When he was a student at Christ the King Seminary in British Columbia, those who knew Christopher Neil said he kept himself hidden behind a mask.
Always controlled and precise, he gave the impression of a devout student, someone who could cite philosophers in conversation, but who spoke as though reading from a script.
“Chris is the kind of person that could lead a double life,” said Robert Collins, who was a seminary student at the same time and lived down the hall from Mr. Neil.
“I never thought he was being totally genuine with me, ever. Maybe he was hiding something then, or maybe that's just the kind of person he was.”
Various pictures of Christopher Neil, a suspected Canadian pedophile who was arrested Oct. 19 in northeastern Thailand. (AFP/Getty Images)
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Mr. Neil, 32, grew up in Maple Ridge, B.C., an hour's drive from Vancouver.
His friends from Maple Ridge Secondary School describe him as the “guy next door,” a perfectly ordinary outsider who was neither popular nor unpopular, loved the music of the Pogues and struggled to come out of his shell in drama class.
But there was something in his past that may have provided a glimpse of his future, of the day he would become the world's most wanted alleged pedophile, a seemingly ordinary English teacher pursued by police forces across the globe, and now awaiting his fate in a Thai jail.
His brother Matthew said there was a traumatic incident when Mr. Neil was a boy that led to him being called to court as a witness. He didn't want to talk about the details, saying only that the suspect left Canada and the matter went away.
But when police told him of the allegations against Mr. Neil, that he had sexually abused a dozen young boys in Asia, older family members immediately seized on this incident, which had been left unmentioned for so long that Matthew had forgotten it ever happened.
One former high-school classmate, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Neil was a great guy. He didn't have many friends, nor did he have a girlfriend, but he once confided in her that he had a crush on a girl at the school.
In Grade 12, he switched from the regular program to Outreach, a stream for students struggling with normal schooling. Mary-Ellen Laidlaw, who ran the program, doesn't remember Mr. Neil, but she's not shocked to hear the allegations against him.
At one point in the early 1990s, she said a survey of 109 students in Outreach found that 100 had been seriously abused – mentally, physically or sexually.
“In Outreach, there were no ordinary kids,” she said. She's able to list a dozen examples of students abused in various ways, often sexually. Some went on to university and success, and others went on to painful lives of abuse and victimhood. The latter, she said, “either end up in a terrible situation or they end up creating a terrible situation.”
Mr. Neil was quiet and shy in those days. Paula Zentner, a teacher and drama director, remembers him as a “wonderful kid” who had dreams of being an actor, but who had a terrible stutter. In his last year of high school, Ms. Zentner thought she had the perfect role for him: one with few speaking parts. Mr. Neil, though, wanted to play the lead.
“I said, ‘Chris, I can't [cast you]. You have a stutter. You're wonderful on stage but it's just not going to work.' He said, ‘Let me try.' ”
She gave him the script and told him to come back in two days. Two days later, by sheer force of will, he had learned to control the stammering, she said. As long as he knew what he was going to say, and had rehearsed it, he could get through his lines without tripping up.
Pursuing the priesthood
It's not clear why Mr. Neil chose to study for the Catholic priesthood, but he entered the Christ the King Seminary in Mission, B.C., in 1995 at the age of 20.
His seminary classmates said Mr. Neil exhibited nothing out of the ordinary in his time at the school. He followed the strict daily regimen without fail, but seldom without complaint, his classmates said. They would rise at 5 a.m., be in the chapel at 6 for meditation, study scripture and philosophy, take their meals in silence, play street hockey and soccer, and then to bed by 9 p.m.
Mr. Neil was part of the rebellious gang that would slip out at night and sneak down to the local lounge for a few beers. They would sit at the bar to watch hockey, and Mr. Neil would remark on an attractive woman if one happened to walk in, which was considered a little risqué for someone studying for the priesthood.
“Chris liked his beer. He would have two or three or five or six, depending how long we were there,” said his classmate Mr. Collins.
Mr. Collins said he was surprised that Mr. Neil wasn't asked to continue his studies after completing his bachelor of arts in 1999 because Mr. Neil was one of the program's top students and was loved by the monks.
Officials at the seminary refused to speak to the media this week, but said through a spokesman that Mr. Neil chose to discontinue his studies, and that during his time as a volunteer catechism teacher, with children aged 10 to 15 in Maple Ridge, there were no complaints about his behaviour.
“From what I gathered, [the priesthood] was something he had lost interest in. I wasn't sure of the struggles that were going on inside his head, but I think he felt he'd had enough and was ready to move on,” said one former seminarian, who asked not to be named.
In those days, the seminary received a daily paper, which Mr. Neil devoured, but there was no Internet access and every activity was tightly monitored. The control was too much for Mr. Neil, who complained bitterly about being cut off from the outside world, his classmate said.
“Ironically, looking back, it was probably one of the safest environments he could have been in,” he said.
During the summer months, Mr. Neil found a plum job as a chaplain working with 12- to 18-year-old cadets, first at Fort Qu'Appelle, Sask., in 1997, then at Clearwater, N.S., in 1998 and 1999 and Nova Scotia's Greenwood Air Cadet training centre in 2000.
Male and female cadets would come to Mr. Neil if they were feeling homesick or needed counselling. He also taught a course in morals and ethics.
Ashley Debaie, now a college student in Halifax, was 14 years old when she went to Mr. Neil for help at Greenwood in 2000.
She sat in his office, adorned with a crucifix and a picture of the last supper, and told him she was having trouble with a superior.
“He was very friendly, very laid-back and down-to-earth. He was a really good listener,” she said.
She said he spoke to her in a soft voice, which she described as high-pitched and squeaky, and advised her to be honest with her supervisor. She said he seemed very wise, and was in no way unusual or creepy.
“No one ever complained about him,” she said. “Everyone liked him.”
Mr. Neil would have had a lot of access to children during his time as a chaplain, and a lot of his time would have been spent in one-on-one situations, because that's the nature of the work, one long-time chaplain said.
In 1999, two years after Mr. Neil joined the cadets, the Canadian Forces instituted a systematic human-rights policy that included a mechanism for cadets to make sexual harassment complaints. The Canadian Forces said there have been no complaints about Mr. Neil, either before or after his picture hit the front pages of the newspaper, and there are no investigations under way.
An overseas odyssey
According to a post he wrote on an Internet message board, Mr. Neil's move to Asia was almost accidental. He was looking for a teaching job in British Columbia, but with little experience he received no offers. His mother found an advertisement in the local paper that said, “Teach in Korea. Make $$$, pay bills.”
After a 10-minute phone interview, he was hired, launching himself on a seven-year career that took him to Thailand, Vietnam and back to Korea, where he fled his job at the Gwangju Foreign School earlier this month.
Colleagues in Korea say he was a good teacher, responsible and conscientious. His enthusiasm was infectious, and he always dressed in a shirt and tie.
“He was the perfect professional,” said Raymond Fowler, 55, who taught with Mr. Neil in Gwangju and lived in an apartment across the hall.
But the postings also reveal that Mr. Neil was no longer leading the sheltered life of a seminary student. He complained that Korean condoms never work, and talked of being attracted to Thai nurses and Vietnamese girls. He asked if anyone knew where he could get a cream for skin rashes, and received responses asking if he had contracted something nasty.
He provided guidance on how to erase pornographic files from a laptop, and recounted nervously disposing of Penthouse magazines before facing Korean customs. And he wondered about the percentage of cases where HIV was transmitted through oral sex. Reports in Thailand say he has refused to take an HIV test in prison, and in his postings he often speaks out against the Korean schools that require employees to get blood tests before starting work.
“I have nothing to hide, but to me it's the principal [sic] of it,” he wrote.
He also enjoyed poking fun at the names of his students, including a female pupil named Yu Suk Me.
In a case of unintended foreshadowing, he expressed enthusiasm for cameras in the classroom, which he says can be very useful in case of legal entanglement.
“I LOVE cameras in the classroom,” he wrote in July of this year. “If a student or parent makes an accusation of some sort, it is extremely easy to prove or disprove if the lesson is on film. Think of it as safety. And ham it up as well!”
In one of his Internet postings, Mr. Neil describes trying to rebuff the advances of a Korean man in a public shower. He writes that the man tried to scrub his back, and even after he told him he wasn't interested continued to stare at him and hope he would change his mind.
“I won't go into any detail but let's just say I felt very violated indeed,” he wrote. “He kept manhandling me, even though I obviously wasn't interested.”
He also posted several poems in which he makes references that, given the nature of the charges against him, seem notable. In a piece called Time, he writes “… my eyes fixed elsewhere, upon the shirtless urchin who for 10 baht sold his life,” and concludes with “then the urchin's smile, alone in my mind, showed a pity and a love, divine.”
On the run
On Oct. 10, the net was beginning to close on Mr. Neil. He was always watching CNN, his colleagues said, and would have known that his photo had been unscrambled by German computer technicians. No one else at the school had noticed that the somewhat distorted image being shown at the top of every newscast bore some resemblance to the new English teacher from Maple Ridge.
His colleague Mr. Fowler remembers talking with him on the night he fled Korea.
“We were going to go to the Brewhouse,” he said, referring to a popular local bar. “I told him meet me at 10. He said it might be hard getting up in the morning.”
Mr. Fowler said there was no clue as to what was happening. Mr. Neil failed to show up at the bar, and the next morning he didn't show up for class. His students, who were looking forward to his plans to start a drama club, were left to wonder where he had gone.
Mr. Neil had even promised to create a program for safety awareness month on Internet safety for children, which principal Joseph Lynn said staff found amusing in retrospect.
Police tracked Mr. Neil to Thailand, where he was found hiding with a 25-year-old Thai transvestite named Ohm, who has been described as a former partner.
Whether the hundreds of photos unearthed by Interpol of young boys being abused are, in fact, images of Mr. Neil will be a matter for the courts to decide.
He stands accused in Thailand of molesting a nine-year-old boy in 2003, and of kidnapping and molesting that boy's older brother, who was 14 at the time. The police allege Mr. Neil paid the boys 500 baht, about $17, to visit him in his apartment and play video games. On the third visit, they allege, Mr. Neil paid the older boy 1,000 baht to take off his clothes in front of a camera. Mr. Neil is also accused of performing oral sex on the boy.
As he sat in custody, Mr. Neil told CTV's Steve Chao that the case against him wouldn't hold up in a Canadian court, but that he didn't want to be extradited to Canada, because people like him don't last long in Canadian jails.
His old friends are still dumbfounded by the turn of events.
“We heard from police that he was with a transvestite,” said Mr. Collins, his seminary classmate. “That shocked me so much. Oh my. That's a long way from seminary.”
With reports from Donald Kirk in Gwangju, South Korea and Jim Pollard in Bangkok
