Emanuel Jaques

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Emanuel Jaques (b. 1965 - d. 1977) was a shoeshine boy in Toronto, Ontario, whose sexual murder shocked the city in August 1977.

Emanuel Jaques was the son of Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. On July 28, 1977, 12-year-old Emanuel, who worked daily shining shoes on what was then the seedy Yonge Street Strip, was lured into an apartment above the Charlie's Angels body-rub parlour at 245 Yonge Street^[1] with the promise of work. He was then restrained and repeatedly sexually assaulted over a period of twelve hours before being strangled and drowned in a kitchen sink.^[2]

Several days after Jaques' disappearance, well-known Toronto gay activist George Hislop received a late-night call from Saul David Betesh, who confessed to the murder and told Hislop that Jaques' body had been hidden under a pile of wood on the roof of the building at which he had been abducted. Hislop arranged for Betesh to hire a lawyer, contacted Metropolitan Toronto Police and then persuaded Betesh to turn himself in.^[3]

Betesh and three other men - Josef Woods, Robert Wayne Kribs and Werner Gruener - were charged with Jaques' murder. In 1978, Betesh, who, according to evidence introduced at trial, held the boy under water until he drowned, and Kribs, who restrained Jaques' legs while Betesh drowned him, were convicted of first-degree murder. Woods was convicted of second-degree murder, while Gruener, who had held open the door of the body-rub parlour to allow Betesh to bring the boy in, was acquitted.^[4]

[edit] Aftermath

Emanuel's murder stunned and outraged the citizens of Toronto since a crime of this nature was considered unthinkable. It caused many to question how safe the city, and more specifically Yonge Street, really was. Some marked this as the point where Toronto "lost its innocence" and that the downtown was becoming too squalid.

Numerous protests and marches occurred, demanding that the city clean up the Yonge Street area. These protests became a catalyst for shutting down the numerous adult stores and body rub parlours along Yonge Street. In fact, as of 2006, only one adult store remains along the Yonge Street corridor where Emanuel was murdered.

Over time, Yonge Street would become a more people-oriented district and new developments such as Dundas Square would revitalize the area.

In October 2002, twenty-five years after the murder, Robert Kribs was denied parole.^[5]