Repeat sexual offender pleads guilty in kidnapping of Outremont teen last summer

Michel Cox, a 44-year-old man accused of kidnapping a teenage girl in Outremont before she escaped from the backseat of a car, has pleaded guilty to charges of forcible confinement, robbery and impersonating a police officer.

Cox was arrested and charged soon after the kidnapping in early August 2020. Cox had been released from prison three years earlier after being there for a number of sexual assaults from the early 2000s. In 2016, a psychologist had determined he was at a high risk of re-offending.

Last August, Montreal police say Cox dressed up as a police officer and pulled up next to a 16-year-old girl on Saint-Viateur near Durocher Street and told her he was arresting her.

Police say he handcuffed her, forcibly put her in the back of the car and blindfolded her.

The girl managed to open the door and get out of the car several minutes later. Paramedics treated her for shock on the spot.

Passersby helped the girl and were able to get a description of the car that led police to arrest Michel Cox later that evening.

According to a Montreal Gazette article published in 2017, Cox spent 12 years in jail for a series of sexual assaults on girls and women between the ages of 14 and 25.

Before he was arrested in 2004, Cox was referred to as the "Bus Stop Rapist" by media outlets because he followed the victims as they got off the bus at night, then assaulted them.

Montreal, Laval and Quebec provincial police at the time had set up a special investigative unit to find the perpetrator of the assaults that took place between 2002 and 2004.

The last assault he allegedly committed before his 2004 arrest was on March 6 of that year in Outremont.

The parole board's decision to release Cox in 2017 included notes from an evaluation completed by a psychologist the year before, saying Cox was still "a risk of re-offending sexually and still evaluated as a high [risk]," according to the Gazette.

The parole board imposed conditions on his release, including that he reside at a halfway house until his sentence expires in 2023, the article said.

His next court date is Oct. 5 at the Montreal courthouse.