VANCOUVER - The families of Robert Pickton’s victims finally got something to bury this year.
The process of returning the remains of the 26 women Pickton was accused of killing began in late summer, after the Supreme Court of Canada ended the legal proceedings in the case by refusing to grant him an appeal.
But advocates for marginalized women have continually fought — often fruitlessly — to ensure the case becomes more than just a collection of macabre stories of lives disposed by a dullard of a man who gained serial-killer celebrity.
In the years since Pickton’s victims vanished, while others disappeared from a lonely stretch of northern B.C. highway and still more went missing from Edmonton, Winnipeg and city streets across Canada, at no time have policy makers been paying more attention.
And potentially explosive challenges to Canada's prostitution laws working their way through courts — cases with roots in the Pickton killings — could force authorities to act.
"We're not going for changes just in and around the Vancouver area," said Gladys Radek, a Vancouver woman who started Walk4Justice, a cross-Canada march to draw attention to the phenomenon of missing and murdered women, by some estimates, up to 500 country-wide.
"We're going for municipal and provincial and federal changes in the judicial system so this won't happen again."
Radek's niece, Tamara Chipman, disappeared in 2005 and is among at least 18 women who have gone missing over four decades along the so-called Highway of Tears, between Prince Rupert and Prince George in northern British Columbia.
In Pickton's case, the legal proceedings ended in July when the Supreme Court of Canada denied his appeal and upheld his convictions on six counts of second-degree murder.
The next week, the B.C. Crown stayed 20 outstanding charges against Pickton, meaning those cases won't go to court. It also meant it is highly unlikely Pickton will ever be charged with the deaths of six more women whose DNA was found on his farm.
Prosecutors argue there would be no point because Pickton is already serving life in prison, but Joel Boen said their decision means Pickton will likely die without ever again having to hear his mother Yvonne's name.
Yvonne Boen is one of six women whose DNA was found on Pickton's farm for whose deaths he has never been charged.
"He killed her and that's the end of the story," Boen, 25, said in an interview earlier this year from his home in Saskatchewan.
But it hasn't been.
A long-demanded inquiry into the Pickton case was announced in September.
In October, provincial justice ministers and their federal counterpart acknowledged that the cases of missing and murdered women haven't been given the attention they deserve.
And later that month, the federal government ponied up $10 million over two years for a Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women initiative.
Alan Young, an Osgoode Hall law professor in Toronto, said the Pickton case was part of the genesis for him and a team of lawyers to challenge Canada's laws against prostitution.
They won in the fall after successfully arguing in Ontario Superior Court the law forces prostitutes — overwhelmingly women — to work in unsafe conditions that make them vulnerable to predators like Pickton. The government has until April to appeal the ruling.
Young said that in 1990, an effort to challenge the same laws at Canada's high court failed. The justices concluded laws that force prostitutes off the street but don't allow them to move indoors were contradictory but not unconstitutional.
"The court sort of threw up its hands and said, 'Well, you know, it's a bit bizarre, a bit odd' — these are the words they used — 'but there's no constitutional problem when all you're saying is the law is strange,'" Young said in an interview.
The Pickton case proved differently.
"It was irrationality leading to the killing fields," said Young.
It's not just Pickton's case bolstering the fight, Young said. Eighteen women have gone missing or been found murdered along the Highway of Tears, an RCMP task force in the Edmonton area has 82 similar cases between Calgary and Edmonton to investigate and a task force in the Winnipeg area has a list of more than 30.
Most are sex-trade workers.
"It is epidemic," said Young. "It is a problem that is inherent in telling people that you can do this business but you can't do it in a safe setting."
The prostitution case is bound to end up before the Supreme Court of Canada. Young expects to be arguing at the Ontario Appeal Court next year and hopes to have a definitive decision from the country's highest court by the end of 2012.
He said he'll be watching the Pickton inquiry to see if Commissioner Wally Oppal concludes that Canada's laws are partly to blame for putting Vancouver women in the serial killer's hunting ground.
Oppal — a former B.C. attorney general who, before politics, spent more than two decades as a judge — will start hearings early next year looking into how Vancouver city police and the RCMP conducted the investigation into the dozens of women that went missing from the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
He's expected to hear angry testimony about how family members were ignored or insulted when they tried to report their loved ones missing; how a turf-war between Vancouver police and the RCMP kept them from working together and how 1998 murder charges against Pickton were stayed, allowing him to continue killing until he was arrested again in 2002.
Oppal is confident his report will lead to better policing nationwide. One Ontario force, he said, is sending a deputy chief to monitor the inquiry.
But he was cautious about suggestions he should also look at the circumstances that force women onto the streets in the first place.
"I don't know that we can go that far because the issues can go and on," he said in an interview.
"We know that there are very complex issues regarding poverty, disenfranchised people, people who have historically lived in poor areas like the Downtown Eastside.
"I don't know how far we can go into delving into some of those complex background materials."
Oppal, whose report is due by Dec. 31, 2011, noted the RCMP have over a million documents on missing women.
Kathy King is wearied by it all.
Her 22-year-old daughter, Cara, went missing in Edmonton in 1997.
King, who now works with women at risk and speaks at so-called "john schools" in Edmonton, phoned four times in a week to report her daughter missing, but no formal report was made until she specifically asked for one.She gave all the information she knew about her daughter's last whereabouts, an admittedly sketchy picture of someone she loved but who had fallen into a high-risk life.
"So then I said, well, now what do we do? And the person said 'Now we wait for a body.'"
King said police procedures in Edmonton have changed significantly since then. The RCMP and the Edmonton police established Project Kare to investigate missing women in Edmonton and Calgary, leading to a murder conviction against Thomas Svekla.
There have been no arrests in Cara's case. King said the years of waiting and hoping and planning for a trial that never came are behind her.
"It would be nice to have some answers, but I think I've come to accept that I probably won't."
Edmonton police now have procedures to treat reports of those missing more seriously butKing said too much of it — even the Pickton inquiry — is after the fact.
She noted the latest tally for the Pickton legal proceedings and investigation is $103 million.
"Where is the money to help these women get off the street? Service organizations are struggling for a pittance. The legal system has the ability to produce millions of dollars for their own process."
Then she paused, apologetic for sounding negative.Initiatives like Project Kare and the Pickton inquiry are great steps, she said.
"But they're just such drops in the ocean."
