Make Sure Nothing Happens

"I've done a lot of things in my life, but I didn't kill your daughter." Richard Bouillon

As it happens, however, Richard Bouillon, who posed as a car salesman when he rented a flat at a rooming house in Quebec, had a history of sex crimes that began in 1974. He certainly did commit 'a lot of things' throughout his life, and now Michel Surprenant knows without a shred of doubt that the man also murdered his 15-year-old daughter Julie in 1999 at Ile Saint-Jean Terrebone, north of Montreal.

Mr. Surprenant is now assured of the indisputable fact that his beautiful young daughter who came to live with him in his rented flat the floor below the man who would become her murderer, as he suspected. But the place where he disposed of her body though finally revealed, did not result in its recovery.

"I would have broken the lease and left", declared a heartbroken father when he was asked during a coroner's enquiry what he would have done had he known Mr. Bouillon was a sex offender.

But he did not know, because that information is not available. And at the hearings that Mr. Surprenant attended, his lawyer on his behalf urged coroner Catherine Rudel-Tessier to recommend changes to the National Sex Offender registry. So that the public might have access to the list that has 28,000 names of convicted offenders, country-wide.

Pointing out that in some U.S. states zip code searches can lead to information on the presence of sex offenders within communities.

"I've been fighting for twelve years. At every stage, I've run up against a string of pitfalls. I see that our system is really not focused on victims, and there is still a lot of work to be done. I think it is a battle that will never be finished", said the anguished father who will never leave off mourning the loss of his daughter.

Since his daughter's death, although Bouillon became a prime suspect (traces of blood discovered on his boots, in his car, conflicting stories to police enquiries, yet the evidence deemed insufficient to charge him), Mr. Surprenant has attempted to discover the truth, to no avail. He was denied access to the man he suspected of having murdered his daughter by the Surete du Quebec investigator.

Yet as it happened, in 2006 Mr. Bouillon, dying of cancer, and obviously wanting to relieve himself of a haunting memory, informed a nurse's aide and auxiliary nurse in 2006, that he had murdered Julie Surprenant. It hadn't crossed their minds to alert authorities. When they heard, five years later, a news report about Mr. Surprenant, they finally stepped forward.

Although they admitted they simply hadn't thought to contact police with what they had been told by the dying man, a lawyer representing Quebec's Order of Nurses spoke before the enquiry of the requirement of professional secrecy that prevents nurses from giving up information entrusted to them by a patient. Even if it involves a crime.

And Mr. Surprenant, who did for his child what any loving, concerned and protective parent would, to try to keep her from harm, and who explained that, "As the adult, it's your job to identify where there might be problems and make sure nothing happens", fully understands that there is just so much one can do to keep a loved one from harm.

But he is also determined to make certain that the laws on advising of the presence of sex offenders in society be amended so that concerned parents can advise themselves to protect their children; one more step a parent can take to do what they can to protect their vulnerable children from the sexual deviants and psychopaths that threaten havoc with people's lives.