YEARS BEFORE Tom Kilgour became a convictedpedophile, he was fresh off an Ontario child sexual abuse trial and back home in New Glasgow.
Kilgour was hired as a substitute teacher by the Chignecto-Central Regional School Board for the 1998-99 school year, and would teach at various schools in Pictou County that year. It would be his third and final teaching stint in Pictou County.
Ontario court records obtained by The Chronicle Herald show that just days before the school year began, on Aug. 28, 1998, Kilgour’s 26-month trial in Newmarket, Ont., on charges of sexual exploitation and sexual assault involving a teenage boy, had ended with an acquittal.
This is a story about a teacher first accused and cleared of sexual assault against children, who was allowed to teach until he was convicted in Switzerland on similar charges nearly two decades later. In 1999 , Kilgour left the Chignecto-Central board and taught at a private boarding school in Switzerland during the early 2000s. There, he was convicted of sexually abusing four teenage boys.
Kilgour is now fighting to overturn the 30-month jail sentence imposed by a Swiss judge last May for engaging in sexual acts with children and sexual coercion.
His appeal hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in Switzerland.
Swiss court records show Kilgour included three stellar reference letters in his application package for the Swiss teaching position. In retrospect, one letter seems to contain a subtle warning.
“If any criticism could be levelled, it would be that he was sometimes too close to his charges,” wrote Rev. John Rose before ending the letter with a final endorsement: “I do not hesitate to recommend him for a position with your organization.”
Rose was one of Kilgour’s former bosses, the headmaster at Albert College, a Belleville private school where Kilgour had been teaching in 1996 when he was arrested and charged with the sexual offences.
The pair had held the same positions during the late 1980s at another Ontario private school, Holy Trinity School in Richmond Hill, where the allegations against Kilgour stemmed from. Rose had left Holy Trinity in 1990, two years before Kilgour's departure when accusations surfaced at the school. A student claimed he was sexually abused by Kilgour. Four years would go by before York Regional Police laid charges. Meanwhile, Kilgour and Rose had reunited again at Albert College.
The Herald could not reach Rose but did speak with Garth Stephenson, a member of the Albert College board of governors while Kilgour taught at the school. Stephenson also provided Kilgour with a glowing referral letter that he used for the Swiss teaching position. Stephenson said he and Rose both knew of the charges against Kilgour soon after they were laid. In fact, he says, Rose made the decision to remove Kilgour from Albert College.
“He took the appropriate action at the time that the charges were laid,' said Stephenson. “Rose said, ‘Tom is not going to continue to be a teacher at Albert College while these charges are open and in the courts.’ Kilgour left Albert College and was not in the school after that. I think Rose did the right thing to make sure Kilgour was not a potential threat.”
Stephenson says the court’s decision was enough to persuade him of Kilgour’s innocence and less than a year later he obliged Kilgour’s request for a referral letter.
“I thought he was an excellent teacher and had been well-respected in the school. I didn’t say some student in Toronto had accused him of misconduct. My feeling was it was untrue. It was not proven at all.
“He had been declared not guilty but his reputation had been ruined. When he called me looking for a referral letter I asked him would he be going overseas to work and I asked him would he be willing to come back to Belleville and he said absolutely not.
“He went through a pile of money trying to defend himself. The three lines they printed in the local paper didn’t do anything to reinstate his career.” David Cloux was one of the four students who was sexually abused by Kilgour at the private Switzerland boarding school, College Alpin Beau Soleil, during the early 2000s, according to court records.
He was the student who eventually went to the police with his story of abuse, which ended with convictions against Kilgour last May. Cloux came across the referral letters, which were presented as evidence at Kilgour’s sexual abuse trial in Switzerland last year.
Cloux says it’s inconceivable to him that Stephenson didn’t see the potential danger Kilgour posed to children.
“He knew Kilgour had been charged with abusing a child. Police and the Crown prosecutor saw enough evidence to think they could get a conviction.
“Garth Stephenson was in a position to prevent Kilgour from going on to abuse me and three of my peers at College Alpin Beau Soleil. He instead wrote a gleaming referral for a man who became a convicted pedophile.”
John McKiggan, a Halifax personal injury lawyer, says sloppiness and an absence of good judgment are what permitted Kilgour to move from school to school for as long as he did. His career took him to classrooms as far away as England and Saudi Arabia.
“I would argue that anything that allowed this guy to continue teaching puts other children in danger,” said McKiggan. “If I was representing the kids in Switzerland I would sue schools that enabled him to keep teaching.
“I’ve been doing these kinds of cases for 30 years. I’ve represented hundreds and hundreds of survivors and only in one case that I’ve done in almost 30 years was there just a single victim. What does that tell you?'
New Glasgow native Jeff Fox says he was sexually assaulted by Kilgour inside a Charlottetown motel room 33 years ago, when he was 15. Fox, who’s now a junior high school phys-ed teacher living in California, said at the time of the alleged incident he was a member of a boys softball team called The New Glasgow Rangers. He said Kilgour was the coach and the team was on the road playing in a Prince Edward Island tournament during the summer of 1984 when the alleged abuse occurred.
Fox says he was among three boys who had accepted Kilgour’s invitation to overnight in his room. Fox says he shared a bed with Kilgour while his teammates slept in the neighbouring bed. The alleged sexual assault happened in the middle of the night, he says.
“I woke up and saw him jerking his arms away from me, pretending he was asleep,” said Fox. “I had an erection. I felt his hand on me. That’s what I remembered.”
Fox says he recalled the incident for the first time 15 years later. Though he was never particularly troubled by the alleged ordeal, he never spoke of it until a few years ago when he opened up to his wife. There’s a part of him that regrets not going to the police with his story.
“I guess back then you’re expected to be a macho guy and you would never admit to it. That’s not what men do.”
He suspects part of him didn’t want to believe what happened.
“To be honest with you, Kilgour really was a very outgoing, helping, generous good guy, that did help out with a lot of different sports, golf, softball, curling.
“A couple summers ago I was home and ran into him at a convenience store at Melmerby Beach and I didn’t know whether to punch him in the mouth or say, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ ” The Herald spoke to one of Fox’s boyhood friends, a teammate with the New Glasgow Rangers. The man, who spoke to the newspaper on the condition of anonymity, says Fox first told him about the alleged incident with Kilgour about 15 years ago. He said he was visiting Fox in California at the time and he can recall that Fox was dealing with a difficult period in his life.
“It was nothing really serious and he overcame it but I remember being in his backyard and him feeling a bit discouraged,” the man recalled. “That’s when he told me and then asked if it had ever happened to me.
“I said absolutely not. I had heard hints and allegations about Tom but I was always the first to defend him because he was like a big brother to me growing up. He was always kind to me and many others, but I believe Jeff. When I look back and see how close he was with us I can see how it could have happened. It’s just tragic.”
Fox ended up connecting with Cloux by phone after reading about Kilgour’s sexual abuse trial in the Herald.
Since going public with his story, Cloux has received several messages of support from people who were students at the Ontario schools where Kilgour taught. In fact, a group of former Holy Trinity School students have issued a letter to the appeals court in Switzerland, asking that Kilgour’s sentence be upheld. The letter, which The Chronicle Herald has obtained, contains the names of 65 former students and their emails.
“All of us can attest to Mr Kilgour’s inappropriate and violating behaviour with us as his pupils,” states a portion of the letter.
“We believe very strongly that Tom Kilgour is a risk to children and that his offending behaviour at College Alpin Beau Soleil was not an isolated incident, but rather the continuation of an established abusive and predatory behaviour that had already been called out to Canadian authorities by one of our peers, before Mr. Kilgour’s employment in Switzerland.”
Andrew Anderson, a graduate of Holy Trinity, reached out to Cloux after learning of his sexual abuse trial. Now 43, Anderson completed grades 4 to 12 at the school. Kilgour was his Grade 10 history teacher and rugby coach.
“He had the aura of the cool teacher,” recalled Anderson. “He was young, he was handsome. He drove a BMW and everyone was like, ‘This guy’s the greatest.’ ” Anderson says he was never inappropriately touched by Kilgour but was among a group of boys at the school who hung around with Kilgour outside school hours. He says on one occasion he was alone with Kilgour at his basement apartment watching pornography and drinking alcohol provided by Kilgour.
Anderson says he also went on trips with Kilgour,
including a Quebec skiing trip and to Montreal to watch the Canadiens play the New York Rangers. During that trip, Anderson remembers Kilgour exposing him to more pornography and alcohol. Looking back, he says, he should never have gotten so close to Kilgour. But at the time, he admits, he admired Kilgour and thought of him as the cool, rebellious teacher. Anderson also says he was friends with the boy who alleged Kilgour sexually abused him.
Anderson says he believed the allegations his friend made against Kilgour and recalled occasions when the three spent time together outside of school. Anderson recalls the then-teenager feeling abandoned by Holy Trinity staff as well as the justice system. The Herald spoke to another former Holy Trinity School student who says he was taught by Kilgour and was a teammate of Anderson’s on the school’s rugby team. The man, who asked that his name not be published, says he and Anderson were best friends at the time and he can recall Anderson talking to him about drinking and watchingpornography at Kilgour’s home, as well as their out-of-town excursions. The man says another schoolmate told him that he had also been at Kilgour’s home alone and had been exposed to pornography and alcohol.
“I wasn’t in those compromising one-on-one situations, my parents were like hawks and I wasn’t allowed to be alone with him,” he recalled. “But hindsight is 20-20. We all looked up to him, we revered him, because as boys we thought he was the coolest guy. “He told us about his sexual exploits with women, so we just thought he was hero.
“But looking back, you can’t help but think we didn’t do enough to stop him, the students, parents and teachers. All of us.”
The Pictou District School Board, which later became part of the amalgamated Chignecto-Central board, proved to be a place of refuge for Kilgour when his teaching career went off the rails in Ontario. Kilgour began his teaching career with a five-year stint with the Pictou board, starting in 1982 and ending in 1986 when he left for Holy Trinity. Two years after leaving Holy Trinity, facing allegations of sexual abuse, he was rehired as a substitute teacher with Pictou board for the 1994-95 school year, and then by the Chignecto-Central board for the 1998-99 school year.
Jo-Anne Jarvis-Jordan, a spokeswoman with the Chignecto-Central board, could not say whether Kilgour had been subject to background checks before his substituting stints. She said the board never received complaints about Kilgour’s teaching performance.
It was only in 2000 that school boards across the province introduced a policy requiring every newly hired teacher to be subject to both criminal records and vulnerable sector checks. There’s no way of knowing if Kilgour would have been red-flagged had those checks been done. A vulnerable sector check doesn’t always pick up non-convictions, such as Kilgour’s acquittals.
But it appears Kilgour’s tenure in Pictou County schools impressed at least one school administrator. Peter White was viceprincipal of New Glasgow High School during Kilgour’s final teaching stint with the Chignecto-Central board. White also wrote Kilgour a referral letter included in his job application for the teaching position in Switzerland. The Herald spoke to White, who is now retired, but he was unable to recall writing the letter or any details about his professional relationship with Kilgour. White says he had no knowledge of Kilgour’s record of sexual abuse charges.
“I think it goes without saying that if I were aware of that, you wouldn’t have the person in the school,” said White. “There was nothing to indicate to me that he was somebody not to be in front of kids.
“But I don’t know anything about Mr Kilgour. I wrote lots of reference letters over my lifetime. I am not denying that I did, but I don’t recall the circumstances of me working with him. I knew his name in the county growing up, but I never knew him personally.”
He said Kilgour had the right to earn a living after his acquittal, but White also now believes Kilgour should not have been hired by the board.
“It’s upsetting. We become teachers and educators to ensure kids are healthy and learning. It’s not shocking that those red flags might not be seen, but it’s a shame if he was harmful to children in the first place or harmed any children. That should have never happened.” The Herald has made several unsuccessful attempts to reach Kilgour, including through his lawyer, but he has not responded.
As for Cloux, he has reached out to his former school, as well as Albert College, Holy Trinity and the Chignecto-Central board hoping each would accept some measure of responsibility for the tragedy that played out at his former school. He’s still waiting.
“While there is an understandable reluctance to accept the facts, the more that it is shared and discussed, the sooner things will change,” said Cloux.
“Once we know the facts, we have a responsibility to act in order to limit the exposure of children to predators like Tom Kilgour.”
