Pedophile sex offender charged with possession of child porn dead a month before trial

Is it wrong to celebrate the death of septuagenarian who was labelled a high-risk sex offender for assaulting a seven-year-old girl?

When former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died on April 10, 2013, a 74-year-old song rose to the top of the charts in the U.K.

Before midnight the Monday she died, the 1939 ditty sung by The Munchkins characters in the classic film The Wizard of Oz was up to No. 4 on the U.K.'s singles chart.

"Ding-dong! The Witch is dead
"Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
"Ding-dong! The Wicked Witch is dead"
– Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead, The Wizard of Oz

That showed the early power of social media campaigns, this one launched the day she died on Facebook called "Make Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead number one the week Thatcher dies." 

So close. By Tuesday the song made it to No. 2.

While I personally don't think we should celebrate the death of anyone, one understands the British people feeling at least a glimmer of schadenfreude upon hearing of the demise of the Iron Lady who did so much damage to her country.

Those who have suffered at the hands of powerful or evil or otherwise despicable people throughout history have a right to rejoice when that person who has created misery and suffering isn't around to do it any more.

But what about a lowly pedophile sex offender who almost nobody knows about, who anyone reading this wouldn't know about if you weren't reading this? He didn't directly affect your life. Is it OK to feel joy about that death?

Some people in the community were outraged when they found out last month a high-risk child sex offender Richard Ian Ellis was out on bail and living in Chilliwack.

Apparently, the 76-year-old died here, too. 

I don't know the cause of death, nor can I find an obituary for him, nor do I even have firsthand evidence to confirm the death of the man born in 1949 (or 1948 which is listed on at least one of his files) even happened. What I do know is the two-letter abbreviation entered next to his most recent criminal file online in the "result" column after his last scheduled court appearance: “AB.”

That stands for “abated.” It seems like an odd word to use to end charges against a dead person since the word "abate" means to lessen or decrease in intensity. It's almost an insult to the dead person: "We wanted to take you to trial for your alleged crime. And we know you know longer exist. But we won't drop the charge fully, just lessen the intensity of it."

In a legal context, however, "abate" or "abatement" is used to describe either reducing or eliminating something, in this case the latter. So instead of a "stay of proceedings," which is used when charges are, colloquially, dropped, "abatement" means the charge, much like the deceased, now simply no longer exists.

Ellis committed a bunch of crimes in Winnipeg in the 1980s, moved to Surrey and carried on in the 1990s. He was convicted of theft $5,000 or under in 2002 on the University Endowment Lands in Vancouver.

Using only Court Services Online for a biography, his seems to have been a pathetic lifetime of smallish crimes. But at the age of 59 he was convicted of sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl in 2007. Not knowing the details of the crime, it must have been very, very bad, because in 2014 after serving his sentence, Vancouver police warned the public the then 66-year-old posed a risk of "significant harm" to the safety of young girls.

Three years after that in 2017, a public notification stated that Ellis would be living in Hope. That was an error, which was corrected. He was living in Chilliwack.

Then in 2021, Ellis was charged with one count of possession of child pornography for an allegation on August 19, 2021. He was scheduled in court on Feb. 4, 2025, for a pre-trial conference in advance of his trial set to start one week from this writing, March 25, 26, 27, 2025.

The notation for the result of that was “initiated by defence.” Then on Feb. 10 the file was scheduled for disposition, and the cased was ended with a finding of "Abated by Crown," which is "Used when it is determined that the accused is deceased." 

Whether you have schadenfreude about his death or not, in our overloaded criminal justice system, it's definitely good news to free up three days of court time and clear these decks for a judge, a public prosecutor, and court staff.

Glee over a death is fleeting at best

I personally am not experiencing schadenfreude or celebrating Ellis's death nor would I celebrate the death of pretty much anyone – almost anyone – no matter how bad they are. 

When a pedophilic slur about me was spray-painted six-feet high on the wall at my office a decade ago, I knew immediately it was connected to my coverage of gangster Curtis Vidal’s home invasion trial. I had also received threatening phone messages about the case, so the graffiti saying "Paul Henderson is a child molester" was a shock but wasn't terribly surprising. It also illustrated that even amongst society's most sociopathic gangsters, which Vidal surely was, a childl molester is lower than low, the worst of the worst. When 41-year-old Vidal was found murdered in an Edmonton garage three years ago, I didn’t feel joy. Not that I'm so vain as to think I'm even worth killing, but I felt a glimmer of relief that one of the most dangerous people who doesn’t like me was gone. Sure.

It's one thing to feel relief when a bad or dangerous person is dead, but I think it is pathological to actually celebrate the death of a human being. Any being, really. Even most meat eaters live with cognitive dissonance blinders on knowing they could never personally kill a domesticated mammal. But, to quote John Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction: "Bacon tastes good."

We’ve all quietly if theoretically wished someone might die. If you are not a sociopath and a person you wished dead did die, I suspect your gut instinct wasn't joy but was actually to feel terrible, if only for a second.

I didn’t know Richard Ian Ellis, where he was born, what his childhood was like, who picked on him in school, if his father beat him, or if his mother abandoned him. Maybe none of that happened but I promise you someone did something to hurt him physically or mentally as a young person, probably both. It's never only nature. Nurture always moulds a man.

I don’t really care to know about Ellis's life, but I am slightly curious. And even if he was the worst type of unredeemable psychopath, even if we were to dehumanize his existence to the value of a blood-sucking leech or a mosquito or a virus, schadenfreude is fleeting and, I believe, fake. It won't actually make you feel better.

Pick off the leech. Eradicate the virus. Enjoy the demise of a pedophile if you need to.

The next one is right around the corner.

-30-

Paul J. Henderson
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