House of horrors burned for TV film

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This article was published 02/12/2009 (5406 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The boy watched as fire began to consume the farmhouse, while a film crew taped the blaze for a movie.

As flames engulfed the two-storey farmhouse near Kipling, Sask., the boy was looking at more than a movie moment — he was witnessing the destruction of the house of horrors where he was held prisoner and raped three years ago by one of Canada’s most notorious child molesters, Peter Robert Whitmore.

"He didn’t really care about the movie," the boy’s father said Wednesday, recalling the blaze that bitterly cold day in February.

"We were all glad to see the place go."

The farmhouse was burned in February during the filming of a television movie called Rust, which will be screened for the community this week before making its major TV debut on the weekend.

Details of the emotional impact of the movie’s production have emerged in the run-up to its release. Filmmakers needed a set to burn for their story. The community of Kipling wanted a painful reminder of a horrible crime razed. The fire solved both their problems.

Whitmore kidnapped two boys in the summer of 2006 and took them to the abandoned home.

He kept the children — a 14-year-old from Winnipeg and a 10-year-old from Saskatchewan — there for days, repeatedly raping them.

The boys eventually were freed, and Whitmore has been jailed.

When it came time to burn the house down, one of Whitmore’s young victims was among those watching.

Pat Beaujot, a local businessman and investor in Kipling Film Productions, said he contacted the victim’s father to let him know they would be burning down the home.

"He felt it would be good for his son to come and watch that," Beaujot said.

The boy came to the scene with his father and a friend, and stood watching and walking around during parts of the blaze, which Beaujot estimated took at least an hour.

The director and star of the film is Corbin Bernsen, who starred in the 1980s TV series L.A. Law. He said he was introduced to the boy, not realizing who he was.

"I said, ‘Are you excited to see this?’ and he said, ‘Yeah,’" Bernsen said.

"I could just see the enthusiasm in his eyes about us burning this farmhouse down.

"Someone afterwards told me, ‘That’s the kid that was kidnapped. He was found in that house.’ So what he was excited about was not watching the house burn. He was more excited about watching that horror burn."

Kevin Hassler, the former mayor of Kipling, said many people in his community were glad to see the building burn.

"A lot of people were happy to see it go and they were actually hoping that it would bring closure to the family affected," he said.

The father said watching the crime scene burn may help, in some small way, to heal some of his family’s wounds. "That house no longer represented anything good anymore," the father said. "It does bring some closure to us."

 

— Winnipeg Free Press, Canwest News Service