S31 E1: The ghost | The Banned Teacher

Okay, listen, fall is my favorite season, and the biggest reason for that is it means TIFF is year.

My name is Elameen Abdul Mahmoud, and I host a show called Commotion.

Normally, we get into the biggest pop culture stories, and we do that in about 25 minutes or so, but during TIFF, we do it in half the time.

Listen to TIFF and 12 in our podcast feed every weekday during the Toronto International Film Festival so you can keep up to date without having to watch four movies in a day.

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This is is a CBC podcast.

This series contains adult content and candid accounts of sexual abuse.

Take care in listening.

I really loved music and I really loved playing the horn.

There's a bittersweet history between Anne-Marie Robinson and the French horn.

It goes back to her days in high school band.

After I left school, I just put it down and never touched it again.

In 2014, Anne-Marie's daughter was in her high school band.

I probably had to have mentioned to her a few times that I played French Horn in high school.

Her daughter was 15, smart, innocent, exactly how a teen girl should be.

She started to think it would have been fun if we could play together.

And so she really begged me to start playing.

So she did.

I just started and I just had this longing.

And so I got back into playing horn again.

She was in a good place in 2014 in a top job in the Canadian federal government, president of the Public Service Commission.

And she had a shiny new French horn.

It came back to me quickly and I got, you know, reasonably good fast.

Anne-Marie decided to join a community band.

They practiced in a church basement.

She arrived at the first rehearsal nervous.

You go down this kind of awkward staircase into this basement, and there was kind of a stage at the end.

It was just like a big, open, empty, cold room.

And I just remember trying to figure out where I was going to sit, and everyone in the room was new to me, so I didn't.

There was a musty smell.

About 60 folding chairs encircled the conductor.

Kind of was a dark, dank, kind of cold church basement.

But, you know, the people were friendly, and

but again, I was just so focused on trying to

get set up and play my horn and was all worried about whether I had the skill level to even be there.

The organizer stood up to welcome the musicians

and he introduced two new members.

First, Anne-Marie.

Then

I looked back and I was just kind of stunned.

I thought he was dead.

Like I really, in my mind, he couldn't exist.

Like, he couldn't exist if I existed.

It's like seeing a ghost.

Almost believe that he wasn't really there.

The band teacher.

I'm Julie Irton.

This is season two of The Band Played On.

It's a new series and a different investigation.

Anne-Marie Robinson is haunted, tormented by something that happened to her when she was in high school.

She alleges rape.

He says it was consensual sex.

I never resisted

because I was like I was under his control.

Our story unfolds in Toronto, Canada's biggest city, but this journey will take us across the country and well beyond this one woman.

I knew she existed.

I knew someone existed.

There's more of us.

Something happened to me too.

Wow, me too.

I just get angry that what brought us together was him.

Just that somebody could be this diabolical.

And that other people let it happen.

Questions will be raised.

Many will be answered.

How many girls at how many schools?

Who knew?

Why didn't those in positions of power prevent this man from getting too close and having sex with teen girls?

And what's the recourse for women who are victims of historical sexual abuse?

We're in 55 division in an interview room.

It's a historical sexual assault occurrence, and the occurrence number is.

Anne-Marie Robinson wants to regain control and fix systemic flaws.

And she's just the kind of person who can pull it off.

We can't move forward as individuals or as a society if we keep this stuff secret.

Keeping this secret has not done anyone any good.

Along the way, she'll gather a posse to help her.

Oh my gosh, welcome to my crowd.

No, no, we're a powerful club.

We haven't met yet.

These are the two singers.

But this whole journey begins with just one woman and one story.

Episode one,

The Ghost.

Tell me your name.

Tell me,

you know, what city we're in, and I'll get a level on your voice.

Okay, San Marie Robinson, and we are in Ottawa.

It's okay.

It's October 2021, and we're sitting in my backyard.

My dog is being taunted by the neighborhood squirrels.

You can edit all this, right?

Hey, come, lie down.

Archie, the Aussie Doodle, is actually a good distraction, an unofficial therapy dog.

Anne-Marie is a bit nervous.

Her shoulders are hunched.

Her dark brown bangs hide the top of her eyes like a shield.

She's in her early 60s, but looks younger.

She's dressed comfortably, loose clothing on a petite frame, no socks, slip-on shoes.

Where's Daddy?

Anne-Marie sought me out.

And we've spoken several times since she first reached out to me in 2020.

We took our time to build trust.

I didn't want to rush Anne-Marie into telling her story.

So this is a first for the microphone.

She's ready.

I would like

what I would consider a proper full investigation.

She wants answers.

I want to do it because I want to understand what happened to me.

I want to know if I'm alone or not, if there's other victims.

And

I want...

And she's done her homework.

You know, by having listened to the band Played On, I kind of knew that you had a sensitivity in this area, which was good.

She tracked down Peter Hamer.

I told his story in the last season of The Band Played On.

In that series, I discovered more than 50 victims of sexual abuse.

Three teachers from one school preyed on those teens over decades.

Peter is one of those survivors.

I found answers.

He found closure.

Anne-Marie comes from another school in a different city, but she wants to take that journey.

Peter has words of warning.

There were so many ups and downs, but there were also so many bad things, like things that we learned that affected me personally, even though they weren't necessarily my story.

And while this season will touch on similar themes, I'm already surprised at how different the attitudes, responses, and excuses are in cases involving girls rather than boys.

I envision different bumps and larger craters along this road with Anne-Marie.

The caution is, take care of yourself while you do it.

But you have to embrace this because this is a huge thing for you, but you have to protect yourself.

I've done my homework too.

Googled Anne-Marie's name right after her first call.

I found government reports, photos, media clippings, plenty of information about her, and videos.

I call this meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on National Finance to order.

Anne-Marie Robinson was a big deal in the Canadian government, a top bureaucrat.

She often presented to politicians in parliamentary committees.

From the Public Service Commission, we're very pleased to welcome

for the first time in her capacity as President of the Public Service Commission, Anne-Marie Robinson.

The Commission oversees the federal workforce.

It's not a union, it's part of the government.

So it's kind of like an Auditor General because it's basically a regulator of the staffing authority.

And she was in charge.

Watching these videos, it's almost like looking at a different person.

She wears confidence with her fitted business suits.

In fluent bureaucraties, she rattles off stats, methods, and protocols in two official languages.

languages.

But at some point, that policy wonk was overtaken by dark, painful memories.

Now she's ready to talk about what brought her here.

So, on my deck, wrangling the dog and the microphone, I start asking questions.

I need to know everything,

but I know we'll need to take it slowly.

Tell me where you grew up.

Okay,

well, I was born in Toronto.

My mom was a single mother and you know she was just trying to get by and make ends meet.

She was the youngest of three.

She has an older sister, a brother in the middle.

They all lived with their mom in public housing.

She hardly knew her dad.

Anne Marie attended Eastern High School of Commerce in Toronto's Danforth area.

She did well in all her classes, but music was the draw.

Well in high school all I did was band, you know, being in the band and being a French horn player and I had wanted at the time to become a professional musician.

What was good about it?

What did you enjoy about it?

I just loved the music.

Yeah, I loved the music.

She even skipped a grade.

I was supposed to be in grade 10.

I was in grade 10 and I was supposed to be in grade 10 music, but Walker put me into grade 11 music.

Her music teacher, Doug Walker.

Mr.

Walker.

He had

kind of short blonde hair.

He was a bit overweight and tall.

The band leader.

He was like one of the kids.

You know, he hung out with kids, it seems.

I kind of associate him more with hanging out with the kids than his colleagues,

which at the time, you know, we thought he was cool because of that, but now it just seems kind of odd to me.

He would have been in his late 20s, maybe almost 30.

It's clear from photos, Anne-Marie was an attractive teenager.

She dressed up for band.

Our band uniform was a blazer and a shirt.

Her dark brown hair was feathered.

Oh, I had fair faucet hair and I was super proud of that.

I would get up every morning and do those big sausage rolls in my head.

She became the music teacher's favorite.

He paid a lot of attention to me, and all the other kids in the school had to share French horns and put them away at night and then sign them out if they wanted to take them home.

And he used his budget to buy me a horn.

High school bands demand commitment, practices, classes, concerts, and trips.

And those trips are coveted.

Kids get away from their parents, they stay in hotels, they play in front of audiences and in competitions.

Anne-Marie tells me about one band trip in 1977.

We were on a school field trip to Belleville, a band trip,

and we were all drinking alcohol and Mr.

Walker provided the alcohol.

She was 16.

They were a few hours' drive from home in a city about halfway between Ottawa and Toronto.

Kind of the first thing I remember

was being in a hotel room in Belleville.

Initially other kids were there in the teacher's hotel room.

Then they left.

She was alone with the teacher.

And then next thing I remember is he was standing over me in his black underwear

and we had intercourse.

Anne-Marie's first time would be with her music teacher.

And then the the next morning, I remember waking up really scared and not being able to make sense of what had happened.

I was obviously drunk on the alcohol that he provided, and there was a bunch of other kids there too.

And, you know, they remember being in the room.

Did any of them suspect what had gone on between you and the teacher?

I don't know.

I mean, I was just way too afraid to talk about it.

The next thing I remember is going into his office.

I don't know how far after the trip it was, but it was pretty close.

And I remember him telling me that he had left his previous school because he'd been punched in the face by a father

of a student for having some sort of sexual contact with that student.

Now, at the time, he told me it wasn't true.

He told me that story, I think, to make me feel responsible for his job.

And I was in grade 10.

I didn't understand the world the way I do now.

But at the time, it made me feel sorry for him.

He told me his life was hard.

And so...

That story, the teacher being punched by an angry father, would lay the foundation for what came next.

She didn't want him to get in trouble.

It evolved into an emotional type relationship, but sort of in a Stockholm Syndrome kind of way, like I had no way out.

Anne-Marie says she developed a dependency on him.

He told her it was love.

And at the time, she thought she was in love too.

I know I was vulnerable, and I had no father, and my mother was just very preoccupied, and for some reason, I didn't feel like I could go to her.

She remembers unwelcome sex with the teacher continued in his car after practices on other out-of-town band trips over and over again.

She was 16, above the legal age to consent, and at the time, 1977, no laws prevented a teacher from having sex with his student if there was consent.

He had sex with me once in the classroom.

in a closet and that you know I remember being humiliating.

I never resisted

because I was like, I was under his control, but he was gonna,

everything was gonna be okay because he was gonna marry me.

And because of the initial what I see now, given the fact that I was drunk with the alcohol he gave me as a rape,

I was it was like I was trying to reconcile that.

She says she always felt under his control

Because he was my teacher,

he was

someone to be trusted.

I mean, and so

even though I didn't like what had happened, I felt

like somehow

I was very confused.

I mean,

immediately after that, he kept telling me that he was in love with me and

all of this stuff and

at some point made me feel like I was actually his girlfriend, which I knew I wasn't because I knew that what we were doing or what had gone on was wrong.

And it had to be kept secret.

He was sneaking around.

I mean, you know, he would treat me differently in private than he would in public.

He told me I wasn't allowed to tell anyone what was happening.

She still can't make sense of it.

A man having sex with a kid.

He never forced me.

I wouldn't say he forced himself on me.

It was more like a routine.

I was an emotional prisoner, not a like he would get me in circumstances, and then I didn't.

Yeah, I don't really like to talk about it.

That's okay.

Yeah.

And it wasn't just during school time.

In March 2017, police in Ketchiken, Alaska got a worried call.

And I haven't heard from them, so I'm getting worried.

It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia.

When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch.

Is it a suicide?

Is it a murder?

What is it?

From ABC Audio and 2020, Cold-Blooded Mystery in Alaska is out now.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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The music teacher also introduced Anne-Marie to another band, a professional one.

I remember being with him going to the Royal Regiment band and him driving me around.

Walker would take me to the armories and there was drinking after.

The Royals is a Canadian military band.

It still operates out of Fort York, the historic military site in downtown Toronto.

The band parades through the city on special occasions, like this one.

This outdoor performance is from a YouTube video in 2015.

They wear formal red military uniforms, shiny boots, and those big bearskin hats like the guards at Buckingham Palace.

The band sometimes plays for royalty.

They're a good band.

I mean, I think they're still a good band now, and they were a great band in the mid-70s.

And

I was a member of the union, and I got paid really good money to play, which, for you know, someone who was raised by a single mother and my mom was on social assistance, it was like, I think I got paid $50 a concert, which in the 70s was incredible.

But it meant seeing her music teacher all summer, even when school was out.

He would drive her to practices and take her home.

Well, it was the same every time we would drive to a street.

And then

he would initiate sexual activity in the front seat of the car.

Yeah, it was just kind of expected.

She was isolated from her teen friends, and it was the beginning of a profound loneliness that would dog her for decades to come.

She needed a father.

She needed support, and her teacher was providing flimsy scaffolding.

It wasn't really love, and there would be no marriage.

He was already living with the woman who would become his current wife, a fellow teacher.

After more than a year of sex on band trips, in cars and in closets, this teenager had to escape.

The only way I could get out was to quit high school.

She didn't see the teacher again and she didn't graduate.

There was no follow-up from either the school board or him or anything.

I just kind of floated away from school one day.

and I

went into a deep depression.

And I know,

I don't have evidence of this, but I know in my heart that everyone knew something was going on and he was out of line.

Like, where were the other adults?

Why didn't they

help me?

She had very good marks.

She was part of the band, but no one asked why she just stopped going to school.

I suffered from severe mental illness after I was having panic attacks.

I had almost two years where I could barely leave the house in the aftermath of all of this.

I was so thrown off my center and I just felt like a bad person.

She was still a teen and needed support.

She found it in another man, someone about a dozen years older.

I got married at 18 and had a lovely boy.

At 21,

I

figured out that you could go to university without having a high school diploma.

Life got back on track.

She completed two degrees, then a master's, most of it part-time.

And then I joined government in 1990 as a GST auditor.

So she worked as a tax auditor.

She raised her son, got divorced, then remarried, then divorced again.

She moved across the country.

Relationships with men were difficult, but she found herself in her work.

I loved everything about government.

I went from department to department and I worked on every file.

So I became eventually a policy wonk.

You know, I got promoted fairly regularly and

then I became a deputy minister

around 2010.

And then I

applied for and got the job as president of the Public Service Commission.

She was in a good place at home and work.

One day she typed the teacher's name into a search.

I googled his name and I found a transcript.

It was really the first time I think in 30 years I'd have the guts to even think about him.

And the victim, he had another victim.

Another teenager, a student at another school.

He'd been banned from teaching.

This woman is my hero.

I would love to meet her.

And it's the same story.

The same story as hers.

Anne-Marie wasn't alone.

There was at least one other woman out there who knew how all this felt.

The online report reveals the band teacher had sex with this teen student over and over again, more than 56 times, at school, in cars.

The Ontario College of Teachers, the profession's regulator, found him guilty of professional misconduct.

But the girl's name is blacked out.

By this stage, Anne-Marie was married to husband number three.

Together, they had a daughter, and that little girl had musical talent.

After I walked out of my high school after Walker, I hadn't touched the French horn.

It was like a thing far, far, far in my past.

But then her daughter joined her high school band and convinced Anne-Marie to pick up the horn again.

And that takes us back to that first band practice and the night she saw the ghost.

He had to be dead, and I know one of the psychologists that I worked with, she described it as me being delusional as a way to feel like I could survive in the world if he didn't exist.

It was easier to imagine her former music teacher dead.

She was able to play music again.

I was invited by one of the instructors to go join the National Capital Concert Band.

So that was in September of 2014,

and it was exciting for me because it was recovering something that I had lost because of Walker.

And

the first rehearsal, they introduced two new members,

it was myself and

Douglas Walker.

When I heard his name and I heard his instrument,

I thought,

you know,

the Doug Walker that I knew, Mr.

Walker, my teacher, he played trumble.

But I thought, okay, it's not that uncommon of a name.

And I looked back and at first I didn't think it was him or I wasn't sure it was him.

It was an old old man and I, you know, I was older too.

And so

at break, he came up to me and I looked at him and I said, you remember me?

And he said, of course I do.

Like I was so shocked.

I couldn't be me if he existed.

And I know that sounds a bit crazy, but I had spent my life trying to build a strong person

and

that person was just so different from the person he left behind.

She had no intention of regressing.

At that point in my career, I was the president of the Public Service Commission.

I was in a deputy minister, and I remember saying to myself,

Okay, this practically destroyed me when I was young, but

I'm strong now.

And so I said, What?

I think we should talk, and let's go for coffee next week.

Anne-Marie and the dog are getting restless.

I'm tired.

Yeah, I'm starting to lose it.

So

we leave it there for the day.

I'm asking the questions, but Anne-Marie is in control.

After what she's been through, I have to give her that.

I want to make this as comfortable as possible.

Arch takes quiet.

Finding Doug Walker, the former music teacher, is not difficult.

I locate his address and send him a registered letter.

He emails me back right away.

He doesn't deny having sex with Anne-Marie, but Walker contends the relationship with Anne-Marie was consensual.

Not surprisingly, he doesn't want to do an interview with me.

But we're moving ahead with this investigation.

and there is much more to come.

He picked the wrong girls.

We're smart.

We are assertive.

We kept going through the shit.

Next time on the band teacher, Anne-Marie goes for coffee with the former band leader.

And so I basically spent the whole week deciding what I was going to say to him.

And she thinks going back to her old school might help kickstart her own memory and her healing.

I was actually sexually assaulted at this school by my teacher in the 1970s.

The band teacher is investigated, reported, written, and hosted by me, Julie Irton.

Allison Cook is the story and script editor, producer, sound designer, and mixer.

Felice Chin is our executive producer and story editor.

Eve Saint Laurent is our legal advisor.

Jennifer Chen, Amanda Pfeffer, and Jen White provided valuable production advice.

Special thanks to the folks at CBC Podcasts for their support.

The managing editor of CBC Ottawa is Drake Fenton.

If you want to binge the whole series, subscribe to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts.

Just click on the link in the show description or binge listen for free by logging in to CBC Listen.

If you or someone you know has been sexually abused, community resources can help.

Reach out to a trusted person, sexual assault center, or rape crisis center in your area.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.