Arctic Predator book cover
'Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada's North' out now

Content warning: The following story contains mentions of sexual assault. Please proceed with caution and care. If you require support, there are resources available.

The following is an excerpt from Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North by Kathleen Lippa.

Dundurn Press
Available: February 4, 2025
Find more here about Arctic Predator

***

There are photographs crucial to this story that I have never seen. I don’t know where they are, or if they still exist. They were developed from a roll of film discovered inside an old school piano in an Arctic community in 1985.

No one should ever see these images. But I wanted to verify their existence because they led directly to the arrest of one of Canada’s worst criminals — Edward Thornton Horne.

The photos were reportedly of boys in Thailand, or the Philippines, or Greenland, or the very community in which the film was found. The police officer who first saw the images knew at once that the photographer was a pedophile.

The discovery of the images coincided with an investigation by social workers into sexual abuse involving schoolchildren. No one realized at the time that the teacher and principal of the school, Mr. Horne, abused boys in the community — and that there were victims in other communities who’d been suffering in silence since the early 1970s.

•••

I sat in a newspaper office in Iqaluit, Nunavut, inside the Tumiit Plaza, a building located at the city’s “four corners,” an iconic spot in the Eastern Arctic where a restaurant called the Kamotiq looked very much like a papier mâché iglu when I first saw it.

I didn’t know much about “the East,” as that part of the North was called. It was May of 2003, and I had just arrived in Iqaluit from Yellowknife to write for Nunavut News/North, a newspaper owned by the visionary entre- preneur and newspaper man Jack “Sig” Sigvaldason. The paper in Iqaluit was just one in a chain of papers Sig owned that had reporters covering the North from Inuvik through Yellowknife, Hay River, Rankin Inlet, and Iqaluit. The workload was daunting — we were required to submit at least a dozen stories and photos to head office in Yellowknife for publication every week. We were a people-focused paper, often meaning soft, feel-good stories, but stories that were nonetheless important to people living in the North. Nunatsiaq News, our competition, was more centred on what I called “government stories” that critically analyzed the new Nunavut government and the organizations created to serve Inuit.

I was outside most days, stopping people in the street and asking them questions for our weekly “Street Beat” feature that included the person’s photo, which I took with my camera. Right from the beginning of my time in Nunavut, locals would speak to me in Inuktitut, assuming I was Inuit, or “half.” Being five foot three, with dark hair and facial features inherited from my father’s side (long-ago ancestors from the Silk Road made their way to Abruzzo, Italy, where my father was born) gave me a certain look that over the years has appeared to some people to be Indigenous. In Nunavut, my look made me approachable, and this attribute would work to my advantage later, when I arrived in small communities to ask people delicate questions.

My co-worker at News/North was Christine Kay, the journalist whose story about the burning school portable in Cape Dorset had caught my attention and would eventually change my life. We wrote widely about Nunavut, from hockey games to housing woes. Nothing ever took hold of me the way the Ed Horne story did.

The crime beat on a newspaper generally did not interest me. I’d won a national award for arts reporting at my first full-time newspaper job in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and when I headed North, I looked forward to all the Inuit art stories I would write. I planned to go to Cape Dorset as soon as possible to report on the carvings and prints being produced there. But the article Kay had written about the people of Cape Dorset watching an old school building burn in a sort of cleansing ceremony took hold of me. Maybe the story reminded me of the Mount Cashel scandal in St. John’s, where I grew up. Kay’s story mentioned a schoolteacher whose abuse of boys had occurred inside the portable building the people of Dorset burned. Feeling that this was a major story Canadians should know about, I spent the next several years trying to grasp the magnitude of Ed Horne’s crimes in Cape Dorset — and elsewhere.

•••

During my first year in Iqaluit, a police officer sat down at a table near me in a popular bar called the Chartroom Lounge and, breathing out a big sigh, said, “Just got back from Kimmirut. Angry little town, full of Horne victims.” There was a sense that local people knew what “Horne victims” meant. I didn’t then. (I would later visit Kimmirut several times. While there are some angry men there, some of whom were abused by Horne, for the most part I encountered generous, kind folks living in a breathtaking Arctic community of about four hundred people.)

I heard things about Horne beyond the crimes that drew me in. He was a brilliant teacher. He spoke many languages, including Inuktitut. He married an Inuk. He had children, one of whom became a police officer. He was Indigenous himself — Mohawk. He had friends in the highest offices in education and travelled the world extensively on his time off.

Everywhere I travelled in the North in my early years there, I heard tragic stories about men who’d been sexually abused by Horne when they were kids. Many suicides of males in the South Baffin region of the newly created territory of Nunavut were blamed on him. And over time Horne had become mythologized. The name Ed Horne alone conjured up the image of a monster hiding inside his role as a teacher. But when I started researching the story, I realized no one really knew what happened at all. The actual scale of the crimes was unknown. Newspaper articles that ever mentioned a Horne criminal case (including one I wrote once) were not in-depth and contained errors. Files relevant to Horne were not easy to access. Only victims knew what happened. And even then, there was a haunting silence — those men, once boys, were desperate to forget what Horne had done to them.

The criminal himself was a mystery. No journalist had ever managed to get more than a few words out of him. Where was he? What happened to him? Was he a free man? No one knew.

Horne’s crimes were never covered extensively in any media, except in superficial reports in the northern Canadian press — this, despite the fact he faced two court cases and served two prison sentences. There was also a major civil case that resulted in millions of dollars in compensation for his victims. Another criminal case involving four men and another civil case would follow. I knew the story needed to be told — for the record, for history, and for the victims to have a sense of closure — even for children to understand their fathers a little better. I also knew that given the shocking subject matter, delving deeply into the Horne story might destroy me emotionally. After conducting interviews and gathering preliminary information, I put the Horne story aside for several years.

But the voices of friends in the North who first told me about the crimes stayed with me. I picked up the story again when I discovered an article in Inuit Art Quarterly about a Cape Dorset artist who had drawn images of Horne abuse. With the help of the co-op manager in Cape Dorset, I contacted the artist by phone in 2020. The completion of this book is due in large part to the courage of that artist and of many other people in Cape Dorset, Kimmirut, Sanikiluaq, Iqaluit, and Apex who wanted this story told, and wanted me to tell it.

•••

June 14, 2022 — Ed Horne appeared to be asleep when I arrived at the coffee shop at Yonge and Wellesley, in Toronto. I’d wanted to meet him for many years, and finally I was able to do it after numerous chats over Facebook Messenger. (A source alerted me to Horne’s presence on Facebook, and I first contacted him via Messenger.) The book was mostly completed by the time I met him. This was mainly a courtesy meeting — a meeting to show him that I was real and I meant business. He was sitting alone at a table for two — holding his cellphone as it rested in his lap. I knew it was him as soon as I walked in. I’d seen photos of him as a teenager in newspaper clippings from British Columbia, where he grew up. I’d seen him in person once, in May 2005, in an Iqaluit courtroom, head bowed, facing new criminal sex charges. This man before me was 78 years old, wearing light-coloured denim jeans, a fluorescent green-yellow vest with a couple of rainbow pins on it that stated a solidarity with the Pride movement, and a weathered baseball cap.

He came across as nonthreatening. Perhaps it was his stooped back or his somewhat shy demeanour. I was aware Horne suffered from serious hearing loss, so I made a point of speaking clearly and at a decent volume. He once had a deep, authoritative voice, but the tone was now diminished. He made eye contact when we talked — a departure from his usual style throughout his life of not looking directly at people. I didn’t think I’d be able to eat or drink a coffee with him given all I knew about his disgusting crimes, but much to my surprise I was comfortable sitting at a very small table with him for over an hour. The fact that Horne didn’t give off an overpowering creepiness — at least not to me that day — was notable. Perhaps, I thought afterward, it is this ability he has to create such feelings of normalcy that enabled him to abuse so many children and get away with it for so long.

•••

From his arrival in the Eastern Arctic in 1971 until his arrest in 1985, Edward Horne’s predations on boys would leave a trail of destruction in Canada’s North. This book is the first full examination of what happened — the crimes, the mistakes, the lies, and the fallout from the abuse.

There have been other outsiders who lived and worked in Canada’s North and abused northern children. A social worker named Kevin Clarke Amyot molested boys in Sanikiluaq in the years 1984–86; seven men alleged they were sexually abused by teacher James MacDiarmid in Pond Inlet in 1969, a tragic situation the anthropologist Hugh Brody later wrote about in his highly regarded book The People’s Land (without naming MacDiarmid). And Maurice Cloughley was a schoolteacher, world traveller, and artist, who abused girls in remote Inuit communities between 1974 and 1979. Following his 1996 trial, where he pleaded guilty to nine charges, he was sentenced to ten years in prison for sexual assaults, forced sexual contact, and forcing students to pose nude for photographs. But in the memories of northerners, Horne has remained the worst of them all, having attained mythical status because of the number of communities affected, rumours about how many victims there were, the enormous compensation payouts victims later received, and Horne’s reported professional achievements while he lived in the North.

Sexual abuse of the vulnerable exists to some extent in all societies, and Inuit society is no exception. With the breakdown in traditional roles created by the movement from traditional camps into organized communities, sexual abuse among Inuit also increased without the participation of outsiders.

It is not known precisely how many boys Horne molested, but there is enough evidence to make the claim that his crimes embody one of the worst cases of institutionalized sexual abuse perpetrated by one man in Canadian history.

•••

Excerpted with permission from Arctic Predator: The Crimes of Edward Horne Against Children in Canada’s North (Dundurn Press, February 4, 2025) by Kathleen Lippa. For more information go to https://www.dundurn.com.

Kathleen Lippa

Kathleen Lippa grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and worked as a reporter at newspapers across Canada, eventually serving as bureau chief for Nunavut News/North in Iqaluit. Kathleen divides her time...