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For decades afterwards, Gerald Barton did not talk about it. What could he possibly say? That he was not a rapist? That he did not knock up that little Miller girl, like her family said he did, that he was not some good-for-nothing, worth-nothing, low-life-sexual-predator, just trying to run away from his past?

No, he didn’t talk about it, because he understood that saying he wasn’t guilty is what every supposedly guilty man says. So he kept quiet, as he bounced from place to place. Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Grande Prairie, parts of B.C., pretty much anywhere is where he went, picking tobacco, paving roads, working construction, installing glass and trying not to look too hard in the rearview mirror.

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“What was the use of me talking about the past?” Mr. Barton says, in a down home, Down East drawl betraying his small-town Nova Scotia roots.

“What you know you got to keep to yourself, and you can’t tell anybody about what happened because they’ll think your some damn rapist, and back when all this was happening I was just a kid, and there was no kind of DNA testing, and people took people for their words.