Missing and Murdered Women: People

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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.

Sunday, September 6

In death, three women shine light on a Manitoba epidemic

Anna Mehler Paperny

From Monday's Globe and Mail

Last updated on Sunday, Sep. 06, 2009 10:48PM EDT

All three of them, as children, were hooked on crack cocaine and locked into a life spent selling themselves for money, drugs, food, shelter and the illusion of protection they couldn't get anywhere else.

All spent years bouncing around Manitoba's foster-care, youth-correction and child-welfare systems, from one program for at-risk minors to another.

And all were found dead, their bodies dumped on the outskirts of town. No one has been charged in their deaths, two of which have so far been declared homicides.

Cherisse Houle, Hillary Angel Wilson and Fonassa Bruyere, the teenage girls who have become the face of Winnipeg's epidemic of missing and murdered young aboriginal women, have a lot in common. And they have become, quite literally, on police press releases and bulletin boards across the region, poster children for systemic failure in child welfare and police investigations – what a Manitoba cabinet minister calls a “state of emergency” for the region.

Those closest to the women suggest that police may not have been searching hard enough for them. But now Winnipeg-area police forces have announced that a new task force will probe the cases of the three teens and dozens of others like them.

It's a move that comes years after the first calls for a special investigation into what native groups estimate are 75 women missing or murdered across Manitoba since the 1960s.

“This shouldn't be happening. In a properly functioning society, this should not be happening,” says Provincial Court Judge Lawrence Allen, who spent years working as a Crown prosecutor in Winnipeg and agreed to speak to The Globe and Mail about the missing women of Winnipeg (an unusual step for a member of the bench).

“It shouldn't be enough [for police] to say, ‘Well we are out there and we periodically try and arrest these guys and make them go to john school' or whatever. It's not working. It isn't enough. And the proof it isn't working are the dead kids.”

Winnipeg's aboriginal community is one of the largest in urban Canada. Its families are disproportionately poor; its children are often reliant on an over-burdened provincial child-welfare system that can leave youth at risk as much as it shelters them.

“They're on the streets and they're not being monitored, they are getting involved in drug possession and theft and crimes. … It's a terrible introduction to life when you think this is happening to children as young as 10 and 11,” Judge Allen says.

“These kids have been so through the ringer that they're burned out by the time they're 17 and 18. But it's a dangerous combination and inevitably, when children are getting into cars with strange men day after day after day, it's not surprising that some of them are suffering, or being killed.”

On Wednesday, RCMP issued a call for tips into Ms. Wilson's death. They weren't getting enough leads, said spokeswoman Sergeant Line Karpish.

“We were actually a bit disappointed, quite frankly, because with all the media attention the case got, we thought we would be inundated and it turned out to be quite the opposite.”

The scenario has been seen before. The disappearance of dozens of women, most of them drug-addicted prostitutes and the majority of them aboriginal, from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside eventually sparked the creation of a task force investigating the cases, culminating in the arrest and conviction of Robert Pickton.

In Edmonton, police task force Project Kare is probing a spate of similar deaths and missing-persons cases involving people in what police consider high-risk lifestyles. Thomas Svekla, the first person charged as a result of the work of that task force, was convicted last year of killing a prostitute.

Ms. Houle, Ms. Wilson and Ms. Bruyere grew up together in Winnipeg's north end. They spent time with each other's families; they shared the same group of friends, going to the same skating rink.

Ms. Houle and Ms. Wilson, especially, remained close through time spent together on and off at a youth correction centre. Ms. Houle, 17, was transferred this spring from a foster home to emergency housing at an aboriginal centre reserved for girls deemed vulnerable to sexual exploitation; Ms. Wilson, 18 and therefore no longer the province's responsibility, was on her own, trying to get clean.

Ms. Houle was found dead on the outskirts of town in July. Police found Ms. Wilson's body six weeks later, almost exactly two years after Ms. Bruyere was killed.

Sgt. Karpish says she doesn't know why people haven't been coming forward with information, but she said a lack of trust in police shouldn't be a factor.

“We have to get past the trust part here,” says Sgt. Karpish. “We're trying to solve a homicide.”

But Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of Vancouver-based Battered Women's Support Services, says police have lost credibility in the community because it's believed that missing-persons reports have been delayed when the person in question was deemed to have too transient or risky a lifestyle.

“They're going to have to demonstrate that they care,” she says. “They've got work to do in terms of appearing credible.”

Police are exploring all possible links, Sgt. Karpish says, but she notes that the things connecting the three girls, and other missing or murdered women, could just be coincidence.

“Winnipeg is not that big of a city – you need to understand that. For one aboriginal woman to know another aboriginal woman in the same age bracket [living] in the north end, that's not that original.”

The police task force, announced last week, is still in the planning stages. On Thursday, the province announced the creation of an “action group” dedicated to the non-criminal aspects of Winnipeg's missing-women epidemic: Community groups are expected to collaborate and advise the provincial government on how to address the missing-women crisis.

Eric Robinson, a Cree MLA, Minister of Culture, Heritage and Tourism and Acting Minister of Aboriginal and Northern Affairs, is spearheading the group, which he says is long overdue.

“We need to see this for what it is: It's a state of emergency.”

Judge Allen says he thinks the crisis of exploited young girls has become worse since he was a prosecutor.

But he says issues of missing women tend to enter the spotlight briefly and then disappear without anything being solved.

“These things come to the attention of the public so sporadically and then people just forget about it. Meanwhile, if you drive down to certain street corners, there's a whole bunch of babies standing on the street, getting into the cars of strange men. And then people are surprised when they end up missing and dead.”