Julie Ireton
speaker
251 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Julie Ireton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But Howard Christie is not easy to locate. I do find a phone number and an email address. Neither work. Then my searching produces a mailing address. So I go old school. I send him a letter with my contacts and a brief explanation. To my surprise, he calls me weeks later. Christy's call catches me off guard, but I start recording with him on speakerphone at my desk, and he agrees to that.
The quality of the phone recording isn't great, but it's good to hear his voice, the recollections of a 93-year-old widower and former vice principal.
I tell him about my research and about the survivors. More than a dozen women allege sexual exploitation, assault, abuse involving the music teacher. Do you ever recall on one of those trips Jackie Short telling you about some things that Doug Walker was doing with students? Jackie seems to recall she even remembers it was on a boat trip on the Alba River.
And yet you don't recall Jackie telling you anything about what Walker was doing?
If you had found out, what would you have done? What would the protocol at that time have been?
You think he would have been fired?
Hmm. I know that five years later in 1987, Allie told the administration what had happened to her. Walker had sex with her on a band trip to Montreal, but the teacher moved. He wasn't fired. Christy was part of that administration, too. It is.
I do find it interesting you say that it would have been cause for dismissal because, you know, in 1987, when it happened to another girl, he was just moved to a different school when Nicky Fork was in charge.
So what did you hear was the reason that Doug Walker was leaving the school? I dialed Jackie short soon after I get off the phone with Christy. I tell her what the former vice principal said, and I remind her he's elderly, and we're talking about 40-year-old memories.
Jackie is adamant about what she told Christy in 1982.
Yeah. Can't answer those questions, right? But it's important to raise them. Jackie is disappointed in Christy's response, to say the least. It wasn't what she wanted or expected to hear. But I'm not finished searching for other adults who were around at the time. The lack of oversight by people in charge continues to baffle Anne-Marie Robinson.
I was in shock when I spoke to him. Anne-Marie recently discovered she actually knows the person who became Doug Walker's boss in 1987. That was right after Ali reported him. Walker moved to Stouffville District Secondary School, not too far from Markham High in the same school board district. And someone else was in charge of the music department there.
He was just, I feel like he was kind of used and in the dark in this whole thing. Anne-Marie met that man when she treated herself to a new French horn.
So I bought my horn from him. To Anne-Marie, Peter Samuelson was just a man who knew a lot about French horns. But Peter was also the head of music at Stouffville District Secondary School in 1987.
Then Anne-Marie told him to expect a call from me. Hello? Hi, is this Peter Samuelson? Yeah. Hi, it's Julie Ireton calling from CBC. How are you? Yeah, good. He's happy to chat, but he has trouble hearing the result of teaching music in small, echoey rooms for decades. We do our best to communicate over the phone.
In 1987, Peter Samuelson was not told why Doug Walker was leaving Markham District High School and why he was coming to his school.
He means what had really happened. Peter tells me what he knew back then.
But then something else about this new music teacher caught Peter Samuelson's attention.
Walker went on to lead four more music departments. Of course, this pattern of moving from school to school all started decades earlier. It all started at Port Credit Secondary School, his first job. Former students say he left before that school year was over. We're about to meet the man who knows why. The man survivors refer to as Punch Daddy. It's late fall 2022. I'm in the driver's seat.
Anne-Marie is the navigator. You go straight. It's been a long drive. We're fueled on fancy lattes and both a bit nervous about where we're headed next.
Showing 181–200 of 251 · page 10 of 13
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