Part I: Our national tragedy

By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service October 20, 2009

Dozens of women have gone missing along the so-called Highway of Tears.

Photograph by: Mikael Kjellstrom, Calgary Herald

They disappear from small towns and big cities, from native reserves in the north and affluent suburbs in the south. They drift away and they abruptly vanish. And they leave, in their wake, broken-hearted families, confounded investigators and gaping holes in the communities where they grew up, forged friendships, held jobs, raised children.

At this moment in Canada, there are 1,573 missing women on file with the Canadian Police Information Centre, a national case-tracking database maintained at the RCMP's Ottawa headquarters.

The number sheds only a partial light on this dark story. It doesn't include the lost or stolen girls under the age of 18 who may have lived to become missing women. It doesn't account, anymore, for those who were once missing but have since been proven dead.

It doesn't embrace women who are gone but not reported missing.

Yet great depths of misery and mystery underlie even this imperfect figure. The stories of Canada's lost women — enough to equal the population of a small town, or the entire staff of a large urban hospital — would fill many mournful volumes.

The stories include some particularly shocking narratives in which a multitude of the missing disappear from a single area — such as B.C.'s "Highway of Tears," a lonely stretch of road between Prince Rupert and Prince George where five of those women were last seen and 13 others are known to have been murdered.

A high-profile search in late August for the remains of Nicole Hoar — one of Hwy. 16's 18 unsolved cases — sparked extensive news coverage and prompted some nationwide soul-searching, at least briefly, about Canada's missing women.

Then, within days, came an overdue pledge by Manitoba RCMP and Winnipeg city police to more closely collaborate in probing a series of disappearances and deaths of aboriginal women in that province.

Similar concentrations of missing or murdered women in Alberta and Saskatchewan were noted, too, along with the single most horrific chapter in the whole sorrowful saga: the dozens of vanished women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside linked to the predatory B.C. pig farmer Robert Pickton.

But there are tears staining village streets, rural sideroads and inner-city avenues across the country. No province or territory is beyond the scope of a tragedy that encompasses every corner of Canada and which — for all of the individual instances of anguish — is made especially plain with a single, breathtaking number: 1,573.

There are thousands of missing men in the country — more than 5,000, in fact, are listed at CPIC — but the spotlight has turned to Canada's lost women because of the clusters of disappearances throughout the West and the sense that predatory men lurk behind the grim statistics.

Even 1,573 strikes Gladys Radek as a low estimate.

A member of the Gitksan Nation of northern B.C. who now lives in Vancouver, Radek has emerged as a leading voice for the lost. It's an angry voice, and the word "racism" rolls easily from her tongue as she discusses the pain of her own family's loss and the disproportionate toll among aboriginal communities like hers.

But the 59-year-old activist, now studying aboriginal law at a Vancouver native college, has called for governments, police agencies and the public to devote more attention to all of Canada's missing women — "red, black, white and yellow," as she puts it — with greater investigative resources to solve existing cases and strengthened social services to prevent new ones.

"It pissed me off that these women were going missing without anybody saying or doing anything about it," says Radek, recalling her gathering awareness of the crisis in the wake of her own niece's unexplained disappearance in September 2005 along the Highway of Tears.

Tamara Chipman — 22 at the time, and the mother of a two-year-old boy — was hitchhiking outside Prince Rupert when she vanished.

"She was just beginning her life," says Radek. "Tamara was a beautiful, spunky girl."

The tragedy sparked a vision. Radek imagined a cross-Canada pilgrimage linking families and communities across the country struggling to cope with missing and murdered women.

Last year, with a Vancouver-to-Ottawa trek she called Walk4Justice, Radek's vision was realized, drawing widespread media coverage and galvanizing public awareness of Canada's lost women.

The number 4 in the name "covers all the races, and all four directions," says Radek. "Before we did that walk, there wasn't really that much attention paid to the missing and murdered women. That's when the families started coming together more and more.

"It was a pretty powerful journey."

Earlier this year, Radek organized a second Walk4Justice between Vancouver and Prince Rupert to spotlight the suffering of families — including her own — who've lost loved ones along the Highway of Tears.

She isn't convinced police in B.C. or elsewhere are doing enough to probe the hundreds of unsolved cases, or that governments are sufficiently seized by the need to invest more in vulnerable communities and demographic groups — native and non-native — to prevent numbers like 1,573 from growing larger.

"We need better services so women don't get caught in such desperate situations," she argues. "We're pushing for a lot more shelters, even in the smallest communities. There's often nowhere for women to go when they're running from violent situations."

RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary defends the efforts of police in B.C. and across the country in probing missing-women cases. In his experience, he says, police agencies "bend over backwards" to co-operate across jurisdictional boundaries, comparing notes and sharing clues to try to solve what are often the toughest cases in police work to crack.

But he does agree with Radek about one thing when it comes to the CPIC total of 1,573 missing women in Canada.

"I thought it would be higher," he says.

Perhaps it's a worldview shaped by his immersion in scores of missing-women cases — most notably the Pickton-linked disappearances of up to 60 sex-trade workers and other high-risk targets in Vancouver — during a 29-year career as one of B.C.'s leading investigators.

The province has emerged as the country's main stage in this long-running tragedy, and Clary wonders aloud if Vancouver's history as a key Pacific port — a magnet not just for tourists and immigrants who've brought prosperity to B.C., but also for criminals — has contributed to the crisis.

Resources, he notes, are not boundless when it comes to investigating missing women, or any crime for that matter. But as a key player in the high-profile and well-funded Project Evenhanded investigation that ultimately unraveled Pickton's crimes, Clary says he sympathizes with isolated investigators across the country, who inevitably have a multitude of other open files on their desks in addition to time-consuming missing-person cases.

"If you have a crime scene and no body — no person — that's easy. You just roll it out like it's a homicide. It's when you don't have a crime scene, it's harder. Because obviously you're adjusting resources and files just never stop coming in," he says.

"I've been on a project here, so we just deal with the one issue — which is easier to handle because there's dedicated resources. But when you're investigating with a detachment or a municipal PD, there's stuff coming your way every day. And, of course, it never ends."

The principal strategy for probing the case of a missing woman is simple enough, he says.

"You identify who their associates are, where they work, and you just start asking questions. Generally, that will lead you somewhere. But there's many cases where you just don't know, and where do you go next?"

Bank accounts, credit cards and cellphones are probed because they're likely to record a person's movements, says Clary.

"You can see them existing in society, and then all of a sudden everything stops," he says. "Whether it's the methadone clinic, or their doctor, or their welfare cheque — it just stops. And you have to ask yourself, why did that happen?"

In so many cases, he says, it's what you can't do for desperate families — the anguished ones seeking closure years or decades after a sister or daughter has vanished — that haunts him and other officers assigned to search for the missing.

Too often, he says bluntly, "you can never give it to them. It's difficult to convey to them that there's nothing more you can do."

And the sad reality, he says, is that the disappeared — in many or even most of the cases on file — are dead.

But without evidence to prove that a missing woman was murdered or otherwise lost her life, families are naturally reluctant to turn the page. The word "missing," for all of its horrifying connotations, preserves at least a shred of hope.

One weekend in September, in the remote woods near Thunder Bay, an Ontario family and a team of volunteer searchers were clinging to such hope.

They scoured the forests of Rainbow Falls Provincial Park looking for clues that might point to the whereabouts of Christina Calayca, a vivacious, 20-year-old childcare worker from Toronto who disappeared — literally "without a trace," a police spokesperson says — after setting off for a morning jog from a campsite on Aug. 6, 2007.

Was the young Filipina-Canadian woman snatched by an unknown assailant or human trafficker? Did she intentionally vanish to create a new life and identity? Or did she simply lose her way in the trees, slip into a stream, fall from a rock ledge?

Police do not have evidence pointing to foul play, says Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Shelley Garr, but they just don't know.

"There are a number of possibilities," she says, "but we don't speak to hypotheticals."

There's a website, www.findchristinacalayca.com, that details a 2008 fundraising gala, holds a cache of news stories, promotes a CD — "Missing You" — that's dedicated to Calayca.

The site exudes affection for the lost woman.

"Each day since her disappearance months ago, Christina's loved ones have hoped and prayed that she would return to us safely," a message states. "If hope alone were enough, she would already be home; but she unfortunately is not."

There have now been six searches — three led by the OPP, three organized by Calayca's family, including one with sniffer dogs supplied by a benevolent search-and-rescue specialist from the U.S.

"She went missing and there's been nothing since," Garr said in a recent interview. "Christina's mother was up again this past weekend. They are still actively searching for answers. But it must be frustrating for them."

The best chance for discovery, she adds, might have been during the initial 17-day search in August 2007, a full-scale operation involving aerial crews and extensive grid-pattern sweeps by emergency personnel on the ground.

"But then we got into fall," says Garr, "and fall turns into winter."

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

scooper@theprovince.com

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Murder and racism along the Highway of Tears

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

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

Hoar was an anomaly. She was white.

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

The other eight were aboriginal.

Of those eight, four were 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com, 604-605-2905

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Highway of Tears

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

Missing persons website adds new hope

Posted By Bobby Roy
Posted 1 hour ago

Every family’s worst nightmare is to hear that a loved one has gone missing, and going through every waking moment worrying about where they could be isn’t easy.

In the every missing persons case, closure is what the family and friends connected to them want and with a help of a new tool, giving the stricken family members and friends closure will be easier to do.

A new website designed to work with the public’s help is hoping to bring some much needed closure to the families of missing persons.

“We have started a website called albertamissingpersons.ca as a new tool for both the public and police to help close missing persons cases,” said Camille Fedoruk, research analyst for Project KARE.

According to kare.ca Project KARE is an investigational unit, created with the highest priority to examine the deaths of several “High Risk Missing Persons” who have been found in the surrounding rural areas of the City of Edmonton. One of the objectives of Project KARE is to investigate all leads, capture and prosecute the person(s) responsible for these crimes.

The new website has been launched with the help of Law Enforcement Agencies and Alberta Medical Examiners to profile the 300 plus missing persons that have been reported in Alberta so that either they will be found alive or their remains can be identified.

“So far I’ve put about 180 of the missing person cases on the website along with seven or eight unidentified human remains cases,” said Fedoruk.

The website contains brief but important verification information about each missing person in hopes that someone out there looking at the site can identify a missing person or unidentified human remains. Each case can contain a photo of the missing person, how long they have been missing for, physical descriptions, where they were last seen, a recent photo, and who to call. Fedoruk along with Cst. Kay Vera and Cst. Roland Mislk were out at the Leduc Scale on June 3 for the Driver Appreciation barbeque to help spread information about the website.

The scale is located on the QEII highway, south of Leduc.

“It takes just one phone call and the trucking industry has such an exposure on the highways.

“A lot of these individuals who go missing lead a high risk lifestyle and that’s why we’re here. Hopefully it might jog someone’s memory,” said Fedoruk.

The website has already had success in British Columbia where a man who had been missing since 2000 was identified through some human remains that someone had seen on the website.

“Just by using one word, like a tattoo, a certain piercing, birthmark or a fracture it makes it easier to identify a person,” said Fedoruk.

“These missing people all have a dad, a mom, a brother and all they want is some sort of closure even if it the worst possible scenario and by launching this website it definitely gives the public and police another tool to help solve these cases,” said Fedoruk.

Anyone who has any information in regards to a missing person is asked to

call the investigating agency for each

missing person that can be found on the newly launched website albertamissingpersons.ca or call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.

© 2009 , Sun Media

Mystery of missing woman solved

By Lori Culbert, Vancouver Sun
April 2, 2009

METRO VANCOUVER - Marie Laura Mah’s is one of the 65 faces on the police missing women poster, and she has not been seen since 1985, according to the tiny bit of information under her black-and-white photo.

But the Missing Women Task Force visited Mah’s son in Alberta this week to tell him officers have confirmed his mother is not, in fact, missing, The Vancouver Sun has learned.

Mah died 23 years ago in Burnaby General Hospital, but her identity remained a mystery until recently because of confusion over names and birthdates.

The surprise discovery was a relief for Daryl Chase, who now knows his long-lost mother died of natural causes and wasn’t the victim of a predator.

“It is better that she didn’t lose her life to someone else’s hand, that she died in the hospital,” Chase, an oil-field worker, said in an interview. “We’re happy that she didn’t end up on somebody’s farm, buried.”

The discovery puts to rest Chase’s constant worrying about Mah’s whereabouts, as well as his anger over his mother’s inclusion on a poster often depicted as a group of sex-trade workers with drug problems.

“She was always a loving mother to me and my sister,” he said, adding that her death certificate indicated Mah had a Burnaby address and a job as a cook when she died at age 42.

Chase said there has been no evidence that Mah was involved in the sex trade or drugs.

Chase and his sister were raised by their mother and father in a Vancouver house until his parents separated when he was seven. He last saw his mother three years later, in 1975, when she was going through difficult times and drinking.

He lived in foster homes, but has since been granted access to his child-welfare records, which show his mother regularly wrote letters to her children and to the ministry about trying to get her kids back.

Mah’s estranged sister reported her missing in 1999.

But police had few leads, said RCMP Cpl. Annie Linteau.

Mah had not been heard from since Christmas 1984 or 1985, her last address was not known, no birth date was provided, and her name was given as Laura Kathleen Mah, even though it was really Marie Laura Mah.

No one connected the woman who died in Burnaby in 1986 with the one reported missing in 1999 until the Missing Women Task Force recently made inquiries with vital statistics, which tracks births and deaths in B.C., Linteau said.

Mah’s photo will be removed from the poster when a new one is made, she added.
Police continue to investigate 38 of the missing women, while Robert (Willie) Pickton was convicted of killing six woman and charged with killing another 20.
Chase will speak with his sister and extended family about a memorial for his mother, and what to do with the remains that were unclaimed for 23 years.

“There she sat in the crematorium, and still sits there.”

lculbert@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun