1 woman's search for justice uncovers 14 more alleged victims of teacher abuse

WARNING: This article contains details of abuse

It all started with just one woman.

Anne-Marie Robinson said she was 16 when her 29-year-old high school music teacher served her alcohol and she ended up in his bed on an out-of-town band trip in 1977. 

Over the next year, she says the teacher groomed and manipulated her into many more sexual encounters: in cars, at school and on other trips.

"He had sex with me once in the classroom, in a closet, and I remember that being humiliating," she said. 

Robinson, 62, says she was vulnerable in high school and didn't fully recognize the exploitative nature of a teacher-student relationship. She always wondered if she was the only one he targeted.

She wasn't. 

A new, 10-episode CBC podcast investigation has found 15 women who claim they were harassed, propositioned or sexually assaulted by the same teacher when they were girls, sometimes for years and in some cases, over the same time period. He taught at seven different schools in the Toronto area between 1974 and 2000.

The teacher, William Douglas Walker, has never been convicted despite complaints to several police forces in Ontario. 

The CBC investigation, which unearthed hundreds of pages of official records, access to information filings, and includes more than two years' worth of interviews with dozens of witnesses, reveals a pattern: adults across various institutions who chose to ignore warnings about a teacher who, for decades, moved from school to school, girl to girl.

Robinson, a former deputy minister and president of the Public Service Commission, says she stopped going to Toronto's Eastern High School of Commerce in 1978 to get away from Walker.

A chance encounter with Walker decades later sent her on a search for justice — but when school boards, police and courts failed to provide the answers, Robinson turned to CBC.

"When there's big pieces that are missing, you just feel like you need to know. You need to understand why this happened, what happened, what other people who were around at the time thought about," said Robinson.

Another woman had gone to the Ontario College of Teachers in the late 1990s with a similar complaint about the same teacher. She had gone to the police first, but no charges were laid.