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[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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On 25 June 2008 the Globe and Mail reported “Wrongful Conviction - Ask more critical questions”.

It said, the wrongful conviction of Anthony Hanemaayer of Toronto for a knifepoint attack committed by the serial rapist and sex-killer Paul Bernardo is a particularly horrifying illustration of the justice system's frailties. That 20-year-old wrong has only now come to light. At a time when a serial rapist was on the loose in Scarborough, Ont., police relied on an amateur sleuth for their evidence, such as it was, against Mr. Hanemaayer, then a 20-year-old, married roofer. Hindsight is always easy, of course; but what hindsight teaches is the importance of asking critical questions. Those questions do not appear to have been asked.

The crime to which Mr. Hanemaayer pleaded guilty (more on that guilty plea in a moment) was a 5 a.m. break-in and the holding of a knife to the throat of a 15-year-old girl in her bedroom. The 15-year-old's mother played sleuth, suspecting that a member of a construction crew nearby had stalked her daughter. She had confronted Mr. Bernardo in her daughter's room, albeit without her glasses on, and had given the construction crew an unremarkable description; the construction company told her it matched Mr. Hanemaayer. Police later provided her with 12 photographs, and when, two months after the attack, she picked out a blurry one of Mr. Hanemaayer from the group, police confirmed that she was right. But did someone ask whether the mother, naturally wanting the attacker brought to justice, was likely to get it right?

Police did ask whether the attacker could have been the Scarborough rapist. But they appear to have deferred to the mother's answer that bedroom break-ins were not his modus operandi.

Two days before Mr. Hanemaayer was charged, another attack, more in keeping with the methods of the then unknown Scarborough Rapist, occurred against a 15-year-old walking home just half a block away from the home in which the bedroom attack occurred. That should have raised questions about whether the Scarborough rapist was responsible for both.

Mr. Hanemaayer, whose marriage cracked under the strain, had pleaded not guilty but panicked when the mother testified with great certainty. Fearing a long penitentiary sentence if found guilty, he accepted a deal with the Crown for two years less a day in a provincial reformatory.

As if to complete the circle of horror in which Mr. Hanemaayer has been ensnared, police obtained a confession from Mr. Bernardo in a 2006 interview, but didn't tell Mr. Hanemaayer, who learned of it from his lawyer only this year. When he is exonerated today by the Ontario Court of Appeal, one man's trials will be over, but the questions about the system's failures will remain to be addressed.

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