For more than 40 years, heinous child killer Saul Betesh has remained behind bars, serving his life sentence without daring to request any kind of release — even though he’s been eligible since 2002.
But the Sun has learned that’s about to change.
For the first time, the notorious shoeshine boy killer plans to appear before a parole board; the 68-year-old Betesh is expected to ask a panel in British Columbia next month to let him out of Pacific Institution on escorted temporary absences, often the first step before seeking parole.
It’s hard to imagine this monster could ever be let out in the community.
It was so long ago. And yet the memory of the vicious rape and murder of Emanuel Jaques remains an indelible scar in our city’s history, a marker often used to demarcate the end of Toronto the Good.
Jaques was just 12, a slight, handsome boy who was saving up money to buy dog food for the new puppy promised him by a neighbour in Regent Park. So he built himself a shoeshine box that summer of 1977 and he painted it light green.
He then went to his parents, recent immigrants from Portugal, and begged for permission to shine shoes with his older brother at the corner of Yonge and Dundas Sts.
Back then, downtown Yonge St. was a seedy stretch of body rub parlours and strip joints. It was no place for a child.
His father finally relented — a decision he would regret for the rest of his life.
Betesh was a 27-year-old steel rigger who had worked on the CN Tower by day and as a gay S&M prostitute by night. Violent and remorseless, he’d been in and out of psychiatric treatment since he was five and poured nail polish remover in his babysitter’s ear.
His best buddy was Robert “Stretcher” Kribs, a bouncer at the Charlie’s Angels Body Rub. Their bond was a mutual appetite for sex with underage boys who they’d lure to Kribs’ apartment above the massage parlour with promises of cash, a new bike or a kite.
It was close to 5:30 p.m. on July 28, 1977 when Betesh approached the Jaques brothers and their friend. He offered them $35 to help move some camera equipment.
Emanuel leaped at the chance and his brother went to a payphone to call home for permission. By the time he returned to say their mother had said no, Emanuel was already gone.
For 12 tortuous hours, he was held captive and raped by the men in the third-floor apartment.
“What was Emanuel Jaques?” Betesh shrugged at his trial. “I wasn’t thinking of Emanuel Jaques, except possibly before and possibly after. I suppose he was part of my fantasies.”
Their original plan was to drug and dump Emanuel in a park. When the drugs didn’t work, Kribs and Betesh decided to hold his head under water in the sink until he drowned.
Police found the boy’s naked and bruised body four days later in a trash bag atop the roof of the body rub.
Kribs pleaded guilty to first degree murder.
Betesh claimed he was not guilty by reason of insanity — but a jury decided otherwise and he’s been serving his life sentence ever since.
While Kribs has applied for parole — and been rejected — in the past, Betesh has never tried.
Perhaps he knew he stood no chance, especially when he’s never expressed a shred of remorse.
“No, I’m not sorry,” he told Toronto Life in 1979. “I don’t feel anything except sorry that it’s put me in here. They say that’s part of my illness. I’m not sorry.”
Now he wants to be let out on escorted day passes?
Betesh has spent these last years at a prison in Abbotsford, B.C. where he’s been looking for pen pals when he’s not working in the prison greenhouse or watching science fiction on TV.
In his post on Canadian Inmates Connect, he describes himself as a practising “Druid Bard” who is a fan of dungeons and dragons, Magic the Gathering, stained glass window making and sewing quilts for charity.
“In closing,” writes the sadistic child killer, “I won’t lie to you. My crime was bad, but with treatment and a bit more time I feel I can once again become a productive member of society.”
Not in this lifetime, he can’t.
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