(News) Monday, 17 December 2007, 03:00 PST
FRANK PEEBLES Citizen staff
A vigil will be held tonight to mark the women and children abused by the sex industry. Survival sex is the desperate last resort of many in our community, and violence is often the price they pay on top of the shame and humiliation and fear.
For the third consecutive year the Prince George New Hope Society is holding a vigil by candlelight - the epitome of fragile beauty - to remind the public that these women and children are risking their very lives just to do a job none of them wants to do.
"Come join us in remembering the women and girls we have lost and to support those who still face violence every day," said New Hope executive director Christal Capostinsky. "So many women face violence on our streets every day. This year we are dedicating the event in honour and memory of Andrea Joesbury, Georgina Papin, Marnie Frey, Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson and Brenda Wolfe."
These six were the victims of violence and murder that Robert Pickton was recently sent to jail for. He inflicted other pains and mental terror on them before they died, and he committed these atrocities over a span of years. The most terrible part of all, advocates say, is that Pickton is one of many men in many B.C. communities doing exactly the same things.
In a recent survey by New Hope surveying sex trade workers from northern B.C., the women were asked if they felt safe while involved in sex work - "felt" being a charged word deliberately chosen.
"Not everyone feels afraid when they are working," Capostinsky said, differentiating from being literally unsafe. "When some women and girls are exposed to sex work at a young age, it becomes normalized."
Yet peril is what the girls describe as a daily possibility for them whenever a stranger stops to exploit their vulnerability. Eighty-eight per cent said they had had a bad date (involving violence, humiliation or clear danger of it), the majority had had at least three bad dates and 20 per cent said they had had six or more bad dates.
"These numbers are alarming," Capostinsky said. "Furthermore, these women and girls continue to work on the streets."
"None of the girls deserve to have bad dates, it just happens," said one of those sex trade workers surveyed in the New Hope study.
The vigil coincides with International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. The public is invited to participate at the New Hope drop-in centre (1046 4th Avenue) at 6:30 p.m.
©Copyright 2007 Prince George Citizen
Monday, December 17
'Fighting to see justice done'
Organization advocates end to violence against sex workers
By BRYN WEESE, SUN MEDIA
Toronto Sun
December 17, 2007
Winnie Cornish still gets understandably emotional about the unsolved murder of her daughter, Darlene MacNeill, a decade ago.
MacNeill was a crack addict and a sex worker whose partially naked body was found floating in Lake Ontario near the Toronto Sailing and Canoe Club in the fall of 1997. She had been strangled.
That there are up to 11 unsolved murders of sex workers in the city since 1991, according to figures provided by the Sex Workers' Alliance of Toronto, is completely unacceptable for Cornish and others like her. She feels it indicates there is an apathy among police and society that allows violence against sex workers not to be taken seriously.
"I think just as much attention should be paid to my daughter's death as anybody else's, even a judge's daughter or a policeman's daughter. We are all human beings. We're all mothers and sisters and daughters and granddaughters," an emotional Cornish, 65, told the Sun by phone from her home in Victoria, B.C.
"I just wish that there was some magic thing that we could do to make people wake up, and make them realize (violence against sex workers) is wrong and what (the police) are doing is not enough."
Today marks the fifth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, a movement that began in Seattle for the victims of the Green River Killer, who killed 48 women, mostly sex workers and runaways, beginning in 1982.
Organizers of Toronto's vigil, who say the movement now honours all missing and murdered sex workers and advocates an end to violence against sex workers, changed tonight's vigil to Thursday night at 8 p.m. in Allan Gardens at Sherbourne and Carlton Sts. because of the weather.
"The working girls would still come out (today), because they work in all types of weather," said Anastasia Kuzyk of the Sex Workers' Alliance of Toronto. "But we don't want to put people at risk."
Whenever it's held, Cornish thinks the vigil is important because it helps people struggling to cope with the unthinkable acts that have struck families like hers all across the country. Also, she said, it's important to raise awareness about what happens to sex workers.
She hopes this year's memorial will mean more to the general public because of the Robert Pickton trial and his recent conviction on six second-degree murder charges. He still faces charges in the killings of another 20 women.
Between 1991 and 2004, 171 female sex workers were murdered in Canada. And according to some statistics, street-level sex workers are 60 to 112 times more likely to be victims of fatal violence than non-sex workers. Sex workers have the highest rate of murder by occupation in Canada.
According to Kuzyk, a semi-retired sex worker who has been championing the rights of prostitutes for years, there is a stigma of sex workers in society that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to change the way violence against sex workers is handled.
"Sex work is a job, and violence isn't in the job description," she said, noting that is the slogan for this year's vigils being held in major cities around the world today.
"We're fighting to see that justice is done to honour those who have lost their lives because of their high-risk lifestyles, which to me is just another label society puts on people to blame them for what has happened to them."
Since 1991, Kuzyk said there are 11 missing or murdered Toronto sex workers whose deaths or disappearances have never been solved.
They include: Julieanne Middleton, 23, Virginia Coote, 33, Darlene MacNeill, 35, Lisa Lyn Anstey, 21, Donna Oglive, 24, Cassandra "Tula" Do, 39, Anne Fernando, 50, Lien "May-Ling" Phem, 39, Florence Harrison, Teresa May and Lori Pinkus.
"Just think, if we had 11 murdered convenience store workers, do you think we would be having this conversation right now?" she said. "Police departments, as a whole, share in the culpability because of the apathy and the ineffectiveness of investigating and finding whose responsible for crimes committed against sex workers."
As for what needs to be done to improve the working conditions of sex workers, Kuzyk said it's more than just decriminalizing the industry, a move her organization supports.
"Realistically, there has to be more than just decriminalizing the laws. We have to address the stigma and give opportunities for women to work safely who are on the lower level of the sex worker hierarchy, like those who are addicts," she said. "The reality is, we can change the laws, but if we don't change the stigma, what's the point?"
What's worse, she said, is that pop culture promotes the negative view of sex workers and even legitimizes violence towards them. Her case in point is the Grand Theft Auto video games, which rewards players for beating up, robbing and killing prostitutes.
"There's a video game out there where you can run down prostitutes and kill them and beat them up and take their money. It feeds into the whole subculture of allowing the violence to continue," she said. "Violence against sex workers should not be normalized, but it is."
As for what Cornish thinks needs to be done so that no one has to go through the pain and suffering she struggles with daily, it might be a matter of making people listen.
"Maybe we should start marching in the street, but I'm 65 years old and I can't fight this any more. But somebody's got to do it," she said.
For Kuzyk, one of the most important things that has to happen is that people stop blaming the victim, though she says that is changing -- albeit very slowly.
"Twenty years ago, they said we asked for it. Ten years ago, they said, 'What do you expect?'
Now they say it's a dangerous profession, but it's still blaming the victim," she said. "They might not change in our lifetime, but at least it's heading in the right direction. It's unfortunate that it came at a price ... When you add up all the missing and murdered sex workers across Canada, we're talking a couple hundred.
"We shouldn't have to change how we live in order to protect ourselves from violent men.
Violent men should be the ones who are held accountable for what they do.
"But it's because it's sex and people get all squeamish."
Copyright © 2007, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.
www.torontosun.com
By BRYN WEESE, SUN MEDIA
Toronto Sun
December 17, 2007
Winnie Cornish still gets understandably emotional about the unsolved murder of her daughter, Darlene MacNeill, a decade ago.
MacNeill was a crack addict and a sex worker whose partially naked body was found floating in Lake Ontario near the Toronto Sailing and Canoe Club in the fall of 1997. She had been strangled.
That there are up to 11 unsolved murders of sex workers in the city since 1991, according to figures provided by the Sex Workers' Alliance of Toronto, is completely unacceptable for Cornish and others like her. She feels it indicates there is an apathy among police and society that allows violence against sex workers not to be taken seriously.
"I think just as much attention should be paid to my daughter's death as anybody else's, even a judge's daughter or a policeman's daughter. We are all human beings. We're all mothers and sisters and daughters and granddaughters," an emotional Cornish, 65, told the Sun by phone from her home in Victoria, B.C.
"I just wish that there was some magic thing that we could do to make people wake up, and make them realize (violence against sex workers) is wrong and what (the police) are doing is not enough."
Today marks the fifth annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, a movement that began in Seattle for the victims of the Green River Killer, who killed 48 women, mostly sex workers and runaways, beginning in 1982.
Organizers of Toronto's vigil, who say the movement now honours all missing and murdered sex workers and advocates an end to violence against sex workers, changed tonight's vigil to Thursday night at 8 p.m. in Allan Gardens at Sherbourne and Carlton Sts. because of the weather.
"The working girls would still come out (today), because they work in all types of weather," said Anastasia Kuzyk of the Sex Workers' Alliance of Toronto. "But we don't want to put people at risk."
Whenever it's held, Cornish thinks the vigil is important because it helps people struggling to cope with the unthinkable acts that have struck families like hers all across the country. Also, she said, it's important to raise awareness about what happens to sex workers.
She hopes this year's memorial will mean more to the general public because of the Robert Pickton trial and his recent conviction on six second-degree murder charges. He still faces charges in the killings of another 20 women.
Between 1991 and 2004, 171 female sex workers were murdered in Canada. And according to some statistics, street-level sex workers are 60 to 112 times more likely to be victims of fatal violence than non-sex workers. Sex workers have the highest rate of murder by occupation in Canada.
According to Kuzyk, a semi-retired sex worker who has been championing the rights of prostitutes for years, there is a stigma of sex workers in society that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to change the way violence against sex workers is handled.
"Sex work is a job, and violence isn't in the job description," she said, noting that is the slogan for this year's vigils being held in major cities around the world today.
"We're fighting to see that justice is done to honour those who have lost their lives because of their high-risk lifestyles, which to me is just another label society puts on people to blame them for what has happened to them."
Since 1991, Kuzyk said there are 11 missing or murdered Toronto sex workers whose deaths or disappearances have never been solved.
They include: Julieanne Middleton, 23, Virginia Coote, 33, Darlene MacNeill, 35, Lisa Lyn Anstey, 21, Donna Oglive, 24, Cassandra "Tula" Do, 39, Anne Fernando, 50, Lien "May-Ling" Phem, 39, Florence Harrison, Teresa May and Lori Pinkus.
"Just think, if we had 11 murdered convenience store workers, do you think we would be having this conversation right now?" she said. "Police departments, as a whole, share in the culpability because of the apathy and the ineffectiveness of investigating and finding whose responsible for crimes committed against sex workers."
As for what needs to be done to improve the working conditions of sex workers, Kuzyk said it's more than just decriminalizing the industry, a move her organization supports.
"Realistically, there has to be more than just decriminalizing the laws. We have to address the stigma and give opportunities for women to work safely who are on the lower level of the sex worker hierarchy, like those who are addicts," she said. "The reality is, we can change the laws, but if we don't change the stigma, what's the point?"
What's worse, she said, is that pop culture promotes the negative view of sex workers and even legitimizes violence towards them. Her case in point is the Grand Theft Auto video games, which rewards players for beating up, robbing and killing prostitutes.
"There's a video game out there where you can run down prostitutes and kill them and beat them up and take their money. It feeds into the whole subculture of allowing the violence to continue," she said. "Violence against sex workers should not be normalized, but it is."
As for what Cornish thinks needs to be done so that no one has to go through the pain and suffering she struggles with daily, it might be a matter of making people listen.
"Maybe we should start marching in the street, but I'm 65 years old and I can't fight this any more. But somebody's got to do it," she said.
For Kuzyk, one of the most important things that has to happen is that people stop blaming the victim, though she says that is changing -- albeit very slowly.
"Twenty years ago, they said we asked for it. Ten years ago, they said, 'What do you expect?'
Now they say it's a dangerous profession, but it's still blaming the victim," she said. "They might not change in our lifetime, but at least it's heading in the right direction. It's unfortunate that it came at a price ... When you add up all the missing and murdered sex workers across Canada, we're talking a couple hundred.
"We shouldn't have to change how we live in order to protect ourselves from violent men.
Violent men should be the ones who are held accountable for what they do.
"But it's because it's sex and people get all squeamish."
Copyright © 2007, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.
www.torontosun.com
Saturday, December 15
A Chilling Trend Spreads Among Our Neighbours
Not in Anybody's Backyard movement branches out to wherever cities want to put addiction treatment centres
Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun
Saturday, December 15, 2007
There is something chilling in the idea behind the group called Not in Anybody's Backyard, which has spawned a chapter in Richmond to oppose an addiction treatment centre.
If the NIABYs are serious about not allowing treatment facilities in anyone's backyard, what's their plan for all of the broken people who desperately want to return to something approaching normal? Let them die in the streets? Drop them in the ocean with a heavy anchor and then go home to a good, old-fashioned family dinner?
The idea that addicts aren't worthy of treatment seems particularly perverse this week after we've all read or heard what the relatives of Robert Pickton's six murder victims had to say about their loved ones. I can't help but see those dead women's faces and hear the voices lamenting their deaths when I think of the devastation that masquerades as a neighbourhood in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Most of the more than 50 women police acknowledge are "missing" from there were addicts. Many were mothers, all were daughters. Many could not escape the horrors of addiction because when they wanted treatment there was no bed available. The lack of treatment facilities is the gravest failing of Vancouver's much-vaunted four pillars plan.
It's important to realize that most of the missing women aren't from Vancouver. Like most of the people who wash up in the Downtown Eastside, that's only where they last lived. They come from all over.
There was such an acute shortage of treatment in Richmond in 2004 that the city's substance abuse committee report said Richmond residents were "regularly" sent to treatment services in Vancouver where "they are frequently thrust into the harsher and more hostile environment of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside."
Today, Richmond has only nine treatment beds and they're only for men. Turning Point Society, which has been in the recovery business for 25 years and claims a 75-per-cent success rate, runs the facility. In all of its years of operation, it has never had a complaint about traffic, attracting drug dealers or increasing the crime rate.
Which brings us back to Richmond's 11,000 NIABYs who have signed a petition opposing Turning Point's application to build a treatment facility for 32 people. The plan includes two houses -- one for up to 10 men, the other for up to 10 women in a structured, support and recovery program. Behind them, Turning Point plans to build 11 suites, which would provide affordable housing mainly for women with children and infants, who have graduated from the structured program.
The centre is in a residential area. But the site is zoned institutional and, up until recently, there was a group home there for troubled teens.
According to Richmond's own statistics, there are 130 Richmond residents on a waiting list for detox and rehabilitation. So, despite what the NIABYs are saying, far from busing recovering addicts in from Vancouver, the flow has been and continues to go the other way.
Perhaps the NIABYs ought to change their name to Not in Anybody's Backyard Unless They Live in Vancouver. Or, maybe Keremeos because its vice-chair Ernie Mendoza wrote favourably to Richmond council about a planned 42-bed facility in a "remote area" in Keremeos, noting that, "Confinement and isolation are positive factors in making sure its residents submit themselves to treatment."
If you want to know more about what NIABY-Richmond (ironically, it's also goes by the name Caring Citizens of Richmond) has to say, it's got a video on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=2uF-89z2Eek=related) and a website (www.niaby-richmond.com)
They say the same stuff about bringing chaos to the neighbourhood, drug dealers, more traffic and crime that NIABYs said before the Triage Emergency Service and Care Society opened a similar-sized facility on Fraser Street at 41st Avenue. (Since Triage opened in August, neighbours report that things are going fine.)
It's what the NIABYs are saying about a proposed recovery house at Dunbar and 16th on the sacred ground of Vancouver's west side.
It's what Coquitlam's NIABY mayor and council are saying about plans to put housing for the disabled, mentally ill and developmentally disabled in the Riverview land, which -- hello -- the province bought in 1904 to house the mentally ill and developmentally disabled.
Many NIABY supporters in Richmond are Chinese, as the majority of Richmond residents are Chinese. But that brings us to the ugliest underbelly of the Richmond NIABYs.
Anyone who disagrees with them is apt to be labelled a racist even though SUCCESS, one of the most influential Chinese organizations in the Lower Mainland, was a member of the committee that urged more addiction treatment services.
Still, any whiff of the R-word and people run for cover. Anybody who needed a reminder of the power of ethnic politics got one when more than 1,000 people -- mainly Indo-Canadian -- blocked the deportation of Laibar Singh and vowed never again to vote Conservative.
Municipal elections are less than a year away, a federal election could be any day soon, and the next provincial election is May 17, 2009.
But this is the time for leadership and education. Politicians and aspiring ones would do well to heed the words of Ontario human rights commissioner Barbara Hall, who recently wrote a response to NIABYs in her province:
"Efforts to keep out persons with disabilities, including mental illness, are no less offensive than preventing racialized persons from moving into a neighbourhood."
Addiction isn't a crime. It isn't something people choose. It is a debilitating illness that affects people at all levels of every society and costs us all dearly.
dbramham@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
So many victims
Across the country, the bodies of 67 women have surfaced, dumped in remote areas. In all but five cases, their killers remain unknown
Zosia Bielski, National Post
Published: Saturday, December 15, 2007
More than a decade ago, Cara King went missing in Edmonton. The impulsive 22-yearold "liked to live on the edge," her mother, Kathy, remembered last month, and "struggled with many, many things." In her teens, she lost interest in school and got involved with a social circle of older men, eventually getting addicted to cocaine. Sometimes, the drug caused psychosis, which landed Ms. King in and out of psychiatric hospitals. By the time of her disappearance in 1997, she had dropped regular contact with her middle-class family and was on the street, prostituting herself.
When Ms. King's mother reported her missing that August and then attempted to follow up, she says police gave her the runaround, until one day an officer told her she should "wait for a body."
Three weeks later, Cara King's corpse was found in a canola field. Today, the case remains unsolved.
Disturbingly, elements of Ms. King's story are playing out in scores of cases across the country as young women continue disappearing, their bodies dumped in remote back country, farmers' fields, industrial lots and along desolate stretches of highway.
Until the spectre of Robert Pickton, their stories went largely unnoticed by the Canadian public. In many instances, the womens' families have been their only campaigners. Until recently, their cases were also mostly ignored by police and treated as unrelated, unsolved homicides.
Across the country, 67 bodies have surfaced. In all but five cases, their killers remain unknown. In British Columbia, 37 women other than those connected to the Pickton investigation remain missing, although families say that number is closer to 80, with women vanishing mostly from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and the notorious Highway of Tears in the north of the province. In Edmonton, 31 women remain unaccounted for, with some cases dating back to the 1930s. In St. Catharines, the deaths of six prostitutes are the focus of a Niagara Regional Police task force. Since 1996, their bodies have turned up in ditches in Vineland and Welland, a school parking lot and the brush in Niagara Falls. Two men have been charged with three of their murders, but three cases remain unsolved.
In all of the cases, police face staggering challenges: huge and often remote search areas, decades worth of victims, many of them leading precarious lives.
"We face a lot of the same challenges as they did in the Pickton case. These victims, it's part of their lifestyle to get into vehicles with strangers at odd hours of the night and to do it away from others seeing it," said RCMP Constable Tamara Bellamy, who is part of Project Kare, a joint task force in Edmonton looking into unsolved murders and cases of "high-risk" missing persons.
"These are women who are addicted or involved in the drug world. It compromises their ability to help us with timelines. That's a real difficulty for us, trying to find witnesses who are able to tell us the last time someone was seen and who they were seen with."
In northern British Columbia, the bodies of 14 women have turned up since 1969 along the Highway of Tears, an isolated 724-kilo-metre stretch of Yellowhead Highway 16 West running between Prince George and Prince Rupert. Some of the women were prostitutes; nearly all were Aboriginal and hitchhiking. They include 26-year-old tree-planter Nicole Hoar and Tamara Chipman, 22, another hitchhiker whose father, Tom Chipman, walked the highway for months, looking in culverts for his daughter.
In Winnipeg, the bodies of 19 prostitutes -- 17 women and two transgendered men -- have turned up north and west of the city in the past 25 years.
The number is escalating: Three women have been murdered since April, the last being Fonessa Lynn Bruyere, 17, whose body was found in a field in August. In Edmonton, the bodies of 23 women have been found in hotel rooms, industrial areas, farmers' fields and along rural roads since 1983.
Last May, RCMP charged Thomas Svekla with murdering Theresa Innes, a 36-year-old prostitute found stuffed in a hockey bag. Earlier this year, Mr. Svekla was also charged in the
death of a second prostitute, 19-year-old Rachel Quinney.
As in other similar investigations, Edmonton police deny that a serial killer is at work, arguing that assumption would jeopardize their work.
In British Columbia this October, RCMP doubled the number of files being probed from nine to 18, and expanded the investigation as far back as 1969 and as far south as Merritt and Kamloops. The investigation consists of 43 officers culled from several units.
"We didn't do a great job talking to our communities and to the victims' families way back when. In the last few years, we've picked up our socks on that," said RCMP Staff Sgt. John Ward.
But aboriginal groups and some family members have criticized the investigation, specifically its expansion beyond the Highway of Tears just as it excludes some 40 missing women they believe vanished along the route. Police are also battling local rumours that a serial killer is prowling the stretch.
In Winnipeg, too, some experts say "a cluster dump" in a field outside the city likely points to a serial killer. In July, the body of 36-yearold Aynsley Kinch was found on the outskirts of Winnipeg. One month later, the most recent victim, Ms. Bruyere, was found a short distance east. Her body lay metres from the spot where Therena Silva's remains were found almost five years earlier.
The field is likely a place where a serial killer feels comfortable discarding victims' bodies, says Kim Rossmo. The former Vancouver police officer warned a serial killer might be stalking prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside, but had his theory dismissed by authorities. Now a professor in the department of criminal justice at Texas State University, Mr. Rossmo says a lack of resources and experience are often behind the categorical resistance of police to label any of the cases as the work of a serial killer.
"I think one of the issues is that it creates the expectation of a certain investigative process. Some agencies don't want to deal with that. If you have a serial murder case, you have to investigate it. That can mean a pretty big demand on limited resources," Mr. Rossmo said.
Along the Highway of Tears, it appears most efforts now focus on preventing new victims.
Working with the RCMP and victims' families, First Nations consultant Don Sabo prepared a list of recommendations to stop abductions along the notorious belt. Last March, his report was presented in Prince George at the highly publicized Highway of Tears symposium, which saw victims' families tearfully demanding answers from the province.
His first recommendation is a shuttle bus service that might reduce the need for hitchhiking.
Currently, the only public transportation between Prince George and Prince Rupert is a daily Greyhound bus. Isolated on reserves, local women often hitchhike into town for basic services, from groceries to doctors' appointments. Few have drivers' licences and fewer still have cars.
"The reason why there are so many young aborginal women going missing is poverty and geography. These reserves have little or no infrastructure. Poverty is the big thing for young women being on the highway," Mr. Sabo said.
Today, Cara King's mother heads the Prostitution Action and Awareness Foundation of Edmonton, which helps local women get out of the sex trade. The offices sit on a drug-infested stretch of 118th Avenue, "the stroll" from which many prostitutes in Edmonton have been disappearing.
She concedes that, "people who are legitimately high-risk are taken seriously now when they're missing," in Edmonton, but she remains bitter watching the Pickton case as her daughter's murder remains unsolved.
"All of a sudden, there's millions of dollars to sift six feet of topsoil at the Pickton farm and there's no money for basic services that are going to prevent that carnage," Ms. King said. "We're fighting an uphill battle."
zbielski@nationalpost.com
© 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.
Project KARE
www.kare.ca
The Pickton Case
www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/pickton/index.html
Missing People Net - Vancouver missing women
www.missingpeople.net
RCMP step up investigation into 18 dead or missing women along Highway 16
www.missingpeople.net/rcmp_step_up_investigation.htm
Where have my sisters gone
http://hazel8500.wordpress.com/fight-the-fading-of-the-light/
Highway of Tears
www.highwayoftears.ca
Vanished Voices
www.vanishedvoices.com
Zosia Bielski, National Post
Published: Saturday, December 15, 2007
More than a decade ago, Cara King went missing in Edmonton. The impulsive 22-yearold "liked to live on the edge," her mother, Kathy, remembered last month, and "struggled with many, many things." In her teens, she lost interest in school and got involved with a social circle of older men, eventually getting addicted to cocaine. Sometimes, the drug caused psychosis, which landed Ms. King in and out of psychiatric hospitals. By the time of her disappearance in 1997, she had dropped regular contact with her middle-class family and was on the street, prostituting herself.
When Ms. King's mother reported her missing that August and then attempted to follow up, she says police gave her the runaround, until one day an officer told her she should "wait for a body."
Three weeks later, Cara King's corpse was found in a canola field. Today, the case remains unsolved.
Disturbingly, elements of Ms. King's story are playing out in scores of cases across the country as young women continue disappearing, their bodies dumped in remote back country, farmers' fields, industrial lots and along desolate stretches of highway.
Until the spectre of Robert Pickton, their stories went largely unnoticed by the Canadian public. In many instances, the womens' families have been their only campaigners. Until recently, their cases were also mostly ignored by police and treated as unrelated, unsolved homicides.
Across the country, 67 bodies have surfaced. In all but five cases, their killers remain unknown. In British Columbia, 37 women other than those connected to the Pickton investigation remain missing, although families say that number is closer to 80, with women vanishing mostly from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and the notorious Highway of Tears in the north of the province. In Edmonton, 31 women remain unaccounted for, with some cases dating back to the 1930s. In St. Catharines, the deaths of six prostitutes are the focus of a Niagara Regional Police task force. Since 1996, their bodies have turned up in ditches in Vineland and Welland, a school parking lot and the brush in Niagara Falls. Two men have been charged with three of their murders, but three cases remain unsolved.
In all of the cases, police face staggering challenges: huge and often remote search areas, decades worth of victims, many of them leading precarious lives.
"We face a lot of the same challenges as they did in the Pickton case. These victims, it's part of their lifestyle to get into vehicles with strangers at odd hours of the night and to do it away from others seeing it," said RCMP Constable Tamara Bellamy, who is part of Project Kare, a joint task force in Edmonton looking into unsolved murders and cases of "high-risk" missing persons.
"These are women who are addicted or involved in the drug world. It compromises their ability to help us with timelines. That's a real difficulty for us, trying to find witnesses who are able to tell us the last time someone was seen and who they were seen with."
In northern British Columbia, the bodies of 14 women have turned up since 1969 along the Highway of Tears, an isolated 724-kilo-metre stretch of Yellowhead Highway 16 West running between Prince George and Prince Rupert. Some of the women were prostitutes; nearly all were Aboriginal and hitchhiking. They include 26-year-old tree-planter Nicole Hoar and Tamara Chipman, 22, another hitchhiker whose father, Tom Chipman, walked the highway for months, looking in culverts for his daughter.
In Winnipeg, the bodies of 19 prostitutes -- 17 women and two transgendered men -- have turned up north and west of the city in the past 25 years.
The number is escalating: Three women have been murdered since April, the last being Fonessa Lynn Bruyere, 17, whose body was found in a field in August. In Edmonton, the bodies of 23 women have been found in hotel rooms, industrial areas, farmers' fields and along rural roads since 1983.
Last May, RCMP charged Thomas Svekla with murdering Theresa Innes, a 36-year-old prostitute found stuffed in a hockey bag. Earlier this year, Mr. Svekla was also charged in the
death of a second prostitute, 19-year-old Rachel Quinney.
As in other similar investigations, Edmonton police deny that a serial killer is at work, arguing that assumption would jeopardize their work.
In British Columbia this October, RCMP doubled the number of files being probed from nine to 18, and expanded the investigation as far back as 1969 and as far south as Merritt and Kamloops. The investigation consists of 43 officers culled from several units.
"We didn't do a great job talking to our communities and to the victims' families way back when. In the last few years, we've picked up our socks on that," said RCMP Staff Sgt. John Ward.
But aboriginal groups and some family members have criticized the investigation, specifically its expansion beyond the Highway of Tears just as it excludes some 40 missing women they believe vanished along the route. Police are also battling local rumours that a serial killer is prowling the stretch.
In Winnipeg, too, some experts say "a cluster dump" in a field outside the city likely points to a serial killer. In July, the body of 36-yearold Aynsley Kinch was found on the outskirts of Winnipeg. One month later, the most recent victim, Ms. Bruyere, was found a short distance east. Her body lay metres from the spot where Therena Silva's remains were found almost five years earlier.
The field is likely a place where a serial killer feels comfortable discarding victims' bodies, says Kim Rossmo. The former Vancouver police officer warned a serial killer might be stalking prostitutes in the Downtown Eastside, but had his theory dismissed by authorities. Now a professor in the department of criminal justice at Texas State University, Mr. Rossmo says a lack of resources and experience are often behind the categorical resistance of police to label any of the cases as the work of a serial killer.
"I think one of the issues is that it creates the expectation of a certain investigative process. Some agencies don't want to deal with that. If you have a serial murder case, you have to investigate it. That can mean a pretty big demand on limited resources," Mr. Rossmo said.
Along the Highway of Tears, it appears most efforts now focus on preventing new victims.
Working with the RCMP and victims' families, First Nations consultant Don Sabo prepared a list of recommendations to stop abductions along the notorious belt. Last March, his report was presented in Prince George at the highly publicized Highway of Tears symposium, which saw victims' families tearfully demanding answers from the province.
His first recommendation is a shuttle bus service that might reduce the need for hitchhiking.
Currently, the only public transportation between Prince George and Prince Rupert is a daily Greyhound bus. Isolated on reserves, local women often hitchhike into town for basic services, from groceries to doctors' appointments. Few have drivers' licences and fewer still have cars.
"The reason why there are so many young aborginal women going missing is poverty and geography. These reserves have little or no infrastructure. Poverty is the big thing for young women being on the highway," Mr. Sabo said.
Today, Cara King's mother heads the Prostitution Action and Awareness Foundation of Edmonton, which helps local women get out of the sex trade. The offices sit on a drug-infested stretch of 118th Avenue, "the stroll" from which many prostitutes in Edmonton have been disappearing.
She concedes that, "people who are legitimately high-risk are taken seriously now when they're missing," in Edmonton, but she remains bitter watching the Pickton case as her daughter's murder remains unsolved.
"All of a sudden, there's millions of dollars to sift six feet of topsoil at the Pickton farm and there's no money for basic services that are going to prevent that carnage," Ms. King said. "We're fighting an uphill battle."
zbielski@nationalpost.com
© 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.
Project KARE
www.kare.ca
The Pickton Case
www.canada.com/vancouversun/features/pickton/index.html
Missing People Net - Vancouver missing women
www.missingpeople.net
RCMP step up investigation into 18 dead or missing women along Highway 16
www.missingpeople.net/rcmp_step_up_investigation.htm
Where have my sisters gone
http://hazel8500.wordpress.com/fight-the-fading-of-the-light/
Highway of Tears
www.highwayoftears.ca
Vanished Voices
www.vanishedvoices.com
Families of Pickton's victims want public inquiry into police handling of case
Canadian Press
December 15, 2007
VANCOUVER - Long before the discovery of severed heads, hands and feet at a suburban pig farm, there were the pleas of family members about their missing loved ones - mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts who'd disappeared without a trace.
One by one, the women who'd spent much of their time in the drug ghetto of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside seemed to vanish, some after paying their rent and leaving savings in bank accounts.
As the list of missing women grew, so did complaints about police by desperate relatives who say their concerns fell on deaf ears because the women were drug-addicted prostitutes.
Now, after serial killer Robert Pickton has been found guilty of murdering six women, families say a public inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of why the Vancouver Police Department waited so long to launch an investigation.
Pickton was convicted Dec. 9 on six counts of second-degree murder after a 10-month jury trial and sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years. Hearings leading into a second trial begin next month on another 20 murder counts.
Sarah de Vries, who was last seen on April 13, 1998, is among those 20 other women Pickton is charged with killing.
Maggie de Vries, Sarah's sister, said police were getting tips about women going off to Pickton's Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm as far back as 1997.
It wasn't until the spring 2001 that a joint RCMP-Vancouver police task force took over the file that the missing women's case appeared to move forward.
Less than a year later, on Feb. 22, 2002, the first charges were laid against Pickton.
That's when archeological experts and the Missing Women's Joint Task Force - led by the Mounties - began scouring his 4.5-hectare property for clues.
"I want to know why so many women had died before they (police) got onto that property," de Vries said.
"I was there at the beginning, pressing for the investigation to be taken more seriously and I saw the resistance to that by the police in early 1999. There was no willingness to admit to the possibility of crimes, let alone murder, let alone serial murder."
Former Vancouver police officer Kim Rossmo, now a research professor in the criminal justice department at Texas State University, warned officials in his department in May 1999 that a serial killer may be at work.
But in June 1999, the force was still saying publicly that the women could be living elsewhere.
"We don't have anything that indicates that in fact there have been 20-plus homicides," spokeswoman Const. Anne Drennan said at the time.
Rossmo, who developed geographic profiling as a crime-fighting tool now used by police forces around the world, said an inquiry is needed but shouldn't serve as a soap box for bashing police.
Rather, it should ensure that the necessary systems are in place so a tragedy on such a massive scale never happens again, he said.
"It's something where you actually would have wished to be wrong," he said about his serial-killer theory. "It would be better if I was wrong and they were right and the women were found alive.
"The general attitude of Major Crime was, 'Well, we don't have any bodies so what can we do?'
I've argued that's akin to a fire department saying, 'We see smoke and no fire so we're not going to do anything.' "
Rossmo said police in all jurisdictions need to look at how they respond to missing persons cases, including on the so-called Highway of Tears - along the western stretch of Highway 16 across northern British Columbia.
In October, the RCMP announced the investigation of missing and murdered women in the area had grown to 18 victims from nine.
Police in Edmonton also revamped their approach to a string of unsolved prostitute murders over several years after stinging criticism.
Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, then the head of the city's police board, defended his officers and criticized Rossmo, who lost a wrongful dismissal suit against then deputy police chief John Unger and the police board.
"It's absolutely unjustified," Owen said of the criticism the force has faced.
"The (Vancouver police department) moved on this very early and was very serious and was concerned about it and did a lot of things. They're taking a bum rap and it bothers me."
Rossmo disputed Owen's remarks.
"The bottom line is we have 26 confirmed deaths by DNA," Rossmo said. "Does he really think that was a system that was working?
"There's at least 10 of those murders confirmed by DNA that occurred after Pickton was known to be a hot suspect. I'd like to know what he considered bad policing if he thinks that was OK."
Much of the criticism was crystallized 2002 in outrage directed at Vancouver Det. Scott Driemel. The spokesman for the missing women task force, told an off-colour joke about a prostitute to some officers and reportedly quipped to a journalist that the women in the Downtown Eastside are so "ugly, they can't get a date."
Driemel claimed his comment was taken out of context but some of the missing women's families remember it as an example of the attitude that permeated much of the department.
Deputy Chief Doug LePard said the force has tried to build better relationships with Downtown Eastside residents, including hiring a former police officer in 2003 as a liaison between the department and sex-trade workers.
LePard has conducted an internal review of the missing women's case and wrote a comprehensive 449-page report that includes several recommendations, some of which have already been enacted.
"It was essentially a management review of what occurred in the Vancouver police department," he said.
The report considers events from the mid-1990s, when women in the Downtown Eastside began disappearing, to February 2002, when police executed search warrants on Pickton's property that led to his arrest.
LePard said he couldn't discuss the report pending an appeal of Pickton's verdict, a possible second trial or a public inquiry.
The B.C. government would decide if an inquiry should proceed after a request to cabinet by the Attorney General's Ministry.
Attorney General Wally Oppal would not make such a request before a decision on whether Pickton will face another trial, said spokesman Shawn Robins.
Sue Davis, a co-ordinator with Prostitution Awareness Counselling and Education, said she's not so sure a costly public inquiry is necessary.
"It's just going to give a bunch of money to people to sit around and talk about us, not to us," Davis said.
Sex workers need a safe place to take customers so they don't have to drift out of the Downtown Eastside to places such as Pickton's pig farm, where they may become vulnerable prey, she said.
"If they had somewhere to take him (Pickton) they wouldn't have been on the farm," Davis said.
Marilyn Kraft, whose daughter Cynthia Feliks was last seen alive in 1997, is one of Pickton's alleged victims in the second indictment.
Kraft said she wants an inquiry into police inaction for the sake of her daughter, who left behind a daughter of her own and would have had her 53rd birthday this week.
Like the other families of missing and murdered women, Kraft is seeking answers to why police didn't take the disappearances seriously when there was an obvious pattern early on.
"If the police had done their job in the first place I'm sure that Mr. Pickton would not have killed as many women or been allowed to because people told the police many times about him, about the pig farm, and they didn't act on it," said Kraft.
"The usual response they gave to a lot of the parents when they reported their children missing was: 'She's around, she went on a holiday.'
"Of course, these girls never went on holidays."
Copyright © 2007 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Pickton tape given to police in 1998
Cop warned bosses about potential serial killer in ‘99
Police told about farm many times
Mines client provides early information in Missing Women Case
December 15, 2007
VANCOUVER - Long before the discovery of severed heads, hands and feet at a suburban pig farm, there were the pleas of family members about their missing loved ones - mothers, sisters, daughters, aunts who'd disappeared without a trace.
One by one, the women who'd spent much of their time in the drug ghetto of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside seemed to vanish, some after paying their rent and leaving savings in bank accounts.
As the list of missing women grew, so did complaints about police by desperate relatives who say their concerns fell on deaf ears because the women were drug-addicted prostitutes.
Now, after serial killer Robert Pickton has been found guilty of murdering six women, families say a public inquiry is needed to get to the bottom of why the Vancouver Police Department waited so long to launch an investigation.
Pickton was convicted Dec. 9 on six counts of second-degree murder after a 10-month jury trial and sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years. Hearings leading into a second trial begin next month on another 20 murder counts.
Sarah de Vries, who was last seen on April 13, 1998, is among those 20 other women Pickton is charged with killing.
Maggie de Vries, Sarah's sister, said police were getting tips about women going off to Pickton's Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm as far back as 1997.
It wasn't until the spring 2001 that a joint RCMP-Vancouver police task force took over the file that the missing women's case appeared to move forward.
Less than a year later, on Feb. 22, 2002, the first charges were laid against Pickton.
That's when archeological experts and the Missing Women's Joint Task Force - led by the Mounties - began scouring his 4.5-hectare property for clues.
"I want to know why so many women had died before they (police) got onto that property," de Vries said.
"I was there at the beginning, pressing for the investigation to be taken more seriously and I saw the resistance to that by the police in early 1999. There was no willingness to admit to the possibility of crimes, let alone murder, let alone serial murder."
Former Vancouver police officer Kim Rossmo, now a research professor in the criminal justice department at Texas State University, warned officials in his department in May 1999 that a serial killer may be at work.
But in June 1999, the force was still saying publicly that the women could be living elsewhere.
"We don't have anything that indicates that in fact there have been 20-plus homicides," spokeswoman Const. Anne Drennan said at the time.
Rossmo, who developed geographic profiling as a crime-fighting tool now used by police forces around the world, said an inquiry is needed but shouldn't serve as a soap box for bashing police.
Rather, it should ensure that the necessary systems are in place so a tragedy on such a massive scale never happens again, he said.
"It's something where you actually would have wished to be wrong," he said about his serial-killer theory. "It would be better if I was wrong and they were right and the women were found alive.
"The general attitude of Major Crime was, 'Well, we don't have any bodies so what can we do?'
I've argued that's akin to a fire department saying, 'We see smoke and no fire so we're not going to do anything.' "
Rossmo said police in all jurisdictions need to look at how they respond to missing persons cases, including on the so-called Highway of Tears - along the western stretch of Highway 16 across northern British Columbia.
In October, the RCMP announced the investigation of missing and murdered women in the area had grown to 18 victims from nine.
Police in Edmonton also revamped their approach to a string of unsolved prostitute murders over several years after stinging criticism.
Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, then the head of the city's police board, defended his officers and criticized Rossmo, who lost a wrongful dismissal suit against then deputy police chief John Unger and the police board.
"It's absolutely unjustified," Owen said of the criticism the force has faced.
"The (Vancouver police department) moved on this very early and was very serious and was concerned about it and did a lot of things. They're taking a bum rap and it bothers me."
Rossmo disputed Owen's remarks.
"The bottom line is we have 26 confirmed deaths by DNA," Rossmo said. "Does he really think that was a system that was working?
"There's at least 10 of those murders confirmed by DNA that occurred after Pickton was known to be a hot suspect. I'd like to know what he considered bad policing if he thinks that was OK."
Much of the criticism was crystallized 2002 in outrage directed at Vancouver Det. Scott Driemel. The spokesman for the missing women task force, told an off-colour joke about a prostitute to some officers and reportedly quipped to a journalist that the women in the Downtown Eastside are so "ugly, they can't get a date."
Driemel claimed his comment was taken out of context but some of the missing women's families remember it as an example of the attitude that permeated much of the department.
Deputy Chief Doug LePard said the force has tried to build better relationships with Downtown Eastside residents, including hiring a former police officer in 2003 as a liaison between the department and sex-trade workers.
LePard has conducted an internal review of the missing women's case and wrote a comprehensive 449-page report that includes several recommendations, some of which have already been enacted.
"It was essentially a management review of what occurred in the Vancouver police department," he said.
The report considers events from the mid-1990s, when women in the Downtown Eastside began disappearing, to February 2002, when police executed search warrants on Pickton's property that led to his arrest.
LePard said he couldn't discuss the report pending an appeal of Pickton's verdict, a possible second trial or a public inquiry.
The B.C. government would decide if an inquiry should proceed after a request to cabinet by the Attorney General's Ministry.
Attorney General Wally Oppal would not make such a request before a decision on whether Pickton will face another trial, said spokesman Shawn Robins.
Sue Davis, a co-ordinator with Prostitution Awareness Counselling and Education, said she's not so sure a costly public inquiry is necessary.
"It's just going to give a bunch of money to people to sit around and talk about us, not to us," Davis said.
Sex workers need a safe place to take customers so they don't have to drift out of the Downtown Eastside to places such as Pickton's pig farm, where they may become vulnerable prey, she said.
"If they had somewhere to take him (Pickton) they wouldn't have been on the farm," Davis said.
Marilyn Kraft, whose daughter Cynthia Feliks was last seen alive in 1997, is one of Pickton's alleged victims in the second indictment.
Kraft said she wants an inquiry into police inaction for the sake of her daughter, who left behind a daughter of her own and would have had her 53rd birthday this week.
Like the other families of missing and murdered women, Kraft is seeking answers to why police didn't take the disappearances seriously when there was an obvious pattern early on.
"If the police had done their job in the first place I'm sure that Mr. Pickton would not have killed as many women or been allowed to because people told the police many times about him, about the pig farm, and they didn't act on it," said Kraft.
"The usual response they gave to a lot of the parents when they reported their children missing was: 'She's around, she went on a holiday.'
"Of course, these girls never went on holidays."
Copyright © 2007 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Pickton tape given to police in 1998
Cop warned bosses about potential serial killer in ‘99
Police told about farm many times
Mines client provides early information in Missing Women Case
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