The offer of work to a known sex offender alarmed his small-town neighbours.

But as a devout Christian and someone who had struggled with substance abuse, Dennis Wickersham wanted to give John Francis Dionne a chance to right his life.

"I try and model my life as much as I can after Christ, knowing that I'm an imperfect person. But I think Christ was a friend to sinners," he says.

"He looked out for those people at the bottom of society's totem pole," Wickersham says.

Dionne, the subject of a Canada-wide warrant following the kidnapping of a 10-year-old girl at a northeast Calgary mall, was arrested Friday night at the farm where he worked in this rural town of about 700 people.

Wickersham, the man's only link to honest work and a straight life, tears up and looks away to talk about it.

Dionne was a friend.

If he's found guilty by the courts, the former convict will not see the outside of a jail for a very long time, Wickersham suspects.

"That's what breaks my heart because you don't like to see a friend flush his life down the toilet like that," Wickersham says.

Hours before the kidnapping, Dionne drove south from his home in Linden for a scheduled blood test at the Sheldon Chumir centre in downtown Calgary.

As an HIV-positive former convict and recovering drug addict, the 75-kilometre trip had become routine.

Normally, he would have been accompanied by Wickersham.

"I probably should have gone with him yesterday to his medical appointment in Calgary."

Wickersham met Dionne after he was released from jail in 2006.

The poultry farmer has lived near Linden since 1995 with his wife and two of four children, the youngest a 14-year old girl.

The two maintained a correspondence after Dionne was charged and acquitted of raping a prostitute.

In the summer of 2010, he was released.

Wickersham drove to the remand centre to pick him up.

"I said if I hadn't have picked you up, where would you go? He said: 'Well, they give us a bus ticket downtown," he says from the garage of his home.

His job as a farmhand in the village of 741 people northeast of Calgary was Dionne's last shot at a normal life.

He took up a residence in a yellow mobile home in a down-beaten trailer park next to Linden's only school.

At the time, the village was plastered with posters warning of his sex-offender status. But Dionne insisted he had no intention to cause harm, appearing on Global TV to announce his hope to return to a quiet, law-abiding life.

For many months, things went well.

Dionne resented the poster and the negative attention, the farmer says. Although he had been convicted of assault, Dionne denied being a pedophile.

Police also had few concerns.

Beiseker RCMP Sgt. Patricia Neely says she would regularly check in on Dionne at the farm.

Asked if Dionne ever did anything that caused concern, her response: "Never."

"We received no complaints from the community," she says.

Some in the town accepted Dionne's presence. Others did not.

Linden's mayor, Darwin Moon, says the village is a tiny, quiet place not known for media crews or big-city crime.

Dionne's warrant is "not something I'd like to show my personal feelings on because it's not good. We have to refrain from what we'd like to do," his says, his face straining. "It would be nice to be able to control who came and went from your town but those days are long gone. The wild west is over."

Wickersham says building trust took time. Dionne submitted to a strict regime: informing the family of his whereabouts and even sharing his bank records to ensure his earnings weren't being blown on alcohol and his former drug of choice, crack cocaine.

"He was willing to do anything I asked him to do," Wickersham says.

Monitoring the ex-convict was labour intensive and Wickersham got busy working on the farm and taking care of his family. Dionne began to slip.

"I asked him how he was doing and he said: 'It's good you're asking. But to be honest, I have been out visiting a friend of mine and we've had a few beers and probably stayed out later than I should have. And it hasn't been going as well lately as it has up until now,' " he says.

"He was doing things he hadn't done for months again.

"We just talked about it. I said: 'John, well, you know where that leads. When you get on to substance abuse, you always make bad decisions and bad choices and I think we don't want to go there again.' And he said: 'You're right, I really don't.' "

As police on Friday revealed more information about the kidnapping, the farmer struggled to comprehend allegations that Dionne posed as a police officer and lured the young girl into his van.

Police say Dionne was pulled over for speeding and then, allegedly, dropped off the young victim at a nearby McDonald's.

The speeding fine "helped him to release what was happening. I think it helped to him realize he didn't want to go there," he says.

Wickersham says Dionne emptied his chequing account on Thursday.

The law closed in the next day. His arrest was inevitable. All Dionne had was a full tank of gas, about $100 and nowhere else to go.

jgerson@calgaryherald.com