Abused trust: 19 years of youth stripped away

Where it all began

It wasn’t just Dennis Foster’s height and broad chest that commanded attention–the teacher had a presence about him.

In 1975, Tammy Gollan was one of his 12-year-old students at Riverside Community School.
“I was afraid of him,” she said, describing her first impression of the man.

He had a past that didn’t intimidate only her, said Gollan.

“A lot of people feared him. He was in the militia and it’s a whole tight-knit community with the peace officers in Prince Albert, the city police, the RCMP.”

Another woman remembers that reputation from when Foster taught her at the same school a year later. Her real name is protected by a publication ban and for that purpose will be called “Sandra.”

“He was well-connected in the community. He was a major in the army and he had friends in high places,” Sandra said.

Sandra recalls that he acted with authority. Unfortunately, that authority included forcing her and other classmates to do as he told.

“He’d always want you in the front and you’d want to be in the back of the room. And anybody that stood up for you, male friends or female friends, they were tormented by him too,” she said.

With her, inappropriate behaviour was right in the open. Foster would make rude comments and touch her, she said.

Another student from that era, Cathy Borrowman-Bendle, agreed that he was well-known for his military background.

He was a major in the Army Reserves, which is a volunteer branch of the Armed Forces.

He taught her Grade 7 year with a similar intensity. He was a “hard teacher,” said Borrowman-Bendle.

She was a good student and a self-described nerd.

As a result, she got special privileges from Foster.

“Stuff like, I would get really good marks, so I would get excused from attending things and got to go take a ‘spare’ when I wanted, and access to the keys in his desk,” she said.

At least, that’s how it started.

The process of special treatment, which is referred to as ‘grooming,’ built up trust between Borrowman-Bendle and Foster – trust that he would later abuse.

Trust abused

Soon, that attention turned into him offering Borrowman-Bendle rides home after school.

The relationship crossed boundaries into sexual territory after Borrowman-Bendle had been his student for over a year.

“I lived in Nordale, and the army range was out there, it’s out beside the dump. And so he said he was going in that direction and he would give me a ride home. I remember that being the first, full sexual assault,” she said.

She described how the sexual attention felt at first.

“In the short-term, I was flattered, because 14-year-old girls love to think they’re sexy. And I grew up knowing I wasn’t. I had very poor self-esteem. So I was flattered, I was confused.”

The sexual relationship went on for two years after, and off and on while she was in Carlton Comprehensive Public High School in Grade 10 and 11.

Borrowman-Bendle never thought of it as a relationship.

“I kind of knew all along that I was being used, but it took me years to wrap my head around the fact, how badly I was being misused.”

As a teen, she said the sex was never forced until their final private encounter.

“The others he sort of, kind of had me thinking I was going along with it. That one I was definitely refusing and asking it to not happen,” she said, very quietly adding, “it did anyways.”

That day she went home and wrote in her diary, “today I was raped.”

The army range was only one of the locations Foster would take his students to before he would sexually assault them.

Another one was within Riverside Community School.

“There were tunnels under the school, there were service tunnels for maintenance. He had access to those via the art room … and only a select number of students were taken down there. Otherwise it was rides home from schools, waiting by the bus stop and he would drive by, “said Gollan.

Down in those tunnels, where pipes were visible and lay low from the ceiling, was a little cubby-sized area. Sandra was one of the students taken down to those tunnels.

At 15, she ended up getting pregnant with Foster’s child.

Foster convicted as a pedophile in 1994

Foster’s assaults and manipulation in the 1970s didn’t stop as time went on.

He continued teaching until 1993, when three elementary school students from Riverside came forward with their stories of Foster’s abuse.

One of those girls was Sandra’s daughter. This showed that the cycle of abuse spanned generations.

After high school, Borrowman-Bendle had pursued higher education and become a teacher.

In the early 1990s, she was substitute teaching in the SRSD, which Foster had been working for more than 20 years. The SRSD is an amalgamation of different school divisions. Prince Albert School Division was one of those, and it was within that smaller division that those women’s interaction with Foster occurred.

Many times, Borrowman-Bendle had to work in the same building as her former rapist. She saw numerous signs that she wasn’t the only one Foster had abused.

This included one incident when her students came to class about 15 minutes late.

“This one kid, I remember him, a kind of round little face and dark hair. He was just furious and said ‘that perv Foster kept us that whole time explaining the difference between mastication and masturbation,’” she said.

Foster continued to intimidate her at school as well, she said. When those young students came forward, all of this helped Borrowman-Bendle realize she needed to do the same.

“I was subbing about a year and a half, two years, and Foster got arrested. I contacted the principal and I said, ‘hey, as a professional courtesy, you should know, I’m going to be testifying,’” she said.

Meanwhile, Gollan had dropped out of school in Prince Albert before she graduated. She said she moved away in an effort to escape the past – a past that, according to her, included years of sexual assaults at the hands of Foster.

However, she decided to return to lay charges against Foster for sexual assault after more people came forward with charges against him.

In the end, Foster was convicted and sentenced six and a half years for his assaults in relation to Sandra, her daughter, and Borrowman- Bendle.

Gollan’s charges were unsuccessful, and Foster was found not guilty in the criminal proceedings. She is insistent that the judge at the trial did believe her testimony and the reason it didn’t move forward were largely technical.

Civil case begins

However, the end of the criminal proceedings was not the end of the legal action for five people.

Borrowman-Bendle, Sandra, and Gollan were among them.

These ex-students in the SRSD said they didn’t keep quiet about their sexual relationship with Foster.

According to them, teachers and other school administrators were told, but did not step in. Thus, the abuse continued.

For example, following the incident that Borrowman-Bendle referred to as “rape,” she went to people in the school system for help, she said.

“I told two teachers in Carlton. I don’t think I said it as bluntly as they would have wanted to hear it, because they both claim I didn’t say it. I can tell you where they were sitting, practically what they were wearing when I told them.”

She was the first to look into legal action against the school division, starting off by going to Ron Cherkewich’s law office. From her perspective, the school system still hadn’t evolved after Foster was caught.

“The reason I approached him [Cherkewich] was, from my perspective I saw no changes. Basically what I saw was a pedophile who had been allowed to hurt generations of children,” she said.

For almost 15 years, Borrowman-Bendle, Gollan, and Sandra forged ahead with their lawsuit against the SRSD, which settled out of court last month.

Read Part 2 of the series, “Sask. Rivers apologizes in 15-year sexual assault lawsuit settlement” on Tuesday to find out more.

claskowski@panow.com

On Twitter: @chelsealaskowsk

by Chelsea Laskowski

Abused trust: 19 years of youth stripped away

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