A former senior manager in the Municipality of Delta will not be going to prison for an indecent assault that took place in Manitoba in 1973.
Cleo Faus (Kip) Gaudry was handed an 18-month conditional sentence on Thursday (Jan. 24) in Vancouver Supreme Court – a sentence similar to parole, with conditions that he must abide by to avoid jail.
Gaudry, 61, pleaded guilty to the charge last May. When he was arrested in 2010, Winnipeg Police Service said it concerned "a historic sexual assault involving a child." The Manitoba court file listed the matter as a "domestic violence" case.
This is the third sex crime conviction for Gaudry, who was hired by Delta in 2001 and rose through the ranks to director of engineering until 2009. He quit that year after police searched his office and home in North Delta as part of a child pornography investigation.
He pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and was sentenced in January 2011 to 18 months in jail and three years probation. The judge said much of Gaudry's "horrible" collection of thousands of images and movies involved extremely young children being abused by adult men.
Gaudry's first prison term came after a guilty plea in 1995 to nine counts of sexual assault. He was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail. The crimes were committed while Gaudry was working for the District of Houston, a small community in northern B.C. At the time, a Houston newspaper reported the RCMP as saying some of the charges involved young people, but details remain under a court-ordered ban on publishing any information that could identify a victim.
During sentencing for the subsequent child pornography possession charge in 2011, the court heard that Gaudry was accessing the online porn within 18 months of serving his first sentence.
Thursday's sentence on the historic 1973 assault includes a 10-year prohibition on being anywhere children may frequent, such as community centres, daycares and public swimming pools. He is also banned from possessing firearms for 10 years and must submit a DNA sample.
- with files from Dan Ferguson