Posted By Trevor Pritchard

A retired police officer who investigated if there was a widespread conspiracy to cover up sex abuse allegations in the Cornwall area denied he was influenced by a superior officer who'd conducted a similar investigation.

“I have my own mind,” Det. Const. Joe Dupuis told the Cornwall Public Inquiry during his third day of testimony Friday.

In August 1998, Dupuis began probing allegations raised by former cop Perry Dunlop that the Cornwall Police Service, the Crown attorney's office, and the local Catholic diocese had conspired to obstruct justice.

The investigation was part of Project Truth: a four-year investigation by the Ontario Provincial Police into rumours a pedophile clan had preyed on children in the area.

One of Dupuis's supervisors on Project Truth was Det. Insp. Tim Smith. In 1994, Smith led a similar investigation to Dupuis's that found no evidence of a conspiracy.

Dupuis would reach the same conclusion in 2001.

Dupuis testified that before Smith retired in 1999, he had weekly contact with the senior officer – a man he held in high regard.

“I take it that you personally respected officer Smith?” asked Helen Daley, an attorney for the Citizens for Community Renewal. “Did you consider him to have more policing experience, at a higher level, than you did?”

“Oh, definitely,” said Dupuis.

Both Daley and inquiry commissioner Normand Glaude suggested that since Smith was now his boss, it might have been difficult for Dupuis to make a finding that there had been a cover-up.

“You were the foot soldier,” said Glaude. “And for you to come to that conclusion, you'd have to be telling your supervisor either, 'You made a mistake back there,' or some other facts or something else happened.”

Dupuis maintained Smith never influenced his 1998 investigation. And had he come to the opposite conclusion, it wouldn't have been the first time he'd disagreed with a supervisor's findings, Dupuis added.

There were elements of Dupuis's 1998 investigion that Smith hadn't probed – in particular, the seizure of 22 porn tapes from the home of alleged abuse victim Ron Leroux in 1993 by officers with the OPP's Lancaster detachment.

Police had been searching Leroux's home for two illegal handguns when they came across the tapes in an upstairs crawl space.

After Leroux said he didn't want the tapes back, the OPP incinerated them in a 45-gallon drum at the detachment. But over the following years, rumours began to circulate the tapes had shown prominent people in the community having sex with children.

Two OPP officers have already told the inquiry the tapes were only destroyed after police were satisfied they showed only commercial pornography.

Dallas Lee, an attorney for The Victims Group, suggested to Dupuis the fact he was investigating the actions of other OPP officers might foster the belief his findings against a conspiracy were “predetermined from the beginning.”

“You believe that you did a thorough investigation?” Lee asked.

“I believe I did,” said Dupuis.

The long-running inquiry is exploring how institutions like the OPP reacted to allegations of historical sexual abuse.