Missing and Murdered Women: Prince George

Showing posts with label Prince George. Show all posts

Sunday, March 7

Highway of Tears case began with three teens

Police realized a serial killer may be at work after bodies of young women found near Highway 16

By Lori Culbert and Neal Hall, Vancouver Sun

March 7, 2010

Ramona Wilson

Photograph by: Family photo, Vancouver Sun

How did the police investigation, commonly referred to as the Highway of Tears case, begin?

What was behind the RCMP's decision to create a team of officers to re-investigate unsolved cases of missing and murdered women in northern and central B.C., some of which date back decades?

Police have been tight-lipped about this high-profile operation, but its team commander, Staff Sgt. Bruce Hulan, sat down with The Vancouver Sun to explain why and how it all started.

It began with three teenage girls who were killed in the span of six months in 1994: Ramona Wilson, Roxanne Thiara and Alisha (Leah) Germaine.

In the fall of 2005, B.C.'s Unsolved Homicide Unit, which also falls under Hulan's command, was asked to examine the three cold cases because RCMP behaviour-science experts -- also known as profilers -- had looked at those files and found some similarities.

"We reviewed the files with the view of whether we could identify or say the homicides had been committed by the same person, or whether there was a reason to believe there were three separate killers," Hulan said during an interview last week.

"There was rumour, speculation and media reports in the north suggesting that a serial killer was responsible for these and other files," he explained.

"So part of our mandate was to determine if there was a serial killer responsible and also trying to identify investigative strategies to move those three files forward."

Ramona was 16 years old when she vanished June 11, 1994 in Smithers, after telling her mother she was going to meet some friends and attend a dance in a nearby community. The Grade 10 high school student never made it to her friend's house and her body was found near the Smithers airport, within a short distance of Highway 16, in April 1995.

Roxanne, 15, supported a drug addiction by selling sex in Prince George. She was last seen working the streets on the July long weekend in 1994. Her body was found the following month near Burns Lake along Highway 16.

Leah Germaine was also 15 and working the streets of Prince George when she disappeared on Dec. 9, 1994. Her body was found a few hours later near an elementary school on the outskirts of Prince George, close to Highway 16.

Those three cases marked the birth of Project E-Pana, which was named by one of the investigators after the mythological Inuit god Pana, who cared for souls in the afterlife until they were reincarnated. The operation is now an integrated one, including members of the RCMP and Vancouver police.

But, Hulan said, the officers soon realized that if they were looking for evidence of a possible serial killer, they would have to broaden the scope of their probe beyond three files.

The criteria for the addition of any more cases was that the victims were female and had to match at least one of the following scenarios:

- Involvement in a high-risk activity that would expose them to danger, such as hitchhiking or prostitution.

- They were either last seen or their bodies were found within a mile of Highway 16.

The officers looked through their databases, such as ViCLAS [Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System] and CPIC [Canadian Police Information Centre], and decided in the spring of 2006 to review six more files.

They were mainly unsolved murders or missing person files involving young women between 1990 and 2006, stretching from Prince Rupert to Prince George.

The public has dubbed Project E-Pana as the Highway of Tears case.

Many of the victims' families have been critical of the treatment they received from the RCMP when their loved ones first went missing, and question how thorough those original investigations were.

"That was then," Hulan said, insisting all victims are treated equally by E-Pana.

He said a modern-day investigation also has access to new technologies, such as DNA testing, that the original investigators did not.

Project E-Pana started with a whimper, rather than a roar, because officers decided all the paper files associated with the historical cases needed to be entered into the RCMP's evidence and reports database. That was necessary, Hulan said, because there were more than 200 boxes of paperwork associated with the nine cases and there was no other way to track whether a suspect's name surfaced in box No. 3 and box No. 133 unless it was all computerized.

Hulan had hoped the data input work could be done in about three months, but the tedious job took close to a year.

And then the files had to be thoroughly reviewed by investigators looking for similar suspects and other common links.

In the meantime, current and retired investigators were providing the names of other potential victims for E-Pana to check out, beyond the nine they had identified. That prompted an expansion of the review to include unsolved cases along Highway 97 and Highway 5 into communities such as Quesnel, Williams Lake, Kamloops and Merritt.

By October 2007, the RCMP had announced the list had doubled to 18 victims, spanning nearly four decades: from 1969 to 2006. The geographical scope had also expanded, into B.C.'s Interior and as far east as Hinton, Alberta.

Investigators reviewed more than 600 files and by February 2009 decided no other cases would be added to the list.

That has been a controversial decision for some family members and advocates, who believe other victims should be included in the Highway of Tears case.

Hulan said the provincial government has committed to funding the project until all the identified files are thoroughly reviewed for any new evidence and all leads are pursued, which could take another three to five years.

lculbert@vancouversun.com

Wednesday, February 10

Federal Liberals call for Highway of Tears national investigation

Published: February 09, 2010 11:00 PM

The federal Liberal Party is calling for a national inquiry into the missing and murdered women along Highway 16, also referred to as the Highway of Tears.

Anita Neville, the Liberals’ critic on the status of women, was in Prince George Friday to meet with groups and families of victims regarding the murders and disappearances.

“My leader, Michael Ignatieff, has made it clear when we’re elected we would make a call for a national investigation,” Neville said. “The Native Women’s Association of Canada has identified 520 aboriginal women who are missing or murdered (since 1970). If a planeload of 520 people went down, you could be sure there would be a national investigation.”

Currently the provincial E-PANA police task force is investigating 18 women and girls missing or murdered along B.C.’s highways. Of those 10 cases are from the stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert.

“Certainly the provincial governments are responding, and that is good, but everyone is responding in a different way,” Neville said. “It’s a national tragedy. It’s a national stain. (But) there is not a comprehensive, coordinated strategy... led by the federal government.”

There are multiple models a national investigation could be based on, such as the investigation in the Air India bombing, which could be drawn on, she added.

“I don’t know exactly what that looks like,” Neville said. “(But) I think what would be required is to meet with a whole range of stakeholders.”

Neville said she has raised the issue several times with the Department of Justice, but receive little response.

Project E-PANA spokeswoman Corp. Annie Linteau said it’s difficult to say if a national investigation or inquiry would be beneficial to the investigation.

“The RCMP is always supportive of any public forum. (But) an inquiry would not be helpful at this time,” Linteau said. “We’re conducting an active investigation... and we are not in a position to disclose our evidence in a public forum.”

Currently 69 officers and civilian staff are dedicated to Project E-PANA.

Additional resources are dedicated to cases of missing and murdered women through Project Evenhanded in Vancouver, Project KARE in and around Edmonton and Manitoba’s missing person/cold case project, Linteau said.

Linteau said without knowing the details of what a national investigation would look like, it’s hard to determine if it would benefit the investigations.

Cariboo-Prince George MP Dick Harris said he is confident in the current police investigations into the cases.

“We have a coordinated investigation between four provinces now, all along Highway 16 from Manitoba to Prince Rupert,” Harris said. “A national investigation has a good sound to it, but what would it achieve?”

Harris said he believes the call for a national investigation is about politics, not solving cases.

“This is a tragedy. This is not something to politicize,” he said. “If she’s using this issue for political reasons, I’m saddened by that.”

http://bit.ly/bLgKyF

Highway of Tears

http://www.highwayoftears.ca/

Friday, December 11

How the Vanishing Point series developed

December 11, 2009

Many women have vanished or been found murdered along the highways of B.C. and Alberta over the past 40 years.

Photograph by: Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun

For the first time, a Vancouver Sun investigation reveals the full story behind the Highway of Tears victims and raises questions about other similar unsolved cases in B.C. and Alberta.

The cases date back to the murder of Gloria Levina Moody in 1969 and end with the murder of a 14-year-old Prince George high school student in 2006. The youngest victim to meet violence along the province's highway was 12.

Neal Hall has covered many high-profile cases for the Vancouver Sun, including the court proceedings in the Clifford Olson case. He teamed up with Lori Culbert on the Robert Pickton case and has been reporting on the Highway of Tears since the beginning.

Hall and Culbert joined forces for the Vancouver Sun's investigative series on the missing and murdered women along the highways of B.C. and Alberta. Culbert recently travelled to northern B.C. with photographer Ian Smith for the series.

http://www.vancouversun.com/Vanishing+Point+series+developed/2280893/story.html

Friday, October 16

Frost still missing after 39 years

Written by Frank Peebles
Citizen staff
Thursday, 15 October 2009

Helen Frost is still missing and still loved by her family, 39 years after she disappeared from Prince George.

Tuesday was the anniversary of her disappearance in 1970 and on Saturday she would have been 57. Her parents in Nanaimo still hope for the day Frost walks through their door and sister Sandy Barnet, now living in the Lower Mainland, still remembers when the two were living with a friend on Queensway when Frost didn't come home one day.

"She left in the evening. I didn't contact the police until two days later, because I didn't know what was going on until then, and there was nothing done in the media, no posters put up, zero. That's just the way it was done back then," Barnet told The Citizen. "And being young myself back then, I didn't know there was any way to push. We just went ourselves out looking. The police back then didn't do anything. Maybe they (police) discuss it, but there doesn't seem to be any new rocks to turn over."

Barnet wonders why Frost was never put on the Highway of Tears list like other missing women from around the region, dating back to about the same time.

On the other hand, she has no evidence Frost met with foul play, and on two occasions in the 1970s - once in Nanaimo and once in Cranbrook - good friends believed they sighted the missing girl, but these were not confirmed.

"To be clear, this investigation has never ceased, it has always been something we have worked on, but sometimes we get new directions to go in, so we would like to bring this to public attention again," said Prince George RCMP spokesman Const. Gary Godwin.

Frost was a troubled girl, said Barnet. The two sisters lived together with a friend in a Prince George apartment. The friend had a baby, and Frost had recently given birth to a child that she gave up for adoption in May of that year. However, the family ties were strong, there was a support network that was in place, and Barnet said it still is.

"My parents and I are on excellent terms; they were on good terms with us then, too, we lucked out on the draw and have great parents," she said. "They were in Nanaimo, and they're in the same house to this day. Us girls had some rebellion going on as teenagers but nothing out of the ordinary, but that was over, we were on our own by then. Helen was 17, I was 19."

Anyone who knows anything about the activities of Helen Frost in October, 1970, or her whereabouts is asked to call Prince George RCMP at 250-561-3300, or give the information anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS / www.pgcrimestoppers.bc.ca

http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/20091015999910325/local/news/frost-still-missing-after-39-years.html

Sunday, August 30

Police search dry well as B.C. missing women's case expands

By Sam Cooper, Vancouver Province
August 30, 2009 8:03 AM

Police in British Columbia began to examine a well in a central part of the province Saturday, as they searched for evidence in the disappearance of an Alberta woman who vanished seven years ago on the so-called Highway of Tears.

RCMP have confirmed they are looking for the remains of Nicole Hoar, 25, of Red Deer, Alta., on a two-hectare rural lot in the small lumber town of Isle Pierre, about 50 kilometres northwest of Prince George.

"The police are digging at Chug's old place because of what I told them," says Cindy Mortimer. "I said, ‘You better look down the well. He poured diesel fuel down there and lit it on fire.' "

Mortimer, 46, was referring to a well on the Pinewood Road property previously owned by Leland Switzer, known to most in the tiny sawmill town of Isle Pierre simply as "Chug."

Switzer is currently in prison for shooting his brother Irwin dead in 2002, just two days after Hoar, who was hitchhiking, went missing from a gas station on the outskirts of Prince George.

Hoar is one of 18 women to have vanished on the route from Prince George to Prince Rupert, a bleak ribbon of pavement bordered by shrivelled black, red and grey pine trees, standing like matchsticks.

Late in the day, RCMP announced they are looking for a man who may have information in connection with Hoar. The unknown male may have information that may assist in the investigation, they said.

In a release, police said the description of the man 2002 was as follows: Caucasian male, described to be in his mid-fifties, black shoulder length hair, very skinny face, sunken eyes, scruffy appearance, thin glasses, was a smoker and had a pronounced jagged scar on the left side of his neck.

Area residents said they aren't surprised the RCMP is digging up Switzer's former property — only surprised it's taken this long to happen. Some say they sense a number of families in the bundle of unsolved cases are about to get closure. "And I'll be able to sleep better at night," Mortimer said.

Mortimer and another Switzer neighbour, Wally Anderson, 68, claimed they've been giving tips to Prince George RCMP Sgt. Judy Thomas since Switzer went to jail.

Anderson says he sniffed the diesel in Switzer's well years ago.

On Saturday, Anderson went back to the place where he believes he discovered a woman's remains in November 2008.

He alleged Switzer had bragged to Mortimer about killing his brother on the day it was done, and at the same time, suggested that Mortimer look in a side-road junk heap near Isle Pierre, under an appliance.

Anderson stood on the spot, where locals throw trash and butcher moose, and pointed to the spot where he walked through a light snow and turned over a fridge, finding a bag of bones. He says when he took the bones to police, they didn't take him seriously.

"I never drive by a deep freezer without checking," he said.

Cynthia and James Andal, who live on the property which backs onto the former Switzer property, say Switzer terrorized and threatened everyone in Isle Pierre, even scaring off a young couple on the next door lot with a shotgun.

"Chug was a nasty piece of work," Cynthia said. "He wasn't physically imposing; he just had a weird look. He was crazy."

James Andal says eight years ago, Switzer walked up to the family's laneway and started a conversation that almost ended in a fight. "He said, ‘Why did you phone the police on me?' I had to just walk away."

"We worried about our children," Cynthia added. "It's disturbing to think you could have been there when something was happening."

The Andals say stories about Switzer were common. Mortimer said he was married to a tough, pretty woman named Karen, and children were removed from their home by authorities.

Saturday, a 15-member search-and-rescue team and a geoscientist using ground-penetrating radar identified additional areas for excavation.

In the morning, police searched the four-metre dry well mentioned by Mortimer, and around noon they seized a crumpled yellow pickup truck for forensic examination, located up a steep 500-metre rock road at a dump on Crown land matching the description given by Mortimer.

At 2:30 p.m. local time, a team of dogs trained in locating human remains arrived on site from Alberta.

All of the missing or deceased women, except Hoar were First Nations women; 13 are confirmed homicides and five are still considered missing.

A man who works at the Isle Pierre sawmill said Switzer had done some welding there, and liked to "spout off stories."

"I heard a lot of crazy s—," the man, who did not want to be named, said. "After he went to jail, women stopped disappearing."

scooper@theprovince.com

Friday, August 28

Murder and racism along the Highway of Tears

By Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun columnist
August 28, 2009 9:01 PM

With the news that RCMP were searching a property near Prince George for the remains of Nicole Hoar, there was in that grisly development in the Highway of Tears investigation something that remained unsaid.

Hoar was an anomaly. She was white.

Of the nine females originally listed by the RCMP as missing along Highway 16 — a list, in retrospect, that now seems laughably small — Hoar was the sole Caucasian, an Alberta girl who was working as a tree planter in the Prince George area. She was also, at 25, the eldest of the nine.

The other eight were aboriginal.

Of those eight, four were 15.

When the RCMP expanded the investigation’s area of interest (reacting, perhaps, to the insistence in the aboriginal community that many more women were missing), the force began looking at similar cases as far afield as Alberta and far northern B.C. Another nine names were added to the list in October 2007, bringing the total to 18.

Aileah Saric-Auger, a high school student from Prince George, became the youngest victim on the revised list, and the most recent. Aileah was 14, and had gone missing in February 2006. Her body was found eight days later in a ditch along Highway 16.

The revised list also expanded the investigation’s time span. The oldest case now went all the way back to 1969 — Gloria Moody, found dead in Williams Lake. Forty years would seem to test the limit of “cold case,” in that the chances of some kind of resolution are now positively frigid. It is this growing distance between crime and the possibility of punishment that is not only a source of frustration for the aboriginal community, but evidence to that community of systemic racism.

In the database of the Native Women’s Association of Canada, there are 520 “known” cases of native women going missing or being murdered, and half of those cases have happened since 2000.

B.C. has the distinction of leading all provinces by a wide margin, with 137.

These murders and disappearances have been going on for decades, however, including in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and critics have charged that investigations into them lapsed because of meagre police resources or, worse, the disinterest of society at large to pursue them. Put more bluntly, racism.

“When I reported my sister missing,” said Lucy Glaim, of Smithers, who was once the youth justice worker for the Wet’sewet’en Unlocking Aboriginal Justice program, “[the RCMP officer] just said something like, ‘She’s just found a party or something, so give her a couple of days.’”

Those couple of days turned into an eternity: Glaim’s sister, Delphine Nikal, disappeared on the morning of June 14, 1990, while hitchhiking from Smithers to a friend’s house in nearby Telkwa. She was never seen again. Glaim had reported her missing the following morning. Delphine was 16.

Glaim’s niece, Cicilia Anne Nikal, had also disappeared a year earlier, and was last seen in Smithers near Highway 16. But her name was not included on the list of 18 because RCMP maintain she was reported missing in Vancouver.

That scenario was contradicted in the 2006 report that came out of the Highway of Tears Symposium in Prince George. The symposium came about because the case file had reached such a critical mass of numbers that it could no longer be ignored. Police, government and media were forced to take notice. It was in that report that Cicilia Anne’s name was included, and that she was “last seen in Smithers near Highway 16.”

There was also this remarkable paragraph in the report’s preamble:

“There is much community speculation and debate on the exact number of women that have disappeared along Highway 16. . . . Many are saying the number of missing women, combined with the number of confirmed murdered women, exceeds 30.”

It then goes on to say that “the exact number of missing women has yet to be determined.”

The exact number? More than 30? The unintended dispassion of those passages screams out at the reader. If there was the possibility of 30 or more women going missing in, say, Dunbar, there wouldn’t be a polite “debate” about numbers. There wouldn’t be a symposium 40 years down the road. There would be immediate wholesale alarm.

Some 33 recommendations came out of that report, some of which have been implemented and some not. A key one — the creation of a shuttle bus service between communities along the highway to remove the need for poor aboriginal women to resort to hitchhiking — has not been realized. Hitchhiking remains common. But one recommendation that did see fruition was the creation of a coordinator for the Highway to Tears program. The coordinator was to act as a liaison between police, affected families and government.

Mavis Erickson, of the Carrier Sekani Family Services in Prince George, is the present coordinator. She is concentrating her efforts, she said, on getting the provincial government to hold an inquiry into the investigations. She has a meeting with Attorney-General Mike de Jong in October.

“It’s been 40 years, and we haven’t had an arrest,” Erickson said. “Many times, we talk to families of women who have been murdered or who have gone missing, and they don’t know what’s going in on the investigations.

“Hopefully, [an inquiry] will answer some questions.”

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com, 604-605-2905

Highway of Tears

RCMP step up investigation into 18 dead or missing women along Highway 16 in northern B.C.