law enforcement back then.
The victims included an eight-year-old boy, a ten-year-old boy, and a fifteen-year-old girl, Karim stated.
“They were children,” she emphasized to the jury that some of the evidence “may be difficult to hear.”
One of the three attacks occurred in September 1994 when a ten-year-old boy was assaulted in Brampton’s Norton Place Park. (Patrick Morrell/CBC)
Neil has pleaded not guilty to the seventeen charges he faces, including kidnapping, sexual assault causing bodily harm, and administering a stupefying drug.
Karim informed the jurors that investigators only identified him as a suspect recently due to genetic genealogy analysis carried out in the U. S.
This investigative method – which compares crime scene DNA with genetic data voluntarily shared through consumer genealogy services – was not available for police use during the 1990s.
The prosecutor noted that police later found additional evidence confirming Neil as the attacker.
The Crown’s opening statement revealed that Neil’s fingerprints matched those collected by police from items left behind by the perpetrator all those years ago.
Lawyer Leo Adler, left, and his client Neil are depicted in a sketch at Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Brampton on Monday. (Pam Davies/CBC)
His DNA also corresponded with samples taken from each of the three crime scenes – Brampton’s Norton Place Park, Idlewood Park in Kitchener, and Wildwood Park in Oakville – according to the Crown.
Neil appeared in court wearing a dark suit jacket and white button-up shirt while sitting next to his lawyer Leo Adler. He seemed to glance over at jurors during Karim’s opening statement.
An indictment filed with Ontario Superior Court indicates that Neil is also accused of making “a video tape recording constituting child pornography” at the time of the Oakville attack on the girl.
The victims’ identities are protected by a publication ban.
Karim informed jurors that employment records show Neil worked at Canada Post in Waterloo during the Kitchener assault in 1992.
Additionally, she mentioned that when police seized Neil’s electronic devices after his arrest in 2024, they discovered photos and videos indicating an “interest” in urine drinking.
The prosecutor pointed out that while there’s no dispute about what happened based on victim accounts; however she noted that defense attorneys question whether Neil was indeed the assailant.
The trial continues.
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