Showing posts with label Sarah de Vries. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 14

Pickton inquiry needs broad scope

BY LIZ STONARD, TIMES COLONIST
SEPTEMBER 14, 2010

While an inquiry into police investigations of missing women and Robert Pickton is appropriate, it would be unfair to leave it at that.

Pickton's victims and all other women who have been or will become victims of such vile predators deserve more. And the police, whose "Odd Squad" and others have done yeomen's duty in past years to shed light on the depths of medical and social issues plaguing Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, deserve more.

After all, our police are not solely responsible for protecting society's vulnerable.

Their ability to do their job depends on broader support from government agencies such as social services.

So besides inquiring into police investigations, it is past time to also inquire what government social-service supports have been available to our most vulnerable citizens.

Services that should include more than just doling out financial allowances and referring clients to a host of unco-ordinated, non-government-funded community resources.

Do government social services take a social history of their clients, like medical personnel take a medical history? Does government just tell clients what government thinks they should have, rather than finding out what they actually need? How many of Pickton's victims had tried to access the government ministry responsible for social services, only to find access difficult, if not impossible?

Let's have an inquiry into government policies that have contributed to the vulnerability of these women who are then easy prey for predators like the Robert Picktons of the world.

Liz Stonard

Port Alberni

© Copyright (c) The Victoria Times Colonist

Comment: Big question, hardly ever talked about. What happened to many of these women as children in their own families while growing up, whether they were in foster care or their natural family? Was there abuse? Violence, sexual, psychological abuse? Something happens to a child and then we don’t hear their story until they do end up in the survival sex trade and in many cases murdered by people like Pickton.

Any statistics through studies that you can quote state that 80 to 90 percent of women in the survival sex trade have been abused as children. Let’s deal with it. Let’s talk about it. Let’s do something positive instead of always having to deal with the end result. Violence and murder.

R.I.P. Sarah Jean de Vries.

- Wayne

Friday, August 20

Police could have caught Robert Pickton earlier and prevented deaths: police report

BY LINDSAY KINES, VICTORIA TIMES COLONIST AUGUST 18, 2010

Frame grab of Robert Pickton while in his jail cell on February 23, 2002.

Photograph by: Handout, Postmedia News

VICTORIA — Police could have caught serial killer Robert Pickton years earlier and likely prevented the deaths of more than a dozen women, an internal Vancouver police investigation concludes.

The report has remained under wraps for more than a year because of court proceedings, publication bans, and now because the B.C. government wants time to study the findings.

But sources familiar with its contents say one of the report's main conclusions is that women's lives could have been saved.

The report, which runs to more than 400 pages, is likely to stir controversy because, while it finds considerable fault with the Vancouver police investigation, it also lays much of the blame on the RCMP for failing to nab Pickton sooner, sources say.

The report says RCMP officers from the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam took the lead on pursuing Pickton as a suspect as early as 1998, because he resided in their jurisdiction where the murders were suspected to have occurred. Yet while some RCMP investigators took the file seriously at first, the detachment eventually let it languish for months on end despite frequent prodding from Vancouver detectives, the report says.

The review concludes that there was enough evidence pointing at Pickton as the prime suspect by mid-1999 for the RCMP to start pulling out all the stops in their investigation — some 2 1/2 years before Pickton's eventual arrest in February 2002.

During that period, more than a dozen women, some of whose DNA was later found at the farm, vanished from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

Vancouver police Deputy Chief Doug LePard authored the report, which Vancouver police officers have been allowed to read at police headquarters for training purposes. It is also circulating in the government.

LePard spent years reviewing the case, interviewed all the major players, and does not spare his own department, detailing extensive problems with the Vancouver police's handling of the file, sources say.

A number of those problems were first documented by the Vancouver Sun in a 2001 report, which found that the department relied upon overworked police officers without the time or resources to do a thorough job. The investigation was also hampered by infighting, computer problems and inadequate training, police sources told the newspaper at the time.

LePard confirms a number of those concerns, according to some of the same sources for the original Vancouver Sun report. But LePard's report notes that while the Vancouver police investigation was inadequate, it still identified Pickton as a suspect, only to have the RCMP drop the ball.

In one instance, Pickton agreed to a voluntary search of his property, but the RCMP never followed up on that offer, the report says.

The Vancouver police have been seething for years that they have borne the brunt of criticism for the case, while the RCMP took credit for finally arresting Pickton.

Former Vancouver police chief Jamie Graham, who assigned LePard to do the review, told the Vancouver Sun in 2002 that the attacks on the Vancouver police were "scandalous" and inaccurate. At the time, the department was incensed by an NBC Dateline report, which suggested Vancouver police had the name of the prime suspect all along, and did nothing with it until the RCMP rode in to save the day.

Graham, who is now chief of the Victoria police department, declined to comment on the contents of LePard's report Tuesday.

But sources say the report sets the record straight by showing that the RCMP were leading the pursuit of Pickton from the outset and let him get away.

The report says police never fully committed to the theory that a serial killer was at work, and that undermined requests for more resources, sources say.

Those findings, combined with the recent revelation that DNA evidence linking Pickton to two of the missing women remained in an RCMP storage locker for seven years before it was tested, are likely to fuel calls for a public inquiry into the police investigation.

Attorney General Mike de Jong has so far refused to commit to an inquiry, saying he needs time to read the internal Vancouver police and RCMP reviews.

He is expected to take the matter to a provincial cabinet meeting next month.

The Vancouver police service, which has supported calls for a public inquiry, will not be commenting on its internal review until after the cabinet meeting, Const. Jana McGuinness said Tuesday.

Former Vancouver police officer Kim Rossmo, who has written a book on criminal investigative failures, said LePard's report suggests the need for a "focused, productive inquiry."

Now teaching at Texas State University, Rossmo was given a copy of LePard's report after signing a confidentiality agreement.

"Fascinating is the word," he said, when asked for his reaction to the report. "It is a significant autopsy into a failed criminal investigation, and there's much to be learned from it.

"Despite my involvement with the case, and my continued connection through various people, I've learned a lot that I did not know before."

Rossmo said any politicians or journalists already dismissing calls for an inquiry should wait until they've seen the report.

"I think it's absolutely essential that this be made public for the good of policing and for community safety," he said.

It's well known that Pickton first surfaced as a suspect in the summer of 1998. At the time, Wayne Leng, a friend of one of the missing women, had set up a toll-free line for information on her whereabouts. He received a tip on the line about Pickton and passed it along to Vancouver police.

Investigators followed up and interviewed the tipster, who told them a woman had spotted bags of bloody clothing and women's identification while cleaning Pickton's trailer.

The detectives also knew that Pickton had been accused of trying to murder a sex-trade worker at his farm in March 1997. Both he and the woman suffered serious injuries in the incident and all the charges against him were later stayed. It was in the aftermath of this incident that police seized Pickton's boots and clothing, but the items were never tested until 2004 — two years after his arrest. The tests detected the DNA of two of the missing women.

The tip about the bloody clothing, along with the earlier attempted murder charge against Pickton, elevated him on the list of suspects. RCMP and Vancouver police investigators pursued Pickton throughout 1998 and into 1999, showing his picture to sex trade workers on the Downtown Eastside and even putting him under surveillance.

By mid-1999, Vancouver police had developed a second source who told them about a woman who claimed to have seen a butchered body on Pickton's property. Police tracked down the woman and interviewed her in August 1999.

The woman would later become a key witness at Pickton's trial, but at the time of the first police interviews, she denied seeing a body.

Up to this point, there had been talk of getting wiretap or running an undercover operation. But the provincial Unsolved Homicide Unit got involved, challenged the reliability of some of the source information, and the investigation apparently stalled at this point, sources say.

Coquitlam RCMP continued to take responsibility for pursuing Pickton as a suspect. But LePard's report suggests the RCMP went for months without doing anything on the file. The report also criticizes senior managers within the Vancouver police for failing to press the RCMP to do more.

It wasn't until February 2002 that a rookie RCMP constable gained access to the farm on a warrant looking for firearms, and found items belonging to the missing women.

Pickton was eventually charged with murdering 27 women whose body parts or DNA was found on his farm. He was convicted on six counts on Dec. 9, 2007, one other charge was stayed, and the Crown recently stayed the remaining 20 charges after the Supreme Court of Canada rejected Pickton's bid for a new trial. The DNA of six other missing women was also found at the farm, but Pickton was never charged in those cases.

Wednesday, August 11

Suffering in silence

Robert Pickton silenced up to 49 women forever, but many survive sexual violence who still aren't free to speak out

BY CONSTANCE BACKHOUSE, CITIZEN SPECIAL AUGUST 11, 2010 7:53 AM

A woman lights candles at the courthouse in New Westminster, B.C., in memory of the victims of serial killer Robert Pickton after he was found guilty in December 2007. This month, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict in six cases.

Photograph by: Andy Clark, Reuters, Citizen Special

I opened my newspaper last week to full-page spreads of dramatic news on the Robert Pickton serial murders. The Supreme Court had upheld the findings of guilt in the murders of six women. The Crown Attorney had stayed all charges on 20 others. Now that the interminable appeals had lumbered to completion, the press was free to divulge the details withheld earlier under the trial judge's gag order.

I hesitated. Could I bear to read about these horrific crimes -- the chainsaws, the slaughterhouse, the blood, the hair, the fragments of jawbones, the pieces of teeth, the freezer bags?

Some days it feels like the world is too much filled with the sexualized images of tortured women. Pornography assaults us from the Internet. Nightly TV features naked women, some duct-taped, others rigged out in sadistic fetish equipment or stretched flat on coroners' slabs, all packaged up as crime-show entertainment.

I took a deep breath and read on. Some newspapers were more discreet, some more salacious, but the coverage was still unbearably grisly.

In the end, what leaped out at me were the voices silenced in this frenzy of attention. The 26 dead women. The up to 23 others the police admit they believe Pickton killed. And these are only the ones we know about. What of the many other women who must have crossed Robert Pickton's path in his 60-year lifetime? Do we suppose he was a model of decorum in his dealings with the others? How many more were sexually abused, exploited, and assaulted?

Fifty-one per cent of Canadian women have experienced at least one act of sexual or physical violence. This shocking finding comes from Statistics Canada data. Do we suppose the government will ever allow the unfairly-maligned agency to update the survey?

We live in a culture where the imagery of sexual violence flourishes on every corner, but the gritty reality of it is almost never described. Fewer than 10 per cent of the women who are sexually assaulted ever report the crime. Treasury Board president Stockwell Day muses about unreported crime, but his solution of longer sentences and more prisons is laughable. It will do nothing to facilitate disclosure.

Perhaps what we need to do is to reframe this as a "free-speech" issue.

Maybe that would redirect attention to the real problem. The uproar that greeted Ann Coulter's purported silencing recently at the University of Ottawa was insistent in its message: Even hateful speakers must be given a platform, a room in a publicly-funded educational institution, and an audience. I thought at the time how unfair it was that some people's free speech gets protected and others' goes overwhelmingly silenced.

Look around you at school, the workplace, the grocery store, the street where you live. Half of the women you see have been abused. Why don't they talk about it? Why have we created a society in which the shame falls on the victimized? It makes no sense that people are embarrassed to speak about their sexual assault, child abuse, sexual harassment, and battering. The humiliation should fall squarely on the abusers. Why is it seemingly impossible to name names of the men who perpetrate this violence?

And why do the few brave women who speak out get spurned? Like the woman who managed to escape Pickton's murderous assault in 1997.

After valiantly resisting his misogynist rage, she lay unconscious in hospital for four days with stab wounds to her chest, abdomen, hands, and arms. Her credible story was buttressed by physical evidence and independent witnesses to her handcuffs and life-threatening injuries. But the Crown attorney thought her lifestyle was more important than her testimony. The case was never prosecuted because she was deemed too "unstable" to appear in court.

And sometimes others who dare to speak, to name names, are hit with slap-suits for defamation. Where are the civil libertarians then? Why are there no cries of "unfair, unfair?" Surely this is another free-speech issue.

Why does Ann Coulter get to speak, but we stand by while those who muster the courage to disclose sexual exploitation are intimidated by million-dollar lawsuits?

In the 1960s and 70s, a new wave of feminists started to hold consciousness-raising meetings, where many finally felt safe enough to talk openly about the violence they experienced. Hundreds of audacious women then stood up at "speak-outs" to identify themselves publicly as survivors of sexual exploitation and violence.

It was a moment when the culture might have shifted, opening up free speech for the masses.

We need to learn more about what made that speech possible, and how we can recapture the energy of those times.

Because when women and children are free to speak about sexual and physical abuse, our world will transform.

Constance Backhouse is a professor of law at the University of Ottawa and co-founder of the non-profit Feminist History Society, FeministHistories.ca.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Comment: Renegade98

8:14 AM on August 11, 2010

Constance, your right in saying that free speech is protected for some and not others. I think we have all experienced that.

You read about the woman that got spurned by the system, the crown see's her as not reliable because she was an addict, and we all know who she was, but her name is still under a media ban and we know Pickton definitely tried to kill her.

When you say that 51 percent of woman we see on the street have been abused sexually and other ways, well in the downtown Eastside, women involved in the survival sex trade, the rate according to stats through studies goes from around 80 to 90 percent.

My friend is one of the murdered. Pickton was charged with her murder, and now the charges have been stayed. In her own words, she was sexually abused as a child by her father, as she told me and many of her friends, she wrote about it and I have read those journal articles and it's disgusting, but it's not news, reporters asked me during the trial whether there was any truth to those

Wednesday, August 4

Sarah deVries: 1 of 20 women for whose murder Pickton will never be tried

BY SUZANNE FOURNIER, THE PROVINCEAUGUST 4, 2010 5:43 PM

Sarah deVries.jpg

Photograph by: Handout, PNG Archive

Sarah deVries, a vibrant, beautiful woman known on the Downtown Eastside as Black Sarah, was the poster child for Vancouver’s missing women.

She took care with her appearance, dressing well if flamboyantly, and poured out her sensitive soul in poetry and diaries.

She began fleeing her upper-middle-class West Point Grey home for the Downtown Eastside before even turning 13. For more than 14 years she was a common sight, blithely rollerblading through the drug-infested streets. She vanished in 1998, and her DNA was found at Robert “Willie” Pickton’s farm.

Her murder falls in the 20 counts for which Pickton will not be tried.

DeVries could be found chatting or teaming up with other working women, or plying her trade alone in her short, short skirt on the corner of Princess and Hastings streets.

When a TV crew sought out women on the Downtown Eastside for a documentary, deVries was a natural choice.

Her gaze was direct, her words emotional. She appeared intent on engaging the other side, telling the camera there are only three ways off the street: “You go to jail, you end up dead, or you do a life sentence.”

She was articulate, had many friends, two children and kept in touch with her adopted family, showing up for Christmas and always calling home on her mother’s birthday, April 17.

DeVries’ disappearance without a trace in the pre-dawn hours of April 14, 1988 spooked her friends.

They felt that if the predator they all believed was out there could snatch deVries and get away with it, no one was safe.

The story of deVries’ disappearance has been told and re-told by Wayne Leng, a former customer. He says he gave deVries the $27 he had in his pocket and dropped her off in the Downtown Eastside, where she met up with a friend named Sylvia Skakum.

She and Skakum fixed heroin and went to work at Princess and Hastings. Skakum got a trick, rode around the block with him in his car and got out back on her corner when they couldn’t agree on a price.

DeVries had vanished.

DeVries’ sudden disappearance galvanized her adopted sister Maggie deVries into searching for her and pressuring the Vancouver police, who appeared to care no more about deVries than any of the dozens of other prostitutes who had disappeared.

Wayne Leng, her former customer, plastered the streets with posters, set up a 1-800 tipline and created a website. It became an international focus for the media and the grieving relatives of the women who were gone.

Leng’s pursuit drew the interest of NBC’s America’s Most Wanted, which did a story on deVries’ disappearance and the dozens of other drug-addicted sex-trade workers who had disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Maggie has written a book about her sister, called Missing Sarah, based on deVries’ life and her personal diaries.

Maggie chose not to attend the preliminary hearing or to find out how women died at Pickton’s hands, preferring to focus on the engaging parts of deVries’ personality and the feelings she expressed in her journals, which seemed to be addressed directly to an audience.

As a child, deVries was bright, engaging and always reaching for her crayons.

She scribbled words to express her thoughts, a habit she kept up all of her life, maintaining a diary in some form no matter how transient or troubled her lifestyle became.

From a spacious Spanish Banks home, poised on tree-lined streets above miles of beach, deVries lived out her life on the dangerous Downtown Eastside, almost predicting her own death in her diaries.

Adopted at 11 months into the family of Pat and Peter deVries, deVries was the youngest of four children.

Her adoptive mother was a busy professional head nurse. Her father, a University of B.C. science professor, appears to have adored deVries, but called her “his little chocolate drop” and “nigger girl,” according to some of her friends who cite passages in the journals she kept all her life.

Her parents separated when she was nine, and deVries told friends later she didn’t like being required to spend time alone with her father. Pat was busy in her job as a head nurse.

DeVries may have been given the music, ballet and riding lessons typical of a privileged upbringing but she repeatedly fled her home in favour of a Downtown Eastside “family” of addicts and a boyfriend who was soon her pimp.

Of mixed aboriginal, Hispanic and black heritage, deVries was an adorable child with warm brown skin and curly black hair, but she faced racial prejudice as soon as she went to school in the wealthy, mostly white westside of the 1970s.

DeVries once told a friend that all she knew of her Mexican-born birth mother was that she was beautiful and loved taking risks, like skydiving.

DeVries’ life became a descent into extreme risk-taking.

Every day she faced the danger of the Downtown Eastside low-track sex trade, where predators carried out brutal assaults with seeming impunity, often barely escaping with her life. She became infected with HIV and hepatitis C.

Ken Craig, a retired longshoreman who also adored deVries and says she often came to his home for a bath and rest from her difficult street life, shows some pieces of paper from her journal that she left behind with him.

DeVries left behind portions of her diaries that say her father called her his “chocolate drop” and his “nigger girl.”

She wrote poems and diary entries in which she poured out the anguish of being a drug-addicted hooker, vulnerable to vicious predators and physically dependent on a merciless drug craving which ruled her every move.

Some of her writing seems to try to educate the public about the humanity and vulnerability of sex-trade workers like her, who somehow know that their life is even more fragile because society doesn’t appear to value who they are.

Together with her chilling narrative about an assault by a violent predator in which she barely escaped with her life, running naked along a highway only to be picked up by a propositioning truck driver and then by a well-dressed man who dumped her, the pessimistic tone of deVries’ own writing suggests no one would notice or protest her death.

Her family and Wayne Leng believe she died in terror at the hands of Robert Pickton.

But some of her friends point out that very little of her DNA was ever recovered at the Pickton farm.

They say that deVries was murdered by someone who felt that if he couldn’t have her, no one could.

Just before she disappeared in the early hours of April 14, 1968, deVries had returned to an old boyfriend.

Her friends say it would have been quite easy for a killer other than Pickton to plant deVries’ makeup bag, which she carried everywhere but often had to replace after loaning or losing it, at the Pickton farm.

A trace of deVries’ DNA, matched to pap smears obtained by the RCMP forensic labs and to the DNA of her children and their biological fathers, was found on the end of a lipstick in a makeup case found in Pickton’s stash of women’s belongings in his workshop.

If deVries did die at the sordid Pickton farm, it was a tragic end for a girl whose charisma, beauty and spirit would have carried her far in any career but the high-risk sex trade of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Her mother Pat deVries took Sarah’s children Jeannie and Ben into her Guelph, Ont. home to raise them.

sfournier@theprovince.com

Monday, February 15

Pickton victim’s daughter speaks

Jeanie de Vries addresses the public for the 1st time.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/02/15/calgary-valentines-day-march-women.html#

Memorial march for women

Demonstrators take to the streets demanding a public inquiry into the hundreds of cases of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/02/15/calgary-valentines-day-march-women.html#

Sarah Jean de Vries – Flickr Images

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshuatree/sets/72157623438179040/

Marches honour missing, slain women

Last Updated: Monday, February 15, 2010 | 12:31 PM PT

CBC News

Winnnipeg's third annual march for missing and murdered women in Manitoba drew about 400 people. (CBC)Thousands of Canadians marched in memory of murdered or missing women on Sunday, part of Valentine's Day rallies held in Vancouver, Calgary and other centres across the country.

Judith Trimble, who waited inside a church gymnasium in southwest Calgary for the march to start, held a picture of her daughter, Cara Ellis.

"My daughter is somewhere looking down on all this and she knows this is for her," Trimble said. "That's why I'm doing it. It's for her. And all the other girls."

Ellis, a 25-year-old addicted to drugs and working as a prostitute, disappeared from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in 1997.

"She is the 26th person on the list of indictments against Robert Pickton," Trimble said. "So this is very emotional for me."

Tradition began in Vancouver

Organizers of the Vancouver Valentine's Day march hoped to attract the attention of international media during the Olympics. (Gerry Broome/AP)It is the memory of women like Ellis that the annual march, which began in Vancouver 19 years ago, is meant to honour.

Olympic celebrations paused Sunday as thousands of people paid tribute to missing and slain woman — one of the largest of the annual marches that has taken place in Vancouver over the years.

The group followed the drumbeat of a First Nations elder through the Downtown Eastside and held a news conference, hoping to attract media from around the world on hand for the Olympics.

Leaders in B.C.'s aboriginal community have called for a public inquiry into the deaths of the slain and missing women.

"I think having international media in the city today is an opportunity today, is a day that can put greater pressure on our government to take steps, to be seen to take steps," Maggie de Vries said. "We're asking for a commitment to a public inquiry as soon as one is possible."

Hundreds march in Calgary

Hundreds marched down the sidewalk in Calgary, some holding placards lined with black and white photos of murdered or missing Canadian women.

Organizers say one-quarter of Calgary's homicides are related to domestic violence and they hope the march will raise awareness about Alberta's high rate of domestic abuse and inspire people to take a stand against it.

Suzanne Dzus, who organized the rally in Calgary, said as a mother and a grandmother, those statistics are particularly worrisome.

"I want them to be safe," she said. "I want to be safe in this world. And when I look at how violence against women is escalating in Canada and Alberta especially, something needs to change. And somebody has to do something."

This was the second year the march was held in Calgary. The Montreal march focused on missing and slain aboriginal women. Organizer Rachel Alouki Labbe said she does not think police are making enough progress in Quebec investigations.

"I think they just don't care because so far they did not resolve a lot of cases," she said. "So I think that if they really care they can do a little bit more than that," she said.

With files from The Canadian Press

Sunday, February 14

Crowd gathers to remember missing Vancouver women

The Canadian Press

Date: Sunday Feb. 14, 2010 8:51 PM ET

VANCOUVER — More than a thousand people took time off from Olympic celebrations Sunday to remember women who have gone missing, honouring them with a march through the city's gritty Downtown Eastside neighbourhood.

Every Valentines Day for the last 19 years, family and friends of missing and murdered women have been marching in memory of their loved ones.

On Sunday, about 1,200 people in Vancouver followed the drumming of female First Nations elders on the march, a crowd size not reached even in the years after serial killer Robert Pickton was arrested and convicted for murdering women from the area.

Maggie de Vries' sister Sarah went missing from the Downtown Eastside in 1998. She told the media before the march began that the Olympics allows them to shine a spot light on what still needs to be done to protect women in the neighbourhood.

"I think it is an opportunity, having international media here in the city right now means that today is that day that can put greater pressure on our government to take steps," she said. "We're asking for a commitment to a public inquiry as soon as one is possible."

Many of the women who went missing were prostitutes or drug addicts, as Sarah de Vries was.

Maggie de Vries said the police ignored the cases of the missing until there was too much pressure to avoid an investigation any longer.

"They were a group we, as a society, don't see as human. When they went missing there were just so many things done wrong and such a lack of initiative for a long time."

The government has said there won't be a public inquiry into the police response until after Pickton exhausts all possibility of appeal, but de Vries said British Columbia's attorney general could at least give the relatives of the missing women a commitment that an inquiry will be held.

Corinthia Kelly, who works with women in the neighbourhood, said women, especially First Nations, still go missing every week.

"Aboriginal women in our society are perceived - as they have been ever since Europeans first came here - perceived to be disposable."

Police don't investigate the disappearances of First Nations women in the same way and that's why women are allowed to disappear without an investigation, Kelly said.

Karen Williams stood in the middle of the noisy crowd, clutching a stack of flyers with her sister's picture and handing them out to anyone who would listen to the story of Alberta Gail Williams.

She said her sister was working in Prince Rupert, on the northwest B.C. coast, when she vanished in 1989. Her family knew immediately that something was wrong, but Williams said police didn't believe them.

One month and one day after she disappeared, her body was found by hikers in the woods. No one has ever been charged.

"Give us some justice," she said as tears rolled down her face. "We've been waiting too long, this Williams family, nearly 20 years."

Many of the more than 60 women who have vanished from the Downtown Eastside have never been found and Williams concedes that at least her family knows what happened to Alberta.

"At least we had a chance to bury her," she said. "But I still want my sister's name to be a household name."

Pickton was originally charged with killing 26 women, but the trial judge divided the case in two. After a long trial, he was convicted of six murders.

His appeal is sitting before the Supreme Court of Canada. The provincial government has said if Pickton loses his appeal, it won't go ahead with the remaining 20 charges.