Bright Lights: Katrin Pacey

Lawyer, Pivot Legal Society

When was the last time you met a member of the legal profession who claimed to be an activist first and a lawyer second? If that sounds a bit odd, it’s because you’ve never met Katrina Pacey.

Pacey, 35, is a staff member with the Pivot Legal Society, a nonprofit legal-advocacy organization that tackles social-justice issues plaguing Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. It’s not a glamorous gig, but it’s rewarding for her. In some ways, she’s a walking contradiction. Pacey is a self-described feminist who fights for sex workers’ rights. She said she comes from a privileged background, yet she spends her working days dealing with some of the most vulnerable women in the city.

She said she was intrigued when Vancouver East NDP MP Libby Davies brought a motion forward in Parliament in 2002 to review prostitution laws after so many women went missing from the Downtown Eastside. Pacey said the sex-trade workers were saying: “We need something different; we need to have safety in our lives.”

“I thought, ‘How do I get these women’s voices and stories to Parliament?’ ” she recalled.

As a student, Pacey knew that the corporate environment of law school would challenge her ideals as a human-rights activist, but she said she wanted to gain the tools and knowledge to use the legal system to advance the interests of marginalized people. After receiving her undergrad degree in political science and earning a master’s degree in women’s studies from UBC, she attended law school and began working with Pivot in her first term.

“I feel like it [Pivot] was a huge part of my education and kept me from deviating from being focused on human-rights issues,” she said, sitting in a modest boardroom at Pivot’s office on East Hastings Street. “I feel like it kept me grounded and real.”

Pacey’s work involves advocating for changes to Canada’s prostitution laws, but she admits that she didn’t always have such conviction about the subject. She had seen how it had divided the feminist community. “I really didn’t want to go there by any personal inclination,” she said, “but when I realized that’s what the demand was—and that it was the most pressing issue for them [women of the DTES]—I felt like I didn’t have a choice.”

When she became involved with sex workers’ rights, she expected a backlash from the feminist legal community. Ultimately, she hopes that her objective will become clear to even her fiercest critics. “What I’m really about is creating a safe and dignified working condition for people involved in sex work, and honouring those people who say this is their choice,” she said emphatically.

Despite some people’s objection to Pacey’s endeavours, her contribution to the field and, specifically, her work with sex workers is undeniable. In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight, Pacey’s long-time coworker and Pivot Legal Society executive director, John Richardson, sang her praises: “She’s definitely someone you want fighting in your corner.”

It’s hard to believe that Pacey graduated from law school only five years ago. Already she has been awarded the YWCA Women of Distinction Award; she routinely speaks about human-rights issues at universities and local colleges; and she is one of the partners at Pivot’s most recent venture as a law firm—Pivot Legal Society LLP.

The firm, an idea developed by Pacey and Richardson, came to fruition in 2006 and has been growing ever since. “I’m really passionate about this because it can help strengthen Pivot as a nonprofit while giving access to affordable legal services to those people who need it most,” she said.

Not surprisingly, even her venture in creating a business model for Pivot leads her down a people-before-profit path. It’s an often thankless cause she has taken upon herself, but it’s never been about her.

Pickton appeal hearing set for next March 25 in nation’s top court

Thursday, September 17th, 2009 | 1:50 pm

Canwest News Service

VANCOUVER – The Supreme Court of Canada has set a tentative date of next March 25 to begin hearing the appeal of serial killer Robert (Willie) Pickton.

Pickton, 56, was convicted on Dec. 9, 2007, of six counts of second-degree murder involving women who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: Mona Wilson, Brenda Wolfe, Sereena Abotsway, Andrea Joesbury, Marnie Frey and Georgina Papin.

He still faces trial on another 20 counts of first-degree murder, but the Crown does not plan to proceed on that second trial if Pickton’s convictions are upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.

Still, the 20-count indictment was in court today and the second trial has been set to begin Sept. 13, 2010.

The date was set anticipating it may take months for a ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada on Pickton’s appeal.

Last June 25,the B.C. Court of Appeal denied Pickton’s bid for a new trial, but a dissseting judgment by one judge of the three-judge panel gave Pickton an automatic right to appeal his case before the nation’s highest court in Ottawa.

In a 2-1 split decision, Chief Justice Lance Finch and Richard Low turned down Pickton’s bid for a new trial, largely rejecting many of the defence arguments.

The Crown, Pickton’s defence had argued on appeal, pursued a theory during the trial that Pickton had acted alone, but as a result of a question by the jury during deliberations switched gears and suggested he could have had an accomplice.

Pickton’s defence also alleged the trial judge, B.C. Supreme Court Justice James Williams, erred in his response to a jury question.

However, Justice Ian Donald disagreed with his colleagues, saying that Williams made “a serious error of law” and that there was a “miscarriage of justice.”

Donald did not think it was fair for the Crown to introduce the possibility Pickton acted with someone else so late in the trial.

“I view the Crown’s behaviour as scrambling to recover ground,” he wrote.

The confusion could have led to the jury’s verdict of second-degree murder, instead of first-degree, Donald wrote.

“Despite the body of evidence against Pickton, the jury deliberated over nine days and reached the somewhat curious result of second-degree murder.”

The Appeal Court also released a ruling on a separate appeal by the Crown.

The three justices unanimously agreed with the Crown that Williams made several errors in law, included severing the 26 counts into two trials; not allowing a key witness to testify; and prohibiting certain similar fact evidence from being admitted. Most details about this evidence are protected by a publication ban.

Still, they said, “there would be no useful purpose” to remedy these errors by ordering a new trial on 26 counts of first-degree murder if Pickton’s six convictions are upheld and he continues to serve his life sentence.

Pickton was initially charged in February 2002 with two counts of first- degree murder after police raided his Port Coquitlam farm. He was eventually charged with 27 counts.

The trial judge stayed one count involving a Jane Doe, a woman whose identity was never identified.

Pickton’s first murder trial began on Jan. 22, 2007.

nhall@vancouversun.com

© 2009 Kelowna.com. All Rights Reserved.

Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

From two of our most fiercely moral voices, a passionate call to arms against our eras most pervasive human rights violation: the oppression of women and girls in the developing world.

Pickton to appeal pig farm murders to top court

By Keith Fraser, Vancouver Province
June 26, 2009

VANCOUVER — A day after he lost a bid to overturn his six murder convictions, serial killer Robert Pickton has decided to appeal his case to Canada's highest court.

Pickton's lawyer Gil McKinnon confirmed on Friday that his client will "soon" file an appeal to be heard in the Supreme Court of Canada.

The 59-year-old former pig farmer from the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam was given the automatic right of appeal because the B.C. Court of Appeal ruling upholding the convictions on Thursday was a split decision.

McKinnon said the appeal would be based on the dissenting opinion of B.C. Court of Appeal Justice Ian Donald. He did not say when the appeal might be heard in Ottawa.

In a lengthy ruling, the majority opinion of the B.C. Court of Appeal found that the evidence strongly suggested that Pickton was the killer or one of the killers on all of the murder counts and rejected his appeal arguments.

Donald admitted that the Crown had a "powerful case" but found that errors by the trial judge amounted to a miscarriage of justice and called for a new trial.

McKinnon represented Pickton at the nine-day Appeal Court hearing earlier this year.

In December 2007, a B.C. Supreme Court jury found Pickton guilty of six counts of second-degree murder after being found not guilty of six counts of first-degree murder. Pickton lured the women, all sex-trade workers from Vancouver's drug-plagued Downtown Eastside, to his pig farm and murdered them.

Pickton was initially charged with 26 counts of murder but the Crown has said it will not proceed with the remaining 20 counts if the murder convictions are upheld.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

In death, three women shine light on a Manitoba epidemic

Anna Mehler Paperny

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Last updated on Sunday, Sep. 06, 2009 10:48PM EDT

All three of them, as children, were hooked on crack cocaine and locked into a life spent selling themselves for money, drugs, food, shelter and the illusion of protection they couldn't get anywhere else.

All spent years bouncing around Manitoba's foster-care, youth-correction and child-welfare systems, from one program for at-risk minors to another.

And all were found dead, their bodies dumped on the outskirts of town. No one has been charged in their deaths, two of which have so far been declared homicides.

Cherisse Houle, Hillary Angel Wilson and Fonassa Bruyere, the teenage girls who have become the face of Winnipeg's epidemic of missing and murdered young aboriginal women, have a lot in common. And they have become, quite literally, on police press releases and bulletin boards across the region, poster children for systemic failure in child welfare and police investigations – what a Manitoba cabinet minister calls a “state of emergency” for the region.

Those closest to the women suggest that police may not have been searching hard enough for them. But now Winnipeg-area police forces have announced that a new task force will probe the cases of the three teens and dozens of others like them.

It's a move that comes years after the first calls for a special investigation into what native groups estimate are 75 women missing or murdered across Manitoba since the 1960s.

“This shouldn't be happening. In a properly functioning society, this should not be happening,” says Provincial Court Judge Lawrence Allen, who spent years working as a Crown prosecutor in Winnipeg and agreed to speak to The Globe and Mail about the missing women of Winnipeg (an unusual step for a member of the bench).

“It shouldn't be enough [for police] to say, ‘Well we are out there and we periodically try and arrest these guys and make them go to john school' or whatever. It's not working. It isn't enough. And the proof it isn't working are the dead kids.”

Winnipeg's aboriginal community is one of the largest in urban Canada. Its families are disproportionately poor; its children are often reliant on an over-burdened provincial child-welfare system that can leave youth at risk as much as it shelters them.

“They're on the streets and they're not being monitored, they are getting involved in drug possession and theft and crimes. … It's a terrible introduction to life when you think this is happening to children as young as 10 and 11,” Judge Allen says.

“These kids have been so through the ringer that they're burned out by the time they're 17 and 18. But it's a dangerous combination and inevitably, when children are getting into cars with strange men day after day after day, it's not surprising that some of them are suffering, or being killed.”

On Wednesday, RCMP issued a call for tips into Ms. Wilson's death. They weren't getting enough leads, said spokeswoman Sergeant Line Karpish.

“We were actually a bit disappointed, quite frankly, because with all the media attention the case got, we thought we would be inundated and it turned out to be quite the opposite.”

The scenario has been seen before. The disappearance of dozens of women, most of them drug-addicted prostitutes and the majority of them aboriginal, from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside eventually sparked the creation of a task force investigating the cases, culminating in the arrest and conviction of Robert Pickton.

In Edmonton, police task force Project Kare is probing a spate of similar deaths and missing-persons cases involving people in what police consider high-risk lifestyles. Thomas Svekla, the first person charged as a result of the work of that task force, was convicted last year of killing a prostitute.

Ms. Houle, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Bruyere grew up together in Winnipeg's north end. They spent time with each other's families; they shared the same group of friends, going to the same skating rink.

Ms. Houle and Ms. Wilson, especially, remained close through time spent together on and off at a youth correction centre. Ms. Houle, 17, was transferred this spring from a foster home to emergency housing at an aboriginal centre reserved for girls deemed vulnerable to sexual exploitation; Ms. Wilson, 18 and therefore no longer the province's responsibility, was on her own, trying to get clean.

Ms. Houle was found dead on the outskirts of town in July. Police found Ms. Wilson's body six weeks later, almost exactly two years after Ms. Bruyere was killed.

Sgt. Karpish says she doesn't know why people haven't been coming forward with information, but she said a lack of trust in police shouldn't be a factor.

“We have to get past the trust part here,” says Sgt. Karpish. “We're trying to solve a homicide.”

But Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of Vancouver-based Battered Women's Support Services, says police have lost credibility in the community because it's believed that missing-persons reports have been delayed when the person in question was deemed to have too transient or risky a lifestyle.

“They're going to have to demonstrate that they care,” she says. “They've got work to do in terms of appearing credible.”

Police are exploring all possible links, Sgt. Karpish says, but she notes that the things connecting the three girls, and other missing or murdered women, could just be coincidence.

“Winnipeg is not that big of a city – you need to understand that. For one aboriginal woman to know another aboriginal woman in the same age bracket [living] in the north end, that's not that original.”

The police task force, announced last week, is still in the planning stages. On Thursday, the province announced the creation of an “action group” dedicated to the non-criminal aspects of Winnipeg's missing-women epidemic: Community groups are expected to collaborate and advise the provincial government on how to address the missing-women crisis.

Eric Robinson, a Cree MLA, Minister of Culture, Heritage and Tourism and Acting Minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, is spearheading the group, which he says is long overdue.

“We need to see this for what it is: It's a state of emergency.”

Judge Allen says he thinks the crisis of exploited young girls has become worse since he was a prosecutor.

But he says issues of missing women tend to enter the spotlight briefly and then disappear without anything being solved.

“These things come to the attention of the public so sporadically and then people just forget about it. Meanwhile, if you drive down to certain street corners, there's a whole bunch of babies standing on the street, getting into the cars of strange men. And then people are surprised when they end up missing and dead.”

© Copyright 2009 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

In death, three women shine light on a Manitoba epidemic

Anna Mehler Paperny

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Last updated on Sunday, Sep. 06, 2009 10:48PM EDT

All three of them, as children, were hooked on crack cocaine and locked into a life spent selling themselves for money, drugs, food, shelter and the illusion of protection they couldn't get anywhere else.

All spent years bouncing around Manitoba's foster-care, youth-correction and child-welfare systems, from one program for at-risk minors to another.

And all were found dead, their bodies dumped on the outskirts of town. No one has been charged in their deaths, two of which have so far been declared homicides.

Cherisse Houle, Hillary Angel Wilson and Fonassa Bruyere, the teenage girls who have become the face of Winnipeg's epidemic of missing and murdered young aboriginal women, have a lot in common. And they have become, quite literally, on police press releases and bulletin boards across the region, poster children for systemic failure in child welfare and police investigations – what a Manitoba cabinet minister calls a “state of emergency” for the region.

Those closest to the women suggest that police may not have been searching hard enough for them. But now Winnipeg-area police forces have announced that a new task force will probe the cases of the three teens and dozens of others like them.

It's a move that comes years after the first calls for a special investigation into what native groups estimate are 75 women missing or murdered across Manitoba since the 1960s.

“This shouldn't be happening. In a properly functioning society, this should not be happening,” says Provincial Court Judge Lawrence Allen, who spent years working as a Crown prosecutor in Winnipeg and agreed to speak to The Globe and Mail about the missing women of Winnipeg (an unusual step for a member of the bench).

“It shouldn't be enough [for police] to say, ‘Well we are out there and we periodically try and arrest these guys and make them go to john school' or whatever. It's not working. It isn't enough. And the proof it isn't working are the dead kids.”

Winnipeg's aboriginal community is one of the largest in urban Canada. Its families are disproportionately poor; its children are often reliant on an over-burdened provincial child-welfare system that can leave youth at risk as much as it shelters them.

“They're on the streets and they're not being monitored, they are getting involved in drug possession and theft and crimes. … It's a terrible introduction to life when you think this is happening to children as young as 10 and 11,” Judge Allen says.

“These kids have been so through the ringer that they're burned out by the time they're 17 and 18. But it's a dangerous combination and inevitably, when children are getting into cars with strange men day after day after day, it's not surprising that some of them are suffering, or being killed.”

On Wednesday, RCMP issued a call for tips into Ms. Wilson's death. They weren't getting enough leads, said spokeswoman Sergeant Line Karpish.

“We were actually a bit disappointed, quite frankly, because with all the media attention the case got, we thought we would be inundated and it turned out to be quite the opposite.”

The scenario has been seen before. The disappearance of dozens of women, most of them drug-addicted prostitutes and the majority of them aboriginal, from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside eventually sparked the creation of a task force investigating the cases, culminating in the arrest and conviction of Robert Pickton.

In Edmonton, police task force Project Kare is probing a spate of similar deaths and missing-persons cases involving people in what police consider high-risk lifestyles. Thomas Svekla, the first person charged as a result of the work of that task force, was convicted last year of killing a prostitute.

Ms. Houle, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Bruyere grew up together in Winnipeg's north end. They spent time with each other's families; they shared the same group of friends, going to the same skating rink.

Ms. Houle and Ms. Wilson, especially, remained close through time spent together on and off at a youth correction centre. Ms. Houle, 17, was transferred this spring from a foster home to emergency housing at an aboriginal centre reserved for girls deemed vulnerable to sexual exploitation; Ms. Wilson, 18 and therefore no longer the province's responsibility, was on her own, trying to get clean.

Ms. Houle was found dead on the outskirts of town in July. Police found Ms. Wilson's body six weeks later, almost exactly two years after Ms. Bruyere was killed.

Sgt. Karpish says she doesn't know why people haven't been coming forward with information, but she said a lack of trust in police shouldn't be a factor.

“We have to get past the trust part here,” says Sgt. Karpish. “We're trying to solve a homicide.”

But Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of Vancouver-based Battered Women's Support Services, says police have lost credibility in the community because it's believed that missing-persons reports have been delayed when the person in question was deemed to have too transient or risky a lifestyle.

“They're going to have to demonstrate that they care,” she says. “They've got work to do in terms of appearing credible.”

Police are exploring all possible links, Sgt. Karpish says, but she notes that the things connecting the three girls, and other missing or murdered women, could just be coincidence.

“Winnipeg is not that big of a city – you need to understand that. For one aboriginal woman to know another aboriginal woman in the same age bracket [living] in the north end, that's not that original.”

The police task force, announced last week, is still in the planning stages. On Thursday, the province announced the creation of an “action group” dedicated to the non-criminal aspects of Winnipeg's missing-women epidemic: Community groups are expected to collaborate and advise the provincial government on how to address the missing-women crisis.

Eric Robinson, a Cree MLA, Minister of Culture, Heritage and Tourism and Acting Minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, is spearheading the group, which he says is long overdue.

“We need to see this for what it is: It's a state of emergency.”

Judge Allen says he thinks the crisis of exploited young girls has become worse since he was a prosecutor.

But he says issues of missing women tend to enter the spotlight briefly and then disappear without anything being solved.

“These things come to the attention of the public so sporadically and then people just forget about it. Meanwhile, if you drive down to certain street corners, there's a whole bunch of babies standing on the street, getting into the cars of strange men. And then people are surprised when they end up missing and dead.”

© Copyright 2009 CTVglobemedia Publishing Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Missing girls’ families accuse police of racism, incompetence

By Brendan Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen
September 5, 2009

KITIGAN ZIBI ANISHINABEG FIRST NATION, Que. — Lisa Odjick is stalked by nightmares of her missing granddaughter.

“One time I dreamt she was being held against her will,” she says. “I could hear her calling me.”

Maisy Odjick, 16, and her friend Shannon Alexander, 17, disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi-Maniwaki area, about 130 kilometres north of Ottawa, on Sept. 6, 2008. The house where they were last known to be was locked. There were no signs of foul play. The teens left behind purses, clothes, electronics, identification and even medication.

On the reserve, rumours abound of human trafficking, prostitution, drug use, even possible sightings of the teens in Montreal, Toronto or as far away as Arizona.

The girls’ parents accuse the Kitigan Zibi police of incompetence. They’ve called the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police force, complacent and racist. (Maisy lived on the reserve; Shannon resided in the nearby town of Maniwaki. It is a joint police investigation.) The parents say the investigation was botched from the start because the provincial police assumed the girls were runaways.

The provincial police won’t discuss the case. Const. Steve Lalande will say only that police are doing “everything humanly possible”_to find the girls.

And while that force says the girls ran away, Kitigan Zibi police say they have no such evidence.

“We didn’t really want to commit (to saying that they were) runaways right away,” explains Kitigan Zibi Police Chief Gorden McGregor. “They (the Surete du Quebec) felt that the information that they had — which is the same as ours — they felt that they were able to commit to that notion.”

Maisy’s mother, Laurie Odjick, says there was no ground search in the days after the girls went missing, for example, and it took police more than a month to seize the girls’ computers.

McGregor understands the families’ frustration, but says there has never been anything solid to investigate.

“We’re dumbfounded.”

Jurisdictional questions only add to the confusion: Maisy is registered to the Kitigan Zibi band; Shannon is Inuit and not registered to the band. Maisy’s mother says every time she asked the provincial police for updates, they referred her to reserve police.

At the outset, the girls’ files were kept apart, even though they went missing from the same place and were believed to be together. Kitigan Zibi police took Maisy’s file, while the provincial force had Shannon’s.

McGregor insists this was only the case with paperwork; police collaborated from the start.

“No matter what: We open up a file on Maisy; they open up a file on Shannon. We still work together on the file,” he said. In any case, after a couple of months, the files were formally joined.

Shannon’s father, Bryan Alexander, believes the provincial police wanted to wash their hands of the case so they gave it to the Kitigan Zibi police — a community force of eight officers.

“This happened in town, not on the reserve. They don’t care if a million . . . Indians go missing,” he said,

echoing the criticism that has been made of police forces across the country in what advocates say are hundreds of missing and murdered women cases.

The circumstances surrounding when the girls were last seen are not entirely clear. Alexander says that on Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, he left the teens at his home — just outside the reserve in Maniwaki — and went to Ottawa for the weekend to help his son paint his apartment.

Later that day, the girls mowed the lawn at Maisy’s grandmother’s home. When the work was done, Maisy announced plans to spend the night at Shannon’s house.

Later that evening, the girls hung out with friends in a park, across the street from the Polyvalente high school, where a dance was being held. A 15-year-old boy who was with the girls that night says the girls claimed they’d just smoked crack. He thought they might be joking, though they did seem drunk or high.

At some point between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., Shannon got into a fight with a boy in the group. Shortly after, Shannon and Maisy left together — the last anyone saw of the girls.

Maisy’s Facebook account was last active at 10:31 p.m. that night.

When Alexander returned from Ottawa on Monday, the girls were nowhere to be found.

On Tuesday, Alexander called police. He’d assumed you had to wait 24 hours to file a missing person’s report.

Four days passed between the last sighting of the girls and that first contact with the police.

• Shannon’s story

Bryan Alexander raised his daughter alone. He explains that his wife, a crack addict, left when Shannon was about a year old. The father and daughter lived in Ottawa until Shannon was about six, moved to Hull, then settled in Maniwaki, where they have family.

As a child, Shannon enjoyed the outdoors where she and her father would ride three-wheelers or go fishing.

In her later teens, she grew argumentative and angry. After a fight with her principal, she quit school.

Sixteen at the time, her father says she enrolled at the adult education centre the following day. While attending night school, she struggled unsuccessfully to find work. She tried grocery stores, restaurants, tobacco shops.

“My daughter’s not stupid,” Alexander says, “she just looks native.” She became increasingly frustrated.

Almost two years before she disappeared, Shannon decided to find her mother. Although warned she might not like what she found, she took a bus to Ottawa and found her mother in a crack house. “She flipped out” and was never the same, he says.

Alexander is himself a former crack addict who struggles with alcoholism. He says he attends AA and NA meetings and hasn’t smoked crack since his daughter’s birth. He knows he wasn’t always the best father, but says he gave his daughter everything she needed.

Alexander says his daughter would sometimes leave home for a few days, but not without calling or leaving a note. She spent some months in a foster home at some point in the past few years, but he isn’t clear on the details.

At the time of her disappearance, Shannon was completing her last high school math credit and was enrolled in a nursing college in Mont-Laurier, where she planned to move.

• Maisy’s story

Laurie Odjick still remembers the day Maisy, the first of her four children, was born. “She was the hardest labour,” she says with a teary smile. “She was always thinking she could do things on her own.”

Maisy became an independent and rebellious teen who fought with her mother.

Almost a year before she disappeared, Maisy dropped out of school. Laurie knew Maisy was experimenting with marijuana and alcohol.

At 16, Maisy moved in with her 18-year-old boyfriend, an arrangement that lasted about a month. She next moved in with her grandmother.

Maisy’s grandmother convinced her to try to finish high school. She had re-enrolled at Maniwaki’s adult education centre and was scheduled to resume her studies days before she disappeared.

Maisy made no secret of her desire to get away from Kitigan Zibi. She often spoke about moving back to the Saugeen Shores-Port Elgin, Ont. area, where she lived from 2003 to 2006, and where she still has friends and family.

In any case, Laurie says, Maisy would have taken her favourite possessions — family photos, and her camera, clothes and jewelry.

Laurie Odjick has been vocal and proactive in her hunt for answers. With the help of her sister-in-law, Maria Jacko, Odjick has organized searches and raised $12,000 in reward money. Every month she sends posters of Maisy and Shannon to women’s shelters across the country.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service