John Schneeberger, the disgraced South African doctor jailed for sex crimes and stripped of his Canadian citizenship, on Monday lost his fight against expulsion from the country.
An immigration Board hearing in Regina took less than 10 minutes to declare him an undesirable alien and order his deportation. Zambian-born, South African-raised Schneeberger, now 42, and his family came to Canada in 1987 and settled in Kipling, a small western farming town with a population of about 1 000 people.
The highly popular doctor’s secret life began to unravel in 1992, when a patient told police he had anaesthetised, undressed, raped and dressed her again before the injected narcotic wore off.
The narcotic, it later turned out, was a drug called Midazolam. Laboratory tests failed to produce a DNA match between semen taken from her underwear and a sample of his blood.
At his trial, Schneeberger described the way he thwarted science — by making an incision on the inside of his left arm and inserting a plastic tube filled with a male patient’s blood. He then insisted on having the sample drawn from the ”vein,” even though a tiny drop from a finger would have sufficed.
He sexually attacked another woman on two separate occasions, but the judge dismissed additional charges of ”improper use of drugs” in her case.
A TV documentary titled I Accuse follows his first victim, Candice Foley, then 23, who found herself ostracised by a small-town community that resented her ”false” charges against one of its most respected members.
She moved to another town, Red Deer, and told her story to a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police detective. He believed her, broke into the doctor’s car, where he found a lip balm stick. He took a smear from it. A minute trace of saliva in the smear contained DNA matching that of the semen.
Recently released after serving the mandatory two-thirds minimum of a six-year prison sentence, Schneeberger had his Canadian citizenship revoked for his failure to admit being under criminal investigation at the time he applied for it.
His wife, Lisa Dillman, divorced him after it transpired that he had sexually molested his stepdaughter when she was 13.
The board left open a decision as to whether Schneeberger will be sent to South Africa or Zambia. – Sapa