Danielle's Talk Show Pitch to Oprah

jaimieclements | June 24, 2010

Join the WAVE. Many beautiful young people find their hopes and dreams destroyed by violence and exploitation. These negative forces need to be recognized and exposed to help prevent further damage and to promote healing for both victims and offenders. Fortunately, many people and organizations are rising to the challenge. This series will celebrate the world-wide wave of Working Against Violence and Exploitation. Thanks for your support.

How Angel found her wings

www.thestar.com

November 07, 2009

Diane Flacks

Angel Wolfe, 16, has found that lost lives are given dignity when they are understood in all their complexity.

CARLOS OSORIO / TORONTO STAR

Angel Wolfe is only 16 but her life has already been marked by tragedy. Eight years ago, she learned that her mother was one of the victims of serial killer Robert Pickton.

Brenda Wolfe's remains were discovered on Pickton's pig farm, her jawbone stuck in mud in a pigsty.

Now her daughter is trying to go beyond the shallowness of notoriety, to appreciate the complexity of the lives that were lost, and to ease the burden of the other relatives of Pickton's victims.

Angel was 5 when she last saw her mother.

At age 8, after three years living with a foster family in Vancouver, police brusquely took a sample of Angel's DNA in order to help identify her dead mother. The encounter with authorities left her shocked and scared.

"It added a rough layer to me – on the outside," Angel says. "On the inside, a huge anger toward my mom grew."

Today, she has transformed that anger into a desire to effect change. In a whirlwind few months starting in August, she began connecting with her mother's native roots and then participated in a Truth and Reconciliation workshop with Governor General Michaëlle Jean.

This meeting inspired Angel to tell her story, to help other native women and youth to avoid her mother's path.

"I want to work toward making an awareness about native women and the stereotypes – `Oh, they're on the streets' – that go with them."

A Grade 11 student who now lives in Toronto, Angel has a steady voice as she speaks candidly about being the daughter of a well-known murder victim and how she has come to love the mother she became reacquainted with second hand.

"Today was my mother's 41st birthday," she says in a phone interview, "so this is a bit emotional."

When asked where she got the fortitude to move beyond her anger, she credits Brenda. "She's on my shoulder giving me the strength she had."

But when the news first broke, she judged her mother harshly. Pickton's victims were on the margins of society – described as drug-addicted denizens of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside sex trade. Many were aboriginal.

Angel feels the view was that they were "disposable" – and so were their relatives. That explains why authorities treated her so badly – as a part of a police investigation, not as a grieving 8-year-old.

Among the haunting pictures of the dozens of missing women that police suspected Pickton of murdering is one of Brenda Wolfe. She is looking at the camera with her head tilted back, wary. The resemblance to her daughter is obvious. "It drove me nuts," Angel says of the initial publicity. "People were calling me – mothers of my friends, `Is Angel's mom in the newspaper?'"

She suffered depression and was given medication. That made her wonder if her mother had an undiagnosed mental illness and perhaps was self-medicating on the streets.

This and other questions provoked Angel to discover who her mother was before addiction took her away. "I started talking to my grandma. I saw these old, old pictures of my mom. She always had this great smile."

The pictures triggered flashes of memory: Brenda loved the ocean and jazz music. She liked to dance and had long, beautiful, curly hair. There were dark memories, too: of Brenda being addicted to over-the-counter pills; of "a man with a tattoo on his neck" offering heroin.

"It all went downhill from there," Angel recalls.

As she learned more about her mother, she began to feel compassion. "An addiction will make you forget who you are," she says. "My mom forgot where she could have gone. All she had were her drugs."

Angel kept a scrapbook of all the newspaper clippings that mentioned her mother. "With me, I cannot heal without knowing all of the truth before I can get my own opinion," she explains.

When she finally burned it, "it was my own version of getting rid of the negative and turning it to ashes."

Angel now feels she was lucky in that Pickton was convicted of second-degree murder in her mother's death.

He faced murder charges regarding 26 missing women, but most of those cases were not resolved.

"I got my closure with the trial. I know who took my mother's life," Angel says. "So many people, they don't know who took their sister or mother or aunt. More needs to be done to find them so their families can move on and make a difference."

As her understanding grew, Angel formed a desire to create a legacy for them all.

So, this summer, despite having little connection with her native heritage (her foster family are non-native) and having never even been fond of camping, Angel literally jumped into the water.

A friend referred her to the Canadian Roots Exchange, an agency created to connect native and non-native youth to native traditions. Angel joined them on a six-day canoe trip through Algonquin Park, to the Silver Lake Pow Wow.

She says she felt a kinship and a sense of pride where before there had been fury and secrets.

Then, in October, she and five other youth from Canadian Roots were invited to meet the Governor General.

"One of the things she told us was that even though she was just talking with a small group of kids, it will make a huge difference for tomorrow in eliminating that gap between non-native and native youth today," Angel says.

She felt she had found a mission, to show native youth that people care, there are options, services, hope.

"I am living proof that you can reach out for help and community, find it and keep your head up high, and good things will happen."

Angel hopes that by speaking out as Brenda Wolfe's daughter, she will also be able to offer optimism to the families of all the missing women.

"Let my mother rest in peace with the truth, and have those other women rest in peace or be found with the truth....They really do deserve some dignity and respect."

Six more charges likely for Pickton

Recommendations going to prosecutors to pursue cases of missing women

Suzanne Fournier, The Province: Thursday, October 29, 2009 9:58 AM

New RCMP evidence has police recommending charges against Robert Pickton in the cases of six more missing women (clockwise from top left): Yvonne Boen, Dawn Crey, Stephanie Lane, Nancy Clark, Sharon Abraham and Jacqueline Murdock.

Photo Credit: Handouts, RCMP

The RCMP are recommending that six new first-degree murder charges be filed against convicted serial killer Robert Pickton.

"We're in the process of sending a report to Crown counsel for their consideration. We're recommending six more charges related to Robert Pickton and the Port Coquitlam property," RCMP spokeswoman Cpl. Annie Linteau told The Province Wednesday.

Linteau noted that all six women appear on the police task force's official list of 63 missing women. Pickton, now 60, was not charged in connection with the death of these six, who went missing between January 1997 and March 2001.

Linteau listed the women as: Yvonne Boen, born on Nov. 30, 1967, who was last seen March 2001; Dawn Crey, whose birthday was Oct. 26, 1958, and was last seen in November 2000; Sharon Abraham, whose date of birth was Sept. 15, 1965, and went missing in December 2000; Stephanie Lane, born on May 28, 1976, who went missing Jan. 10, 1997; and Jacqueline Murdock, born Jan. 28, 1971, and was last seen in August 1997.

Those five women, all of whom were mothers, went missing from Vancouver's drug-infested Downtown Eastside The sixth woman, Nancy Clark, who was born July 29, 1966, was last seen Aug. 22, 1991, in Victoria.

The news that the RCMP will finally recommend charges was cathartic to some of the women's family members.

Yvonne Boen's son, Troy Boen, 23, exploded in anger and relief when told of the RCMP's decision.

"About f---ing time, but why did it take them so long?" demanded Troy, who was the last member of his family to see his mother alive.

"My mum deserves her day in court . . . I'm glad the RCMP are finally saying Pickton should be charged with my mum's death." Troy, the eldest of Boen's three sons, attended many gruelling days of Pickton's long trial in B.C. Supreme Court.

In December 2007, Pickton was convicted of counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Marnie Frey, Georgina Papin, Sereena Abotsway, Brenda Wolfe and Mona Wilson. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

Troy Boen was also present when three B.C. Appeal Court judge's upheld Pickton's conviction last June 25 in a 2-1 split decision that also gave Pickton the automatic right to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada.

That appeal is expected to be heard this spring. If the appeal is dismissed, B.C.'s Criminal Justice Branch has made it clear that it will not proceed with an additional 20 murder charges, which were severed in August 2006 from the first trial.

Linteau said that the RCMP is recommending another six new charges be laid now "out of an abundance of caution." "We are carrying on with the assumption there could be further judicial proceedings and we are putting everything that could be done back on the table, rather than being unprepared if further trials are required." Should Pickton's appeal be upheld by Canada's top court, prosecutors would move quickly to ask for a new trial on all 32 murder charges.

Linteau said families of all six women have been told in the past that their loved one's DNA was "tied to the Pickton farm," but they won't be officially notified yet of possible charges "because it is up to the Crown to decide whether to proceed." A massive RCMP-Vancouver Police Department task force began searching the ramshackle Pickton pig farm in Port Coquitlam in February 2002.

On Feb. 22, 2002, Pickton was charged with the first two murders of what would become a lengthy list of 26 homicides.

The vehicle-strewn farm, full of human and animal burial sites, was examined by experts down to bedrock, and Pickton soon gained the notorious reputation of being Canada's worst accused serial killer.

Debra Benning was a longtime friend of Boen who believes Pickton should be "held accountable" for Yvonne's death.

"In my heart, I know she's gone, but I think everyone should know if Pickton was responsible," said Benning.

Ernie Crey, a Sto:lo Nation leader, has fought tirelessly for justice for his troubled sister Dawn, whose DNA was confirmed on the Pickton farm in 2004 but whose name was left off the list of those who Pickton would be charged with murdering.

"There's never emotional, psychological or spiritual closure for any of the family members of the missing women, we're always left with the history and the loss of our loved ones, but I am still seeking legal closure," said Crey.

Jacqueline Murdock, a Carrier First Nation mother of four, is still mourned by her large family, said her aunt Elizabeth Murdock, 68, in an interview from Fort St. James.

"It's good if they charge that man finally with Jackie's death. We all want answers."

© Copyright (c) CW Media Inc.

How does society think about murdered, missing women?

THE CANADIAN PRESS

EDMONTON – A University of Alberta PhD student says society has made progress, but has a long way to go when it comes to how we think about missing and murdered women.

Amber Dean is studying the lives and deaths of women involved in prostitution, drugs and other high-risk, vulnerable lifestyles to see ‘‘what they can tell us about the way our society is organized.’’

Dean says she became interested while living in Vancouver and noticed how the way the missing women were described changed over time.

She said at first, there was a lot of talk about how they were involved in prostitution and their addiction to drugs.

But Dean said at the conclusion of the trial of Robert Pickton, there was a lot of emphasis put on the victims and an attempt to tell ‘‘at least some aspect’’ of their stories.

Dean said her thesis also looks at the pictorial representations of the Vancouver women by a group of forensic artists on the website of Project EDAN – which stands for Everyone Deserves a Name.

Organized by Wayne Leng, the site features somewhat idealized portraits of the slain and missing women, including Georgina Papin of the Enoch Cree First Nation near Edmonton.

Pickton, of Port Coquitlam, B.C., was convicted in December of killing Papin and five other women and sentenced to life in prison with no parole eligibility for 25 years.

He faces trial next year on another 20 counts of first-degree murder.
‘‘The artists were upset because the pictures in the missing posters seemed to present the women as more criminal than victim in a way because they look like mug shots,’’ she said.

‘‘So, they’ve attempted to create portraits that, in their words, are gentler and softer.’’

The last time I saw Sarah de Vries before she vanished off the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

In Memory of Sarah Jean de Vries, gone but not forgotten.

Sarah de Vries, a true friend, who is believed to have been murdered by Robert Pickton vanished off the streets of the Downtown Eastside April 13, 1998. The last time I saw Sarah, she had called on that day wanting to come over and get some clothes and have some clothes and have something to eat.

I picked her up at the infamous Beacon Hotel and drove home. She bagged some of her clothes from her closet and then had something to eat, it was Fruit Loops, wow, she loved those. We talked for a while as she was getting ready to go out on the streets to work. I asked her if she need something money and she said yes and I gave her all I had on me which was $27.00. That would help her she said. As I drove her back and left her off at the Beacon, I said be cool my friend, she said I'll call you, and that was the last I ever saw of her. She went missing sometime in the early morning hours of April 14, 1998. And now Robert Pickton is charged with 1st degree murder in her case. I miss her and I love her and she will always be in my heart.

Wayne

PHS to operative renovated Downtown Eastside Hotel
By Cheryl Chan, The Province, September 14, 2009

The Downtown Eastside’s most notorious hotel re-opened for business Monday with a new mandate: providing safe, clean rooms for 40 homeless people.

The Backpackers Inn on 7 West Hastings Street — a crime and drug haven singled out by Vancouver Police as the worst-run SRO in the city — was purchased by the provincial government in January for approximately $3-million.

“I wasn’t sure this one could actually get done,” said housing minister Rich Coleman, referring to the deplorable conditions the hotel was in before renovations began.

“I’m just thrilled and impressed at how it’s turned out.”

The former owner completed renovations on the three-storey brick building as part of the sale conditions before the province took possession in July and put in fire and safety upgrades.

Re-christened the Beacon Hotel, the building will be operated by the PHS Community Services Society, which is also set to provide support to the new tenants — many of them from the New Fountain shelter a block away who often struggle with drug addiction and mental illness.

PHS operates the New Fountain as well as a string of other DTES hotels, the Insite supervised injection site and a lifeskills centre.

The society will operate housing in the new Woodward's development and is set to renovate a heritage building it owns at Carrall and Hastings - the old Merchant Bank building at Pigeon Park.

PHS recently opened the renovated Pennsylvania Hotel at Carrall and Hastings and will operate the $21.6-million Station Street supportive-housing development.

The Beacon Hotel is the latest SRO to be unveiled out of the 23 hotels purchased and renovated by the province at a cost of $138-million.

Other recent openings include the 25-unit Savoy and the 63-room Dominion Hotel. Renovations at two more buildings — the 40-room Orwell Hotel and the 138-room Marble Arch — are expected to be completed in late fall.

Michael Shadbolt, who had been homeless in the Downtown Eastside for two years, said he’s happy to finally have a roof over his head.

“It’s a complete change of life for me, a place to re-charge my batteries. It’s just safe, clean housing,” said Shadbolt, 47.

Coleman said safeguards such as 24/7 staffing, secure entrances, surveillance cameras and a police liaison officer have been put in place to make sure the building doesn’t revert back to its former state.

© Copyright (c) The Province

The Search for Sarah

Life on the Street - By Sarah de Vries

Missing People Net - Downtown Eastside missing women's website: 1999 - 2009

AVENUE ZERO MOVIE TRAILER

Featuring candid interviews with victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of human trafficking in Canada Avenue Zero weaves a spellbinding portrait of a dark and sinister trade flourishing in the shadows of the law.

Is a trucker responsible for missing women on Highway of Tears?

By Keith Bonnell, Canwest News Service
August 9, 2009 3:05 PM

Police investigating the disappearance of missing and murdered women across this country are being urged to take a long, hard look at the trucking industry, following an FBI investigation that has linked serial killings to long-haul truck drivers in the U.S.

It's a call that Angela Marie MacDougall is taking across Western Canada — and one that's being echoed by an international expert on serial killers.

MacDougall is the executive director of Battered Women's Support Services in British Columbia, and she has been touring the Prairie provinces for the last two weeks, speaking with women's support groups, sex-trade workers and relatives left shattered by the disappearance of their loved ones.

She's trying to form a coalition to bring forward a report this fall on the disappearance of women in Canada. Some have placed the national numbers in the hundreds.

"There is a sickness within our society that grinds down the lives of aboriginal women," said MacDougall.

It's a problem that has plagued the Prairies, with advocacy groups saying the streets in cities such as Winnipeg are no longer safe — as others question whether serial killers are to blame.

B.C. police have the Missing Women's Task Force; Alberta police have the Project Kare task force; and Mounties in Manitoba announced last week they will review decades' worth of cold cases where the victims were women, looking for any possible links.

On her tour, MacDougall is taking with her a report released earlier this year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, explaining the work done in the U.S. to link truck drivers to serial killings.

Analysts have compiled a list of more than 520 homicide victims who have been found along or near highways in more than 40 states, as well as a list of 200 potential suspects.

"The suspects are predominantly long-haul truck drivers," the FBI said this spring in its report publicizing the Highway Serial Killings initiative.

It said the victims, many of them drug addicts and prostitutes, are often picked up at truck stops, sexually assaulted, murdered, then dumped along a highway.

So far, 10 suspects believed to be responsible for 30 killings are in custody, the FBI said.

The FBI uses a massive database for violent crimes. A unit of 23 analysts goes through the system, looking for links among crimes that have been submitted by state investigators.

Last year, the FBI took the program online, making it available to law-enforcement agencies across the U.S. But participation is still voluntary, so much of the agency's work is convincing police forces across the country to use the program.

FBI unit chief Michael Harrigan said there's no systemic problem with the trucking industry.

"It's an honourable profession," he told Canwest News Service. "These are a very, very small minority of individuals."

Still, MacDougall said the report should serve as a wake-up call in Canada, a country where there are roughly half a million licensed truckers on the road.

Thoughts immediately come to mind of the so-called Highway of Tears, a 700-kilometre stretch of road that runs between Prince George and Prince Rupert, B.C.

RCMP say 18 women are missing from the area, while Amnesty International attributes 32 missing persons cases to the area, all women, most of them aboriginal.

"A truck driver can pick up a woman in one state and take them to another state and dump them," MacDougall said, adding the FBI report shows predators could find the industry's working conditions ideal for committing their crimes.

If long-haul truck drivers are behind any of the missing-women cases, it would instantly reframe the issue as a Canada-wide problem, rather than a province-by-province phenomenon.

"It's our intention to encourage law enforcement, and encourage the (trucking) industry to take some responsibility for ensuring women's safety," she said.

"We're also talking about women who got away from long-haul truck drivers," MacDougall said, adding she knows of eight B.C. women who she said have been attacked, but escaped.

The RCMP in Manitoba have said there is no evidence to support the theory that the province's unsolved homicides are linked, let alone that truckers are behind any of them.

The RCMP also analyze violent crimes with the help of a database

The VICLAS database, or Violent Crime Linkage System, is meant to help officers search for possible serial criminals — including killers.

"All law-enforcement agencies in Canada contribute to this VICLAS," said Sgt. Line Karpish.

"Right now, we have no reasons to believe that our homicides are linked to other cases," she said, adding: "I'm not going to get into the specific occupations of those that could be travelling criminals."

But, if they haven't already, Canadian police should at least consider a link between long-haul truck drivers and the disappearance of women, said Steven Egger, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

"It's something they should look at," said Egger, author of The Killers Among Us, a exploration of serial murder, who consulted with the Alberta task force on missing women.

"It's something they might want to check with the FBI and check if it has any fit with what they're looking at," Egger said, adding it was very possible the force has already considered such a scenario.

The group that represents the trucking industry in Canada said it hadn't heard of the FBI report.

"Like any population, could there be a serial killer (among) truck drivers? Sure," said Doug Switzer, a spokesman for the Canadian Trucking Alliance. "Who am I to argue with the FBI?"

But he stressed that, just because there could be killers among the ranks of Canada's truck drivers, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the industry itself.

"It's not that truck drivers are by nature serial killers," said Switzer. "Serial killers are dysfunctional people. . . . There's something very wrong with them that makes them serial killers."

He said he wasn't aware of his organization being approached about potential serial killers by police.

"There's no particular efforts that are made within the trucking industry to look for serial killers," he said.

The Manitoba RCMP's decision to review cold cases stretching back to the 1960s has raised speculation that one or more serial killers could be responsible.

But MacDougall, who has spent two decades working with abused women, including sex-trade workers, said the truth may be something less sensational, far more prevalent, and just as dark.

"We like to think that there's some abhorrent individual who's out there killing women," she said. "It's much harder for us as a society to understand that hatred of women . . . is deeply entrenched in our society.

"There are men who seek out young aboriginal women to beat and rape and pay them."

© Copyright (c) The Province

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

"REMEMBER THEIR NAMES"

"REMEMBER THEIR NAMES",
originally uploaded by Renegade98.

VPD (Vancouver Police) could not have been more wrong all the way through. When families and friends were telling them nothing else made sense but that a serial killer or killers were responsible, VPD ignored it. When Geo Profiler Kim Rossmo wanted to issue a Press Release about the very real possiblity of a serial killer, it was squashed by VPD. ... Read MoreThey were wrong, DEAD WRONG. Ex-cop says he suspected serial killer: http://www.missingpeople.net/vancouver_police_kept_quite_on_possible_serial_killer-june_21,_2001.htm

Exhibit focuses on missing B.C. women
Can you remember their names? A new exhibit introduces the public to the women who went missing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

http://watch.ctv.ca/news/top-picks/remember-their-names/#clip196723

Canada AM coverage of Remember Their Names

Remember their names : Canada AM: New exhibit focuses on missing B.C. women.
Can you remember their names? A new exhibit introduces the public to the women who went missing on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.


Remembering ‘just another junkie’
Canice Leung
24 July 2009 05:43

Sarah Jean de Vries. It’s not a name I knew before seeing filmmaker Janis Cole’s video installation, Remember Their Names, at a Toronto gallery, but I’d now be hard-pressed to forget it.

Her missing poster, case No. 98-88486, reads like this: Known prostitute and drug user; black, white, Aboriginal, Mexican Native heritage; age 28; last seen at Princess and Hastings streets on April 14, 1998.

She is one of 27 dead women Robert Pickton faces murder charges for; one of 68 women, Indians, junkies and whores, missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Not a week into her disappearance, friends and family postered and pushed police to act — not just for Sarah, but for dozens who had disappeared since the 1980s.

That inaction is Cole’s constant theme. A screen flashes quotes from police: “We’ve done as much as we could.” “We’re in no way saying there is a serial killer ... (or) the women are dead.”

The installation loops footage of Sarah shooting up. “There’s three ways you can go: Jail; dead; or end up a lifer down here,” she says.

In a 1999 Seattle Times article, Sereena Abotsway echoed Sarah’s despair, saying she feared for her safety. She joined community marches to call for police action as women disappeared. Two years later, she, too, went missing, one of six women Pickton was convicted of killing in 2007.

This is Canada’s collective shame, ignoring women like Sarah and Sereena, who felt fear and vulnerability with urgency, who asked for (and gave) help, but received none.

It’s a tired cry for a static situation: Why has nothing been done? Since 1969, 18 women have disappeared or been murdered on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, in northern B.C. Last fall, best friends Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi reserve north of Ottawa without even their wallets, but for months police maintained the teens had simply run away.

“No one cares, we are just junkie scum. Yet if we had been somebody important and our daughter had gone missing,” Sarah wrote, presciently, before her disappearance, “no stone unturned, no rock or cranny would be left unsearched.”

metro canada

CTV Canada AM Video - 'Remember Their Names' exhibition by Janis Cole.

Remembering 'just another junkie'

Canice Leung
24 July 2009 05:43

Sarah Jean de Vries. It’s not a name I knew before seeing filmmaker Janis Cole’s video installation, Remember Their Names, at a Toronto gallery, but I’d now be hard-pressed to forget it.

Her missing poster, case No. 98-88486, reads like this: Known prostitute and drug user; black, white, Aboriginal, Mexican Native heritage; age 28; last seen at Princess and Hastings streets on April 14, 1998.

She is one of 27 dead women Robert Pickton faces murder charges for; one of 68 women, Indians, junkies and whores, missing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

Not a week into her disappearance, friends and family postered and pushed police to act — not just for Sarah, but for dozens who had disappeared since the 1980s.

That inaction is Cole’s constant theme. A screen flashes quotes from police: “We’ve done as much as we could.” “We’re in no way saying there is a serial killer ... (or) the women are dead.”

The installation loops footage of Sarah shooting up. “There’s three ways you can go: Jail; dead; or end up a lifer down here,” she says.

In a 1999 Seattle Times article, Sereena Abotsway echoed Sarah’s despair, saying she feared for her safety. She joined community marches to call for police action as women disappeared. Two years later, she, too, went missing, one of six women Pickton was convicted of killing in 2007.

This is Canada’s collective shame, ignoring women like Sarah and Sereena, who felt fear and vulnerability with urgency, who asked for (and gave) help, but received none.

It’s a tired cry for a static situation: Why has nothing been done? Since 1969, 18 women have disappeared or been murdered on Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, in northern B.C. Last fall, best friends Maisy Odjick and Shannon Alexander disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi reserve north of Ottawa without even their wallets, but for months police maintained the teens had simply run away.

“No one cares, we are just junkie scum. Yet if we had been somebody important and our daughter had gone missing,” Sarah wrote, presciently, before her disappearance, “no stone unturned, no rock or cranny would be left unsearched.”

metro canada

Remembering 'just another junkie'

A new exhibition to remember the missing women of Vancouver at Trinity Square Video. Please see web links.

http://www.trinitysquarevideo.com/exhibition.php?id=36

http://www.rememberoursisterseverywhere.com/events/remember-their-names

http://missingwomen.blogspot.com/2009/06/remember-their-names.html

http://imagearts.ryerson.ca/documentarynow/artists/Janis_Cole.html

Remember Their Names (Janis Cole)

Documenting grief and pain
By Fran Schechter

The notorious serial killer never appears in Remember Their Names, an installation by NOW contributor and documentary filmmaker Janis Cole about the prostitutes, many of them aboriginal, who disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Cole doesn’t need to remind us how they met their end; instead, she focuses on the women and the grief of friends and relatives who searched for them.

In a darkened room, two projections feature missing-persons posters: The larger screen switches from group to individual mug shots, the floor below it strewn street-memorial-style with flowers, photos, stuffed animals and native smudge bundles. The smaller projection is overlain with police quotes justifying their inaction. Some paper posters are crumpled on the floor.

You can’t help wondering what terrible life experiences put these women here. In a short video on the third wall, Sarah Jean DeVries, one of the dead, speaks frankly about heroin as she shoots up. A desk nearby holds a photo of her daughter and photocopied pages from DeVries’s diary, wrenching words of self-loathing and rage at the men who used her.

Though this documentary work doesn’t pack the angry, visceral punch of Vigil, Rebecca Belmore’s performance on the same subject, it’s still a moving cry of pain for those lost in this ugly chapter of our recent history.

At Trinity Square Video, to August 8. Cole gives a master class Saturday (July 18) from 3 to 5 pm.

NOW | July 15-22, 2009 | VOL 28 NO 46
Copyright 2009 NOW Communications

NOW Magazine
Remember Their Names

'Insensitive' coroner's staff rub more salt into victims' wounds

Family told murdered woman's remains would be returned by post

By Suzanne Fournier, The Province
June 25, 2009 6:35 AM

Anxiously awaiting a court decision today on the fate of convicted serial killer Robert Pickton, Britney Frey is hoping she will finally be able to lay to rest the remains of her mother, Marnie Frey.

Britney, who is only 16 but has been designated Marnie's next-of-kin for legal purposes, says she is angry that "the coroner's office told me they would put my mother's remains in the mail — there's no way I'd let them do that."

Britney will be in court today to hear if Pickton's conviction for the second-degree murder of her mother and five other women will be upheld, or whether more legalities will delay the release of her mother's remains.

Britney and her late mother's stepmother, Lynn Frey, will be up at dawn today to catch a ferry from Nanaimo and then a bus to get to court in Vancouver. Both called the coroner's remarks "insensitive."

"I thought it was disgusting, and I told them not to do that, because I will come and get my mother," said Britney.

Lynn Frey, who attended many days of the lengthy legal proceedings against Pickton, said yesterday: "I got a call from Victims' Services and they said, 'Don't bother coming to court, it will only be a minute,' and they refused to give us any funding to attend court.

"I said, 'I want justice and don't tell me there's no point in me coming down.'

"This decision is important," she said, "because we want to bring Marnie home. We want Marnie's remains back.

"We have got a death certificate now, but when I talked to the coroner, I was told when it comes time to release the remains, 'We'll put it in the mailbox for you.' This is the kind of insensitivity we've had to deal with all along."

Marnie Frey gave birth to Britney in 1992, when she was 18. Marnie, who grew up in Campbell River, was introduced to hard drugs in her teens. She moved to Vancouver, but called home regularly, up to eight times a day.

On her 25th birthday, she called home, but was never heard from again and, in 1997, she was reported missing.

In November 2002, the Freys were told an RCMP forensics team had found Marnie's remains on the Pickton farm. At Pickton's lengthy trial, evidence showed only Marnie's jaw and three teeth had been recovered.

On Dec. 9, 2007, a jury found Pickton guilty of the second-degree murder of Marnie Frey and five other women: Andrea Joesbury, Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Brenda Wolfe and Georgina Papin.

The Freys will likely still have to wait for the end of legal proceedings against Pickton. Both prosecution and defence are expected to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, leaving all the victims' families waiting to bury their loved ones.

B.C. Coroner's Service spokesman Jeff Dolan confirmed "we've had ongoing discussions with them [the Freys and other victims' families] and they've been told [victims'] remains will be released at the end of legal proceedings."

Dolan said the coroner makes decisions on each case in consultation with prosecutors.

Dolan could not confirm who spoke with the Freys.

He said human remains, "whether complete or a smaller portion, are released in a way to guarantee the dignity of the deceased." He said he had not heard of any coroner ever mailing human remains.

"In the history of the coroner's service, I can't say it's never happened, but we treat all remains with the same dignity."

E-mail: sfournier@theprovince.com

© Copyright (c) The Province

http://www.theprovince.com/Insensitive+coroner+staff+more+salt+into+victims+wounds/1729932/story.html

Mobile Access Project played a role in crimes

Vancouver Sun
June 20, 2009


Your lead editorial of June 17 was absolutely bang-on in terms of why the provincial government's decision to cut funding to the Mobile Access Project -- a van that offers street workers condoms, needles, protection, information and refreshments -- is utterly unconscionable.

Vulnerable women working in the sex trade continue to be targets for violence, and many of them don't trust the police to handle adequately any information or intelligence they provide.

The MAP van staff were the recipients of hundreds of tips and bad date reports, which found their way to police.

These often provided the missing pieces to investigative puzzles, helping to get violent, sadistic men off the low track.

If we've learned anything from the last decade of carnage on the Downtown Eastside, it's that drug-addicted sex trade workers will not go to police if they believe that will affect their access to drugs or their safety, but they will talk to outreach workers they come to know.

The incredibly short-sighted decision to cut this program will result in increased sexual assaults and other serious assaults on these women.

Once again, the cost of solving these crimes will far outweigh the minuscule investment in programs like the van.

Lori Shenher

Vancouver
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Lori Shenher is the former lead detective on the Vancouver Missing Women case.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Mobile+Access+Project+played+role+solving+crimes/1715616/story.html

On Lori Shenher

http://www.missingpeople.net/news_articles_with_former_lead_d.htm

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

FBI database links long-haul truckers, serial killings

By Scott Glover
April 5, 2009
LOS ANGELES TIMES

The growing database includes more than 500 female victims, most of whom were killed and their bodies dumped at truck stops, motels and other spots along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the U.S.
By Scott Glover
April 5, 2009
The FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers are responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies have been dumped near highways over the last three decades.

Federal authorities first made the connection about five years ago while helping police link a trucker to a string of unsolved killings along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma and several other states. After that, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to track suspicious slayings and suspect truckers.


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A computer database maintained by the FBI has grown to include information on more than 500 female crime victims, most of whom were killed and their bodies discarded at truck stops, motels and other locations along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the U.S.

The database also has information on scores of truckers who've been charged with killings or rapes committed near highways or who are suspects in such crimes, officials said. Authorities said they do not have statistics on whether driving trucks ranks high on the list of occupations of known serial killers.

But the pattern in roadside body dumps and other evidence has prompted many investigators to speculate that the mobility, lack of supervision and access to potential victims that come with the job make it a good cover for someone inclined to kill.

"You've got a mobile crime scene," one investigator said. "You can pick a girl up on the East Coast, kill her two states away and then dump her three states after that."

Although some local police agencies have been briefed on the program, the FBI had not publicized its existence outside law enforcement until earlier this year, when officials agreed to show The Times the inner workings of the operation and share details of some of their cases.

Housed in a nondescript brick building on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., FBI analysts pore over reports and computer entries looking for patterns in slayings from California to Connecticut.

Since the program began, more than two dozen killings have been solved, authorities said.

Michael Harrigan, who oversees the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, said the program helps local police "connect the dots" to slayings outside their jurisdictions. He said most of the victims led high-risk lifestyles that left them particularly vulnerable.

"We don't want to scare the public and make it seem like every time you stop for gas you should look over your shoulder," Harrigan said. "Many of these victims made poor choices, but that doesn't mean they deserved to die."

Though most of the entries in the database pertain to unsolved slayings, cases that authorities consider "cleared," or solved, remain in it so that investigators may potentially link additional crimes to a known perpetrator. There are also entries on sexual assaults and missing-person cases linked to highway locations. FBI officials declined to provide The Times with a more detailed breakdown of the database's contents.

The program's success depends largely on local police departments' voluntarily providing data on seemingly random killings, sexual assaults and other violent crimes to the FBI, where it is stored in a massive computer database. FBI analysts can query the computer to spot patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed.

This was exactly the kind of help Terri Turner was looking for when she turned to the FBI in early 2004. Turner, a senior criminal intelligence analyst with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation, was working on a string of seven slayings along I-40 in which the victims were truck-stop prostitutes who had been killed and left at roadside locations.

Turner's inquiry was given to an analyst with the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, which maintains the agency's crime database. The analyst found that the database contained more than 250 cases of roadside female crime victims, many of them bearing enough similarities to suggest patterns in the violence. Subsequent searches and Internet research bumped the number to 350. As a result, bureau officials created a separate computer database to track such crimes and assigned an analyst to work full time on the serial killer program.

Later that year, Turner's suspected killer was identified as John Robert Williams, a 28-year-old trucker.

Williams and his girlfriend had kidnapped a woman from a casino in Mississippi, killed her and dumped her body along a rural county road, authorities said. Concerned that they'd been seen leaving the casino with the victim, Williams' girlfriend panicked and called police, telling them that she and Williams had found the body. Their story quickly unraveled, and the pair were arrested for murder.

During subsequent interrogations, police said Williams confessed to more than a dozen slayings -- including many of the cases Turner had been investigating. He had detailed knowledge of how the crimes had been committed, such as whether the women were killed by manual strangulation or with the use of a ligature, according to authorities. He explained how some had been sexually assaulted, in some cases after they were dead, they said.

Williams knew, for example, that one victim, Buffie Rae Brawley, had the word "Ebony" tattooed on her right thigh, investigators said. And he knew that the truck-stop prostitute had deep lacerations on her head, which he said she suffered when he struck her with a "tire thumper," a trucker's tool used to bounce off truck tires to gauge their pressure.

Police said Williams told them that Brawley solicited him for sex at a truck stop in Indianapolis.

"The second she tapped on my window, she was a dead woman," one investigator quoted the trucker as saying.

Williams has since recanted his confession, and there is no DNA linking him to any of the slayings. But Sgt. Larry Hallmark of the Grapevine, Texas, Police Department said he and other investigators do not believe that Williams' confession was bogus.

"He actually bragged that we wouldn't find any DNA because he didn't have sex with them in the traditional sense," said Hallmark, who interviewed Williams several times and has submitted a potential death penalty case to the district attorney in his county outside Dallas.

Hallmark said investigators from other jurisdictions "are kind of waiting in line" to see what happens with his case.

The investigator of Brawley's death is among them.

"We're about 10th in line," said Capt. Clarke Fine of Hendricks County, Ind. "I figure if Texas fries him, we're good."

Spotting patterns

For the most part, the FBI analysts assigned to the serial killer program have spent their time combing through crime data that is months or even years old for patterns that might link slayings to one another or to a suspect. But occasionally, they have spotted patterns as they were actually occurring. That was the case two years ago when authorities noticed that dead prostitutes who had been shot with a .22-caliber gun were being found along highways in Georgia and Tennessee.

The body of one victim, Sara Hulbert, was found behind a truck stop in Nashville.

Sgt. Pat Postiglione, a veteran homicide investigator with the Nashville Police Department, was assigned the case. He called the FBI and learned that Hulbert's killing fit a pattern of recent slayings and might have been the work of serial killer, something he'd already suspected.

With little to go on, he and another detective began reviewing videotape taken at the Truck Stops of America site in downtown Nashville where the victim had been found. It was mind-numbing stuff: big rigs pulling in and out of one of the busiest truck stops in the state, like planes taking off and landing at LAX.

The only thing that caught Postiglione's eye was a yellow 18-wheeler that seemed to come and go within about 30 minutes. The interval seemed short compared with that of other truckers, who spent at least an hour -- or even several -- as they fueled up, ate and maybe slept for a while.

As leads go, it was pretty thin. But then the detective got lucky. As Postiglione approached the truck stop the morning after watching the tape, he said, he saw what he thought was the yellow rig heading toward a nearby area of East Nashville known for prostitution.

Postiglione said he followed as the driver slowly wheeled his truck down streets lined with warehouses, budget motels and liquor stores. After a few minutes, the driver returned to the truck stop and parked, he said.

His curiosity piqued, Postiglione approached the driver's door and knocked. After a few seconds, a disheveled-looking man emerged from the cab, the detective said.

His name was Bruce Mendenhall. He was of average height and build with a sort of pinched face. His shirt was unbuttoned and he wore no shoes. As Postiglione sized him up, he said he noticed a speck of blood on the man's thumb and what he thought were several corresponding drops on the driver's door of the truck.

Though there could have been many reasonable explanations for the blood, Postiglione said, he was suspicious.

"Something -- I don't know if it was instinct or whatever -- was telling me, 'Don't let this guy leave before I look in his truck,' " the detective recalled.

According to Postiglione, Mendenhall calmly agreed to submit to a DNA swab and signed a consent form granting the detective permission to search the truck.

The officer said he stepped up into the cavernous cab, large enough to stand up in and walk around. He took a couple of steps into the sleeper compartment and sat down on the bed. To his left, behind the driver's seat, was a plastic bag. In it was some women's clothing covered in blood, he said. Also recovered from the cab were a cellphone and an ATM card belonging to a young woman who had gone missing in Indianapolis just 12hours earlier, authorities said. She has not been heard from since and is presumed dead.

By the time crime-scene technicians were finished with the cab, authorities have said, they had found blood or DNA linking Mendenhall to at least seven victims. He has since been charged with four slayings, officials said. Mendenhall has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial in Nashville.

Postiglione said the timeline the FBI put together showed that the intervals between killings were getting shorter and shorter.

"He was spiraling out of control," the detective said.

Other targets

Not all the victims attributed to alleged serial killer truck drivers have been prostitutes whose work made them easy targets. About a month after Mendenhall's arrest, another long-haul trucker, Adam Leroy Lane, parked his rig in a suburban Boston neighborhood and slipped through an unlocked door into the home of Kevin and Jeannie McDonough.

The McDonoughs were lying in bed when they heard a whimper from the adjacent bedroom where their 15-year-old daughter, Shea, had been sleeping. They went to see what was wrong and found a masked figure holding a knife to their daughter's throat. Kevin McDonough, a slight but muscular utility contractor, grabbed the intruder, applied a chokehold and wrestled him to the floor. His wife grabbed the knife.

When police arrived, they discovered that Lane was armed with three knives, a length of wire and a martial arts throwing star. In the cab of his truck was a DVD titled "Hunting Humans," about a serial killer.

A Massachusetts state trooper who earlier that year had attended an FBI presentation in Reno about the serial killer program sent an e-mail to the bureau.

"I just want to make sure this guy is on your radar," the trooper wrote.

That message ultimately led to Lane's being connected to slayings in two other states, for which he is awaiting trial. He pleaded guilty to the Massachusetts charges and was sentenced to 50 years in state prison.

J. Patrick Barnes, a New Jersey prosecutor who charged Lane with one of the murders, said the FBI was instrumental in helping solve his case.

"We're so busy looking at cases in our own towns, our own counties and our own regions that we sometimes miss what's going on around us," Barnes said.

"You can't connect the dots if you don't know what the dots are."

Access to a database

Hanging in a cubicle in the FBI office near Quantico, Va., is a map of the United States. It's covered in red dots representing some of the 500-plus cases in the Highway Serial Killings Initiative database. For all the crimes they represent, FBI supervisory agent John Molnar said he thinks the number of such offenses has been "grossly underreported."

Molnar said he hopes that will change in the wake of a decision last year to make the database available to law enforcement officials online, allowing police with a password to submit case information and make their own queries.

Though many of the dots on the map now appear connected to one another by similarities -- such as the killers' modes of operation -- the vast majority are not connected to any known suspect.

They are potential serial slayings waiting to be solved, the FBI says.

One involves the 2005 discovery of a decomposing human leg by ATV riders roaring through the woods near Interstate 55 in central Illinois. Painted toenails suggested that the leg, and another discovered nearby, belonged to a woman. But with little else to go on, the case went cold.

Three years later, an FBI analyst used a partial tattoo on one of the legs to help state police link the remains to Lindsay Harris, a 21-year-old call girl who had vanished from the Las Vegas Strip -- some 1,400 miles away -- about two weeks before the limbs were found.

She was the third Las Vegas sex worker whose dismembered remains were found along a highway from 2003 to 2005, prompting authorities to speculate that a trucker or someone else who frequents the highways was responsible for the slayings.

A fourth young woman who disappeared from the Strip and is presumed dead is also thought be part of the pattern. Her remains have not been recovered.

Mike Jennings, the Illinois State Police special agent who worked with the FBI to identify Harris' remains, said he plans to retire in a couple of years and that the case of the fourth woman will weigh heavily on his mind if it remains unsolved.

"My gut feeling," Jeninngs said, "is that it's a trucker."

scott.glover@latimes.com

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