CUE Center NATIONAL ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE FOR MISSING PERSONS

NATIONAL ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE FOR MISSING PERSONS - Coming March 2010

Who Should attended? Families of the missing, advocates, law officers, coroners, forensic specialist, search personnel (all types), non profit missing person organizations, government agencies, private investigations and more.

National Round Table Conference Goals: * Sharing a trained and professional view for solving cold case and search there of; missing persons * Understanding the resources available to be deployed when needed, what their capabilities are and how to obtain them. * Exploring the relevant positive and negative experiences of people who have experienced a missing loved one. * Creating new approaches to missing persons cases, and effectively deploying available resources; building communication and support * Developing a high-level view of the modifications needed to our current resources and organizational community over the next five years.

"REMEMBER THEIR NAMES"

"REMEMBER THEIR NAMES",
originally uploaded by Renegade98.

VPD (Vancouver Police) could not have been more wrong all the way through. When families and friends were telling them nothing else made sense but that a serial killer or killers were responsible, VPD ignored it. When Geo Profiler Kim Rossmo wanted to issue a Press Release about the very real possiblity of a serial killer, it was squashed by VPD. ... Read MoreThey were wrong, DEAD WRONG. Ex-cop says he suspected serial killer: http://www.missingpeople.net/vancouver_police_kept_quite_on_possible_serial_killer-june_21,_2001.htm

Exhibit focuses on missing B.C. women
Can you remember their names? A new exhibit introduces the public to the women who went missing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/remember-their-names/#clip196723

Canada AM coverage of Remember Their Names

Remember their names : Canada AM: New exhibit focuses on missing B.C. women.
Can you remember their names? A new exhibit introduces the public to the women who went missing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.


Remembering ‘just another junkie’
Canice Leung
24 July 2009 05:43

Sarah Jean de Vries. It’s not a name I knew before seeing filmmaker Janis Cole’s video installation, Remember Their Names, at a Toronto gallery, but I’d now be hard-pressed to forget it.

Her missing poster, case No. 98-88486, reads like this: Known prostitute and drug user; black, white, Aboriginal, Mexican Native heritage; age 28; last seen at Princess and Hastings streets on April 14, 1998.

She is one of 27 dead women Robert Pickton faces murder charges for; one of 68 women, Indians, junkies and whores, missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Not a week into her disappearance, friends and family postered and pushed police to act — not just for Sarah, but for dozens who had disappeared since the 1980s.

That inaction is Cole’s constant theme. A screen flashes quotes from police: “We’ve done as much as we could.” “We’re in no way saying there is a serial killer ... (or) the women are dead.”

The installation loops footage of Sarah shooting up. “There’s three ways you can go: Jail; dead; or end up a lifer down here,” she says.

In a 1999 Seattle Times article, Sereena Abotsway echoed Sarah’s despair, saying she feared for her safety. She joined community marches to call for police action as women disappeared. Two years later, she, too, went missing, one of six women Pickton was convicted of killing in 2007.

This is Canada’s collective shame, ignoring women like Sarah and Sereena, who felt fear and vulnerability with urgency, who asked for (and gave) help, but received none.

It’s a tired cry for a static situation: Why has nothing been done? Since 1969, 18 women have disappeared or been murdered on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, in northern B.C. Last fall, best friends Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi reserve north of Ottawa without even their wallets, but for months police maintained the teens had simply run away.

“No one cares, we are just junkie scum. Yet if we had been somebody important and our daughter had gone missing,” Sarah wrote, presciently, before her disappearance, “no stone unturned, no rock or cranny would be left unsearched.”

metro canada

CTV Canada AM Video - 'Remember Their Names' exhibition by Janis Cole.

Remembering 'just another junkie'

Canice Leung
24 July 2009 05:43

Sarah Jean de Vries. It’s not a name I knew before seeing filmmaker Janis Cole’s video installation, Remember Their Names, at a Toronto gallery, but I’d now be hard-pressed to forget it.

Her missing poster, case No. 98-88486, reads like this: Known prostitute and drug user; black, white, Aboriginal, Mexican Native heritage; age 28; last seen at Princess and Hastings streets on April 14, 1998.

She is one of 27 dead women Robert Pickton faces murder charges for; one of 68 women, Indians, junkies and whores, missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Not a week into her disappearance, friends and family postered and pushed police to act — not just for Sarah, but for dozens who had disappeared since the 1980s.

That inaction is Cole’s constant theme. A screen flashes quotes from police: “We’ve done as much as we could.” “We’re in no way saying there is a serial killer ... (or) the women are dead.”

The installation loops footage of Sarah shooting up. “There’s three ways you can go: Jail; dead; or end up a lifer down here,” she says.

In a 1999 Seattle Times article, Sereena Abotsway echoed Sarah’s despair, saying she feared for her safety. She joined community marches to call for police action as women disappeared. Two years later, she, too, went missing, one of six women Pickton was convicted of killing in 2007.

This is Canada’s collective shame, ignoring women like Sarah and Sereena, who felt fear and vulnerability with urgency, who asked for (and gave) help, but received none.

It’s a tired cry for a static situation: Why has nothing been done? Since 1969, 18 women have disappeared or been murdered on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, in northern B.C. Last fall, best friends Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi reserve north of Ottawa without even their wallets, but for months police maintained the teens had simply run away.

“No one cares, we are just junkie scum. Yet if we had been somebody important and our daughter had gone missing,” Sarah wrote, presciently, before her disappearance, “no stone unturned, no rock or cranny would be left unsearched.”

metro canada

Remembering 'just another junkie'

A new exhibition to remember the missing women of Vancouver at Trinity Square Video. Please see web links.

http://www.trinitysquarevideo.com/exhibition.php?id=36

http://www.rememberoursisterseverywhere.com/events/remember-their-names

http://missingwomen.blogspot.com/2009/06/remember-their-names.html

http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/documentarynow/artists/Janis_Cole.html

the bridge

'Information detective' tries to restore names to the missing

KnoxNews.COM

Ky. 'Tent Girl' started man's quest to help families find peace

By Jim Balloch
Posted July 19, 2009 at midnight

LIVINGSTON, Tenn. - One Halloween night many years ago, a man named Riddle told a 17-year-old boy a chilling, true tale of murder and mystery.

As the boy grew into a man, the story was the foundation of the mission he chose for his life: to bring light into the dark corners of the criminal justice system, where the dead languish unclaimed in morgues around the country because they have lost their names as well as their lives.

"I feel this is my calling," said Todd Matthews, 39, the father of two boys and husband of a very patient woman.

Today, Matthews is Southeast regional coordinator for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or www.namus.gov . It is a new federal program designed to aid law enforcement - and involve the public - in identifying John or Jane Does and connecting them with some of the nation's estimated 100,000 active missing persons cases.

But for years, Matthews and a few other dedicated private citizens with similar quests labored alone.

His obsession

The roots of Matthews' quest are near Georgetown, Ky. There, on May 17, 1968, well driller Wilbur Riddle uncovered the corpse of a woman wrapped in green tent canvas.

Her right hand was clenched, as if she had tried to claw her way out of the material. She had no identification, and authorities guessed she was about 16 years old.

In newspaper stories, she became known as "The Tent Girl."

Riddle later retired and moved to Livingston, about 20 miles north of Cookeville. On Halloween 1987, Matthews was in the Riddle household for the first time. He was visiting their daughter Lori, whom he later married. That was when he heard of the Tent Girl and how she was buried without a name.

"Everybody loves a mystery, I guess, but that story really grabbed hold of me," he said. "It definitely changed my life forever."

He was driven to find out who she was and, perhaps, who killed her. He relentlessly pursued information about the case, devoting nearly all his spare time to scouring newspaper stories for missing persons cases and talking to law enforcement agencies.

He even spoke with the funeral director who had buried the girl.

"He just got so wrapped up in it, sometimes he forgot he had a family," Lori Riddle said. "We were spending money on gas, on travel, sometimes we had $300 or $400 phone bills at a time when both of us were making an hourly wage."

She says she understands what drives him.

"He has always been a tender-hearted man, very tuned in to emotions and how other people feel," she said. "And he lost a brother and a sister when they were babies, so he knows what it feels like to lose a loved one."

"But at least I know where they are and I can go visit their graves," he said. "These (unidentified) people are all somebody's loved ones who don't get to do that, don't even know where they are."

The Tent Girl identified

In 1992, he acquired his first computer and networked with other private citizens interested in cold cases. He tirelessly searched Web sites devoted to missing person cases and set one up for the Tent Girl.

In the meantime, he had seen an FBI report that a piece of cloth found with Tent Girl was possibly a baby's diaper. He began to suspect she might have been a mother, and perhaps older than originally thought.

Late one night in 1998, he saw a post from Rosemary Westbrook of Benton, Ark., who was trying to locate her missing sister, last seen in Lexington, Ky., around 1967. The description and other details matched the Tent Girl case. He contacted Westbrook, and together they compiled enough facts for an exhumation.

Tests confirmed that the Tent Girl was Westbrook's sister: Barbara Ann Hackman Taylor. Matthews had it right: She was 24, not 16, and she was the mother of a little girl.

Taylor's husband, a carnival worker who had since died of cancer, had told people she ran off with another man.

CBS' "48 Hours" broadcast the Tent Girl story. The Matthewses watched it in their living room.

"I thought it was all over," she said, referring to her husband's quest.

But it was just beginning.

Even before the show ended, Todd got calls from people wanting him to help find a missing loved one.

"I had started this from the standpoint of someone who was dead, and now I was starting to hear from people on the missing side," he said.

Unable to say no, he formed a Web site devoted to missing persons and unidentified remains cases. Later he merged that into The Doe Network, a larger and more technically proficient site that has been credited with putting names to more than 40 previously unidentified bodies.

Everyone deserves a name

Out of the Doe Network arose a related project, Project EDAN, or Everyone Deserves A Name, through which certified forensic facial reconstruction artists donate their time and service to difficult cases.

Matthews' work with Project EDAN took him to Campbell County. In 1997, the body of a murdered woman was found off Interstate 75. Detective Eddie Barton, now retired, had contacted Matthews after learning of the Doe Network. Barton was searching for someone, anyone, who could help with the vexing case.

"We had exhausted all the resources we had," he said. Although it later turned out the woman had once been fingerprinted, those prints had not been sent to the FBI's National Crime Information Center system.

Through the facial reconstruction arranged by Projct EDAN, the woman was eventually identified by fingerprints in another database. Her name was Ada Elena Torres Smith, reported missing in Texas.

Her killer was never found. Barton said he suspects a connection between her murder and that of a black woman, unidentified to this day, who was found in the same area close to where Smith was found.

"It was Todd's group that led to the identification," Barton said.

Many police officers are reluctant to include civilians in their investigative process. But Barton said that once he talked with Matthews, "I knew he wasn't some kook who was trying to dabble in law enforcement. He has put a lot of time and effort into what he does."

Matthews readily states he has no desire to get into law enforcement and does not consider himself an investigator.

So, exactly what is he, then?

After thinking for a few seconds, he says: "Information detective." By that, he said, he means one who gathers and links information to give to law enforcement.

Because of his successes, Matthews was just one of two civilians with a seat on a federal advisory board that eventually led to the creation of NaMus. For now, he has temporarily shifted gears. He is putting much of his time into contacting law enforcement agencies and telling them about NaMus and its cost-free availability as an investigative tool.

But he still finds time to scan his computers, searching for that one scrap of information or lead that can put a real name to a John Doe, which in turn may lead to the solving of a crime.

"I'm so used to it now, it's just an everyday thing for us," Lori Matthews said. "And I am just so proud of him. He is doing something that is really good. It means so much to the families of the missing persons. He will never give it up, and I couldn't ask him to."

Jim Balloch may be reached at 865-342-6315.

NamUs - National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

Project EDAN - Everyone Deserves A Name


TentGirl

External Link:
Sketches express softer side of missing women

26 missing lives

Remember Their Names (Janis Cole)

Documenting grief and pain
By Fran Schechter

The notorious serial killer never appears in Remember Their Names, an installation by NOW contributor and documentary filmmaker Janis Cole about the prostitutes, many of them aboriginal, who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Cole doesn’t need to remind us how they met their end; instead, she focuses on the women and the grief of friends and relatives who searched for them.

In a darkened room, two projections feature missing-persons posters: The larger screen switches from group to individual mug shots, the floor below it strewn street-memorial-style with flowers, photos, stuffed animals and native smudge bundles. The smaller projection is overlain with police quotes justifying their inaction. Some paper posters are crumpled on the floor.

You can’t help wondering what terrible life experiences put these women here. In a short video on the third wall, Sarah Jean DeVries, one of the dead, speaks frankly about heroin as she shoots up. A desk nearby holds a photo of her daughter and photocopied pages from DeVries’s diary, wrenching words of self-loathing and rage at the men who used her.

Though this documentary work doesn’t pack the angry, visceral punch of Vigil, Rebecca Belmore’s performance on the same subject, it’s still a moving cry of pain for those lost in this ugly chapter of our recent history.

At Trinity Square Video, to August 8. Cole gives a master class Saturday (July 18) from 3 to 5 pm.

NOW | July 15-22, 2009 | VOL 28 NO 46
Copyright 2009 NOW Communications

NOW Magazine
Remember Their Names

Remember Our Sisters Everwhere

Welcome to Remember Our Sisters Everywhere (ROSE), a website project
dedicated to the remembrance of women who have been murdered. Here we
intend to build a vibrant virtual community of women's memorial and violence prevention activists.

The ROSE website champions a cultural shift towards the remembrance
and valuing of the women we have lost to violence. When all of us - mothers,
fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters, sons, and friends - remember those
women we have lost, we acknowledge the vulnerability, and the value, of
the lives of all women.

Over the past nineteen years, we have witnessed across Canada the birth
of over sixty women's memorials, from marches to monuments, as well as
thousands of yearly vigils. The ROSE website will carry this legacy online and
around the world to deepen their impact on public consciousness.

The murder of women is one of the harshest realities of our time. Remembering
can be painful - but forgetting hurts us more.

Throughout the world atrocities against women are perpetrated daily: women
are raped and murdered in the Sudan; killed in deliberately set kitchen fires
in India; disappeared and murdered in Juarez, Mexico; gunned down in
public institutions in North America; suffer domestic violence in Russia;
are tortured and murdered by serial killers in Vancouver and in every country
in the world; trafficked for sex globally; and 60 million women and girls are
“missing” from the world today as a result of sex-selective abortions and female
infanticide . Despite the great weight of the problems we are addressing, we
believe that the ideas represented by the memorial movement in Canada will
have a positive international influence on the struggle to end violence against
women, especially when published on the World Wide Web.

As support for the project grows, we will mentor new memorial makers through
the forums on the site and generate and explore ways to prevent violence and
challenge those attitudes that operate at the deepest levels of society, and
which lead to violence against women.

The ROSE website is currently in beta (testing stage of development.) We are
using Ning technology to see if it meets our needs. Over the coming months
we will be adding content and inviting new members.

ROSE, formerly the Global Women's Memorial, was developed by the National
Film Board of Canada, Pacific-Yukon Region, and is now a project of Tides
Canada Initiatives.

By remembering our sisters everywhere we work together to prevent violence.

To contact the ROSE Committee: rememberoursisterseverywhere@gmail.com

Website:
Remember Our Sisters Everywhere

'She had a million-dollar smile' - Winnipeg Free Press

'She had a million-dollar smile' - Winnipeg Free Press

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