A dad in charge of "hillbilly sex ring" handed over his children to family members for sex in exchange for cigarettes or beer. William Goler and his relatives had been having incestuous relationships for over 100 years and saw it as a way of life, authorities in Canada discovered.
Thirteen adults from the notorious clan were jailed after being found guilty of on 100 incest charges and additional sexual offences with children aged between six and 14. William, his common law wife Wanda Wiston and his brother Tom were locked up alongside other male and female family members.
In an isolated mountain community in rural Canada, 20 relatives crammed into one house including aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, and brothers and sisters. Far from the scrutiny of others, they maintained a twisted existence where the girls often gave birth to their siblings’ babies, the Mirror reports.
Their story mirrors that of the Colts - dubbed the world's most inbred family - in which patriarch Tim Colt an "incest" farm in Australia where he raped his daughters with his sons and fathered their children. The Goler clan’s sordid secret was revealed when one of William's children went to one of her teachers sobbing and described what happened to her in 1984.
The 14-year-old said she was treated as her dad’s wife and, from the age of nine, was raped up to 14 times a month by him as he was trying to get her pregnant. Her teachers contacted the police and they began questioning the kids, who slowly opened up to officers.
Two years later the case eventually came to court where Sandra’s 11-year-old sister Donna gave a harrowing testimony about what happened.
“The first time I can remember I was five, just going on six, because I had just graduated from Kindergarten going into grade one,” she said. “I came home and that was the first time I had been raped and it was by my father. If somebody wanted to have sex with one of his kids he would let them for a case of beer or a carton of cigarettes, or even a pack of cigarettes.
“They got to pick out whichever child they wanted to have sex with. We had nothing to say, we couldn't prevent it, we couldn't stop them. We were basically lined up against the wall and they chose the one they wanted and we were forced to do it.
Sickeningly, she said that “some kids were even forced to watch when someone was having sex.”
The prosecutor described the case as “something out of the movie Deliverance” - which famously depicted in breeding in the deep south of America. Decades of inbreeding had taken its toll on the family and their defence lawyer Bob Levy told Canadian TV the family were “on another planet” and “borderline retarded”.
Their intelligence levels were in the “bottom one or two per cent” of society, he said. They didn’t have any idea what was happening to them during their trial and one of the defendants had no idea what the word incest meant.
The court was told that all of the defendants had themselves been sexually abused as children. But it didn’t end there and incredibly it was found that incest had been a way of life for generation, as Acadia University sociologist Jim Sacouman testified.
“There’s census material that makes it very clear that in breeding and incest were occurring in the 1860s and 1870s in the Goler family,” he later said. William Goler was jailed for seven years for incest, gross indecency and buggery.
His common law wife Wanda Wiston, was sentenced to four years for sexually assaulting eight children. His son Tom was jailed for three years for buggery with a nephew and niece and his former brother-in-law, Roy Hills, for one year for buggery with a seven year old girl.
Another family member, Charlie Goler Jr, was jailed for two years for having sex with an underage cousin. Cranswick Goler received six years and nine months for buggery with a 12-year-old male cousin and his sisters, Josie and Mary, 12 months for sexual assault.
Lawrence Johnstone got two and a half years for buggery with a niece. The family’s 12 children were sent for adoption to families to begin new lives with new identities and were reportedly making good progress.
Donna went on to campaign for the rights of abused children and for a change in the law so that the young relatives of paedophiles can never be left alone with them.
"They can't babysit their niece, they can't babysit their cousin or their own child," she told CBC. "They cannot be alone whatsoever with a child under the age of 14, unsupervised."
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