By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service October 20, 2009
Dozens of women have gone missing along the so-called Highway of Tears.
Photograph by: Mikael Kjellstrom, Calgary Herald
They disappear from small towns and big cities, from native reserves in the north and affluent suburbs in the south. They drift away and they abruptly vanish. And they leave, in their wake, broken-hearted families, confounded investigators and gaping holes in the communities where they grew up, forged friendships, held jobs, raised children.
At this moment in Canada, there are 1,573 missing women on file with the Canadian Police Information Centre, a national case-tracking database maintained at the RCMP's Ottawa headquarters.
The number sheds only a partial light on this dark story. It doesn't include the lost or stolen girls under the age of 18 who may have lived to become missing women. It doesn't account, anymore, for those who were once missing but have since been proven dead.
It doesn't embrace women who are gone but not reported missing.
Yet great depths of misery and mystery underlie even this imperfect figure. The stories of Canada's lost women — enough to equal the population of a small town, or the entire staff of a large urban hospital — would fill many mournful volumes.
The stories include some particularly shocking narratives in which a multitude of the missing disappear from a single area — such as B.C.'s "Highway of Tears," a lonely stretch of road between Prince Rupert and Prince George where five of those women were last seen and 13 others are known to have been murdered.
A high-profile search in late August for the remains of Nicole Hoar — one of Hwy. 16's 18 unsolved cases — sparked extensive news coverage and prompted some nationwide soul-searching, at least briefly, about Canada's missing women.
Then, within days, came an overdue pledge by Manitoba RCMP and Winnipeg city police to more closely collaborate in probing a series of disappearances and deaths of aboriginal women in that province.
Similar concentrations of missing or murdered women in Alberta and Saskatchewan were noted, too, along with the single most horrific chapter in the whole sorrowful saga: the dozens of vanished women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside linked to the predatory B.C. pig farmer Robert Pickton.
But there are tears staining village streets, rural sideroads and inner-city avenues across the country. No province or territory is beyond the scope of a tragedy that encompasses every corner of Canada and which — for all of the individual instances of anguish — is made especially plain with a single, breathtaking number: 1,573.
There are thousands of missing men in the country — more than 5,000, in fact, are listed at CPIC — but the spotlight has turned to Canada's lost women because of the clusters of disappearances throughout the West and the sense that predatory men lurk behind the grim statistics.
Even 1,573 strikes Gladys Radek as a low estimate.
A member of the Gitksan Nation of northern B.C. who now lives in Vancouver, Radek has emerged as a leading voice for the lost. It's an angry voice, and the word "racism" rolls easily from her tongue as she discusses the pain of her own family's loss and the disproportionate toll among aboriginal communities like hers.
But the 59-year-old activist, now studying aboriginal law at a Vancouver native college, has called for governments, police agencies and the public to devote more attention to all of Canada's missing women — "red, black, white and yellow," as she puts it — with greater investigative resources to solve existing cases and strengthened social services to prevent new ones.
"It pissed me off that these women were going missing without anybody saying or doing anything about it," says Radek, recalling her gathering awareness of the crisis in the wake of her own niece's unexplained disappearance in September 2005 along the Highway of Tears.
Tamara Chipman — 22 at the time, and the mother of a two-year-old boy — was hitchhiking outside Prince Rupert when she vanished.
"She was just beginning her life," says Radek. "Tamara was a beautiful, spunky girl."
The tragedy sparked a vision. Radek imagined a cross-Canada pilgrimage linking families and communities across the country struggling to cope with missing and murdered women.
Last year, with a Vancouver-to-Ottawa trek she called Walk4Justice, Radek's vision was realized, drawing widespread media coverage and galvanizing public awareness of Canada's lost women.
The number 4 in the name "covers all the races, and all four directions," says Radek. "Before we did that walk, there wasn't really that much attention paid to the missing and murdered women. That's when the families started coming together more and more.
"It was a pretty powerful journey."
Earlier this year, Radek organized a second Walk4Justice between Vancouver and Prince Rupert to spotlight the suffering of families — including her own — who've lost loved ones along the Highway of Tears.
She isn't convinced police in B.C. or elsewhere are doing enough to probe the hundreds of unsolved cases, or that governments are sufficiently seized by the need to invest more in vulnerable communities and demographic groups — native and non-native — to prevent numbers like 1,573 from growing larger.
"We need better services so women don't get caught in such desperate situations," she argues. "We're pushing for a lot more shelters, even in the smallest communities. There's often nowhere for women to go when they're running from violent situations."
RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary defends the efforts of police in B.C. and across the country in probing missing-women cases. In his experience, he says, police agencies "bend over backwards" to co-operate across jurisdictional boundaries, comparing notes and sharing clues to try to solve what are often the toughest cases in police work to crack.
But he does agree with Radek about one thing when it comes to the CPIC total of 1,573 missing women in Canada.
"I thought it would be higher," he says.
Perhaps it's a worldview shaped by his immersion in scores of missing-women cases — most notably the Pickton-linked disappearances of up to 60 sex-trade workers and other high-risk targets in Vancouver — during a 29-year career as one of B.C.'s leading investigators.
The province has emerged as the country's main stage in this long-running tragedy, and Clary wonders aloud if Vancouver's history as a key Pacific port — a magnet not just for tourists and immigrants who've brought prosperity to B.C., but also for criminals — has contributed to the crisis.
Resources, he notes, are not boundless when it comes to investigating missing women, or any crime for that matter. But as a key player in the high-profile and well-funded Project Evenhanded investigation that ultimately unraveled Pickton's crimes, Clary says he sympathizes with isolated investigators across the country, who inevitably have a multitude of other open files on their desks in addition to time-consuming missing-person cases.
"If you have a crime scene and no body — no person — that's easy. You just roll it out like it's a homicide. It's when you don't have a crime scene, it's harder. Because obviously you're adjusting resources and files just never stop coming in," he says.
"I've been on a project here, so we just deal with the one issue — which is easier to handle because there's dedicated resources. But when you're investigating with a detachment or a municipal PD, there's stuff coming your way every day. And, of course, it never ends."
The principal strategy for probing the case of a missing woman is simple enough, he says.
"You identify who their associates are, where they work, and you just start asking questions. Generally, that will lead you somewhere. But there's many cases where you just don't know, and where do you go next?"
Bank accounts, credit cards and cellphones are probed because they're likely to record a person's movements, says Clary.
"You can see them existing in society, and then all of a sudden everything stops," he says. "Whether it's the methadone clinic, or their doctor, or their welfare cheque — it just stops. And you have to ask yourself, why did that happen?"
In so many cases, he says, it's what you can't do for desperate families — the anguished ones seeking closure years or decades after a sister or daughter has vanished — that haunts him and other officers assigned to search for the missing.
Too often, he says bluntly, "you can never give it to them. It's difficult to convey to them that there's nothing more you can do."
And the sad reality, he says, is that the disappeared — in many or even most of the cases on file — are dead.
But without evidence to prove that a missing woman was murdered or otherwise lost her life, families are naturally reluctant to turn the page. The word "missing," for all of its horrifying connotations, preserves at least a shred of hope.
One weekend in September, in the remote woods near Thunder Bay, an Ontario family and a team of volunteer searchers were clinging to such hope.
They scoured the forests of Rainbow Falls Provincial Park looking for clues that might point to the whereabouts of Christina Calayca, a vivacious, 20-year-old childcare worker from Toronto who disappeared — literally "without a trace," a police spokesperson says — after setting off for a morning jog from a campsite on Aug. 6, 2007.
Was the young Filipina-Canadian woman snatched by an unknown assailant or human trafficker? Did she intentionally vanish to create a new life and identity? Or did she simply lose her way in the trees, slip into a stream, fall from a rock ledge?
Police do not have evidence pointing to foul play, says Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Shelley Garr, but they just don't know.
"There are a number of possibilities," she says, "but we don't speak to hypotheticals."
There's a website, www.findchristinacalayca.com, that details a 2008 fundraising gala, holds a cache of news stories, promotes a CD — "Missing You" — that's dedicated to Calayca.
The site exudes affection for the lost woman.
"Each day since her disappearance months ago, Christina's loved ones have hoped and prayed that she would return to us safely," a message states. "If hope alone were enough, she would already be home; but she unfortunately is not."
There have now been six searches — three led by the OPP, three organized by Calayca's family, including one with sniffer dogs supplied by a benevolent search-and-rescue specialist from the U.S.
"She went missing and there's been nothing since," Garr said in a recent interview. "Christina's mother was up again this past weekend. They are still actively searching for answers. But it must be frustrating for them."
The best chance for discovery, she adds, might have been during the initial 17-day search in August 2007, a full-scale operation involving aerial crews and extensive grid-pattern sweeps by emergency personnel on the ground.
"But then we got into fall," says Garr, "and fall turns into winter."
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
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