Richard Neil found guilty in 1990s 'woodland rapist' cold case

A three-decade search for a predator dubbed southern Ontario's "woodland rapist" has ended with a Toronto man convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault.

Toronto man, 67, convicted of 17 offences in connection with attacks that long baffled police

Thomas Daigle · CBC News

· Posted: Nov 13, 2026 11:11 AM EST | Last Updated: 13 minutes ago

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WARNING: This story contains details of sexual assault against children.

A three-decade search for a predator dubbed southern Ontario's "woodland rapist" has ended with a Toronto man convicted of kidnapping and sexual assault.

A jury at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Brampton on Friday found Richard Neil guilty of a total of 17 offences in connection with three brutal attacks on children in public parks in 1992, 1994 and 1995.

Two boys, aged 8 and 10, and a 15-year-old girl each told police they'd been lured into wooded areas, tied up and raped by a stranger. The victims all said they'd been forced to drink the assailant's urine.

Once DNA evidence showed the same unknown suspect had carried out all three attacks in the Ontario communities of Kitchener, Brampton and Oakville, police launched an urgent search to identify the man and catch him.

Nearly 30 years went by without a significant break in the case — until advances in forensic technology led to Neil's arrest in 2024.

Richard Neil leaves a Brampton, Ont., courthouse on Oct. 16. (Evan Mitsui/CBC)

At the time, police announced there may be more victims.

The 67-year-old Neil, a British-born former Canada Post and UPS driver, had homes in Toronto and Victoria, B.C.

The divorced father of three insisted he wasn't involved in the 1990s assaults. But the evidence — including DNA, fingerprints and Neil's interest in urine-drinking — was hard to dispute.

It took the jury less than four hours of deliberation to unanimously accept the Crown's version of events. 

Neil will be sentenced at a later date.

"There's some relief of course, mixed with a little bit of disappointment that we couldn't catch him at the time," retired Halton Regional Police Det. Sgt. Graham Barnes told CBC News.

A Halton Regional police officer is seen in 1995 holding a composite sketch of the then-unknown child sex predator dubbed the 'woodland rapist.' (CBC)

Longtime cold case

The case long baffled investigators from the Peel, Halton and Waterloo regions, who formed the Project Woodland task force in 1995. As the manhunt made headlines at the time, the media labelled the unidentified attacker the "woodland rapist," given his pattern of violence.

A composite sketch of a man — based on descriptions provided by the victims — was distributed to law enforcement agencies across the province and nearby U.S. states.

Officers canvassed Oakville neighbourhoods nightly in 1995 and reportedly received more than 1,300 tips over the years. Neil's trial heard that the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto had looked at 310 persons of interest in total — to no avail.

At one point, Barnes, the former lead detective said he even hired a Texas-based firm to see if a Russian satellite had captured an image of a licence plate on an SUV linked to the attacker.

WATCH | DNA on underwear worn as a mask helped identify Neil:

DNA on underwear worn as mask helped identify alleged child rapist

October 18|

Duration

1:58

Warning: Story contains details of sexual assaults against children | 31 years after a teen girl was forced into the woods and attacked in an Oakville, Ont., park, a jury has been shown underwear worn as the assailant’s mask. A forensic scientist testified that DNA on the underwear matched the accused, Richard Neil, who is on trial for a series of sexual assaults against children in the 1990s.

By 1999, police speculated the assailant could be dead.

But Crown attorney Shazin Karim told the jury police finally identified Neil as a suspect in recent years thanks to genetic genealogy analysis conducted in the U.S. 

The investigative technique — which involves comparing crime scene DNA to genetic data voluntarily submitted to direct-to-consumer genealogical services — was unavailable to police in the 1990s.

One of the victims previously told CBC News that according to investigators, the breakthrough was made possible after one of Neil's relatives submitted their DNA to an ancestry-type website.

The victim, who was 10 when he was assaulted in Brampton's Norton Place Park in 1994, said he was "shaking" when he was told of Neil's arrest. 

"I felt overwhelmed with joy, then sadness," he said, "as I started to recall the memories of that day."

In September 1994, Peel Regional Police said a boy was walking through Brampton's Norton Place Park when he was approached by a suspect and lured to a nearby wooded area, where he was sexually assaulted. (Patrick Morrell/CBC)

Neil's trial before Justice Rosemarie Juginovic began in early October. The jury heard contemporaneous police interviews of the three victims, who were not required to testify. Their identities are covered by a court-ordered publication ban. 

Three horrific attacks

The unsolved attacks on children sent shockwaves through southern Ontario communities in the 1990s.

On Aug. 21, 1992, an eight-year-old boy told police he'd been approached by a man offering to show him a collection of bikes in a wooded area of Kitchener's Idlewood Park. The man later pulled out a pocket knife and tied the boy's foot to a tree before sexually assaulting him.

On Sept. 29, 1994, the 10-year-old boy reported a similar attack in the Brampton park. He said he was forced to drink urine from a bottle and perform sex acts on the man.

The jury in the trial of Richard Neil was shown this image of a two-litre pop bottle recovered from the scene of a brutal attack on a 15-year-old girl at Wildwood Park in Oakville, Ont., on Aug. 31, 1995. The girl told police the unknown assailant forced her to drink urine from the bottle. (Ontario Superior Court of Justice)

Then, on Aug. 31, 1995, a 15-year-old girl recounted another violent incident with further similarities, including the use of a bottle for urine-drinking. The court heard she was held at gunpoint and also made to snort cocaine.

Prosecutors said forensic analysis showed it's "20 quadrillion times more likely" that DNA collected at the three crime scenes belonged to Neil, rather than another, random person.

The jury was told Neil's fingerprints matched those lifted from two shopping bags and a two-litre pop bottle located at Wildwood Park in Oakville, where the girl was assaulted.

What's more, Karim, the Crown attorney, said images, videos and messages seized from Neil's electronic devices demonstrated he has "an interest in urine-drinking."

Neil acknowledged having a "simple fetish" for urine, insisting "it's actually quite common." He said he had only "engaged in that act" with consenting adults.