Former Fergus resident convicted in child sex stings gets day parole

OTTAWA – A former Fergus resident twice busted by the cops for arranging to have sex with children has been granted day parole.

Wilfred Thyssen, 69, has been serving a five-year, two-month sentence since 2024 in minimum security at Joyceville Institution in Kingston.

A father of two, Thyssen was twice convicted of arranging to have sex with a child, and once for failing to comply with court-ordered conditions — notably not to have internet access without direct supervision.

Thyssen and his wife moved from their Fergus home of almost 40 years after news of his offences spread.

“I hate what I became and what I was doing, I’ll say behind the scenes, because nobody, except myself, knew what I was doing,” Thyssen said during a June 30 Parole Board of Canada video hearing.

Nobody else, except for the police.

In March 2021, Thyssen arranged to meet a detective posing as a parent and showed up at a Toronto hotel to have sex with the man’s two children.

While on bail, in September 2023, he arranged to meet an OPP internet child exploitation officer posing as a mother to have sex with her child. He was arrested in the Fergus Walmart parking lot.

He was sentenced to prison in April 2024 and was eligible for parole last month.

The board considered full and day parole, granting Thyssen day parole at a halfway house after it was determined there was an “average” risk he would reoffend sexually.

“If you put all the sex offenders in Ontario in one room, you’d fall into the average range, and that’s an elevated risk level,” board member Patrice Valeriano told Thyssen.

Day parole allows Thyssen to participate in community-based activities while residing at a halfway house before full parole is granted, or until his mandatory September 2027 release date. He must return to the facility at night during his six-month parole term.

Thyssen downplayed accessing chat rooms to arrange illegal sexual activities, despite saying he knew it was wrong.

Asking for help “was not manly,” he told the board, adding he was “too scared.”
Thyssen said he interacted with people saying they had been having sex since they were children.

“I was going for the cheap thrill,” he said.

Had the thought crossed his mind, Valeriano asked, that someone could have gone after his own daughters, now in their 40s, with their own children?

“It would make me feel awful, it might stop me for a day or so, but then you minimize the consequences in your brain and you justify to yourself for carrying on,” Thyssen said.

“We know that people who minimize, people whose self-talk is such that when they’re doing something completely inappropriate, and they talk themselves into it being okay, these are factors that contribute to recidivism, to re-offense,” Valeriano said, later adding a theme of minimization ran throughout the nearly two-hour hearing.

Valeriano asked why Thyssen had not sought sex-drive reducing medication to reduce his risk of reoffending, as recommended in a 2024 assessment by a psychiatrist.

Board member Lynn Carter challenged Thyssen, asking what concrete strategies he had internalized.

Thyssen said a session on consent helped him realize he was “willing to hurt people” for his own pleasure.

“That made me feel terrible, it made me feel sick to my stomach,” he told the board.

Thyssen scored a better-than-average rating on a moderate-intensity sex offender program, but needed a lot of improvement based on a sex offender primer.

He also completed victim impact, healthy relationships and alternatives to violence programming in prison.

Correctional Service Canada assigned Thyssen a high intervention level, suggesting he requires a lot of programming, supervision and monitoring to manage his risk.

But a correctional plan update, measuring Thyssen’s progress behind bars, suggests his reintegration potential is high.

A psychological risk assessment found Thyssen has a Statistical Information Recidivism score of 22 – a risk scale suggesting four of five offenders like Thyssen won’t reoffend.

Thyssen told the board he would find the structure, programming and accountability of a halfway house beneficial.

He added he would avoid reoffending by staying off the internet and allowing his wife to have control over online aspects of his life.

In a written decision granting day parole, Valeriano and Carter noted Thyssen minimized his harm, blamed the system for allowing him to reoffend, and made his wife a scapegoat during the hearing.

The board denied full parole, ruling Thyssen’s plan not to reoffend was insufficient.

His skills, the members wrote, had been shaped by a prison that “set up barriers and restrictions that have not tested your change or stability.”

The halfway house, with curfews and monitoring, would test his potential, the decision stated.

Thyssen would “not present an undue risk to society” on day parole, the members wrote, also granting him leave privileges to spend time with his family.

Thyssen was ordered to stay off the internet, not to be around children, to participate in psychological assessment, report his relationships, and his phone must be monitored.

“There is nobody in charge of these conditions but you,” Valeriano told Thyssen.