 | Amateur Sleuths Name Anonymous Dead The Associated Press - 20 hours ago LIVINGSTON, Tenn. (AP) — Four days a week Todd Matthews earns $11.50 an hour working for an automotive parts supplier. He punches in at 4:15 am, ... |
LIVINGSTON, Tenn.
Four days a week Todd Matthews earns $11.50 an hour working for an automotive parts supplier. He punches in at 4:15 a.m., punches out nearly 11 hours later, then drives half a mile to his little beige house on a hill where, in the distance, he can glimpse the Appalachian mountains.
He spends the next seven to eight hours at his desk, beneath shelves lined with miniature plastic skulls, immersed in a very different world.
Their faces seem to float from his computer — morgue photographs, artist sketches, forensic reconstructions — thousands of dead eyes staring from endless Web sites as though crying out for recognition. John and Jane and Baby "Does" whose nameless bodies have never been identified.
His wife, Lori, complains that Matthews spends more time with the dead than he does with the living, including his two sons, Dillan, 16, and Devin, 6.
You need a hobby, she says, or a goal.
I have a goal, he replies, though he describes it as a "calling".
He wants to give "Does" back their names.
His obsession began two decades ago, when Lori told him about the unidentified young woman wrapped in canvas whose body her father had stumbled on in Georgetown, Ky., in 1968. She had reddish brown hair and a gap-toothed smile. And no one knew her name.
So locals blessed her with one. They buried her under an apple tree with a pink granite tombstone engraved with the words "Tent Girl."
At 37, Matthews is a sensitive soul who has always felt an affinity for the dead, perhaps because two of his siblings died just after birth. Matthews still chokes up when he visits the graves of Gregory Kenneth and Sue Ann. But at least he knows where they are buried.
Tent Girl haunted him. Who were her siblings? What was her name?
Matthews began searching library records and police reports, not even sure what he was seeking. He scraped together the money to buy a computer. He started scouring message boards on the nascent Internet.
In the process, Matthews discovered something extraordinary. All over the country, people just like him were gingerly tapping into the new technology, creating a movement — a network of amateur sleuths as curious and impassioned as Matthews.
Today the Doe Network has volunteers and chapters in every state. Bank managers and waitresses, factory workers and farmers, computer technicians and grandmothers, all believing that with enough time and effort, modern technology can solve the mysteries of the missing dead.
Increasingly, they are succeeding.
The unnamed dead are everywhere — buried in unmarked graves, tagged in county morgues, dumped in rivers and under bridges, interred in potter's fields and all manner of makeshift tombs. There are more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the U.S., according to national law enforcement reports, and about 100,000 people formally listed as missing.
The premise of the Doe Network is simple. If the correct information — dental records, DNA, police reports, photographs — is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing. Law enforcement agencies and medical examiners offices simply don't have the time or manpower. Using the Internet and other tools, volunteers can do the job.
And so, in the suburbs of Chicago, bank executive Barbara Lamacki spends her nights searching for clues that might identify toddler Johnny "Dupage" Doe, whose body was wrapped in a blue laundry bag and dumped in the woods of rural Dupage County, Ill., in 2005.
In Kettering, Ohio, Rocky Wells, a 47-year-old manager of a package delivery company, scoots his teenage daughters from the living room computer and scours the Internet for anything that might crack the case of the red-haired Jane Doe found strangled near Route 55 in 1981. "Buckskin Girl," she was called, because of the cowboy-style suede jacket she was wearing when she was found.
And in Penn Hills, Pa., Nancy Monahan, 54, who creates floor displays for a discount chain, says her "real job" begins in the evening when she returns to her creaky yellow house and her black cat, Maxine, turns on her computer and starts sleuthing.
Monahan's cases include that of "Beth Doe", a young pregnant woman strangled, shot and dismembered, her remains stuffed into three suitcases and flung off a bridge along Interstate 80 near White Haven in December 1976. And "Homestead Doe," whose mummified body was found in an abandoned railroad tunnel in Pittsburgh in 2000. Her toenails were painted silver.
Monahan was so moved that last year she sought out the tunnel, climbed down the embankment and offered a silent prayer for the young woman whose life ended in such a pitiful place.
"It's like they become family," Monahan says. "You feel a responsibility to bring them home."
The stories of Doe Network members are as individual as the cases they are trying to solve. Bobby Lingoes got involved through his connection with law enforcement — he's a civilian dispatcher with the Quincy, Mass., police department. Traycie Sherwood of Richmond, Mo., joined when her adoptive mother died and she went on line searching for her birth mother. Daphne Owings, a 45-year-old mother of two in Mount Pleasant, S.C., needed something to take her mind off the war when her husband was sent to Iraq. Carol Ceiliki of Whitehall, Pa., was searching for her ex-husband.
And Laura Allen Hood of Fort Smith, Ark., was searching for her brother.
For years, Hood refused to speak about Tony, who vanished without a trace in 1978 while visiting friends in Oklahoma. He was 16, two years older than his sister. Her parents tried to shelter the family from the pain, tried to make life for his siblings as normal as possible. But, she says, "it never leaves your mind."
Hood describes years of false sightings and false hope — stalking someone in a car because he looked like Tony, picking up hitchhikers who bore a resemblance, her mother wrapping a Christmas present year after year for the son who never came home.
It wasn't until 2004, when Hood's own son became a teenager that she decided to find her brother once and for all. Trolling the Internet she discovered the Doe Network. Sifting through its vast indexes, she found new reason to hope.
For the first time in her life, Hood e-mailed a stranger — Matthews in Tennessee: "Can you help me find my brother?" she pleaded.
Matthews responded with a series of questions. Was the case filed as missing with the National Crime Information Center, an FBI clearinghouse? Did she have dental records or relevant medical information? Had the family submitted DNA to law enforcement?
Finally, Matthews asked for a photograph of Hood's brother, which he forwarded to one of the professional forensic artists who donate time to the network.
Nothing prepared Hood for the black-and-white image that filled her computer screen a few weeks later. Gone was the long hair and devil-may-care grin. Smiling, ghost-like, but yet so very real — the artist's depiction of a middle-aged Tony.
Hood stared at the image, her mind racing. Was he alive? Dead? Did she really want to know?
Four years later, Tony Allen has still not been found. There have been a number of false matches, though, and each narrows the search. Hood says she feels a new sense of certainty that someday, someone will click on a mouse and find a connection.
Matches can be triggered by a single detail — a tattoo, a piece of clothing, a broken bone. It's just a question of the right person spotting the right piece of information and piecing together the puzzle. The process can be tedious and frustrating; months or even years of endless late-night clicking on a dizzying array of sites can often lead nowhere.
And it can take its toll. Lori Matthews once left her husband for six months because of his obsession with Tent Girl. "He didn't talk about anything else," she said. "It wasn't normal."
They reconciled after Matthews agreed to limit the amount of time — and money — he spent on "Does."
Still, Matthews and others say the rewards of cracking a case make the time worthwhile. The Doe Network claims to have assisted in solving more than 40 cases and ruling out hundreds more.
Successes are not entirely joyous, says Kylen Johnson, a 38-year-old computer technician from Clarksburg, Md. "On the one hand, you are giving families the information they have been searching for. On the other, you are extinguishing all hope that their missing loved one will be found alive."
Johnson tells of a Kentucky woman who had been searching for her ex-husband for 18 years. The woman described a tattoo on his shoulder — the initials "RGJ." Johnson, with other Doe volunteers, was able to track down a John Doe with identical markings in Vermont.
Johnson still marvels at how grateful the woman was at the other end of the phone. And at how strange it felt, that someone would thank her for finding out their husband had been murdered.
"Nothing you find can be any worse than something that has already gone through your mind," says Mary Weir of Palmer, Alaska, describing the sickening moment when she spotted an artist's rendition of her 18-year-old daughter's face on the Network.
Samantha Bonnell had been missing for 19 months. She was killed while running across a California highway in 2005, and buried in an unmarked grave — Jane Doe 17-05.
"Her name wasn't Jane Doe," Weir said, her words punctuated by sobs.
"She was Samantha, my Samantha and she had curly red hair and green eyes and freckles on her face. And she was a real person and she was loved. She wasn't just a number. She was funny and maddening and she wrote her first resume at 10 — for a baby-sitting job! And she read Shakespeare for fun. And she was just bigger and brighter than the rest of us, and the world is worse off for not having her."
Bonnell's remains were exhumed last year. She was buried in her native Oregon beneath a headstone carved with her name.
Today her mother actively lobbies the state government to pass legislation making it easier to file missing-persons reports for people 18 and over — some local authorities are slow to pursue missing adults, saying they have every right to go missing — and mandating DNA samples be taken from family members within 30 days of a report being filed. Several states already have such laws and many others are considering them.
"I don't care who you are," Weir says, "to be buried with no name implies that your life didn't matter, that you were just discarded like trash. I wanted better for my daughter — and for all the other missing people out there."
"They do God's work," says Mark Czworniak, 50, a veteran homicide detective in Chicago.
He first encountered the Doe Network when he was approached by Lamacki, the Chicago bank executive, about potential matches. Unlike some officers, Czworniak has no hesitation about working with civilian volunteers, especially those willing to devote endless hours to cold cases that he cannot get to.
Czworniak says there are hundreds of "Does" in the department files. He is assigned five, including a tall, thirtysomething man found at the Navy Pier in 2003. Czworniak hopes that the man's height will help Lamacki or another Network volunteer eventually make an identification.
"She's like a little bloodhound," says Czworniak, who exchanges e-mails with Lamacki on cases every week and has introduced her to other detectives. "She has the wherewithal and interest and time and she searches these sites I'm not even aware of."
Such praise was rare in the early days of the network, when overeager members were more likely to be derided as "Doe nuts" by police and medical examiners. That changed partly as the organization imposed stricter rules on who could join and developed a system of area directors, researchers and media representatives. Now a potential "solve" is rigorously vetted — and voted on — by a 16-member panel, and potential matches are submitted to law enforcement agencies only by designated members.
In another sign of the network's influence, Matthews was asked to serve on a government task force involved in creating the first national online data bank for missing and unidentified.
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, NamUS, launched last year, is made up of two databases, one for the missing and one for the unidentified. The goal is to have medical examiners and law enforcement agencies around the country constantly update information on both sites. Next year the sites will be linked and made available for public searching.
No one believes NamUS will put the Doe Network out of business — there will always be a need for people with their expertise to make the necessary connections.
And so, families of the missing will no doubt continue to rely on people like Todd Matthews.
At his house in Livingston, Matthews has built a little nook next to the living room — his "Doe office," he calls it. His desk is laden with pictures of dead bodies. He says he gets many e-mails about cases every week. Every night he scrolls down the lists, searching for new information:
Unidentified White Female. Wore a necklace of silver beads and three small turquoise stones, one resembling a bird. Found in a Calendonia cornfield in New York state in 1979. ...
Unidentified White female. Strawberry blonde hair and 12 infant teeth. Wearing a pink and white dress that buttoned in the back and a disposable diaper. Found Jackson County, Miss. 1982. ...
Unidentified Black Female. Gunshot wound to the skull. Found next to highway ramp in Campbell County, Tenn., in 1998...
The last case is close to Matthews' heart. Sally, he named her, after a Campbell County police officer entrusted him with her skull in 2001.
The police didn't have the time or means to pay for a clay reconstruction, and so — with the approval of the local coroner — Matthews took the skull to a Doe Network forensic artist. A picture of the reconstructed head was placed on the Network site. The skull sat on Matthews' desk for over a year, and even Lori, who was at first so horrified she couldn't look at it, grew fond of Sally. She remains unidentified.
But even Sally cannot take the place of the first Doe, the one who changed Matthews' life. He still regularly drives to Kentucky, to a lonely plot in Georgetown to visit her.
"She's family now," he says.
Standing by her grave, he tells of the night in 1998 when, scouring chat rooms for the missing, he stumbled upon a message from Rosemary Westbrook of Benton, Ark.
Westbrook sought information about her sister, Bobbie, who was 24 when she went missing 30 years earlier. Bobbie had married a man who worked in a carnival, and she was last seen in Lexington. She had reddish brown hair and a gap-toothed smile.
Over and over Matthews stared at the message. And in his heart he knew.
Lori, he cried, racing into the bedroom and shaking awake his wife
"I've found her. I found Tent Girl."
E-mails were exchanged. Phone calls were made. When Matthews received a photograph of Westbrook's sister, he had no doubt. She looked just like the forensic artist's portrait sketched years earlier — the one engraved on Tent Girl's headstone, the one that had obsessed him for years.
Weeks later the remains were exhumed. The match was confirmed by DNA.
"It was the best peace of mind in the world," Westbrook says. "What Todd did for our family ... I can't describe it ... I don't have the words. Just to have a grave to visit means everything when you have been wondering for so long."
The family decided to re-inter Bobbie in the place that had been her resting spot for so many years. Beneath the stone etched "Tent Girl" they placed a small gray one engraved with her real name, the name that Matthews had restored.
She was Barbara Ann Hackmann, now and for eternity.
LIVINGSTON, Tenn. — Four days a week, Todd Matthews earns $11.50 an hour working for an automotive parts supplier. After work he drives home, where he spends the next seven hours immersed in a very different world.
The faces seem to float from his computer — morgue photographs, artist sketches, forensic reconstructions — thousands of dead eyes staring from websites. John and Jane and Baby "Does" whose bodies have never been identified.
His wife, Lori, complains that Matthews, 37, spends more time with the dead than he does with the living. You need a hobby, she says, or a goal.
I have a goal, he replies, though he describes it as a "calling." He wants to give the "Does" back their names.
The Doe Network has volunteers and chapters in every state. Bank managers and waitresses, factory workers and farmers, all believing that with enough time and effort, modern technology can solve the mysteries of the missing dead. Increasingly, they are succeeding.
There are more than 40,000 unnamed bodies in the U.S., according to national law enforcement reports, and about 100,000 people formally listed as missing.
The premise of the Doe Network is simple. If the correct information — dental records, DNA, police reports, photographs — is properly entered into the right databases, many of the unidentified can be matched with the missing. Law enforcement agencies and medical examiner's offices simply don't have the time or manpower.
Using the Internet and other tools, volunteers do the job.
And so in Penn Hills, Pa., Nancy Monahan, 54, who creates floor displays for a discount chain, says her "real job" begins in the evening when she returns to her house, turns on her computer and starts sleuthing.
Monahan's cases include that of "Beth Doe," a young, pregnant woman strangled, shot and dismembered, her remains stuffed into three suitcases and flung off a bridge along Interstate 80 near White Haven in December 1976. And "Homestead Doe," whose mummified body was found in an abandoned railroad tunnel in Pittsburgh in 2000.
"It's like they become family," Monahan says. "You feel a responsibility to bring them home."
Matches can be triggered by a single detail — a tattoo, a piece of clothing, a broken bone. It is just a question of the right person spotting the right piece of information. The process can be tedious and frustrating; months or even years of clicking on a dizzying array of sites can often lead nowhere.
Still, the rewards of cracking a case make the time worthwhile. The Doe Network claims to have assisted in solving more than 40 cases and ruling out hundreds more.
Successes are not entirely joyous, says Doe volunteer Kylen Johnson, a computer technician from Clarksburg, Md.
"On the one hand, you are giving families the information they have been searching for. On the other, you are extinguishing all hope that their missing loved one will be found alive."
"Nothing you find can be any worse than something that has already gone through your mind," says Mary Weir of Palmer, Alaska, describing the sickening moment when she spotted an artist's rendition of her 18-year-old daughter's face on the Doe Network.
Samantha Bonnell had been missing for 19 months. She was killed while running across a California highway in 2005 and buried in an unmarked grave — Jane Doe #17-05.
"Her name wasn't Jane Doe," Weir said, her words punctuated by sobs. "She was Samantha, my Samantha, and she had curly red hair and green eyes and freckles on her face. And she was a real person, and she was loved. She wasn't just a number."
http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_8742597Missing Pieces
http://www.missingpiecesshow.info/MissingPiecesLinks3.html
| North Shore News |
Let's go back to a real measure of punishment based on the facts of each crime.
Misplaced compassion overturns the purpose of justice.
That's what happened in the case of Darcy Lance Jones; a 20-year career vagrant "subsisting on the dole, panhandling and petty crime to support a drug habit involving marijuana, crack cocaine and heroin," according to the Vancouver Sun.
On Aug. 1, 2007, Jones capped his version of citizenship by venomously attacking and robbing 81-year-old retired doctor Peter Collins in Vancouver's Holy Rosary Cathedral.
On Feb. 28, the Vancouver Sun reported the measure of punishment meted out to Jones: a pretend jail sentence of two years less a day -- house arrest -- to be followed by three years probation. No steel bars, just words on paper.
The headline, Judge Flays Society in Sentencing Homeless Robber, got my dander up.
Did Judge William Kitchen somehow have two victims in mind?: One a real victim, the other an imaginary one. Jones, who cleverly waited out the proceedings for six months to gain first consideration in the judge's mind; and Collins, a kindly, old, law-abiding citizen who was effectively transformed from a victim of violence into a sacrificial lamb in order to enable a convenient rehabilitation of his ne'er-do-well attacker.
Shakespeare had it right; we've got it wrong. His sage words in Measure for Measure are the essence of common sense:
"We must not make a scarecrow of the law
Setting it up to (frighten) the birds of prey
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror."
If Shakespeare could visit our streets today he would come face to face with wandering 16th century fearless vagrants. And he would shrug and say "You weak and foolish people; so long as predators have nothing to fear, there will be no peace in your homes and byways."
Judge Kitchen noted that "Two generations ago, there were almost no street people in Vancouver. If a person slept or begged on the street, the police would intervene. . . . Today in Vancouver there are perhaps thousands living on the streets and in the parks. They sleep everywhere -- even in the doorways of the courthouse and police station. . . . Society created this situation. Law abiding citizens condone it and it has become the expectation of those like Darcy Jones. In fact it is more than an expectation; it is viewed as an entitlement."
The judge is wrong! Society didn't create the mess we're in. Vancouver's mess began in 1972, born of the democratic vanities and conceit of our federal government and the philosophies of Trudeau and his stillborn Just Society.
Some history: After we became a nation in 1867, it took our national government until 1892 to formulate a uniform criminal law. The first version of the Criminal Code of Canada contained 12 situations in which a "loose, idle or disorderly person or vagrant" might be arrested and upon conviction subjected to a maximum fine of $50 or imprisonment not exceeding six months with or without hard labour.
At first, the offence of vagrancy was directed at being a vagrant. In 1954, the code was amended to make vagrancy the doing of any prohibited act. Vagrancy offences were reduced to five, three of which dealt with street disorder and were quickly dubbed Vag A, B and C.
"Every one commits vagrancy who
a) Not having any apparent means of support is found wandering abroad or trespassing and does not, when required, justify his presence in the place where he is found;
b) Begs from door to door or in a public place;
c) Being a common prostitute . . . is found in a public place and does not, when required, give a good account of herself."
The combined effect of the offences of mischief and vagrancy made it possible for police to control disorder on our streets.
Thirty-six years ago vagrancy A, B and C were repealed -- altruism prevailing over realism -- and disorder took to the streets with gusto.
Once the shackle of vagrancy C was removed, an endless stream of vulnerable young girls made street prostitution a rat race presided over by sociopathic johns, pimps and drug pushers.
It was immediate and horrific: unshackled vagrant prostitutes became prey. Worst of all some began to disappear. One by one they vanished to become the 65 missing women of Vancouver's Skid Road. Yet as each girl disappeared another girl arrived and took her place.
If the vagrancy sections had remained in the Criminal Code and been enforced, I am certain that the serial holocaust murder of our most vulnerable of young girls would not have occurred.
Wake up, you parliamentarians. Restore vagrancy offences. Give police the means to bring order to our streets.
Contact Judicial Gadfly at wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca or by posting your comment directly on the Writer's Corner of www.realjustice.ca
A Vancouver Sun team has been nominated for a 2007 National Newspaper Award for its coverage of the verdict in the Robert (Willie) Pickton murder trial.
Five Sun reporters - Lori Culbert, Neal Hall, Jeff Lee, Chad Skelton and Derrick Penner - were on the team nominated in the breaking news category for their handling of the Dec. 9, 2007, verdict in the Pickton case.
Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Andrea Joesbury, Mona Wilson, Brenda Wolfe, Georgina Papin, Sereena Abotsway and Marnie Frey. He was later sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years.
The Sun's nomination was among 16 received by Canwest Publishing Inc. newspapers in an announcement Thursday by the National Newspaper Awards office in Toronto. Another Canwest paper, the Ottawa Citizen, received six.
The Globe and Mail received 15 nominations, the highest of any newspaper. Altogether, 63 finalists in 21 categories were announced Thursday.
The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony in Toronto on May 9. Winners will receive cheques for $1,500 and an award certificate.
| Vancouver Sun |
|
VANCOUVER - Danielle LaRue's life was a disaster from the beginning to its haunting end. Like too many first nations children, she never had a chance to succeed. Home was never safe for her. As a child, no one, no parent, social worker, police officer, lawyer or law ever protected her.
"She was physically and sexually abused. She was abused in every way a child could be," says her sister Kim.
By the time Danielle reached her teens, only heroin eased the pain and selling sex on the street was the only way to pay for it.
On May 12, 2003, Vancouver police issued an alert that the 25-year-old had been missing from the Downtown Eastside since the previous December. Not a single newspaper in Metro Vancouver reported it.
It wasn't until a year ago that Global TV's John Daly revealed that police had received an unsigned note, presumably from Danielle's killer, in early December 2002. When nothing was reported in the newspaper, the killer sent a second chilling note to police.
"This is about Vancouver prostitute who disappear at the end of November 2002. Don't remember name she gave me, had no ID. Sounded like she had just recently come to Vancouver. Caucasian, long black, curly hair, jeans, black leather jacket, tattoos and jewelry. She is dead . . . .
"I send this info so you can notify her family. If you can, please make mention of her name in Vancouver Sun. I would like to know who she was . . . .
"To her family. I am sorry more than you can imagine. I did not intend this but am still responsible. She will not be unmourned. Have brought flowers to her grave once already, plan to do so every years as am able. Not ideal, but better than no visits at all. I know you can't forgive me but please believe I tried my very hardest to bring her back."
The police file remains open. Danielle's body has never been found and nor has her killer.
"I can't say that anything could have saved her," Kim says. "When you're abused to the extent that she was as a child, I don't think anything can help. That's why I think anybody who hurts or molests a child should be killed because that child never gets over it. Some kids live as normally as they can be. But they never get over it."
Despite her own short, brutal life, Danielle did what she could to keep her brother and sister safe.
Kim says almost everyone she's ever known has either been murdered or died of a drug overdose. She reels off the names of girlfriends who died at 13, 14 and 15.
Had it not been for Danielle, Kim says she too might be on the list of women missing or murdered from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside -- a list that has kept growing even after serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton was put in jail in 2002.
For Kim, being alive at 28 is a near miracle. It's also Danielle's legacy.
HOLY SMOKE
Danielle's nickname was Holy Smoke. She was fearless; a spitfire who was desperately protective of her younger sister and brother, who were badly in need of someone to look after them. But then, so was Danielle.
Their ancestors were hereditary chiefs of the Neskonlith, which is part of the Shuswap First Nation. Being born into a hereditary chief's family is like being born into royalty. It means both respect and the responsibility of looking after others.
Even after the Canadian government did away with the hereditary system, the LaRues led their people. Danielle's great-great-grandfather was the first to be elected, followed by his son. Danielle's grandfather was elected and so was her own father, Norman. But like so many other things in Norman's life, nothing was simple. His election was overturned by the federal Indian Affairs Department because of voting irregularities.
Norman was born on a reserve outside of Chase. His father was a Second World War veteran; his mother was murdered when he was still an infant. Norman lived with his grandparents before being packed off to the Indian residential school in Kamloops.
Like too many children, he was abused and eventually was among the first to sign on to the class-action lawsuit against the government for the systemic abuse perpetrated in residential schools.
But it wasn't only at school that Norman was abused. When he was only 12, Norman and his father spent the entire summer bingeing on alcohol. Norman often blacked out, but before that he beat anyone who got in his way.
And so his life life ebbed and flowed. Sober, Norman was acknowledged by everyone to be articulate, charming, brilliant even. Drunk, he was violent and dangerous. His rap sheet grew at about the same pace as his list of accomplishments.
He started a free medical clinic in the 1960s for skid-row residents in Kamloops, spearheaded the native civil rights movement in B.C. with the formation of the Native Alliance for Red Power in 1969. He was a boxing coach. For a while, he worked as a CBC reporter. By the end of his life, he was starting to gain recognition as an artist.
Danielle, Kim and Norman Jr. were separated in age by only four years. When they were little, their dad studied business administration in Spokane, Wash. But in the 1980s, they moved back to Kamloops and Norman resumed drinking, and drinking a lot.
Drunk, he was wildly abusive to his wife -- a Caucasian and an alcoholic -- and to their children. Eventually, his wife left him, sobered up and became an addictions counsellor. By then it was too late for their children.
Danielle was the first to go into foster care. Kim and her younger brother went to live with their paternal grandparents. But eventually they ended up in foster homes as well. Kim remembers a particularly abusive one in northern B.C. when she was eight and Norman Jr. was seven.
To protect them, Danielle kidnapped her siblings. Even at 10, she was fierce. She held the foster parents at bay and, for a while, even the police. Finally, several officers subdued her, and only when forced did she relinquish her hold on her siblings.
A few years later, in February 1989, their father was charged with second-degree murder. Larry Meristy had been found dead only a few metres from the doorway to Norman's one-room shack in Kamloops. Meristy's skull had been fractured five times by repeated blows from a baseball bat. Both Norman and Meristy had been drinking for two days. Both had blood-alcohol readings three times the legal driving limit.
Norman Sr. was convicted in September that year, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. In the fall of 1991 and only two days into a second jury trial, a Kamloops newspaper ran a story outlining one version of what had happened the night Meristy was murdered. The judge declared a mistrial.
Finally, in 1992, only a few weeks before the third trial was set to begin, the Crown stayed the charges. Two witnesses and one of the RCMP investigators had died. Another witness was no longer in Canada. Norman LaRue walked free, but not exonerated.
By then, Danielle had already run from foster care to the streets. She was barely a teenager. She began made a living the only way she could. She sold herself for sex.
"She never had a pimp. She was way too tough for that," says Kim. "She only had one serious boyfriend, when she was 16. After that she kept them [boyfriends] like pets. She'd take care of them for a while and when she got bored she'd get another one. I don't think she ever loved anybody like that one even though he beat her, took her money and left her dope-sick. With him, she'd put up with anything."
Perhaps it was because for a short time while she was with him, Danielle had something approaching a normal life. When 13-year-old Kim also ran away from foster care, Danielle took her into their nicely furnished house in Prince George.
But soon after Kim arrived, Danielle discovered that heroin eased her pain. Bit by bit, the furniture disappeared from the house; it was sold to pay for drugs. The home became a shooting gallery.
Even then, Danielle tried to keep her younger sister out of it.
"She'd protect me, kick ass and fight anyone who tried to do anything to hurt me," says Kim. Still, it wasn't long before Kim followed her sister into the streets and on to heroin.
"As soon as you take heroin, you don't feel that shit any more," she says. "It makes everything okay. It makes everything good. That's something that's hard to walk away from. And Danielle wouldn't deal with it. She didn't want therapy. She didn't want rehab. She always said, 'I have time to straighten my life out later.'
"Whatever Danielle chose to do, she was good at. And she was the best heroin addict. Even when nobody else could find heroin in the 1990s, she'd find it."
Soon after their mother died of cancer, 19-year-old Danielle's search for heroin landed her in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Kim knew she would never come back.
"Everybody knew that once you went to the Downtown Eastside you were done. You were either going to be dead or in jail. Those were the only exits you had. .... It's like a big black pit with stabbings, murders and ODs. It's crazy down there. Nobody cares about anybody but themselves and their next fix."
But while Danielle's life was going downhill fast, her father was having a renaissance. The Kamloops Art Gallery had bought some of his work and was planning a major show. A local company with business in Japan had commissioned him to carve six totem poles. They paid him a $5,000 advance.
Norman celebrated with heroin. On Feb. 24, 2000, he died of an overdose at the age of 59. He was widely mourned. In a letter to the Kamloops Daily News, Karl Ireland wrote: "At the end of his life he had become deeply committed to learning how to become a gentle man. He was struggling with that issue when he died. He deeply regretted past violent acts. He and his many loved ones can be proud without reservation."
Danielle was 21. Kim was 19. Both were addicts, selling sex and doing minor crimes to support their habits. Their brother wasn't faring any better.
Once, Kim remembers all three of them appearing in court on the same day. Danielle was released, but both Kim and their brother went to jail.
Norman Jr. is a violent alcoholic, who was declared a long-term offender when he was only 21.
In December 2000, when a 23-year-old woman coming out of an alcoholic blackout refused to have sex with him, Norman slashed her throat with enough force to break the knife in two. The woman recovered. Norman was convicted of aggravated sexual assault.
According to court documents, he was neglected and sexually abused by female relatives as a very young child. By 15, he was so dangerous and unmanageable that child-care authorities created a special program for him. He did well until another youth was placed in the home.
But by 19, Norman had more than 18 convictions ranging from break and enter to assault and resisting arrest. The last time his name appeared in a Vancouver paper was last September. A week after walking away from a Vancouver halfway house, Norman turned himself in.
In 2002, Kim was arrested after Kamloops police received a complaint about a woman "watering a neighbour's roof." She and five others were charged with a variety of offences including possession of stolen property and improper storage of firearms.
Her last arrest was for armed robbery. Kim went to court so high that she now can't recall whether she pleaded guilty to armed robbery or to a lesser charge. But she went to jail and only got out two years ago.
INSTITUTIONS WERE HOME
Danielle's reputation as a fearsome fighter kept Kim safe in jail. Nobody messed with Danielle's little sister.
"For me and Danielle, institutions are like home. We don't want to be there. But you get three regular meals. You have a place to sleep. You see your friends, play some games and get your health back up before you go back to drugs and the street. Because when you get out, it's usually on the bus and straight back downtown."
Danielle took the ride back downtown one time too many. As Sun reporter Lori Culbert reported earlier this week, women have few places to go, whether they're getting out of jail or rehab or trying to find a place to detox. Even rat-infested, fleabag, single-room occupancy hotels on the Downtown Eastside often refuse them shelter. The managers either assume they are prostitutes and will turn tricks in the room, or they fear for the women's safety living among male addicts.
Kim can't believe that Danielle died without a fight. But she's haunted by not knowing what happened and the fact that Danielle's body has never been found. Despite the two letters about her death, the case remains unsolved.
Like Danielle, Kim says she would likely have gone straight back to drugs and prostitution when she walked out of jail. But her boyfriend had bought bus tickets out of town and out of British Columbia. In the bus-depot parking lot, they smoked one last pipe of crack cocaine, threw their pipes away and got on.
Now 28, Kim is in a methadone program and has "a crazy good job" -- her first steady job ever.
She has caught up academically. She's articulate, funny and seemingly confident. But that's not how she feels.
"From the age you start taking drugs, you stop growing. Socially, I'm like a 13-year-old," she says.
Kim scarcely dares to hope for anything. That's how mean her life has been. But she hopes Danielle's body will be found so the family can put up a marker for her. Kim has little hope that Danielle's murderer will be found. Too many women are missing and dead and no one has been charged.
When pushed, Kim says she hopes to stay strong and clean for her four children, who are doing well in good, safe foster homes.
Only with prodding does Kim dare voice to a dream for herself.
"I want to go to university and study law. I've wanted that ever since I was a kid."
dbramham@png.canwest.com
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VANCOUVER - Danielle LaRue's life was a disaster from the beginning to its haunting end. Like too many first nations children, she never had a chance to succeed. Home was never safe for her. As a child, no one, no parent, social worker, police officer, lawyer or law ever protected her.
