When Robert Pickton's lawyers argued for a new trial at Canada's highest court Thursday, they had some surprising allies -- the family members of some of his victims.
At issue in the Supreme Court of Canada was whether a mistake by the trial judge in answering a question from the jury unfairly influenced the verdict. The jury had asked if they could find Pickton guilty even if they didn't believe he acted alone.
"The question was not answered correctly. It was wrong in a number of respects," defence lawyer Gil McKinnon argued in court.
If the conviction were overturned, Pickton would be ordered to stand trial a second time. Crown counsel has already indicated that any new trial would cover 26 charges of murder against him, not just the six that he has already faced.
Without a new trial, those charges will never be heard.
Rick Frey's daughter Marnie disappeared in 1997. After a decade-long fight for justice and a marathon trial, Pickton was convicted of her murder and the killings of five other woman.
Despite the emotional anguish that would no doubt accompany an overturned conviction, Frey told CTV News he would welcome a new trial.
"There's a lot of unanswered questions," he said. "I know it costs a lot of money, but I mean, you still have to have justice.
The court has reserved judgment on the matter, and is expected to make its decision in a few months.
With a report from CTV British Columbia's Stephen Smart
Sharon Prior was a beautiful 16 year old blonde from Point St-Charles, Quebec . Sharron was last seen March 29 1975 going to Marina's Pizzeria on Wellington and Ash Avenue to meet some friends. She was later found in Longueil, Quebec, brutally murdered.Her killer or killers were never brought to justice, even after all of these years. The Prior family still have not had closure after 32 years. This is another cold case file. There has to be someone who has information about the suspect or suspects. There is also a website that you can visit and read Sharron's story and all of the newspaper articles. Help this family rest easier and catch the evil person(s) who did this to Sharron.
They are the heartwrenching stories that shock whole communities, bringing waves of fear and sorrow that can linger for years. Disappearances and unsolved murders devastate Canadian families in all parts of the country, creating anger and suspicions that may never be put to rest. In collaboration with the CBC News series Canadian Cold Case, the CBC Digital Archives presents a collection of stories from unsolved crimes in Canada.
Vagina Monologues, annual Memory March to take place this month
Cheryl Rossi
Vancouver Courier
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Actor and artist Marita Eason didn't protest when her friend and colleague told her they were going to perform in The Vagina Monologues for free to raise money for organizations that help women.
"I was born from a woman, I'm going to make women, women are my friends, my family," Eason said. "And the numbers are really scary. Two hundred women and girls, approximately, every year are murdered and [go] missing every year in Canada. That's a lot of people."
The resident of Railtown will perform the monologue "My Angry Vagina" at the WISE Hall, March 27, and the Massey Theatre in New Westminster, March 28.
"It talks about the woes of what we women have to deal with, from tampons, to paps, to thongs," Eason said.
The performances will dovetail with Vancouver's fourth annual Memory March on March 28 to honour women and children who go missing or are murdered by men. The Arts Matters Society in Abbotsford has organized all three events.
In 2005, Gwynne Hunt, artistic director of Arts Matters, took over The Femicide List of murdered and missing women and children that was started by Mary Billy, editor of the now defunct Herspectives quarterly magazine, after the Dec. 6, 1989 Montreal Massacre.
"There doesn't appear to be any government agency or women's group anywhere that I can find that is keeping a full list of missing and murdered women and children," Hunt said.
So she's writing a book called Rampage: The Pathology of an Epidemic, which includes interviews with people who keep lists and those who've lost loved ones.
"I'm trying to put a face to something that we should all be ashamed of as Canadians, that there's so much violence against women and children," Hunt said. "And being a feminist from the '60s, I can honestly say that things haven't gotten any better."
The silent march and vigil on March 28 will honour the 3,450 women and children on Hunt's list.
Money raised at the WISE Hall performance of The Vagina Monologues supports the Memory March while money raised at the Massey Theatre will go to Westminster House, a recovery centre for women trying to overcome addiction and the Domestic Violence Response Team, both in New Westminster. Ten per cent of the proceeds will go to the V-Day organization founded by Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, to help stop violence against women and girls around the world.
In 2007, V-Day and UNICEF launched the global campaign to stop rampant sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This year's V-Day spotlights the problems there.
V-Day notes that since conflict began in 1996, sexual violence has been used to torture and humiliate hundreds of thousands of women and girls and destroy families in that country.
"In addition to the severe psychological impact, sexual violence leaves many survivors with genital lesions, traumatic fistulae, severed and broken limbs, unwanted pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV," the organization's website states. "Survivors are regularly ostracized and abandoned by their families and communities."
The Vagina Monologues plays at the WISE Hall, 1882 Adanac St. at 8 p.m. The Memory March starts at 2 p.m. at the Missing Women's Memorial in Crab Park, at the foot of Main Street, and ends at the Marker of Change in Thornton Park at Main and Terminal.
(British Columbia) (Criminal) (As of Right / By Leave)
(Publication ban in case)
Keywords
Criminal Law.
Summary
Case summaries are prepared by the Office of the Registrar of the Supreme Court of Canada (Law Branch) for information purposes only.
(Publication ban in case) Criminal law - Trial - Charge to jury - Parties to offence - Law of co-principal - Aiding and abetting - Whether the trial judge instructed the jury on co-principal liability in his main charge - If so, whether the co-principal instruction was adequate and given with proper notice to counsel - Whether the trial judge erred procedurally when he answered the jury’s question without having a clear understanding of the nature of the problem that was troubling the jury and without asking them to clarify the question - Whether the trial judge erred in his response to the jury question and in his subsequent amendment of the “actual shooter” instruction. Whether the curative proviso in s. 686(1)(b)(iii) of the Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46, should be applied. Pickton was convicted of six counts of second degree murder. It is alleged that he murdered each of the six victims at his farm property in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, after taking them from the downtown eastside area of Vancouver where each of them was a sex-trade worker. Pickton appealed his conviction and sought a new trial. The majority of the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal. Donald J.A., dissenting, would have allowed the appeal and ordered a new trial. In his view, the failure of the trial judge to instruct the jury on aiding and abetting and how they might apply in this case was an error of law amounting to a miscarriage of justice to which the curative provision could not be applied.
Factums
33288
Robert William Pickton v. Her Majesty the Queen
(British Columbia) (Criminal) (As of Right / By Leave)
VANCOUVER -- When Robert (Willie) Pickton's judge changed his instructions to the jury at the trial's 11th hour, it might have resulted in jurors being able to convict the former pig butcher of acts that are not even criminal, his defence lawyers argue.
In an appeal argument recently filed with the Supreme Court of Canada, Pickton's lawyers Gil McKinnon and Patrick McGowan say a chain of events sparked by a question by the jury resulted in the Crown urging the judge to change the rules of the game just before the buzzer sounded.
Instead of deliberating whether to agree with the Crown's long-held theory that Pickton alone murdered six women, the defence argued, Justice James Williams told the jurors they could find him guilty if they believed he "actively participated" in the murders.
That, the defence argued in the written document, may have left jurors with the impression they could convict Pickton if, for example, they believed he merely drove the women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside to his farm, where someone else might have killed them.
"Put simply, the jury's critical question was incorrectly answered, the ‘goalposts' were changed by the amendment at a very late and impermissible stage of the trial, and the Crown gained a significant, unjustified advantage," Mr. McKinnon and Mr. McGowan argue in the 64-page document.
"There was a real risk that the jury convicted Pickton for indirect acts upon which they were not properly instructed, which the defence did not have an opportunity to address, and which might even fall outside the ambit of criminal liability."
It was on Day 6 of deliberations, following a year-long trial in 2007, that the jury asked the judge if they could find Pickton guilty of murder if they believed he had "indirectly" taken part in one or more of the six murders.
Mr. Williams did not ask the jurors to clarify their question. Despite objections by the defence, Mr. Williams -- urged by the Crown -- altered a previous instruction that told jurors they must believe Pickton shot the women to convict him of murder, and instead said they could find him guilty of murder if they concluded he "actively participated" in the deaths.
Mr. McKinnon and Mr. McGowan argue in the appeal document this was a "miscarriage of justice" because the defence was never given an opportunity to respond to this change in direction.
"The Crown persuaded the trial judge to insert an ‘escape hatch' into the main charge, resulting in a stunning, tactical advantage that was clearly wrong. If the jury had a reasonable doubt about whether or not Pickton shot any of the women, they could now consider an alternate actus reus (criminal act) to convict," the document says.
"Trial fairness is at the heart of this appeal. No matter how heinous the crime, an accused has a constitutional right to a fair trial."
Two days after asking the question, the jury acquitted Pickton of first-degree murder but found him guilty of second-degree murder in the deaths of Sereena Abotsway, Marnie Frey, Andrea Joesbury, Georgina Papin, Mona Wilson, and Brenda Wolfe.
The defence is seeking the convictions be quashed and a new trial be ordered.
The Crown has until March 5 to respond to the defence documents.
During arguments before the B.C. Court of Appeal in early 2009, the Crown argued it had not changed the playing field and a majority of the three justices agreed. One dissenting justice disagreed, paving the way for the defence to make this appeal before the Supreme Court of Canada, which will be heard March 25.
The Crown has said that, if Pickton's appeal is successful, any new trial should proceed on all 26 counts of first-degree murder he is facing; if the defence is unsuccessful, the Crown intends to stay the remaining 20 murder charges against Pickton as he is already serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Many family members of those 20 additional victims are devastated that Pickton may never be tried in court for their loved ones' deaths. Most the families of the original six victims are dreading the thought of re-living another long, painful trial.
In October, police recommended the Crown charge Pickton with six new charges of first-degree murder, potentially bringing the number of murder counts he could face to 32.
While the Crown maintained during the trial that Pickton acted alone, luring the women from the Downtown Eastside to his farm where killed them and butchered their bodies in his slaughterhouse, the defence had argued Pickton's farm "was a beehive of activity" and that other persons - such as his friends Dinah Taylor and Pat Casanova - could have killed the women.
The Supreme Court of Canada decided in late November to allow Pickton's defence lawyers to broaden their appeal when they appear before the court in March, beyond the issues arising from the 2-1 decision of the B.C. Court of Appeal.
Shannon Kari, National Post Published: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Police and prosecutors are refusing to comment on arguments filed in the Supreme Court of Canada that suggest there is "considerable" evidence Robert Pickton did not act alone.
The expanded Crown theory, which will be put to the Supreme Court on March 25 when it hears an appeal by Pickton, states that he may have had accomplices.
Yet neither the Crown nor the special police task force that investigated the murders of more than two dozen women is willing to address the accomplice theory.
"We cannot speak to this as it is before the courts. There is the possibility of other trials," said RMCP spokeswoman Corporal Annie Linteau.
The spokesman for the criminal justice branch of the B.C. Ministry of the Attorney-General also declined to comment. "At this point, it is not possible to address the case in isolation from the appeal process," Neil MacKenzie said.
Pickton, 60, was convicted by a jury in 2007 of six counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of women lured from the Downtown Eastside section of Vancouver to his farm in Port Coquitlam.
The pig farmer is serving a life sentence and facing 20 other counts of first-degree murder, which are on hold pending the outcome of the Supreme Court hearing.
There have been suggestions that more than one person might have been involved in at least some of the murders.
Yet no one else has been prosecuted and the Crown stressed at the trial of Pickton that he was the sole suspect. "The Crown intends to prove that these murders of these six women were the work of one man, the accused, Robert William Pickton," said the prosecution in its opening address at the trial.
Now, in written arguments filed at the Supreme Court, the Crown says there are two equally valid ways Pickton could have been convicted.
"Pickton was the architect of these murders," the Crown states. In expanding on arguments first made in the B.C. Court of Appeal last year, it lays out an "alternate route to liability" that it says is "well founded" in the evidence.
There is "considerable and obvious" evidence that Pickton may not have acted alone, but as the person in charge of a "murderous joint venture," the Crown states. "The pool of evidence clearly left open the possibility that others were acting in concert with Pickton," it adds.
The Crown is permitted during a trial to put forward more than one way a jury can convict an accused. In the Pickton appeal, it is now arguing he either killed the women on his own or is guilty as a "coprincipal" in the murders.
There were never alternate theories suggested at the actual trial, though, said Peter Ritchie, who was lead defence lawyer at the lengthy court proceeding (Mr. Ritchie is not involved in the appeal).
"The Crown was adamant Pickton acted by himself," Mr. Ritchie said yesterday. "If there was a suggestion other people were involved, we would have defended the case that way," he said.
The defence pointed to alternate suspects during the trial, which were dismissed as "red herrings" by the prosecution.
"If the Crown believes there is evidence that others were involved, you would think an investigation would proceed with vigour," Mr. Ritchie said. "Instead, one is left wondering," he added.
The 24-year-old woman disappeared Sept. 17 after being released from the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff's Station. Her parents have filed negligence claims against L.A. County.
By Carla Hall
March 16, 2010
In the six months since Mitrice Richardson vanished in rugged Malibu Canyon, detectives have tracked reported sightings of her. Searchers have combed a total of 40 square miles looking for any sign of her -- alive or dead. U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D- Los Angeles) called for the FBI's involvement, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas asked the Sheriff's Department to review the policies that led to the release of the Cal State Fullerton graduate from the custody of the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff's Station shortly after midnight Sept. 17, 2009, without her car, purse or cellphone. But none of that has assuaged her frustrated parents, who on Tuesday -- the day before the six-month mark of their daughter's disappearance -- stood in front of the county's Hall of Administration and criticized what they see as authorities moving slowly on the search and politicians ignoring them. Richardson, 24, was arrested at Geoffrey's, a Malibu restaurant, for not paying an $89 dinner bill. Patrons and staffers said that she had acted bizarrely that night. Since her disappearance, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department have discovered evidence that she had been suffering from a severe bipolar disorder. Deputies who arrived to arrest her described her as "coherent and rational," said L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca in a letter to the Board of Supervisors. Her father, Michael Richardson, filed a damages claim against the county, citing deputies for negligence in releasing his daughter into the night, especially after they were told of her odd behavior. His claim echoes a similar one filed two months ago by Richardson's mother, Latice Sutton. Sutton and Richardson are not married to each other. Both believe there are more facts to uncover about deputies' actions that night in Calabasas. "This is just a drastic step we have to take," said her father regarding his claim for damages. Police homicide detectives investigated the case full time for four months and continue to follow leads. So do sheriff's investigators, according to Steve Whitmore, a department spokesman. But Sutton complained Tuesday that authorities "haven't been returning phone calls. They just dropped this. We've been trying to get drones out to search Malibu Canyon." Mike Hennig, co-director of the San Diego nonprofit RP Search Services West, has agreed to provide his company's unmanned aerial drones to search the dense and steep Malibu area. "It's very safe, very efficient," he said of a drone that can both photograph and evaluate difficult-to-access areas. His firm's drones were used in recent high-profile missing-persons cases in San Diego County. Hennig said he has spoken to two law enforcement officials (whose names he could not recall) who were receptive to the idea of using drones to search for Richardson. "We're kind of on hold waiting to hear back." Whitmore said: "We have no problem with that. The sheriff is always open to any new ideas. But we haven't been officially asked." carla.hall@latimes.com
The jury in the Robert Pickton trial was entitled to find him guilty whether it concluded he was the sole killer of sex trade workers or the “head honcho” of a “murderous joint venture” the Crown argues in documents filed with the Supreme Court of Canada.
Any legal errors made by the judge should not entitle Pickton to a new trial, state Crown counsel in written arguments for the March 25 hearing.
The evidence against Pickton is “overwhelming” that he was “at the centre of this inhuman scheme to murder and dismember vulnerable women from the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver,” the Crown writes. “Ordering a new trial in this case, where conviction is inevitable, would only serve to detract from society’s perception of fairness and the proper administration of justice,” it adds.
Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder by a British Columbia Supreme Court jury in December 2007, and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years. He is facing another 20 counts of first-degree murder, which the B.C. government says it will prosecute if a new trial is ordered for Pickton on the other six murder charges.
The B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the six murder convictions, in a 2-1 decision released last year. The split decision entitled Pickton to appeal his case to the Supreme Court.
The central issue in the appeal is an instruction given by Justice James Williams to the jury on its sixth day of deliberation. The jury asked if Pickton could be convicted of murder if it concluded he “indirectly” took part in the murder of any of the women.
The question resulted in heated discussions between Crown and defence counsel and Judge Williams outside the presence of the jury. The judge reminded the prosecution it agreed to the original jury instructions that it had to find Pickton to be the “actual shooter” to find him guilty of murder.
When the jury was called back into court, the judge told them he made a mistake and explained that if Pickton “actively participated” in the murders he could be convicted.
The written arguments filed in the Supreme Court by Pickton’s lawyers argue that the “goal posts” were moved by this decision, giving the Crown an unfair advantage.
In response, the appeal lawyers representing the B.C. Crown criticize the judge, the defence and even decisions made by their own prosecution colleagues during the trial.
“The Crown was wrong to agree to the actual shooter” instruction, write Gregory Fitch and John Gordon, on behalf of the appeals branch of the B.C. Ministry of the Attorney-General.
Judge Williams made many rulings, including a decision to separate the 26 counts into two trials, which were “unduly favourable” to Pickton, the Crown states. The decision to tell the jury that Pickton could be convicted if he “actively participated” was simply correcting a legal mistake, it adds.
The Crown arguments also suggest there is “considerable” evidence that the killings of the women were a “joint venture” led by Pickton. The Crown points to a police statement by Pickton where he called himself the “head honcho” and said that others were involved.
No one else has been prosecuted in the deaths of the 26 women and during the 2007 trial the Crown said “the same person” caused the deaths of each of those victims.
As Peacha Atkinson sits quietly in the Edmonton courtroom, taking in the grisly details of Ellie May Meyer’s death, her mind drifts back two decades.
“There are so many connections,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard to take.”
Twenty years ago, Meyer dated Atkinson’s brother for about six months. Her accused killer, Joseph Laboucan, was convicted of murdering Atkinson’s 13-year-old daughter, Nina Courtepatte.
Atkinson is spending as much time as she can at Laboucan’s preliminary hearing. It’s a grimly appropriate way to mark Sexual Exploitation Awareness Week, which runs until Friday.
At the time of her death, Meyer was a drug addict who sold herself on Edmonton’s streets to pay for her habit.
But when Atkinson met her, “it was before she got into trouble.”
“She was really nice,” Atkinson recalls. “We all lived in the same area, around Alex Taylor school. We’d go and visit her and my brother, and she was always trying to feed everybody. She was a good cook.”
The relationship with Atkinson’s brother didn’t last long, but there were never any hard feelings.
“Every now and again we’d bump into each other and we’d always say hello,” she says.
Eventually, they lost touch. Atkinson had no idea that Meyer had slipped into addiction and life on the streets.
Fast forward to April 2005. Atkinson’s entire world disintegrated into horror and grief when her 13-year-old girl was lured from West Edmonton Mall to a golf course outside of town by a group of young people led by Laboucan. She was beaten, sexually assaulted and killed.
A month later, Meyer’s body was found.
“When I heard it was her, I was in total shock. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” she says. “It’s another person I know. How could this be happening?”
Atkinson spent the next three years reliving the lurid details of Nina’s final hours as Laboucan and his accused accomplices each went on trial.
In 2008, Laboucan was charged with Meyers’s murder. For Atkinson it seemed the merry-go-round would never stop spinning.
“When you lose a loved one like this, you never fully get over it. But for us, it seems, the wounds can’t heal,” she says.
Over the past 27 years, there have been 31 verified homicides of vulnerable women like Meyer in the Edmonton area. Only five of those have been solved.
There are dozens more who’ve vanished and aren’t accounted for. Project KARE, the RCMP-led task force investigating these cases, hasmore than 70 files.
Kate Quinn, head of the Prostitution Awareness and Action Foundation of Edmonton, which has events planned all week to mark Sexual Exploitation Awareness Week, said it will be “a great day when we don’t need groups like Project KARE.”
“We want to engage Albertans in confronting the harsh truth that sexual exploitation in its many, many forms, exists in Alberta,” she says.
The victims aren’t the only casualties.
Their deaths leave behind loved ones adrift on a sea of grief, anger, confusion and self-doubt.
Janice Smolinski's son Billy disappeared over 5 years ago. She has never given up hope and is a woman of amazing strength and courage. I came to know Janice through Facebook and what I have read about her son Billy and her fight to champion a new law. Janice is championing a new law in Congress known as "Billy's Law."
Please check out the following links for more information.
(AP) — MINNEAPOLIS - A new online database promises to crack some of the nation's 100,000 missing persons cases and provide answers to desperate families, but only a fraction of law enforcement agencies are using it.
The clearinghouse, dubbed NamUs (Name Us), offers a quick way to check whether a missing loved one might be among the 40,000 sets of unidentified remains that languish at any given time with medical examiners across the country. NamUs is free, yet many law enforcement agencies still aren't aware of it, and others aren't convinced they should use their limited staff resources to participate.
Janice Smolinski hopes that changes-and soon. Her son, Billy, was 31 when he vanished five years ago. The Cheshire, Conn., woman fears he was murdered, his body hidden away.
She's now championing a bill in Congress, named "Billy's Law" after her son, that would set aside more funding and make other changes to encourage wider use of NamUs. Only about 1,100 of the nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide are registered to use the system, even though it already has been hailed for solving 16 cases since it became fully operational last year.
"As these cases become more well known, as people learn about the successes of NamUs, more and more agencies are going to want to be part of it," said Kristina Rose, acting director of the National Institute of Justice at the Justice Department.
Before NamUs, families and investigators had to go through the slow process of checking with medical examiner's offices one by one. As the Smolinski family searched for clues to Billy's fate, they met a maze of federal, state and nonprofit missing person databases that weren't completely public and didn't share information well with each other.
NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, allows one-stop sleuthing for amateurs, families and police. Anyone can enter all the data they have on a missing person, including descriptions, photos, fingerprints, dental records and DNA. Medical examiners can enter the same data on unidentified bodies, and anyone can search the database for potential matches that warrant further investigation.
So far, about 6,200 sets of remains and nearly 2,800 missing people have been entered, said Kevin Lothridge, CEO of the National Forensic Science Technology Center in Largo, Fla., which runs NamUs for the Justice Department.
Detective Jim Shields of the Omaha, Neb., Police Department hadn't heard about NamUs until he saw a presentation at a conference in 2008. He then had a local volunteer associated with NamUs input his data on several missing people.
Among them was Luis Fernandez, who had been missing for nearly a year before his family went to police in 2008. Shields didn't have a lot on Fernandez, a known gang member who'd been in and out of jail-only gender, race, height, weight, age and some data on his tattoos.
It proved to be enough. Just a few weeks later, similarities were spotted with the unidentified remains of a homicide victim found in a farm field in Iowa in 2007. In January, a lab informed Shields it had a DNA match-and that he could break the news to Fernandez' family.
"I could say fairly certainly that this would never have been solved if not for NamUs," Shields said.
Some other recent successes:
Paula Beverly Davis, of the Kansas City, Mo., area, had been missing for 22 years until a relative saw a public service announcement on TV in October for NamUs and told her sister, who gave it a try. Among the 10 matches her sister found were a body dumped in Ohio in 1987 that had the same rose and unicorn tattoos as her sister. DNA tests confirmed the body was Davis.
? Sonia Lente disappeared in 2002. Last June, an amateur cybersleuth with the Doe Network, a nationwide volunteer group that helps law enforcement solve cold cases, noticed similarities between Lente's description in NamUs and an unidentified body found near Albuquerque, N.M., in 2004. Dental records later established it was Lente.
Detective Stuart Somershoe of the Phoenix Police Department said his agency, which has over 500 open missing persons cases, just finished entering 100 cases into NamUs. He's hopeful his department can make a match.
"It's kind of time-consuming but I think it's a worthwhile program," Somershoe said.
NamUs grew out of a Justice Department task force working on the challenge of solving missing persons cases. One need that the task force identified was to give people who could help solve cases better access to database information.
"Billy's Law" sailed through the House late last month and is pending in the Senate, where supporters are confident it will easily pass.
The bill would authorize $10 million in grants annually that police, sheriffs, medical examiners and coroners could use to train people to use NamUs and to help cover the costs of entering data into the system. It would also authorize another $2.4 million a year to run the system and ensure permanent funding.
The bill would also link NamUs with a major FBI crime database that's now available only to law enforcement, partly because it contains sensitive information about ongoing investigations. That confidential data would be withheld from NamUs when necessary.
Billy Smolinski, of Waterbury, Conn., was last seen Aug. 24, 2004, when he asked a neighbor to look after his dog. His pickup truck was later found outside his home, though not where he usually parked it. His wallet and other belongings were still inside.
The Smolinski family first struggled to get police to take a missing adult case seriously. It took a long time for investigators to finally conclude Billy had been killed, perhaps as a result of a love triangle gone sour. The family put up reward posters, searched places where they thought his body might have been hidden and kept pressure on police.
Smolinski said she came to see how police were often overwhelmed, but to her NamUs is a "no-brainer."
"If they find remains I'm hopeful they'll identify him through NamUs," Smolinski said.
Another pointless article in the Raleigh News & Observer. What, was this written by the Associated press? You’d think they were doing a national news roundup for all the care and detail they don’t give the piece.
Hello? News & Observer? This isn’t some regional news bon-bon, it’s the story of eight nine people who have turned up dead less than 30 miles from your outskirts. This is likely the work of a serial killer? Raleigh? this is your problem too.
Since 2009, families and medical examiners have had access to a free online database that's designed to assist in the identification of more than 40,000 sets of unidentified remains across the country. Dubbed "NamUs," short for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, the program allows both parties to enter identifying characteristics of a missing person or unidentified body in the hopes that this information exchange will help match a face to a fate.
It's a grim consolation for those whose friends or families have been affected by violence or accidents. Nevertheless, the Associated Press reports that the free service has helped solved 16 cases since the cross-matching feature went live in July of last year. The numbers don't end there: the service is home to around 6,200 unidentified sets of remains, 2,800 missing people, and--according to The Crime Report--has been accessed (on the missing persons front) by more than 185,000 people as of January 2009.
What's the problem? According to the AP, only 1,100 of the nation's 17,000 law enforcement agencies, or 6.5 percent, are registered with the service. That's partly a publicity issue, as numerous law enforcement agencies simply don't know the service exists. Others are more leery about using limited resources to participate in the service.
That doesn't sit well with Janice Smolinski, sponsor of the "Billy's Law" bill that aims to encourage wider use of the NamUs system. If passed--it's already received House approval and remains pending in the Senate--the bill would generate $10 million in annual grants for law enforcement agencies to both train new users and help them resource the data entry process of adding new details to the system. The bill would also allow for an annual grant of $2.4 million to keep NamUS, as a whole, up-and-running.
As for how the system actually works, NamUs profiles are rated based on a one-to-five star system. A one-star profile contains scant details about a person: perhaps a name, or the location where they disappeared, but that's it. A five-star profile is the whole kit-and-caboodle, with a full swath of details and identifying characteristics, as well as a picture or rendering of a person's likely image.
According to The Crime Report, there's currently no mandate that forces law enforcement to database details about a 21-or-over missing adult. Billy's Law won't change that aspect of the system, but it will allow the database to link up with the National Crime Information Center Missing and Unidentified Person File database in hopes that this could increase the detail of NamUS profiles (or, conversely, fill out the system with more.) Similarly, law enforcement will be required to submit missing persons reports for children (21-and-under) to the NamUs database.
For Smolinski, the legislative victory would be bittersweet. She remains confident that the NamUs database will give her the details she needs to close her own case--that of her son, Billy, who went missing in Connecticut in 2004.
The official list of missing or murdered young women on B.C. and Alberta highways contains 18 names. But many more victims may have left anguished families behind.
By LORI CULBERT and NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUN
March 7, 2010
RCMP Staff Sgt. Bruce Hulan stands along the long row of "highway of tears" documents, some that go back 40 years in Surrey, December 10, 2009.
Photograph by: Bill Keay , Vancouver Sun
In their hunt to determine whether a serial killer is preying on girls and women along B.C. roadways, investigators have identified 2,000 “persons of interest” in the so-called Highway of Tears investigation.
Project E-Pana, the joint RCMP-Vancouver police unit probing missing and murdered women along B.C. highways, previously has been tight-lipped about the high-profile investigation.
In his first extensive media interview, team commander Staff Sgt. Bruce Hulan has revealed new details to The Vancouver Sun about a case that has generated much emotion and debate across this province.
Until now, it has not been clear what criteria the RCMP used to draw up its list of 18 “Highway of Tears” victims, how they chose the geographical scope of their project, and what headway has been made on possible suspects — including a person of interest targeted during a mysterious search this summer of a Prince George property.
E-Pana began in 2005 with a review of three unsolved 1994 murders along northern B.C.’s Highway 16, but would soon expand its scope.
“We started doing the review but very early into it we recognized that, if we are looking for this serial killer, we’ll have to broaden our scope and have a look at other files,” Hulan said this week.
“I don’t think we’ll be able to say [whether there is a serial killer at play] until we’re at the point where we are satisfied that we have been successful in solving or charging in all 18 of the files, or the majority, or having determined what the circumstances were that led to the murders.”
To zero in on a suspect or suspects police examined 619 unsolved files of violence against women along three highways, including murders and missing person cases, as well as sexual assaults and attempted sex assaults. A half dozen of the cases are in the Hinton area of Alberta, while the majority are from B.C.
That file review, which wrapped up earlier this year, identified the 18 cases of missing and murdered women included on the official police list, as well as an additional 16 sex-crime cases that appeared very similar because the women were targeted on specific highways.
“Our purpose in reviewing the [sex crimes] files is to identify elements common to our homicide cases which may assist us in identifying the person responsible,” said RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Annie Linteau, who attended The Sun’s interview with Hulan.
Victims’ families and women’s advocates argue the official list should be much longer than 18 names, suggesting up to twice that number of girls and women have met similar violence in northern and central B.C. over the past 40 years.
A Vancouver Sun investigation has uncovered 13 other victims who went missing or were murdered near a major roadway in B.C. or Alberta, who appear to be similar to the 18 on the official list and, in some cases, had been linked in the past to the “highway murders” by previous police investigations. The stories of these additional cases will be told in our series “The Vanishing Point” over the next five days.
In some of the additional cases identified by The Sun, Hulan argued the victims don’t meet the criteria the RCMP set for inclusion on the list. Victims must be female and match at least one of the two following scenarios: they were involved in a high-risk activity such as hitchhiking or the sex trade, or they were last seen — or their body was found — within a mile or so from three specific B.C. highways.
Hulan conceded other victims might potentially be linked to one or more of the women on the official list, but he added the RCMP had to make its investigation manageable, so it focused on a certain geographical area.
“There are other investigations out there that, when you look at them, would cause you to be concerned whether there are connections between them, but as I said before, we are constrained by resources,” Hulan said. “We couldn’t look at the entire province.”
The cases that are on the official list span Highway 16 from Prince Rupert all the way to Hinton, Alberta; Highway 97 from Prince George to Kamloops, and Highway 5, which includes Merritt.
In addition to the 2,000 persons of interest identified in the cases reviewed by police, there is a secondary list of 5,000 people whose names surfaced in the files for various reasons. There have been common names in some files, Hulan said.
“With anyone identified in the files as a person of interest we do a background check and analysis on them, their criminal history, and when they were in and out of custody, and if they had the opportunity or not to commit the homicide.”
None of the 2,000 persons of interest has been identified, but in August police said a previous owner of a Prince George-area property they were searching was a person of interest in the disappearance of Highway of Tears victim Nicole Hoar. Convicted murderer Leland Switzer, who has been in jail since 2005, previously owned the property.
While Hulan wouldn’t confirm Switzer as a person of interest, he revealed evidence was seized from the property and from a vehicle found at a nearby dump. The evidence is being analysed for DNA and undergoing other testing.
E-Pana has also sent evidence recovered during the historical homicides to modern-day labs, which in some cases has created new leads and in other cases has ruled out past suspects.
It is often inaccurately reported that Nicole Hoar was the only non-native person on the Highway of Tears list, but The Sun has determined eight of the 18 women and girls are non-native. Hulan estimated the list was half native and half non-native.
“These victims weren’t targeted because they were white or native or any other race, for that matter.
“They are victims because ... they were engaged in high-risk activity,” he said.
Many of the relatives of women on the list cringe at the description of their loved ones doing something high-risk, arguing some were just walking or cycling on a highway, or were hitchhiking in the 1970s, when it was a commonplace activity.
The $6-million E-Pana investigation, which employs 60 people — including 17 RCMP and two Vancouver officers, as well as civilians and retired police officers — is not investigating all 18 files at once.
“We prioritized files based on the risk of losing evidence and the potential threats to the public” he said.
Hulan said it is possible detectives could provide some future answers for the families, but given that some files are four decades old, the perpetrators may no longer be alive.
“Is it likely we will be able to charge on all 18 of them? I’m doubtful about that.”
For some relatives such as Kevin MacMillen, whose sister was killed near 100 Mile House in 1974, being included on the Highway of Tears list has meant hope that the case is getting new attention.
“It was a great relief,” said MacMillen, who said he has always suspected the person who murdered Colleen had killed again, either before or after.
Brenda Wilson doesn’t like her sister Ramona’s name being on the list because of the negative connotations that her sister was doing something wrong the day she vanished from Smithers in 1994.
“I think if there’s any justice that we receive it would be in finding answers to who did this to Ramona and why, and how can we prevent it from happening again, and just to see a change in the ways things are done with the investigation, and [police] having better relationships with families,” Brenda said in a recent interview.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) ― A new online database promises to crack some of the nation's 100,000 missing persons cases and provide answers to desperate families, but only a fraction of law enforcement agencies are using it.
The clearinghouse, dubbed NamUs (Name Us), offers a quick way to check whether a missing loved one might be among the 40,000 sets of unidentified remains that languish at any given time with medical examiners across the country. NamUs is free, yet many law enforcement agencies still aren't aware of it, and others aren't convinced they should use their limited staff resources to participate.
Janice Smolinski hopes that changes — and soon. Her son, Billy, was 31 when he vanished five years ago. The Cheshire, Conn., woman fears he was murdered, his body hidden away. She's now championing a bill in Congress, named "Billy's Law" after her son, that would set aside more funding and make other changes to encourage wider use of NamUs. Only about 1,100 of the nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide are registered to use the system, even though it already has been hailed for solving 16 cases since it became fully operational last year.
"As these cases become more well known, as people learn about the successes of NamUs, more and more agencies are going to want to be part of it," said Kristina Rose, acting director of the National Institute of Justice at the Justice Department.
Before NamUs, families and investigators had to go through the slow process of checking with medical examiner's offices one by one. As the Smolinski family searched for clues to Billy's fate, they met a maze of federal, state and nonprofit missing person databases that weren't completely public and didn't share information well with each other.
NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, allows one-stop sleuthing for amateurs, families and police. Anyone can enter all the data they have on a missing person, including descriptions, photos, fingerprints, dental records and DNA. Medical examiners can enter the same data on unidentified bodies, and anyone can search the database for potential matches that warrant further investigation.
So far, about 6,200 sets of remains and nearly 2,800 missing people have been entered, said Kevin Lothridge, CEO of the National Forensic Science Technology Center in Largo, Fla., which runs NamUs for the Justice Department.
Detective Jim Shields of the Omaha, Neb., Police Department hadn't heard about NamUs until he saw a presentation at a conference in 2008. He then had a local volunteer associated with NamUs input his data on several missing people.
Among them was Luis Fernandez, who had been missing for nearly a year before his family went to police in 2008. Shields didn't have a lot on Fernandez, a known gang member who'd been in and out of jail — only gender, race, height, weight, age and some data on his tattoos.
It proved to be enough. Just a few weeks later, similarities were spotted with the unidentified remains of a homicide victim found in a farm field in Iowa in 2007. In January, a lab informed Shields it had a DNA match — and that he could break the news to Fernandez' family.
"I could say fairly certainly that this would never have been solved if not for NamUs," Shields said. Some other recent successes: — Paula Beverly Davis, of the Kansas City, Mo., area, had been missing for 22 years until a relative saw a public service announcement on TV in October for NamUs and told her sister, who gave it a try. Among the 10 matches her sister found were a body dumped in Ohio in 1987 that had the same rose and unicorn tattoos as her sister. DNA tests confirmed the body was Davis.
— Sonia Lente disappeared in 2002. Last June, an amateur cybersleuth with the Doe Network, a nationwide volunteer group that helps law enforcement solve cold cases, noticed similarities between Lente's description in NamUs and an unidentified body found near Albuquerque, N.M., in 2004. Dental records later established it was Lente. Detective Stuart Somershoe of the Phoenix Police Department said his agency, which has over 500 open missing persons cases, just finished entering 100 cases into NamUs. He's hopeful his department can make a match.
"It's kind of time-consuming but I think it's a worthwhile program," Somershoe said.
NamUs grew out of a Justice Department task force working on the challenge of solving missing persons cases. One need that the task force identified was to give people who could help solve cases better access to database information.
"Billy's Law" sailed through the House late last month and is pending in the Senate, where supporters are confident it will easily pass.
The bill would authorize $10 million in grants annually that police, sheriffs, medical examiners and coroners could use to train people to use NamUs and to help cover the costs of entering data into the system. It would also authorize another $2.4 million a year to run the system and ensure permanent funding. The bill would also link NamUs with a major FBI crime database that's now available only to law enforcement, partly because it contains sensitive information about ongoing investigations. That confidential data would be withheld from NamUs when necessary.
Billy Smolinski, of Waterbury, Conn., was last seen Aug. 24, 2004, when he asked a neighbor to look after his dog. His pickup truck was later found outside his home, though not where he usually parked it. His wallet and other belongings were still inside.
The Smolinski family first struggled to get police to take a missing adult case seriously. It took a long time for investigators to finally conclude Billy had been killed, perhaps as a result of a love triangle gone sour. The family put up reward posters, searched places where they thought his body might have been hidden and kept pressure on police.
Smolinski said she came to see how police were often overwhelmed, but to her NamUs is a "no-brainer."
"If they find remains I'm hopeful they'll identify him through NamUs," Smolinski said. ___ On the Net: National Missing and Unidentified Persons System: http://www.namus.gov
Glendene Grant has never given up hope that her daughter is still alive. 
Now, four years after the disappearance of her daughter, Grant is circulating three "age-progressed" sketches of what Jessie might now look like. They're drawn by Diana Trepkov, a forensic artist who's worked with police departments across North America. 
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