How sex abuse turned Tim into a criminal

Tim Petsche says he only survived years of sexual abuse at the hands of his minor hockey coach by immersing himself in the gambling habit that his abuser had planted and nurtured. Minor hockey coach Jimmy Hutchinson would ingratiate himself with his players' parents and take the boys to his home for weekend-long sleepovers. 'He was looking for the quiet type,' Tim says.

Tim Petsche was sentenced yesterday to two years less a day in jail for defrauding Canada Trust of more than $250,000.

Tim Petsche's childhood ended the year he turned 11. He even remembers the exact moment it happened. What he has more trouble recalling is the boy he was before that moment: the quiet little guy with the dark hair who never raised his hand in class although he often knew the answers; the boy who was chatty with his friends but shy around grown-ups; the child who was born at Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital and lived in a typical home in Stoney Creek with typical parents -- a mother devoted to raising her family, a father who put in long hours working hard at Brewers Retail.

Tim realizes now that was the only time his life was ever "normal." And, as so many normal boys do in this country, Tim fell in love with the game of hockey. He didn't just want to watch it on TV, though. He wanted to lace up his skates, get on the ice and play. At six, the smaller-than-average grade-schooler became a right-winger. Turns out he was a natural. It wasn't long before he made his first rep team. His father got up at ungodly hours to drive Tim to early morning practices. His mother went to every game.

By September 1981, two months shy of Tim's 11th birthday, he got a new coach -- a man who knew his way around a rink and had a reputation as an enthusiastic and skilled mentor. His name was James Hutchinson. He liked the boys to call him Jimmy.

Jimmy's family name was famous around Hamilton. It was his kin who opened Hutch's restaurant on the beach strip back in 1946. The Globe and Mail once declared the burger joint had "the greatest and the greasiest chips in the Western Hemisphere." The gregarious bachelor had two homes. One was a small cottage that stood next to the restaurant, before Hutch's moved to its current location on Van Wagner's Beach. The other was a house on Dumbarton Avenue in east Hamilton.

Almost immediately after meeting his new team, Jimmy ingratiated himself with the boys and their parents. Some things he did were coach-like things to do. He bought the kids matching helmets and Cooperalls, for instance. Other things went beyond the usual duties of a coach. Jimmy started phoning his players' homes so he could talk to their mothers and fathers about their game performance. Next, he started dropping by their homes for lengthier discussions. He'd sit in their kitchens, have coffee and get to know the parents. Friendships developed. Soon Jimmy was playing cards with the fathers and inviting the mothers over to his home for drinks and a chance to listen to his vast record collection. In return, many of the moms began to cook for the single man. One even prepared a full Christmas dinner and delivered it to his home.

"Anybody who met him thought he was the greatest guy around," Tim says. "He was nice ... I liked him, but at the same time, I knew he was different." Tim says he wasn't sure why he thought his popular new coach was different. It might have had something to do with the ill-fitting toupee he wore or the odd, mismatched clothes, Tim says. But mostly, it was just a little boy's gut feeling that Jimmy wasn't like the other adults he knew. For the young hockey players, it was easy to forget sometimes that Jimmy was a man in his mid-30s. He acted more like a pal: a buddy: especially during the sleepovers.

Within weeks of meeting his 16 players, Jimmy began inviting the boys for weekend slumber parties at his Van Wagner's Beach home. The parties would start when Jimmy picked the boys up in his van Friday after school and ended when he drove them home Sunday night. Four boys one weekend, another four the next. It worked out that each boy got to spend one weekend a month at the coach's house. The boys couldn't wait for their next turn. It was all they could talk about. Jimmy's place was a dream come true. "He had pinball machines, movies, video games," Tim says. "We could have anything we wanted to eat from the restaurant." On many of those nights, Jimmy took the boys to the racetrack. He'd hand each of them $20 and teach them how to place a bet. Most of the kids preferred to spend the cash on junk food. They'd stuff themselves, run around, have fun. But Tim took the track seriously. He used his money to make more money. "I was good at betting," he says. Sometimes, the 10-year-old would win as much as $100 in a night.

After a night at the track, the boys would go back to Jimmy's. They could stay up as late as they wanted and when they finally tired, they'd crash on mattresses on the living-room floor. The rotating sleepovers, Tim says now, were Jimmy's way of "weeding" the boys out. "He was looking for the quiet type," he says. After a few times through the rotation, Tim was spending every other weekend with his coach. Then it was every weekend. "The next thing you know, I'm going all the time with two other guys."

Every day, Jimmy would pick Tim up from school and they'd spend time together. On the weekends, they went to double-headers at the track -- afternoon and evening races both Saturday and Sunday. Tim saw less and less of his family. He started drifting away from friends. It didn't matter, though. All he wanted was his next night at the track. "Soon, it was all I could think about. I fell in love with it ... . It wasn't the money. It was the satisfaction of just winning." Jimmy took him to Mohawk Raceway, Flamborough Downs, Woodbine and tracks in Fort Erie and Saratoga, N.Y. Each trip was followed by a sleepover. Tim's parents weren't at all concerned about the time he was spending at his coach's house. But his mother was a little worried about her son's fondness for gambling. She brushed her fears aside, though, by reminding herself Tim was in good hands.

Four or five months into the hockey season and a couple of months after his 11th birthday, Tim's childhood ended. It was a Friday.

"I just remember sleeping one night in a house he bought on Dumbarton Avenue. Other boys were there. I remember waking up to some sensation. Someone was touching me. It was scary. I rolled over so he thought I was still sleeping." The next morning, Jimmy said nothing about touching Tim's genitals during the night. Ashamed and scared, Tim didn't want anyone to know what had happened. Besides, who would believe him? Jimmy would never do anything wrong, would he? After that, Tim was sexually assaulted five to seven times a week by Jimmy Hutchinson for the next three and a half years. He was kissed and fondled almost daily. "He would start trying to kiss me. Sticking his tongue in my ear. Making me touch him."

By the end of 1982, Tim was spending almost every night at his coach's house. For the most part, it was a relationship Tim's parents encouraged. Once, when he was 13, his mother insisted her son stay home at least one night a week. Jimmy convinced her to allow him to stay there as well. So, for a few months, the hockey coach slept in Tim's bedroom every Tuesday night. "I love you, Bud," Jimmy told him.

"I was ashamed," Tim says. "I was afraid. I thought there was something wrong with me." It is unusual for The Spectator to name a victim of sexual assault. In this case however, Tim requested that his name be used because he wants people to understand that he is not an anonymous statistic. He is a real person who lives in our community.

The only bright spot for Tim in the whole dark, ugly thing was that the more time he spent with Jimmy, the more often he got to go to the track. As soon as Tim was old enough to get to the racetrack on his own, he didn't need his abuser any more. But his abuser still wanted him. After enduring three and a half years of sexually charged "sleepovers" with his popular hockey coach, the new high school student refused to continue satisfying Jimmy's appetite for little boys. But now Tim had an appetite of his own to feed -- the gambling addiction Jimmy planted and nurtured during the years of abuse. The only way he survived the abuse, Tim says now, was by becoming engrossed in gambling. The quiet, small youngster applied himself to gambling, just as he had done with his school work. And with hockey. At Jimmy's knee, he learned how to study the racing program. How to play the odds. He had nothing to spend his winnings on, so he set it aside and gambled it away on his next visit to the track. Tim loved winning. He loved the idea of beating the system. Most of all, though, he loved being at the track because it postponed the inevitable fondling that would come afterward. As both the abuse and the gambling escalated, Jimmy would take Tim on week-long trips to a track in Saratoga, N.Y., where they'd bet on races all afternoon and night, then sleep in the same bed in their hotel room. The boy's parents were a little concerned that such a young boy was so interested in gambling, but they were able to shrug off their misgivings by reassuring themselves that with Jimmy, their son was in good hands.

When Tim entered Grade 9 at Saltfleet High School, his world suddenly got bigger. Rather than just spending time with Jimmy and the other boys Jimmy liked, Tim made friends at school. Some were old enough to drive. And they were willing to drive Tim to the racetrack. "That meant I didn't need Jimmy any more," Tim says. To make up for the cash his abuser was always willing to give him, Tim started stealing money to feed his gambling habit. He stole it from his father's pants pockets, his mother's purse. "I've never done anything or thought of doing anything violent to get money," he says. "I'd prey on people who trusted me." When he was 14, he had $1,000 worth of winnings in his bank account sometimes. All he ever spent it on was more gambling. The teen began expanding his gambling horizons. In grades 9 and 10, he started playing poker and euchre at school. He'd skip class to join games in the stairwells at Saltfleet. "The most you could ever win was $400 or $500," he says.

Though he was no longer having sexual relations with Jimmy, the coach wasn't entirely out of his life. If Tim couldn't get a ride to the track, he would be desperate enough to ask Jimmy for a lift. The man always obliged, making it clear that if Tim changed his mind about having sex, he'd be happy to pay him for it. "You're the one I love most," Jimmy said.

"Here I am trying to meet girls and deal with my feelings," Tim remembers.

When Tim turned 15, accusations about Jimmy spread through the Stoney Creek hockey parent community. The players themselves had been talking about their coach and his favourite boys for some time, though. "The kids were saying: 'Tim's a faggot. He's queer. He's gay,'" Tim remembers. "It makes you feel more alone than you already do." Tim had never told anybody about the things Jimmy made him do, not even when his older sister confronted him with her suspicions.

By 1986, Stoney Creek hockey league officials were all but certain they had a pedophile coaching their boys. They turned to the police for help, but a brief investigation went nowhere. So the league's board of directors took matters into its own hands and voted Coach Hutchinson out. That didn't stop him, though. He simply joined the Hamilton hockey league instead. And the board there accepted him, despite warnings from the Stoney Creek league.

Now 17, Tim had a girlfriend and a gambling addiction. He was also starting to break the law. He was shoplifting clothes on his lunch hour (often with enough money in his pocket to pay for them) and returning them to the same store a few days later for cash refunds. The cash, of course, would be used for gambling.

Around the same time, police launched a second investigation into James Hutchinson's relationships with his hockey players. One officer, who knew the Petsche family, asked Tim's father if his son had ever been abused by Jimmy. Tim was questioned by his father and the ashamed teen vehemently denied anything improper had occurred during those hundreds of sleepovers. "My father told the police I said no. And so the police never came to question me. They never bothered to ask me for any details. If they had, maybe I would have told them the truth. "I know now they obviously didn't do their job. I am angry." Eight other hockey players did reveal they had been sexually assaulted by Jimmy. In 1989, when Tim was 18, the well-liked coach was arrested.

It would be another nine years before Tim told anyone his secret. And all the while Tim continued to deny anything had happened between him and Jimmy, his young life spiralled out of control. After graduating from Saltfleet, he enrolled at McMaster University, taking mostly business courses. "I tried to do the work the first month I was there." By the fifth week of classes, Tim was studying his racing programs during lectures. By the sixth week, he was cutting class to play pool in the student lounge. He liked that a crowd would gather to watch him. Soon afterward, he was playing pool six hours a day, winning $50 or $60 from other Mac students. At night he'd put that money on the horses. Tim flunked out of his first year at Mac.

The following year, he enrolled in business accounting at Mohawk College. That year and the next, he was an A student. He played the ponies at night but steered himself away from pool halls during the day. Then, in July 1991, 47-year-old Jimmy Hutchinson pleaded guilty to sexually abusing eight boys he coached in minor hockey. A court-ordered psychiatric report labelled him a homosexual pedophile. He was sentenced to two years less a day in jail and three years' probation. His victims tried to win monetary damages from their abuser, but their efforts were thwarted by Jimmy's bankruptcy claim. The victims' statement of claim said most of the boys exhibited the symptoms of an emotional disorder and required counselling. One became "depressed and suicidal." He threatened his father with a knife and begged his mother to kill him. In his statement of defence in the civil suit, Jimmy said that if the boys did have psychological problems, they had them before he met them.

Tim, now in his third year at Mohawk, followed the trial in the local media and began to gamble his life away again. "That's when I got into trouble with the bookies." A member of a well-known organized crime family was taking Tim's bets on professional sports. "Most of it was on the NBA, which I didn't really follow." In less than a month, he racked up $12,000 in debts. He didn't have the money. "I stalled. Made up excuses for another month," he says. "I didn't want anyone to break my knees."

Eventually, Tim confessed his debt and his gambling addiction to his family. They bailed him out and scraped together more than $10,000 to send the 22-year-old to a gambling rehabilitation facility in Philadelphia for a month. His college year was lost. In Philadelphia, a battery of psychological tests indicated Tim was likely the victim of childhood sexual abuse. Even then, he lied and told counsellors their test results were wrong.