By ANDREW HANON, Edmonton Sun
March 16, 2010 9:33pm
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.
It’s a pain that Atkinson knows all too well.
“It’s like dominos falling.”
Courtesy of the EDMONTON SUN
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