WARNING: This article contains details of sexual violence.
The three victims were about as vulnerable as one can imagine: two single mothers, home alone with their young children, and a 13-year-old girl babysitting her little brother.
In each case, a stranger appeared inside their home at night and raped them.
He smelled of gasoline, metal, smoke and sweat. He had rough hands and rougher language.
He took his time, and when he was finished, he threatened to come back if they told anyone what he’d done. They all reported to police.
The three assaults took place over a 16-month period in 1984 and 1985, and for 40 years this serial Calgary rapist got away with his crimes.
One of the women died before Calgary police charged Richard Hubert Jones with nine offences related to the three sexual assaults in May 2023.
Last week, Jones, who is now 72 years old, admitted that his DNA matched the attacker’s DNA collected by police from the bodies of the victims and the homes where the violent crimes took place.
In a hearing Friday, the case proceeded in a way that will almost certainly result in a conviction.
Prosecutor Vicki Faulkner read a lengthy agreed statement of facts that detailed each woman’s account of being attacked.
She then read aloud the facts surrounding the DNA evidence. Crediting advances in forensic technology and investigative techniques, four decades after the attacks police determined that the chances of the perpetrator’s DNA belonging to a person other than Jones is one in the hundreds of trillions or more.
Defence lawyer Julie Grivel did not call any evidence and did not argue against conviction.
Justice Christopher Simard will deliver a decision at a later date.
The hearing took place following lengthy pre-trial applications and hearings.
Sometimes, in cases where a judge’s pre-trial decisions have not been favourable to the defence, proceeding in this manner protects the accused’s appeals of those pre-trial motions.
In this case, Grivel declined to comment on why the defence had taken this course.
The process spared the surviving two victims from testifying again. They had already testified at a preliminary inquiry in 2024.
Their accounts of what took place come from that testimony and from the statements each of the three victims gave to police in the 1980s.
A publication ban protects the victims’ identities. CBC News will use their initials.
The first attack took place on Feb. 20, 1984, when 13-year-old T.N. was babysitting her five-year-old brother in the Calgary community of Thorncliffe.
A man appeared inside the home. T.N. told him to get out, but he took the little boy by the hand, leading him to his room.
The intruder returned, removed T.N.’s nightgown and raped her. She was shaking and crying, so he put a pillow over her face.
“He said he didn’t want to see that,” she later told police.
When the man turned to leave, he threatened T.N. with a knife, telling her to wash herself and said if she told anyone, he’d come back and kill her.
A few minutes later, T.N. grabbed her brother and ran to a neighbour’s home, where she collapsed in the woman’s arms.
A month later and nine kilometers away, the rapist struck again. This time, 30-year-old C.T. was home with her nine-year-old son.
The two had fallen asleep together as she read him bedtime stories.
C.T. woke up to a figure standing at the foot of her bed. She told police that she ran, trying to lead the man away from her son.
He chased her to her living room sofa, calling her a “bitch” and a “c–t,” and threatening to beat her if she looked at him.
The attacker grabbed C.T. by the neck and forced her into her son’s bedroom.
“I tried to speak calmly to him,” she said in her preliminary inquiry testimony. “I said, ‘Please leave.’”
Instead, he asked her personal questions, taunted her and tried to kiss her as he raped her.
C.T. was crying as the man left. He threatened to come back if she moved or tried to identify him.
“I was terrified,” said C.T. “I was worried sick about my son, worried he’d woken up and was watching.”
C.T. told police the man smelled of gasoline, metal, smoke and sweat, and that his rough hands and language led her to believe he was uneducated.
She locked her front door and grabbed a big knife from her kitchen. As she called police, C.T. noticed the window screen above the kitchen sink had been sliced open.
The third attack took place in June 1985 in the city’s southwest.
With her 12-year-old daughter in bed upstairs, 33-year-old N.C. fell asleep on her sofa.
She woke up to a man’s hand over her mouth.
He told her he’d been watching her for three days.
“I bet you’ve always fantasized about some guy raping you,” he said.
The intruder pushed N.C. to the stairs leading up to the second level. He held her by the hair, removed her clothes and raped her.
During the commotion, N.C.’s daughter woke up and came to the top of the stairs.
N.C. shouted, “Stay right there.”
After it was over and the man left, N.C. laid at the bottom of the stairs for a while before she got up and locked her front door and called police.
The girl described her mother as being “in shambles.”
N.C. died in 2007.
Sixteen years later, Jones was arrested after his DNA came back as a match to the three sexual assaults.
Simard heard that the chances of the DNA belonging to someone else are one in 130 trillion in two of the cases and one in 120 sextillion in the third case.
When asked if he admitted to the facts read aloud by the prosecution, he whispered “yes.”
If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911. For support in your area, you can look for crisis lines and local services via the Ending Sexual Violence Association of Canada database.
