A woman in Niagara Falls, N.Y., says she wishes she had told police 15 years ago that William Shrubsall had tried to rape her in a snow bank near her home.
Two years after the 1986 incident, in which Christy Verner said Mr. Shrubsall, then 15, tried to sexually assault her, he bludgeoned his mother to death with a baseball bat. Mr. Shrubsall was classified as a young offender at the time and served 16 months in jail.
Ms. Verner was providing some of the first evidence at a Nova Scotia Supreme Court hearing at which Crown prosecutors are trying to have Mr. Shrubsall, a U.S. fugitive, declared a dangerous offender and jailed indefinitely for attacks on two Halifax women in 1998.
Prosecutors plan to produce several women who say they were assaulted by Mr. Shrubsall.
Mr. Shrubsall fled to Halifax in 1996 while he was on trial in New York on charges of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl. He was subsequently found guilty.
But Ms. Verner, who says she was attacked when she was 14 and was enraged at the 16-month sentence for the murder of Mr. Shrubsall's mother, told the court she wished she had identified her assailant to police.
"I kind of wanted to forget about the whole thing, but how can you forget about it now after what he did to his mother?" she said.
But in 1986, Ms. Verner said, she told police only that a young man had tried to rape her by pushing her into a snowbank and threatening to cut her with a knife unless she performed oral sex on him.
She said that when he tried to unbutton her jeans she screamed loudly and twisted his nose violently, and the man, whom she identified as Mr. Shrubsall, ran away.
Ms. Verner, who waived her right to keep her name from being published, said she learned the identity of her assailant later, but didn't tell anyone because she feared that no one would take her word over that of Mr. Shrubsall. He was a well-known honours student at a local high school.
She said she also feared that her father would take matters into his own hands. "I was afraid my father would find out who he was and hunt him down like a dog."
Instead, she said, several of her friends exacted vengeance once by punching him, chasing him to his home, and dragging him out from under the family car where he tried to hide and slamming him against the vehicle.
She said she also tormented him every time she saw him at social events.
"I'd say things like 'Rapist, you know who you are.' I wanted to make sure his friends knew about it . . . He knew who I was and he stayed away because he didn't want to have the crap beat out of him," Ms. Verner testified.
Earlier in the day another woman testified that in 1995, Mr. Shrubsall grabbed her buttocks and her waist as she was walking in Niagara Falls, N.Y. He was found guilty of assaulting her.
A third woman testified that Mr. Shrubsall invited her to his house six years ago to interview her at the age of 17 for early admission to the University of Pennsylvania.
She said she found it inappropriate that he kissed her three times.