Missing and Murdered Women: Cold Case

Showing posts with label Cold Case. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 24

The murder of Sharron Prior in 1975 remains unsolved. Please help solve this Cold Case.

Sharon Prior was a beautiful 16 year old blonde from Point St-Charles, Quebec . Sharron was last seen March 29 1975 going to Marina's Pizzeria on Wellington and Ash Avenue to meet some friends. She was later found in Longueil, Quebec, brutally murdered.Her killer or killers were never brought to justice, even after all of these years. The Prior family still have not had closure after 32 years. This is another cold case file. There has to be someone who has information about the suspect or suspects. There is also a website that you can visit and read Sharron's story and all of the newspaper articles. Help this family rest easier and catch the evil person(s) who did this to Sharron.

website: www.sharronprior.com

CBC Digital Archives:

Cold Cases: Unsolved Crimes in Canada

They are the heartwrenching stories that shock whole communities, bringing waves of fear and sorrow that can linger for years. Disappearances and unsolved murders devastate Canadian families in all parts of the country, creating anger and suspicions that may never be put to rest. In collaboration with the CBC News series Canadian Cold Case, the CBC Digital Archives presents a collection of stories from unsolved crimes in Canada.

http://archives.cbc.ca/society/crime_justice/topics/3776/

Sunday, February 14

Decades later, unsolved deaths of young women haunt investigators.

Image via Wikipedia

By Neal Hall, Canwest News Service

December 13, 2009

VANCOUVER - A former Kamloops detective got excited about a possible break in the murder of Colleen Rae MacMillen, 16, when a U.S. man confessed to killing her.

MacMillen's body had been found on a logging road about 25 kilometres south of 100 Mile House, B.C., about a month after the she went missing in 1974.

But the man changed the details of how the murder was carried out, and police later concluded it was a bogus confession, said Ken Leibel.

The suspect, Edwin Henry Foster, 19, made the confession while serving an eight-year sentence for a gas station robbery. He hanged himself in a Washington state prison in 1976.

The prospect of resolution fizzled into yet another frustrating dead end in the unsolved murder of Colleen MacMillen.

Her brutal death is just one of a grim series of disappearances and murders of women in northern B.C. that have haunted Leibel and other detectives over the years.

Leibel said he got excited again when he began investigating another likely suspect, who lived outside of 100 Mile House in the 1970s.

``Somebody came to the detachment and said a man had tried to abduct them and they took down the licence plate,'' Leibel recalls.

Police ran the plate and saw that the man, Jerry Baker, had a history of sex offences, had done time in prison and had returned to the Williams Lake area around the time MacMillen was killed - the teenager was last seen hitchhiking to a girlfriend's house about six kilometres away in Lac la Hache.

At the time, Leibel felt the man could have been responsible for other murders as well. His name had surfaced in several other investigations, including the murders of Pamela Darlington in Kamloops in 1973 and Gail Ann Weys in Clearwater in 1974.

He tried questioning Baker about MacMillen's murder, ``but he was extremely nervous and denied it.''

Fifteen years later, Baker became the prime suspect for the murder of a young girl named Norma Tashoots, 17, whose body was found on July 10, 1989 in a wooded area near 100 Mile House. She had been shot.

She was last seen about a month earlier being dropped off near 100 Mile House while hitchhiking to Vancouver.

A local resident suggested Baker was responsible for the Tashoots murder.

Baker, who had reported his Ruger handgun stolen to police the day after Tashoots was last seen, was interviewed and denied being involved. The investigation eventually dead-ended.

But it was reopened in 2001 after a complete file review and a decision to try an undercover operation.

Baker eventually confessed to murdering Tashoots to an undercover officer and confided where he had disposed of the murder weapon - the gun he had reported missing - which was recovered. He was convicted in 2003 of the murder.

``Is he responsible for four or five (murders) or one? I don't know,'' Leibel said of Baker.

He said police considered the possibility of a serial killer being involved in the growing number of unsolved murders that occurred along highways in B.C. 's Interior.

``If you've got somebody driving, you could have one guy,'' Leibel said. ``You can cover a lot of ground in a day.''

`It could be anyone'

There has been criticism levelled at police and RCMP over the years for failing to solve the majority of the highway homicide cases including those of the 18 girls and women on the Highway of Tears victims' list.

Leibel said the cases were especially difficult to investigate because they seemed to involve a killer who was a complete stranger to the victims, many of whom were teenage girls trying to hitch a ride.

``It could be anyone,'' he said of trying to find a suspect. ``It's different than when you're investigating a jealous husband or boyfriend.''

There has also been criticism from native communities that police didn't properly handle cases involving some of the aboriginal victims.

But Leibel said police treat every murder the same, regardless of the race, colour or socio-economic background of the victim.

``I always looked at the victim the same: You're my client and I'm going to get some justice for you,'' Leibel said. ``You investigate it as if they were your own brother, sister or parent.''

Leibel retired as a Mountie in 1992 and currently works on contract with the RCMP, interviewing people who apply to become Mounties. Even today, he still thinks about the unsolved murder of MacMillen.

``The odd time I'll be walking with my morning coffee and I'll think: Could I have done something different?'' Leibel, now 58, recalled.

``I'm a proud sucker,'' he said, adding he solved dozens of murders over his 21-year career. Those were the days when a murder file was kept in boxes, before computers and modern forensic science, including DNA testing.

``Overall, I had a pretty good success rate but there were ones that got away (with murder).''

Leibel says he still has his notebooks from those days, which he keeps in his basement, hoping one day to get a phone call, asking him to to testify about the cold case if it gets solved and goes to trial.

``One day, you hope for the call,'' he said.

Keith Hildebrand, the commander of the Quesnel detachment until he retired last year, also finds it frustrating that he could never find the solution to the murder of Deena Braem, 16, who was last seen hitchhiking on Sept. 25, 1999. Her body was recovered three months later, on Dec. 10, northwest of Quesnel near Pinnacles Provincial Park.

Hildebrand said the unsolved murder file was already gathering dust when he arrived as detachment commander. He oversaw the Braem investigation and brought in detectives with the Surrey-based Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. They thoroughly went through the file and tried to find any tips that were not probed.

``We had some good leads but they ended in another dead end,'' explained the 58-year-old retired officer, who now runs the community policing office in Quesnel.

``They are investigating tips,'' he added about the state of the current investigation.

Hildebrand estimated that over the years, more than $1 million has been spent investigating Braem's murder.

It was frustrating for him, when he retired in 2008, that the case remained unsolved.

``It bugs me the most of all my (36) years of service. It was like a loose end you leave behind,'' Hildebrand said.

``Usually, when I took on a file, it had a good result to it,'' he added.

``It was a frustrating investigation for everybody, including her parents,'' he recalls. ``It still bothers me.''

Asked if he believes a serial killer is operating along the highways of B.C. 's Interior, Hildebrand said he is uncertain.

``The evidence is that there is something,'' he said. ``Something unusual.''

Retired Mountie Fred Bodnaruk, who was a staff-sergeant when he headed the investigations into the murders of Colleen MacMillan and Pamela Darlington in the early 1970s, admitted that even though he retired in 1977, he still thinks about the cases.

``They never leave you,'' he said. ``You dream about them, especially the ones you don't solve.''

He always thought a serial killer could have been responsible for several ``highway murders,'' as they were called then.

At one time, Bodnaruk suspected U.S. serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible for Darlington's murder.

The nude body of the 19-year-old was found at the edge of the Thompson River in 1973 with bite marks on her body - a Bundy trademark in some U.S. killings. But investigators concluded that although Bundy had been known to visit Canada, there was no evidence he was in the area at the time.

Bundy, a former Seattle resident, was caught and sentenced to death in Florida for three murders. Just before Bundy was executed in 1989, he confessed to committing more than 20 murders but investigators felt he was responsible for many more.

``Bundy didn't confess anything until the end,'' Bodnaruk said. ``I felt police here should have gone down to talk to Bundy.''

Bodnaruk also compared notes ``all the time'' with Seattle detectives investigating the serial murder case known as the Green River killer. The man eventually caught, Gary Ridgway, pleaded guilty in 2003 to killing 48 women.

Now 78, Bodnaruk recently watched a TV documentary about a man named Wayne Clifford Boden and felt he might be a suspect. Boden was a travelling salesman who killed three women in Montreal before moving to Calgary, where he killed again and got caught in 1972.

He was known as the Vampire Killer because he left bite marks on all his victims, similar to Darlington.

The TV documentary detailed how Boden travelled through Kamloops to Vancouver.

Boden, however, was arrested in Calgary in 1972, convicted of four murders and died in prison in 2006.

Surrey private investigator Ray Michalko has been investigating the Highway of Tears cases on his own time since 2006.

``I was watching the news about the second anniversary of Tamara Chipman going missing (in 2005) and I complained to my wife that nobody seemed to be doing anything, and she said `You're a PI, why don't you do something','' he recalled.

He started investigating the initial eight mysterious disappearances and murders along Highway 16. He estimates he spends up to 40 hours a month pursuing tips he receives by e-mail or on his toll-free line, which he publicizes using letters and posters, including some posted in federal prisons and provincial jails in B.C.

He said when he receives a paying job in the north, he stays a few days longer to do followup on the Highway of Tears tips.

Michalko, 62, a former North Vancouver Mountie, said there is no shortage of theories and rumours about who is behind the murders and disappearances.

Some say it's a cop or a long-haul trucker preying on young girls walking along the highway alone, he said.

``I have seen no evidence of that,'' Michalko said of the rumours. ``There's a million places to pull off and go undetected, but not in a tractor-trailer.''

He's also been told that the girls were abducted and used in some sort of sex trafficking ring. Again, he discounts that theory because he has received no solid tips of it happening.

He initially believed there was a serial killer cruising the highway ``but I don't believe that now. But until you catch somebody, you don't know.''

Despite ``one name that keeps popping up'' - he wouldn't reveal the man's name, other than to say he is linked to a community close to Prince George - there is little to link the unsolved cases together, other than the fact the girls and young women were last seen on the highway, many of them hitchhiking.

He now believes the murders were likely crimes of opportunity committed by various men living in the local communities where the tragedies took place or passing through those communities.

``That's scarier than having a serial killer,'' Michalko explained, adding it means more than a dozen men got away with murder and are still walking free.

Currently there are 60 people, including retired homicide detectives working on contract, assigned to the Project E-Pana investigation, which is conducting homicide probes of 18 female victims along Interior highways.

Investigators descended last August on a piece of property in the Isle Pierre district west of Prince George looking for evidence related to the 2002 disappearance of Nicole Hoar, 25, who was from Red Deer and working as a tree planter when she was last seen hitchhiking near a gas station west of Prince George.

At the time of Hoar's disappearance on June 21, 2002, the property searched by police was owned by Leland Switzer, a welder who told police in 2004 that the night Hoar disappeared he and a friend stopped and urinated near the Mohawk gas station - Hoar's vanishing point.

Switzer told police about this because he said he didn't know if police used a ``fine tooth comb'' to search the scene.

During his police statement, which was obtained by Global TV and provided to The Vancouver Sun, Switzer provided the name of a friend and neighbour whom Switzer claimed had broken down crying when Switzer asked if he was responsible for all the ``girls'' going missing along Highway 16.

``My daughter heard a gun shot that night,'' Switzer added. ``When Nicole Hoar went missing, right?''

He said his wife and daughter were home that night but Switzer said he was at a dance and maintained 33 people saw him there.

Two days after Hoar's disappearance, Switzer fatally shot and killed his older brother, Irvin Switzer, at his parents' property, near his own home. He now is serving life for that murder.

Police confirmed last week that investigators seized a vehicle and other exhibits during the search related to Hoar. The exhibits now are being tested in the RCMP forensics lab.

Vancouver Sun

Sunday, December 13

Possible Highway of Tears suspects haunt detectives

There has never been an arrest in this mystery

Sunday, December 13th, 2009 | 6:40 pm

Canwest News Service

A former Kamloops detective got excited about a possible break in the murder of Colleen Rae MacMillen, 16, when a U.S. man confessed to killing her.

MacMillen's body had been found on a logging road about 25 kilometres south of 100 Mile House about a month after the she went missing in 1974.

But the man changed the details of how the murder was carried out, and police later concluded it was a bogus confession, said Ken Leibel.

The suspect, Edwin Henry Foster, 19, made the confession while serving an eight-year sentence for a gas station robbery. He hanged himself in a Washington state prison in 1976.

The prospect of resolution fizzled into yet another frustrating dead end in the unsolved murder of Colleen MacMillen.

Her brutal death is just one of a grim series of disappearances and murders of women in northern B.C. that have haunted Leibel and other detectives over the years.

Leibel said he got excited again when he began investigating another likely suspect, who lived outside of 100 Mile House in the 1970s.

"Somebody came to the detachment and said a man had tried to abduct them and they took down the licence plate," Leibel recalls today.

Police ran the plate and saw that the man, Jerry Baker, had a history of sex offences, had done time in prison and had returned to the Williams Lake area around the time MacMillen was killed – the teenager was last seen hitchhiking to a girlfriend's house about six kilometres away in Lac la Hache.

He tried questioning Baker about MacMillen's murder, "but he was extremely nervous and denied it."

She was last seen about a month earlier being dropped off near 100 Mile House while hitchhiking to Vancouver.

A local resident suggested Baker was responsible for the Tashoots murder.

Baker, who had reported his Ruger handgun stolen to police the day after Tashoots was last seen, was interviewed and denied being involved. The investigation eventually dead-ended.

But it was re-opened in 2001 after a complete file review and a decision to try an undercover operation.

Baker eventually confessed to murdering Tashoots to an undercover officer and confided where he had disposed of the murder weapon – the gun he had reported missing – which was recovered. He was convicted in 2003 of the murder.

"Is he responsible for four or five [murders] or one? I don't know," Leibel said of Baker.

He said police considered the possibility of a serial killer being involved in the growing number of unsolved murders that occurred along highways in B.C. 's Interior.

"If you've got somebody driving, you could have one guy," Leibel said. "You can cover a lot of ground in a day."

It could be anyone'

Leibel said the cases were especially difficult to investigate because they seemed to involve a killer who was a complete stranger to the murder victims, many of whom were teenage girls trying to hitch a ride.

"It could be anyone," he said of trying to find a suspect. "It's different than when you're investigating a jealous husband or boyfriend."

There has also been criticism from native communities that police didn't properly handle cases involving some of the aboriginal victims.

But Leibel said police treat every murder the same, regardless of the race, colour or socio-economic background of the victim.

"I always looked at the victim the same: You're my client and I'm going to get some justice for you," Leibel said. "You investigate it as if they were your own brother, sister or parent."

He retired as a Mountie in 1992 and currently works on contract with the RCMP, interviewing people who apply to become Mounties. Even today, he still thinks about the unsolved murder of MacMillen.

"The odd time I'll be walking with my morning coffee and I'll think: Could I have done something different?" Leibel, now 58, recalled.

"I'm a proud sucker," he said, adding he solved dozens of murders over his 21-year career. Those were the days when a murder file was kept in boxes, before computers and modern forensic science, including DNA testing.

"Overall, I had a pretty good success rate but there were ones that got away [with murder]."

"One day, you hope for the call," he said.

Keith Hildebrand, the commander of the Quesnel detachment until he retired last year, also finds it frustrating that he could never find the solution to the murder of Deena Braem, 16, who was last seen alive hitchhiking on Sept. 25, 1999. Her body was recovered three months later, on Dec. 10, northwest of Quesnel near Pinnacles Provincial Park.

"We had some good leads but they ended in another dead end," explained the 58-year-old retired officer, who now runs the community policing office in Quesnel.

"They are investigating tips," he added about the state of the current investigation.

Hildebrand estimated that over the years, more than $1 million has been spent investigating Braem's murder.

It was frustrating for him, when he retired in 2008, that the case remained unsolved.

"It bugs me the most of all my [36] years of service. It was like a loose end you leave behind," Hildebrand said.

"Usually, when I took on a file, it had a good result to it," he added.

"It was a frustrating investigation for everybody, including her parents," he recalls. "It still bothers me."

Asked if he believes a serial killer is operating along the highways of B.C. 's Interior, Hildebrand said he is uncertain.

"The evidence is that there is something," he said. "Something unusual."

They never leave you'

"They never leave you," he said. "You dream about them, especially the ones you don't solve."

He always thought a serial killer could have been responsible for several "highway murders," as they were called then.

At one time, Bodnaruk suspected U.S. serial killer Ted Bundy was responsible for Darlington's murder.

The nude body of the 19-year-old was found at the edge of the Thompson River in 1973 with bite marks on her body – a Bundy trademark in some U.S. killings. But investigators concluded that although Bundy had been known to visit Canada, there was no evidence he was in the area at the time.

"Bundy didn't confess anything until the end," Bodnaruk said. "I felt police here should have gone down to talk to Bundy."

Bodnaruk also compared notes "all the time" with Seattle detectives investigating the serial murder case known as the Green River killer. The man eventually caught, Gary Ridgway, pleaded guilty in 2003 to killing 48 women.

He was known as the Vampire Killer because he left bite marks on all his victims, similar to Darlington.

The TV documentary detailed how Boden travelled through Kamloops to Vancouver.

Boden, however, was arrested in Calgary in 1972, convicted of four murders and died in prison in 2006.

Surrey private investigator Ray Michalko has been investigating the Highway of Tears cases on his own time since 2006.

"I was watching the news about the second anniversary of Tamara Chipman going missing [in 2005] and I complained to my wife that nobody seemed to be doing anything, and she said You're a PI, why don't you do something'," he recalled.

He started investigating the initial eight mysterious disappearances and murdersalong Highway 16. He estimates he spends up to 40 hours a month pursuing tips he receives by e-mail or on his toll-free line, which he publicizes using letters and posters, including some posted in federal prisons and provincial jails in B.C.

He said when he receives a paying job in the north, he stays a few days longer to do follow-up on the Highway of Tears tips.

Michalko, 62, a former North Vancouver Mountie, said there is no shortage of theories and rumours about who is behind the murders and disappearances.

Some say it's a cop or a long-haul trucker preying on young girls walking along the highway alone, he said.

"I have seen no evidence of that," Michalko said of the rumours. "There's a million places to pull off and go undetected, but not in a tractor-trailer."

One name popping up

He's also been told that the girls were abducted and used in some sort of sex trafficking ring. Again, he discounts that theory because he has received no solid tips of it happening.

He initially believed there was a serial killer cruising the highway "but I don't believe that now. But until you catch somebody, you don't know."

Despite "one name that keeps popping up" – he wouldn't reveal the man's name, other than to say he is linked to a community close to Prince George – there is little to link the unsolved cases together, other than the fact the girls and young women were last seen on the highway, many of them hitchhiking.

He now believes the murders were likely crimes of opportunity committed by various men living in the local communities where the tragedies took place or passing through those communities.

"That's scarier than having a serial killer," Michalko explained, adding it means more than a dozen men got away with murder and are still walking free.

60 people assigned

Switzer told police about this because he said he didn't know if police used a "fine tooth comb" to search the scene.

During his police statement, which was obtained by Global TV and provided to The Sun, Switzer provided the name of a friend and neighbour whom Switzer claimed had broken down crying when Switzer asked if he was responsible for all the "girls" going missing along Highway 16.

"My daughter heard a gun shot that night," Switzer added. "When Nicole Hoar went missing, right?"

He said his wife and daughter were home that night but Switzer said he was at a dance and maintained 33 people saw him there.

Two days after Hoar's disappearance, Switzer fatally shot and killed his older brother, Irvin Switzer, at his parents' property, near his own home. He now is serving life for that murder.

Police confirmed last week that investigators seized a vehicle and other exhibits during the search related to Hoar. The exhibits now are being tested in the RCMP forensics lab.

nhall@vancouversun.com

Wednesday, October 21

‘I miss my daughter’

By Barb Pacholik, Regina Leader-Post

October 21, 2009

Patsy Favel disappeared from the lives of her mother and son on Sept. 30, 1984, four days after Cody’s first birthday.

Photograph by: Regina Leader-Post, Canwest News Service

REGINA — Time is fixed in the photo — an attractive, young mother proudly holding her infant in her arms.

Both are looking at the photographer, no small feat as any parent who has posed for photos with a wriggling infant knows. The mother has a sweet smile that heightens her cheekbones and carries through to her eyes. Her nine-month-old son clutches at the front of her blouse.

If only time had stood still at that joyous moment for Patsy Favel and her baby boy, Cody Blue Favel.

Twenty-five years later, other pictures overwhelm Patsy's mother, ugly images that creep into Alice Berger's thoughts during the day and interrupt her sleep at night. They are graphic images, of two men shooting her daughter in cold blood — a story she has heard about her daughter's fate.

Years ago, the images that filled Berger's dreams about her daughter were optimistic — that she was happy and healthy, a new start, a new life.

There's no telling if any of the dreams or nightmares or stories hold any truth. There's really no telling anything about Patsy. She disappeared from the lives of her mother and son on Sept. 30, 1984, four days after Cody's first birthday. Vanished.

The photos of Patsy with her son are the last ones of her.

Berger's memories of that time are fading with the years, but of one thing the 75-year-old is certain: "She was very, very proud of her boy." Berger later adds, "She just loved him."

A mother, a daughter, a sister — loving and loved and valued.

"I miss my daughter. Lots."

While Patsy Favel is Regina's oldest reported case of a missing woman, many other parents like Berger walk the line between hope and dread.

Across the province, the list of long-term missing women — gone six months or more — stretches to 29 names, five from this city and about one-third from the southern half of the province. While they are outnumbered by missing men more than two to one, the men are more often victims of misadventure, lives lost while boating, swimming, or hiking in the bush. Foul play is suspected in 70 per cent of the missing women's cases, but in only 21 per cent of the men's, according to a provincial report on missing persons.

In its report to the Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons, the Saskatchewan First Nations Women's Commission Secretariat noted that aboriginal females are going missing at a disproportionate rate. Of Saskatchewan's missing women, 12 are Caucasian and 17 aboriginal. Aboriginal people make up only 14 per cent of Saskatchewan's population.

"Higher-risk lifestyles, transitions from reserve to urban without a strong support system, lack of proper transportation — such as hitchhiking from a reserve to urban centre — all contribute to risks that a person may or may not go missing," says the secretariat's report.

"By identifying that some First Nation women may go missing because of who they are, a stronger response can be put in place if a person is thought to be missing," it adds.

In recent years, there's been far more attention on missing persons, with the creation of special police units, committees, and awareness campaigns. Berger admits she's angry that focus was absent when her daughter vanished.

"Now it's too late. Why didn't they do that right away when a person goes missing?" she asks.

"Darn it, why do they leave us behind? Why don't they do something to help with our children?" she asks.

Berger and her husband of 40 years live in a tidy little house — they won a contest for their yard with its flower baskets and trimmed lawn this summer — on the Piapot First Nation, where her youngest brother is the chief, she notes with pride.

Walls of her home are given over to photos of her children, grandchildren and what she affectionately refers to as her "greats" — great, and great-great-grandchildren. There is one picture, slightly out of focus, of a very slender Patsy smiling beside a Christmas tree — the last Christmas with her family.

Patricia Maye Favel, who would be 43 today, is the youngest of Berger's six children. "When I wanted to baby her, I called her Pa-a-tsy," says her mother, dragging out the syllables.

Her mother remembers a quiet girl who enjoyed reading while growing up on Kawacatoose First Nation. "I thought she was going to be a quiet girl the rest of her life."

Patsy was close to her sister, Maxine, a few years older. By age 18 and then living in Regina, Patsy had followed her sister into a lifestyle that reduces their mother to tears even today. Both were addicted to what was the favoured street drug in 1980s Regina — "poor man's heroin," a mix of the prescription pills Talwin and Ritalin. Patsy occasionally found the cash to support her habit on what was then dubbed the "low stroll," a few downtown blocks where mostly poor, aboriginal women sold their bodies to buy drugs, and bought drugs to dull the reality of selling their bodies.

"I tried to stop her, talk to her. We tried everything," says Berger. "Once you get hooked on something like that, it's hard to quit." At five-foot-seven, Patsy had dwindled to 45 kilograms.

When Berger hadn't seen Patsy for a few days, she went looking for her at Maxine's apartment. She spotted Patsy in her brown 1975 Camaro, but her daughter waved her off, as if she didn't want her to come near.

"That was the last time I seen her," says Berger.

Later that Sunday, around 10:30 p.m., Patsy, who had bleached her curly, dark hair blonde a week before, stood two blocks from the Regina police station. According to witnesses who talked to police after family reported her missing on Oct. 2, she had been seen that Sept. 30 night getting into a smaller, red or orange, Japanese-made car, possibly a Datsun or Toyota, driven by a man.

A woman who was also working that night told the Leader-Post in 1984 that she was approached by an Asian man driving such a car. She recalled a Chinese pagoda hanging in the window. When that woman turned him away, he headed towards the street where Patsy was waiting. Like so many other things about the case, there's no way to know if it's true. "It's possible, but it's nothing certain," police said back then.

Even today, the cold case detective in charge of the file can't rule out anything, including a possible link to another mystery. Nearly a year before Patsy vanished, 19-year-old Annette Kelly Peigan disappeared from the downtown on July 29, 1983. Badly burned remains, found three weeks later in a ditch on the city's eastern edge, were subsequently linked to her. It was impossible to determine a cause of death, and Peigan is among the RCMP's cold cases.

After realizing her daughter was gone without any explanation, Berger and her husband searched alleys, drove streets, picked through garbage cans, and consulted with an elder who had a vision of Patsy — all to no avail. Berger believes police could have done more.

Tears glisten on her cheeks as she speaks about the disturbing story she heard a few years ago, that Patsy was taken and killed by two men in the street wars over drugs, prostitution and turf.

"That shot wasn't meant for her. . . . They mistook her as Maxine," she says, relating the tale she heard second-hand. Clearly, Berger fears there may be some truth to it, as she weeps and is comforted by her husband.

"That was the last story I ever heard about Patsy."

Today Maxine is also missed, dead from her addiction, while her sister Patsy is just missing. A victim of a bad date or street violence? Drifted away from a life she didn't want? Alive or dead? Not knowing is the hardest part, says Berger.

"I still have hopes for her coming back. I hope they find her some day."

Patsy's baby boy, Cody, is now a man of 26. Berger cared for her grandson for a time after Patsy disappeared until the child never returned home from a visit to his paternal family. He did keep in touch over the years, and Berger did her best to keep the mother he never knew alive, telling him, "she loved you."

As a young man, Cody found another family, the Native Syndicate street gang, and paid dearly for its acceptance. In December 2006 the then 23-year-old was shot in the upper left chest and lost a lung as punishment for failing to obey the gang.

Despite the risks, Cody testified last year against the men responsible. By then, he was looking to turn his life around.

Like Patsy, Cody too may disappear from Berger's life. At the time of his testimony last year, he spoke of entering a witness protection program.

Friday, August 28

Murder and racism along the Highway of Tears

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

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

Hoar was an anomaly. She was white.

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

The other eight were aboriginal.

Of those eight, four were 15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com, 604-605-2905

Highway of Tears

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

Tuesday, August 4

Manitoba RCMP probe opens door to serial killer theory

By Keith Bonnell, Canwest News Service
August 4, 2009 5:01 PM

Is there a serial killer stalking women in Manitoba?

Bernadette Smith thinks so.

Her sister, Claudette Osborne, vanished a year ago after walking out of a Winnipeg hotel.

The sex-trade worker had never gone three days without talking to family members. Her disappearance left behind four children; the youngest was just two weeks old.

"I believe it's true that there's somebody out there preying on those women, that they believe, because of their lifestyle, that nobody cares and that they won't be missed," Smith said. "But it's not true."

The RCMP said there's no currently no evidence to support the theory that a serial killer is responsible for the dozens of missing and murdered women in Manitoba — but they've now opened the door to the possibility.

The force has announced it will be reviewing unsolved homicides where the victim was a woman. At least one of the cases stretches back to the 1960s.

It's a response to public pressure and follows meetings between the RCMP, residents and provincial Justice Minister Dave Chomiak.

The Manitoba RCMP's five-person historical case unit will be looking for any possible links, any new evidence, or any instances where modern methods, including DNA comparisons, could heat up a cold case.

"If there are any links among (the cases), obviously we will follow up on that," RCMP spokeswoman Sgt. Line Karpish said.

While the RCMP insists there's no reason to suspect a serial killer, a leading expert in the field say it's very possible, especially since many of the victims are believed to be women in the sex trade — a favourite target of those who repeatedly kill strangers.

Dr. Steven Egger is an associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake and the author of The Killers Among Us, a look into serial murder and its investigation.

"Police frequently don't see a pattern," he said, citing a "myopic view" among officers and commanders.

He said there a reluctance to dedicate the resources to looking at possible serial killings, as well as concerns over jurisdictional issues with other police forces.

Prostitutes are among the most common victims of serial killers, Egger said, calling slain sex-trade workers "the less dead."

"People just don't give a damn about prostitutes," he said.

Egger consulted with Project Kare, the Edmonton-based police task force looking into the disappearance of women in Alberta.

"The thing that struck me about Edmonton," he said, "is you've got a lot of places you can dump bodies outside the urban areas."

The same could be said of other Prairie cities, such as Winnipeg, he said.

The RCMP review will focus only on homicides, which means if there's no body — and foul play is only suspected — the case won't be reviewed.

The RCMP don't police the city of Winnipeg, meaning cases inside the city won't necessarily fall under the mandate of the review.

Both those limitations concern Smith, who said she wants a full police task force — with input from aboriginal community groups — dedicated to the missing women.

Nahanni Fontaine agrees.

The director of justice for Manitoba's Southern Chiefs Organization, Fontaine said she doesn't care who's killing aboriginal women in Manitoba — she just wants the disappearances to stop.

"They keep trying to reassure us that there's not a serial killer," Fontaine said of police.

"Personally I don't care," she said. "If it's not one or two really smart psychotic killers that are getting away with it, that means there's 20 murderers that are getting away with it who are on the street right now."

Her organization has long called for a task force into the disappearances, similar to Project Kare in Alberta.

She said among those often labelled "sex-trade workers" are young girls who are being forced to work the streets.

"Contrary to the way these particular women are portrayed as prostitutes or sex trade workers or just the lowest of the low, they're not," she said. "They're somebody's mother; they're somebody's daughter."

No one needs to tell that to the family members of the missing and dead.

Smith said her sister's now two-year-old son has a toy truck with his mother's picture in it.

"He pushes that thing around and talks to his mom," Smith said.

The boy's father recently tried to replace the worn picture and the boy didn't react well.

"He had a crying fit," Smith said.

"It's a roller-coaster every day," she said. "You don't know if today is the day she's going to be found.

"It's like you're living in a nightmare you just want to wake up from."

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

Sunday, July 26

CUE Center NATIONAL ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE FOR MISSING PERSONS

NATIONAL ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE FOR MISSING PERSONS - Coming March 2010

Who Should attended? Families of the missing, advocates, law officers, coroners, forensic specialist, search personnel (all types), non profit missing person organizations, government agencies, private investigations and more.

National Round Table Conference Goals: * Sharing a trained and professional view for solving cold case and search there of; missing persons * Understanding the resources available to be deployed when needed, what their capabilities are and how to obtain them. * Exploring the relevant positive and negative experiences of people who have experienced a missing loved one. * Creating new approaches to missing persons cases, and effectively deploying available resources; building communication and support * Developing a high-level view of the modifications needed to our current resources and organizational community over the next five years.

Friday, April 24

Proposed memorial would be place for reflection and healing

By Barb Pacholik, Leader-Post
April 24, 2009 8:48 PM

REGINA — When someone dies, there is often a gravesite, a place to gather and remember; when someone vanishes, there is a void.

Lori Whiteman would like to fill that emptiness with a special place for reflection, healing and hope. The "Place of Reflection," as it's proposed, would be dedicated to those missing, but not forgotten — people like her mother, Delores "Lolly" Whiteman.

"There is a very real possibility that I may never find my mom, and never, therefore, have a place to go visit a gravesite. And there are other family members who are like me, who may never have that place to go. And the family members who have found their loved ones still need that healing," explains Whiteman. Her mother, originally from the Standing Buffalo Dakota First Nation near Fort Qu'Appelle, was last seen in the Edmonton area in 1987. Today she would be almost 64.

Inspired by a sculpture owned by Whiteman, the proposed memorial, which organizers hope to locate on the RCMP Depot grounds in Regina, is for a stone sculpture of a grandmother by Cree sculptor Lyndon Tootoosis. It's based on a legend about an elderly woman who becomes separated from her family and is expected to die. When they later reconnect, the family remembers her words: "I'll wait here."

"The foundation of (the memorial) comes from the idea of missing women, but it is intended for all of those people who are waiting or who require that strength or who have experienced loss and need a place to go to draw that strength and healing," says Whiteman.

Just as aboriginal women have been the catalyst for the memorial, they have been the impetus for putting all missing persons on the public agenda.

Whiteman is part of Saskatchewan Sisters in Spirit, a grassroots organization formed after Amnesty International raised the alarm about Canada's missing and murdered aboriginal women in a report. Stolen Sisters stated "the (Native Women's Association of Canada) has estimated that over the past twenty years, more than five hundred indigenous women may have been murdered or gone missing in circumstances suggesting violence." Women who largely carried on their lives unnoticed — until they were gone — became a rallying point for public awareness walks, conferences, studies, and monuments like the one envisioned by Whiteman.

With the spotlight focused on missing aboriginal women, the fact more men go missing in this province has been relegated to the shadows. Among the 95 people in Saskatchewan identified by police as long-term missing, 67 are men and 28 women. Overall the split between aboriginal versus non-aboriginal missing is nearly 50-50. Specifically for men, 36 are caucasian and 29 of aboriginal descent (two are unknown), and among the 28 women, the breakdown is 16 of aboriginal descent to 12 caucasian.

But those working in the area say the raw numbers tell half the story.

RCMP Staff Sgt. Fran Stevenson, who was a member of the Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons, notes a larger proportion of the men reflected in those figures are more likely to be victims of misadventure. For example, 14 of the missing are suspected drownings, and only one of those 14 are women.

"(The men) are out in the bush, they're out hunting — those kinds of things . . . In the north with the terrain and men are more likely to be out in those conditions — hunters and fishermen, which are predominantly male," he adds.

According to the final report of the Provincial Partnership Committee on Missing Persons, released in 2007, foul play is suspected in 70 per cent of the missing women's cases, but in only 21 per cent of the men's disappearances. Five missing women found in the last three years turned into homicide investigations.

What's more, while aboriginal people make up 48 per cent of the missing — they form only 14 per cent of the population. So they are disappearing at a disproportionate rate.

"It is an alarming number of indigenous women that have been missing and those who are missing have been discovered murdered, statistically," says Brenda Anderson, a Luther College professor, who created what's believed to be the first-of-its-kind university class focused on missing indigenous women.

"If we draw attention to one thing, does that mean that we're paying less attention or that that other group is less valuable? Of course, the answer would be no. But statistically, are the men showing up murdered and raped and brutalized in that fashion?" she adds.

"You can't look at it as just a race issue. You can't look at it as just a sexist issue. It's a combination. And violence against women gets played out when people are disempowered, when they're frustrated, when they want to strike out. They're going to look for the weakest one. They're going to look for the one that people won't notice. They're going to have bought into those stereotypes that this really isn't a human being."

The slayings by Robert Pickton in B.C. or the Project KARE task force examining the deaths and disappearances of numerous Alberta women have fuelled fears that a serial killer targeting women may also lurk in the land of the Living Skies.

Stevenson, from Saskatoon RCMP's major crime and historical case unit, said cold case investigators regularly ponder that possibility. "If we see two people going missing from a similar area, or two people who have a lot of similar characteristics going missing from an area — of course, we look at those to see if there's any commonalities.

"We do keep looking at it. And we hope to prevent any serial offenders from operating."

Det.-Sgt. Brent Shannon, in charge of cold cases for the Regina Police Service, says there are "unique circumstances" in each of the city's 11 outstanding long-term missing persons cases. In recent years, they include Danita Faith Bigeagle, a 22-year-old last seen in February 2007 on the 800 block of Victoria Avenue. Two years earlier, Melanie Geddes, 24, never came home after going to a party Aug. 13, 2005, in the 900 block of Robinson St. Her remains were found four months later in the Qu'Appelle Valley near Southey. Her death is now an unsolved homicide.

In the wake of those disappearances, plus five-year-old Tamra Keepness vanishing from Regina in 2004, the provincial government created a province-wide strategy in 2005 for missing persons, including money for officers who focus on those cases.

"You can always compare and draw some similarities, but to say there's a pattern, we don't feel that at all, not in Regina, not even on a provincial level," says Shannon.

The disappearance of another young woman, Amber Redman, in that same time frame provided the impetus for Anderson's class. A month after Geddes vanished, 19-year-old Redman disappeared after leaving a Fort Qu'Appelle bar. Three years passed before she was found when her killer unwittingly led undercover RCMP officers to her remains on a nearby First Nation.

Spotting a missing persons poster for Redman in 2005 and thinking "not another one," Anderson decided to develop her class providing a global perspective on missing indigenous women, showing Canada's experience is not unique, and helped organize an international conference in Regina last year that focused on the issue.

"If you're going to recognize that brown-skinned women go missing more often than those who are not brown-skinned, then you have to ask the question of how does race play into this," she says. "Why are they targeted? What are the messages that we hear from our media, from our government, from our police. What are the stereotypes and biases?

"Obviously the First Nations and Metis populations have suffered from the past of residential schools, so there's a higher percentage that are in poverty. But the idea that they're all taken because they're involved in a high-risk lifestyle is not accurate at all. And there's often that assumption or inference," says Anderson.

"If they are in a high-risk lifestyle, why are they in it? That points to our abysmal treatment and conditioning, and so a higher percentage of people in those high-risk (activities) means there's going to be more taken. My other question would be, 'Well so what if they're in a high-risk lifestyle, what kind of statement is that that we think that makes it OK then for it to happen, and that a sex trade worker's life is of less value than anyone else's life?' That's a pretty sad look at the world. It's kind of a way to dismiss it, and to distance ourselves from it: 'Well they were asking for it. It's not going to hurt me, so why should I be concerned about it?' It's kind of a way to disconnect from the sadness, the horror of it."

Anderson doesn't want students leaving her class thinking the blame lies with any one group or thing.

"It is the structure of how we think and we have to challenge that at every level and understand that if you hear a story and you flip the channel because it doesn't affect you, then maybe we need to think about how do we see community?"

In the words of Stevenson, "One missing person is too many."

bpacholik@leaderpost.canwest.com

© Copyright (c) The Regina Leader-Post