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By Dan Ferguson - Surrey North Delta Leader
Published: August 29, 2008 10:13 AM
A convicted sex offender who molested dozens of young victims in northern Ontario will stand trial for the indecent assault of another 11 boys.
The order was made after a preliminary hearing of the charges against 68-year-old Ralph Rowe of Surrey wrapped up Aug. 22 in Kenora, Ont. on 26 counts.
No date for the trial has been set yet.
Rowe, a former Anglican priest and Boy Scout leader, is currently serving a three-year sentence for a 2007 conviction on charges of forcible rape and attempted rape.
It’s his second stay in jail for molesting boys as young as six in several remote Ontario First Nations communities between 1971 and 1986.
Rowe had earlier served four-and-a-half years of a six-year jail sentence after he pleaded guilty in 1994 to 39 counts of indecent assault.
One Crown prosecutor described Rowe as one of the most prolific pedophiles Canada has ever seen.
He has to date been convicted of indecently assaulting 24 young people while he was working as a travelling minister, flying from town to town to conduct services.
After he finished serving his first prison sentence, Rowe left his home in Thompson, Man. and went to live in Surrey, where his older brother Ernest “Art” Rowe, a retired minister from Fort. St. John, worked as a fill-in minister at St. Michael’s Anglican church in Newton.
Members of the St. Michael’s congregation remember Ralph Rowe as a soft-spoken person who maintained a low profile until his brother’s death in 2003.
After that, they say Rowe began to take a more prominent role, singing with the church choir and occasionally delivering prayers from the front of the church (not as a minister, but as lay members of the church routinely do).
The congregation was never informed of Rowe’s criminal convictions.
At the time, police did not routinely notify communities about the presence of a potentially dangerous sexual offender.
Surrey RCMP and parole officers did know about Rowe’s presence, and so did the local church diocese, which decided not to reveal Rowe’s criminal record because of privacy concerns.
Under his terms of release Rowe was supposed to avoid contact with young people and to regularly report to the local parole office.
Last year, police began investigating the West Coast activities of Rowe, attempting to reconstruct where he went and what he did while he was attending St. Michael’s.
dferguson@surreyleader.com
