Jeffrey Baldwin: Files on starved boy’s grandparents’ abuse not passed on, inquest told

Not long after baby Jeffrey Baldwin was placed in the care of the grandparents who would ultimately starve him to death, a children’s aid society worker looked at files on the couple’s record of child abuse, a coroner’s inquest heard Thursday.

But that information was not passed on to the workers directly involved in Jeffrey’s care and the grandparents’ shocking history didn’t come to light at large until after the 5-year-old boy died in 2002.

When he died, Jeffrey was a skeletal 21 pounds — about what he weighed when he was first sent to his grandparents four years earlier.

The missed opportunity in October 1998 was one of several the inquest heard about that could have exposed Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman’s sordid past and prompted children’s aid to snatch Jeffrey and his three siblings out of their care. Bottineau and Kidman are serving life sentences for second-degree murder

The Catholic Children’s Aid Society had, in its own files, records of Bottineau abusing her first child and of Kidman beating Bottineau’s next two children from a previous relationship, sending them to hospital.

There were records of the CCAS supervising Bottineau and Kidman’s care of the three daughters they had together. There were records of abuse investigations in the following years, including allegations made about some children Bottineau cared for as a “foster day mom.”

The Catholic Children’s Aid Society sent Jeffrey and two of his siblings (the York Children’s Aid Society managed the file of Jeffrey’s youngest sibling) to live with their grandparents when these files were a records search away.

The inquest heard Thursday from CCAS manager Louise Galego that common practice was to check internal records of the parents who were the subject of an investigation, not necessarily the grandparents as alternate caregivers.

However, Galego said, a records search for Jeffrey’s mother, Yvonne Kidman, should have turned up the records of the supervision order she and her sisters were under when they were young. The file should “conceivably” have turned up, Galego said, but she couldn’t say for sure if a search was ever done or not.

Those records would have noted that Yvonne Kidman and her sisters were under a supervision order after Bottineau’s two older children were removed from the home following the severe beating by Norman Kidman.

One of those two children reported later that Bottineau and Kidman abused and neglected her and her brother, sometimes locking them in dog crates.

As an adult, she called the Catholic Children’s Aid Society requesting old files about her, the inquest heard. That was just months after Jeffrey had been placed in Bottineau and Kidman’s home.

The worker in the adoption department found those old records and mailed out copies, but workers in the child protection department, who were dealing directly with the Bottineau-Kidman-Baldwin family, were never told, the inquest heard.

The CCAS has implemented many changes since Jeffrey’s death, including various iterations of record-keeping systems, Galego testified. But gaps still remain, she said.