My immediate response to that is yes, I think there would definitely have been a very different outcome. In our case, Christopher was abducted from the mall, on a shopping trip with his mother and younger sister, and he was taken from the mall to the offender's residence. He was held there against his will, for approximately 36 hours, at an address and a location that was probably about a block away from where we lived, and continue to live to this day.
At the end of that 36-hour period, the attacker, the man who murdered him, decided that he had no alternative, unless he wanted to go back to prison, but to do away with Christopher, to end his life, preventing him from testifying or identifying him should he ever be apprehended. And that was his whole modus operandi.
Today, if we had the sex offender registry that is in place in Ontario—which is a state-of-the-art role model for registries in other jurisdictions—the outcome would have been very different. Time is of the essence in these investigations, and police were on the scene within about three minutes of Christopher's abduction. They responded very quickly but did not have much information to go on. They had no information on sex offenders who were living in the community, although by order of his release from the institution, Fredericks—who had abducted and murdered Christopher—had registered his address with the police services, as he was required to do. They had no access to that information. It wasn't contained on a database. It was contained in the local police station where he registered, and it was confined there. It was held basically in a Hilroy exercise scribbler. That was where the information was stored.
Today we have a database with IT support that is second to none. There is no comparison. Today that information would have been available to officers immediately on the response to the call to the shopping mall, and within minutes they would have had a list of known sex offenders, child molesters. Fredericks had been convicted of a sexual assault on a young boy in this very city some three years before he abducted and murdered Christopher. So he had a record, and this information would have been available to police officers.
I mentioned Christopher's being held for 36 hours. Certainly a police intervention would have taken place much before 36 hours, and this would have made an incalculable difference to his mother and me.